Grove Koger

As I expand and update When the Going Was Good, I’m posting revised entries from the first edition. Today’s deals with a humorous and engaging account by Robert Byron.

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The Road to Oxiana (London: Macmillan, 1937)

Distantly related to the famous poet, Robert Byron attended Eton and Oxford but neglected his studies for the “larger world.” (What’s more, school officials may have been put off by Byron’s frequently expressed distaste for Shakespeare and his habit of dressing up as Queen Victoria.) The young man visited Italy in 1923 and Hungary the following year, and took an automobile trip on the Continent with two friends in 1925. Greece in particular excited his imagination, and he became an ardent but discriminating philhellene, championing Greek political causes and writing admiringly of Byzantine (but not ancient Greek) culture.

Byron set out in 1933 with fellow writer Christopher Sykes to visit fabled Oxiana, the land of the Oxus, a river known today as Amu Darya that forms part of Afghanistan’s border with Russia. They hoped to travel in charcoal-burning cars (!), but this impractical plan was abandoned quite early on. Despite his ostensible destination, Byron was particularly interested in the early Islamic architecture of Persia (now Iran), the mosques of which had been opened to non-Muslims only two years before. Specifically he hoped to inspect the burial tower of one King Kabus, in which structure he understood that the body of the eleventh-century monarch was suspended in a glass case. 

Set out as a series of journal entries, some quite brief, The Road to Oxiana in fact occupied Byron for three years, its seemingly offhand and informal manner the result of careful design. Byron held strong views on art and architecture, and these, combined with his disregard for conventional pieties and his sharp humor, make his book as readable now as it was perplexing to many upon publication. (An absurd conversation with an ambassador is rendered as a musical duet, its dynamics marked from pp to Roaring ff.) Critics have credited Byron with revolutionizing the English travel book, transforming it from a dilettantish exercise to an art form. Although Afghan officials prevented Byron from catching more than a glimpse of the Oxus, the “road” he had taken to get there was exhilarating.

If you’re looking for a good edition of Byron’s Road, I suggest the Oxford UP edition (New York, 1982), with an introduction by noted critic of travel literature Paul Fussell, the author of Abroad: British Literary Traveling Between the Wars. It’s the cover of that edition that you see at the top of today’s post.

And if you’d like to read more by this nearly forgotten writer, try Europe in the Looking-Glass: Reflections of a Motor Drive From Grimsby to Athens (1926); The Station: Athos, Treasures and Men (1928); and First Russia, Then Tibet (1933); Shell Guide to Wiltshire (1935). For information about Byron himself, see: Mark Cocker, Loneliness and Time: The Story of British Travel Writing (Pantheon, 1992); Robert Eisner, Travelers to an Antique Land: The History and Literature of Travel to Greece  (The University of Michigan Press, 1991); and Paul Fussell, Abroad: British Literary Traveling between the Wars (New York: Oxford University Press, 1980).

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