Category Archives: Books

Autumn Reading

“Aprils have never meant much to me,” says Truman Capote in Breakfast at Tiffany’s, and I agree with him. I was made for autumn. Give me, as Ray Bradbury wrote, “That country where it is always turning late in the year. That country where the hills are fog and the rivers are mist; where noons go quickly, dusks and twilights linger, and midnights stay.”

If you’ve been paying any attention at all—and you have—then you know I love this season more than any other. November particularly, but December too, and yes, December is fall in Savannah—and technically everywhere else till winter officially arrives on December 21. But December truly is autumn here, and as I’ve said elsewhere, it’s the best month of the year to be in this lovely little burg.

Why? Just take a casual walk in any direction and you’ll see and feel it. The students are on winter break, and tourists are few. Parking is plentiful. There’s no waiting in restaurants and bars. Temperatures are in the 50s, there are no sand gnats or mosquitoes, the sun is low on the horizon, the leaves are changing, and the deafening roar of summer’s cicadas is gone for another season. The quiet you hear walking through the squares is almost startling. The city’s beauty is on full display in the lengthening shadows of the slanting afternoon sun. The sultriness of summer is gone, the St. Patrick’s Day mob and the gawking tourists of spring are still three months away, and for now nirvana reigns supreme. Draw near the fire on a cool and dark December twilight in your favorite downtown pub and have a glass of cheer. In December Savannah really is Charm City.

The return of December means several other more unpleasant things, however, besides the fact that you’re behind on your holiday shopping. For UGA fans it means settling for another 9-3 season that should have been much better, while wrapping yourself in what has become an annual December ritual: telling yourself it’s okay because “Mark Richt is such a classy and nice guy.” Unlike that Jackass in Columbia or that Stiff Guy in Tuscaloosa Who We Wish We Had or that Other Jackass That Wears a Visor at Auburn. Who cares if we’re playing in a Bowl Named for a Department Store rather than a playoff game. We’ve got the Last Nice Guy in Sports coaching our team, by golly, and we’re gonna keep him. Okay, Stan, move on, enough of that.

What else? For Falcons fans December means bracing for yet another disappointing season while being pleasantly surprised that a 5-8 record gets you tied for first place in the NFC South. Might there be January football in Atlanta after all? Perchance to dream.

December might bring the melancholy end of college football season but this year it also brings the anticipation of the first-ever four-team playoff. Then you realize that it’s yet another glorious way for the NCAA to avoid choosing a real and undeniable college football champion the way it does in basketball and every other sport—except for the most popular one in America.

But thank goodness December also brings wood-burning fires, Christmas tree smells, Old Fezziwig Ale, Holiday Porter, bourbon eggnog and pumpkin spice coffee creamer. It is indeed a downright glorious time to be alive. It’s also time to take stock of our autumn reading while planning what lies ahead to read during the long nights of winter. Here’s what I’ve been reading this fall, broadly defined as Labor Day to Thanksgiving:

Philosophy and History: Did he really say “philosophy”? Indeed I did. Long-suffering followers may recall that in the summer I was reading Nature’s God: The Heretical Origins of the American Republic by Matthew Stewart (Norton, 2014). If Jefferson and Hamilton are the pole stars of the continuing political differences in this country—how big should government be and what should it do?—then the other eternal conflict and tension has been between the Enlightenment and the Reformation—reason vs. religion.

The titanic struggle between rational thought (philosophically defined) and emotionally charged revealed religion is still alive and well in American culture, politics, and society. Recent polls continue to show that Americans would give fewer votes to an avowed atheist than to another fictitious politician of almost any religious stripe, including presumably Muslim. Some states still have religious tests on the law books expressly forbidding atheists from holding office. Was the United States in fact founded by infidels, free thinkers, skeptics and outright atheists, as Stewart asserts, and if so, doesn’t that give the lie to this being a “Christian nation”? He makes a convincing argument but as I’m fascinated by this subject, I wanted to dig a little deeper. I read two other books, one a classic and the other new, to provide a little more context.

The Enlightenment can be defined as a belief system built upon the premise that we understand nature and man best through the use of our natural faculties—as opposed to a belief in the supernatural and revealed religion. It’s another way of exploring the age-old questions, What is the nature of the universe and man’s place in it?

Henry F. May’s The Enlightenment in America was first published in 1976 (Oxford University Press), and his conclusions, as you might expect, are much less bold than Stewart’s even as he is more careful with the evidence. He divides the Enlightenment in America into four overlapping periods:

The Moderate Enlightenment, 1688-1787, characterized by the defense of balance and order in all things, a belief, May asserts, that is still deeply imbedded in American institutions (or at least it was in 1976).
The Skeptical Enlightenment, 1750-1789, the Enlightenment of Voltaire and David Hume, characterized by skepticism about religious dogma, which May writes was the least influential in America.
The Revolutionary Enlightenment, 1776-1800, the Enlightenment of Jefferson, Paine, and the French Revolution, the belief in the clean sweep and the new start, characterized by the optimism that men would be more free and morally better in the future. Jefferson firmly believed that all Americans would eventually be Unitarians. Instead Unitarianism became the religion of the upper class of eastern Massachusetts.
The Didactic Enlightenment, 1800-1815, relying heavily on the Scottish Enlightenment, with a firm belief in moral values, the certainty of progress, and the importance of culture, particularly literature.

None survived far into the nineteenth century intact, and all ran headlong into the anti-intellectualism and religious enthusiasm of the Second Great Awakening and advent of Jacksonian Democracy. In the end, if our Founders were indeed freethinkers, as Matthew Stewart contends—and undoubtedly many if not most of them were—then there is a curious disconnect between our own intellectual heritage and the world we’ve somehow created. Understanding it and explaining it will continue to provide fertile ground for philosophers and scholars for years to come.

The Pursuits of Philosophy: An Introduction to the Life and Thought of David Hume by Annette C. Baier (Harvard University Press, 2011) is a more recent analysis of one of the most controversial thinkers of the 18th century. The man lauded and damned as an infidel and outright atheist in his own time was at heart really just an agnostic who subscribed to the “live and let live” theory. Hume didn’t know if God existed; He might, and He might not. Hume understood the human need to believe in an all-knowing, all-powerful supernatural being who controlled and supervised everything we do. But he argued that no one could prove that deity’s existence definitively one way or the other, and therefore no one should ever force that belief on other people, particularly using the power of government or laws. And unlike most people, Hume was content with not knowing. Even downright happy. He didn’t try to change his Christian friends’ minds, and he asked them not to try to change his. As Baier writes, “He valued his friendships more than he cared about his friends’ agreement with his views.” Good advice for all of us in this age of Facebook rants.

Hume also rejected the notion of original sin, repulsed by the idea that men should be ashamed of what were natural human impulses, such as sexual desires. From that day to this Hume’s ideas have been denounced as heretical, revolutionary and downright dangerous. Samuel Johnson detested Hume, and that fact alone makes him worthy of our respect and attention (for more on Johnson, keep reading). It’s worth noting that Hume the confirmed agnostic met his death with stoical calm and peace; Johnson the confirmed Christian was terrified of what lay beyond and clung tenaciously to his last breath.

At 144 pages of text, this book is a nice short introduction to one of the great minds of the 18th (indeed any) century. Read this before moving on to a more doorstop-sized biography like Ernest Mossner’s The Life of David Hume (Oxford, 1980).

Jefferson and Madison: The Great Collaboration by Adrienne Koch. This book was first published in 1950 and is a very lucid and readable introduction to one of the great friendships in American history. The Jefferson-John Adams friendship is more famous for the correspondence carried on by those twin titans in their last years, but the Jefferson-Madison partnership was more influential across Jefferson’s lifetime in shaping his ideological convictions and the political thought and policies that evolved from them. Madison grounded Jefferson in some of his more theoretical notions, like his idea that the Earth belongs to the living, and that therefore debts should be cancelled every 19 years or so. Maybe so, Madison said, but when do you start counting? And what do you do about debts that are sometimes contracted for and that benefit posterity, like wars? Besides applying the brakes to Jefferson’s philosophical whims, Madison was also simply a good and caring friend. It was for good reason that Jefferson told him, just months before his death, “to myself, you have been a pillar of support thro’ life. Take care of me when dead, and be assured that I shall leave with you my last affections.” Koch wrote extensively about the thought of the founders in a career cut short (she died in 1971 at age 59), and this one is well worth reading.

The Great Books: Wuthering Heights by Charlotte Brontë (1847), Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen (1813), and The Red Badge of Courage by Stephen Crane (1895).

The first two books were written by two of the most prominent authors of the nineteenth century, and all three of these offerings (like most good novels) have been variously plundered by Hollywood. Having seen the 1939 version of Wuthering Heights starring Merle Oberon and Lawrence Olivier—and never having read or seen any dramatized version of Pride and Prejudice—I was anxious to read both.

I liked Brontë’s much better. My only memory of the movie is Heathcliff and Catherine sitting on the moors, the night wind blowing through Oberon’s hair. Their literary counterparts are much darker and disagreeable people than I remember them being on screen, but perhaps I need to watch it again. Heathcliff and Catherine are two of literature’s most famous lovers, yet they are dismally unappealing characters whose relationship is not a linear progression but is instead a twisting, page-turning tale of friendship, obsession, revenge, cruelty, sometimes implacable hatred, and deep and abiding love. The Brontës were a brooding and somber lot, and this book fully embodies that. Perfect autumn reading.

Austen, I must confess, disappointed me. This is obviously an important book in the history and development of the novel as a literary art form, but I am utterly confounded as to how it has provided so much fodder for both the big and small screen. I understand the tension between Elizabeth and Darcy, but almost nothing happens in these pages of any consequence. There’s a lot of letter-writing, talking, drinking tea, and heart-fluttering over whether Mr. Darcy or some other charming but equally dull fellow has feelings for someone, followed by someone thinking about writing letters, talking, drinking tea, or heart fluttering. (I found the Heathcliff-Catherine relationship much more compelling.)The most interesting character to my mind was Mr. Bennett, Elizabeth’s father, in part because he had a nice study in which to retreat from the rest of the members of his family, most of whom he can barely tolerate and from which he needed to escape, and often.

As to Crane’s much-lauded book about the essence of personal courage, somehow I avoided having to read this in K-12. Most poor souls did not. I can see now why so many people hate reading once they graduate from high school. The book’s most redeeming quality is that the covers are not very far apart.

Autobiography: Pride and Negligence: The History of the Boswell Papers by Frederick Pottle (McGraw-Hill, 1982) and Boswell’s London Journal, 1762-1763, ed. by Frederick Pottle (McGraw-Hill, 1950).

“I am lost without my Boswell.” So says Sherlock Holmes about Dr. Watson in “A Scandal in Bohemia.” James Boswell is most famous as the author of the monumental biography, The Life of Samuel Johnson, first published in 1791 and never out of print. I bought a nice Easton Press edition in three volumes a few years back and loved it. Boswell is best known as Johnson’s biographer, but he was a fascinating and complex man in his own right, well worthy of our attention, and his published journals are just the place to start.

Boswell would be well at home in today’s world of social media. He kept extensive journals throughout his life, covering the most intimate details of his private goings-on and detailed transcriptions of his conversations with the great men of eighteenth-century Britain, including Georgia’s founder James Edward Oglethorpe, Samuel Johnson of course, the artist Joshua Reynolds, actor David Garrick, writer Oliver Goldsmith, the aforementioned David Hume, Voltaire, and many, many others. And just like today’s most avaricious Tweeters and Facebook-posters, he held nothing back, even when he probably should have. He wrote about everything: politics, art, literature, court intrigues, his sexual and sensual escapades (including cavorting with London’s prostitutes and contracting and living with an STD), the peccadilloes of his friends and associates, falling out with his father over his chosen career, his fear of ghosts, and everything else you can imagine. He was an inveterate sinner who feared damnation but would walk out of a church and have sex with a prostitute. Sometimes he would miss the sermon because he was lusting over a woman in another pew. It is about as good a revealing snapshot of everyday life in eighteenth-century Britain—and a man driven by and forever at war with his passions—as we are ever likely to have, and it is all fascinating, a ripping good read.

Boswell died in 1795 at age 54, leaving behind a wealth of personal papers and journals that he hoped would one day be published. His family, however, had other ideas. Generations of his descendants thought his writings inappropriate and scandalous, detailing as they did his every whim, fancy, and indiscretion. They were also ashamed of their association with a man whom they considered to have lowered himself by acting the sycophant to the overbearing and boorish Johnson simply to obtain material for his biography.

Boswell’s descendants didn’t exactly lose his writings, but it’s safe to say they put them away and mostly forgot about them as they passed from generation to generation. They were “rediscovered” in the 1920s and 30s in a croquet box at Malahide Castle in Ireland and in a stable loft at the home of a Scottish laird at Fettercairn House near Aberdeen. The story of the Boswell Papers’ disappearance and re-discovery is told in fascinating if sometimes excruciating details in Frederick Pottle’s Pride and Negligence: The History of the Boswell Papers. Pottle was a lifelong Boswell scholar and edited, in the Boswell Factory at Yale, all but one of the thirteen volumes of the popularly published journals that begin with the London Journal.

When Boswell’s London Journal, 1762-1763, was first published in 1950, it was a surprising best seller and one can see why. It’s racy and titillating, gossipy and erudite, introspective and philosophical, witty and just plain fun. There are two famous scenes in these pages: Bozzy’s first meeting with Johnson on May 19, 1763, of course, but also the memorable day when he confronts his girlfriend Louisa as to whether she knowingly gave him a venereal disease: “Madam, I have had no connection with any woman but you these two months. I was with my surgeon this morning, who declared I had got a strong infection, and that she from whom I had it could not be ignorant of it. Madam, such a thing in this case is worse than from a woman of the town, as from her you may expect it. You have used me very ill. I did not deserve it.” Louisa protested her innocence, but to no avail. Boswell stormed out and ended the relationship. Later in a quieter moment he confessed to his journal that he’d had this same disease twice before, but if he ever apologized to poor Louisa, the journal is silent.

Boswell kept on writing till his last days, and though his father scolded him for keeping “a register of his follies and communicat[ing] it to others as if proud of them,” we are the ultimate beneficiaries. There are twelve other volumes after this one and I look forward to reading them all.

Bedtime Reading: Great Tales of Terror and the Supernatural, ed. by Herbert A. Wise and Phyllis Fraser (Modern Library, 1944). October’s darker days and the coming of Halloween always put me in the mood for stories that explore that tenuous ground between light and shadow that Rod Serling made so famous, that creepy place where we’ll encounter, as the editors write in their splendid introduction, the “rips or gaps in the impalpable curtain that divides the natural world of our experience from all the tremendous mystery that lies beyond.”

I’ve written at length about the genre, and this year I dipped into this fine compendium that comes in at over a thousand pages. The first part, the Great Tales of Terror, comprises almost a third of the book, and includes some real gems: Ambrose Bierce’s “The Boarded Window” with its chilling twist ending; Thomas Hardy’s “The Three Strangers,” a weird tale of 19 people gathered in a shepherd’s cottage and what happens when three unknown men wander in off the moor; “The Interruption” by W.W. Jacobs, about a man who poisons his wife and then lives in fear of his housekeeper, who knows he did it; Geoffrey Household’s “Taboo,” a tale of the ancient fear of werewolves; and the forgotten classic by Carl Stephenson, “Leiningen versus the Ants,” first published in Esquire in 1938, about what happens to a man who refuses to abandon his plantation in the face of an invading army of voracious insects. This section contained other tales by H.G. Wells, Conrad Aiken, and, surprisingly, Faulkner and Hemingway.

The editors caution the reader that “too generous a ration of horror may defeat its intended purpose, and succeed only in creating a surfeit instead of a feast.” They were right. Preferring to save the supernatural for next October, after feasting on the tales of terror, I stopped.

Which it’s time to do with this column. Next up: War and Peace. Turn the page and enjoy the upcoming winter.

Summer Reading

The Kids Are Alright

“I Miss Her If She Goes to the Bathroom”: The Richard Burton Diaries

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The Richard Burton Diaries. Edited by Chris Williams. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2012. $35.00. 693 pp.

“Do you really keep a diary? I’d give anything to look at it. May I?” So asked Algernon, to Cecily, in Oscar Wilde’s The Importance of Being Earnest.

Reading someone else’s letters and diaries can be a great guilty pleasure. What people choose to say about themselves in their diaries can tell us a great deal about who they thought they were and, usually, what they wanted the world at large to know about them. Because let’s face it, everyone who keeps a diary knows that at some point someone besides themselves is going to read it. So one chooses very carefully what to put in and what to leave out. The very act of keeping a diary or a journal is an act of self-selection, self-editing, and self-censorship.

Richard Burton was one of the most gifted actors of his generation. He was born in Wales in 1925 and died in Switzerland of a stroke at the age of 58 in 1984. Years of hard living, primarily booze and cigarettes, took their toll. He was one-half of one of the most famous Hollywood couples in history, having been married—twice—to Elizabeth Taylor. And he had a reputation of being an enormously talented artist who squandered that talent on lesser roles because of alcohol, women, laziness and lack of ambition. Why, one might ask, would anyone publish his diaries 30 years after his death, and why would anyone want to read them?

Because they are absolutely fascinating. Most good diaries are. Samuel Pepys was a government clerk, but his diary is still widely read 300 years after his death (“I went out to Charing Cross to see Major General Harrison hanged, drawn, and quartered; he looking as cheerful as any man could in that condition.”) James Boswell’s journals—the famous biographer of Dr. Samuel Johnson—were long thought to have been lost but were rediscovered at Malahide Castle in Ireland in the 1920s 150 years after his death, and they are still being published. When Boswell’s London Journal was published in 1950, it became an immediate world-wide best seller, much to the surprise of the publisher and editor. There’s something voyeuristic about us, and reading other people’s diaries, letters, or emails is almost irresistible, particularly when the juicy parts are left in, as when Boswell accused his mistress Louisa of giving him gonorrhea: “Madam, I have had no connection with any woman but you these two months. Such a thing in this case is worse than from a woman of the town, as from her you may expect it. You have used me very ill. I did not deserve it.”

Richard Walter Jenkins was born November 10, 1925, at Pontrhydyfen in the Afan valley of Wales to a family of coalminers. He took the surname of his legal guardian Philip Burton in 1943. Burton was nominated for seven Academy Awards but never won, and was best known for playing Mark Antony opposite Elizabeth Taylor in Cleopatra (1963), Thomas Becket in Becket (1964), Henry VIII in Anne of the Thousand Days (1970) and O’Brien in 1984 (1984). His family deposited his personal papers, including his diaries, at Swansea University in Wales in 2005. The Burton Papers now are a central part of the new Richard Burton Archive facility, which was formally opened in April 2010.

Burton began keeping a diary as a teenager in 1939 and sporadically kept up the practice until his death 45 years later. There are enormous gaps in the chronicle, but what’s here makes for wonderful reading. Burton was a gifted writer, and I found myself underlining and underscoring passages throughout. He had a keen insight into human nature and character and was remarkably honest about his own talents and foibles.

Two things stand out above all else in these pages, one a surprise, the other not. The surprise: Richard Burton loved books more than anything else in the world and would rather spend his time reading than acting, drinking, or chasing women. Books remained the one constant in his life from childhood to death and he read constantly, widely, voluminously. Who knew that Burton and Taylor read the Encyclopedia Britannica together?

Second—not so surprising—he was infatuated with Elizabeth Taylor. Everything about her—her acting ability, her brain, her conversation, but above all else, her beauty, captivated Burton, and some of the most stunning passages in his diaries are about her. His descriptions of her physical attributes and his attraction to her make the book worth reading all by itself.

In these pages, Burton is amazingly self-effacing. He often thinks that acting is a silly way for a grown man to make a living, and he says so. He loathes so much about his profession and he grouses constantly about it: “One of those days when acting seems peculiarly silly. What a sloppy job to have.” For him it was a means to an end: good books, good food and drink, good living, great women. He dreads having to go to work, hates reading scripts and trying to memorize lines. There is a lot of small talk and gossip here about other actors and their faults and failures, but he is equally unsparing about his own.

Here we see Richard Burton stripped of much of his glamor. He watches his weight and his waistline, usually complaining about both. He tries to cut down from as many as 100 cigarettes a day. He drinks too much—at one time apparently 3 bottles of vodka a day: “I became very drunk later and shouted a lot. At E. I don’t know what about. Just plain sloshed…I have been more or less drunk for two days. I don’t know why but I enjoyed it thoroughly.” He quarrels too often with fellow actors, strangers, and especially with his four wives through five marriages. He feels old and out of shape and can’t sleep. He falls behind in his diary and chastises himself for it. He wishes he could stop working so he could spend all his time reading, drinking, playing Yahtzee, and doing crossword puzzles: “Both Eliz and I agreed that we never want to work again but simply loll our lives away in a sort of eternal Sunday. We are both bone lazy. And enjoy it.” “I wouldn’t object to having the whole year off. I could write a book, or dream a lot, or get fit or fat.” He wishes people would leave him alone: “I have one disease that is incurable, that I am easily bored.”

And why did he keep these diaries? As editor Chris Williams points out, Burton never laid out a rationale, he “just got on and did it.” For all of his reputation for laziness, Burton wasn’t intellectually lazy. He read constantly and wrote long thoughtful passages in his diaries about politics, world events, and history. It seems he believed that a well-rounded, educated gentleman should keep a daily account of his thoughts and deeds, and should try as best as one could to do so honestly. This Burton tried to do when his drinking and other distractions didn’t get the better of him, which they did for months at a time:

“I woke to my astonishment at 11:00. How late. I would like to awake, until my death, about 6 or 7 in the morning, but life and nerves being what they are, one is lucky to be up and shouting at 4 in the afternoon. There is a kind of lethargy, induced only by vulgarity, which prompts late rising. I remember the days when to sleep more than 5 hours a day was considered self-indulgence. And I am now self indulgent. It must be booze and age.”

Elizabeth Taylor is the co-star of these diaries, and she comes off as being lovely, talented, and long-suffering at the hands of Burton, who could be an absolute load to have around. He was by turns loving and hateful, broodingly silent and mentally cruel, and an alcoholic, who, by his own admission, had a hard time expressing affection or sympathy for other people’s suffering. But he loved her beyond all telling, and several of the lines on E, as he called her, are worth quoting at some length:

“I am madly in love with her at the moment, as distinct from always loving her, and want to make love to her every minute.”

“E has become very slim and I can barely keep my hands off her. She is at the moment among the most dishiest girls I’ve ever seen. The most. I mean dishiest.”

“After 7 or is it 8 years I still miss her if she goes to the bathroom.”

“My God she’s a beauty. Sometimes even now, after nearly 8 years of marriage I look at her when she’s asleep at the first light of a grey dawn and wonder at her.”

“Elizabeth. . .asked if I would stop loving her if she had to spend the rest of her life in a wheelchair. I told her that I didn’t care if her legs bum and bosoms fell off and her teeth turned yellow. And she went bald. I love that woman so much sometimes that I cannot believe my luck. She has given me so much.”

“I have been inordinately lucky all my life but the greatest luck of all has been Elizabeth. She has turned me into a moral man but not a prig, she is a wildly exciting lover-mistress, she is shy and witty, she is nobody’s fool, she is a brilliant actress, she is beautiful beyond the dreams of pornography, she can be arrogant and wilful, she is clement and loving, she is Sunday’s child, she can tolerate my impossibilities and my drunkenness, she is an ache in the stomach when I am away from her and she loves me! She is a prospectus that can never be entirely catalogued, an almanack for Poor Richard. And I’ll love her till I die.”

Burton and Taylor fought as passionately as they loved and finally divorced in June 1974. Less than sixteen months later they married again, though the second time lasted less than a year. Still, it’s clear in these pages that he loved her as he never loved anyone else: “I miss her like food.”

His love of reading is noted almost every day: “Maybe I’ll just read and read and read…Sunday papers arrived and I settled down for the day…spent the afternoon browsing through Oxford Dictionary of Quotations. . . new bookcase arrived and I had it fixed next to the bathroom in guest bedroom and suitably filled it with books. Will have to order another bookcase. . .Looking forward to Switzerland and books and peace.”

Burton is self-effacing but he could be wickedly, bitingly funny and sarcastic about other people as well. A few of his bon mots: “She was as mini-skirted as a California palm tree. The hem was only slightly below the neck.” Pop singer Gordon Waller was “suffering from a bad attack, which may be permanent, of refusing to be impressed. I feel sorry for the poor bastard. He was one of those pop singers who didn’t survive his first success.” Writer Roddy Mann “fairly bristles with insignificance.” On Charles de Gaulle: “I’d kick him in the arse if I could reach that high.” Frank Sinatra was “a petulant little sod.” Eddie Fisher, one of Elizabeth’s ex-husbands, was “a gruesome little man and smug as a boot.” And then there was this, on fellow actor Rod Steiger’s facelift: “it makes him look like one-half of a naked asshole. He says he can’t get any jobs and will soon be broke. It might be because people don’t want to be looking at a talking asshole.”

Burton would have no doubt been pleased, if not a little amused, to see his own diaries in print. He was approached about it during his life: “I have been offered a million dollars for one month of this diary. Somebody is mad. And I is not it. But I wonder if it would be interesting. I would, after all, like to read the diary of an office-worker. Might people be interested in reading a month in the life of an actor, especially one married to such an exotic wife as mine?” Indeed they would.

As to life beyond death, he didn’t expect it: “I wish I could believe in a God of some kind,” he offers at one point, “but I simply cannot. My intelligence is too muscular and my imagination stops at the horizon, and I have an idea that the last sound to be heard on this lovely planet will be a man screaming. In fear and terror. It might be me.” Needless to say, it wasn’t. Burton suffered a cerebral hemorrhage in August 1984 and is buried in Switzerland. Elizabeth Taylor outlived him by almost 27 years.

As writer Jessamyn West wrote, “people who keep journals have life twice.” Thanks to Chris Williams and Yale University Press, Richard Burton in these pages has achieved a kind of immortality that a lover of the printed word like himself would have prized far beyond the afterlife he has long enjoyed for being—one can almost hear Burton yawning—an actor. “My first love,” he said, “is not the stage. It is a book with lovely words in it.” A man after my own heart.

Worth Reading: Spencer Tracy: A Biography

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Spencer Tracy: A Biography. By James Curtis. Alfred A. Knopf, 2011, 1,001 pp. $39.95

He’s the kind of actor who makes it look so easy and you think to yourself, I can do that. Go ahead and try it. It’s not easy and you can’t do it.

Spencer Tracy is widely considered to be the greatest film actor of the 20^th century. Perhaps even the greatest actor of all time. Clark Gable considered him untouchable. “The guy`s good,” Gable famously said. “There`s nobody in the business who can touch him, and you`re a fool to try. And the bastard knows it, so don`t fall for that humble stuff!”

Having recently plowed through mammoth biographies of Lyndon Johnson and Walter Cronkite, two of the seminal figures in the second half of the twentieth century, I decided to complete the triumvirate by reading James Curtis’s recent biography of my favorite actor. At almost exactly 1,000 pages, it’s not a fast read, but it’s a wonderful journey.

I first encountered Spencer Tracy as a college senior at the University of Georgia in 1986. As a journalism major focusing on radio-TV-film production, I took the late great Barry Sherman’s class on journalism and broadcast history, and he challenged us to become familiar with the great movies and actors of the past, in the same way one reads “classic” books and authors to become more “well rounded.”

To help us along on that quest, he screened Citizen Kane in class, and before long I was haunting the student center theater for any classic movies that showed up. It was there that I first saw Casablanca and Gone With the Wind, both on the big screen. I was hooked.

Pretty soon I was wearing out my VCR, recording old movies on TBS and AMC (back when they showed old movies on either of those stations), anything that featured Humphrey Bogart and Clark Gable. Arsenic and Old Lace led me to Cary Grant, other movies to Henry Fonda, Jimmy Stewart, Edward G. Robinson, Gary Cooper, Errol Flynn, and Katharine Hepburn. I watched Alfred Hitchcock, John Ford, Preston Sturges, Ernst Lubitsch, and other directors. I bought a copy of Halliwell’s Filmgoer’s Companion and read it to tatters, all 1,200 pages.

James Cagney died that spring and I became interested in his work, watching and studying everything of his that I could find. Nobody then or now could dance like him, and when he was on screen, you couldn’t watch anybody else. As one critic wrote about Cagney, “He can’t even put a telephone receiver back on the hook without giving the action some special spark of life.”

About that time, PBS aired a documentary on Spencer Tracy. He was in a class all by himself. I had heard of him, of course, and was familiar with the names of some of his movies like Bad Day at Black Rock, but I’d never seen him on the screen. He was so good that he didn’t seem to be acting; as his fellow actors say, you never saw the mechanism at work. One reviewer watching him on stage in 1929, before he ever set foot in front of a camera, captured his style perfectly:

“No makeup—none to speak of—no tricks whatever; just an unassuming, easy manner that gets him about the stage without your quite knowing how he does it. He belongs to that school of acting—if it is a school—which doesn’t want you to think it is acting. It is acting, though, of a very high order, forceful, reserved, artistic.”

Tracy was born in Milwaukee in 1900, served in the Navy in World War I, and made his stage debut as a student at Ripon College in 1921. He attended the American Academy of Dramatic Arts (where he learned, he said, “the value of sincerity and simplicity, unembellished and unintellectualized”) and mastered his trade for 10 years in the daily grind of a stock company. The legendary George M. Cohan called him “the best goddamned actor I’ve ever seen.”

He hit it big on Broadway in 1930’s The Last Mile, and Fox Studios in Hollywood signed him to a contract that same year. He made his big screen debut in Up the River, directed by John Ford. Unlike most actors trained on the stage, Tracy was subdued, letting the camera come to him. It was inauspicious debut to the 75 films he would eventually make and that would establish him as the best screen actor in history, with nine Academy Award nominations and two Oscars for best actor.

For all his acting talent, Tracy was the stereotypical “tortured” artist. He was as well known for his long-standing relationship with Katharine Hepburn, his moodiness, and his alcoholism as he was for his acting. After his first-born child, John, was born deaf, Tracy for the rest of his life blamed himself and his sins for his son’s affliction and it ate at him like a cancer. He suffered from chronic insomnia and took mouthfuls of pills just to catch an hour’s sleep. Tracy had multiple affairs with other actresses long before he met Hepburn—most notably Loretta Young and Ingrid Bergman–and his marriage to actress Louise Treadwell had settled into an awkward, platonic partnership by 1940.

Tracy and Hepburn first met filming Woman of the Year in 1942 and were together until his death 25 years later. I had always assumed it was an open secret, but Curtis tells us that was not the case. They were finally outed in several high-profile national magazines in the mid 1950s. Tracy had been married to Louise Treadwell since 1923, and they never divorced. After discovering their son John was deaf, Louise founded the John Tracy Clinic in Los Angeles and used her celebrity status to ensure its eventual success. Tracy’s staunch Catholicism and Louise’s insistence on remaining Mrs. Spencer Tracy until her death combined to keep them in a relationship that was unusual even in Hollywood. Despite their estrangement, they were still married at Spencer’s death in 1967, still respected each other, valued the other’s advice, and maintained a semblance of family with their two children. Curtis deftly details the finer points of their shared and singular history.

Hepburn’s attraction to Tracy was immediate and intense. But what did Tracy see in Hepburn? We’re never quite sure, and Curtis lets the reader fill in the blanks on this particular subject. According to Hepburn, she never knew exactly how he felt about her. That he loved her is beyond doubt, but he apparently never told her, which is hard to believe. They appear to have been intellectually suited and admired each other’s acting ability enormously. They were undoubtedly lovers, though one wonders how much that ever entered into the equation, as Tracy was 42 when he met Hepburn and looked and acted 10 years older. She helped him through his insomnia and alcoholism, though the evidence points to the inescapable fact that he physically abused her on more than one occasion. They didn’t share a home until the last 5 years of his life; “I love him but I can’t live with him and he won’t live with Louise,” Hepburn said. In the end, it’s clear they were best friends, in the truest sense of those words, and enjoyed each other’s company and companionship. They made each other contented and happy.

At least as happy as anyone like Tracy could ever be. Alcoholism nearly ruined him. Several times in his career he would go on 10-day benders and wind up in hospital detox centers, bringing to a screeching halt whatever picture he might be working on or about to start, holding up production and costing the studio millions. His father and grandfather were alcoholics, and his working-class Irish Catholic upbringing in Milwaukee did nothing to dissuade him from seeking solace in a bottle. He went through long periods of sobriety, most notably after meeting Hepburn, but never really sought professional help. Alcoholism was more often seen as a moral failing than a disease during his life, a view to which both Hepburn and Tracy partially subscribed. He eventually brought it under control himself, though he never fully mastered it. He would go on and fall off the wagon with excruciating regularity all of his life.

Curtis chronicles all of this in wonderful detail, but the heart of the story—as in Tracy’s life—was his work before the camera. Tracy labored in obscurity at Fox Studios through 5 years and 19 films before moving over to MGM and stardom in 1935. If you’ve never seen him on screen, go on Netflix right now and queue up any one of a dozen of his best pictures: Inherit the Wind (widely acclaimed as his best work), Judgment at Nuremburg, Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner, Father of the Bride, Boy’s Town, Fury (his 1936 break-out role), Captains Courageous, San Francisco, The Old Man and the Sea, Bad Day at Black Rock.

In my opinion all nine of his movies with Katharine Hepburn are good but especially watch Woman of the Year, Keeper of the Flame, State of the Union, Adam’s Rib, Pat and Mike, and Desk Set. The latter movie is little regarded among movie critics, but two scenes in it are worth studying in some detail: when Tracy quizzes Hepburn about her memory over lunch on the rooftop of their office building, and later when Tracy gets caught in the rain on the way home and Hepburn invites him in for dinner. Both scenes feature two movie legends at the top of their game, with a natural affinity for their work and for each other that comes through brilliantly on screen. I particularly like him in Stanley Kramer’s It’s a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World, because he’s as superb a comedian as anyone else in that picture. Bottom line: if he’s in it, watch it. You will never be disappointed.

There are many actors, then and now, who never convince you they’ve done anything more than memorize lines and pretend to be someone else. For all their matinee idol appeal, I’ve always felt this way about Brad Pitt and Tom Cruise; you can tell they’re performing. Even some of Hollywood’s greatest legends, like Clark Gable, John Wayne, Gary Cooper, and Errol Flynn, were always accused of just playing themselves, that they weren’t really actors. As John Wayne famously said, “I don’t act, I react.” (Tracy once told the Duke, “It’s a good thing you’re so good looking, because you can’t act your way out of a paper bag.” Of Gable, whom he loved, he said, “Can’t act, doesn’t care, and everybody loves him better than any actor that was ever born.”)

Tracy, as one critic wrote, did not act, he was. It never seemed as if he was trying to perform. He belonged to a school of acting “which believed in selection—not how much the actor could do in any given scene, but how little he had to do to make the point, using the minimum to make the maximum.” Tracy understood the power of silence, of scarcely moving; it was all in his eyes and face, and the way he held himself. As Curtis writes, he demanded the audience’s attention in a natural and subdued way, dared them not to feel what he was feeling, not to think what he was thinking. To my mind, Tom Hanks is the living embodiment of Spencer Tracy: they both underplay to enormous effect what others would turn into farce.

How did he do it? What was his technique? No one really knows, because he never really shared his secret, a legacy, perhaps of his days working as a magician as a boy. Gene Kelly, who starred with Fredric March and Tracy in Inherit the Wind, described it thus: “I could understand and see what March was doing. He was like Olivier. A wonderful technician. You could see the characterization taking shape—the cogs and wheels beginning to turn. If you studied his methods closely, it was all there, like an open book. But with Spence it was just the reverse. He’d play a scene with you, and you’d think nothing much was happening. Then, when you saw the rushes, there it all was—pouring out of his face. He was quite amazing. The embodiment of the art that conceals art. It was impossible to learn anything from Spence, because everything he did came from some inner part of himself, which to an outsider anxious to learn, was totally inaccessible. All you could do was watch the magic and be amazed.”

Part of it, of course, was his natural talent and ability. When other actors asked him for advice, he would invariably reply, “There’s nothing I can teach you. Your either are an actor, or you’re not. And you are.” But though he made it seem effortless, it wasn’t. He did have a photographic memory, a gift for any actor, but he worked hard at making it seem as though he wasn’t doing anything at all. He spent long hours alone in his room at night preparing himself for the next day’s work.

Watch him read the verdict in Judgment at Nuremburg (over 10 minutes, done in one take): “Before the people of the world . . . let it now be noted . . . that here in our decision, this is what we stand for: Justice, truth, and the value of a single human being”; watch him cross examine Fredric March in Inherit the Wind, or give the final speech in Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner: “Old? Yes, Burnt out? Certainly. But I can tell you the memories are still there—clear, intact, in destructible. And they’ll still be there if I live to be a hundred and ten.” A cough here, a lowering of his voice mid-sentence there, a catch in his throat as he described his love for Christina (Hepburn): Small, subtle things, that make his performances seem wholly natural, but nearly impossible to replicate. As Stanley Kramer, who directed all three movies, said: “Tracy reduced everything to a fine powder of simplicity, and that takes hard work, it takes a lot of hard work. ‘Improvisation,’ Tracy always said, ‘is perspiration.’”

It wasn’t unusual for his fellow cast and crew to burst into applause after one of his scenes. Fellow actors on the set or movie lot would stand offstage just to watch him work. The three movies cited above contain his best work, superb, flawless performances. If I ever aspired to act, I would study them until my eyes blurred. Burt Lancaster, following the verdict scene in Judgment at Nuremburg, asked Tracy, “How did you do that so easily?” Tracy quietly replied, “You practice for 35 years.” The art that conceals art, using the minimum to make the maximum. There was nobody better.