The Poet as Voyager
The work that emerged from these trips is varied and shows both the strengths and flaws in Auden’s poetry. The connecting theme, though, is that of the journey, and it is not a journey undertaken for diversion or relaxation, as so many of our journeys now are. Auden traveled as part of his quest; the trip to Berlin was an escape from sexual repressiveness in England and an exploration of that part of his nature; the trip to Iceland seems to have been motivated by a desire to get away from Europe and its problems, to travel back in time, in a sense; the trips to Spain and China were part of a program of progressively more intense political involvement.
The Iceland trip was a mixture of despair, discomfort, insight, and sheer farce. Auden must have been a curious sight, in the strange outfit he chose for the riding part of the trip—an outfit built up on a base of pyjamas and culminating, after various jerseys, in a layer of yellow oilskin. And it is hard not to laugh at the idea of Auden and MacNeice, in the dying days of the trip, being entertained by the director of what was then known as a lunatic asylum and being invited to spend the night in the hospital. The doctor, having no common language with them, spoke to the two poets in Latin. A similarly surreal anecdote comes from the Chinese trip that Auden was later to embark upon with Christopher Isherwood. On this trip they found themselves having tea with Madam Chiang Kai-shek, who asked them if poets like cake. “I thought they preferred only spiritual food,” she said.
Letters from Iceland is one of Auden’s oddest books. It belongs to that comparatively rare genre, the epistolary travel book, and is very loosely organized, foretelling, in parts, the potpourri of curious facts that is his commonplace book, A Certain World. Auden acquired a great deal of knowledge about Iceland in the time he was there, and much of it is delightfully arcane. The professional travel writer, Auden felt, was a serious creature, obliged by the expectations of the reader to give an informative account of history and geography; Auden and MacNeice, by contrast, waffled, interspersing letters to friends with poems, epistolary and otherwise. The strange facts included are very strange; if Auden went there to escape the constraints of the life he was leading and to find an alternative to European concerns, then he was amply rewarded.
The finest poem in the book is one that in my view reveals Auden’s imagery at its most lyrically powerful. I have a house in Argyll, a remote part of Scotland, where the Atlantic comes sweeping up against a coast of islands. When I look out to sea there, Auden’s hauntingly beautiful words often come to me, as a snatch of song or a passage of music may be associated with some familiar and much-loved place:
And the traveller hopes: ‘Let me be far from any
Physician’; and the ports have names for the sea;
The citiless, the corroding, the sorrow;
And North means to all: ‘Reject!’
And the great plains are for ever where the cold fish is hunted,
And everywhere; the light birds flicker and flaunt;
Under the scolding flag the lover
Of islands may see at last
Faintly, his limited hope …
These are exquisite lines, quintessentially Audenesque. They surprise and entrance, and one can see the great plains of the sea and the scolding flag fluttering on the ship as the islands come into sight. And yet they reveal one of Auden’s great faults: that of falling in love with words irrespective of their meaning. The reader is likely to wonder why any traveler would wish to be far from a physician; far from crowds, yes; far from bureaucrats or importuning traders, yes; but far from a physician? Unless, of course, the physician stands for all that is overly fussy and cosseting in modern society; in which case we would want him or her absent in order to experience danger. The answer, though, is probably more prosaic: hoping to be far from a physician is a way of saying that you hope you don’t fall ill; expressing the thought so simply, however, does not sound very poetic.
And then we come to that famous and troubling phrase, “and the ports have names for the sea.” As Auden reveals in a letter, he meant to write poets but ports is what was printed. He could have changed the typographical error, but he felt that this sounded better and the mistake was kept. What this demonstrates is a willingness to sacrifice meaning to sound, a tendency that means that some of Auden’s lines end up being either obscure to the point of being nonsensical, or just plain wrong. This is pointed out with some delight by the somewhat acerbic critic, A. L. Rowse, who takes Auden to task for saying things that are not true just because he likes the sound of the words.
The fact that the ports had names for the sea reveals another of Auden’s curious traits—that of personalizing the inanimate. Unlike the choosing of words for effect, this is a harmless habit; indeed I feel that it adds substantially to the charm and impact of Auden’s work. Only when he allows History to speak does it appear at all sinister—but there are many others, entire movements, that had done that with History. The line “Perhaps the roses really want to grow,” taken from “If I Could Tell You,” is an example of this inclination to attribute human feelings to inanimate objects, nonhuman beings, or natural forces. “Come says the wind” is another, as is the inferring, in “Streams,” of playful moods in water. This personalization does more than serve the poet’s rhetorical purpose; it reminds us that Auden felt keenly our separation from nature and the need to become one with it again.