Victorian Eccentrics

SIR RICHARD BURTON'S WIFE -- Jean Burton--Knopf ($3).

This is the story no less of Isabel Burton than of her spectacular husband, translator of the Arabian Nights. But she was at least a match for him. They were as daft, disarming a pair of eccentrics as boredom with Victorian England produced.

Burton was a cross between Byron and Major Hoople--a proud, fierce, foolish, gifted man with one streak of true genius --a genius for failure. Isabel, like her husband, was a rebel, but of a far more conventional sort. Her rebelliousness began like the romantic dreams of any English Backfisch; it was her great distinction that she stuck by them. And her dreams, after a fashion, stuck by her.

Isabel Arundell was a poor-relation of a great Roman Catholic family, convent-schooled, country-bred. At 16 she soaked her brain in the Orientalisms of Disraeli's novel Tancred (which she reread constantly all her life); and at 16 she was deeply impressed by the following prophecy, .from the lips of a gypsy named Hagar Burton:

"You will bear the name of our tribe, and be right proud of it. You will be as we are, but far greater than we. Your life is all wandering, change, and adventure. One soul in two bodies in life or death, never long apart. Show this to the man you take for your husband."

She first saw Richard Burton in Boulogne, three years later; before she knew his name, she knew he was the only man she would ever marry. Burton scarcely noticed her. But for ten years, against her mother's howling efforts to marry her off, she stuck to her guns. At length she got him (they eloped), and her 30 years of wangling, promotion, and happy servility began.

She wangled him a consulship in Brazil, and followed him there with 59 pieces of luggage. Her own job, while Richard was off prospecting for non-existent gold or investigating a rumored 160-ft. sea serpent, was "fending off Foreign Office inquiries as to his whereabouts."

Next post she wangled him--"on Richard's solemn oath that he would act with 'unusual' prudence"--was the consulship at Damascus . . . "the dream of my childhood ... I am to live amongst the Bedawin Arab chiefs; I shall smell the desert air; I shall have tents, horses, weapons, and be free. . . ." They arrived with a museum load of African, South American and Indian bric-a-brac and five dogs--to which they soon added twelve horses, three goats, a camel, a snow-white donkey, a pet lamb and a baby panther (which the horrified peasants poisoned).

Damascus was too Oriental for gayety, but not for long. Isabel instituted polyglot Wednesday receptions--"there were thirty-six races and creeds and tongues." Dressed as a Moslem woman, she frequented the bazaars and harems. Their great friends were Abd-el-Kadir, an almost legendary chieftain who had held out for 15 years against the French, and Jane Digby El Mezrab, the Mabel Dodge Luhan of her time. The four of them used to have ritual evening meals on the roof, "and after that we would smoke our narghilehs and talk and talk and talk far into the night. . . ."

Burton really tried to act like a consul, but after a time the job blew up amid smoky rumors of his anti-Semitism and of his wife's eccentricities. They got back to London, back to the friendship of Ouida who was in love with Burton, of Swinburne (whom Burton once picked up under one arm and carried kicking downstairs), of Wilkie Collins, Bulwer-Lytton --a society of scholars, geographers and occultists. Richard dabbled in mesmerism; Isabel had startling spasms of second sight.

She managed, finally, to get him the unimportant consulate at Trieste, and at that job--or rather in time stolen from it --they spent the rest of Richard's life. Isabel had her church work, the SPCA, and no less than 26 good women friends, all of whom "speak three or four languages, are good musicians, and swim like fish." She also launched a campaign for Richard's knighthood with an "innocent directness" such as England had never before seen.

Richard dyed his hair, Isabel sported "an extremely golden wig"--but it was no use. They rose no longer at 3 or 4 but as late as 6:30; they stopped swimming; the exploring days were gone for good. Burton wrote: "This day eleven years I came here. WHAT A SHAME!" They drifted from spa to spa, even tried a witch. It was to get money, and to cheer himself, that Burton got busy on his translation of the Arabian Nights. When he died, Isabel personally draped his old Bedouin costume about his wax-image at MadameTussaud's. She announced with satisfaction:

"They have given him a large space with sand, water, palms, and three camels, and a domed skylight painted yellow throws a lurid light on the scene. It is quite lifelike."

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