The Devil Drives: A Life of Sir Richard Burton [Paperback]

Though in that case the biographer would probably never get to work at all, and there is probably a happy medium. If there is, this book undoubtedly strikes it, and it may be one of the very best biographies ever written. It's certainly the best I've ever read - and re-read, because it truly is a life, all the way from Burton's childhood in France to his death of pleurisy at the age of 69, and the literary horrors that followed. Say "Richard Burton" today, of course, and you're likely to find that people think first, and often only, of the Welsh actor: the first Burton has succumbed to the same partial oblivion as the first Dylan, the first Tom Jones, and the first band named after an insect (the Beatles were named in homage of Buddy Holly's backing-band, the Crickets).

But the first Richard Burton is far more interesting than the second, which is saying a lot. There were many great scholars and great explorers in the nineteenth century, but very few men could claim membership of both groups. Burton could, joining the first by his astonishing ability to master languages and translate from them, and the second by his arduous and often extremely dangerous expeditions in Africa, Asia, and the Americas. He is still famous for being one of the first Europeans to reach the Muslim holy city of Mecca, for example, and despite being under the threat of instant lynching if his disguise was ever penetrated, he retained sufficient *sang-froid* on his arrival to make a secret sketch of the Ka'aba, or the sacred meteoric stone that is the culmination of the Hajj.

Brodie describes this expedition, and the others to places like the Brazilian jungle and the fabled African city of Harar, in vivid and often moving detail, and even the most blasé 21st-century traveller is in no danger of underestimating the skill, effort, and courage Burton required to reach places that today are often no more than a few hours away by plane. Burton very nearly died on two of his expeditions to Africa, for example, once nearly being killed in an attack on his camp and once nearly succumbing to fever. That attack of fever explains why he never won what he richly deserved, the credit of being the first man to discover the source of the Nile: he was prostrate recovering from it when his companion Speke set out alone and triumphed, though there was controversy for some years to come about whether Speke had actually reached the true source.

And in its sketches of figures like Speke, a hunting fanatic with an odd fetish for shooting pregnant animals, that the book becomes even more valuable than it already is as a record of an extraordinary man and his life and work. Brodie sets Burton in his age, and shows how out of place he was in it. A freethinker in a society dominated and controlled by religion, and a pioneering sexologist at a time when writers could be fined for publishing books on contraception, he was never at home in Britain and never at home out of it, which explains much of the restless spirit and energy that drove him endlessly on, physically in his youth, and scholastically in his middle and old age, when he translated and published such works as *The Arabian Nights* and the *Kama Sutra*.

Though he took the precaution of doing so under a pseudonym, and using a fictitious publishing house in the sacred Indian city of Benares. He need not have worried: this work, which one reviewer condemned as fit only for the gutter, made him rich, and he had the satisfaction of seeing the miserable failure of an expurgated version of his Arabian Nights published by his devoutly Catholic wife Isabel. Brodie's portrait of Isabel, as unsuited in psychology and intellect to her husband as he seemingly was to her, is another valuable part of the book, and sets the stage well for the final act, when Isabel, in one of the greatest acts of literary vandalism ever performed, conducted a holocaust of her husband's papers and notes after his death.

That loss is irrevocable, but Isabel justified herself, and tried to deflect the criticism she rightly attracted, by saying that it was what her husband would have wanted. But then, as Brodie demonstrates, Isabel had identified with her husband for so long that she was incapable of distinguishing her desires from his own when he was no longer there to contradict her. Richard's triumphs in life were Isabel's, and Isabel's hatred of pornography became Richard's in death. It's another illustration of the identification of self with subject that mars so many biographies and that helps, by its absence, to make this one so rewarding. Although she doesn't explicitly say so, Brodie seems to have come across Burton because of his visit to the Mormon capital Salt Lake City and his subsequent writing on the subject. Brodie, though later excommunicated, was born a Mormon and presumably came across Burton's book on Mormonism during her study of the religion's early history. Some spark was struck and this book was the result. It was a chance as happy as I think you will be if you ever read it.