THE DEVIL DRIVES: A LIFE OF SIR RICHARD BURTON by Fawn M. Brodie. 390 pages. Norton. $6.95.
The Victorian age can now be seen as an outburst of bourgeois baroque—extravagant in form, larger than life, gaudy, ridiculous, but above all productive and resolutely confident. No man better personified this outburst than Explorer Richard Burton,* the magnifico of satanic mien who prowled through unmapped regions like a lion, visited the forbidden cities of Mecca, Medina and Harrar, and discovered Lake Tanganyika.
He could bandy quips with poets and wits in London and chat about women and food in the local idiom with polygamous cannibal kings in the Congo. He could write with equal authority (if not always total accuracy) on swordsmanship, sex, the source of the Nile or the location of the moun tains of the moon. Fine fencer and linguist, he was also a natural actor and raconteur, a competent artist and something of a poet. He truly exemplified Baudelaire's negative definition of the superior man: he was "not a specialist."
Clinical Detachment. Such a man naturally attracted many biographers—ten in all—and played dashing walk-on parts in innumerable histories and memoirs. His eleventh, Fawn M. Brodie, has shown her skill before (Reconstructionist Thaddeus Stevens, Mormon Joseph Smith). She intrepidly explores the intrepid explorer, and in Burton the mystery is darker than any continent. He is a hard chap to map. His source may lie in the Peaks of Paranoia or the Pools of Narcissus. It is anybody's guess.
Biographer Brodie never loses sight of the fact that however twisted and ambiguous the motives behind Burton's achievements may have been, the achievements were considerable. She would let Burton speak for himself but for the fact that Burton did not speak for himself. The uninhibited chronicler of the world's erotica and dispassionate taxonomist of the infinite varieties of human sex life, was singularly reticent about his own.
"Discovery is mostly my mania," he wrote. His biographer answers him back: "Burton's real passion was not for geographical discovery, but for the hidden in man, for the unknowable and therefore the unthinkable. What his Victorian compatriots called unclean, bestial or Satanic, he regarded with almost clinical detachment. In this respect he belongs more properly to our own day."