Thursday, January 10, 2019

Quote of the Day (Richard Burton, on Alcohol and ‘The Age of the Abyss’)


“I stuck to my diet and had a whisky and soda before lunch, followed by a half dozen belons, a steak au poivre, a salad with French dressing, and a hefty lump of cheese. I drank Lafite ‘60, about two glasses, and two or three brandies after the cheese with sugarless and creamless coffee. Later that night I had a couple more whiskies and soda. Apart from water that is all I took in that day…. E[lizabeth Taylor] was astonishingly drunk even as I got to lunch. I don't recollect her before ever being incoherent from drink. I expect it from the drugs she's forced to take, but not from the booze. Christ I hope she's alright. It would be frightful to live the rest of our lives in an alcoholic haze, seeing the world through fumes of spirits and cigarette smoke. Never quite sure what you did or said the day before, or what you read, whether wise or foolish, tardy or too soon. Good I'm going to have a whisky and soda right now. There are few pleasures to match tipsiness in this murderous world especially if, like me, you believe in your bones that it, the world as we know it, is not going to last much longer. This is the age of the abyss and any minute now or dark day we could tumble over the edge into primal chaos. Some frigging foreigner will press a button and gone it will all be. Even the Miners Arms in Pontrhydyfen. Our little lives will be shattered with a cosmic bang. ‘These millions of white faces,’ as Archie MacLeish says, and then ‘nothing, nothing, nothing at all.‘ But don't let's be stoned all the time. Let's have days and days of brilliant clarity, etched and limpid, cool and surgical….”—Actor Richard Burton (1925-1984), diary entry for January 10, 1969, The Richard Burton Diaries, edited by Chris Williams (2012)

I have always wanted to read the diaries of Richard Burton, and this past weekend I finally got my hands on a copy at a library near me. Since then, I’ve been consuming entries the way I once might have gone after a Crackerjack box, sampling one here, one there, finding myself unable to stop. 

The entry here hardly contains the most news—it doesn’t describe his purchases, for wife Elizabeth Taylor, diamonds and a plane, each costing at least $900,000, nor his high-profile friends and films of the time. 

But these lines may evoke something more revelatory and fascinating than any more seemingly momentous incident. Such was the consequence of a self-loathing genius—a talented writer who (perhaps correctly) believed he was miscast as a gifted, well-compensated actor—pursuing “the drinking man’s diet.”

There are several astonishing elements of this entry:

*That phrase, “that is all I took in that day.” The amount of alcohol involved is not inconsiderable.

*Burton largely passes over his own drinking, but not his wife’s.

*Shortly after conjuring up the very real consequences of alcohol abuse, the actor indulges in his thirst for another whisky and soda.

*Burton wishes for liquid oblivion to wipe out “the age of the abyss” he sees in the hands of nuclear powers around the world—but somehow also wishes for “days and days of brilliant clarity, etched and limpid, cool and surgical”—an outcome that feels ever more elusive by the end of this paragraph.

Clear-eyed enough to see the disappointing finish to his life and his wife’s (who, though successfully drying out in the Betty Ford Clinic in the 1980s, lived out the rest of her days more by taking advantage of her celebrity than by strengthening her real muscles as an actor), Burton is also seemingly powerless to stop it. 

It is quite sad to behold the evolution—or, rather, the devolution—of these entries. Initial ones, from the early 1940s, are short, befitting a youth still struggling to find his place and his voice.  The decade or so from the 1960s to early 1970s featured the longest ruminations, when the actor would take out his typewriter and type right in front of Ms. Taylor. He was trying to harness his creativity by imposing self-discipline. But, from the mid-Seventies and continuing for several years, there were no entries. 

Burton had slipped into an extended lost weekend of substance abuse. The voice on stage had, despite heavy cigarette use, lost little of its mellifluous richness. But the “voice” on the printed page, in the last entries from early 1983, over a year before his death, is exhausted, confessing that his last wife, Sally, is “still depressed and fed up….Being with me is not as glamorous as people think.”

Perhaps it was no accident that some of his best, Oscar-nominated performances--in Becket, The Spy Who Came in From the Cold, Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, and his late-career triumph of stage and screen, Equus--center around disillusioned, burnt-out cases

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