The Highly Civilised Man: Richard Burton and the Victorian world
Dane Kennedy Harvard University Press, 354pp, £17.95
ISBN 0674018621
In the mid-1840s, Richard Burton, a subaltern in the Indian army already known as a brilliant linguist, assumed the guise of Mirza Abdullah, a wealthy half-Arab and half-Iranian merchant, in order to spy on the people of Sindh. He put on a wig, stained his face with henna and, wearing the fine flowing robes of a seller of linen and calicoes, wandered through bazaars, listening, talking and taking opium. His impersonation was, he wrote, a great success: Mirza Abdullah "secured numberless invitations, was proposed to by several papas and won, or had to think he won, a few hearts".
General Sir Charles Napier, impressed by Burton's reports, asked him to investigate ru-mours of homosexual brothels in Karachi that catered to British soldiers. With characteristic thoroughness, Burton spent several evenings in these lupanars and prepared a paper that included all possible details of prices and esoteric practices (the brothels were soon shut down). Four years later, taking the identity of Shaykh Abdullah, a Pathan mystic, he embarked, newly circumcised, on the perilous journey to the forbidden places of the Hejaz, which, when written up as the Pilgrimage to al-Madina and Mecca, secured his lasting fame.
Burton was celebrated as a man of adventure, thanks not only to this audacious trip, but to his epic search, with John Hanning Speke, for the source of the Nile. His books fed the Victorian craving for knowledge of exotic cultures, offering revelations of danger, sex and the forbidden pleasures of going native. He prided himself on looking like Satan (beetle-browed, with a fierce stare) and boasted that he had committed all the sins in the Decalogue and drunk more brandy than Dr Johnson. When he talked, Bram Stoker said, "the whole world of thought seemed to flame with gorgeous colour". "Dirty Dick" Burton translated the Kama Sutra, thought Islam better than Christianity, praised polygamy and wrote treatises on human sacrifice. His life, Dane Kennedy writes, was "smothered in otherness", and when he died the Times accused him of having as much sympathy with barbarism as with civilisation.
Too many biographies of Burton, Kennedy believes, have portrayed him "in Nietzschean terms as a heroic, independent spirit", so "oversized that he succeeded in breaking free from the orbit of his own age". The Highly Civilised Man sets out, instead, to "demythologise" and "rehistoricise" the scholar-explorer. Burton was, as Kennedy skilfully shows, a committed self-fashioner who longed for fame and understood the fascination the Orient held for his audience. Almost everything we know about his transgressions - the drugs and sex, the defence of deviant customs - comes from his own writings, and he invariably portrayed himself as an outsider and a solitary traveller in alien lands, when in reality he was carrying out army orders or taking part in an expedition funded by the Royal Geographical Society.
Kennedy is adept at teasing out the implications of Burton's ambivalent status as an "orientalist" agent of western imperialism who at the same time rebelled against the empire, immersed himself in the east, and chased after knowledge for the sake of knowledge. But while his identification with the Islamic world was close and lasting, his response to the many other non-western cultures he encountered was often less sensitive. Kennedy makes much of Burton's defence of indigenous ways of life and espousal of "relativism", yet he still regarded black Africans as "hideous" and "bestial", and he argued - in the face of critics within anthropological circles and the anti-slavery movement - that they constituted a separate species of humankind. He had other strong prejudices, too (anti-Semitism, misogyny): Burton, always difficult to pin down, is sometimes difficult to stomach.
After serving, mostly unhappily, as British consul in Fernando Po, Santos and Damascus, he settled in Trieste and began to translate erotica. The translations were a form of crusade: Burton was scathing about western ignorance of sexual technique, hated Victorian prudery, and had a particular distaste for the moral pur- ity campaign of the 1880s. Whatever his motives, he deserves recognition as a pioneer sexologist. His 16-volume edition of the unexpurgated Arabian Nights was, he admitted, "a talisman against ennui and despondency". Most remarkable are the reams of footnotes, featuring, among many strange things, a geography of sodomy and tales of Egyptian men copulating with crocodiles. Graham Greene described Burton as "one of the most bizarre characters whom England has produced". It'll take more than Kennedy's thoughtful study to cut him down to size.
Paul Laity is an editor at the London Review of Books
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