As I proofed and reformat my novel about Richard Burton, The World is Our Widow, and the Arabian horror novel Forty Hands of Night for print publication I felt compelled to read words from his pen concerning the tales that he translated and which formed the backdrop for Forty Hands of Night. What did these fantastic tales mean to a man who lived a real rugged life of fantastic risk and grinding austerity? Fall River Press offers a nice hardback selection discounted through Barnes & Nobles; an artfully done volume that is among my best friends.
Burton spent over 30 years intermittently translating this massive catchall of Middle Eastern folklore. In his forward he begins by discounting the laborious nature of the project as one of love, and escapism. He goes on to describe how the reading of such tales helped alleviate the excruciating boredom of his “long years of official banishment to the luxuriant and deadly deserts of Western Africa, and to the dull and dreary half clearings of South America.”
Burton further describes how, among the largely illiterate Islamic nations in which he travelled as a holy man, teacher, and doctor, fireside recitations of tales from this mythic canon, made him more than a welcome visitor, but a sought after guest.
That is all fascinating in its own right. But then Burton finishes his introduction—after giving credit to two literary colleagues—by attacking the ‘pop culture’ of his day:
Professional ambition suggested that literary labours, unpopular with the vulgar and half educated, are not likely to help a man up the ladder of promotion…professionally speaking, I was not a success, and at the same time, I had no cause to be ashamed of my failure. In our day, when we live under a despotism of the lower “middle class” Philister who can pardon anything but superiority, the prizes of competitive services are monopolized by certain “pets” of the Mediocratie, and prime favorites of that jealous and potent majority—the Mediocrities who know “no nonsense about merit.” It is hard for an outsider to realize how perfect is the monopoly of common place, and to comprehend how fatal a stumbling stone that man sets in the way of his advancement who dares to think for himself, or who knows more or who does more than the mob of gentlemen employee who know very little and who de even less.
Sir Richard Francis Burton, 1884
I thought that ‘Old Dick the Rogue’, odd man out in Her Majesty’s Imperial Service, would approve of my quoting him at length to a number of like-minded writers and online apostates in an age of vulgar mob rule and publishing bias that he would certainly feel uncomfortably familiar with. Let us not forget his reminder of the importance of fantasy to a person whose sense of honor is incompatible with the world in which he finds himself adrift.
