Chapter 18 - What Auden Made of Byron

Summary

The idea that Auden should write a travel book occurred to him in the spring of 1936 after he had had lunch at Bryanston with Michael Yates, a former pupil from his days as a master at the Downs School. Yates reported that he was due to visit Iceland that summer as part of a small school trip, and, as he later recalled, Auden quickly became excited by the thought of the journey.¹ His imagination had been stirred by thoughts of the North ever since his father had read the small boy Norse myths as bedtime stories. After some slightly tangled negotiations, Auden persuaded his publisher Faber to cover the costs of a trip, and he arranged with the teacher leading the excursion that they should meet while there: their experiences could form an element in the book that he had agreed to co-write with his friend Louis MacNeice. Auden took the boat from Hull sometime in mid-June, but as it happened MacNeice’s arrival was delayed until 9 August and the Bryanston party wasn’t scheduled to turn up till the 17, so Auden spent much of the time on his own, including the voyage out which took five or so tiresome days. He was not much taken with Reykjavik once disembarked: ‘Lutheran, drab and remote’ was his first impression.² He spent a lonely week, with ‘nothing to do but soak in the only hotel with a licence; at ruinous expense’, not greatly diverted by the task of correcting the proofs of his next volume of poems which Faber had sent through. But then he set out to explore the island with a guide, taking an anthropological interest in local phenomena such as cheese making and herring gutting, and his spirits rose (Prose, I. 256, 258).