by Robert Byron
THE ROAD TO OXIANA
ROBERT BYRON was born on 26 February 1905. He was educated at Eton and Merton College, Oxford, where he was one of the earliest collectors of Victoriana as a light-hearted prelude to his challenge to Victorian aesthetic values and accepted classicism. Byron was only twenty-two when he wrote The Station from a visit to Mount Athos. This was followed by The Byzantium Achievement and The Birth of Western Painting, seminal works for the appreciation of the Byzantine contribution. In 1933 the publication of First Russia, Then Tibet, also published by Penguin, assured his reputation as a traveller and connoisseur of civilizations. Journeys through Russia and Afghanistan inspired The Road to Oxiana, for which he received the Literary Award of the Sunday Times for 1937.
Byron was a combative personality with a gift for friendship; among his closest companions were Harold Acton, Evelyn Waugh, Henry Yorke (Greene), Alfred Duggan and, later, Nancy Mitford. He wrote frequently on architecture and was a great admirer of Lutyens and a founder of the Georgian Group. In the Second World War in 1941 Byron perished at sea on his way back to Meshed as an observer. This tragedy cut short a life of remarkable achievement and lasting vision.
COLIN THUBRON is a distinguished travel writer and novelist. His first books were about the Middle East, but in the past thirty years he has devoted himself to travelling and writing about Russia, Central Asia and China, most notably in Among the Russians, Behind the Wall, The Lost Heart of Asia, In Siberia and most recently Shadow of the Silk Road. He has won many awards.
ROBERT BYRON
The Road to Oxiana
With an Introduction by COLIN THUBRON
PENGUIN BOOKS
PENGUIN CLASSICS
Published by the Penguin Group
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First published by Macmillan & Co. Ltd 1937
Published in Penguin Books 1992
Published in Penguin Classics with an Introduction 2007
1
Introduction copyright © Colin Thubron, 2007
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ISBN: 978-0-14-191277-6
INTRODUCTION
The Road to Oxiana has been called the seminal travel book of the twentieth century. Witty, lyrical, erudite, combative, it still strikes the reader with a vivid contemporary immediacy. Composed in the form of a random diary, its deceptively conversational tone was, of course, the result of meticulous craft. Spiky character sketches and farcical conversations (replete with musical notation) are interlaced with news clippings, scholarly digressions and some of the most precise and beautiful architectural descriptions in the language. This eclectic technique, moving at will between aesthetic refinement and anecdotal absurdity, has ensured the book’s appeal into a later age. Travel writers as diverse as Bruce Chatwin and Jonathan Raban have esteemed it; the critic Paul Fussell acclaimed it as the Ulysses and Waste Land of travel writing.
The force and complexity of its author’s character—at once playful and fervently serious—provoke instant curiosity. Even in his own day, Robert Byron was a prodigy. He was born in 1905 of an upper-middle-class family, unrelated to his Romantic namesake. His father was a civil engineer of fluctuating fortune, and his mother, whom he loved deeply, was an amateur artist who passionately encouraged (and criticized) her son’s talents. At Eton and Oxford he was already developing precocious aesthetic tastes and fierce opinions, and set himself self-consciously against the accepted pieties of his day, from Rembrandt and Shakespeare to the “vacuous perfection” of classical sculpture. His rooms at Merton were filled with Victoriana in provocative bad taste, including a plethora of bell jars enclosing wax fruit and cloth flowers. His friends were clever, aristocratic, eccentric, sometimes effete; his letters glitter with the names of Harold Acton, Henry Greene, Oliver Messel and the rest.
Among this gilded youth, the affectation of effortless superiority sometimes tipped over destructively into adult life. But in Byron there was something steely and driven. Even in the modish milieu he inhabited, his temper often overflowed. In conversation “he leered and scowled”, wrote his contemporary Evelyn Waugh, “screamed and snarled, fell into rages that were sometimes real and sometimes a charade—it was not easy to distinguish.”
After graduating with a third-class history degree, which he never bothered to collect, he fell at once into travel and journalism. In these interwar years, when the motor tour made independence easier, a host of enterprising young men deserted a grey Britain for meaningful experience abroad. Now Byron’s earlier books read like preparations for their masterful culmination. Europe in the Looking-Glass, published in 1926, was a light-hearted romp to Greece; but The Station (1928), a study of Mount Athos, and First Russia, then Tibet (1933), convey a different promise.
In between these, astonishingly, Byron published two weighty studies of Byzantine art and its influence: The Byzantine Achievement and The Birth of Western Painting. For by now, after intense travel, his youthful repudiation of Western art and Roman Catholicism had matured into a fascination with the world of Greek Orthodoxy. “It has really grown into a mania with me,” he wrote to a friend, “as I get more and more hopelessly immersed in Byzantium.”
His location of the roots of Western art in Byzantium was bold for its time; but significantly he accorded alien cultures a deep validity of their own. In this he was influenced by the German historian Oswald Spengler’s recently published The Decline of the West (whose salient passages Byron marked with enthusiastic pencil scorings), a work which scorned the Western enslavement to classicism and the “empty figment of one linear history.”
By now Byron was becoming famous. His books, though rarely selling well, had achieved for him, in aggregate, a succes d’estime. Their reception was mixed with dissent—accusations of facetiousness and overwriting abound—but his admirers, from Waugh to Rebecca West, were prestigious. Arnold Bennett praised The Station for its urbane wit and observation, and D. H. Lawrence, reviewing it in Vogue, declared: “Athos is an old place, and Mr Byron is a young man. The combination for once is really happy.”
Byron wrote that the catalyst for his fascination with Persian art was a photograph of Gumbad-i-Kabus, the great eleventh-century tomb-tower near the Caspian Sea. An obsession wi
th Persian brickwork followed, as he studied the works of Arthur Upham Pope, doyen of Persian art studies. By early 1933 Byron was hatching a plan for an expedition to Chinese Turkestan, today’s Xinjiang, but it was thwarted by native insurrection. So the goal became Afghanistan through Persia. At first he was to link up with an eccentric two-lorry expedition testing the use of charcoal gas instead of petrol; but he parted from it, with relief, within hours of their rendezvous in Afghanistan.
His companion instead was a friend his own age, Christopher Sykes, a Persian-speaker who had briefly been honorary attaché at the Tehran embassy, and who was engaged—unknown to Byron—in espionage. The world they were entering was in flux. In Afghanistan the ruler Nadir Shah was murdered while Byron was still in Iran, and was succeeded by his cautious and long-surviving son Zahir. In Iran, by contrast, a new dynasty, the Pahlavi, had taken power in 1925, and its first Shah was an autocratic moderniser. Byron ridiculed him in a typical anecdote:
I remarked to Christopher on the indignity of the people’s clothes: “Why does the Shah make them wear those hats?”
“Sh. You mustn’t mention the Shah out loud. Call him Mr. Smith.”
“I always call Mussolini Mr. Smith in Italy.”
“Well, Mr. Brown.”
“No, that’s Stalin’s name in Russia.”
“Mr. Jones then.”
“Jones is no good either. Hitler has to have it now that Primo de Rivera is dead. And anyhow I get confused with these ordinary names. We had better call him Marjoribanks, if we want to remember whom we mean.”
“All right. And you had better write it too, in case they confiscate your diary.”
I shall in future.
He did. Byron started the journey in high spirits. In Venice, where his book begins, his half-requited passion for Desmond Parsons, son of the fifth Earl of Rosse, was momentarily assuaged during a three-day reunion. The novelist Anthony Powell, a contemporary, called Byron “congenitally homosexual”, but his known relationships seem to have been cool or failed. Plump, short, with hooded eyes, his attraction was in his personality and conversation.
In The Road to Oxiana his humour spans every genre from quirky playlets to uproarious vignettes and nuggets of gossip. In this irreverent context the scenic descriptions glow with sudden poetry. Above all his evocations of Persian architecture are delivered with a descriptive gift which has never been surpassed: passionately attentive, lyrical, yet almost scientifically precise. As he releases himself from his everyday levity to study an early mosque or tomb, one can positively feel the tensing of critical muscle and the rapt responsibility to his subject. Confronted by the handful of buildings to which he attributed genius—the minarets of Herat, the Gohar Shad mosque in Meshed, the Sheikh Lutfullah in Isfahan, and finally Gumbad-i-Kabus—his vocabulary expands into a lexicon of striking colours: café-au-lait, gentian, prawn, the bloom of grapes or peach.
His obsession with architectural brickwork was shocked into second place by the experience of Herat, a city ruled throughout the fifteenth century by the civilized descendants of Tamerlane. The lonely minarets of its near-vanished royal college, built by the patron queen Gohar Shad, converted him to the beauty of tiled decoration, and his description of these masterpieces preserves them more richly than any photograph. But it is a bitter memorial now. Since Byron’s day the two finest minarets have fallen, and the others are so shaken by Russian gunfire that their mosaic faience cover the ground in multicoloured pools.
In this man of extremes, the counterpart to his architectural loves was, of course, the repudiation of received opinion, and of sentimental orientalism (“the Omar Khayyam brigade.”) As he admired his first Seljuk mausoleum he exulted that “This at last wipes the taste of the Alhambra and the Taj Mahal out of one’s mouth… I came to Persia to get rid of that taste.” As for the giant Buddhas of Bamian, his description may go a small way to reconciling a reader to their destruction by the Taliban: “Neither has any artistic value. But one could bear that; it is their negation of sense, the lack of any pride in their monstrous flaccid bulk, that sickens.” In his diary he concluded: “If I lived with the Buddhas, I should be ill.”
Typically, he traced the vigour of Persian Islamic art to a time well before its supposed zenith in the sixteenth century, finding its roots in his Turkic and Mongol brick tomb-towers. Of these the high, phallic mausoleum of Gumbad-i-Kabus, whose dead prince had been suspended there in a glass coffin in 1007, was the apogee. “A tapering cylinder of café-au-lait brick springs from a round plinth to a pointed grey-green roof, which swallows it up like a candle-extinguisher… Up the cylinder, between plinth and roof, rush ten triangular buttresses, which cut across two narrow garters of Kufic text…”
It was the passion for such monuments that drove Byron forward. An intermittent hypochondriac, he hated what he called “adventure”. Yet twice, endangering his life, he entered the forbidden mosque of Gohar Shad in disguise, his face blackened by charcoal; and his journey from Herat to Mazar-i-Sharif—he and Sykes were the first Englishmen to attempt it, and Byron made notes for Military Intelligence—is still hard and perilous today. Travel, he wrote to his mother, was “a grindstone to temper one’s character and get free of the cloying thoughts of Europe.”
If there is a defect in The Road to Oxiana it is that of Byron’s time and class. Despite his respect for Persian art and his disdain for British convention, an ingrained condescension pervades his relationships with the modern inhabitants. He rarely attempts empathy, and at worst he is downright choleric. Several times he physically assaults people who infuriate him. And the diaries from which his book was refined are, if anything, more intemperate still. “My point of view,” he wrote to his mother, “is fundamentally that of the artist rather than the district nurse.” His descriptions, like those of Kinglake, are peppered with Anglocentric references. (A tweedy road supervisor looks like Lloyd George; the Murghab river is “about the size of the Thames at Windsor”, and an asphalt road down the Khyber Pass is as smooth as Piccadilly.)
But Byron’s overweening character and glittering mosaic of a book were all of a piece. And its final excerpt brings him home to his beloved mother. “What I have seen she taught me to see,” he writes, “and will tell me if I have honoured it.” This was no idle accolade. After her son’s death she said: “I was always surprised when he struck out or changed any words I didn’t like—immediately—I was a very hard critic.…”
Almost a year and a half went by—months consumed by lecturing, articles and the transposing of his first two travel diaries—before Byron joined Desmond Parsons, who was living in Peking, and began again on The Road to Oxiana. But this most celebrated of twentieth-century travel books was restarted in profound dejection. Parsons was diagnosed with the fatal Hodgkin’s disease, and returned to London for treatment. Byron remained through a bitter winter, struggling to write. He was struck down by fever, then neuralgia. He worried about money. He started to drink, and to veer out of control. At one dinner he smashed the china and glass at the British Embassy. “My muse is dead,” he wrote to his sister.
But it was only sleeping. He settled at last to a discipline of six hours a day, interspersed with herbal tea. Audaciously he kept the narrative form of his diaries intact in all their freshness and panache, only pruning a little here, easing the narrative flow there, and buttressed them with retrospective research. At the end he wrote to his publisher, Harold Macmillan, that the book surprised him by its substance: “I venture to think it is the best thing I have written.”
It is hard, in so individual a work, to trace what others may have influenced it. Earlier travellers to Persia, like Lord Curzon, leave no perceptible trace, and the travel books of Byron’s contemporaries, notably Peter Fleming, proceed in a time-honoured linear narrative. Byron admired Norman Douglas, whose works were as erudite and richly styled as his own, but The Road to Oxiana, in its fluent demotic voice, has survived more surely into the twenty-first century than Douglas’s Old Calab
ria.
Byron’s book was published in 1937, to varying acclaim. Graham Greene found it alternately brilliant, gossipy and “dryly instructive”. Evelyn Waugh crossly accused it of self-centredness, yet praised its gusto and dialogue; and G. M. Young, Byron’s first mentor, in a long, thoughtful review in the Sunday Times, placed Byron in the tradition of his namesake: “the last and finest fruit of the insolent humanism of the eighteenth century.”
But by now all humanism was under threat, and Byron had flung himself into a clamorous crusade against Fascism. The outbreak of war found him employed in propaganda by the BBC, and in February 1941, under cover of journalism, he set sail for Alexandria on an espionage mission to observe Russian activity in northeast Iran. He was thirty-five. Three days out to sea, somewhere beyond Scotland’s Cape Wrath, his boat was torpedoed and sunk, and Byron presumed drowned, leaving behind bitter speculation on all that he might have done.
Colin Thubron
ENTRIES
PART I
Venice
s.s. “Italia”
CYPRUS
Kyrenia
Nicosia
Famagusta
Larnaca
s.s. “Martha Washington”
PALESTINE
Jerusalem
SYRIA
Damascus
Beyrut
Damascus
IRAK
Baghdad
PART II
PERSIA
Kirmanshah
Teheran
Gulhek
Teheran
Zinjan
Tabriz
Maragha
Tasr Kand
Saoma
Kala Julk
Ak Bulagh
Zinjan
PART III
Teheran
Ayn Varzan
Shahrud
Nishapur
Meshed
AFGHANISTAN
Herat
Karokh
