Richard Burton, The Writer
Richard Burton, as a writer, was never so naive as to believe that he could compete with his own literary hero, Dylan Thomas. In the mastery of combining just the perfect amount of beautiful, lyrical poetic-prose with humour, pathos and nostalgia, Dylan Thomas had learnt his 'Craft and Art' at an early age. This was never more evident than in Dylan Thomas's most beloved short story and broadcast which he had entitled, 'A Child's Christmas In Wales'.
Originally published in 1965 by Heinemann and received with both critical and public acclaim, Richard Burton's own book, simply entitled, 'A Christmas Story,' is however a very touching and poignant piece of writing.
Set in Richard Burton's childhood home town of Taibach, Port Talbot in the early 1930's, this semi-autobiographical short piece tells the story of a memorable Christmas Eve, when an eight-year old Richie Jenkins, for some unknown reason, was forced to leave the comfort and security of his sister's house to walk in the cold streets of Taibach with his Uncle Dan.
Written from the perspective of a bewildered, fearful and confused young boy, it has a perfect sense of place, humour, Welsh family values, community and character.
Beautifully crafted, 'Dylanesque' in style, it is notable for one particular passage in which he describes the physical and personal characteristics of his beloved sister Cecilia and which ends with a comparison to an unnamed woman, which is unmistakably Elizabeth Taylor.
Marlene Dietrich is quoted as saying..."This man was not only a great actor, but a man who made hearts beat faster. I admired his writing talent just as much as his theatrical achievement. Read his 'Christmas Story' someday, and you will fall in love with him."
Perfect reading for a Christmas Eve, 'A Christmas Story' will remain Richard Burton's own personal tribute to his hero Dylan Thomas, the man, the literary genius and personal friend.
The two poems which follow the selected pieces of Richard Burton's writing below were discovered by his widow, Sally Hay Burton when, shortly after his death whilst clearing out his private library at his home in Celigny, Switzerland, she discovered them secreted among some private papers.
'Portrait Of A Man Drowning' was written during the filming of 'The Spy Who Came In From The Cold', just before his fortieth birthday in November of 1965, and is obviously written by Burton during a very melancholic and difficult time in his life. The untitled poem is also very moving, and although undated, it appears to be a poignant farewell to his beloved Wales.
Originally published in 1965 by Heinemann and received with both critical and public acclaim, Richard Burton's own book, simply entitled, 'A Christmas Story,' is however a very touching and poignant piece of writing.
Set in Richard Burton's childhood home town of Taibach, Port Talbot in the early 1930's, this semi-autobiographical short piece tells the story of a memorable Christmas Eve, when an eight-year old Richie Jenkins, for some unknown reason, was forced to leave the comfort and security of his sister's house to walk in the cold streets of Taibach with his Uncle Dan.
Written from the perspective of a bewildered, fearful and confused young boy, it has a perfect sense of place, humour, Welsh family values, community and character.
Beautifully crafted, 'Dylanesque' in style, it is notable for one particular passage in which he describes the physical and personal characteristics of his beloved sister Cecilia and which ends with a comparison to an unnamed woman, which is unmistakably Elizabeth Taylor.
Marlene Dietrich is quoted as saying..."This man was not only a great actor, but a man who made hearts beat faster. I admired his writing talent just as much as his theatrical achievement. Read his 'Christmas Story' someday, and you will fall in love with him."
Perfect reading for a Christmas Eve, 'A Christmas Story' will remain Richard Burton's own personal tribute to his hero Dylan Thomas, the man, the literary genius and personal friend.
The two poems which follow the selected pieces of Richard Burton's writing below were discovered by his widow, Sally Hay Burton when, shortly after his death whilst clearing out his private library at his home in Celigny, Switzerland, she discovered them secreted among some private papers.
'Portrait Of A Man Drowning' was written during the filming of 'The Spy Who Came In From The Cold', just before his fortieth birthday in November of 1965, and is obviously written by Burton during a very melancholic and difficult time in his life. The untitled poem is also very moving, and although undated, it appears to be a poignant farewell to his beloved Wales.
Richard Burton's 'A Christmas Story'
There were not many white Christmases in our part of Wales in my childhood-perhaps only one or two--but Christmas cards and Dickens and Dylan Thomas and wishful memory have turned them all into white. I don't know why there should have so few in such a cold, wet land-the nearness of the sea, perhaps.The Atlantic, by way of the Bristol Channel, endlessly harried us with gale and tempest. Perhaps they blew the snow over us to the Black Mountains and Snowdonia and England.
Most of the Christmases of my childhood seem the same, but one of them I remember particularly, because it departed from the seemingly inexorable ritual. On this Eve of Christmas, Mad Dan, my uncle, the local agnostic, feared for his belief but revered for his brilliantly active vocabulary in the half-alien English tongue, sat in our kitchen with a group of men and with biting scourge and pithy whip drove the great cries of history, the epoch-making, world-changing ones, out of the temple of time. they were all half-truths, he said, and therefore half-lies.
I sat and stoned raisins for the pudding and listened bewitched to this exotic foreign language, this rough and r-riddled, rolling multisyllabic English.
" 'There is only one Christian and he died upon the Cross,' said Nietzsche," said Dan.
Nietzsche, I thought - a Japanese. Perhaps he can speak Japanese, I thought. it was said that he, Dan, knew Latin and Greek, and could write both of them backwards.
"Can you speak Japanese, Mad Dan?"I asked.
"Shut up, Solomon," he said to me.
" 'Workers of the world, unite! You have nothing to lose but your chains,' " he said. "Irresponsible rubbish. Cries written by crabbed fists on empty tables from mean hearts.
" 'Dulce et decorum est pro patria mori.' "
"What's that?" I asked.
"Latin, Copperfield," he said "meaning it is sweetly bloody marvellous to die for your country.
" 'Man is born free and is everywhere in chains' -- golden-tongued, light-brained, heedlessness of consequences.
" 'I think, therefore I am' -- Descartes."
"French," I guessed.
Most of the Christmases of my childhood seem the same, but one of them I remember particularly, because it departed from the seemingly inexorable ritual. On this Eve of Christmas, Mad Dan, my uncle, the local agnostic, feared for his belief but revered for his brilliantly active vocabulary in the half-alien English tongue, sat in our kitchen with a group of men and with biting scourge and pithy whip drove the great cries of history, the epoch-making, world-changing ones, out of the temple of time. they were all half-truths, he said, and therefore half-lies.
I sat and stoned raisins for the pudding and listened bewitched to this exotic foreign language, this rough and r-riddled, rolling multisyllabic English.
" 'There is only one Christian and he died upon the Cross,' said Nietzsche," said Dan.
Nietzsche, I thought - a Japanese. Perhaps he can speak Japanese, I thought. it was said that he, Dan, knew Latin and Greek, and could write both of them backwards.
"Can you speak Japanese, Mad Dan?"I asked.
"Shut up, Solomon," he said to me.
" 'Workers of the world, unite! You have nothing to lose but your chains,' " he said. "Irresponsible rubbish. Cries written by crabbed fists on empty tables from mean hearts.
" 'Dulce et decorum est pro patria mori.' "
"What's that?" I asked.
"Latin, Copperfield," he said "meaning it is sweetly bloody marvellous to die for your country.
" 'Man is born free and is everywhere in chains' -- golden-tongued, light-brained, heedlessness of consequences.
" 'I think, therefore I am' -- Descartes."
"French," I guessed.
"Right, Seth," he said. Thou shalt have a Rolls-Royce and go to Oxford and never read a book again.
" 'I think, therefore I am,' " with scorn. "Wallace the fruiterer-he who sells perishable goods after they have perished to Saturday night idiots--might well say of them, 'They do not think, therefore they are not, they buy perishable goods after they have perished.' "
Out of the welter of names and quotations ( Mad Dan's "My personal leaden treasury of the human tragedy") the cries, the references rolled out endlessly. he said that Martin Luther should have had a diet of worms. Why, I thought, why should the man eat worms?
"Can you eat worms? I asked.
"Not as readily as the worms will eat you," he said. he roared with delight at this incomprehensible joke. he had become more and more burning and bright. he said he had a cold, and took some more medicine from a little bottle in his pocket.
This was as it should be. Uncle Dan had been talking ever since I could remember. until this moment Christmas was Christmas as it always had been. But then my sister's husband, cheekboned, hollowed, sculptured, came into the room.
"Alright right, boys," he said, "off you go-take the boy with you."
"Where to?" I asked.
"Just go with Dan and behave yourself," he said.
"Where's my sister?" I said
"Never mind," he said, "Go you."
" 'I think, therefore I am,' " with scorn. "Wallace the fruiterer-he who sells perishable goods after they have perished to Saturday night idiots--might well say of them, 'They do not think, therefore they are not, they buy perishable goods after they have perished.' "
Out of the welter of names and quotations ( Mad Dan's "My personal leaden treasury of the human tragedy") the cries, the references rolled out endlessly. he said that Martin Luther should have had a diet of worms. Why, I thought, why should the man eat worms?
"Can you eat worms? I asked.
"Not as readily as the worms will eat you," he said. he roared with delight at this incomprehensible joke. he had become more and more burning and bright. he said he had a cold, and took some more medicine from a little bottle in his pocket.
This was as it should be. Uncle Dan had been talking ever since I could remember. until this moment Christmas was Christmas as it always had been. But then my sister's husband, cheekboned, hollowed, sculptured, came into the room.
"Alright right, boys," he said, "off you go-take the boy with you."
"Where to?" I asked.
"Just go with Dan and behave yourself," he said.
"Where's my sister?" I said
"Never mind," he said, "Go you."
I went out into the night with Dan and the other men.
Why were they sending me out at this time of night on Christmas Eve?
My mother had died when I was two years old, and I had lived with my sister and her husband ever since. i had had lots of Christmases since my mother's death, and they could already be relied on, they had always been the same. There was the growing excitement of Uncle Ben's Christmas Club ( you paid a sixpence or shilling a week throughout the year ), and the choosing from the catalogue--Littlewood's Catalogue.There was the breathless guessing at what Santa Claus would bring. What was in those brown paper parcels on top of the wardrobe? Would it be a farm with pigs in a sty, and ducks on a metal pond, and five-barred gates, and metal trees, and Kentucky fences, and a horse or two, and several cows, and a tiny bucket and a milk-maid, and a farmhouse complete with red-faced farmer and wife in the window? And a chimney on top? Pray God it wasn't Tommy Elliot's farm, which I'd played with for two years and which I feared--from whispers that I'd caught between my sister and Mrs.Elliot--was going to be cleaned up and bought for me for Christmas. It would be shameful to have a secondhand present. Everybody would know. it must be, if a farm at all, a spanking-new one, gleaming with fresh paint, with not a leaden base showing through.
And I would spend an hour singing Christmas carol duets from door to door with my friend Trevor, picking up a penny here and a ha'penny there. and then home at nine o'clock, perhaps to gossip with my sister and eat more nuts, and be sent to bed sleepless and agog. and now, at the time of getting to bed, I was being sent out into the night with Mad Dan and his audience--all of them with Christmas colds, and all of them drinking medicine out of little bottles kept in their inside pockets.
We went to the meeting ground of our part of the village. It was called "The End". It was a vacant stretch of stony ground between two rows of cottages--Inkerman and Balaclava. Both the Inkerman people and the Balaclava people called it "The End". Insularity, I realize now, streetophobia--to each street it was "The End". It should have been called "The Middle".
The miners had built a bonfire and stood around it, burning on one side and frozen on the other. Chestnuts and--because there had been plenty of work that year--potatoes were roasted to blackness, and eaten sprinkled with salt, smoky and steaming straight from the fire. And Mad Dan, making great gestures against the flames, told the half-listening, silent, munching miners of the lies we had been told for thousands of years, the mellifluous advice we had been told to take.
Turn the other cheek. turn the other cheek, boys, and get your bloody brain broken. Suffer all my children. this side of the river is torment and torture and starvation, and don't forget the sycophancy to the carriaged and horsed, the Daimlered, the bare-shouldered, remote beauties in many mansions, gleaming with the gold we made for them. Suffer all my baby-men, beat out, with great coal-hands, the black melancholy of the hymns. When you die and cross that stormy river, that roaring Jordan, there will be unimaginable delights, and God shall wipe away all tears, and there will be no more pain. Lies! Lies! Lies!"
Why were they sending me out at this time of night on Christmas Eve?
My mother had died when I was two years old, and I had lived with my sister and her husband ever since. i had had lots of Christmases since my mother's death, and they could already be relied on, they had always been the same. There was the growing excitement of Uncle Ben's Christmas Club ( you paid a sixpence or shilling a week throughout the year ), and the choosing from the catalogue--Littlewood's Catalogue.There was the breathless guessing at what Santa Claus would bring. What was in those brown paper parcels on top of the wardrobe? Would it be a farm with pigs in a sty, and ducks on a metal pond, and five-barred gates, and metal trees, and Kentucky fences, and a horse or two, and several cows, and a tiny bucket and a milk-maid, and a farmhouse complete with red-faced farmer and wife in the window? And a chimney on top? Pray God it wasn't Tommy Elliot's farm, which I'd played with for two years and which I feared--from whispers that I'd caught between my sister and Mrs.Elliot--was going to be cleaned up and bought for me for Christmas. It would be shameful to have a secondhand present. Everybody would know. it must be, if a farm at all, a spanking-new one, gleaming with fresh paint, with not a leaden base showing through.
And I would spend an hour singing Christmas carol duets from door to door with my friend Trevor, picking up a penny here and a ha'penny there. and then home at nine o'clock, perhaps to gossip with my sister and eat more nuts, and be sent to bed sleepless and agog. and now, at the time of getting to bed, I was being sent out into the night with Mad Dan and his audience--all of them with Christmas colds, and all of them drinking medicine out of little bottles kept in their inside pockets.
We went to the meeting ground of our part of the village. It was called "The End". It was a vacant stretch of stony ground between two rows of cottages--Inkerman and Balaclava. Both the Inkerman people and the Balaclava people called it "The End". Insularity, I realize now, streetophobia--to each street it was "The End". It should have been called "The Middle".
The miners had built a bonfire and stood around it, burning on one side and frozen on the other. Chestnuts and--because there had been plenty of work that year--potatoes were roasted to blackness, and eaten sprinkled with salt, smoky and steaming straight from the fire. And Mad Dan, making great gestures against the flames, told the half-listening, silent, munching miners of the lies we had been told for thousands of years, the mellifluous advice we had been told to take.
Turn the other cheek. turn the other cheek, boys, and get your bloody brain broken. Suffer all my children. this side of the river is torment and torture and starvation, and don't forget the sycophancy to the carriaged and horsed, the Daimlered, the bare-shouldered, remote beauties in many mansions, gleaming with the gold we made for them. Suffer all my baby-men, beat out, with great coal-hands, the black melancholy of the hymns. When you die and cross that stormy river, that roaring Jordan, there will be unimaginable delights, and God shall wipe away all tears, and there will be no more pain. Lies! Lies! Lies!"
The night was getting on. Christmas was nearly here. Dan was boring now, and sometimes he didn't make sense, and he was repeating himself. What was in those parcels on top of the wardrobe, and why had I been sent out so late on Christmas Eve? I wanted to go home.
"Can I go home how, Mad Dan?"
"Shut your bloody trap and listen," he said, "or I'll have you apprenticed to a haberdasher."
This was a fate worse than death to a miner's son. There was, you understand, the ambition for the walk of the miners in corduroy trousers, with yorks under the knees to stop the loose coal running down into your boots and the rats from running up inside your trousers and biting your belly ( or worse ), and the lamp in the cap on the head, and the bandy, muscle-bound strut of the lords of the coalface. There was the ambition to be one of those blue-scarred boys at the street corner on Saturday night with a half a crown in the pocket and, secure in numbers, whistle at the girls who lived in the residential area. The doctor's, the lawyer's, the headmaster's daughter.
And Dan roared on. he said he believed nothing and believed everything. That he knew nothing and knew everything. He said he was the Voltaire of Aberavon. He wept once or twice, and the silent miners chewed and stared uneasily. Crying was for women, or for preachers when talking of God's magnanimity, his mercy, his love. Miners did not weep--not even gabby miners like Mad Dan, who evaded work whenever he could. Mad Dan, with passionate eloquence, had long been an advocate of frequent and lasting strikes. Life was too rough to cry about.
I tried to sneak out of the circle around the bonfire and make my way home, but one of the miners caught me by the ear and brought me painfully back. "You'll go home when we go home," he said.
Dan didn't speak anymore--he chuntered on--that is to say he would have been mumbling into his beard, had he had a beard. There came out of the grey embers of his dying oratory occasional flashes of coherence.
"Who sent the slave back to his master?"
"Was St. Paul a Christian?"
And, with snarling sarcasm, "There was an Israelite indeed in whom there was much guile."
" 'Give me liberty or give me death.' "
" 'Thou hast conquered, O pale Galilean; the world has grown grey from thy breath.' "
The wind, tigerish, now crouched, now circled, now menaced the bonfire. and the bonfire, now rearing back down from, now roaring back at the wind, would send showers of sparks and smoke and coloured flame up the endless open chimney of the night. I was bored and bewildered. I pondered on some of the half-baked things that Mad Dan had been saying--he talked like a book, they said of him. What did Mad Dan mean about cries being lies? Anyway his cries didn't such much like cries to me. They sounded like sentences. Cries were screams and things like that when somebody twisted your arm or busted your nose.How could "Turn the other cheek" be a cry? or "God is love" or "The wages of sin is death"? I dimly guessed what time in mist confounds. Why was the Twenty-third Psalm a poem of incomparable beauty? The teacher in school had said it was. I puzzled about this, too. It didn't rhyme. How could it be a poem if it didn't rhyme?
What were the cries? How could something be a half-truth? Why were cries lies? Why couldn't I go home? Why was I kept out so late on Christmas Eve, when Holy Santa was due any time after midnight? I dimly guessed what time in mist confounds.
"Can I go home how, Mad Dan?"
"Shut your bloody trap and listen," he said, "or I'll have you apprenticed to a haberdasher."
This was a fate worse than death to a miner's son. There was, you understand, the ambition for the walk of the miners in corduroy trousers, with yorks under the knees to stop the loose coal running down into your boots and the rats from running up inside your trousers and biting your belly ( or worse ), and the lamp in the cap on the head, and the bandy, muscle-bound strut of the lords of the coalface. There was the ambition to be one of those blue-scarred boys at the street corner on Saturday night with a half a crown in the pocket and, secure in numbers, whistle at the girls who lived in the residential area. The doctor's, the lawyer's, the headmaster's daughter.
And Dan roared on. he said he believed nothing and believed everything. That he knew nothing and knew everything. He said he was the Voltaire of Aberavon. He wept once or twice, and the silent miners chewed and stared uneasily. Crying was for women, or for preachers when talking of God's magnanimity, his mercy, his love. Miners did not weep--not even gabby miners like Mad Dan, who evaded work whenever he could. Mad Dan, with passionate eloquence, had long been an advocate of frequent and lasting strikes. Life was too rough to cry about.
I tried to sneak out of the circle around the bonfire and make my way home, but one of the miners caught me by the ear and brought me painfully back. "You'll go home when we go home," he said.
Dan didn't speak anymore--he chuntered on--that is to say he would have been mumbling into his beard, had he had a beard. There came out of the grey embers of his dying oratory occasional flashes of coherence.
"Who sent the slave back to his master?"
"Was St. Paul a Christian?"
And, with snarling sarcasm, "There was an Israelite indeed in whom there was much guile."
" 'Give me liberty or give me death.' "
" 'Thou hast conquered, O pale Galilean; the world has grown grey from thy breath.' "
The wind, tigerish, now crouched, now circled, now menaced the bonfire. and the bonfire, now rearing back down from, now roaring back at the wind, would send showers of sparks and smoke and coloured flame up the endless open chimney of the night. I was bored and bewildered. I pondered on some of the half-baked things that Mad Dan had been saying--he talked like a book, they said of him. What did Mad Dan mean about cries being lies? Anyway his cries didn't such much like cries to me. They sounded like sentences. Cries were screams and things like that when somebody twisted your arm or busted your nose.How could "Turn the other cheek" be a cry? or "God is love" or "The wages of sin is death"? I dimly guessed what time in mist confounds. Why was the Twenty-third Psalm a poem of incomparable beauty? The teacher in school had said it was. I puzzled about this, too. It didn't rhyme. How could it be a poem if it didn't rhyme?
What were the cries? How could something be a half-truth? Why were cries lies? Why couldn't I go home? Why was I kept out so late on Christmas Eve, when Holy Santa was due any time after midnight? I dimly guessed what time in mist confounds.
Why had my sister been upstairs all this night on Christmas Eve when I was home? Why wasn't she peeling potatoes, or something? Why were two of my aunties sitting in the parlour, and with them Mrs.Tabor T.B.--she who wore her husband's cap on back to front? Why did they talk low? I dimly guessed. Was my sister dead? Dying? I loved my sister--sometimes with an unbearable passion.
I suddenly knew that she was dying.
"Is my sister dying, Mad Dan? I said.
"We are all dying, Nebuchadnezzar," he said. "Even your growing pains are reaching into oblivion.She'll last the night, Dyfrig," he said. "She'll last the night."
Now my sister was no ordinary woman--no woman ever is, but to me, my sister less than any. When my mother had died, she, my sister, had become my mother, and more mother to me than any mother could have been. I was immensely proud of her. I shone in the reflection of her green-eyed, black-haired, gypsy beauty. She sang at her work in a voice so pure that the local men said she had a bell in every tooth, and was gifted by God. And these pundits who revelled in music of any kind and who had agreed many times, with much self-congratulations, that of all instruments devised by man, crwth, violin, pibcorn, dulcimer, viola, church organ, zither, harp, brass band, wood-wind, or symphony orchestra--they had smugly agreed that there was no noise as beautiful at its best as the sound of the human voice.
She had a throat that should have been coloured with down like a small bird, and eyes so hazel-green and open that, to preserve them from too much knowledge of evil, they should have been hooded and vultured and not, as they were, terrible in their vulnerability. She was innocent and guileless and infinitely protectable. She was naive to the point of saintliness, and wept a lot at the misery of others. She felt all tragedies except her own. I had read of the Knights of Chivalry and I knew that I had a bounden duty to protect her above all other creatures. It wasn't until thirty years later; when I saw her in another woman, that I realized that I had been searching for her all my life.
Why had I been sent out? When would they let me go home? Why were my aunties there, and Mr.Tabor T.B.? ( She was called Mrs.Tabor T.B. because she'd had eight children, all of whom had died in their teens of tuberculosis. She was slightly mad, I think, and would mutter to herself, "It wasn't Jack or me. T.B. was in the walls. The council should have had that house fumigated. The T.B. was in the walls.")
Mad Dan was silent now. His stoned eyes stared into the fire. A little spittle guttered quietly from the corner of his mouth.
"Let's have a song, boys," he said slowly. "Stay me with minims, comfort me with crotchets."
The crag-faced miners sang with astonishing sweetness a song about a little engine.
"Cranshaw Bailey had an engine;
It was full of mighty power.
He was pull a little lever;
It was go five miles an hour.
Was you ever see,
Was you ever see,
Such a funny thing before?"
I suddenly knew that she was dying.
"Is my sister dying, Mad Dan? I said.
"We are all dying, Nebuchadnezzar," he said. "Even your growing pains are reaching into oblivion.She'll last the night, Dyfrig," he said. "She'll last the night."
Now my sister was no ordinary woman--no woman ever is, but to me, my sister less than any. When my mother had died, she, my sister, had become my mother, and more mother to me than any mother could have been. I was immensely proud of her. I shone in the reflection of her green-eyed, black-haired, gypsy beauty. She sang at her work in a voice so pure that the local men said she had a bell in every tooth, and was gifted by God. And these pundits who revelled in music of any kind and who had agreed many times, with much self-congratulations, that of all instruments devised by man, crwth, violin, pibcorn, dulcimer, viola, church organ, zither, harp, brass band, wood-wind, or symphony orchestra--they had smugly agreed that there was no noise as beautiful at its best as the sound of the human voice.
She had a throat that should have been coloured with down like a small bird, and eyes so hazel-green and open that, to preserve them from too much knowledge of evil, they should have been hooded and vultured and not, as they were, terrible in their vulnerability. She was innocent and guileless and infinitely protectable. She was naive to the point of saintliness, and wept a lot at the misery of others. She felt all tragedies except her own. I had read of the Knights of Chivalry and I knew that I had a bounden duty to protect her above all other creatures. It wasn't until thirty years later; when I saw her in another woman, that I realized that I had been searching for her all my life.
Why had I been sent out? When would they let me go home? Why were my aunties there, and Mr.Tabor T.B.? ( She was called Mrs.Tabor T.B. because she'd had eight children, all of whom had died in their teens of tuberculosis. She was slightly mad, I think, and would mutter to herself, "It wasn't Jack or me. T.B. was in the walls. The council should have had that house fumigated. The T.B. was in the walls.")
Mad Dan was silent now. His stoned eyes stared into the fire. A little spittle guttered quietly from the corner of his mouth.
"Let's have a song, boys," he said slowly. "Stay me with minims, comfort me with crotchets."
The crag-faced miners sang with astonishing sweetness a song about a little engine.
"Cranshaw Bailey had an engine;
It was full of mighty power.
He was pull a little lever;
It was go five miles an hour.
Was you ever see,
Was you ever see,
Such a funny thing before?"
They sang a song about what you could see from the hills of Jerusalem; they sang a song about a saucepan--of a green hill far away, without a city wall; of a black pig and how necessary and how dreadful it was to kill it; of the shepherds and the Magi. Mad Dan stared, and I sang soprano.
There was a disturbance outside the fire's night wall and my auntie Jinnie came suddenly into the light.. Mad Dan stood up.
"All right?" he said.
"Lovely," she said. "Nine pounds--a wench."
"Come, Joseph of Arimathea," he said to me. "Santa called early tonight. Home we go."
We walked a few steps.
"Oh!" he said. "Any of you boys got a piece of silver?A tanner would do, but a crown or a florin would be tidier."
One of the men threw him a florin. "Tell her it's a happy Christmas from Nat Williams, and all that," he said.
We went home. Mrs.Tabor T.B. was downstairs in the kitchen, husband's cap on back to front. My brother-in-law was whistling at the hearth, with the flat iron and the nuts, working steadily. My auntie Jinnie and my cousin Cassie, spinsters both, were arch and coy, and spoke to me as if I were demented and slightly deaf.
There was a disturbance outside the fire's night wall and my auntie Jinnie came suddenly into the light.. Mad Dan stood up.
"All right?" he said.
"Lovely," she said. "Nine pounds--a wench."
"Come, Joseph of Arimathea," he said to me. "Santa called early tonight. Home we go."
We walked a few steps.
"Oh!" he said. "Any of you boys got a piece of silver?A tanner would do, but a crown or a florin would be tidier."
One of the men threw him a florin. "Tell her it's a happy Christmas from Nat Williams, and all that," he said.
We went home. Mrs.Tabor T.B. was downstairs in the kitchen, husband's cap on back to front. My brother-in-law was whistling at the hearth, with the flat iron and the nuts, working steadily. My auntie Jinnie and my cousin Cassie, spinsters both, were arch and coy, and spoke to me as if I were demented and slightly deaf.
"Santy Clausie has brought Richie-Pitchie a prezzy-wezzie for Christmas. Go upstairs and see what Santy has brought you."
I went upstairs with Mad Dan. as I went, Mrs.Tabor T.B. said to my breath-whistling, nut-cracking brother-in -law, "Talk to the council, Elfed," she said, "get them to fumigate the whole house."
I dimly guessed, of course, but there was still a chance that there would be a fire engine, loud-red and big enough for an eight-year old to ride in. The prezzy-wezzy was a furious, red-faced, bald, wrinkled old woman, sixty minutes old.
"Try this for size," said Mad Dan, and pressed the florin into the baby's left hand. She held the money tightly- "You've got a good grip," said Dan to the baby. "She'll never be poor," he said to my sister.
My sister looked washed-out and weak. She smiled at me, and I gave her a kiss.
"Well, what do you think of your Christmas present?" she said
"Fine," I said. "Is this all I get?"
"No, there will be more in the morning."
"O.K.," I said. "Good night, then."
We went downstairs together, and the baby screamed.
"There," said Mad Dan, "'Tis the only cry that is true and immortal and eternal and from the heart. Screaming we come into the world and screaming we go out."
"Well, what do you think of your new sister?" they asked in the kitchen.
"New niece," I said. "Fine."
I went to my bed in the boxroom. The bed was old, and the springs had long ago given up, and sleeping in it was like sleeping in a hammock.
My brother-in -law blew out the candle. "Sleep now," he said. "No lighting the candle and reading." He closed the door and went downstairs.
I pulled the clothes over my head, made a tent, felt for my Woolworth's torch, and with John Halifax, Gentleman propped against my knees, began to read. The Atlantic wind, wild from America whooped and whistled around the house. the baby choked with sobs on the other side of the bedroom wall. I listened. well, at least, I thought, it isn't Tommy Elliot's farm.
I went upstairs with Mad Dan. as I went, Mrs.Tabor T.B. said to my breath-whistling, nut-cracking brother-in -law, "Talk to the council, Elfed," she said, "get them to fumigate the whole house."
I dimly guessed, of course, but there was still a chance that there would be a fire engine, loud-red and big enough for an eight-year old to ride in. The prezzy-wezzy was a furious, red-faced, bald, wrinkled old woman, sixty minutes old.
"Try this for size," said Mad Dan, and pressed the florin into the baby's left hand. She held the money tightly- "You've got a good grip," said Dan to the baby. "She'll never be poor," he said to my sister.
My sister looked washed-out and weak. She smiled at me, and I gave her a kiss.
"Well, what do you think of your Christmas present?" she said
"Fine," I said. "Is this all I get?"
"No, there will be more in the morning."
"O.K.," I said. "Good night, then."
We went downstairs together, and the baby screamed.
"There," said Mad Dan, "'Tis the only cry that is true and immortal and eternal and from the heart. Screaming we come into the world and screaming we go out."
"Well, what do you think of your new sister?" they asked in the kitchen.
"New niece," I said. "Fine."
I went to my bed in the boxroom. The bed was old, and the springs had long ago given up, and sleeping in it was like sleeping in a hammock.
My brother-in -law blew out the candle. "Sleep now," he said. "No lighting the candle and reading." He closed the door and went downstairs.
I pulled the clothes over my head, made a tent, felt for my Woolworth's torch, and with John Halifax, Gentleman propped against my knees, began to read. The Atlantic wind, wild from America whooped and whistled around the house. the baby choked with sobs on the other side of the bedroom wall. I listened. well, at least, I thought, it isn't Tommy Elliot's farm.
'Meeting Mrs.Jenkins'
Published in 1966, this was to be the second book which Richard Burton would have published in his lifetime.
Again, a slim volume of just twenty-four pages, it had originally been written as a commissioned article which had appeared in 'Vogue' magazine entitled 'Burton Writes Of Taylor' but the publishers W. Morrow decided that it was such an excellent piece of writing that it should be released in book form to reach a wider audience. Written in the form of three different scenes, set in three different years, it is Richard Burton at his creative best...
Again, a slim volume of just twenty-four pages, it had originally been written as a commissioned article which had appeared in 'Vogue' magazine entitled 'Burton Writes Of Taylor' but the publishers W. Morrow decided that it was such an excellent piece of writing that it should be released in book form to reach a wider audience. Written in the form of three different scenes, set in three different years, it is Richard Burton at his creative best...
The house in California - it was the Bel Air district of Los Angeles, I think - looked as it had been flung by a giant hand against the side of a hill and had stuck.
From the main living room, master bedroom, guest bedrooms, dining room kitchen level, the house jutted and dropped one floor to a 'playroom'.
The 'playroom' was not for children.
It was complete with bar and barman, hot-dog simmerer, king-sized double-doored two-toned refrigerator, drugstore hotplates, big-game trophies on the walls (the host was a big-game hunter who acted in his spare time) and huge, deep, low divans and easy chairs - villainously uncomfortable for men, but marvellously made for cute little women who could tuck their little legs away and blazingly efface their cute little pretty pouting little personalities in niches of the vast furniture and make like cute little pussycats.
Below the 'playroom' the house again jutted and dropped to the swimming pool, the showers, and the changing rooms.
It was my first time in California and my first visit to a swank house. there were quite a lot of people in and round the pool, all suntanned and all drinking the Sunday morning liveners - Bloody Mary's, boiler-makers, highballs, iced beers. I knew some of the people and was introduced to the others. Wet, brown arms reached out of the pool and shook my hand. The people were all friendly, and they called me Dick immediately. I asked if they would please call me Richard - Dick, I said, made me feel like a symbol of some kind. they laughed, some of them. It was, of course Sunday morning and I was nervous.
I was enjoying this small social triumph, but then a girl sitting on the other side of the pool lowered her book, took off her sunglasses and looked at me. She was so extraordinarily beautiful that I nearly laughed out loud. I didn't, of course, which was just as well. The girl was not, and quite clearly was not going to be, laughing back. I had an idea that, finding nothing of interest, she was looking right through me and was examining the texture of the wall behind . If there was a flaw in the sandstone, I knew she'd find it and probe it right to the pith. I fancied that if she chose so, the house would eventually collapse.
I smiled at her and, after a long moment just as I felt my own smile turning into a cross-eyed grimace, she stared slightly and smiled back. There was little friendliness in the smile. A new ice cube formed of its own accord in my Scotch-on-the-rocks.
She sipped some beer and went back to her book. I affected to become social with others but out of the corner of my mind - while I played for the others the part of a poor miner's son who was puzzled, but delighted by the attention these lovely people paid to him - I had her under close observation. She was, I decided, the most astonishingly self contained, pulchritudinous, remote, removed, inaccessible woman i had ever seen. she spoke to no one. She looked at no one. she steadily kept on reading her book. Was she merely sullen? I wondered. I thought not. There was no trace of sulkiness in the divine face. She was a Mona Lisa type, I thought. In my business everyone is a type. she is older than the deck chair on which she sits, I thought headily, and she is famine, fire, destruction and plague, she is the dark lady of the sonnets, the only true begetter. She is a secret wrapped in an enigma inside a mystery, I thought, with a mental man-to-man nod to Churchill.
Her breasts were apocalyptic, they would topple empires down before they withered. Indeed, her body was a miracle of construction and the work of an engineer of genius. It needed nothing except itself. It was true art, I thought, executed in terms of itself. It was smitten by its own passion. I used to think things like that. I was not long down from Oxford and Walter Pater was still talked of and I read the art reviews in the quality weeklies with much caring about the art itself, and it was Sunday morning in Bel Air, and I was nervous, and there was the Scotch-on-the-rocks.
Like Miniver Cheevy I kept on drinking and, in the heady flow of the attention I was getting, told story after story as the afternoon boozed slowly on. I went in swimming once or twice. So did she, but, lamentably, always after I'd come out. She swam easily and gracefully as an Englishwoman would and not with the masculine drive and kick of most American girls. She was unquestionably gorgeous. I can think of no other word to describe a combination of plentitude, frugality, abundance, tightness. She was lavish. She was dark unyielding largesse. She was, in short, too bloody much and not only that, she was totally ignoring me. I became frustrated almost to screaming when I had finished a well-received and humourous story about the death of my grandfather and found that she was turned away in deep conversation with another woman. I think I tried to eavesdrop but was stayed by words like Tony and Janet and Marion and Sammy. She was not, obviously, talking about me.
Eventually, with half-seas-ed cunning and with all the nonchalance of a traffic jam, I worked my way to her side of the pool. She was describing - in words not normally written - what she thought of a producer at MGM. This was my first encounter with freedom of speech in the USA, and it took my breath away. My brain throbbed ; I almost sobered up. I was profoundly shocked. It was ripe stuff. I checked her again. there was no question about it. She was female. In America the women apparently had not only got the vote - they'd got the words to go with it.
I was also somewhat puzzled and disturbed by the half-look she gave me as she uttered the enormities. Was she deliberately trying to shock me? Those huge violet-blue eyes (the biggest I've ever seen, outside those who have glandular trouble - thyroid, et cetera) had an odd glint in them. You couldn't describe it as a twinkle...Searchlights cannot twinkle, they turn on and off and probe the heavens and so on.
Still I couldn't be left out. I had to join in and say something. I didn't reckon on the Scotch though....I didn't reckon it had warped my judgement and my sense of timing, my choice of occasion. With all the studied frenzy of Dutch courage I waded into the depths of those perilous eyes.
In my best chiffon-and-cut-glass Oxford accent I said : 'You have a remarkable command of Olde Englishe.'
There was a pause in which I realised with brilliant clarity the relativity of time. Aeons passed, civilisations came and went, brave men and cowards died in battles not yet fought, while those cosmic headlights examined my flawed personality. Every pock-mark on my face became a crater of the moon. I reached up with a casual hand to cover up the right-cheeked evidence of my acne'd youth. Halfway up I realised my hand was just as ugly as my face and decided to leave the bloody thing and die instead. But while contemplating the various ways of suicide and having sensibly decided, since I had a good start, to drink myself to death, I was saved by her voice which said, 'Don't you use words like that at the Old Vic?'
'They do,' I said, 'but I don't. I come from a family and an attitude that believe such words are an indication of weakness in vocabulary and emptiness of mind....Despite Jones's writing that in times of acute shattered agony and fear, as in trench warfare, obscenities repeated in certain patterns can at times become almost liturgical, almost poetic....I ran out of gas.
There was another pause ; more empires fell, captains and kings and councellors arrived and departed. She said three four letter words. These were, I think, 'Well! Well! Well!'.
Somebody laughed uneasily. The girl had turned away. I had been dismissed. I felt as lonely as a muezzin, as a reluctant piano lesson on a Saturday afternoon, as the Last Post played on a cracked bugle.
I went home and somebody asked, when I told them where I'd been, what was she like. 'Dark. Dark. Dark. Dark. She probably,' I said, 'shaves.' To nobody in particular, I observed that the human body is eighty per cent water.
It wasn't until five years later that I saw her again, across a restaurant - I can't remember which restaurant or indeed which country or continent. I think she waved at me. I think I scowled back - particularly at her new husband. She had the impertinence to look happy, even radiant. I had liked him a great deal, but now he'd married this girl I write of, and he hadn't even had the grace to ask me to be in 'Around The World In Eighty Days'. I was the only actor in the world who hadn't been asked - with a promise of a small Cezanne - to act in that film. I still liked him and though I bitterly resented her obvious happiness and though I muttered mysteriously to myself words like 'bucolic' and 'bovine content', I believe that I forced a smile at them through my clenched teeth as I left.
The years have gone by - seven or eight. It's Sunday in Paris in early winter. There is a persistent drizzle of cold grey rain.This pleases us. It means we can walk to Fouquet's and not ride in the car because the poor notorious couple will not be bothered by the paparazzi. Their cameras do not like the rain. She is excited at the thought of this tiny expedition - Fouquet's is one block away from our hotel. She glows. I am excited too. I glow. 'Is the dress alright?' she asks.
'Whenas in silks my Julia goes,* I say. 'Then, then, methinks, how sweetly flows the liquefaction of her clothes!'
'Richard,' she says, 'I methink you right across the liquefaction of your face if you don't give me a straight answer. Is it all right?'
'Lovely,' I say, 'And don't shout and bawl at me like that,' I say, 'or you'll be a partner to the shortest marriage since my Great-Aunt Mary Jane Loughhor dropped dead just as she was signing the marriage certificate in the chapel vestry.'
We went down in the elevator. I tipped the concierge a wink - the only kind of tip I really enjoy giving. We walked along the Rue de Berri to the Champs Elysees. we turned right, towards the Arc de Triomphe - the cold rain had swept the great street empty of people. Almost. There was a man and a greyhound. A Fiat car squelched through the wet . We were alone in a street in a city where all but us and the man with the greyhound and the man in a Fiat had died in a vast silent painless war that had come in the night.
'Alone, alone, all, all alone,' I sang, 'alone on a wide, wide sea! And never a saint...' the Fiat screamed into a U-turn. The man parked it ahead of us. He leaped out of his car and started towards us. He was thirty-five years old ; his hairline receded , he was wearing a short raincoat and pointed shoes and three cameras. And I had known him all, already know him all. I'd known him in Rome and London and Paris and Geneva. had known him at airports and railway stations - I'd known him shout insults in Italian and French and English and German. I had not liked him. He was running towards us. He was unique because he was alone. I'd known him before only in numbers, running with the pack, elbowing, screaming, frantic. I'd known him, with old-fashioned gallantry, call my wife a whore and me a gigolo and my friends pimps. I had not liked him.
'When,' I said, 'when the world is over, when the oceans and graves deliver up their dead and this planet has gone screaming back to seething gas and we stand alone in the multitude for the final severe searching before the Supreme Judge, the last thing we'll see,' I said, warming to my speech, 'is one of these blokes trying to take a photograph of it all and asking the Great Mathematician to cheat his look a little to the left.'
'Now, Richard, don't start that rubbish, don't say things like that,' she said. 'Don't get into one of your death moods, we'll have it for the rest of the day. Trouble with the Welsh is,' she said, 'that they think everybody's Welsh, even Death.'
We had stopped.
'Why not? He's a local man,' I said. 'He's a very distinguished feller. we must be prepared for him and courteous when he comes.'
'Don't' she said quickly. 'Don't make fun. You can't talk your way out of the fear of death.'
'You want a bet?'
'Don't, please don't talk about it.'
'Good God. It's the most absorbing subject and has been since the first man died.'
'And don't you die on me.' she said 'I couldn't bear it again.'
'Don't you die on me either.' we stared at each other.
Her brilliant eyes had dimmed. the violet in them had turned dark - almost to blackness. They looked like water over coal, like black macadam in the rain under street lamps at night.
An emotion compounded of - who knows what? - of fear and love and pride and beauty and self-pity seized us both by the throat and shook us like a dog. The man crouched three feet away from us, backing as we walked, clicking and clicking. I feinted a kick at the photographer's left knee. As he dropped his camera I backhanded him across the face. He was off balance and fell quickly onto his back. Equally quickly he was up and clicking and clicking in a sweet courteous stream in three languages. I cursed back in four. The Welsh language is little known to paparazzi.
We entered Fouquet's. My wife was silent and bright with fury. I ordered a drink. 'Why did you do that? Why did you have to spoil the day?'
'I had to do something,' I said. ' I was terrified I was going to cry and I can't abide weeping in a man.'
'Go back and apologize,' she said.
I went downstairs.
I came back.
'Did you?' she asked.
'Yes.'
'How did he take it?'
'Like a proper little gentleman,' I said. 'He belted me right across the chops.'
She laughed
I licked the tender, slightly shredded flesh beside my molars, and I cursed some more.
'Stop that!'
'What's the matter,' i said, 'didn't you use words like that in Culver City?'
Her lower jaw hideously receding, her upper front teeth vilely bucking, and in a very highfaulutin, nauseous English accent, she said :
'Yes, of course, they did, but I didn't - I come from a race and family that believe the use of such words to be an indication of weakness in vocabulary and intellectual emptiness....'
She smiled at me and patted my hand. I made a plaintive woofing noise and she smiled again.
The ice cubes in my Scotch-on-the-rocks melted and sank without trace.
From the main living room, master bedroom, guest bedrooms, dining room kitchen level, the house jutted and dropped one floor to a 'playroom'.
The 'playroom' was not for children.
It was complete with bar and barman, hot-dog simmerer, king-sized double-doored two-toned refrigerator, drugstore hotplates, big-game trophies on the walls (the host was a big-game hunter who acted in his spare time) and huge, deep, low divans and easy chairs - villainously uncomfortable for men, but marvellously made for cute little women who could tuck their little legs away and blazingly efface their cute little pretty pouting little personalities in niches of the vast furniture and make like cute little pussycats.
Below the 'playroom' the house again jutted and dropped to the swimming pool, the showers, and the changing rooms.
It was my first time in California and my first visit to a swank house. there were quite a lot of people in and round the pool, all suntanned and all drinking the Sunday morning liveners - Bloody Mary's, boiler-makers, highballs, iced beers. I knew some of the people and was introduced to the others. Wet, brown arms reached out of the pool and shook my hand. The people were all friendly, and they called me Dick immediately. I asked if they would please call me Richard - Dick, I said, made me feel like a symbol of some kind. they laughed, some of them. It was, of course Sunday morning and I was nervous.
I was enjoying this small social triumph, but then a girl sitting on the other side of the pool lowered her book, took off her sunglasses and looked at me. She was so extraordinarily beautiful that I nearly laughed out loud. I didn't, of course, which was just as well. The girl was not, and quite clearly was not going to be, laughing back. I had an idea that, finding nothing of interest, she was looking right through me and was examining the texture of the wall behind . If there was a flaw in the sandstone, I knew she'd find it and probe it right to the pith. I fancied that if she chose so, the house would eventually collapse.
I smiled at her and, after a long moment just as I felt my own smile turning into a cross-eyed grimace, she stared slightly and smiled back. There was little friendliness in the smile. A new ice cube formed of its own accord in my Scotch-on-the-rocks.
She sipped some beer and went back to her book. I affected to become social with others but out of the corner of my mind - while I played for the others the part of a poor miner's son who was puzzled, but delighted by the attention these lovely people paid to him - I had her under close observation. She was, I decided, the most astonishingly self contained, pulchritudinous, remote, removed, inaccessible woman i had ever seen. she spoke to no one. She looked at no one. she steadily kept on reading her book. Was she merely sullen? I wondered. I thought not. There was no trace of sulkiness in the divine face. She was a Mona Lisa type, I thought. In my business everyone is a type. she is older than the deck chair on which she sits, I thought headily, and she is famine, fire, destruction and plague, she is the dark lady of the sonnets, the only true begetter. She is a secret wrapped in an enigma inside a mystery, I thought, with a mental man-to-man nod to Churchill.
Her breasts were apocalyptic, they would topple empires down before they withered. Indeed, her body was a miracle of construction and the work of an engineer of genius. It needed nothing except itself. It was true art, I thought, executed in terms of itself. It was smitten by its own passion. I used to think things like that. I was not long down from Oxford and Walter Pater was still talked of and I read the art reviews in the quality weeklies with much caring about the art itself, and it was Sunday morning in Bel Air, and I was nervous, and there was the Scotch-on-the-rocks.
Like Miniver Cheevy I kept on drinking and, in the heady flow of the attention I was getting, told story after story as the afternoon boozed slowly on. I went in swimming once or twice. So did she, but, lamentably, always after I'd come out. She swam easily and gracefully as an Englishwoman would and not with the masculine drive and kick of most American girls. She was unquestionably gorgeous. I can think of no other word to describe a combination of plentitude, frugality, abundance, tightness. She was lavish. She was dark unyielding largesse. She was, in short, too bloody much and not only that, she was totally ignoring me. I became frustrated almost to screaming when I had finished a well-received and humourous story about the death of my grandfather and found that she was turned away in deep conversation with another woman. I think I tried to eavesdrop but was stayed by words like Tony and Janet and Marion and Sammy. She was not, obviously, talking about me.
Eventually, with half-seas-ed cunning and with all the nonchalance of a traffic jam, I worked my way to her side of the pool. She was describing - in words not normally written - what she thought of a producer at MGM. This was my first encounter with freedom of speech in the USA, and it took my breath away. My brain throbbed ; I almost sobered up. I was profoundly shocked. It was ripe stuff. I checked her again. there was no question about it. She was female. In America the women apparently had not only got the vote - they'd got the words to go with it.
I was also somewhat puzzled and disturbed by the half-look she gave me as she uttered the enormities. Was she deliberately trying to shock me? Those huge violet-blue eyes (the biggest I've ever seen, outside those who have glandular trouble - thyroid, et cetera) had an odd glint in them. You couldn't describe it as a twinkle...Searchlights cannot twinkle, they turn on and off and probe the heavens and so on.
Still I couldn't be left out. I had to join in and say something. I didn't reckon on the Scotch though....I didn't reckon it had warped my judgement and my sense of timing, my choice of occasion. With all the studied frenzy of Dutch courage I waded into the depths of those perilous eyes.
In my best chiffon-and-cut-glass Oxford accent I said : 'You have a remarkable command of Olde Englishe.'
There was a pause in which I realised with brilliant clarity the relativity of time. Aeons passed, civilisations came and went, brave men and cowards died in battles not yet fought, while those cosmic headlights examined my flawed personality. Every pock-mark on my face became a crater of the moon. I reached up with a casual hand to cover up the right-cheeked evidence of my acne'd youth. Halfway up I realised my hand was just as ugly as my face and decided to leave the bloody thing and die instead. But while contemplating the various ways of suicide and having sensibly decided, since I had a good start, to drink myself to death, I was saved by her voice which said, 'Don't you use words like that at the Old Vic?'
'They do,' I said, 'but I don't. I come from a family and an attitude that believe such words are an indication of weakness in vocabulary and emptiness of mind....Despite Jones's writing that in times of acute shattered agony and fear, as in trench warfare, obscenities repeated in certain patterns can at times become almost liturgical, almost poetic....I ran out of gas.
There was another pause ; more empires fell, captains and kings and councellors arrived and departed. She said three four letter words. These were, I think, 'Well! Well! Well!'.
Somebody laughed uneasily. The girl had turned away. I had been dismissed. I felt as lonely as a muezzin, as a reluctant piano lesson on a Saturday afternoon, as the Last Post played on a cracked bugle.
I went home and somebody asked, when I told them where I'd been, what was she like. 'Dark. Dark. Dark. Dark. She probably,' I said, 'shaves.' To nobody in particular, I observed that the human body is eighty per cent water.
It wasn't until five years later that I saw her again, across a restaurant - I can't remember which restaurant or indeed which country or continent. I think she waved at me. I think I scowled back - particularly at her new husband. She had the impertinence to look happy, even radiant. I had liked him a great deal, but now he'd married this girl I write of, and he hadn't even had the grace to ask me to be in 'Around The World In Eighty Days'. I was the only actor in the world who hadn't been asked - with a promise of a small Cezanne - to act in that film. I still liked him and though I bitterly resented her obvious happiness and though I muttered mysteriously to myself words like 'bucolic' and 'bovine content', I believe that I forced a smile at them through my clenched teeth as I left.
The years have gone by - seven or eight. It's Sunday in Paris in early winter. There is a persistent drizzle of cold grey rain.This pleases us. It means we can walk to Fouquet's and not ride in the car because the poor notorious couple will not be bothered by the paparazzi. Their cameras do not like the rain. She is excited at the thought of this tiny expedition - Fouquet's is one block away from our hotel. She glows. I am excited too. I glow. 'Is the dress alright?' she asks.
'Whenas in silks my Julia goes,* I say. 'Then, then, methinks, how sweetly flows the liquefaction of her clothes!'
'Richard,' she says, 'I methink you right across the liquefaction of your face if you don't give me a straight answer. Is it all right?'
'Lovely,' I say, 'And don't shout and bawl at me like that,' I say, 'or you'll be a partner to the shortest marriage since my Great-Aunt Mary Jane Loughhor dropped dead just as she was signing the marriage certificate in the chapel vestry.'
We went down in the elevator. I tipped the concierge a wink - the only kind of tip I really enjoy giving. We walked along the Rue de Berri to the Champs Elysees. we turned right, towards the Arc de Triomphe - the cold rain had swept the great street empty of people. Almost. There was a man and a greyhound. A Fiat car squelched through the wet . We were alone in a street in a city where all but us and the man with the greyhound and the man in a Fiat had died in a vast silent painless war that had come in the night.
'Alone, alone, all, all alone,' I sang, 'alone on a wide, wide sea! And never a saint...' the Fiat screamed into a U-turn. The man parked it ahead of us. He leaped out of his car and started towards us. He was thirty-five years old ; his hairline receded , he was wearing a short raincoat and pointed shoes and three cameras. And I had known him all, already know him all. I'd known him in Rome and London and Paris and Geneva. had known him at airports and railway stations - I'd known him shout insults in Italian and French and English and German. I had not liked him. He was running towards us. He was unique because he was alone. I'd known him before only in numbers, running with the pack, elbowing, screaming, frantic. I'd known him, with old-fashioned gallantry, call my wife a whore and me a gigolo and my friends pimps. I had not liked him.
'When,' I said, 'when the world is over, when the oceans and graves deliver up their dead and this planet has gone screaming back to seething gas and we stand alone in the multitude for the final severe searching before the Supreme Judge, the last thing we'll see,' I said, warming to my speech, 'is one of these blokes trying to take a photograph of it all and asking the Great Mathematician to cheat his look a little to the left.'
'Now, Richard, don't start that rubbish, don't say things like that,' she said. 'Don't get into one of your death moods, we'll have it for the rest of the day. Trouble with the Welsh is,' she said, 'that they think everybody's Welsh, even Death.'
We had stopped.
'Why not? He's a local man,' I said. 'He's a very distinguished feller. we must be prepared for him and courteous when he comes.'
'Don't' she said quickly. 'Don't make fun. You can't talk your way out of the fear of death.'
'You want a bet?'
'Don't, please don't talk about it.'
'Good God. It's the most absorbing subject and has been since the first man died.'
'And don't you die on me.' she said 'I couldn't bear it again.'
'Don't you die on me either.' we stared at each other.
Her brilliant eyes had dimmed. the violet in them had turned dark - almost to blackness. They looked like water over coal, like black macadam in the rain under street lamps at night.
An emotion compounded of - who knows what? - of fear and love and pride and beauty and self-pity seized us both by the throat and shook us like a dog. The man crouched three feet away from us, backing as we walked, clicking and clicking. I feinted a kick at the photographer's left knee. As he dropped his camera I backhanded him across the face. He was off balance and fell quickly onto his back. Equally quickly he was up and clicking and clicking in a sweet courteous stream in three languages. I cursed back in four. The Welsh language is little known to paparazzi.
We entered Fouquet's. My wife was silent and bright with fury. I ordered a drink. 'Why did you do that? Why did you have to spoil the day?'
'I had to do something,' I said. ' I was terrified I was going to cry and I can't abide weeping in a man.'
'Go back and apologize,' she said.
I went downstairs.
I came back.
'Did you?' she asked.
'Yes.'
'How did he take it?'
'Like a proper little gentleman,' I said. 'He belted me right across the chops.'
She laughed
I licked the tender, slightly shredded flesh beside my molars, and I cursed some more.
'Stop that!'
'What's the matter,' i said, 'didn't you use words like that in Culver City?'
Her lower jaw hideously receding, her upper front teeth vilely bucking, and in a very highfaulutin, nauseous English accent, she said :
'Yes, of course, they did, but I didn't - I come from a race and family that believe the use of such words to be an indication of weakness in vocabulary and intellectual emptiness....'
She smiled at me and patted my hand. I made a plaintive woofing noise and she smiled again.
The ice cubes in my Scotch-on-the-rocks melted and sank without trace.
Richard Burton's Introduction To The Folio Society Edition Of William Shakespeare's 'The Tragedy Of Hamlet'
A copy of the 1964, third impression, Folio Society edition of William Shakespeare's 'Tragedy Of Hamlet' which features the following beautifully written introduction by Richard Burton.
Originally published by The Folio Society in 1954, this later copy was printed by Mackays of Chatham and is complete with the original slip-case.
Originally published by The Folio Society in 1954, this later copy was printed by Mackays of Chatham and is complete with the original slip-case.
An actor who is playing Hamlet should, perhaps, not write about the play. He has formulated his own opinions in order o portray the character as best he feels able. This means that, for the moment, he is set in his ideas about a character on the analysis of which the finest brains of critics and actors have been bent for three hundred and fifty years ; so it may seem presumptuous of him to drag the cloak of his opinion in so vast an arena.
To speak of any man with other than superficial judgement requires more than a few moments, or a page or two of print. To speak of Hamlet quickly, summarily, is more unwise still - for Hamlet is not a person but a quintessence.
It has been estimated that some ten thousand books, articles and theses have been written on Hamlet, which indicates that it is by far the most controversial play in the canon. It would also suggest that there can be very little left to add. Certainly an actor would prefer to simplify, rather than further complicate the issue, if only for the reason that there is a very definite limit to the number of these subtleties, suggested by generations of learned critics, which an actor can embody in one performance.
Why this controversy? Perhaps chiefly because each reader who discovers the play for the first time, and for the first time wonders at the strange, almost unworldly, and yet most human Prince of Denmark, will hold in his mind yet another - if only very slightly different - picture of him from all others held before.
Charles Lamb felt that there was a little of us all in Hamlet. Here is a character in whose sufferings we can all of us feel the throb of our own ; in whose gentleness, or rage, fear, horror, in whose very love of life, or bewilderment in it's difficulties, we can often hear an echo that is sadly or gladly personal.
But does that of necessity give rise to controversy on such a scale? The plot of the play, baldly considered, is simple enough. It is with the convolutions that result in the final hecatomb that the writers on Hamlet concern themselves ; but there are many plots as complicated in contemporary dramatic writing, many plays with a more fearsome list of dead at the final curtain. It is, in the final analysis, the weird light that follows the young Prince through the windings of the story that so fascinates the commentators. For the character of Hamlet is unique in all literature - a portrait of such depth and breadth, of such tender subtlety, as, filling the minds of watcher or reader, can create in each a different picture. The mirror that is here held up to nature flashes fires of infinite colours and intensity.
The questions to be asked are almost limitless ; their answers multitudinous, and none of them satisfactory to everyone. It is certainly not within the scope of this Introduction to attempt to answer them, and certainly an actor faced with the part is wisest to look for his own answers not in the critical Tower of Babel that looms over the play, but in the text of the play itself.
John Barrymore, one of the memorable Hamlets of the century, said : 'Not only does every actor play Hamlet provided he live long enough, but every member of the audience plays it, each in his own unyielding fashion...you can play it standing, sitting, laying down or, if you insist, kneeling. You can have a hangover. You can be cold sober. You can be hungry, overfed, or have just fought with your wife. It makes no difference as regards your stance or your mood. There are within the precincts of this great role a thousand Hamlets, any one of which will keep in step with your whim of the evening.'
Sir John Gielgud, probably the greatest Hamlet of the contemporary theatre, gave us a Hamlet poetical - sensitive - illogical. Here was the beautiful, effortless, tenor voice, soaring from the early depths of misery, through the antic hysteria of a torn mind, to the exquisite resolution of death - faced and accepted. Here Hamlet shrank from immediacy with a mind too fine to cut through the tangle of his fate with a bloody sword ; a mind driven to near-lunacy by his mother's carnality, and pathetically finding horror even in the simplicities of Ophelia.
This was a definitive performance, but, in an indefinable part, not exclusive.
It is still possible for an actor broad of face, wide of shoulder, thick of thigh and robust of voice - in brief, too solid for such a sensitive interpretation as Gielgud's, to advance his own definition, survive the onslaught of the adverse, and attempt some of the many facets of so versatile a character.
I strongly recommend that readers of Hamlet should, for their own enjoyment, also read some at least of the writers about the play - bearing in mind that some of the flashes of the mirror may only be will-o'-the-wisps.
A modern reflection upon Hamlet is that it is the tragedy of a man who could not make up his mind. To chase a possible will-o'-the-wisp, to risk death by drowning in it's pursuit, let us postulate that there is 'within the precincts' a Hamlet who could not only make up his mind, but who knew very well what he was about.
Hamlet vows vengeance in the presence of the ghost. On only one occasion in the play does Hamlet find the King unattended, and, therefore, vulnerable. He comes upon him praying, alone. Now might he do it, and now he'll do it - 'that would be scanned ; a villain kills my father, and for that, I, his sole son, do this same villain send to heaven'. His withdrawal from action is strongly reasoned, according to the doctrine of an eye for an eye. He must not, in killing the King, be kind, take him in prayer and 'season'd for his passage'. he must wait until the King is again vulnerable, but in 'some act that has no relish of salvation in 't', and pay home the debt of his father, who was killed in the full flush of his unrepented life.
The next time that Hamlet thinks Claudius may be within the shadow of his sword is in the Closet Scene. A cry from an eavesdropper behind the arras draws his blade in deadly thrust, and his cry of hope, 'is it the King?' It cannot be laid at the door of Hamlet's vacillation that the over-zealous Polonious should be the first fortuitous victim.
From then on Hamlet is defending his own life ; his companions on the enforced voyage to England, who are to hand him over to death, are sent to their own death by him, as the result of his immediate decision. Their death is fortuitous, but results from the mounting tide of evil that stems from the first sinning of the King, not from a by-blow of Hamlet's indecision. He kills them to return to Denmark alive. Once back, he is faced with the culminating horror of evil in the Laertes plot, so that he is forced to final action. The King is killed, and with him his instrument, Laertes, and in the welter of evil Hamlet himself has to die.
There is a brief to be upheld on such a line, that is to say, there is a possible Prince of Decision who can hold the interest. The play may not be one of weakness, but a portrait of strength in its finest most certain form. Horror is pulled upon our heads perhaps by the initial horror of murder, gathering way and reflected in Hamlet's mind, not in the weakness of that mind.
The epitaph for the writer of a thousand pages or a thousand words on Hamlet is forever the same : the reflection from one facet of the jewel took the eye, but let no-one think that there is only one colour in the diamond.
Here is the play. Read it. The greatness is here in the bald, printed line.
To speak of any man with other than superficial judgement requires more than a few moments, or a page or two of print. To speak of Hamlet quickly, summarily, is more unwise still - for Hamlet is not a person but a quintessence.
It has been estimated that some ten thousand books, articles and theses have been written on Hamlet, which indicates that it is by far the most controversial play in the canon. It would also suggest that there can be very little left to add. Certainly an actor would prefer to simplify, rather than further complicate the issue, if only for the reason that there is a very definite limit to the number of these subtleties, suggested by generations of learned critics, which an actor can embody in one performance.
Why this controversy? Perhaps chiefly because each reader who discovers the play for the first time, and for the first time wonders at the strange, almost unworldly, and yet most human Prince of Denmark, will hold in his mind yet another - if only very slightly different - picture of him from all others held before.
Charles Lamb felt that there was a little of us all in Hamlet. Here is a character in whose sufferings we can all of us feel the throb of our own ; in whose gentleness, or rage, fear, horror, in whose very love of life, or bewilderment in it's difficulties, we can often hear an echo that is sadly or gladly personal.
But does that of necessity give rise to controversy on such a scale? The plot of the play, baldly considered, is simple enough. It is with the convolutions that result in the final hecatomb that the writers on Hamlet concern themselves ; but there are many plots as complicated in contemporary dramatic writing, many plays with a more fearsome list of dead at the final curtain. It is, in the final analysis, the weird light that follows the young Prince through the windings of the story that so fascinates the commentators. For the character of Hamlet is unique in all literature - a portrait of such depth and breadth, of such tender subtlety, as, filling the minds of watcher or reader, can create in each a different picture. The mirror that is here held up to nature flashes fires of infinite colours and intensity.
The questions to be asked are almost limitless ; their answers multitudinous, and none of them satisfactory to everyone. It is certainly not within the scope of this Introduction to attempt to answer them, and certainly an actor faced with the part is wisest to look for his own answers not in the critical Tower of Babel that looms over the play, but in the text of the play itself.
John Barrymore, one of the memorable Hamlets of the century, said : 'Not only does every actor play Hamlet provided he live long enough, but every member of the audience plays it, each in his own unyielding fashion...you can play it standing, sitting, laying down or, if you insist, kneeling. You can have a hangover. You can be cold sober. You can be hungry, overfed, or have just fought with your wife. It makes no difference as regards your stance or your mood. There are within the precincts of this great role a thousand Hamlets, any one of which will keep in step with your whim of the evening.'
Sir John Gielgud, probably the greatest Hamlet of the contemporary theatre, gave us a Hamlet poetical - sensitive - illogical. Here was the beautiful, effortless, tenor voice, soaring from the early depths of misery, through the antic hysteria of a torn mind, to the exquisite resolution of death - faced and accepted. Here Hamlet shrank from immediacy with a mind too fine to cut through the tangle of his fate with a bloody sword ; a mind driven to near-lunacy by his mother's carnality, and pathetically finding horror even in the simplicities of Ophelia.
This was a definitive performance, but, in an indefinable part, not exclusive.
It is still possible for an actor broad of face, wide of shoulder, thick of thigh and robust of voice - in brief, too solid for such a sensitive interpretation as Gielgud's, to advance his own definition, survive the onslaught of the adverse, and attempt some of the many facets of so versatile a character.
I strongly recommend that readers of Hamlet should, for their own enjoyment, also read some at least of the writers about the play - bearing in mind that some of the flashes of the mirror may only be will-o'-the-wisps.
A modern reflection upon Hamlet is that it is the tragedy of a man who could not make up his mind. To chase a possible will-o'-the-wisp, to risk death by drowning in it's pursuit, let us postulate that there is 'within the precincts' a Hamlet who could not only make up his mind, but who knew very well what he was about.
Hamlet vows vengeance in the presence of the ghost. On only one occasion in the play does Hamlet find the King unattended, and, therefore, vulnerable. He comes upon him praying, alone. Now might he do it, and now he'll do it - 'that would be scanned ; a villain kills my father, and for that, I, his sole son, do this same villain send to heaven'. His withdrawal from action is strongly reasoned, according to the doctrine of an eye for an eye. He must not, in killing the King, be kind, take him in prayer and 'season'd for his passage'. he must wait until the King is again vulnerable, but in 'some act that has no relish of salvation in 't', and pay home the debt of his father, who was killed in the full flush of his unrepented life.
The next time that Hamlet thinks Claudius may be within the shadow of his sword is in the Closet Scene. A cry from an eavesdropper behind the arras draws his blade in deadly thrust, and his cry of hope, 'is it the King?' It cannot be laid at the door of Hamlet's vacillation that the over-zealous Polonious should be the first fortuitous victim.
From then on Hamlet is defending his own life ; his companions on the enforced voyage to England, who are to hand him over to death, are sent to their own death by him, as the result of his immediate decision. Their death is fortuitous, but results from the mounting tide of evil that stems from the first sinning of the King, not from a by-blow of Hamlet's indecision. He kills them to return to Denmark alive. Once back, he is faced with the culminating horror of evil in the Laertes plot, so that he is forced to final action. The King is killed, and with him his instrument, Laertes, and in the welter of evil Hamlet himself has to die.
There is a brief to be upheld on such a line, that is to say, there is a possible Prince of Decision who can hold the interest. The play may not be one of weakness, but a portrait of strength in its finest most certain form. Horror is pulled upon our heads perhaps by the initial horror of murder, gathering way and reflected in Hamlet's mind, not in the weakness of that mind.
The epitaph for the writer of a thousand pages or a thousand words on Hamlet is forever the same : the reflection from one facet of the jewel took the eye, but let no-one think that there is only one colour in the diamond.
Here is the play. Read it. The greatness is here in the bald, printed line.
'The Prince Of Denmark' Richard Burton's Personal View
In 1964, at the height of Richard Burton's return to theatrical super-stardom due to his triumphant return to the stage in John Gielgud's historical production of 'Hamlet' at the Lunt-Fontanne Theatre on Broadway, Playbill magazine asked him to write a short piece relating to playing the role of Shakespeare's Prince of Denmark.
In an article entitled 'The Prince Of Denmark - Four Views', Richard Burton wrote warmly and affectionately about the role of 'Hamlet' and what the character, and the play, meant to him.
In what was the 400th Anniversary of the birth of William Shakespeare, Richard Burton's piece wonderfully conveys the respect and admiration Shakespeare's character holds for him and other actors who have taken on the challenging role, and in many ways it is as if Richard Burton was writing about an old friend.
The other actors who were asked to contribute to the article and to share their experiences and views on the play and the character of the man were Christopher Plummer, Maurice Evans and Sir John Gielgud himself. The article appeared in the April, 1964 issue of Playbill, the magazine itself featuring the iconic image of Richard Burton as Hamlet on Broadway on the front cover.
In an article entitled 'The Prince Of Denmark - Four Views', Richard Burton wrote warmly and affectionately about the role of 'Hamlet' and what the character, and the play, meant to him.
In what was the 400th Anniversary of the birth of William Shakespeare, Richard Burton's piece wonderfully conveys the respect and admiration Shakespeare's character holds for him and other actors who have taken on the challenging role, and in many ways it is as if Richard Burton was writing about an old friend.
The other actors who were asked to contribute to the article and to share their experiences and views on the play and the character of the man were Christopher Plummer, Maurice Evans and Sir John Gielgud himself. The article appeared in the April, 1964 issue of Playbill, the magazine itself featuring the iconic image of Richard Burton as Hamlet on Broadway on the front cover.
If one man believes that Hamlet is the tragedy of a man who cannot make up his mind and plays it that way - then that is, for three and a half hours, what Hamlet is. If another believes him to be a frustrated soldier, envious of "the delicate and tender Prince...with divine ambition puffed", then that is what he is. If another chooses to mince delicately on high heels, scornful and scorning, to his deadly appointment with Laertes' rapier, then that is what Hamlet is. These actors have but to have enough power of personality to command your attention and their Hamlets are for a couple of hours what these actors choose to be, or cannot help being.
Someone once told me that the first Hamlet you see is the one that dominates the rest of your life. I've asked this of other people and apparently it is not true. In my case however it is. the first Hamlet I ever saw was in 1944 at Oxford. The actor was Gielgud. I was lucky. I saw - and see in my memory - the golden renaissance Prince, witty, scholarly, loving, high-poetic; infinitely, smilingly, and heart-breakingly melancholic. His was indeed so near perfect a performance that he nearly killed my ambition. Who could match him? I thought. who could match him? It was Sir John himself who later on when I became friends with him persuaded me, by inference more than by direct statement, that every man is his own Hamlet, that Hamlet (assuming that there is the initial talent) is so massive that there is no room for all.
Who in two or three hundred words, or for that matter, two or three thousand books can throw light on Hamlet? Thousands of volumes, philosophical, psychological, idolatrous, religious, political and hate-filled have been written about this most inconsistent and disjointed creation of Shakespeare. He is so illusive that he can be (and has been) played as a homosexual, as a man of action (someone once told me that Olivier's performance of Hamlet was the best performance of Hotspur he had ever seen), as demoniacal , as one suffering from satyriasis, as a poet, as an intellectual, as a brilliant but tragic comedian and so on through endless permutations of these and many other labels. He has even, as we all know, been played by women. my own theory, if you can call it one, is that no actor has ever been right or perfect as Hamlet, and that everybody has been right and perfect. Let me quickly qualify this by adding that any weaknesses or strengths of the individual actor will be exaggerated under the blinding light of this most searching of parts. You'll see the man reveal himself for what he is when the great Prince gets at him - exciting, vulgar, envious, perversely witty, obscene, poetic, exotic, brave, cowardly, cynical, romantic, empty, mystical, posturing, lovable, charming, self-pitying - a combination of some or all of these things and more, or that most dreadful revelation of all - prosaic, inadequate and dull.
I have played Hamlet many times and in many ways. I played him first with no thought of his inconsistencies but with sheer delight in the verbal magic of each individual scene. I later played him with some attempt to connect up all the apparent incongruities. (I found this exhausting and fell back easily into self-pity). I played him again, as Hugh Griffith put it, as a Welsh preacher, bewildered but determinedly sonorous in the labyrinthine ways of Elsinore. I tried him once as a crafty (but poetically gifted) politician, anxious that never again would anyone pop in between the election and my hopes. I am, at the time of writing, playing Hamlet again and there is no knowing in this production (and no Hamlet has been given more freedom or more help from a director) how this Hamlet will turn out. But whatever the verdict, I hope that whatever happens, I will not qualify for the last three words of the previous paragraph.
*********************************************
Someone once told me that the first Hamlet you see is the one that dominates the rest of your life. I've asked this of other people and apparently it is not true. In my case however it is. the first Hamlet I ever saw was in 1944 at Oxford. The actor was Gielgud. I was lucky. I saw - and see in my memory - the golden renaissance Prince, witty, scholarly, loving, high-poetic; infinitely, smilingly, and heart-breakingly melancholic. His was indeed so near perfect a performance that he nearly killed my ambition. Who could match him? I thought. who could match him? It was Sir John himself who later on when I became friends with him persuaded me, by inference more than by direct statement, that every man is his own Hamlet, that Hamlet (assuming that there is the initial talent) is so massive that there is no room for all.
Who in two or three hundred words, or for that matter, two or three thousand books can throw light on Hamlet? Thousands of volumes, philosophical, psychological, idolatrous, religious, political and hate-filled have been written about this most inconsistent and disjointed creation of Shakespeare. He is so illusive that he can be (and has been) played as a homosexual, as a man of action (someone once told me that Olivier's performance of Hamlet was the best performance of Hotspur he had ever seen), as demoniacal , as one suffering from satyriasis, as a poet, as an intellectual, as a brilliant but tragic comedian and so on through endless permutations of these and many other labels. He has even, as we all know, been played by women. my own theory, if you can call it one, is that no actor has ever been right or perfect as Hamlet, and that everybody has been right and perfect. Let me quickly qualify this by adding that any weaknesses or strengths of the individual actor will be exaggerated under the blinding light of this most searching of parts. You'll see the man reveal himself for what he is when the great Prince gets at him - exciting, vulgar, envious, perversely witty, obscene, poetic, exotic, brave, cowardly, cynical, romantic, empty, mystical, posturing, lovable, charming, self-pitying - a combination of some or all of these things and more, or that most dreadful revelation of all - prosaic, inadequate and dull.
I have played Hamlet many times and in many ways. I played him first with no thought of his inconsistencies but with sheer delight in the verbal magic of each individual scene. I later played him with some attempt to connect up all the apparent incongruities. (I found this exhausting and fell back easily into self-pity). I played him again, as Hugh Griffith put it, as a Welsh preacher, bewildered but determinedly sonorous in the labyrinthine ways of Elsinore. I tried him once as a crafty (but poetically gifted) politician, anxious that never again would anyone pop in between the election and my hopes. I am, at the time of writing, playing Hamlet again and there is no knowing in this production (and no Hamlet has been given more freedom or more help from a director) how this Hamlet will turn out. But whatever the verdict, I hope that whatever happens, I will not qualify for the last three words of the previous paragraph.
*********************************************
'The Magic of Meredith Jones'
"There was a school-teacher in the Elementary School who was called Meredith Jones, who is lamentably dead, and he first opened my eyes to the extraordinary width, beauty, depth and colour of the English language, although he was a Welsh speaking Welshman like myself..."
Richard Burton, in conversation with Vincent Kane,'Kane On Friday' B.B.C. Wales, 1977.
Richard Burton, in conversation with Vincent Kane,'Kane On Friday' B.B.C. Wales, 1977.
Throughout his career, Richard Burton, a surprisingly humble man, never failed to mention during the many interviews in his life, the people to whom he owed a tremendous debt and without whom he would have probably never become the great stage and screen actor he was destined to be.
Philip Burton, Emlyn Williams and John Gielgud were invariably named as was his former English Master at the Port Talbot Elementary School, Meredith Jones.
The article below was written by Richard Burton as a tribute to Meredith Jones and first appeared in The Sunday Times on the 17th of June, 1956.
Philip Burton, Emlyn Williams and John Gielgud were invariably named as was his former English Master at the Port Talbot Elementary School, Meredith Jones.
The article below was written by Richard Burton as a tribute to Meredith Jones and first appeared in The Sunday Times on the 17th of June, 1956.
Meredith Jones was a schoolteacher, a recognisable spiritual descendant of Geraldus Cambrensis and Shakespeare's Fluellen - passionate, fluent, something of a scholar, mock-belligerent, roughly gentle, of remarkable vitality and afraid of nobody. He was the concentrated essence of a kind of bi-lingual South Walian, unknown perhaps over the border, who speaks the alien English tongue with a loving care and octosyllabically too! No short word for them if a longer one will do - men of brilliantly active vocabularies who love an audience. In the more suspicious and austere North of the Principality, we South Walians are described with an amused tolerance as Sioni Hoys, a rough translation of which would be 'Johnny Shouts' - makers of flaming gestures for the love of it, who turn all things, from rugby football to a walk over the Brombil to T.S.Eliot, into powerful drama in the telling of it.
I remember Meredith Jones talking, for instance, of 'The Love Song of J.Alfred Prufrock' and holding us all, a group of young boys, spellbound as he unfolded with conscious looks of wonder the marvellous courage of the man Eliot to write the poem 'Prufrock' at the time that he did. 'No, if I should die boys think only this of me or Sassoon or Owen and Thomas with their beautiful bitterness but I have measured out my life with coffee spoons. What a gesture gentlemen.' Meredith would, in the high flow of his talk, describe anybody of whatever age or sex as 'Gentlemen', as if at a council meeting. 'What quiet bravery, and who's to say, who will argue with me, who will deny that Prufrock's slow death was not the more terrible?'
His stage was an elementary council school, leaky, and many years condemned, with buckets and bucket-boys at the ready for the ever-threatening rain. He worked hard. All day long he taught eleven-plus boys the rudiments of arithmetic and English to prepare them for then entrance into the Local Grammar School and at night he presided in the same school over a Youth Club. And always he talked and couldn't bear to stop.
At night when the club was shut he would invariably say, 'Walk home with me boys,' and delightedly we would; for what we all knew was that some lecture to be delivered would be only half completed by the time of our arrival at his house, which would mean a further half-hour of talk while he offered to walk us back home. A further walk even might be necessary while he talked and talked. His subjects were legion.
'Consider the tax on the brain, gentlemen, of the great mathematician pondering in his chill chambers at Cambridge the incontrovertible fact that there is no square root of a minus quantity. Let us examine the mystery of numbers, let us involve ourselves with him, let me explain.' And he would. And astonishingly we potential corner boys and billiard markers would catch a glimpse of the glory of man from Meredith's play with the assumption that two and two make four.
He had a trick too, of reducing the most august and Olympian figures to the familiar, the known and the nudge-able:
'Honest and ugly old Van (Van Gogh), boys, smouldering like slag, painting in the high sun until it burned his brain. Put your hat on, Van, they told him, put your hat on.'
His manner was such as perhaps a few adults could tolerate, and his seemingly deliberate dismissal of facts, dates and figures as trivial was perhaps maddening to the more educated. He defended the local habit of exaggeration which approached sometimes the near mendacity, as it were a virtue. He would argue that it was the unconscious and poetic shaping of a story that sometimes distorted its most prosaic accuracy, and how relieved were the secret liars and stretchers of fact.
Indeed his description of Truth as a shadowy wing-three-quarter running for ever down a ghostly touchline was an acting tour de force. 'Nobody will ever catch him,' he would say, 'And he will never go into touch.' Great artists, philosophers and poets eternally corner flagging will never get their arms around the legs of truth. He would actually do the run in small, playing all the parts himself - the majestic philosopher, the mad artist, the wild crying poet, and Truth royal, immutable, faintly effeminate and untouchable. It was a remarkable performance.
His impact on me was decisive but not immediate. It was culmative, not a blinding moment of revelation. I felt with him my mind broadened with every step I took. I couldn't believe this week that I was so ignorant last week, or this year that I wandered for twelve months in the darkness that was last year. He taught me to love the English language without actually talking about the English language. He taught me to be a reader without being much of a reader himself. I became, indeed, an under-the-bedclothes-with a torch reader, bequeathing to myself, no doubt, a legacy of bad eyesight in my middle age, while Meredith, because he was too busy, became a past master at the art of 'glancing-through'. he had glanced through everything, and could elaborate on it and was extremely difficult to fault.
Since I left Meredith Jones' circle I have enjoyed the talk of many pretty talkers; notably the gifts of the gab of failing actors, at large in the nearest pub, and unpublished writers, bitter among the gas-rings and the dirty dishes, and Oxford undergraduates who rarely took firsts. they were thruppenny thinkers all, dealers in warped platitudes and twisted cliches, but none had the huge personality of this man, or possessed the dark-eyed insolence to take on an opponent in the opponent's special subject and destroy him with a fire of improbable and, to the specialist, infuriating irrelevancies. To his death, and lamentably he is dead now, I never saw him matched.
My debt to this man, and my devotion to his memory, are, I hope, apparent in this article. Without him I would have missed
a large slice of my life - and I would not have gone to a great university and I would probably not have become an actor. I would not have had the courage to answer an advertisment and I would not have gone to London except possibly in a leeked red beret and with an enclosure ticket for Twickenham. I would, I suspect in some unpleasant job, have become morose, suspicious, bitter and impossible to live with. I might even have become a politician.
I remember Meredith Jones talking, for instance, of 'The Love Song of J.Alfred Prufrock' and holding us all, a group of young boys, spellbound as he unfolded with conscious looks of wonder the marvellous courage of the man Eliot to write the poem 'Prufrock' at the time that he did. 'No, if I should die boys think only this of me or Sassoon or Owen and Thomas with their beautiful bitterness but I have measured out my life with coffee spoons. What a gesture gentlemen.' Meredith would, in the high flow of his talk, describe anybody of whatever age or sex as 'Gentlemen', as if at a council meeting. 'What quiet bravery, and who's to say, who will argue with me, who will deny that Prufrock's slow death was not the more terrible?'
His stage was an elementary council school, leaky, and many years condemned, with buckets and bucket-boys at the ready for the ever-threatening rain. He worked hard. All day long he taught eleven-plus boys the rudiments of arithmetic and English to prepare them for then entrance into the Local Grammar School and at night he presided in the same school over a Youth Club. And always he talked and couldn't bear to stop.
At night when the club was shut he would invariably say, 'Walk home with me boys,' and delightedly we would; for what we all knew was that some lecture to be delivered would be only half completed by the time of our arrival at his house, which would mean a further half-hour of talk while he offered to walk us back home. A further walk even might be necessary while he talked and talked. His subjects were legion.
'Consider the tax on the brain, gentlemen, of the great mathematician pondering in his chill chambers at Cambridge the incontrovertible fact that there is no square root of a minus quantity. Let us examine the mystery of numbers, let us involve ourselves with him, let me explain.' And he would. And astonishingly we potential corner boys and billiard markers would catch a glimpse of the glory of man from Meredith's play with the assumption that two and two make four.
He had a trick too, of reducing the most august and Olympian figures to the familiar, the known and the nudge-able:
'Honest and ugly old Van (Van Gogh), boys, smouldering like slag, painting in the high sun until it burned his brain. Put your hat on, Van, they told him, put your hat on.'
His manner was such as perhaps a few adults could tolerate, and his seemingly deliberate dismissal of facts, dates and figures as trivial was perhaps maddening to the more educated. He defended the local habit of exaggeration which approached sometimes the near mendacity, as it were a virtue. He would argue that it was the unconscious and poetic shaping of a story that sometimes distorted its most prosaic accuracy, and how relieved were the secret liars and stretchers of fact.
Indeed his description of Truth as a shadowy wing-three-quarter running for ever down a ghostly touchline was an acting tour de force. 'Nobody will ever catch him,' he would say, 'And he will never go into touch.' Great artists, philosophers and poets eternally corner flagging will never get their arms around the legs of truth. He would actually do the run in small, playing all the parts himself - the majestic philosopher, the mad artist, the wild crying poet, and Truth royal, immutable, faintly effeminate and untouchable. It was a remarkable performance.
His impact on me was decisive but not immediate. It was culmative, not a blinding moment of revelation. I felt with him my mind broadened with every step I took. I couldn't believe this week that I was so ignorant last week, or this year that I wandered for twelve months in the darkness that was last year. He taught me to love the English language without actually talking about the English language. He taught me to be a reader without being much of a reader himself. I became, indeed, an under-the-bedclothes-with a torch reader, bequeathing to myself, no doubt, a legacy of bad eyesight in my middle age, while Meredith, because he was too busy, became a past master at the art of 'glancing-through'. he had glanced through everything, and could elaborate on it and was extremely difficult to fault.
Since I left Meredith Jones' circle I have enjoyed the talk of many pretty talkers; notably the gifts of the gab of failing actors, at large in the nearest pub, and unpublished writers, bitter among the gas-rings and the dirty dishes, and Oxford undergraduates who rarely took firsts. they were thruppenny thinkers all, dealers in warped platitudes and twisted cliches, but none had the huge personality of this man, or possessed the dark-eyed insolence to take on an opponent in the opponent's special subject and destroy him with a fire of improbable and, to the specialist, infuriating irrelevancies. To his death, and lamentably he is dead now, I never saw him matched.
My debt to this man, and my devotion to his memory, are, I hope, apparent in this article. Without him I would have missed
a large slice of my life - and I would not have gone to a great university and I would probably not have become an actor. I would not have had the courage to answer an advertisment and I would not have gone to London except possibly in a leeked red beret and with an enclosure ticket for Twickenham. I would, I suspect in some unpleasant job, have become morose, suspicious, bitter and impossible to live with. I might even have become a politician.
'The Trials Of Travel With Liz'
This delightful piece of writing by Richard Burton first appeared as an article in 'Vogue' magazine on the 15th of April, 1971 under the title 'Travels With Liz'. The article proved so popular however that it was subsequently re-printed by the Observer newspaper, under the new heading 'The Trials Of Travel With Liz'.
Travelling with Elizabeth Taylor is a kind of exquisite pain. Let me explain why this is: I am ferociously over-punctual, whereas Elizabeth is idolently the opposite. I love Elizabeth to the point of idolatry, but - let's repeat that 'but' - she will unquestionably be late for the Last bloody Judgement. And, infuriatingly, she is always breathtakingly on time. She actually misses no train, or plane or boat, but of course misses the fact that her husband has had several minor heart attacks waiting for her while he shifts a shivering Scotch to his quivering mouth to his abandoned liver, waiting, waiting, waiting for her to come out of the lavatory.
And the hooters howl or somebody says, 'All aboard' or 'last call for flight 109 to Los Angeles,' and not standing there is my stupendously serene lady, firmly believing that time waits for no man but her. In a sense I am one of the original boys who watched the train go by and lusted for London and, indeed, I finally caught that train and never went back and never will.
Elizabeth is not the only one of her sex who thinks that a hair's breadth is half a mile wide. I have a sister-in-law who for years has been catching the 10.55 from Paddington to Port Talbot, resolutely believing that it's the 9.55. She has never understood why the train is always an hour late. But travel has become to us, as to most itinerant professionals, a part of our lives. We have been forced by habit to become doomed nomads, incapable any more of being sweet stay-at-homes, sweet lie-a-beds, forced to work around the world. We find nowadays that staying in any one place for more than - shall we say - three months is intolerable. And there is no place we've been to that we don't love.
We love New York (but not in June) and Los Angeles and London and Paris and San Francisco and Puerta Vallarta and Gstaad and that rough country of my heart, Wales, and even Ireland, though the land is so unharsh that it gives a cragged moored felled fenned man like me a touch of the creeps.
We sit around in the middle of the night wherever we are and dream of places we have been to - my wife is a bad sleeper and worries about spiders and mosquitoes - and in the middle of the night is sometimes an open forum as to where you would like to be now. And she says, or I say, perhaps in Paris, 'Wouldn't you sell your soul for an ordinary drugstore where you can have hamburgers or coleslaw or corned beef hash with an egg on top?'
And then again we're in New York and again we awake at the dying time of night and dream of a bistro in Switzerland or some of the remoter regions of France unspoiled by Michelin or a trattoria in Italy nestling at the foot of a hill at the top of which is a magnificent church and there is a turbulent red wine and salami and cheese that crumbles in the hand, falling down its own face like a landslide. We separate countries into foods.
Then there is, of course, the press. I mean photographers. If they are not there to meet us off the plane or train or boat, I lament the end of our careers. If they are, I blame Elizabeth for being too notorious. What can you do? What can she do? You're damned if they're there and you're damned if they're not.
However, travelling with Elizabeth has its compensations. She loves it. Porters and stewards and even stewardesses reward her with enormous over-attention and therefore I get a little on the side. Customs men from Port Said to Porto Santo Stefano grace her with a kiss on the hand. Grim men at Chicago and Dover wish her well. I remember once going into a restaurant, a famous one, in the South of France, and there were so many cars outside that we couldn't pull up to the entrance. We had two of our dogs with us. They ran ahead and up the steps into the restaurant. We had forgotten that dogs are forbidden in the place. The head waiter came out in a passion of outrage looking like an impersonation of Peter Ustinov impersonating a head waiter and with a shuddering admonitory finger was about to order them out when suddenly he saw Elizabeth and the cosmic gesture of dismissal turned, in a flash, into the most sycophantic leering smile of welcome that it has been my privilege to see. I laughed for the rest of the day. So much so that I allowed them to overcharge me. After all, one hundred dollars for two bowls of soup and two quenelles de brochet and two mille-feuilles is going a bit far, I think. They fed the dogs too. By hand. Very sweet. We've never been back.
But back to the drawbacks. how would you like to have a shoe of your wife's stolen off her foot by some fanatical fool at an airport - one of several thousand fools on this particular occasion - and feel the urgency of the crowd toppling you inexorably, it seemed at the time, into a trampled and affectionate death? How would you like to pass your small daughter over the heads of the madding crowd to a friend, all of us shouting in a language we didn't know? How would you like your wife to be hit in the stomach by a paparazzo because he wanted an unusual photograph? It happened, you know. No jokes. Honest to God, he hit my wife in the stomach. I wasn't there or I would have long ago walked Death Row. Or how would you like to travel from Paris to Geneva with two nannies, four children, five dogs, two secretaries, a budgerigar, and a turtle who has to be kept permanently in water, and a wildcat, and 140 bags and Rex Harrison edging his way through the narrow bag-sieged foyer screaming in a low mutter - this was in the Lancaster Hotel in the Rue de Berri - 'Why do the Burton's have to be so filthily ostentatious?'
Well, I'll tell you, it's a tough old ride, but I wouldn't swap the privilege of travelling with Elizabeth for anything on earth.
And the hooters howl or somebody says, 'All aboard' or 'last call for flight 109 to Los Angeles,' and not standing there is my stupendously serene lady, firmly believing that time waits for no man but her. In a sense I am one of the original boys who watched the train go by and lusted for London and, indeed, I finally caught that train and never went back and never will.
Elizabeth is not the only one of her sex who thinks that a hair's breadth is half a mile wide. I have a sister-in-law who for years has been catching the 10.55 from Paddington to Port Talbot, resolutely believing that it's the 9.55. She has never understood why the train is always an hour late. But travel has become to us, as to most itinerant professionals, a part of our lives. We have been forced by habit to become doomed nomads, incapable any more of being sweet stay-at-homes, sweet lie-a-beds, forced to work around the world. We find nowadays that staying in any one place for more than - shall we say - three months is intolerable. And there is no place we've been to that we don't love.
We love New York (but not in June) and Los Angeles and London and Paris and San Francisco and Puerta Vallarta and Gstaad and that rough country of my heart, Wales, and even Ireland, though the land is so unharsh that it gives a cragged moored felled fenned man like me a touch of the creeps.
We sit around in the middle of the night wherever we are and dream of places we have been to - my wife is a bad sleeper and worries about spiders and mosquitoes - and in the middle of the night is sometimes an open forum as to where you would like to be now. And she says, or I say, perhaps in Paris, 'Wouldn't you sell your soul for an ordinary drugstore where you can have hamburgers or coleslaw or corned beef hash with an egg on top?'
And then again we're in New York and again we awake at the dying time of night and dream of a bistro in Switzerland or some of the remoter regions of France unspoiled by Michelin or a trattoria in Italy nestling at the foot of a hill at the top of which is a magnificent church and there is a turbulent red wine and salami and cheese that crumbles in the hand, falling down its own face like a landslide. We separate countries into foods.
Then there is, of course, the press. I mean photographers. If they are not there to meet us off the plane or train or boat, I lament the end of our careers. If they are, I blame Elizabeth for being too notorious. What can you do? What can she do? You're damned if they're there and you're damned if they're not.
However, travelling with Elizabeth has its compensations. She loves it. Porters and stewards and even stewardesses reward her with enormous over-attention and therefore I get a little on the side. Customs men from Port Said to Porto Santo Stefano grace her with a kiss on the hand. Grim men at Chicago and Dover wish her well. I remember once going into a restaurant, a famous one, in the South of France, and there were so many cars outside that we couldn't pull up to the entrance. We had two of our dogs with us. They ran ahead and up the steps into the restaurant. We had forgotten that dogs are forbidden in the place. The head waiter came out in a passion of outrage looking like an impersonation of Peter Ustinov impersonating a head waiter and with a shuddering admonitory finger was about to order them out when suddenly he saw Elizabeth and the cosmic gesture of dismissal turned, in a flash, into the most sycophantic leering smile of welcome that it has been my privilege to see. I laughed for the rest of the day. So much so that I allowed them to overcharge me. After all, one hundred dollars for two bowls of soup and two quenelles de brochet and two mille-feuilles is going a bit far, I think. They fed the dogs too. By hand. Very sweet. We've never been back.
But back to the drawbacks. how would you like to have a shoe of your wife's stolen off her foot by some fanatical fool at an airport - one of several thousand fools on this particular occasion - and feel the urgency of the crowd toppling you inexorably, it seemed at the time, into a trampled and affectionate death? How would you like to pass your small daughter over the heads of the madding crowd to a friend, all of us shouting in a language we didn't know? How would you like your wife to be hit in the stomach by a paparazzo because he wanted an unusual photograph? It happened, you know. No jokes. Honest to God, he hit my wife in the stomach. I wasn't there or I would have long ago walked Death Row. Or how would you like to travel from Paris to Geneva with two nannies, four children, five dogs, two secretaries, a budgerigar, and a turtle who has to be kept permanently in water, and a wildcat, and 140 bags and Rex Harrison edging his way through the narrow bag-sieged foyer screaming in a low mutter - this was in the Lancaster Hotel in the Rue de Berri - 'Why do the Burton's have to be so filthily ostentatious?'
Well, I'll tell you, it's a tough old ride, but I wouldn't swap the privilege of travelling with Elizabeth for anything on earth.
'The Last Time I Played Rugby'
A wonderful and nostalgic piece of writing regarding one of Richard Burton's personal passions and favourite subjects, Welsh rugby. This article was commissioned by, and first appeared in The Observer newspaper on October the 6th, 1970
It's difficult for me to know where to start with rugby. I come from a fanatically rugby-conscious Welsh miner's family, know so much about it, have read so much about it, have heard with delight so many massive lies and stupendous exaggerations about it and have contributed my own fair share, and five of my six brothers played it, one with some distinction, and I mean I even knew a Welsh woman from Taibach who before a home match at Aberavon would drop goal from around forty yards with either foot to entertain the crowd, and her name, I remember, was Annie Mort and she wore sturdy shoes, the kind one reads about in books as 'sensible', though the recipient of a kick from one of Annie's shoes would have been not so much sensible as insensible, and I even knew a chap called Five Cush Cannon who won the sixth replay of a cup final (the previous five encounters, having ended with the scores 0-0, 0-0, 0-0, 0-0, 0-0 including extra time) by throwing the ball over the bar from a scrum ten yards out in a deep fog and claiming a dropped goal. and getting it. What's more, I knew people like a one-armed inside half - he'd lost an arm in the First World War - who played with murderous brilliance for Cwmavon for years when I was a boy. he was particularly adept, this one, at stopping a forward bursting through from the line-out with a shattering iron-hard thrust from his stump as he pulled him onto it with the other. he also used the misplaced sympathy of innocent visiting players who didn't go at him with the same delivery as they would against a two-armed man, as a ploy to lure them on to concussion and other organic damage. they learned quickly, or were told after the match when they had recovered sufficiently from Jimmy's ministrations to be able to understand the spoken word, that going easy on Jimmy-One-Arm was first cousin to stepping into a grave and waiting for the shovels to start. A great many people who played unwarily against Jimmy died unexpectedly in their early forties. They were lowered solemnly into the grave with all match honours to the slow version of Sospan Fach. they say the conductor at these sad affairs was noticeably one-armed but that could be exaggeration again.
As I said, it's difficult for me to know where to start, so I shall begin with the end. The last shall be first, as it is said, so I'll tell you about the last match I ever played in.
I had played the game representatively from the age of ten until those who employed me in my profession, which is that of an actor, insisted that I was a bad insurance risk against certain dread teams in dead-end valleys who would have little respect, no respect, or outright disrespect for what I was pleased to call my face. What if I were unfortunate enough to be on the deck in the middle of a loose maul?..they murmured in dollar accents. Since my face was already internationally known and since I was paid, perhaps overpaid, vast sums of money for its ravaged presentation, they, the money men, expressed a desire to keep it that way. Apart from wanting to preserve my natural beauty, it would affect continuity, they said, if my nose was straight on Friday in the medium shot and was bent towards my left ear on Monday for the close-up, millions of panting fans from Tokyo to Tonmawr would be puzzled, they said. So to this day there is a clause in my contract that forbids me from flying my own plane, skiing and playing the game of rugby football, the inference being that it would be alright to wrestle with a Bengal tiger 5,000 miles away, but not to play against, shall we say, Pontypool at home. I decided that they had some valid arguments after my last game.
It was played against a village whose name is known only to it's inhabitants and crippled masochists drooling quietly in kitchen corners, a mining village with all the natural beauty of the valleys of the moon, and just as welcoming, with a team composed almost entirely of miners. I hadn't played for four or five years but was fairly fit, I thought, and the opposition was bottom of the third class and reasonably beatable. Except, of course, on their home ground. I should have thought of that. I should have called to mind that this was the kind of team where, towards the end of the match, you kept your bus ticking over near the touch-line in case you won and had to run for your life.
I wasn't particularly nervous before the match until I was disguised with a skull-cap and everyone had been sworn to secrecy. I heard a voice from the other team asking, 'Ble ma'r blydi film star 'ma?' ( Where's the bloody film star here?) as we were running on to the field. My cover, as they say in spy stories, was already blown and trouble was to be my shadow, (there was none from the sun since there was no sun - it was said in fact that the sun hadn't shone there since 1929) and the end of my career the shadow of my shadow for the next eighty minutes or so. it was a mistaken game for me to play. I survived it with nothing broken except my spirit, the attitude of the opposition being unquestionably summed up in simple words like, 'Never mind the bloody ball, where's the bloody actor?' Words easily understood by all.
Among other things I was playing Hamlet at that time at the 'Old Vic', but for the next few performances after that match I was compelled to blast him as if he were Richard The Third. The punishment I took had been innocently compounded by a paragraph in a book of reminiscence by Bleddyn Williams, with whom I had played on and off (mostly off) in the R.A.F. On page 37 of this volume Mr Williams is kind enough to suggest that I had distinct possibilities as a player were it not for the lure of tinsel and paint and money and fame and so on. Incidentally, one of the curious phenomena of my library is that when you take Bleddyn's autobiography from the shelves it automatically opens at the very page mentioned above. friends have often remarked on this and wondered afresh at the wizardry of the Welsh. It is in fact the only notice I have ever kept.
Anyway this little snippet from the great Bleddyn's book was widely publicised and some years later by the time I played that last game had entered into the uncertain realms of folk legend and was deeply embedded in the subconscious of the sub-Welshmen I submitted myself to that cruel afternoon. they weren't playing with chips on their shoulders, they were simply sceptical about page 37.
I didn't realise I was there to prove anything until too late.
And I couldn't. And didn't. I mean, prove anything. And I am still a bit testy about it. Though I was working like a dog at the 'Old Vic' playing Hamlet, Coriolanus, Caliban, 'The Bastard' in King John and Toby Belch, it wasn't the right kind of training for these great knotted gnarled things from the bowels of the earth.
In my teens I had lived precariously on the lip of first rugby by virtue of knowing every trick in the canon, evil and otherwise, by being a bad, bad loser, but chiefly, and perhaps only because I was very nippy off the mark. i was 5ft 10 and a half in height in bare feet and weighed, soaking wet, no more than 12 and a half stone., and since I played in the pack, usually at open side wing-forward and since I played against genuinely big men, it therefore followed that I had to be galvanically quick to move from inertia. When faced with bigger and faster forwards, I was doomed. R.T.Evans, of Newport, Wales and the Universe, for instance, - a racy 14 and a half stone and 6 feet 1 and a half in height was a nightmare to play against and shaming to play with, both of which agonies I suffered a lot, mostly, thank God, the latter lesser cauchemar. Genuine class, of course, doesn't need size though sometimes I forgot this.
Once I played rather condescendingly against a Cambridge College and noted that my opposite number seemed to be shorter than I was in rugby togs, and looked like a schoolboy compared with Mike Owen, Bob Evans or W.J.D.Elliot. However this blond stripling game me a terrible time. He was faster and harder and wordlessly ruthless, and it was no consolation to find out his name afterwards, it meant nothing at the time. He has forgotten me but I haven't forgotten him. This anonymity was called Steele-Bodger and a more onamatopoeic name for it's owner would be hard to find. he was, and I promise you, Steel and he did, I give you my word, Bodger. say his name through clenched teeth and you'll see what I mean. I am very glad to say I have never seen him since except from the safety of the stands.
In this match, this last match played against troglodytes, burned to the bone by the fury of their work, bow-legged and embittered because they weren't playing for or hadn't played for and would never play for Cardiff or Swansea or Neath or Aberavon, men who smiled seldom and when they did it was like scalpels, trained to the last ounce by slashing and hacking away neurotically at the frightened coal face for 7 and a half hours a day, slatactitic, tree-rooted, carved out of granite by a rough and ready sledge-hammer clinker, against these hard volumes of which I was the soft-cover paperback edition. I discovered some truths very soon, just after the first scrum, for instance, that it was time I ran for the bus and not for their outside-half. He had red hair, a blue and white face and no chin. Standing up straight his hands were loosely on a level with his calves and when the ball and I arrived exultantly together at his stock-still body, a perfect set-up you would say, and when I realised I was supine and he was lazily kicking the ball into touch, I realised that I had forgotten that trying to intimidate a feller like that was like trying to cow a mandrill, and that he had all the graceful willowy-give and sapling-bend of stressed concrete.
That was only the outside-half. From then on I was elbowed, gouged, dug, planted, raked, hoed, kicked a great deal, sandwiched and once humiliatingly, taken from behind with nobody in front of me when I had nothing to do but run yards to score. Once, coming down from going up for the ball in a line-out, the other wing-forward - a veteran of at least fifty with grey hair - chose to get up as I was coming down if you'll forgive this tautological syntax. Then I was down and he was up and to insult the injury he generously helped me up from being down and pushed me in a shambling run towards my own try-line with a blood-curdling endearment in the Welsh tongue, since during all these preceding ups and downs his unthinkable team had scored and my presence was necessary behind the posts as they were about to attempt the conversion.
I knew almost at once and appallingly that the speed, such as it had been, had ended and only the memory lingered on, and that tackling Olivia de Havilland and Lana Turner and Claire Bloom was not quite the same as tackling those Wills and Dais, those Toms and Dicks.
The thing to do, I told myself with desperate cunning, was to keep alive, and the way to do that was to keep out of the way. This is generally possible to do when you know you're outclassed, without everybody knowing, but in this case it wasn't possible to do do because everybody was being very knowing indeed. Sometimes in a lament for my lost youth (I was about twenty-eight) I roughed it up as well as I could but it is discouraging to put the violent elbow into the tempting rib when your prescience tells you that what is about to be broken is not the titillating rib, but your pusillanimous pathetic elbow.
After being gardened, mown and rolled a little more, I gave that up, asked the captain of our team if he didn't think it would be a better idea to hide me deeper in the pack. i had often, I reminded him, played right prop, my neck was strong and my right arm had held its own with most. He gave me a long look, a trifle pitying perhaps, but orders were given and I went into the maelstrom, and now the real suffering began. Their prop, with whom I was to share cheek and jowl for the next eternity, didn't believe in razor blades since he grew them on his chin and shaved me thoroughly for the rest of the game, taking most of the skin in the process, delicacy not being his strong point. he used his prodigious left arm to paralyze mine and pull my head within an inch or two of the earth, then rolled my head around his, first taking my ear between his forefinger and thumb, humming 'Rock of Ages' under his breath. By the end of the game my face was as red as the setting sun and the same shape.
Sometimes, to vary the thing a bit, he rolled his head around what little he had around, under and around again my helpless head. I stuck it out because there was nothing else to do, which is why on Monday night in the Waterloo Road I played the Dane looking like a Swede, with my head permanently on one side and my right arm in an imaginary sling intermittently crooked and cramped with severe shakes and involuntary shivers as of one with palsy. I suppose to the connoisseurs of Hamlet it was a departure from your traditional Prince but it wasn't strictly what the actor playing the part had in mind. A melancholy Dane he was though. Melancholy he most certainly was.
I tried once to get myself removed to the wing but by this time our captain had become as, shall we say, 'dedicated' (he may read this) as the other team and had actually wanted to win. he seemed not to hear me and the wing in this type of game I knew never got the ball and was, apart from throwing the ball in from the touch, a happy spectator, and I wanted to be a happy spectator. I shuffled after the pack.
I joined in the communal bath afterwards in a large steamy hut next to the changing-rooms, feeling very hard done by and hurt though I didn't register the full extent of the agonies that were to crib, cabin and confine me for the next few days. I drank more than my fair share of beer in the home team's pub, joined in the singing and found that the enemies were curiously shy and withdrawn until the beer had hit the proper spot. Nobody mentioned my performance on the field.
There was only one moment of wild expectation on my part when a particularly grim, sullen and taciturn member of the other side said suddenly with what passed shockingly for a smile splitting the slag heap of his face like an earth tremor:
'Come outside with us will 'ew?' there was another beauty with him.
'Where to?' I asked.
'Never 'ew mind,' he said. 'You'll be awright. Jest come with us.'
'O.K.'
We went into the cruel February night and made our way to the outside Gents' - black painted concrete with one black pipe for flushing, wet to the open sky. we stood side by side in silence. They began to void. So did I. There had been beer enough for all. I waited for a possible compliment on my game that afternoon - I had after all done one or two good things if only by accident. I waited. But there was nothing but the sound of wind and water. I waited and silently followed them back into the bar. Finally I said:
'What did you want to tell me?'
'Nothing' the talkative one said.
'Well, what did you ask me out there for then?'
'Well,' the orator said, 'well us two is brothers and we wanted to tell our mam that we'd ad a...'
He hesitated, after all I spoke posh except when I spoke Welsh, which oddly enough the other team didn't speak to me though I spoke it to them. 'Well we just wanted to tell our mam that we had passed water with Richard Burton,' he said with triumphant care.
'Oh 'ell,' I said.
I went back to London next day in a Mark VIII Jaguar, driving very fast, folding up and tucking away into the back drawer of my subconscious all my wounds, staunched blood, bandaged pride, feeling older than I've ever done since. The packing wasn't very well done as from time to time all the parcels of all the games I'd ever played wrapped up loosly in that last one will undo themselves, spill out of the drawer into my dreams and wake me shaking to the reassuring reaching-out for the slim cool comfort of a cigarette in the dead vast and doomed middle and with a puff and a sigh, Mitty myself into Van Wyk, Don White and Alan Macarley and winning several matches by myself by 65 points to nil, repack the bags.
As I said, it's difficult for me to know where to start, so I shall begin with the end. The last shall be first, as it is said, so I'll tell you about the last match I ever played in.
I had played the game representatively from the age of ten until those who employed me in my profession, which is that of an actor, insisted that I was a bad insurance risk against certain dread teams in dead-end valleys who would have little respect, no respect, or outright disrespect for what I was pleased to call my face. What if I were unfortunate enough to be on the deck in the middle of a loose maul?..they murmured in dollar accents. Since my face was already internationally known and since I was paid, perhaps overpaid, vast sums of money for its ravaged presentation, they, the money men, expressed a desire to keep it that way. Apart from wanting to preserve my natural beauty, it would affect continuity, they said, if my nose was straight on Friday in the medium shot and was bent towards my left ear on Monday for the close-up, millions of panting fans from Tokyo to Tonmawr would be puzzled, they said. So to this day there is a clause in my contract that forbids me from flying my own plane, skiing and playing the game of rugby football, the inference being that it would be alright to wrestle with a Bengal tiger 5,000 miles away, but not to play against, shall we say, Pontypool at home. I decided that they had some valid arguments after my last game.
It was played against a village whose name is known only to it's inhabitants and crippled masochists drooling quietly in kitchen corners, a mining village with all the natural beauty of the valleys of the moon, and just as welcoming, with a team composed almost entirely of miners. I hadn't played for four or five years but was fairly fit, I thought, and the opposition was bottom of the third class and reasonably beatable. Except, of course, on their home ground. I should have thought of that. I should have called to mind that this was the kind of team where, towards the end of the match, you kept your bus ticking over near the touch-line in case you won and had to run for your life.
I wasn't particularly nervous before the match until I was disguised with a skull-cap and everyone had been sworn to secrecy. I heard a voice from the other team asking, 'Ble ma'r blydi film star 'ma?' ( Where's the bloody film star here?) as we were running on to the field. My cover, as they say in spy stories, was already blown and trouble was to be my shadow, (there was none from the sun since there was no sun - it was said in fact that the sun hadn't shone there since 1929) and the end of my career the shadow of my shadow for the next eighty minutes or so. it was a mistaken game for me to play. I survived it with nothing broken except my spirit, the attitude of the opposition being unquestionably summed up in simple words like, 'Never mind the bloody ball, where's the bloody actor?' Words easily understood by all.
Among other things I was playing Hamlet at that time at the 'Old Vic', but for the next few performances after that match I was compelled to blast him as if he were Richard The Third. The punishment I took had been innocently compounded by a paragraph in a book of reminiscence by Bleddyn Williams, with whom I had played on and off (mostly off) in the R.A.F. On page 37 of this volume Mr Williams is kind enough to suggest that I had distinct possibilities as a player were it not for the lure of tinsel and paint and money and fame and so on. Incidentally, one of the curious phenomena of my library is that when you take Bleddyn's autobiography from the shelves it automatically opens at the very page mentioned above. friends have often remarked on this and wondered afresh at the wizardry of the Welsh. It is in fact the only notice I have ever kept.
Anyway this little snippet from the great Bleddyn's book was widely publicised and some years later by the time I played that last game had entered into the uncertain realms of folk legend and was deeply embedded in the subconscious of the sub-Welshmen I submitted myself to that cruel afternoon. they weren't playing with chips on their shoulders, they were simply sceptical about page 37.
I didn't realise I was there to prove anything until too late.
And I couldn't. And didn't. I mean, prove anything. And I am still a bit testy about it. Though I was working like a dog at the 'Old Vic' playing Hamlet, Coriolanus, Caliban, 'The Bastard' in King John and Toby Belch, it wasn't the right kind of training for these great knotted gnarled things from the bowels of the earth.
In my teens I had lived precariously on the lip of first rugby by virtue of knowing every trick in the canon, evil and otherwise, by being a bad, bad loser, but chiefly, and perhaps only because I was very nippy off the mark. i was 5ft 10 and a half in height in bare feet and weighed, soaking wet, no more than 12 and a half stone., and since I played in the pack, usually at open side wing-forward and since I played against genuinely big men, it therefore followed that I had to be galvanically quick to move from inertia. When faced with bigger and faster forwards, I was doomed. R.T.Evans, of Newport, Wales and the Universe, for instance, - a racy 14 and a half stone and 6 feet 1 and a half in height was a nightmare to play against and shaming to play with, both of which agonies I suffered a lot, mostly, thank God, the latter lesser cauchemar. Genuine class, of course, doesn't need size though sometimes I forgot this.
Once I played rather condescendingly against a Cambridge College and noted that my opposite number seemed to be shorter than I was in rugby togs, and looked like a schoolboy compared with Mike Owen, Bob Evans or W.J.D.Elliot. However this blond stripling game me a terrible time. He was faster and harder and wordlessly ruthless, and it was no consolation to find out his name afterwards, it meant nothing at the time. He has forgotten me but I haven't forgotten him. This anonymity was called Steele-Bodger and a more onamatopoeic name for it's owner would be hard to find. he was, and I promise you, Steel and he did, I give you my word, Bodger. say his name through clenched teeth and you'll see what I mean. I am very glad to say I have never seen him since except from the safety of the stands.
In this match, this last match played against troglodytes, burned to the bone by the fury of their work, bow-legged and embittered because they weren't playing for or hadn't played for and would never play for Cardiff or Swansea or Neath or Aberavon, men who smiled seldom and when they did it was like scalpels, trained to the last ounce by slashing and hacking away neurotically at the frightened coal face for 7 and a half hours a day, slatactitic, tree-rooted, carved out of granite by a rough and ready sledge-hammer clinker, against these hard volumes of which I was the soft-cover paperback edition. I discovered some truths very soon, just after the first scrum, for instance, that it was time I ran for the bus and not for their outside-half. He had red hair, a blue and white face and no chin. Standing up straight his hands were loosely on a level with his calves and when the ball and I arrived exultantly together at his stock-still body, a perfect set-up you would say, and when I realised I was supine and he was lazily kicking the ball into touch, I realised that I had forgotten that trying to intimidate a feller like that was like trying to cow a mandrill, and that he had all the graceful willowy-give and sapling-bend of stressed concrete.
That was only the outside-half. From then on I was elbowed, gouged, dug, planted, raked, hoed, kicked a great deal, sandwiched and once humiliatingly, taken from behind with nobody in front of me when I had nothing to do but run yards to score. Once, coming down from going up for the ball in a line-out, the other wing-forward - a veteran of at least fifty with grey hair - chose to get up as I was coming down if you'll forgive this tautological syntax. Then I was down and he was up and to insult the injury he generously helped me up from being down and pushed me in a shambling run towards my own try-line with a blood-curdling endearment in the Welsh tongue, since during all these preceding ups and downs his unthinkable team had scored and my presence was necessary behind the posts as they were about to attempt the conversion.
I knew almost at once and appallingly that the speed, such as it had been, had ended and only the memory lingered on, and that tackling Olivia de Havilland and Lana Turner and Claire Bloom was not quite the same as tackling those Wills and Dais, those Toms and Dicks.
The thing to do, I told myself with desperate cunning, was to keep alive, and the way to do that was to keep out of the way. This is generally possible to do when you know you're outclassed, without everybody knowing, but in this case it wasn't possible to do do because everybody was being very knowing indeed. Sometimes in a lament for my lost youth (I was about twenty-eight) I roughed it up as well as I could but it is discouraging to put the violent elbow into the tempting rib when your prescience tells you that what is about to be broken is not the titillating rib, but your pusillanimous pathetic elbow.
After being gardened, mown and rolled a little more, I gave that up, asked the captain of our team if he didn't think it would be a better idea to hide me deeper in the pack. i had often, I reminded him, played right prop, my neck was strong and my right arm had held its own with most. He gave me a long look, a trifle pitying perhaps, but orders were given and I went into the maelstrom, and now the real suffering began. Their prop, with whom I was to share cheek and jowl for the next eternity, didn't believe in razor blades since he grew them on his chin and shaved me thoroughly for the rest of the game, taking most of the skin in the process, delicacy not being his strong point. he used his prodigious left arm to paralyze mine and pull my head within an inch or two of the earth, then rolled my head around his, first taking my ear between his forefinger and thumb, humming 'Rock of Ages' under his breath. By the end of the game my face was as red as the setting sun and the same shape.
Sometimes, to vary the thing a bit, he rolled his head around what little he had around, under and around again my helpless head. I stuck it out because there was nothing else to do, which is why on Monday night in the Waterloo Road I played the Dane looking like a Swede, with my head permanently on one side and my right arm in an imaginary sling intermittently crooked and cramped with severe shakes and involuntary shivers as of one with palsy. I suppose to the connoisseurs of Hamlet it was a departure from your traditional Prince but it wasn't strictly what the actor playing the part had in mind. A melancholy Dane he was though. Melancholy he most certainly was.
I tried once to get myself removed to the wing but by this time our captain had become as, shall we say, 'dedicated' (he may read this) as the other team and had actually wanted to win. he seemed not to hear me and the wing in this type of game I knew never got the ball and was, apart from throwing the ball in from the touch, a happy spectator, and I wanted to be a happy spectator. I shuffled after the pack.
I joined in the communal bath afterwards in a large steamy hut next to the changing-rooms, feeling very hard done by and hurt though I didn't register the full extent of the agonies that were to crib, cabin and confine me for the next few days. I drank more than my fair share of beer in the home team's pub, joined in the singing and found that the enemies were curiously shy and withdrawn until the beer had hit the proper spot. Nobody mentioned my performance on the field.
There was only one moment of wild expectation on my part when a particularly grim, sullen and taciturn member of the other side said suddenly with what passed shockingly for a smile splitting the slag heap of his face like an earth tremor:
'Come outside with us will 'ew?' there was another beauty with him.
'Where to?' I asked.
'Never 'ew mind,' he said. 'You'll be awright. Jest come with us.'
'O.K.'
We went into the cruel February night and made our way to the outside Gents' - black painted concrete with one black pipe for flushing, wet to the open sky. we stood side by side in silence. They began to void. So did I. There had been beer enough for all. I waited for a possible compliment on my game that afternoon - I had after all done one or two good things if only by accident. I waited. But there was nothing but the sound of wind and water. I waited and silently followed them back into the bar. Finally I said:
'What did you want to tell me?'
'Nothing' the talkative one said.
'Well, what did you ask me out there for then?'
'Well,' the orator said, 'well us two is brothers and we wanted to tell our mam that we'd ad a...'
He hesitated, after all I spoke posh except when I spoke Welsh, which oddly enough the other team didn't speak to me though I spoke it to them. 'Well we just wanted to tell our mam that we had passed water with Richard Burton,' he said with triumphant care.
'Oh 'ell,' I said.
I went back to London next day in a Mark VIII Jaguar, driving very fast, folding up and tucking away into the back drawer of my subconscious all my wounds, staunched blood, bandaged pride, feeling older than I've ever done since. The packing wasn't very well done as from time to time all the parcels of all the games I'd ever played wrapped up loosly in that last one will undo themselves, spill out of the drawer into my dreams and wake me shaking to the reassuring reaching-out for the slim cool comfort of a cigarette in the dead vast and doomed middle and with a puff and a sigh, Mitty myself into Van Wyk, Don White and Alan Macarley and winning several matches by myself by 65 points to nil, repack the bags.
Richard Burton's Letter to Elizabeth Taylor On The Break-Up Of Their First Marriage
June 25, 1973
So My Lumps,
You're off, by God!
I can barely believe it since OI am so unaccustomed to anybody leaving me. But reflectively I wonder why nobody did so before. all I care about - honest to God - is that you are happy and I don't much care who you'll find happiness with. I mean as long as he's a friendly bloke and treats you nice and kind. If he doesn't, I'll come at him with a hammer and clinker. God's eye may be on the sparrow but my eye will always be on you. Never forget your strange virtues. Never forget that underneath that veneer of raucous language is a remarkable and puritanical LADY. I am a smashing bore and why you've stuck by me so long is an indication of your loyalty. I shall miss you with wild passion and regret.
You may rest assured that I will not have any affairs with any other female. I shall gloom a lot and stare morosely into unimaginable distances and act a bit - probably on the stage - to keep me in booze and butter, but chiefly and above all I shall write. Not about you, I hasten to add. No Millerinski Me, with a double M. There are many other and ludicrous and human comedies to constitute my shroud.
I'll leave it to you to announce the parting of the ways while I shall never say or write one word except this valedictory note to you. Try and look after yourself. Much love. Don't forget that you are probably the greatest actress in the world. I wish I could borrow a minute portion of yopur passion and commitment, but there you are - cold is cold as ice is ice.
On July the 4th, after receiving this letter from Burton, Elizabeth Taylor made the following statement to the press;
"I am convinced it was be a good and constructive idea if Richard and I separated for a while. Maybe we loved each other too much. I never believed such a thing was possible.
But we have been in each other's pockets constantly, never being apart but for matters of life and death, and I believe it has caused a temporary breakdown of communication.
I believe with all my heart that the separation will ultimately bring us back to where we should be - and that's together.
Wish us well during this difficult time. Pray for us.
So My Lumps,
You're off, by God!
I can barely believe it since OI am so unaccustomed to anybody leaving me. But reflectively I wonder why nobody did so before. all I care about - honest to God - is that you are happy and I don't much care who you'll find happiness with. I mean as long as he's a friendly bloke and treats you nice and kind. If he doesn't, I'll come at him with a hammer and clinker. God's eye may be on the sparrow but my eye will always be on you. Never forget your strange virtues. Never forget that underneath that veneer of raucous language is a remarkable and puritanical LADY. I am a smashing bore and why you've stuck by me so long is an indication of your loyalty. I shall miss you with wild passion and regret.
You may rest assured that I will not have any affairs with any other female. I shall gloom a lot and stare morosely into unimaginable distances and act a bit - probably on the stage - to keep me in booze and butter, but chiefly and above all I shall write. Not about you, I hasten to add. No Millerinski Me, with a double M. There are many other and ludicrous and human comedies to constitute my shroud.
I'll leave it to you to announce the parting of the ways while I shall never say or write one word except this valedictory note to you. Try and look after yourself. Much love. Don't forget that you are probably the greatest actress in the world. I wish I could borrow a minute portion of yopur passion and commitment, but there you are - cold is cold as ice is ice.
On July the 4th, after receiving this letter from Burton, Elizabeth Taylor made the following statement to the press;
"I am convinced it was be a good and constructive idea if Richard and I separated for a while. Maybe we loved each other too much. I never believed such a thing was possible.
But we have been in each other's pockets constantly, never being apart but for matters of life and death, and I believe it has caused a temporary breakdown of communication.
I believe with all my heart that the separation will ultimately bring us back to where we should be - and that's together.
Wish us well during this difficult time. Pray for us.
'Lament For A Dead Welshman'
Stanley Baker, Richard Burton's fellow actor and close friend since the earliest days of their theatrical career, died on the 28th of June, 1976 of complications arising from lung cancer.
Deeply affected by this, Richard Burton chose to write his own personal obituary to Stanley Baker in tribute to his great friend.
Deeply affected by this, Richard Burton chose to write his own personal obituary to Stanley Baker in tribute to his great friend.
"There are so few of us, and God knows we can't afford to give many of us away; for I mean you can take a lot of the Irish and the Scots and the Jews, and the French and all those others, including the Russians and about a billion Chinese and all those people who live in the United States, but there are so few of us and so many of the others. And I mean it's not fair to take away from me and mine a rough and terrifying old boot like Stanley Baker.
There are the English in their millions too, and the Irish with their poetry, and the Scots with their carefully controlled romanticism (there's a lot of them about), and the English forever carrying on from Italy how much they would love to be in England now that April's there, except that it is summer in Los Angeles, and I have just heard that my beloved Stanley Baker is dead.
Now let me tell you about him and you make accept it as a murderous love-letter if you like, but stand by for the kind of thing that he would like to hear if he could hear, which he can't. Though I'm not sure he would, even if he could.
He was tallish, thickish, with a face like a determined fist prepared to take the first blow but not the second, and if for Christ's sake, you hurt certain aspects of his situation such as his wife or his children, or even me, you were certain to be savagely destroyed. And he is dead. And did you know the funny little poem that Stanley loved and pretended he didn't, which went :-
He had the plowman's strength within the grasp of his hand,
He could see a crow three miles away.
He could hear the green oats growing
And the southwest wind making rain,
And the trout beneath the stone,
And he's dead.
Let me tell you how rough and strange a life he had with a father - who fell down a pit cage when he was fourteen years old and lost a leg (I mean the father was fourteen, not Stanley) - and about Stanley and his adorable family who found the world as bizarre as any invention I could make, and of course he's dead. It is not fair. He was the authentic dark voice of the Rhondda Valley. He was the first man who skidded with exaltation under the Co-op stallion and pelted the privileged as they came out of the grammar school because he was disallowed entry, and all the street corner poets stood on his massive shoulders and tried to dwarf him, and of course the cosmic bastards killed him behind my back, and I'll have a word or two to say to them one of these days because somebody has been mucking around, otherwise he wouldn't be dead, would he, and whose tears are burning my cheeks and whose heart is shifting uneasily in mine, and why is he dead?
Who arranged it? Tears, idle bloody tears, tears from the depths of some divine despair on the edge of a cowing swimming pool in Los Angeles, and there's a girl playing the piano and it's the Sonata Pathetique and she's playing the bit that's called 'allegro molta e con brio' and we should all do that shouldn't we? If we could. Not that my Stanley liked pianos. he used them as foot-stools. In fact the lovely old Stanley wasn't exactly cultured. He read minds not books, he was harshly unpoetic, he didn't like people very much, and made it clear, sometimes painfully, and he hated to lose at anything and rarely did, but what the hell can you do if you come from such a murderous background?
Those low hills, those lowering valleys, the Rhondda fawr, the Rhondda fach and their concomitant buses and grey roofs and pit heads and dead grass and crippled miners and cages endlessly falling with your father inside and smashed to bits, and such with a convulsive heave Stanley shrugged off the mighty mountains and strode across Europe, who or what the devil killed him?
It couldn't be his heart because mine is still going. Not his brain because mine is still weeping, and for Christ's sake he is not allowed to be organically dead because I am alive and we are the same. What strange fury burned his bones? What malevolent God knocked him off behind my back? There are very few around. People like Stanley.
I saw him act in a church once in New York. It was incongruous. The clashing of two alien eternities. He knelt before the altar and stared at it. The altar gave in and has never been the same since. I got him a part in a play once, and if you like the authenticity of inconsequential detail it was called 'Adventure Story' and was about Alexander The Great, and anyway I was playing Haephestian and Paul Scofield was Alexander The Great and, would you believe it, Stanley went on to splendid things and I was fired on the third day. Stanley was the one who took the razor from my throat and sharpened it. Before handing it back. And he was the chap I kept for about ten weeks when he was broke and indeed to God I gave him two pounds sterling every payday and when he was successful later he paid me back with interest.
He's one of the only two men who paid me back, out of hundreds, and the only one with interest. And he is dead. Well now, what can you in the middle of the night beside a swimming pool in Beverly Hills except to call up that girl and ask her to play an impromptu of Chopin's 'allegro assai, quasi presto' and shouldn't we all if we knew what it meant, and it is as impromptued as a careful step? What thieves these dead men are, because what do they do except steal your soul away with memories or hex you with iambic, and who am I to forget Stanley's bitter humour and the look from the eyes when somebody was boring the marrow out of him?
There is a class of Welshmen, original and unique to themselves, powerful and loud and dangerous and clever and they are almost all South Welshmen and almost all from the Rhondda Valley, and there are not many of them, but even in London you can find them if you search for a bit.
There are the Donald Houstons and the Gwyn Thomases, (if you've never read him you must in order to understand us) and the Cliff Morganses and short, obese, slightly bowlegged Bleddyn Williamses, and they are as charming as daggers. Others are deferential to the point of sycophancy and you must watch out in case they turn to murder. In fact they are an alien race and nobody knows where they come from or what they are. If you move about forty miles west you will find the relatively exotic other Welsh people like Dylan Thomas and Daniel Jones (I believe that Jones is the only man who has written seven symphonies and speaks Chinese), and Harry Secombe and the mad woman who said to me one day, 'I'd love to be your mother', and I said with brilliant dispatch, 'You are'. And she said, 'Lucky boy'.
But Stanley was inwrought with his valley and so am I with the idea of the valley, that incomparable valley, burned and black, and how curious it was that it took a total foreigner to show me how lovely it was in its brutal way. 'Stop the car', she said, a Californian no less, and indeed there was the valley, and I stood by the Californian lady and she pointed out as the winds howled around our ears like dementia how perversely magical it was. And she said, 'Aren't you ashamed that you don't recognise your own country?' And I said, 'It's Stanley's'. And it is.
It took me years and years to understand the line, 'After the first death there is no other'. What, I said to myself about this otherwise admirable poet, does he mean? And what he meant was that, after Abel was killed under the green tree by Cain, mortality had invested our lives. And of course you can't shrug the thing off. You can dance and laugh and giggle, but it takes a direct intelligence - not a woolly mind like mine - to understand the most obvious things.
And now we get back to Stanley again because I said to him one day with some condescension, because I knew he didn't read poetry or anything much, except scripts and books that could be made into scripts, 'What the 'ell', I said, 'does this mean?' 'What?' he said. 'This bloody thing', I said. 'What bloody thing?' he said. 'It has been tormenting me all my life'. 'How does it go?', he said. And I said, 'Well now, Stanley, it's from the Bible and it goes, if you want to see it going; "In the beginning was the Word and the Word was with God etc." What' I said 'does it mean?' And little Stanley, though he was a big fellow, you know, said,'Well it's obvious isn't it? It's a mistranslation. The Greeks probably don't have a word for it.' 'Word for what?' I said. 'Idea,' he said. 'Change the word "word" to "idea" and the whole thing makes sense'. And, of course, the clever reader will know immediately that I am not merely writing about Stanley but about all of us. and about me. Brothers are chauvinistic about their kind. Nobody knows us, except us.
Nobody knew Stanley except us and we can only talk about him to foreigners with a kind of desperation because they couldn't possibly understand him except for one exquisite alien called Ellen, his wife, and it took her a bit of time too, I bet.
And of course I moved around the periphery, occasionally setting a careful foot inside the icecold circle and being dismissed or thrown out. And we fought. Physically I mean. we smashed windows and broke trains and lusted after the same women and drove through the Continent together, pustular and acne'd and angry and madly in love with the earth and all it's riches, and we met unforgettable people in forgotten bars, and once we were in a bar in Biarritz and there was this impossibly drunken American sunk in a reef of Scotch whisky, blind as an eyeless bull, muttering inanities to himself, and we tried to prop the poor bastard up but he was unsaveable and finally I got bored and said, 'Let's go. He's a useless son of a bitch'. And Stanly said, 'Good God, Rich, we can't leave him to the French, he's William Faulkner'. And he was. and immediately my intellectual snobbery surfaced like a dead fish and Faulkner has never been so feted, Nobel Prize and all, as he was for the next three days. But of course, it took Stanley to recognise him.
There are the English in their millions too, and the Irish with their poetry, and the Scots with their carefully controlled romanticism (there's a lot of them about), and the English forever carrying on from Italy how much they would love to be in England now that April's there, except that it is summer in Los Angeles, and I have just heard that my beloved Stanley Baker is dead.
Now let me tell you about him and you make accept it as a murderous love-letter if you like, but stand by for the kind of thing that he would like to hear if he could hear, which he can't. Though I'm not sure he would, even if he could.
He was tallish, thickish, with a face like a determined fist prepared to take the first blow but not the second, and if for Christ's sake, you hurt certain aspects of his situation such as his wife or his children, or even me, you were certain to be savagely destroyed. And he is dead. And did you know the funny little poem that Stanley loved and pretended he didn't, which went :-
He had the plowman's strength within the grasp of his hand,
He could see a crow three miles away.
He could hear the green oats growing
And the southwest wind making rain,
And the trout beneath the stone,
And he's dead.
Let me tell you how rough and strange a life he had with a father - who fell down a pit cage when he was fourteen years old and lost a leg (I mean the father was fourteen, not Stanley) - and about Stanley and his adorable family who found the world as bizarre as any invention I could make, and of course he's dead. It is not fair. He was the authentic dark voice of the Rhondda Valley. He was the first man who skidded with exaltation under the Co-op stallion and pelted the privileged as they came out of the grammar school because he was disallowed entry, and all the street corner poets stood on his massive shoulders and tried to dwarf him, and of course the cosmic bastards killed him behind my back, and I'll have a word or two to say to them one of these days because somebody has been mucking around, otherwise he wouldn't be dead, would he, and whose tears are burning my cheeks and whose heart is shifting uneasily in mine, and why is he dead?
Who arranged it? Tears, idle bloody tears, tears from the depths of some divine despair on the edge of a cowing swimming pool in Los Angeles, and there's a girl playing the piano and it's the Sonata Pathetique and she's playing the bit that's called 'allegro molta e con brio' and we should all do that shouldn't we? If we could. Not that my Stanley liked pianos. he used them as foot-stools. In fact the lovely old Stanley wasn't exactly cultured. He read minds not books, he was harshly unpoetic, he didn't like people very much, and made it clear, sometimes painfully, and he hated to lose at anything and rarely did, but what the hell can you do if you come from such a murderous background?
Those low hills, those lowering valleys, the Rhondda fawr, the Rhondda fach and their concomitant buses and grey roofs and pit heads and dead grass and crippled miners and cages endlessly falling with your father inside and smashed to bits, and such with a convulsive heave Stanley shrugged off the mighty mountains and strode across Europe, who or what the devil killed him?
It couldn't be his heart because mine is still going. Not his brain because mine is still weeping, and for Christ's sake he is not allowed to be organically dead because I am alive and we are the same. What strange fury burned his bones? What malevolent God knocked him off behind my back? There are very few around. People like Stanley.
I saw him act in a church once in New York. It was incongruous. The clashing of two alien eternities. He knelt before the altar and stared at it. The altar gave in and has never been the same since. I got him a part in a play once, and if you like the authenticity of inconsequential detail it was called 'Adventure Story' and was about Alexander The Great, and anyway I was playing Haephestian and Paul Scofield was Alexander The Great and, would you believe it, Stanley went on to splendid things and I was fired on the third day. Stanley was the one who took the razor from my throat and sharpened it. Before handing it back. And he was the chap I kept for about ten weeks when he was broke and indeed to God I gave him two pounds sterling every payday and when he was successful later he paid me back with interest.
He's one of the only two men who paid me back, out of hundreds, and the only one with interest. And he is dead. Well now, what can you in the middle of the night beside a swimming pool in Beverly Hills except to call up that girl and ask her to play an impromptu of Chopin's 'allegro assai, quasi presto' and shouldn't we all if we knew what it meant, and it is as impromptued as a careful step? What thieves these dead men are, because what do they do except steal your soul away with memories or hex you with iambic, and who am I to forget Stanley's bitter humour and the look from the eyes when somebody was boring the marrow out of him?
There is a class of Welshmen, original and unique to themselves, powerful and loud and dangerous and clever and they are almost all South Welshmen and almost all from the Rhondda Valley, and there are not many of them, but even in London you can find them if you search for a bit.
There are the Donald Houstons and the Gwyn Thomases, (if you've never read him you must in order to understand us) and the Cliff Morganses and short, obese, slightly bowlegged Bleddyn Williamses, and they are as charming as daggers. Others are deferential to the point of sycophancy and you must watch out in case they turn to murder. In fact they are an alien race and nobody knows where they come from or what they are. If you move about forty miles west you will find the relatively exotic other Welsh people like Dylan Thomas and Daniel Jones (I believe that Jones is the only man who has written seven symphonies and speaks Chinese), and Harry Secombe and the mad woman who said to me one day, 'I'd love to be your mother', and I said with brilliant dispatch, 'You are'. And she said, 'Lucky boy'.
But Stanley was inwrought with his valley and so am I with the idea of the valley, that incomparable valley, burned and black, and how curious it was that it took a total foreigner to show me how lovely it was in its brutal way. 'Stop the car', she said, a Californian no less, and indeed there was the valley, and I stood by the Californian lady and she pointed out as the winds howled around our ears like dementia how perversely magical it was. And she said, 'Aren't you ashamed that you don't recognise your own country?' And I said, 'It's Stanley's'. And it is.
It took me years and years to understand the line, 'After the first death there is no other'. What, I said to myself about this otherwise admirable poet, does he mean? And what he meant was that, after Abel was killed under the green tree by Cain, mortality had invested our lives. And of course you can't shrug the thing off. You can dance and laugh and giggle, but it takes a direct intelligence - not a woolly mind like mine - to understand the most obvious things.
And now we get back to Stanley again because I said to him one day with some condescension, because I knew he didn't read poetry or anything much, except scripts and books that could be made into scripts, 'What the 'ell', I said, 'does this mean?' 'What?' he said. 'This bloody thing', I said. 'What bloody thing?' he said. 'It has been tormenting me all my life'. 'How does it go?', he said. And I said, 'Well now, Stanley, it's from the Bible and it goes, if you want to see it going; "In the beginning was the Word and the Word was with God etc." What' I said 'does it mean?' And little Stanley, though he was a big fellow, you know, said,'Well it's obvious isn't it? It's a mistranslation. The Greeks probably don't have a word for it.' 'Word for what?' I said. 'Idea,' he said. 'Change the word "word" to "idea" and the whole thing makes sense'. And, of course, the clever reader will know immediately that I am not merely writing about Stanley but about all of us. and about me. Brothers are chauvinistic about their kind. Nobody knows us, except us.
Nobody knew Stanley except us and we can only talk about him to foreigners with a kind of desperation because they couldn't possibly understand him except for one exquisite alien called Ellen, his wife, and it took her a bit of time too, I bet.
And of course I moved around the periphery, occasionally setting a careful foot inside the icecold circle and being dismissed or thrown out. And we fought. Physically I mean. we smashed windows and broke trains and lusted after the same women and drove through the Continent together, pustular and acne'd and angry and madly in love with the earth and all it's riches, and we met unforgettable people in forgotten bars, and once we were in a bar in Biarritz and there was this impossibly drunken American sunk in a reef of Scotch whisky, blind as an eyeless bull, muttering inanities to himself, and we tried to prop the poor bastard up but he was unsaveable and finally I got bored and said, 'Let's go. He's a useless son of a bitch'. And Stanly said, 'Good God, Rich, we can't leave him to the French, he's William Faulkner'. And he was. and immediately my intellectual snobbery surfaced like a dead fish and Faulkner has never been so feted, Nobel Prize and all, as he was for the next three days. But of course, it took Stanley to recognise him.
'Celebration - 25 Years of British Theatre'
W. H. Allen and Company, First Edition, 1980
Foreword by Richard Burton
A first edition copy, published in hardback, of the W. H. Allen and Company book, 'Celebration - 25 Years of British Theatre'.
This edition was first published in 1980 and was issued with the ISBN 0-491- 02770-2.
The book consists of ten chapters written by theatre critics and arts correspondents, such as Milton Shulman, Christopher Grier, Sydney Edwards and Charles Wintour.
The publisher's cover notes for this edition read;
"Celebration - 25 Years of British Theatre is a full, opinionated, colourful account of the richest years the theatre has known in recent times. Conceived by Sydney Edwards, Arts Editor of the Evening Standard, to whom the book is dedicated following his sudden death in July 1979, it surveys the past twenty-five years' achievement on the stage as reflected through the Evening Standard Drama Awards - an event which started in 1955. In that year, British theatre took a radical new direction, and the arrival at the Royal Court of John Osborne's 'Look Back In Anger' in 1956 caused a revolution which was to affect every branch of its activity.
With an introductory chapter by Charles Wintour, Editor of the Evening Standard, this unique book has authoritative contributions from Michael Billington, theatre critic of the Guardian; Milton Shulman, theatre critic of the Evening Standard; Michael Coveney, theatre critic of the Financial Times, Sydney Edwards and Michael Owen, arts correspondent of the Evening Standard. Each contributor writes about a different aspect of the theatre in relation to the Awards, and opera critic Christopher Grier together with dance critics Mary Clarke and Clement Crisp describe the rise of the important Opera and Ballet Awards.
Celebration - 25 Years of British Theatre includes a definitive list of all those who have received an Evening Standard Drama Award over the past twenty-five years, and over seventy black and white photographs illustrate the joy these Awards have given.
Essential reading for everyone interested in British Theatre."
Richard Burton was invited to write the foreword for this first edition copy and his final draft was completed on the 29th of September, 1979. His completed foreword reads in it's entirety;
"Awards for acting are a continual source of somewhat wry ironic and sometimes downright brutal observations among actors - usually bibulously at large in the nearest pub - and especially among those who have never won. Even the world famous Hollywood Oscar Awards are sometimes derided and the announcement of somebody or other having won is greeted by my colleagues with howls of anguished disbelief. Oddly enough, i have never heard the Evening Standard Awards denigrated.
Now, like a few people of my age - I am fifty-three - who had more or less the same opportunities, I can carpet a large room with 'awards' of every conceivable kind. But the Standard is unique. I think that I realised that the season twenty-five years ago I was up against the the very awesome cream of my profession. (Look at the playbills for that year). With all the due deference to our American relatives the sheer depth of talent among British stage actors and actresses is without parallel in the world. I will go further and say that the post World War Two generations of performers so brilliantly spawned in the Fifties, Sixties and Seventies are probably more dazzling than even England with her great tradition of theatre has ever produced. It is what makes the Standard so great.
And another important word about the great awards: actors, most famously, must have confidence in themselves. The poor player who struts and frets his hour upon the stage is, with all his bombast, a very friable creature. He can crumble at a word. He needs to be loved in his or her own way. For a young man floundering in a flood of insecurities the tangible solid Evening Standard Award was heart-warming. I truly believe that my performance of Henry V improved vastly after I received that Award. I wear it like the victor of Agincourt wore the leek as a memorable honour, good countrymen...
May I add a personal note regarding the death of Sydney Edwards. He was so much a part of this yearly event and the preparation of the book that it is a damnable shame that he didn't live to see it in print. But apart from all that he was a true friend to me whether I was up or down. He had an immense love for the theatre in all its forms and managed miraculously to write column after column for his newspaper without ever being less than entertaining and never pernicious or viciously personal. The last time I saw him which was between a matinee and an evening performance in New York, I noticed that he was very excited. Why, I said, are you in such a state? He replied, 'Well, I am dancing with the Royal Ballet tonight - Nureyev and all.' And he actually did."
This first edition copy of 'Celebration - 25 Years of British Theatre' was published by W. H. Allen and Company Limited and printed by W. and J. Mackay Limited on black cloth boards with gilt lettering and is complete with the original dust-jacket, designed by Nick Thirkill.
This edition was first published in 1980 and was issued with the ISBN 0-491- 02770-2.
The book consists of ten chapters written by theatre critics and arts correspondents, such as Milton Shulman, Christopher Grier, Sydney Edwards and Charles Wintour.
The publisher's cover notes for this edition read;
"Celebration - 25 Years of British Theatre is a full, opinionated, colourful account of the richest years the theatre has known in recent times. Conceived by Sydney Edwards, Arts Editor of the Evening Standard, to whom the book is dedicated following his sudden death in July 1979, it surveys the past twenty-five years' achievement on the stage as reflected through the Evening Standard Drama Awards - an event which started in 1955. In that year, British theatre took a radical new direction, and the arrival at the Royal Court of John Osborne's 'Look Back In Anger' in 1956 caused a revolution which was to affect every branch of its activity.
With an introductory chapter by Charles Wintour, Editor of the Evening Standard, this unique book has authoritative contributions from Michael Billington, theatre critic of the Guardian; Milton Shulman, theatre critic of the Evening Standard; Michael Coveney, theatre critic of the Financial Times, Sydney Edwards and Michael Owen, arts correspondent of the Evening Standard. Each contributor writes about a different aspect of the theatre in relation to the Awards, and opera critic Christopher Grier together with dance critics Mary Clarke and Clement Crisp describe the rise of the important Opera and Ballet Awards.
Celebration - 25 Years of British Theatre includes a definitive list of all those who have received an Evening Standard Drama Award over the past twenty-five years, and over seventy black and white photographs illustrate the joy these Awards have given.
Essential reading for everyone interested in British Theatre."
Richard Burton was invited to write the foreword for this first edition copy and his final draft was completed on the 29th of September, 1979. His completed foreword reads in it's entirety;
"Awards for acting are a continual source of somewhat wry ironic and sometimes downright brutal observations among actors - usually bibulously at large in the nearest pub - and especially among those who have never won. Even the world famous Hollywood Oscar Awards are sometimes derided and the announcement of somebody or other having won is greeted by my colleagues with howls of anguished disbelief. Oddly enough, i have never heard the Evening Standard Awards denigrated.
Now, like a few people of my age - I am fifty-three - who had more or less the same opportunities, I can carpet a large room with 'awards' of every conceivable kind. But the Standard is unique. I think that I realised that the season twenty-five years ago I was up against the the very awesome cream of my profession. (Look at the playbills for that year). With all the due deference to our American relatives the sheer depth of talent among British stage actors and actresses is without parallel in the world. I will go further and say that the post World War Two generations of performers so brilliantly spawned in the Fifties, Sixties and Seventies are probably more dazzling than even England with her great tradition of theatre has ever produced. It is what makes the Standard so great.
And another important word about the great awards: actors, most famously, must have confidence in themselves. The poor player who struts and frets his hour upon the stage is, with all his bombast, a very friable creature. He can crumble at a word. He needs to be loved in his or her own way. For a young man floundering in a flood of insecurities the tangible solid Evening Standard Award was heart-warming. I truly believe that my performance of Henry V improved vastly after I received that Award. I wear it like the victor of Agincourt wore the leek as a memorable honour, good countrymen...
May I add a personal note regarding the death of Sydney Edwards. He was so much a part of this yearly event and the preparation of the book that it is a damnable shame that he didn't live to see it in print. But apart from all that he was a true friend to me whether I was up or down. He had an immense love for the theatre in all its forms and managed miraculously to write column after column for his newspaper without ever being less than entertaining and never pernicious or viciously personal. The last time I saw him which was between a matinee and an evening performance in New York, I noticed that he was very excited. Why, I said, are you in such a state? He replied, 'Well, I am dancing with the Royal Ballet tonight - Nureyev and all.' And he actually did."
This first edition copy of 'Celebration - 25 Years of British Theatre' was published by W. H. Allen and Company Limited and printed by W. and J. Mackay Limited on black cloth boards with gilt lettering and is complete with the original dust-jacket, designed by Nick Thirkill.
Richard Burton's Poem, 'Portrait of a Man Drowning'
'Portrait of a Man Drowning'
Who can he be,
That man alone in the saloon bar's corner?
Who can he be,
That man alone, solitary, musing.
Remembering.
What can he be?
The shoulders hunched.
The face pocked, rived and valleyed
With a lifetime's small tradgedies.
The slanting mirror on the wall
Embalmed in Coope and Alsop
Reflecting his receeding hair,
His thick shoulders,
His silent simian hirsute hands.
What is, what was the weight that sloped
Those hunching shoulders?
That man alone, solitary musing, Thinking
Of what can be.
Nothing?
Or does he live again the nightmare
Of all the same he suffered and made others to suffer,
The torn promise, the shattered word,
His red hand caught in the emotional till,
The things he had never done and never would now,
Lost lovely things. The hopeless things long lost,
The hot blush of childhood lies,
Love and hate and fear and love again and hate
And the ultimate terrible ineluctable wrath of God.
Does he hear the silent howl of death?
Hunched, solitary, silent.
That man alone in the saloon bar's corner
That man alone, solitary, musing,
Who can he be?
I lift my eyes from the bitter pint.
I see that man in the mirror.
That man is me.
Who can he be,
That man alone in the saloon bar's corner?
Who can he be,
That man alone, solitary, musing.
Remembering.
What can he be?
The shoulders hunched.
The face pocked, rived and valleyed
With a lifetime's small tradgedies.
The slanting mirror on the wall
Embalmed in Coope and Alsop
Reflecting his receeding hair,
His thick shoulders,
His silent simian hirsute hands.
What is, what was the weight that sloped
Those hunching shoulders?
That man alone, solitary musing, Thinking
Of what can be.
Nothing?
Or does he live again the nightmare
Of all the same he suffered and made others to suffer,
The torn promise, the shattered word,
His red hand caught in the emotional till,
The things he had never done and never would now,
Lost lovely things. The hopeless things long lost,
The hot blush of childhood lies,
Love and hate and fear and love again and hate
And the ultimate terrible ineluctable wrath of God.
Does he hear the silent howl of death?
Hunched, solitary, silent.
That man alone in the saloon bar's corner
That man alone, solitary, musing,
Who can he be?
I lift my eyes from the bitter pint.
I see that man in the mirror.
That man is me.
'Untitled Poem'
The Mountain earth feels damp against my hand;
Around me sway a thousand sap-filled stalks
Of tender grass; The cows browse drowsily
Below me in the fields, and silly sheep
Bleat so pathetically. Dusk descends
And makes the cool earth cooler; lovers slow
In Sunday best drift past like ghosts of laughs
And murmurings; and some go up and some
Go down the mountain.
I see the gamblers hide behind some hedge or shade,
And play silently between dexterity
Of toil's blunt fingers shuffling dirty cards;
And panting greyhounds run a merry race around them
In the fading light.
There is no life stir now
There is no hub-bub of activity;
The rushing of the whispering waterfall
Breathes silence on the mad tormented valley.
The voices rise insidiously as is
The creeping dusk."Abide With Me," they moan,
A hundred coal-fogged voices harmoniously
Goad up in an ecstasy of melancholy magic;
All is still.
And there were things that made me;
Grew around the core of my young soul,
But I have other worlds for whom to weep;
I shall return no more.
The Mountain earth feels damp against my hand;
Around me sway a thousand sap-filled stalks
Of tender grass; The cows browse drowsily
Below me in the fields, and silly sheep
Bleat so pathetically. Dusk descends
And makes the cool earth cooler; lovers slow
In Sunday best drift past like ghosts of laughs
And murmurings; and some go up and some
Go down the mountain.
I see the gamblers hide behind some hedge or shade,
And play silently between dexterity
Of toil's blunt fingers shuffling dirty cards;
And panting greyhounds run a merry race around them
In the fading light.
There is no life stir now
There is no hub-bub of activity;
The rushing of the whispering waterfall
Breathes silence on the mad tormented valley.
The voices rise insidiously as is
The creeping dusk."Abide With Me," they moan,
A hundred coal-fogged voices harmoniously
Goad up in an ecstasy of melancholy magic;
All is still.
And there were things that made me;
Grew around the core of my young soul,
But I have other worlds for whom to weep;
I shall return no more.
The dedicated flower bed located in Talbot Memorial Park, where Richard Burton's 'Untitled Poem' is on display.
This page was updated on the 20th of January, 2021