Ivan Lett—

Rare is the book campaign that immensely satisfies both personally and professionally. As work began for The Richard Burton Diaries, edited by Chris Williams, there was a typical shape to the assumptions for such a book coming from Yale University Press:

“Oh great, the diaries of the Victorian explorer?”

“No, the Hollywood actor.”

“What does that have to do with Yale?”

Now it’s not that Sir Richard Francis Burton was connected to Yale, but historically his reputation as an explorer, writer, diplomat, and linguist might seem more aligned with the biographies and memoirs we have previously published. Regardless of books like Frankly, My Dear or The Hollywood Sign in our Icons of America series, the disbelief of our publishing Richard Burton, the Welsh actor, was prevalent. Why should a university press publish this material? What could Richard Burton have to contribute to public and scholarly discourse?

You don’t know Richard Burton.

Covering the actor’s diaries from age fourteen in 1939 until he ceased writing in them in 1983, the year before his untimely death, The Richard Burton Diaries include everything from boyhood notes on Shakespeare’s Richard II to observances of famous colleagues and celebrities. No matter the page, his diaries are excitingly filled with thoughtful, passionate, incisive, scandalous, allusive, and even drunken ruminations. Certainly well-known for his film career and marriages to Elizabeth Taylor, Burton reveals himself on paper to be much more: a consummate man of letters. Williams, who was former director of the Richard Burton Centre in Wales, writes that “it is possible to suggest that a more varied Burton emerges from his own writings than the one currently circulation in the public domain. We find here Richard Burton the acclaimed actor, the international film star and the jet-set celebrity, but we also find Richard Burton the family man, father and husband….[A] Richard Burton who reads, who thinks, who longs to write.”

Like all titles in my column, this book was acquired through our London office; Burton’s papers are now housed at Swansea University in Wales after a gift from his widow Sally. Given his death at a young age, it seems fair to speculate that members of my generation are less familiar with Burton than Liz Taylor, especially stateside. Lindsay Lohan and Grant Bowler’s portrayal of the couple in this fall’s Liz & Dick on Lifetime was only a taste of the many sides and experiences in Richard Burton’s life.  I knew about him from watching The Taming of the Shrew and Cleopatra, (embarrassingly admitting that I’ve not yet seen the film adaptation of Equus), but reading Burton has been a different kind of experience, one that connects the actor with his audience with various personas more provocative and arresting than what any stage or costume change could do. No man-on-screen, he thinks, acts, and desires as deeply, even more profoundly, than his performances explicitly convey. These are Burton’s words:

‘Only our concept of time makes it possible for us to speak of the Day of Judgement by that name; in reality it is a summary court in perpetual session.’ That is from a letter of Kafka’s. It haunts me. The supreme judge at that severe searching of the soul is oneself. It is I who act, I who do the deed or have the thought and it is I only who can judge the action or the thought. I am prosecutor and defender, Satan and Saint. I am totally responsible for all my sins and goodnesses. And I am alone. That great storehouse of knowledge and memory, ignorance and idiocy, brilliance and banality, good and evil is in my own brain and only my own brain can call itself to the bar for the agony of self examination. An endless, life-long viva voce. I wish I had more time to think. I wish I didn’t have the nightly performance hovering over me day after day. Last night the audience was a phantom, now with you, now gone, a chimera of wrong responses. I felt angry with them and I’m afraid allowed it to show a few times. Afterwards we went to the John McClures’ flat for supper. We talked until 3.15am. Mostly about Lenny Bernstein. How much we all loved him and how we loathed some of the things he does to himself and to other people. For Bernstein is indeed a fascinating creature, genius and dolt, a man and a woman. A boy and a girl. There is no personal hell quite like the hell Lenny lives through. All the time, all the time night and day there is the battle between his super ego and his utter self loathing – a Mahatma Miserable. I think that master means to die shortly unless the will to live re-asserts itself. […] I’ve written and thought myself into a state of depression. Ah! How I’d love the panacea of a drink now. A double ice cold vodka martini, the glass fogged with condensation, straight up and then straight down and the warm flood the pain-killer hitting the stomach and then the brain and an hour of sweetly melancholy euphoria. I shall have a Tab instead. Disgusting.

Watching the book’s publicity unfold across numerous outlets like the Today Show, the New York Times, NPR, not to mention the rally of support from countrymen in Wales, has buzzed around both YUP New Haven and London offices for weeks. As a book comes to life, it underscores the importance of the dedicated research and hard work poured into it from numerous parties—Williams, the editor, Burton’s family, Swanesa University, among numerous others in media and publishing—and certainly the subject of Richard Burton is a trove of discovery for theatrical aficionados and literary buffs alike, with so much new material brought to public attention.

I have been and will always be dedicated to the power and scope of the written word. If that passion seems remotely familiar, read The Richard Burton Diaries to discover far more than a kindred spirit. He was a man that everyone could appreciate through his expressions of the humanity that we know is accessible to each of us in words.

Ivan Lett is Online Marketing Manager for Yale University Press.