After its title page an author’s statement declares that the book makes no pretensions to literary merit – ‘it is offered to the public in the sole hope that the public will buy it’. In fact, a few pages later, Byron says he hopes it will further ‘the new sense of European consciousness’, and this was certainly a truer intention. For it was a first book, very much a young man’s book, and before long Robert Byron was to mature into a writer of high learning, skill and lasting influence, and to be the great master of that particular genre of travel writing with which he first experimented in 1926. He travelled constantly all his life, and became a great authority on matters Byzantine, until six books later, in 1936, he wrote his masterpiece The Road to Oxiana, which established his place once and for all in the English literary canon.
With Europe in the Looking-Glass Byron was pioneering a new kind of travel writing. With The Road to Oxiana one can almost say that he invented another, so startlingly original was its form – a kind of artificial diary and memorandum, put together collage-like in afterthought, and declared by scholars to have had the same sort of effect upon travel writing that Eliot and Joyce had upon fiction. Certainly, by way of Oxiana we can the trace the influence of Robert Byron upon countless later practitioners, from Patrick Leigh-Fermor to Eric Newby to Rory Maclean (who also travelled with a car – not a Sunbeam, but a Trabant).
And many more of us, too, may feel that we have been liberated by Byron’s example from the curse of the travelogue – the stigma that used to imply that travel-writing could not qualify as true literature. Alas, few of us now alive have been able to thank him. Robert Byron died in 1941, aged thirty-five, when a German U-boat torpedoed the ship in which was sailing on a BBC commission to Egypt. His body was never recovered.
– Jan Morris, 2012
A POLICEMAN, pacing sedately along the left side of Upper Brook Street at half-past ten on the sultry night of Friday, the 1st of August, 1925, was surprised to find stretched lengthways upon the pavement three recumbent figures, studying a map by the dim green light of a street lamp above them. Drawn up by the kerb stood a massive touring car, the back of which was entirely occupied with a mountainous pile of trunks and suitcases. The policeman, after a minute’s hesitation, unbent so far as to take a glance at the map himself; and, if his eyesight was good, he may remember to this day the shadowy outline of East Anglia that spread itself beneath him, bounded on the west by the Great North Road.
‘Out through Finchley,’ murmured a voice, ‘then past Hatfield to Peterborough, leaving Cambridge on the right.’
This was settled. The map was folded. And the three figures, David Henniker, Simon O’Neill and myself, rose to their feet and moved towards the car. With a last glance, the policeman continued on his way, stolidly scrutinizing the unending succession of area railings that lined the remainder of the street.
The preliminaries of the tour had been rather erratic. One weekend, at the beginning of May, David had arrived in Oxford and asked me to dine with him. We had had a peculiar dish of sole covered with burnt custard and muscatels. During this he suggested that I should join him and Geoffrey Pratt on ‘a trip to the Balkans’. The prospect seemed delightful. We began to outline the route, but found it impossible without the aid of an atlas. Then David motored home to bed.
A few days later Wembley opened her gates a second time to a patriotic public. The first person to be seen on arrival in the Amusement Park was Simon, sitting bolt upright on the Giant Racer, in a bowler hat and gloves. He was nervously sharing a compartment with a small boy in a vermilion cap, and was immediately whisked out of sight as we arrived at the pay-box. For the past year he had been on a visit to the Galapagos Islands as part of a scientific expedition, and since his return we had not until this moment seen him – nor he Wembley.
After he had alighted and suffered the effusive greetings consequent on so long an absence, we asked him what he was doing. He said he did not know. I suggested that he should come with David to the Balkans. It would mean another car. He replied that he thought that that could be managed. At that moment the police, who were on the track of a couple of missing iron chairs, appeared round the corner. We disappeared into Hong Kong, and thence entered Trinidad by a back way, where we drank Planter’s Punches. Eventually we parted in Shaftesbury Avenue.
At the beginning of July the prospective members of the party spent Friday to Monday at Highworth, David’s home.
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