6 - Auden's travel writings

Summary

A travel book owes so little to the writers, and so much to the people they meet, that a full and fair acknowledgment on the part of the former is impossible.

We must beg those hundreds of anonymous Icelanders, farmers, fishermen, busmen, children, etc., who are the real authors of this book to accept collectively our gratitude.

The radical force of these very first words of Letters from Iceland (1937, p. 9) still impresses; their insistence on group authorship is in keeping with Auden's left-wing politics of the time and markedly out of step with the predominant individualism of twentieth-century travel writing. Even in terms of its formal authorship, Letters from Iceland is a joint composition by two writers, as was Auden's other travel book, Journey to a War (1939).

The significance of Auden's co-authored works has been underlined by Stan Smith, who identifies them as those ‘which most conspicuously insist on their status as texts, not representations of the real, but aware of their own artifice . . . They are also the works which most directly confront the artifice of a capitalist society in crisis’ (Smith, p. 109). Auden’s travel books were written in a decade when social and economic insecurity and political polarities saw ‘abrupt and important changes in outlook and affiliation’; and when disorder and instability (for the middle class in particular) ‘led to the radicalization of many intellectuals, and a crisis in outlook [that was] reflected in every aspect of art and culture’.