Dear America,
You may remember that back in World War II, when the U.S. built Thule Air Base in Greenland, it also built U. S. Naval Air Station Keflavik in Iceland, which opened in 1943. The airfield was later subsumed into the country’s international airport, familiar now to so many Americans as a stop on the way to Europe (and a chance to visit the famous Blue Lagoon.) “A grounded aircraft carrier,” some military wit called the entire island back in wartime, meaning that the location was ideal for ferrying troops and supplies to Europe. Later, the station was instrumental for Cold War monitoring and support of NATO. Although it finally closed in 2006, the U. S. since has deployed strategic bombers there, with perhaps 200 personnel, and conducts training with NATO allies. The U.S. has also recently rebuilt a hangar to accommodate submarine-hunting aircraft.
Why does this interest me? Donald Trump, aside from planning to abandon NATO, is still plotting to find a way to acquire Greenland and to “take back” the Panama Canal. He’s unlikely to know much about Iceland, but if he did know that the U. S. built the country’s very busy and profitable airport, one can easily imagine him wanting it back.
Part of my motive in coming to Iceland was to escape the barrage of Trump’s assaults on you, America, and the rest of the world.
Now that I’m here, taking a sanity break and trying to write something with meaning in a time when magical thinking has overtaken reality, I find that I’m as anxious as ever—perhaps even more than at home. For the time being I’ve abandoned my admittedly small acts of phone calls to my senators and postcards to voters. But I should have known that, even from afar, I would be constantly checking news sites and sinking into despair with each new headline.
Away from the news, I’m interested in other views of Iceland and have been reading W. H. Auden’s Letters from Iceland, based on his three-month summer visit in 1936. That year the tensions in Europe were already considerable, and I’m trying to detect Auden’s response. News then, of course, traveled slowly, as did everything; Auden’s boat trip from England to Iceland had taken four and a half days. Mailed letters were the chief means of communication.
Allow me, dear America, to report on Auden’s book, which does offer some insights into its time and perhaps our own. Although the young author, still in his 20s and still a Brit—he would emigrate to America in 1939—was under contract to produce a book, he seemed to have little plan for it. Indeed, he wrote to a friend, “I’ve been here a month and haven’t the slightest idea how to begin to write the book.” Instead, he played a lot of cards, ate foods he didn’t like (among them whale fluke and sheep udder), rode horses and stayed with farmers, and disliked Reykjavik’s nightlife because it never got dark. When he began to meet people, he decided that the gossip he gathered was unreliable and probably libelous. He did not want to write a mere travel book and was afraid of being boring.
In part because he’d brought along a book by Lord Byron, Auden settled on writing to his imaginary Byron “a chatty letter in light verse about anything I could think of, Europe, literature, myself…. This letter in itself will have very little to do with Iceland, but will be rather a description of an effect of traveling in distant places which is to make one reflect on one’s past and one’s culture from the outside.” He would supplement the verse with actual letters to real people, with more accounting of his activities. (For a reader in 2025, the letters are significantly more interesting than his tortured formal verse.) His companion, the Irish poet Louis MacNeice, agreed to co-author by contributing poems and a fictionalized, humorous account of some of their travel.
The result has been described by scholars as a “miscellany of wisdom, wit, and observations,” “an amusing and unorthodox travel book.” For this reader, who would have liked to have learned more about Iceland in 1936, it reads as the jokey musings of a young man showing off his Oxford education by referencing classical works while ignoring most of what lay before him. Even one of the most explicit descriptions in a letter, of a visit to a whaling station, is strangely truncated. “A seventy-ton one was lying on the slip-way like a large and very dignified duchess” (okay, I find that a lovely metaphor) and “to see it torn to pieces with steam winches and cranes is enough to make one a vegetarian for life.” There’s a bit more after that—“the submerged bodies of five dead whales” in the bay, a stream of blood staining the water, and the workers who, at the clang of a bell, “stuck their spades in the carcass and went off for lunch. The body remained alone in the sun, the flesh still steaming a little. It gave one an extraordinary vision of the cold controlled ferocity of the human species.” The same letter goes on extensively about a long scary dream he’d had the previous night.
I have to wonder if the “cold controlled ferocity” of whaling felt to Auden like a foreboding. Already, Jewish people in Germany had been stripped of their citizenship, and in March Germany had remilitarized the Rhineland, the part of Germany that, by treaty after World War I, had been demilitarized for the security of France and Belgium. That summer, as Auden and MacLeish were larking around Iceland, Germany was using the Berlin Olympics to glorify Hitler and the Nazi party.
The parts of the book that sit me up straight are a few disdainful references to Nazis Auden encountered. Once he mentions a bus trip during which a group of Nazis “talked incessantly” about the island’s beauty and the Aryan qualities of the Icelandic “stock;” he was pleased when the bus passed a couple of dark-skinned children. MacNeice elsewhere mentions that “Hitler who wants to reclaim this island will no doubt substitute the Eddas [Icelandic manuscripts from the 13th century] for the Lutheran prayerbook.” How Hitler would “reclaim” an island Germany had never controlled is a puzzle, but it is true that in the 1930s many feared that Nazi Germany, which then had a diplomatic presence on the island, would take over militarily. That was the reason that the U.S. and Britain forced Iceland, a neutral nation, into the treaty that allowed the construction of the Keflavik station.
While Hitler and Trump are not identical in their purposes, their behaviors certainly rhyme. George Packer, in a recent Atlantic article, identified Trump’s assault on USAID as “a trial blitzkrieg.” Just as Hitler in 1939 sent “tanks and bombers into defenseless Poland to see what works before turning on the Western powers,” Trump’s success with shutting down USAID “provided a model for eviscerating the rest of the federal bureaucracy.”
At the very end of Letters from Iceland, MacNeice’s poetic “Epilogue” concludes with these lines addressed to Auden: “Our prerogatives as men / Will be canceled who knows when. / Still I drink your health before / The gun-butt raps upon the door.”
A decade later, in 1947, Auden published what is perhaps his most famous poem, the book-length “The Age of Anxiety,” winner of the Pulitzer Prize. Set in a wartime bar in New York City, four strangers express to one another their unease with the condition of the world, which included the post-war effects of industrialism. Uncertain of their futures, they’re lonely and lacking in purpose.
Aside from its literary merits, said to be innovative and which I’m ill-equipped to judge, “The Age of Anxiety” is known for capturing the emotional landscape of its time. One character, the only woman, says at one point, “Lies and lethargies police the world / in its periods of peace.” A radio playing in the back of the bar interrupts both the conversation and the structure of the poem with news bulletins.
As I type these words, my watch brings me news alerts. Now tariffs are on and “beautiful.” Now they’re off. Now they’re on again, higher here and lower there, bullied by Trump demands.
Perhaps every age enters with its own brand of anxiety. America, we may not be fighting a military war today, but deadly wars rage around us, and our would-be dictator is waging a tariff and economic assault against the rest of the world. He and his loyalists, claiming war-time emergency powers, are imprisoning and deporting immigrants without due process or any shred of compassion. Science is under attack, as are the institutions that care for public health and the environment. So much else is being dismantled, destroyed, irretrievably lost. Global instability, we should understand, is a recipe for war.
Those four lonely strangers in Auden’s fictional bar—at least they had one another, and they talked. Who do we Americans have, in our physical lives, when we hide behind our screens and live within conspiratorial bubbles, isolating ourselves and willfully careening into fascist control?
Dear America, I’m not sure at this point who I’m even addressing.
Not quite without hope,
Nancy
Nancy Lord, a former Alaska State Writer Laureate who lives in Homer, Alaska, is the author of three short story collections, five books of literary nonfiction, and the novel pH. Her environmental writing has appeared widely in journals and anthologies. She currently teaches science writing for Johns Hopkins University. Her most recent writing residency was in April 2025 at NES, in northern Iceland.
Read Nancy Lord’s first Letter to America (a poem), as well as other nonfiction appearing in Terrain.org: “Slate” and “Glacier,” a video. And read “Finding Beauty in a Troubled World,” Holly J. Hughes’s interview of Nancy Lord.
Read other Letters to America online or in Dear America: Letters of Hope, Habitat, Defiance, and Democracy, published in partnership with Trinity University Press.
Header photo by Nancy Lord. Photo of Nancy Lord by Stacy Studebaker.
