RICHARD BURTON
A Life
Melvyn Bragg
Boston: Little, Brown and Company, 1989
533 pp., $22.95
The life of the late Richard Burton is a sad one. Not so much perhaps because a great theatrical talent was wantonly squandered, as a number of earlier biographers and critics have claimed, but because throughout his life an inner demon of intense self-hatred always led Burton to betray or destroy nearly everyone around him.
Melvyn Bragg, an English novelist and scriptwriter, has been given access by Burton's widow, Sally, to the notebooks that the actor sporadically kept, beginning back in 1966 when he and Elizabeth Taylor went off to Rome to film the Taming of the Shrew under the direction of Franco Zeffirelli. It is these notebooks that make Bragg's Life truly fascinating, setting it infinitely apart from the conventional celebrity biography of today. In these notebooks, these journals, as Bragg details at one point in his massive work,
Burton wrote about Elizabeth, their marriage for better and
for worse (sometimes unbearable), her illnesses, her
talent, his health, Ifor's [his older, paralyzed brother]
incapacity, the children, the dogs, authors Evelyn Waugh,
Octavio Paz, Nathanael West, Ian Fleming: drink, money,
events of the day, the moonshots, Teddy Kennedy's
Chappaquiddick, acting, the filming of Anne of the
Thousand Days, gossip of grandees and the Welsh past
and the circus which passes him by. He writes of places:
Puerto Vallarta, London, Paris, Gstaad, of restaurants,
of ideas about them, about modern poetry, about sexuality.
And, in addition, he writes of the high life, the giddy glamour of it all, the yacht, the diamonds, the parties, and the pain.
Maddeningly, however, instead of publishing the notebooks per se, limiting himself to footnotes and annotations, Bragg has chosen to cut and paste, taking a sentence here, a paragraph there, to push along his biographical saga, leaving the reader wanting more Burton and less Bragg. Admittedly, Burton only began keeping his notebooks in the last seventeen years of his life, yet it seems a pity to have Bragg pastiching Burton's style when we could have the original.
Still, even with this caveat, the many Burton excerpts make Bragg's book singularly compelling reading. First and foremost, Burton was an admirable raconteur, although it should be noted that telling the same story more than once profoundly bored him, so he could always be counted on to be creative in a retelling. Second, he had a novelist's eye for detail. And third, he was always stingingly honest to the point of viciousness in his evaluations of people, which means the book contains more high-level, splendidly wicked gossip than that of
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