The Highly Civilized Man Richard Burton and the Victorian World [Paperback]

The Highly Civilized Man by Dane Kennedy is the fifth Burton biography that I have read, and I would rank it 4th. In fairness, Kennedy didn't set out to write a biography of one of the most interesting people of the Victorian Era. He really used Sir Richard Francis Burton as an exemplar of the Victorian spirit of science and empire. Burton was unique for the breadth of endeavors in which he excelled and pioneered, but Kennedy demonstrates that the man was also a product of his time -- as much OUTSIDE the box as he was OF the box.

Rather than a mere chronicle of Burton's life, Kennedy takes on different facets of his subject's complex character. Chapters bear such headings as The Gypsy, The Orientalist, The Explorer, The Sexologist, etc. While the order of these sections basically presents the sequence of the major events of Burton's life, there is little if any new information provided, and it is assumed that the reader already knows something about Burton. This book is really more about Dane Kennedy's take on his subject rather than the subject himself.

It is appropriate, given Kennedy's contention that Burton represented the thinking of his age, that the analysis presented in The Highly Civilized Man is very much representative of its time. Just as Fawn Brodie's interpretation of Burton is steeped in the psychoanalytical mumbo jumbo of the 1960s, this book tars Burton with the current trendy labels of modern humanities scholarship. In a decade, the -ists and -isms of The Highly Civilized Man will likely seem quite dated.

If you are only going to read one biography of Sir Richard Francis Burton, then I can't recommend this one. The hands-down best is A Rage to Live by Mary Lovell. However, that book is pretty long, and if you are not looking for that kind of commitment, check out Burton by Byron Farwell.

When I first discovered that a new Burton biography by a professor of history was soon to be published I had high expectations. Upon receipt of Professor Kennedy's Burton biography titled The Highly Civilized Man, I started digesting his work. The asserted themes of the work included 1) placing Burton and his work in context with the larger issues and challenges of Victorian times, and 2) using Burton to better understand the nature of changes beginning to percolate socially due to the interaction of Victorian England with its colonial enterprises. Indeed, as far as I know, this approach is pioneering and insightful. As I continued reading to about page 90, I thought Professor Kennedy's effort was well done, and the book would be another jewel to adorn the crown of Burton research, along with the work of Mary Lovell. I am of the opinion Professor Kennedy succeeded in achieving both this stated objectives. From this standpoint, his book is a success.

The observations of Burton as a harbinger bridging the transition from the Victorian Era to the Modern Era reflect the type of insights one expects from a biographer trained in the rigors of academic scholarship. I enjoyed the in depth academic analysis of Burton from the standpoint of concepts of relativism as applied to notions of cultural difference. Professor Kennedy has also highlighted the role played by Burton in the early development of anthropology as an academic discipline. Social/Cultural Anthropology's primary research methodology is called participant/observation. Certainly, this approach was an inherent part of Burton's nature, and the scope of his anthropological observations were derived by this research approach. I was also glad to see that Professor Kennedy gave particular attention to discussing Burton's Stone Talk and his Kasidah. The earlier biographies did not devote much attention to either of these important works.

As long as Kennedy stayed focused on academic based scholarship he avoided the pitfalls that plagued the earlier biographies that predated Lovell's Rage to Live. Unfortunately, the book digressed into complicated histories that are not fully recounted. Yet, Professor Kennedy felt compelled to make several definitive conclusions sorely lacking the professional level of scholarship a professor should be required to meet. The outcome of Kennedy's failures is a setback in Burton scholarship. Given the effort to place Burton in context, the irony is that the book with notable examples omits necessary context to understand and evaluate some of the Professor's conclusion. For example, the recounted history of Burton firing over the head of a crowd of Greek Orthodox Christians fails to acknowledge that Burton resorted to this solution after trying less violent alternatives, and after he and fellow members of his party were injured by rocks thrown at them. The key point is that Burton used a hierarchy of options to confront unstable situations. This point also relates to the absurd conclusion that Richard and Isabel were role-playing in the desert, and that there is a hidden psychology to uncover. The decision to have Isabel act as Richard's son was an attempt to protect her from rape and death, and to give Richard an option before resorting to lethal force. The Burtons took their personal safety serious as illustrated by their habit of carrying two revolvers and three Bowie knives when traveling.

Professor Kennedy has a mildly obsessive theme about people Burton did not know going into the desert for homosexual interludes that randomly pops up in the book. He includes a discussion of Burton and several earlier biographers who speculated about Burton's sexuality. But Kennedy failed to note those writers assumed Richard and Isabel had a loveless and sexless marriage, and they used outmoded, almost now quaint, modes of Freudian analysis. The illusion of the Burton's loveless marriage was gutted by the original sources brought to light by Ms. Lovell. Professor Kennedy fails to point out the deficiencies of Brodie and Mclynn concerning their analysis of Burton and sexuality. The deficiencies in The Highly Civilized Man about the question of Burton's sexual interests are too numerous to address in a short review nor are the issues he raised concerning Damascus, Crowley and others. Kennedy's treatment of Burton in Damascus is a travesty. Not once does the professor inform the reader that all segments of society in Damascus worked to bring Burton back from his recall. The Damascus treatment is lacking in necessary detail and skewered to the degree that the discussion should have been deleted form the book. It is also one of the examples where Kennedy included information that is extraneous to accomplishing his two professed themes.

The book appears to have been written with segments produced using an academic analysis methodology with other portions written in an almost stream of consciousness with points lacking critical evaluation. Moreover, there are instances of contradiction. This leads one to conclude the work was not scrutinized properly before going to press. The Kasidah analysis includes a conclusion that Burton believed there is no God or afterlife, yet in the chapter titled the Afterlife, Kennedy indicates Burton may have concluded there is continuing life. In fact, towards the end of the Kasidah and towards the end of note 2, Burton makes it plain he has a positive view on a continuing future life. It is not a life however with the attributes of anyone's religious acculturation. The chapter on the afterlife in large part is one of the commendable aspects of this biography.

All of the hallmarks of a work that will withstand the centuries are present in this work if only the good professor would later reissue it, and correct the many deficiencies and expand the themes of Burton as harbinger, Burton as catalyst, Burton as a pioneering mystic and Burton as scribe in the manner of Thoth, the Ancient Egyptian principle of wisdom.

One of the most remarkable men who ever lived was Captain Sir Richard Francis Burton. He was a poet, explorer, linguist, soldier, and translator, with remarkable accomplishments in each of these fields. The best biography of this astonishing and energetic man is still _The Devil Drives_ by Fawn Brodie, but in _The Highly Civilized Man: Richard Burton and the Victorian World_ (Harvard), Dane Kennedy has written something else. His book covers aspects of this multi-faceted man who was busy all his life making his own legend, but who is revealed here as "very much a man of his time, a product of nineteenth-century Britain and its imperial encounter with the world." Kennedy traces the sources of the intellect behind Burton's many efforts, even his famous physical feats such as his pilgrimage in disguise to Mecca or his role in finding the source of the Nile. Among other things, Burton was, as the chapter headings here classify him, an Orientalist, a relativist, a racist, and a sexologist, and Kennedy has taken a useful look at all these roles.

The different chapters with their themes cover Burton's life in a more-or-less chronological way. Burton had a genius for languages and would eventually become fluent in perhaps a couple of dozen of them. His first foreign assignment was to the British East India Company, and although Burton sought glory in battle, his contribution was really to increase the knowledge of the land, the language, and the people. He took his capacity for imitation of other cultures to its most famous exercise in making the hajj in 1853. As Kennedy points out, there was no reason for any disguise; he could have simply have asserted his belief in Islam (a freethinker, he always did value the societal strengths of Islam, and he considered Christian missionaries to be on a misconceived quest) and joined the flood of foreigners in the pilgrimage. But this would not serve his purposes. A convert to Islam (no matter of what degree of sincerity, or how loosely attached to the Church of England) would be outcast from respectable society, preventing him from becoming a national hero and limiting sales of his great _Personal Narrative of a Pilgrimage to Al-Medinah and Meccah_. Burton's racism was a product of his time, and of his travels in Africa; he respected African cultures, even if he felt Negroes to be inferior and incapable of improvement. Kennedy makes the case that Burton had a relativist conception of culture, but such relativism did not encompass any struggle for improvement of political rights. Burton's value of other cultures included his view of their acceptance of sexuality, an acceptance he found lacking in his own country. Kennedy explains that with publication of his translations of the _Kama Sutra_, _The Perfumed Garden_, and especially _The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night_, Burton intended to subvert his nation's "purity forces." While Burton wrote that the _Nights_ was not fit for women to read, he filled it with strong and independent female characters who exhibited the sort of sexual desire women were supposed to keep hidden. Burton wanted to change British sexual morality, and his views would have grated against the current "just say no" philosophy. "Shall we ever understand," he sighed, "that ignorance is not innocence?"

Kennedy makes the case that not only was Burton remarkable in the many aspects of his efforts, he was eager to "advance the larger epistemological quest to understand, explain, and classify difference." He thus informed Victorian debates on race, religion, and sexuality, debates that are continuing into our own contentious times. Burton is a compelling character, and these essays on different features of his career and interests are filled with important insights about him and about the times of which he was a product.