A new biography of Sir Richard Burton, 19th-century explorer and translator of the Arabian Nights, provides a re-assessment of this "orchestra without a conductor", writes David Tresilian Dane Kennedy, The Highly Civilized Man: Richard Burton and the Victorian World, Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard UP, 2005. pp354 Do we need a new biography of the British 19th- century explorer and adventurer Sir Richard Burton (1821 -- 1890), celebrated translator of the Arabian Nights, would-be discover of the source of the Nile, and general perpetrator of gung-ho exploits and empire-building derring-do? According to Dane Kennedy in his neatly packaged new redaction of Burton's life, The Highly Civilized Man: Richard Burton and the Victorian World, we do, Burton being worth returning to if only because of the interest he offers to the "empirically challenged body of literature known as postcolonial theory." While some readers' hearts may sink at this, fearing thickets of academic jargon, in fact Kennedy has produced an elegantly written account of Burton's life, seeing in him a representative of various 19th-century European types, including the gypsy, orientalist, impersonator, explorer and sexologist. While Kennedy's book does not have the detail of earlier accounts, among them the biographies by Fawn Brodie ( The Devil Drives, 1967) and Frank McLynn ( Burton: Snow upon the Desert, 1990), it does have the virtue of being concise, unlike Burton himself, the author of over 70 books including works on African exploration, journeying in north India, the Arab peninsula and north and south America, and 30 volumes of translation. Kennedy usefully explores the connections between Burton's career and wider aspects of 19th-century history and culture, as well as detailing, through Burton's example, some of the multiple interactions between the European and non-European worlds. Born abroad and raised in France, Burton seems never to have felt at home in his native England. Expelled from Oxford in 1842, where his ne'er-do-well father had hopes that he would become a clergyman, Burton left England to join the forces of the East India Company as a junior officer, seeing service in the war in Sindh (now a province of Pakistan) and distinguishing himself as a linguist. Over the course of his life Burton is believed to have learned some 25 languages, part, perhaps, of a talent for disguise, and his early experiences in India set the pattern for what was to follow. For the rest of his life Burton veered wildly between hair-raising risk and periods of intense study, and his experiences in Sindh led to the publication of Sindh, and the Races that Inhabit the Valley of the Indus (1851), the first of four books on India, described by his best biographer, Fawn Brodie, as a "brilliant ethnological survey" that helped to lay the foundations for modern anthropology. At a loose end following his period in Sindh, Burton set out on the first of the expeditions for which he is perhaps still best known. Deciding that exploration held out the most promising route to fame and fortune, Burton set out for Mecca and Medina in 1853, disguising himself as a Afghan Muslim in order to do so. While Burton was not the first non- Muslim European to visit the holy cities, he was almost certainly the best at marketing his achievement to a hungry audience back home, setting the pattern for later 19th-century European explorers, such as Stanley, Livingstone, Speke and Baker, other members of the so-called "big five", all of whom had an eye on the celebrity expeditions of this sort could bring. Burton's Pilgrimage to El-Medinah and Mecca (1855), an adventure yarn mixed with the results of his omnivorous curiosity, was a great success, and it encouraged him to undertake an expedition to the East African city of Harar, now in Ethiopia, describing the journey in First Footsteps in East Africa (1856). However, these expeditions were child's play compared to what now became Burton's burning ambition: to find the source of the river Nile, perhaps conceived while staying in Cairo in preparation for his trip to Mecca. In 1857 Burton and his companion John Speke, a fellow East India Company officer, mounted an expedition inland from Zanzibar in search of the fabled source of the river in the Mountains of the Moon, Burton's sufferings on this mission being horrendous. By the time he arrived on the shores of Lake Tanganyika Burton was so ill with malaria that he could not walk, and it was left to Speke, himself nearly blind, to trek north to discover Lake Victoria, wrongly insisting that this was the source of the Nile. In 1864, the White Nile's true source was identified by Samuel Baker as being Lake Albert some distance to the north-west. Burton later travelled in north and south America, producing works on Mormonism ( City of the Saints, 1861), the highlands of Brazil (1869), as well as other regions of Africa, investigating the customs of tribes in Dahomey (in A Mission to Gelele, King of Dahomey, 1864) and Gabon ( Abeokuta and the Cameroons Mountains, 1863) and writing up his East African explorations as Lake Regions of Central Africa in 1860. Yet, his main focus in later years, financed by a series of British government sinecures, was his translation of works from the Arabic, including a complete translation of the Arabian Nights, published in 10 volumes in 1885, with six supplemental volumes following from 1886 to 1888. This translation, undertaken at breakneck speed and circulated by subscription only to avoid the obscenity laws, was an unexpected success, Burton observing ruefully that "I struggled for forty-seven years. I distinguished myself honourably in every way I possibly could. I never had a compliment, nor a 'thank you,' nor a single farthing. I translated a doubtful book in my old age, and immediately made sixteen thousand guineas. Now that I know the tastes of England, we need never be without money." Selections from Burton's text are still in print, and though translated into what a contemporary authority on the Nights, Robert Irwin, has described as a "sort of composite mock-Gothic, combining elements from Middle English, the Authorised Version of the Bible and Jacobean drama," it has had some influential admirers. Jorge Luis Borges, for example, particularly admired it, Burton's often bizarre English translation being part and parcel of what for Borges was the most fruitful way of reading the text: "I think the reader should enrich what he is reading. He should misunderstand the text; he should change it into something else." In his book Kennedy has revisited much of this biographical material, giving it a novel re-organisation. Burton, for him, can best be understood as conforming to various 19th-century types, representing the very model of the Victorian explorer, for example, in the early part of his career, as well as the archetypal fin-de-siècle man of letters at the end of it, friend of doubtful poets such as Swinburne and translator of what were widely believed to be racy works of foreign fiction. Kennedy's book is divided up into sections under headings of this sort, allowing him to dwell on Burton's ambiguous relationship to England, fame as a celebrity African explorer and determined enemy of English hypocrisy on sexual and other matters through his later role as a scandalous translator. He has expanded discussions of Burton's views on race and cultural relativism, though both of these turn out to be inconclusive. Though she writes in an older idiom, Brodie's opinion that Burton's views on these things were largely a result of mood seems unlikely to be improved upon: it would be hard to make a claim for Burton as a systematic thinker despite his vast curiosity and mania for exploration, and many of his books are frank potboilers. Perhaps the most that can be said is that he did not approach the areas he travelled through with any preconceptions, preferring to keep his eyes open as a way of feeding an insatiable thirst for experience. In this he was quite unlike his fellow explorer John Speke, who does not seem to have taken any particular interest in the cultures he travelled through or made any attempt to learn their languages. Kennedy's attempt at interesting the reader in Burton's poetry, whether in the Kasidah, a spin-off from the vogue for oriental themes established by Edward Fitzgerald's Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam (1859 & 1868), or in the dire Stone Talk, a discussion between a paving slab and a Doctor Polyglott, seems doomed to failure, not least because such Victorian poeticising has not survived the ridicule of later generations. The notes to Kennedy's volume are particularly valuable in that they illustrate the ways in which Burton is now discussed in academic circles, providing intriguing starting points for further reflection. If Burton emerges from this book split up into variously connecting aspects, he can always be put back together again by reference to more conventional narrative treatments. In any case, Burton was always something of "an orchestra without a conductor," as Alan Moorehead noted in his now classic accounts of the exploration of the Nile. What we have here is a collection of ways of seeing Burton, guiding one through both the sometimes forbidding detail of earlier accounts and the vast expanse of Burton's own life and works. It seems a pity that the book has so few illustrations and not a single map. Yet, though Kennedy does not say so, Burton still emerges from the 19th-century gloom rather like a character from Lytton Strachey's Eminent Victorians, the earnestness and energy going hand-in- hand with a dreary heaviness and neurotic attitudes of the most peculiar sort. In his 1918 volume of mock-Victorian biographies, Strachey used his deflationary wit to do for General Gordon, defender of Khartoum, among others, hoping to bring the elegance and wit of 18th-century France to the rescue of his stolid countrymen, many of whom were still struggling with the legacy of Kennedy's "Victorian World". Interesting though Kennedy's updating of Burton's biography undoubtedly is, one cannot help wishing that Strachey had also had a go at him.
