Word: burtons
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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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...
...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...
Lady for Burning. Two things almost defeated her-Burton's stubborn inability to see the difference between Catholicism and any other religion, and his invincible interest in the theory of sex. She dealt with both problems in masterly fashion. When he died in 1890 at 79, she arranged for him to receive the last sacrament of the Roman Church. He had been dead for two hours, but the priest took her word that he was alive. Then, "sorrowfully, reverently, and in fear and trembling," she set about burning his manuscript of The Scented Garden, an encyclopaedic sex manual whose...
...Lady Burton had her dead hero interred at the Catholic cemetery of Mortlake in a marble mausoleum resembling, as much as anything in marble can, a tent. She bought a cottage near by to facilitate regular visits to this marmoreal monstrosity. She hoped, like so many Victorians, to communicate with the dead. But whatever regions Sir Richard was then exploring, he failed to report back to Lady Burton at the tent. It would have served her right if he had returned just once, and burnt her biography...