DEVIL DRIVES - Softcover

Brodie, Fawn M.

4.2

495 ratings by Goodreads

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0345215982 ISBN 13: 9780345215987

Publisher: Ballantine Books, 1969

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Richard Burton's life offers dazzling riches. He was one of the greatest Victorian explorers, an innovative translator and brilliant linguist, a prolific travel writer, a pioneer in the fields of anthropology and sexual psychology, a mesmeric lover, a spy and a publisher of erotica.
Fawn Brodie has created a vivid portrait of this remarkable man, who emerges from the richly textured fabric of his time. His travels to Mecca and Medina dressed as a Muslim pilgrim, his witnessing of the human sacrifices at Dahomey and his unlikely but loving partnership with his pious catholic bride are all treated with warmth, scholarship and understanding

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About the Author:

Fawn Brodie was born a Mormon in Ogden, Utah, in 1915. She attended the universities of Utah and Chicago. Her prize-winning No Man Knows My History, the life of the Mormon founder Joseph Smith, was published in 1945. Afterwards, at her own wish, she was excommunicated from the Mormon Church, but was nevertheless elected a Fellow of the Utah Historical Society in 1967. Her other works include a critical edition of Burton's The City of the Saints, a best-selling biography of Thomas Jefferson and an acclaimed study of Richard Nixon. She died in 1981.

Before long Burton had made friends with every Sheikh and religious leader around Damascus, and had gained some insight into the religious and political intrigues. A true romantic, despite his veneer of cynicism, he also took it upon himself to right the wrongs of the oppressed. Occasionally he tried out his old disguise, like Harun al Rashid, testing the temper of the people at night, his excitement heightened by his having for the first time in his life real political power. The Turkish Wali governing Syria in 1869, Mogammed Rashid Pasha, was a corrupt ruler who became so notorious for maladministration and extortion that even in this venal period of the decaying Ottoman Empire he was recalled to Constantinople in chains in 1871 and later conveniently assassinated. The last thing he wanted in Damascus was an inquisitive British consul who could speak Arabic like an Arab, and who had a reputation for being a gifted spy. Burton soon documented the Wali�s venality, and secretly urged the Foreign Office to agitate with the Turkish government for his recall.

Isabel, his wife, arrived in Damascus from London on December 31, 1869 with a mountain of luggage and five dogs. She had come expecting, as she wrote in her diary the day she left England, to find in Damascus "my Pearl, the Garden of Eden, the Promised Land, my beautiful white City with her swelling domes and tapering minarets, her glittering golden crescents et in green of every shade." But upon arrival she saw only barren yellow mountains, ugly shrubbery, wild dogs, and offal in the streets. In the first stages of cultural shock she felt "six times farther away from home than when living in Brazil". Unwilling to be locked up at night within the Damascus gates, Burton insisted on taking a house on a river in the Kurdish village of Salihiyay, on the foothills of the mountains to the north. It was a spacious house, with a garden full of apricot, lemon and orange trees. There was a fountain in the patio, and the flat roof was laden with potted flowers.

To the five dogs - a St Bernard, two brindled bull-terriers, two Yarboroughs - the Burtons added a Kurdish pup, a camel, a white donkey, three goats, a pet lamb, a Persian cat, as well as chickens, turkeys, geese, ducks, guinea fowls, and pigeons. Later a Moslem leader gave them a panther cub that had been trapped in the desert, which soon became their favourite. "He used to sleep by our bedside," Isabel wrote. "He had bold bad black eyes that seemed to say, �Be afraid of me.�" For a time she spent most of her days keeping the pets from eating each other.

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