The Station.
Athos: Treasures and Men - Robert Byron
Robert Byron was born in England in 1905 into a family
distantly related to Lord Byron. He attended Eton and Merton College, Oxford
(left without a degree), and wrote several travel books, the most famous of
which, The Road to Oxiana, shows up
on many lists of best travel narratives. Byron had strong opinions and didn’t
shrink from expressing them: “Isn't Robert simply killing,” wrote Nancy Mitford
in a letter; “I love it when he talks about poetry & books, he seems to
hate everything which ordinary people like!”
Travel books were extremely popular between the wars.
Every major British author of time released one: Peter Fleming, Aldous Huxley,
Rebecca West, Evelyn Waugh, D.H. Lawrence, Graham Greene, Auden, and Christopher Isherwood, to name only
the best-known (see Paul Fussell’s overview of this great genre Abroad).
The Station is basically a travel
book, written when Byron was only 22 and released in 1928.
Age is key here because this is very much a young guy’s book.
He’s passionately lyrical about the scenery so some passages; especially
memorable is the ascent to the summit of Mount Athos, crowned by the Church of
the Transfiguration.
We might, had we wished, have
put out a hand to pluck the sky, have palmed away a cup of blue. For that broad
illimitable space was now reality, possessing an interesting and unsuspecting
texture. . .
His fervor to convince us non-experts to appreciate
Byzantine buildings, decoration and other art is infectious and persuasive though
sometimes the non-expert suspects specialists would quarrel with Byron’s
assertions.
His language is often mannered, an unchecked fault of a
youth bubbling over with knowledge and excitement about his topic. For
instance, because his language is so pretentious and affected, he does not
clearly explain the simple distinction of Idiorrhythmic and cenobitic
monasticism.
He spares no
cutting observation on range of topics. His faux outrage is pretty funny.
The food at lunch, though
plentiful, was of a nastiness without precedent. Seeing me unable to swallow,
Mark asked me why I did not eat the cheese. "Because I don't like
it." "But it's delicious - just the same as we have in Scotland,
called Crowdy." Thus the barbarians always reason. The veneer which they
have acquired in the centres of the world falls off. Without a tremor they
conjure up some filthy habit of their native fastnesses. And, not content with
the very shame of the revelation, must needs elevate it to a standard for the
universe. "Crowdy!" It has always been apparent to thinking people
that some frightful custom, some orgiastic rite that would discredit the
aborigines of Papua, has attended the childhood of those grim tribes among whom
Albert and Victoria, in the guise of "Lord and Lady Churchill," were
the Rosita Forbeses of their day. And now it is plain. "Crowdy!"
These rancid, fretid curdles that I needs must eat "because we do in
Scotland." Scotland? Where is Scotland?
Rosita
Forbes was an explorer and travel writer, by the way.
He’s painfully honest and skeptical with people he meets,
questioning them closely when they don’t make any sense:
Gripped by a vinous pentecost, I launched into speech: "We bathe every day, Father Stephen. Are there sharks here ?" "Sharks? They abound." "Have you seen them?" "I? No, I haven't seen them. But there are quantities." "But if you haven't seen them, how do you know?" "How do I know? They ate a deacon two hundred and fifty years ago. A lamb was set as a bait; they caught the shark, and there he was inside." Having long arranged, in case of natural and accessible death, to be buried in a mackintosh and manure the garden, I was appalled by this prospect of leaving my vile body, not even digested, in the stomach of a fish. And resolved, in the contemplative silence that followed, never to bathe again.
Waugh’s Vile Bodies
came out in 1930 – I wonder if the expression was current then.
And anybody who’s lived overseas will connect with
stories of odd requests from the locals. It really is best to be blunt.
A day or two later he began
again: "A few years ago a man died here who had a number of English
medals." (Greeks frequently obtained them in the war.) "Medals?"
I replied, not wholly understanding the word. "Yes, medals," he
repeated, drawing imaginary ribbons on his chest. "When you return to
England, will you send me some?" "Send you medals? But how, and for
what reason?" "Why not? Can't you go to the Foreign Office in London,
and have them sent to me?" "But why? You have done nothing."
"No, but I will. I will do great things. I love England." "You
must do them first. Besides, the Foreign Office does not distribute
medals." "The Foreign Office does not distribute medals? Who
does?" "The King." "Have you visited the King?"
"No. " "I visited our Kings three times." Pause. "But
when you get back, you will send me those medals?" "No."
Silence. Each gazes at the sea, breathing hard. "What can I do to be
famous? I do want to be famous."
Later in the 1930s, as an in-your-face kind of guy with
decided enthusiasms, dislikes and prejudices, at dinner parties he’d ask Nazi
sympathizers if they were in German pay.
Unlike Evelyn Waugh whooping for Mussolini's invasion of
Ethiopia, Byron the staunch individualist hated fascism and appeasement. In a
letter he wrote “I am going to have Warmonger put on my passport. These people
are so grotesque, if we go to war it will be like fighting an enormous zoo.”
During World War II, with his cover as a foreign
correspondent for a London newspaper, he was dispatched on an intelligence
mission to the Middle East. The ship he was on was torpedoed and sunk off the
northwest coast of Scotland. His body was never found.
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