A really lovely copy, with a touch of darkening to the spine of the jacket, and a contemporary gift inscription on the front free endpaper. The pseudonym “Waughburton” is an amalgam of the American writer Richard Halliburton whose account of a trip round the world, “’The Royal Road to Romance”, had been one of the hits of 1925, and the Waughs Alec and Evelyn.Paul Fussell in “Abroad” writes: “Innocence and Design is a ‘novel’ barely disguising its real identity as both a travel book - it includes maps of Persia, called ‘Media’ - and a collection of architectural and topographical essays. The hero is Sir Constantine Bruce, an eccentric Scot, who journeys to the Middle East in search of the Moslem principles of ‘chromatic architecture’ - he plans to re-do Riggs, his Scottish estate, in color, but with greater subtlety than we might imagine, for he hopes to ‘employ color only so as to accentuate the general form, instead of swamping it with theatricality’. Comedy arises from the conflict between Sir Constantine’s innocence, architectural, aesthetic, and political, and mid-Eastern intrigue: he constantly blunders into plots hatched by the Foreign Office and Military Intelligence, plots reflecting the struggle between British and Russian interersts in Persia.Sykes and Byron drafted the book while actually there, ‘sitting amid saddlebags in the courtyards of caravanserais’, and we can infer the division of work: Sykes contrived the horseplay narrative, while Byron contributed the inset essays - overwritten, most of them, on Persian national character, colored architecture, Islamic building, and the sad state of Persian thought and feeling under the dictatorship of Byron’s bete noire, Reza Shah. The alternation of narrative and exposition here characterizes most travel books generically, and can be seen to resemble the essential mechanism of conversation seriously pursued, which, as Waugh once perceived, consists of narrative alternating with ‘comment’”.
