The Road to Oxiana

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

With an Introduction by
COLIN THUBRON

PENGUIN BOOKS

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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
All rights
reserved

The moral right of the introducer has been asserted

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ISBN: 978-0-14-191277-6

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 with 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…”