Putting Time on Ice

LETTERS FROM ICELAND by W. H. Auden and Louis MacNeice. 253 pages. Random House. $7.50.

Even a tourist-class guidebook--the kind written in hoked-up feature writer's prose--furnishes vicarious travel. Letters from Iceland is a first-class VIP travel book written by two poets; it provides not only the usual armchair transport but also a vicarious voyage into the past.

The period is 1936, and those who read this minor masterpiece for the first time will be given a lively sense of what it was like to be young in that year and possessed of an eloquent dread of what the near future held. Its two gifted and high-spirited young authors--Wystan Hugh Auden and Louis MacNeice--have, in fact, put time on ice.

Now that future is our ruefully remembered past. Today we are threatened by fear of the Bomb; then it was the spread of Fascism that gave the young a sense of doom and justified revolt against the Oldies:

Down in Europe Seville fell Nations germinating hell . . .

The two poets, cruising the dormant volcanic cones of Iceland on ponies, never lost their awareness of the active political volcanoes of Europe, which had first erupted in Spain. The last line in the book, "Still I drink your health before/The gun-butt raps upon the door," crystallizes in a phrase the tone of the period. Although no gun-butt ever knocked on the doors of Auden or MacNeice, the two poets were better prophets than most politicians. They sang of Armageddon and the man.

On the surface, of course, politics and history have little to do with a simple, slightly offbeat excursion to Iceland. But for the two young poets the laws of metaphor applied. The ancient island democracy was a place where "Ravens from their walls of shale/Cruise around the rotting whale." Europe was the beached behemoth and the ravens, the Blackshirts and the SS. Out of their few weeks spent getting saddle sores on bad-tempered Icelandic ponies or in rattletrap buses on boulder-paved roads, eating terrible meals of smoked mutton in smokier hovels, Auden and MacNeice re-created an odd and magical journey compounded of poems (satirical, epistolatory and familiar), letters, guidebook information, parodies, private jokes and public protest.

A minor decoration of the original volume, unhappily left out in the re-edition, were Auden's hit-or-miss photographs. Its principal treasure was and is his long poem, Letter to Lord Byron. Few poets since Byron have tried to crack the great romantic's seven-foot whip, and only Auden among Englishmen has succeeded, as here:

For since the British Isles went Protestant

A church confession is too high for most.

But still confession is a human want, So Englishmen must make theirs now by post

And authors hear them over breakfast toast. For failing them, there's nothing but

the wall

Of public lavatories on which to scrawl.

MacNeice is dead now, and Auden, an immeasurably more talented poet, has become a happier, wiser traveler, with a preference for balmier summer spots--the island of Ischia near Naples, for instance, and the civilized hills of Austria. But in Letters from Iceland, the two precocious patriarchs of an Oxford poetic school spoke with the same youthful, irreverent voice. The book is probably the only successful verse partnership since the old English firm of Beaumont & Fletcher closed shop. It is, moreover, an object lesson for all dull dogs who could find nothing more exciting in a place like Iceland than watching the glaciers whiz by.

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