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The 100 best nonfiction books / No 40 / The Road to Oxiana by Robert Byron (1937)

The 100 best nonfiction books: No 40 – The Road to Oxiana by Robert Byron (1937)

Much admired by Graham Greene and Evelyn Waugh, Robert Byron’s dazzling, timeless account of a journey to Afghanistan is perhaps the greatest travel book of the 20th century

Robert McCrum

Monday 31 October 2016

According 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.”

“I always call Mussolini Mr Smith in Italy.”

“Well, Mr Brown.”

“No, that’s Stalin’s name in Russia.”

Further debate establishes that “Jones” is no good either. That’s what Byron calls Hitler in Germany. (In 1938, together with Unity Mitford, Byron would attend the last Nuremberg rally.) Eventually, the two travellers settle on “Marjoribanks” for the shah (“Marjoribanks” will recur throughout the subsequent pages of Byron’s journey).

Quotation from Byron hardly begins to do justice to the pleasures of his writing. The Wildean mix of scholarship and irreverence becomes addictive, as in this typical passage about the Lutfullah mosque from Byron’s visit to Isfahan:

“I have never encountered splendour of this kind before. Other interiors came into my mind as I stood there, to compare it with: Versailles, or the porcelain rooms at Schönbrunn, or the Doge’s palace, or St Peter’s… . All are rich; but none so rich. Their richness is three-dimensional; it is attended by all the effort of shadow: in the mosque of Sheikh Lutfullah, it is a richness of light and surface, of pattern and colour only. The architectural form is unimportant. It is not smothered, as in rococo; it is simply the instrument of a spectacle, as earth is the instrument of a garden.”

Byron was often as daring as he was witty. To enter the forbidden mosque of Goharshad, he disguised himself by blackening his face with charcoal. From Herat to Mazar-i-Sharif, he and Sykes were the first Englishmen to undertake what was, and remains, a highly dangerous route.

Byron was insouciant towards the risks he took. Many of his best passages are strikingly joyous and carefree, in prose that’s lambent, simple and brilliantly observed, as in this conclusion to a sunset at the shrine of Niamatullah:

“While the cadent sun throws lurid copper streaks across the sand-blown sky, all the birds in Persia have gathered for a last chorus. Slowly, the darkness brings silence, and they settle themselves to sleep with diminishing flutterings, as of a child arranging its bedclothes.”

Byron’s grand journey plans were frustrated. He would never get further east than Afghanistan. The dividend, for his readers, is that he plunges himself into his Afghan adventures with infectious brio: in April, he’s arrested for an “incident”; in May, we find him as a guest at the consul’s ball; various kinds of transport break down or fail. Somehow, and very entertainingly, Byron ends up in Kabul.

“A winding hill road brought us down from the Charikar plateau to a smaller plain inside a ring of mountains; running water and corrugated iron glinted among its trees. At the entrance to the capital the police deprived the vicar and the curate of their rifles, to their great distress; but being in turbans, no one would believe they were government servants.”

There were still a few bizarre, comic encounters to record:

“This morning at the Legation I met a Colonel Porter, who asked what my share in the world’s work was. I said I had been looking at Mohammadan architecture.

‘Mind you,’ he replied. ‘I can tell you the key to the problem, if you like.’

‘Really. What is it?’

‘The whole thing’s phallic,’ he uttered in a ghoulish whisper.

I was surprised at first to note the influence of Freud on the north-west frontier, but soon discovered that for Colonel Porter the universe itself was phallic.”

After the thrills of Kabul and the Khyber Pass, England looked – as it always looks upon that inevitable return home – “drab and ugly from the train”. Suddenly deflated, Byron confesses to feeling “dazed at the prospect of coming to a stop, at the impending collision between 11 months’ momentum and the immobility of a beloved home”. Laconic, he writes: “The collision happened. Our dogs ran up. And then my mother – to whom, now it is finished, I deliver the whole record.”

Finally, Byron’s journey of heart and mind reverts, poignantly, to its source, where no artifice or extravagance will seduce that all-consuming first reader. “What I have seen she taught me to see,” he writes, “and will tell me if I have honoured it.”

Byron was lost at sea on 24 February 1941, aged 35, when the Egypt-bound ship on which he was sailing was torpedoed by a German U-boat off Cape Wrath.

A signature sentence

“Below the gleaming silver crags and stunted green-feathered pines, the mountain fell 3,000 feet to the coastal plain, an endless panorama of rusty red speckled with myriads of little trees and their shadows, beyond which, 60 miles away across the blue sea, appeared the line of Asia Minor and the Taurus Mountains.”