The Richard Burton Diaries (93 page)

Saturday 3rd
I've decided that I don't know what poetry is. Last night, in a glut of gloom, I ploughed through the ‘collected’ poetry, ‘all he wishes to preserve’, of W. H. Auden. In ten thousand there is hardly one memorable line. Most of it is type-writing. Some of it is scribble. Much of it is indifferent prose cut up. Almost totally it is formless. When is a poem a poem? I will slash away again at Auden since his aura glitters, and find out. I remember reading poetry in tandem with him at Oxford. About three years ago, it was.
⁸⁶
Among other things I read Dunbar's ‘Timor Mortis Conturbat Me’ and ‘the Boast of Dai’ from David Jones’
In Parenthesis
. I doubt if it had ever been heard before at the Union. It was well received. As we walked away afterwards for a drink Auden, a little piqued, asked ‘How on earth did you learn to speak Cockney so brilliantly?’ His own reading was the usual toneless monotony of the poet reciting his own stuff. Dylan was an exception. But listen to Yeats or T. S. Eliot. Or listen, as we had to once, to Archie MacLeish moan without sense or sound his
own lovely verse. E and Ivor and I listened in a tortured agony in a house on a hill in Massachusetts, longing to smash the book out of his hands and read it ourselves. I think that once the mould of form was smashed by a master or series of masters, Pound and Eliot perhaps in poetry and the Impressionists even more perhaps (since I know little about painting) in art, anybody can fool you.
⁸⁷
And will. And we will never know if they're mucking us about.

The Mexicans today are having a holiday and have decided to fire off explosives all day long. It is almost impossible to speak because of the noise. It is the day of Santa Cruz. The noise is so great that unquestionably they are trying to shoot the Cross to pieces. It is faintly reminiscent of a wartime blitz. There is to be a procession later on at 5 o'clock from one church to another. It has to cross the bridge. What's the betting that somebody is going to blow up the pont when it is packed with small children? Child-chops for dinner with chips? Grilled babies bums. Charcoal-broiled infant with basted brains? Terrine of doting mothers washed down with a sweet liqueur of drunken fathers? I mean Charcoal, of course. A bloody great explosion a second ago has nearly taken my head off. I am essentially unpopular today – everybody has left me and gone to the upper house – which pleases me.

There goes another tremendous explosion, and now we have a brass band playing some god-awful tune with interruptions from a choir and the ineluctable and occasional reply to the atom-bomb. Now a band is playing ‘John Brown's Body’. Will somebody tell me why?

There goes another big bang. And another. And another. And me.

Sunday 4th
[...] Charlie, a divine dirty little cheeky shoe-shine boy from the village came and had a swim in the pool last evening and stayed to have supper with his minute brother. This massive mite is known as Jim. We had tacos with all the trimmings, frijoles and guacamole lettuce and sundry hot sauces. Jim firmly refused all vegetables. Tacos and chicken only thank you. Charlie cleaned my boots for his supper. He is very bright and has picked up English quite well. I would love to pay for his education but we tried that before and the parents are useless. They are so ignorant that they can only see to next week and the handful of pathetic pesos it brings in from boot polish. The working class here have none of the self-sacrificing fanaticism of the Welsh or Scots to get their children educated. David Jones, who lived next door to Gwen in Cunard Cottages worked himself to the bone, denied himself all pleasures except chewing-bacco, went into unpayable debt to put his five or six children in college and then quietly slit his throat.
⁸⁸
The schools system here is pretty hopeless. The school is so overcrowded that no child gets a full day at school but everyone has a half day. [...] The nuns tell us that the school needs roughly
$100,000. I wonder if we can arrange this somehow. How odd it is that all Roman Catholic countries, including the gifted Irish, are so badly educated. Latin America, Spain, Italy. And yet it was Spanish priests who first brought what we consider to be ‘learning’ into Latin America for instance. In the last few years two new churches have been built in P.V. but the school has remained the same. So the Lord giveth and he also taketh away.

I have been very unsociable for the last two or three days and recognize it all very well. I am about to start work. Once I'm going all will be fine but from now on until about the fourth of June when the first rushes have been seen and hopefully found adequate, (Will I like the girl? Will I like the Director? Will they bore me? Will I be any good?) I shall be, in E's words, a basket case. [...]

Monday 5th
[...] Some malicious and dangerous little people put sugar in the petrol tank of the B-Buggy and did something to the brakes the night before last. George was putting it away into the garage when he lost control of the Bug, he was driving it in reverse down the hill from the house, and was forced to run it into the house at the bottom of the hill which, though steep, is quite short thank God. Our suspicions are directed towards a couple of men from Guadalahara who came up to the house on Saturday night and said they represented Volks-Vagon [
sic
] cars and were having an exhibition or show in the town, and would we, E and I, pose by exhibits for photographs. Jim said no and they were much piqued. It appears that they bought sugar from La Altena next door. If any of us had been driving the car the
other
way down where the descent is really precipitous, something like 1 in 4, there could very easily have been a death. Especially as there are usually quite a lot of children playing around at night in these streets. Well the luck holds, but malevolence of that kind is frightening and the world is full of it.

I remember a small incident at Paddington Station during the War. I was on my way home to Port Talbot and had arrived very early at the Station to be sure of a seat. It was the late train leaving about midnight as I remember. I was travelling 3rd Class of course in those days, coming down, I think, from Oxford. I got me a seat and settled down to read a book by the light of a torch. All seats except one were soon taken. Then a soldier, private, arrived followed by a tiny porter who was carrying his kit-bag a suitcase and sundry brown paper parcels. The soldier was of medium height and I suppose in his early twenties. He stood by while the porter stacked his bags on the rack. The Porter waited for the tip and the soldier said in a horrible towny Cardiff accent: ‘That's bloody ‘ad yew, ‘asn't it? You getting no bloody tip from me boyo. Bugger off.’ The Porter shrugged and walked away. My hatred for the soldier was so overwhelming that I felt like murdering him. I made myself cool down and then very deliberately and without haste stood up and in total silence opened the door of the carriage and one by one threw all his bags and parcels onto the platform. He looked at me with the hatred of a nightmare but he said
nothing and went out to pick up his bags. I closed the door behind him and held it so he couldn't get back in. He must have found a seat elsewhere and I never saw him again. The other occupants of the carriage with typical British taciturnity never referred to the incident at all though we were all together in that compartment for several hours. Odd incident.

Tuesday 6th
Well, I broke the ice yesterday and plunged into learning the lines of
Anne
. I learned about ten pages which I will have to re-learn today, while learning another then. By tomorrow yesterday's ten will have fixed themselves in my memory, more or less, while I revise today's ten, and so on. There are quite a few pages of course which contain only a line or two while others, especially in a wordy costume piece of this kind have long uninterrupted monologues. The script is 144 pages long. I do not speak on about 35 of them. That leaves 109. At ten a day that theoretically gives me the whole part of eleven days, though in actual fact it is generally about twice as long because the period of study becomes longer and longer as more and more is committed to memory and the revision extends itself day by day. Also, there are some days when the memory refuses to take in anything at all, and one can only revise.

The script itself is robust and unsubtle but sweeps along at a spanking pace. I hope the direction matches it. Henry is mad, I think. If I continue to think so after I've really got the part into my bones, I shall play him that way. He is certainly demonic. Great charm and stupendous outbursts of rage all co-mixed up with a brilliant cynical intelligence. I might be able to make something of it. Especially if the director and girl are good and help it all along. Since I gather that the other parts, Wolsey, Cromwell, Howard, Thomas Boleyn etc. etc. are being played by Hordern, Colicos and people of their stature I have no worries on that score.
⁸⁹
Especially Michael Hordern. I think him to be one of the best actors in the world and a rough adversary in a two-handed scene and hard to beat. I don't mean a selfish, spoiled actor like Rex who tries silly old-fashioned things like up-staging, and trying to distract the eye of the audience during a moment which should be yours, but someone who is so deadly perfect and precisely timed that, unless
you
are too, he is likely to over-balance you.

Just before lunch as we were sitting down here in the lower house George came in looking very apologetic and said that the Governor of Jalisco's daughter was outside with the Director of Tourism for P.V. and would we have a drink with her etc.
⁹⁰
We said, with a huge groan from E, Caroline and I, ‘ OK’. It was as smile-fixed a meeting as one could imagine. Platitudes came out from both
sides with unfailing and desperate regularity. ‘And do you like our country?’ ‘We love it, that's why we live here.’ ‘Are you here to rest.’ ‘Yes, I wear a beard because I'm just about to play the English King Henry VIII.’ ‘My father, the Governor, says to say "Hello" to you.’ ‘Would you say "Hello" back for us?’ ‘Well I see that you are going to have lunch. It was nice meeting you. If there's anything you need do not hesitate to let us know.’ ‘Thank you. How kind. We shall.’

She had a face like a double-chinned scimitar. [...]

Wednesday 7th
[...] I went to bed early last night, about 9 and read Waugh's
Put out more Flags
for the umpty-ninth time.
⁹¹
I shall have it by heart if I'm not careful. It is astonishing for such a careful writer how often, for a comic effect, he uses the word ‘distaste’. The first time he used it was I think in
Decline and Fall
and the line is something like: ‘"This is my daughter," said the headmaster, with some distaste.‘
⁹²
I remember being convulsed as a small boy. It is a good trick that he uses a lot. ‘The Brigadier looked at Basil with revulsion.‘
⁹³
But these little lapses apart, he is the writer I'd like to write like most. See Tom Thumb wanting to play Goliath, or the Elephant who dreams of being a ballerina. Anyway I'll never write anything except occasional pieces for the magazines unless I spend four or five hours a day on this diary alone, and not 30 minutes.

[...] We are supposed to go to Jim's house for lunch but E is so late – it is now 1.30 and she has been preparing since 12.30. – I may stay here and raid the ice-box and learn some more lines. Have just heard that E has only just gone upstairs to change. Unbelievable. ‘Lunch isn't ready over there anyway,’ says Caroline stoutly in defence of E. Not the point. We're going to visit the house, the lunch is incidental. E is really fixated about time and her appearance. Even to walk around the corner to a pub for a half of bitter takes an hour's make-up. And nobody needs it less. And imagine how bad it's going to be as she gets older and less good-looking. Start in the morning for dinner at seven, I fancy. [...] I've just heard that E is ready. It is 1.45!

Thursday 8th
Well, I did not go to Jim's which turned out to be a good idea as I learned quite a lot of lines and thoroughly revised the others. I made myself a huge ‘cylffyn’ or ‘cwlffyn’ i.e. a very big sandwich.
⁹⁴
It consisted of a layer of krafft [
sic
] cheese, a layer of sliced tomato and a layer of crisp ice-cold lettuce between two well buttered thick slices of bread. Chased down by a mug of hot tea. Delicious.

[...] I cannot stop reading Waugh. In the last two or three days I have read
Scoop, Put Out More Flags, A Little Learning, Officers and Gentlemen
and am just finishing
Men at Arms
.
⁹⁵
The whole thesis is a lament for the death and dissolution of the Squirearchy. They were tougher than he thought. They are still there, as established as ever. A pity for his theme. A greater pity is that he died before finishing his auto-biography. It would have been interesting to read his reactions to what is in essence a socially unchanged world. The same laws of breeding and background and school still apply. Only, it would seem, in the arts and particularly in sciences, does it not apply. No school, however eminent, can help you as a painter or writer or physicist unless you have the brains or talent. Most of the brilliant new crop of scientists which we have in GB, and are exporting to the USA, have provincial accents, I'm told. But in essence the old order never changeth.

Friday 9th
Yesterday we went fishing and trawling.

Tuesday 13th
Neither the Governor nor his mate turned up so we were spared that. Today we go to Church to ‘stand-up’ for a lovely motherless boy who is to be confirmed. His name is Sergio and he is 11 years old. He is extremely polite and his manners are exemplary though he tends to forget himself around E and likes to hug her a lot. I think we have a case of calf love on our hands. I may say it's reciprocated by E. I can just about hugging calf-love abide but draw the line at bull-love. The syntax in the last sentence leaves a lot to be desired. But then I am having a nasty attack of withdrawal from liquor and am not myself at all. I feel as stale as half a loaf in a dust-bin and as tired as a hundredth birthday and do not like going back to Europe at all. We leave for LA tomorrow, spend a day with Sara, then to NY and spend a day with Kate, then to Paris and Versailles to be presented with the Medaille d'Or and spend a night and then to London and the Dorchester and rehearsals. [...] That is not to say that I don't like Europe. I love it with a passion and could never exile myself from it for longer than a few months, but I loathe the means of getting there. Flying must be, to the initiated, the most boring and paradoxically the most nerve-wracking method of transport ever devised by mankind for his own torture. In fact show me a man or woman over the age of 20 who likes being flown, I exclude pilots and private plane-owners, and say that they have no fear, and I will show you a LIAR. In any case I have a great fondness for flying-cowards. [...] Any man who confesses to me that aeroplanes give him the screaming ab-dabs becomes a friend for life. When I first met Debbie Reynolds’ husband, Harry Karl, and when he confessed to me on the
Queen Mary
(I mean, of course, the ocean-going ship and not the late Dowager) that
in the many hundreds of miles, hundreds of thousands of miles rather, that he is forced to travel in the course of his business, he had yet to get on a plane sober, I practically kissed him firmly on the mouth.
⁹⁶
He showed little taste in marrying Debbie but he obviously has an admirable talent for being craven. [...] ‘Cowards die many times before their death’, said the Swan of Avon.
⁹⁷
Include me in, Will. [...]