This is tricky. First the facts. In 1936 W.H. Auden persuaded Faber and Faber to commission a travel book about Iceland. He spent three months in the country, part of the time travelling with his friend Louis MacNeice and a group of schoolboys and a teacher from Bryanston School. Auden and MacNeice collaborated in the writing of the book, which was published in 1937 as Letters from Iceland. It contained not only Auden's 'Letter to Lord Byron', but also a number of other putative letters (to Richard Crossman and William Coldstream, for instance), MacNeice's 'Eclogue from Iceland', the famously camp prose-piece 'Hetty to Nancy', and the joint-authored 'Last Will and Testament'. According to Auden, MacNeice wrote about eighty of the 240 pages (the review in the TLS compared MacNeice's contributions to 'desolate pools unmoved beside a volcano five times in eruption'). As well as the poems and prose pieces the book includes 52 black and white photographs, all taken by Auden, appendices containing pie-charts and graphs, and a fine, coloured folding map. There is an extensive bibliography and one chapter is entirely devoted to an anthology of excerpts from other books about Iceland. The pages of the volume are thick, white unwater-marked wove paper and the whole thing - as eloquently described by Bloomfield and Mendelson, in their Auden Bibliography - is

LRB 20 March 1997 | PDF Download