REASSESSMENT
Robert Byron
Gavin Stamp
The Road to Oxiana Robert Byron, with an introduction by Bruce Chatwin (Picador pp. 288, £2.50) The Road to Oxiana was first published in 1937: now its author is in sudden danger of becoming a cult figure. In his recent book, Abroad, about travel writers of between the wars, Paul Fussell devoted a whole chapter to Robert Byron and Bruce Chatwin's introduction to this new edition has been printed in the Guardian.
It is odd that the rediscovery of Byron did not occur sooner, yet reviewers of Fussell's book evidently had never heard of him or his several books. I find Byron's comparative obscurity a puzzle; though his books have been rare and expensive for years he made regular appearances in all the many memoirs and diaries of the Oxford jeunesse doree of the 1920s. Evelyn Waugh and Harold Acton have described his inebriate somnolence and pugnacity as an undergraduate, his involvement in the notorious Victorian Exhibition of 1924 and his remarkable resemblance to Queen Victoria — which he occasionally exploited to good effect. As a young man, Byron would suddenly discover a generally familiar subject with enthusiasm, and then angrily demand how others knew all about it already — a trait which those of us who are even more ignorant may find encouraging and one which may explain the vitality and sense of excitement which pervade his writings.
There may be other reasons for Byron's neglect today: he was never afraid to speak his mind and did not suffer fools gladly. He fell out with many friends, particularly over Appeasement — 'Are you in German pay?' he once publicly asked a Chamberlain supporter over lunch — while his irrational hatred of Roman Catholicism caused a breach with Evelyn Waugh. Furthermore, Byron's work on Byzantine art may well have been conveniently forgotten by those who survived him. (The Station of 1928 was an account of a visit to Mount Athos with Talbot Rice.) Towards the end, Waugh was afraid that Byron was becoming unbalanced and would end as a Communist — a curious accusation as Byron loathed bureaucracy and tyranny and, unlike so many of his generation, was never a naïve fellow-traveller. His unjustly neglected book, First Russia, Then Tibet (1933) contains an observant and critical account of Soviet life and aspirations as well as brilliant evocations of the characters of Moscow and Leningrad. But he preferred to look at Orthodox churches than at modern Constructivist buildings 'that might cause an ephemeral surprise in the suburbs of Wolverhampton.' I find particularly endearing — and contemporary — Byron's 'contempt for those foreign intellectuals and particularly those English ones, who . . . are so intoxicated with admiration that they can spare no word of sympathy for their fellow-intellectuals, the men in Russia likest to themselves, for whom there is no place or hope under the system they so ardently covet. That this system would immediately, on attaining power, annihilate these miserable hypocrites, these hypnotees of every windblown theory, these bastards by uplift out of comfortable income, is the one satisfaction 1 could derive from its introduction into England.' Byron was one of the finest English writers on architecture this century. His whole issue of the Architectural Review on New Delhi was a brilliantly perceptive tribute to Lutyens; it also glories in the arrogant achievement of the European humanist tradition: . . he has revealed and given life that balanced sanity and proportion which is the distilled essence of beauty, and which Europe calls the humanist ideal . . . The majority are deaf to all but the "rights of man" — whether to give or to withhold them. They forget that one of those rights is beauty. This at least the English have given. And for this at least the English will be remembered.' Similarly, Byron's magnificently rude polemic against Establishment philistinism and architec tural vandalism, How We Celebrate the Coronation (of 1937), is a piece of angry writing in the splendid tradition of Ruskin and William Morris.
The Road to Oxiana is an account of a journey made in Persia and Afghanistan in 1933-34, in part with Christopher Sykes. Byron had been first stimulated by seeing a photograph of the remarkable 11th-century brick burial tower at Gumbad-i-Kabus and then wished to go on to remote and tantalising Turkestan, through which flows the River Oxus between Afghanistan and Russian Asia. The book records his search for the creations of Gohar Shad, wife of Shah Rukh, son of Timur, the builder of the Musulla at Herat. This had been largely destroyed by the British in 1885 in the face of a threatened Russian invasion of Afghanistan . . . `. . . the most glorious productions of Mohammedan architecture in the 15th century, having survived the barbarism of four centuries, were now razed to the ground under the eyes, and with the approval, of the English Commissioners. Nine minarets and the mausoleum escaped.' The search culminated in Byron's perilous entry into the Shrine of the Imam Riza in exclusive, Shiite Meshed, disguised as a middle-class Persian.
Oxiana was Byron's masterpiece and it succeeds on many levels. The architectural judgments — often unorthodox — are always stimulating; the description of the absurdities of the modern Persia of Riza Shah (called `Marjoribanks' lest the police read the diary) — vain, effete and naïvely Western — contrasted with the proud and independent Asian vigour of the Afghans, will be sympathetically familiar to anyone who has travelled through those two unfortunate countries more recently. But, above all, the book is entertaining, and funny. Byron had a highly developed sense of irony and the absurd, which he often conveyed by repeating hilarious conversations verbatim; 'Mr Trump-of-Raphael gave a tea party . . I sat between the English bishop and a Kajar prince. "Why are you out here?" asked the bishop angrily. "Travelling." "What in?" ' What is more absurd is that, right through the 1960s and '70s, the years of the Hippie Trail through Herat and Kandahar in search of narcotics and nirvana, The Road to Oxiana was out of print and that now this new edition finds both countries closed to us. The threat from the north which haunts Byron's pages has become an appalling reality, as Bruce Chatwin angrily laments in his suitably emotional introduction. This paperback edition is very reasonably priced, but really we need illustrations of all the buildings Byron described. These are readily available in the collection of Robert Byron's own Photographs which have been given to the Courtauld Institute by his sister, Lucy Butler: documents all the more valuable today since the damage done to these ancient monuments by both Shiite fanaticism and Soviet aggression is too painful to contemplate.
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