My Influences... And Yours?

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Like many writers, I was reared on a never-ending veneration for big guns such as Ernest Hemingway, F. Scott Fitzgerald, James Joyce, and Virginia Woolf. Authors who’ve passed some ‘immortal’ litmus test for stuffy academic types to get overly excited about. Harsh? Perhaps, because most of the top tier lit club have deservedly earned their marks. But along the path I’ve learned some of the best prose originates from sources other than these writing titans. Here are two actors—who apparently fancied putting pen to paper over starring roles—and one journalist that I would stack up with the best of the best and have returned to often for inspiration.

Immutable And Ineluctable

Richard Burton. Say the name and Elizabeth Taylor jumps to mind. But there was so much more to the man besides Liz & Dick, scandal, and great acting chops that were highlighted in movies like The Spy Who Came in from The Cold, Where Eagles Dare, and 1984. He was a damn fine writer and he's included in an upcoming article I'm putting together over this holiday weekend. Here's an except from his life-long journal that was published in 2012:

The more I read about man and his maniacal ruthlessness and his murdering envious scatological soul the more I realize that he will never change. Our stupidity is immortal, nothing will change it. The same mistakes, the same prejudices, the same injustice, the same lusts wheel endlessly around the parade-ground of the centuries. Immutable and ineluctable. I wish I could believe in a God of some kind but I simply cannot. My intelligence is too muscular and my imagination stops at the horizon, and I have an idea that the last sound to be heard on this lovely planet will be a man screaming.

How sobering is that, right? And there's many more entries like that in The Richard Burton Diaries. And the dead live again, Richard's words are featured daily on Twitter which I regularly check. Burton ... fascinating guy. Back to work I go on a piece I'm calling My Unlikely Writing Influences.

Past Voices

I'm reading a Harvard Classics featuring Descartes, Voltaire, Rousseau, and Hobbes. Most days on Twitter I follow accounts dedicated to Samuel Pepys, Richard Burton, and actively contribute to a Thomas Paine page. Waiting to be read are memoirs by Anais Nin and Charles Darwin. Put bluntly, I enjoy reading dead people ruminating about the minutiae of their daily lives, cultural events of their day, and whatever else passed their radars. Question: I'm looking to expand beyond the mostly white guys and looking for women essayists before the 20th century and writers from countries outside the US. Any suggestions?

The Comedians (1966)

Graham Greene's The Comedians (1966) opens as the Medea ship makes its way to Port-Au-Prince, Haiti with a rich assortment of passengers aboard, including a former presidential candidate, a military “expert,” and a hotelier named Brown who dubs all of them comedians—his rationale:

Now that I approached the end of life it was only my sense of humour that enabled me sometimes to believe in Him. Life was a comedy, not the tragedy for which I had been prepared, and it seemed to me that we were all, on this boat with a Greek name (why should a Dutch line name it’s boats in Greek?), driven by an authoritative practical joker towards the extreme point of comedy. How often, in the crowd on Shaftesbury Avenue or Broadway, after the theatres closed, have I heard the phrase—“I laughed till the tears came.”

Here's the link to the rest of my article.

Adventures, Spies, Gangsters, and Thrillers

The public image of Richard Burton (1925-1984), for better or for worse, will forever be intertwined with Elizabeth Taylor (who he married twice) and for a lifetime struggle with alcohol. But at his Hollywood start, Burton established himself as a top Shakespearean actor on par with Laurence Olivier and John Gielgud. Poor film choices—a number of them with Taylor—helped dilute that prestige during his lifetime. Looking back now, thirty years after his passing, there are more triumphs: Hamlet, Becket, Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, 1984, etc. than failures like the bottom of the barrel, The Klansman (1974).

Here are four films (two hits, two lesser-known efforts) that show the versatile range of a man who once with self-deprecating humor mused, “The Welsh are all actors. It’s only the bad ones who become professional.”

Please read the rest of my article over at Criminal Element.

Initial Briefing

"I want you to, ah, to stay out in the cold ... a little longer."

The Richard Burton Diaries

When I’m not reading submissions for BEAT to a PULP, I usually can be found around bedtime reading children’s books to my daughter, and, then after she's asleep, biographies for my own pleasure. Normally I prefer bios of authors or historical icons, like John Adams or Albert Einstein or Steve Jobs. Actors generally aren't high on my list, and, though Richard Burton was an actor I respected (for The Spy Who Came In From the Cold and, here’s the pulp kid in me, The Wild Geese and Where Eagles Dare), his bio wouldn’t be one I'd gravitate to.

Just the same, The Richard Burton Diaries ended up on my Kindle Fire. At first, I thought I had made a mistake. As I swiped through the digital pages, I was kinda bored, and even when "E" entered the picture, it didn’t help things. (You know who E is, right? Yeah, Elizabeth and Richard were Brad and Angelina forty-five years before. Still, wasn’t interested ... never understood celebrity and probably won’t in this lifetime.) I almost gave up on the read, but then—this is going to sound weird—I felt like I was starting to relate to this Welsh-born thespian on a personal level. Maybe it was just his thoughts on being exhausted at the end of a long work day and how he just wanted to finish the latest novel on his nightstand. That sentiment is universal, right? With pithy diary entries, I kept reading on. More often than not, the diary is dedicated to what he ate, drank, and read for leisure. Burton was a voracious bookworm and could finish a novel in a day. He lists many, and I jotted down a few he recommended. He comes across as just an average guy, and his humble way of proclaiming the absurdity of the media circus about him kept me going.

Many, many pages are devoted to E. No doubt he loved her deeply. He worries about her tiniest fears and dotes on every aspect of her life. Almost too much but obviously they were river deep, mountain high in love. They divorced in ‘75 and got together again for work on the disastrous Private Lives play. At first everything went well with their public reunion but fairly soon Burton wrote:

"ET as exciting as a flounder temporarily…. This is going to be a long seven months. ET beginning to bore which I would not have thought possible all those years ago. How terrible a thing time is."

By the way, if you like reading about the famous knocking the famous, there are plenty of those moments sprinkled about. Franco Zefferelli and Jean Moreau get hit predominantly hard. As does the director of The Maltese Falcon, “Huston is a simpleton. But believes himself to be a genius. And a self aggrandizing liar. Cunning at it.”  

Still, I find the best entries to be the quiet ones devoted to the women he loved and the children he adored ... the ordinary guy—the guy I get—who just so happened to become one of the most famous actors of the 20^th century.

And somewhere across time—October 5, 1966 to be exact—RB was scrawling, “In case there is any mistake. This diary is written for my own benefit.” Maybe so, sir. But I came to enjoy your ramblings and thoughts on life. I was sad when your life in these pages ended. Salud.