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

The Road to Oxiana

With an Introduction by COLIN THUBRON

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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
All rights reserved

The moral right of the introducer has been asserted

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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.