Read Ebook {PDF EPUB} The Road to Oxiana by Robert Byron Robert Byron. Byron's primary goal was to visit monuments and buildings, and a good deal of The Road to Oxiana is taken up with architecture. This is never boring or staid, however, with Byron's lively prose and strong personal opinions (including an aversion to Buddhist and Greek art) making even the sections I barely understood rather fun. As an example, here is a short comment from Delhi, right at the end of the trip. Byron's great talent is his ability to capture something of a scene or a meeting in a few words. He is a rather detached and unemotional narrator, however: we never feel threatened by the dangers he faces or exult with him at his successes. (On the other hand, neither does he inflict on us the artificial second-hand nostalgia of Bruce Chatwin's introduction to this edition.) Nor do we get much of a picture of any of the people Byron met, or of his travelling companion Christopher Sykes. Indeed he seems quite insensitive to people and culture, with that careless arrogance of the English imperial elite abroad: only a month before the end of the trip, for example, do he and Christopher realise that they can't treat the Afghan guards accompanying them as if they were English domestic servants. I know too little to really appreciate Byron's architectural commentary. Outside of that there is little of intellectual substance in The Road to Oxiana : the history is episodic, the comments on contemporary politics are often uninformed, and there is little of ethnographic depth. When all is said and done, I think I would have enjoyed as much and learnt more from an introduction to Islamic art and architecture, a history of Persia and Afghanistan, and something about life in the region in the 1930s. But it is perhaps travel writing generally that doesn't appeal to me: The Road to Oxiana is certainly an outstanding example of the genre. Cookie Consent and Choices. 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The 100 best nonfiction books: No 40 – The Road to Oxiana by Robert Byron (1937) A ccording to Robert Byron’s Oxford contemporary Evelyn Waugh – never the most reliable witness – the future author of The Road to Oxiana used to delight in shouting “Down with abroad”. Typical in striking a pose, Byron was an aggressive Oxford aesthete of the “Brideshead generation”, a homosexual wanderer whose precocious career as a travel writer and art historian can be traced through a succession of prewar gems. ( Robert Byron by James Knox, published by John Murray in 2003, remains the principal biographical source.) Byron wrote The Station , aged 22, after a visit to Mount Athos on a mule, Fortnum & Mason saddlebags bursting with a soda siphon and chicken in aspic. This was followed by The Byzantine Achievement (1929) and The Birth of Western Painting (1930). In 1933, the publication of First Russia, Then Tibet confirmed Byron’s reputation as a traveller and connoisseur. In the same year, accompanied by his friend Christopher Sykes, but tormented by his unrequited love for Desmond Parsons, Byron set out on a journey to Persia and Afghanistan, by way of Jerusalem, Damascus and Baghdad, in search of the origins of Islamic architecture. After many vicissitudes, The Road to Oxiana (the remote northern borderland of Afghanistan) became the record of his 11-month journey, a fabulous and intoxicating weave of surreal vignettes, journal entries and odd playlets. In these gorgeous pages, poetry, gossip and scholarship become braided into an exotic tapestry that dazzles as much today as it did on publication. As many critics have noted, unlike his contemporaries, such as Peter Fleming and Norman Douglas, Byron has not dated. An enthusiastic literary critical response ranged from Graham Greene, who admired Byron’s demotic, conversational brilliance, to the rivalrous Evelyn Waugh, who had to concede the book’s high spirits, via the Sunday Times , which linked Byron to his namesake (no relation) and declared him “the last and finest fruit of the insolent humanism of the 18th century”. Today, widely considered to be Byron’s masterpiece, The Road to Oxiana stands as perhaps the greatest travel book of the 20th century. It’s a title that continues to inspire hyberbole. The American critic Paul Fussell, writing in Abroad , his important 1982 study of interwar literary travelling, has judged that “what Ulysses is to the novel between the wars, and what The Waste Land is to poetry, The Road to Oxiana is to the travel book”. This extravagant claim is supported by writers as varied as Bruce Chatwin, Colin Thubron and William Dalrymple. In their different ways, each shares a veneration for The Road to Oxiana . Chatwin, whose debt to Byron was profound, declared it to be “a sacred text”, and campaigned to get the book back into print with Picador in 1981, after almost 50 years of obscurity. Byron starts his quest, in medias res , with himself as a “joy-hog” in Venice, immersed in the sea at Lido. The bathing, on a calm day, must be the worst in Europe: water like hot saliva, cigar ends floating into one’s mouth, and shoals of jellyfish. Once he is joined by Christopher Sykes, Byron begins to hit his stride as as an aphorist: “The King David hotel is the only good hotel in Asia this side of Shanghai.” Lines such as these will remind Byron’s readers that when, on a visit to Soviet Russia, he had encountered an Intouristguide, a Shakespeare-denier who insisted that the plays could never have been written by a grocer from Stratford, Byron had cheerfully replied: “They are exactly the sort of plays I would expect a grocer to write.” In the same spirit, Byron was untroubled by the perils of his trip. Crossing into Persia, his companion Sykes nervously rebukes him for disrespecting the shah out loud. He suggests: “Call him Mr Smith.” The road to inspiration. The Road to Oxiana, Robert Byron's account of his journey to Persia and Afghanistan in 1933-34, is widely recognised as the greatest of all pre- war travel books. As Paul Fussell neatly put it in Abroad, "What Ulysses is to the novel between the wars, and what The Waste Land is to poetry, The Road to Oxiana is to the travel book." Byron was killed in the second world war aged only 35, lost when his ship was torpedoed by a German U-boat off Cape Wrath. Yet in his brief 15 years as a writer, he achieved an astonishing amount. He was a brave and energetic traveller, an art historian of astonishing erudition, and a profoundly perceptive connoisseur of civilisations. Above all, he was a writer of breathtaking prose - prose whose sensuous, chiselled beauty has cast its spell on English travel writing ever since. For at his best Byron had a remarkable ability to evoke place, to bring to life a whole world in a single unexpected image, to pull a perfect sentence out of the air with the ease of a child netting a butterfly. The perfection and visual precision of the writing in Oxiana, combined with its wit, its farcical playlets, its intriguing scholarly essays and its fierce passion for its subject - a search for the Central Asian roots of Islamic architecture - have given the book a far greater degree of immortality than the travel writing of any of Byron's contemporaries. Few today read Waugh's travel books, or the now very dated works of Peter Fleming, all of which outsold Byron's work during his lifetime. But although Byron had little financial success from his writing while he was alive, he has gone on to be the posthumous literary mentor to almost all the best travel writers who followed him, from Patrick Leigh Fermor, Eric Newby and Colin Thubron to Bruce Chatwin, who wrote that for him, Oxiana was "a sacred text, beyond criticism". In his introduction to the 1981 Picador edition of the book, which brought Oxiana back into print after nearly half a century of neglect, Chatwin tells how he carried his copy "spineless and floodstained" on four journeys through Central Asia. For him it was, he wrote, quite simply "a work of genius". I am not neutral on this either, for I also write as an abject devotee: Oxiana had an electrifying and life-changing effect on me, and was responsible for me wanting to become a travel writer. In those days, it seemed as if Byron's elusiveness only heightened his mystique. Little seemed to be written on him, and the Picador edition of Oxiana contained only four brief lines of biography: "Robert Byron was born in 1905 and educated at Eton and Merton College, Oxford. Among his other books are The Station, The Byzantine Achievement and First Russia, Then Tibet. He died when his ship was torpedoed in 1941." There was no author picture, and few of his other books seemed to be in print. A genius who died in his mid-30s, at the height of his powers, leaving one outstanding masterpiece behind him: for me all this gave Byron a fascination quite unlike that of any of his contemporaries. Now James Knox has produced the first full account of Byron's brief life. It's clearly a labour of love, the product of 15 years of research, during which time Knox interviewed almost all of Byron's surviving contemporaries and visited many of his favourite haunts. It is a solid piece of work, meticulously researched, and likely to become the definitive biography; but whether it will do anything to enhance Byron's reputation remains to be seen. For Byron no longer stands alone with his one perfect book. Instead, Knox places him firmly in his context amid the chatter and arcane snobberies of what Humphrey Carpenter has labelled "the Brideshead generation". For much of the biography, the writer last seen drinking tea with the Turkmen of the Hindu Kush is almost invisible amid a shrieking crowd of vapid Bright Young Things, all busy chasing around London in honking vintage cars. All the old Brideshead stories are wheeled out and dusted down: Harold Acton declaiming his poetry through a megaphone, jolly student japes at the Hypocrites Club, Diana Mitford eloping with Oswald Mosley. For all that he clearly admires Byron, in the first half of his book Knox, albeit unintentionally, manages to emphasise the least attractive side of his subject's character: the camp aesthete and gilded country-house fixture; the slightly ludicrous house-party chatterer who affected to hate all western art after El Greco; the belligerent controversialist who would rather die than be seen agreeing with conventional opinion. As Nancy Mitford wrote after spending a weekend with him: "Isn't Robert simply killing? He seems to hate everything which ordinary people like!" (There was some truth to this: when Byron was in Russia, his Intourist guide insisted that Shakespeare's plays could never have been written by a grocer from Stratford- upon-Avon. Byron replied: "They are exactly the sort of plays I would expect a grocer to write.") As Knox heads off into a lengthy discussion of Byron's Eton and Oxford days - at this point, according to Waugh, Byron used to shout "Down with Abroad" and told the novelist Henry Yorke that Paris and Vienna left him "speechless with repulsion, loathing, even resentment" - you feel a growing sense of despair, as a writer of quite exceptional intelligence, wit and ability is revealed as an effete and narrow-minded public-school prat, setting the Thames alight with petrol and managing to get himself sent down from Oxford, before setting off to Mount Athos with Fortnum & Mason saddle bags bulging with chicken in aspic and a soda siphon. Yet in the end, Byron survives this treatment, and the more he grows up, and the more travel widens his mind (and the further we get from the malign influence of Waugh, Acton, Powell and co), the more one grows to admire and even like the man. As an aesthete he was well ahead of his time. He was a pioneer enthusiast for Byzantine art at a time when Byzantium was regarded as a bastion of medieval superstition and its history ignored in all British universities. He was a pioneer conservationist, crusading to save Georgian London from the developers and responsible for saving Carlton House Terrace. He was a lone champion of Lutyens and was the first to realise the scale of the latter's achievement in building New Delhi and making a firm break with a century of Tropical Gothic architecture: "People don't realise what has been done," he wrote to his mother, "how stupendous it is, and such a work of beauty, so unlike the English. One would never have thought it of them. It will be a mystery to historians." More surprisingly, Byron's political instincts were also very sharp. He hated the pomposity and prejudice of the British in India almost as much as he hated their Indo-Saracenic architecture: Bombay he described as "absolutely awful: Indian, Swiss chalet, French chateau, Giotto's tower, Siena cathedral & St Peter's are to be found altogether in almost every building", while Darjeeling he thought was "Bognor or Southend roofed in corrugated iron and reassembled in the form of an Italian hill town. the whole of [British] India is a gigantic conspiracy to make one imagine one is in Balham or Eastbourne. In a country full of good example, the English have left the mark of the beast." Visiting Russia, he quickly woke up to the horrors of Stalinism at a time when other London intellectuals such as HG Wells and the Webbs were busy grovelling in front of the red tsar: "Nothing could be more sinister," he wrote, "than this regime based from top to bottom on a system of spying. No more shall I be deceived by English intellectuals who come on guided tours." His greatest moment came, however, with the advent of the Nazis. While many of his Oxford contemporaries initially took a benign view of Hitler - Unity Mitford crowing over her "delicious Stormies" (stormtroopers) and Evelyn Waugh cheering on Mussolini's fascists in Ethiopia - Byron was an arch-enemy of both fascism and appeasement: "I am going to have Warmonger put on my passport," he declared. "These people are so grotesque, if we go to war it will be like fighting an enormous zoo." In the strange confrontation that took place in English life in the late 1930s, as the gilded butterflies of Brideshead found themselves confronted by the goosestepping armies of Nazi Germany, few got it as right as Byron. Like Orwell, he outgrew the limitations of the attitudes into which he had been born, and left behind him, in The Road to Oxiana , a monument to the civilised humanism he so admired. Despite a wobbly start, once out of the Brideshead mire, Knox's well-researched and thorough biography reminds us quite how serious a loss Byron's premature death was for English letters. · William Dalrymple's most recent book is White Mughals (Flamingo). Robert Byron. Robert Byron (26 February 1905 – 24 February 1941) was a British travel writer, best known for his travelogue The Road to Oxiana . He was also a noted writer, art critic and historian. Contents. Biography 1 Bibliography 2 References 3 Further reading 4 Literary Archives 5 External links 6. Biography. Byron was born in 1905, and educated at Eton and Merton College, Oxford, from which he was expelled for his hedonistic and rebellious manner. He was best known at Oxford for his impersonation of Queen Victoria. He died in 1941, during the Second World War, when the ship on which he was travelling was torpedoed by a U-Boat off Cape Wrath, Scotland, en route to Egypt. Byron travelled to widely different places; Peking, his temporary home. In his day, Byron's travel books were outsold by those of writers Peter Fleming and Evelyn Waugh. An appreciation of architecture is a strong element in Byron's writings. He was a forceful advocate for the preservation of historic buildings and a founder member of the philhellene, he also pioneered, in the English speaking world, a renewal of interest Byzantine History. Byron has been described as 'one of the first and most brilliant of twentieth century philhellenes'. [1] He attended the last Nuremberg Rally, in 1938, with Nazi sympathiser Unity Mitford. Byron knew her through his friendship with her sister Nancy Mitford, but he was an outspoken opponent of the Nazis. Nancy Mitford hoped at one stage that Byron would propose marriage to her, and was later astonished as well as shocked to discover his homosexual tastes, complaining: "This wretched pederasty falsifies all feelings and yet one is supposed to revere it." [2] Byron's great, though unreciprocated, passion was for Desmond Parsons, younger brother of the 6th Earl of Rosse, who was regarded as one of the most magnetic men of his generation. They lived together in Peking, in 1934, where Desmond developed Hodgkin's Disease, of which he died in Zurich, in 1937, when only 26 years old. Byron was left utterly devastated. Byron died aged 35 in 1941 after his ship, the SS Jonathan Holt , was torpedoed by U-97 a Type VIIC submarine in the North Atlantic. His body was never found. An acquaintance from early days, Evelyn Waugh noted Byron's gumption. In 1928 he wrote to Henry Yorke "I hear Robert has beaten us all by going to India in an aeroplane which is the sort of success which I call tangible." But writing in 1948, Waugh said of Byron in a letter to Harold Acton: "It is not yet the time to say so but I greatly disliked Robert in his last years & think he was a dangerous lunatic better off dead." [3] The passionately anti-communist Waugh believed that during the 1930s Byron had become pro-Soviet, though Byron's – and Waugh's – biographer Christopher Sykes firmly denied any such sympathy on Byron's part. Prince Charles read Byron's prose All These I Learnt on BBC Radio 4 on National Poetry Day, 5 October 2006. In February 2012, his book 'Europe in the Looking Glass' was serialised by BBC's Radio 4 Book of the Week. The program included detailed passages of Germany and an eye-witness report of the 1922 Greek refugee exodus and massacres following the Great Fire of Smyrna. Bibliography. Europe in the Looking-Glass. Reflections of a Motor Drive from Grimsby to Athens (1926) The Station (1928) – visiting the Greek monasteries of Mount Athos The Byzantine Achievement (1929) Birth of Western Painting. A History of colour.form,and iconography. G. Routledge, 1930. An Essay on India (1931) The Appreciation of Architecture (1932) First Russia, Then Tibet (1933) The Road to Oxiana (1937) – visiting Persia and Afghanistan Imperial Pilgrimage (1937) – a small guide to London from the "London in your pocket series". London, London Passenger Transport Board, (1937) Letters home edited by Lucy Butler (his sister). London, John Murray, (1991). ISBN 0-7195-4921-3. References. ^ Norwich, John Julius (1996) Byzantium – The Decline and Fall , P. 449, Penguin, ISBN 978-0-14-011449-2 ^ D. J. Taylor, Bright Young People: The Rise and Fall of a Generation, 1918–1940 (London: Chatto & Windus, 2007), p. 210. ^ Waugh, Evelyn; Edited by Mark Amory (1980). The Letters of. Further reading. Fussell, Paul. (1982). Abroad: British Literary Traveling Between the Wars . Oxford, OUP. ISBN 0-19-503068-0. Knox, James (2003). Robert Byron: A Biography . London, John Murray. ISBN 0-7195-4841-1. Literary Archives. Robert Byron Papers. General Collection, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library. Yale University. External links. http://www.artandarchitecture.org.uk/search/results.html?_photographer=%22ULAN33812%22&display=+Robert+Byron Photographs of buildings taken by Byron. http://www.courtauldimages.com Photographs of Central Asia by Byron. http://www.blinkx.com/burl? blinkxreferrer=resultTitle&v=A9_zDoNdp4no_dJPgwQV1w His biographer James Knox talking briefly of Robert Byron. EngvarB from August 2014 Use dmy dates from August 2014 All articles with unsourced statements Articles with unsourced statements from August 2015 WorldHeritage articles needing clarification from August 2015 1905 births 1941 deaths Alumni of Merton College, Oxford British travel writers British civilians killed in World War II People educated at Eton College LGBT writers from England 20th-century British writers People lost at sea. Help improve this article. About Us Privacy Policy Contact Us. Copyright © World Library Foundation. All rights reserved. eBooks from Project Gutenberg are sponsored by the World Library Foundation, a 501c(4) Member's Support Non-Profit Organization, and is NOT affiliated with any governmental agency or department.