The Saga of Ruffian Dick

THE DEVIL DRIVES: A LIFE OF SIR RICHARD BURTON by Fawn M. Brodie. 390 pages. Norton. $6.95.

The Victorian age can now be seen as an outburst of bourgeois baroque--extravagant in form, larger than life, gaudy, ridiculous, but above all productive and resolutely confident. No man better personified this outburst than Explorer Richard Burton,* the magnifico of satanic mien who prowled through unmapped regions like a lion, visited the forbidden cities of Mecca, Medina and Harrar, and discovered Lake Tanganyika.

He could bandy quips with poets and wits in London and chat about women and food in the local idiom with polygamous cannibal kings in the Congo. He could write with equal authority (if not always total accuracy) on swordsmanship, sex, the source of the Nile or the location of the moun tains of the moon. Fine fencer and linguist, he was also a natural actor and raconteur, a competent artist and something of a poet. He truly exemplified Baudelaire's negative definition of the superior man: he was "not a specialist."

Clinical Detachment. Such a man naturally attracted many biographers--ten in all--and played dashing walk-on parts in innumerable histories and memoirs. His eleventh, Fawn M. Brodie, has shown her skill before (Reconstructionist Thaddeus Stevens, Mormon Joseph Smith). She intrepidly explores the intrepid explorer, and in Burton the mystery is darker than any continent. He is a hard chap to map. His source may lie in the Peaks of Paranoia or the Pools of Narcissus. It is anybody's guess.

Biographer Brodie never loses sight of the fact that however twisted and ambiguous the motives behind Burton's achievements may have been, the achievements were considerable. She would let Burton speak for himself but for the fact that Burton did not speak for himself. The uninhibited chronicler of the world's erotica and dispassionate taxonomist of the infinite varieties of human sex life, was singularly reticent about his own.

"Discovery is mostly my mania," he wrote. His biographer answers him back: "Burton's real passion was not for geographical discovery, but for the hidden in man, for the unknowable and therefore the unthinkable. What his Victorian compatriots called unclean, bestial or Satanic, he regarded with almost clinical detachment. In this respect he belongs more properly to our own day."

Burton's father was an Irishman, an inactive lieutenant colonel in the British army, who drifted about Europe hunting boar and let his sons educate themselves. It was a break for Richard, leaving him free to form his own character. Oxford sent him down without a degree, after he misbehaved at a steeplechase, despite his erudition in Greek, Latin and three or four modern languages. His friends called him "Ruffian Dick," and admired him as a brawler, toper and wit. He shipped out to Bombay as an officer in the East India Company. Before long, he had mastered Hindustani, Sindhi and half a dozen dialects. To get to know the natives, he impersonated Moslem merchants on the North-West Frontier or prowled the bazaars as a Hindu holy man. This did not help his career. Even more damaging to his reputation as sound senior officer material was the fact that he wrote a scrupulously detached report on male brothels in Karachi. He won the grudging admiration of generals and the envious malice of Anglo-Indian officials. Both groups were glad to see Burton go on to Zanzibar, Timbuctoo, or the devil. There is fine comedy in the way in which the Victorian Establishment tried in vain to as similate the flamboyance and scandal of Burton and to make of his exploits an edifying story like that of the pious Livingstone.

Catnip in Tails. In London after a brisk tour of the Crimean War, Burton cut a theatrically romantic figure. Glowering in evening dress, yellow from fever, scarred on the cheek by a Somali javelin, carrying a dark nimbus of unspeakable sins learned in the evil Orient, Burton was pure catnip to the ladies in the drawing room. That he should have been catnip to Lady Burton is comedy at its highest. Isabel Arundell was pious, snobbish as only a daughter of the O.E.C. (Old English Catholic) aristocracy can be, and both romantic and puritanical.

Such women romantics can do only one of two things with such a man as Burton: aspire to reform him or pretend that he is just as he should be. Isabel Burton, in defiance of what she may well have suspected to be strong homosexual leanings in her husband, played the English game of Let's-Pre-tend-and-Be-Happy-Families. She did it so well for nearly 30 years that the man Burton almost disappeared under the respectable shawl she knitted for him. Of course, she reasoned, Richard did have odd friends, but that was because he was so generous. The friends were odd indeed: one was Monckton Milnes (Lord Houghton), owner of the finest collection of erotica in Europe; another was Poet Algernon Swinburne, who had a taste for flagellation. Through all this, in Damascus, Trieste and Santos, where Burton served as British consul, his wife clung to the female theory that all men are little boys at heart; they only like to show off. Her iron, doting conviction was that nothing bad ever really happened, and besides, in the end, dear Richard would accept the Faith.

Lady for Burning. Two things almost defeated her--Burton's stubborn inability to see the difference between Catholicism and any other religion, and his invincible interest in the theory of sex. She dealt with both problems in masterly fashion. When he died in 1890 at 79, she arranged for him to receive the last sacrament of the Roman Church. He had been dead for two hours, but the priest took her word that he was alive. Then, "sorrowfully, reverently, and in fear and trembling," she set about burning his manuscript of The Scented Garden, an encyclopaedic sex manual whose translation from the Arabic had occupied Burton's last years (a partial version survived). Also into the flames went his private journal of 40 years, which he had kept under lock and key. This act left her free to clean up Ruffian Dick for the visitors and write a biography of "the most pure, the most refined and modest man that ever lived."

Lady Burton had her dead hero interred at the Catholic cemetery of Mortlake in a marble mausoleum resembling, as much as anything in marble can, a tent. She bought a cottage near by to facilitate regular visits to this marmoreal monstrosity. She hoped, like so many Victorians, to communicate with the dead. But whatever regions Sir Richard was then exploring, he failed to report back to Lady Burton at the tent. It would have served her right if he had returned just once, and burnt her biography of him.

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