Two hours after the doctor pronounced him dead, Sir Richard Burton's wife, Isabel Arundel, pronounced him alive and insisted the priest give him extreme unction so his soul would go to heaven. A huge Catholic funeral followed, which many of his friends did not attend because the corpse would never have consented to what he would have considered a superstitious charade. She also burned his last work, a translation from Arabic of The Scented Garden, which was mostly concerned with heterosexual love but had a final chapter on pederasty. Later, she committed thousands of pages of his journals and diaries to the flames.
For those who loved to shock, there was no better place or time to be born than Victorian England. Shocking for the sake of getting attention is puerile, and there is that element in the personality of the explorer, translator, linguist, and pioneer ethnologist Sir Richard Burton. However, there seemed to be a deeper motive in the outlandish words and deeds of this brilliant, very complex man: anger at the inability of Victorian society to deal with truths—including sexual truths. Sir Richard Burton hated pretense of all kinds, yet, paradoxically, time and time again, he resorted to disguise to penetrate foreign lands and cultures.
I cannot hope to do justice to this author of 43 volumes on exploration and travel, aside from dozens of translations, books, and manuals on miscellaneous subjects like fencing and the use of the bayonet. He spoke twenty-five languages and fifteen additional dialects of those languages. Drawn by the forbidden, he mastered Arabic and, disguised as a pilgrim, visited the forbidden cities of Mecca and Medina; he searched for the source of the Nile, berated the king of Dahomey about his fondness for human sacrifice, wrote an overly thorough report on homosexual brothels in India which made contemporaries suspect he was one, cataloged the sexual practices of hundreds of different peoples in clinical detail and also the almost infinite cruelties humans inflict on each other. He was one of the first ethnographers—his words on the customs of the people he encountered ran into the millions. He contracted and suffered many of the epidemic diseases blighting the mid-nineteenth century—cholera, diphtheria, yellow fever—and once had a javelin thrown through his jaw. (Still impaled by the javelin, he escaped and had it removed by a doctor several hours later.) If you took only his writings about the people of the Middle East and Africa today, you would call him a racist. However, he was equally scathing and venomous about Europeans. Burton seemed only to really admire the Bedouins and the Mormons.
The clichéd phrase used to describe such a man as Richard Burton is "insatiable curiosity." I would replace "insatiable" with "rampaging."
I need to give a suitably shocking example of Sir Richard's forbidden topics, so the reader doesn't imagine we are talking about exposing ankles or calling a leg a leg. In some tribes, Burton informs us that older women manipulate the clitoris of young girls to enlarge them to increase their experience of sexual pleasure when they grow into womanhood.
At the age of nineteen, fresh from the convent, intelligent, unquestioningly religious, and wildly romantic, Isabel Arundel met Richard Burton, who was then twenty-nine. Probably not one waking hour passed from that meeting until she died, in which he was not foremost in her thoughts. She describes a dancing party early on: "There was Richard like a star among rushlights. That was a Night of nights; he waltzed with me once and spoke to me several times, and I kept my sash where he put his arms around me to waltz and my gloves which my hands had clasped. I never wore them again."
Isabel never considered another man, and her intensity never waned. It took that sort of absolute obsessive certainty to endure his many absences before and after marriage, such as visiting the forbidden cities of Mecca and Medina in disguise, becoming the captain and chief of staff of a 4000-strong Bashi Bazouks irregular Ottoman regiment during the Crimean war, searching Central Africa for the source of the Nile, hobnobbing with Brigham Young in Salt Lake City.
Ten years after the first meeting, the no-holds-barred atheist, chronicler of sexual deviation, and critical clinical observer of human nature married the irredeemably Catholic, true believer in good and evil and love and fate idealist. It was a funny marriage, of course, but it seemed to work—partially because Isabel's devotion knew no limits. She had prepared herself for a rigorous life, learning to do tasks that women of her class weren't supposed to do, like washing clothes, caring for chickens, milking cows, riding a horse like a man. She acquired several languages. She wrote books. She even tried to learn how to fence, anticipating defending her God-man husband.
Although seeming somewhat abashed by being caught in such a conventional trap as marriage, Burton treated Isabel with kindness and affection.
In terms of beliefs, they didn't change each other one iota. Burton wrote a book decrying Jesuit influence in Paraguay before the order was expelled as "deadening, brutalizing, religious despotism." Without his knowledge, Isabel appended a preface arguing with the text. As for the forbidden, marriage settled Burton into domesticity but did nothing to curb his appetite for ferreting out what the Victorian society considered taboo. He was outraged at the Victorian denial of female sexual desire and thought different cultures' approaches were more loving and human. Isabel doubtlessly found the proximity to the forbidden exciting and appalling and exciting because it was appalling. (Forgive this digression, but it is worth noting that through much of the Middle Ages, women were commonly condemned as the source of lasciviousness. I don't know whether women fared any better with the belief of that era.)
Isabel managed to moderate somewhat Burton's penchant for saying absolutely the wrong thing—frequently odd customs of the tribes he had visited—at the wrong time—let's say a social gathering of luminaries—to the wrong person—imagine the wife of the Archbishop of Canterbury or some such personage. To protect him from indecency statutes, Isabel pleaded with coauthors to stop encouraging her husband in his investigations. Although she denied it, she helped edit some of the salacious parts of his translation of the Arabian Nights.
Isabel was living with two men—the one she dreamed of and the one she shared her life with. They were different men and irreconcilable. They probably would have detested each other.
The act was futile if she burned the manuscript of The Scented Garden to save the world from prurient literature. Anyone with a kindle app and $7 could download it today if she wanted to preserve her husband's reputation even more so. The notes on Burton's famous unexpurgated translation of 1001 Nights and dozens of other works had established him as the world's foremost expert on sexuality across the globe and across the ages. If there is such a thing as an eroticism nerd, Burton was that. I believe she wanted to save her dream of the man. As for burning his diaries: doubtless Burton loved this woman whose adoration was described by observers as comical, but given his scathing honesty, she probably figured in them in perhaps not the most flattering light.
I would like to make a defense of Isabel Burton using her words. She wrote in her diary before her marriage: "I could not live like a vegetable in the country. I can't picture myself in a white apron, with a bunch of keys, scolding my maids, counting eggs and butter, with a good and portly husband (I detest fat men!)… A dry crust, privations, pain, danger for him I love would be better. Let me go with the husband of my choice to battle, nurse him in his tent, follow him under the fire of ten thousand muskets, prepare his meals when faint, his bed when weary, and be his guardian angel of comfort—a felicity too exquisite for words… Why with spirits, brains, and energies, are women to exist on worsted work and household accounts? It makes me sick, and I will not do it."
And Isabel Burton did not do it.
She anchored, nurtured, promoted, and unconditionally defended her brilliant husband. Burton had an unbelievable streak of luck, surviving to thirty-nine before marriage. But there is an unavoidable element of a numbers game to survival, and the support of another increases the odds in one's favor. Impossible to know, but I believe because of Isabel's devotion Sir Richard Burton lived longer and produced more than she burned.
Most of this blog comes from The Devil Drives by Fawn M. Brodie, an excellent read.
