The Richard Burton Diaries (187 page)

They want us to come back on Sunday to visit the War Museum but museums ought, as Dylan once said, to be put into museums and I can't think
of anything more boring. One of the men there, a very suave under-secretary of the Foreign Office said that some ambassador had been to visit and after a couple of hours said that he had tears in his eyes. Lying bastard, I thought. Unless they were tears of boredom.

[...] E wrote two letters last night while I read
Dombey and Son
. Years since I read it but page after page comes back to my memory. We had several volumes of Dickens at home. They were won by my brothers, principally Ivor I think, for good attendance at Sunday School or day school.

Friday 24th
Exhausting work up in the mountains, physically exhausting. Running about at a half crouch and diving into fox-holes at 9000 feet is not only wearying but boring. Seemingly endless explosions go off all around us and at the end of each day I am covered with dirt, some artificial put on by Ron and some, the most uncomfortable kind put on by nature in all the bombing and slithering about. By evening time I am a mass of aches from the use of unaccustomed muscles. So much so that I missed two days in this diary. Too stiff to be bothered. [...]

Still with
Dombey and Son
. Must confess that Dickens could do with some editing. Sometimes his discursiveness is charming but sometimes one is minded to skip. One can see him beginning a chapter with ‘now let's start this with some fine writing!’ Little Dombey is, let's face it, a bit of a pain in the ass. And the famous ‘death of little Dombey’ very contrived.
¹⁶⁸
I'd forgotten how often people cry in Dickens. Tears are for ever starting from people's eyes. But it's all good reading nevertheless. [...]

We are going to go to an island supposedly very beautiful and sub-tropical 70% wooded etc. with interior lakes called Mljet.
¹⁶⁹
We shall paddle around it. Tea and off again in the egg-beater. [...]

E told me tonight that she was always perfectly assured of herself in the early fifties when she knew that she was a sort of second string to Jean Simmons, Grace Kelly and Colleen Gray and Audrey Hepburn variously because deep down she could fall back on a sort of cultural or artistic background.
¹⁷⁰
She is vague as to exactly what she means and so am I [...] but she thinks that growing up as she did surrounded as she was by great works of art, by your Van Goghs, Monets, Renoirs etc. gave her a sense of proportion about the relative insignificance of whether she played ‘Young Bess’ or whether somebody else did – in this case Jean Simmons.
¹⁷¹
E thinks that makes her sound like some kind of intellectual egotist but I don't think so at all. I was and to a certain extent still am, an awful academic snob. There was no mind, if
G. B. Shaw will forgive the paraphrase, that I didn't despise in the film business when I compared it with my own.
¹⁷²
There was nothing much to compare it with. One can hardly describe Darryl Zanuck, Lew Schreiber, L. B. Meyer, Jack Warner and all their little satellites as being the owners of towering brains.
¹⁷³
As E says, for her it was a harbour in which she could watch with some dispassion the busy toing and froing while for me, much more arrogantly, it was a mountain peak on which I could look down on the despicable ants.

I have been a little put out by something that Ron Berkeley told me and which I have yet to verify. I have predicated my still unwritten article or what ever it might turn out to be about Tito on the belief that he never ever ordered anyone, including captured Germans who had behaved with atrocity to his defenceless people and
hetniks who betrayed and murdered the partisans, to be shot. Now Ron tells me that he was in a bar in Dubrovnik the other night and in the course of conversation with a group of Jugoslavs he said that I was particularly fascinated by Tito because of this. Whereupon two men immediately stood up from the table and left the cafe-bar without a word. Ron asked why this, as Jugoslavs are generally polite. The proprietor who is a cockney Slav believe it or not said that the fathers of the two men had been shot in the Jugoslavian ‘purge’ of 1948.
¹⁷⁴
I must now try and find out if these two killings (altogether, Ron says 41 people from Dubrovnik were shot at that time) were personal settling of scores or whether the orders came from the top. If so I shall be a disappointed man. I mean if the orders came from Belgrade. I must also find out if the people are willing to talk. So far, after countless conversations with all kinds of people I have never heard one bad word about Tito and very few pejorative remarks about communism, though quite a lot about bureaucracy and its attendant evils – particularly nepotism and the fact that a member of the party, though inferior in merit to a cardless Slav, will always get the vote. I asked Branko, a veteran Slav actor who speaks good English, why nobody, but simply nobody, spoke ill of Tito.
¹⁷⁵
Was it caution or fear perhaps. Branko said that it was neither, that Tito was still a father-figure. To the older generation – people of my age and his (57? 62?) – he and Sava had been the legendary saviours and to the younger generation – those of 30 and under – there had never been any other President.
¹⁷⁶
Tito and President had become synonymous. Rather, I suppose, the way in which Caesar came to mean King. Kaiser and Czar are probably etymologically derived from Julius and
his namesakes. The young ones know that he saved them from [the] Boche beast and the Red Bear and those who might have opposed him in the crisis of 1948 – if Ron's story in the pub is to be credited – were presumably knocked off or incarcerated. I must ask more of Branko and find out if I can detect in him any signs of caution or fear when next he chats at my instigation. I think I'll be able to tell. I must ask about Djilas and whether it would be possible for me to meet him or even whether it would be advisable of me to ask somebody like Popovi
who is a member of the party.
¹⁷⁷

Saturday 25th,
Kalizma [...] I'd forgotten that
Dombey
was written in serial form which accounts, a great deal I imagine, for the incredibility of the plot which is really beyond belief. No question but that E. M. Forster was right (he is quoted in the afterword by Alan Pryce Jones) when he said that Dickens was the most popular novelist of the nineteenth century and its greatest humourist.
¹⁷⁸
He is not however a great novelist because I don't believe half he says and his obvious ‘set-pieces’ set my nerves on edge and were it not for the fact that I am congenitally unable to skip passages I would have read the book in half the time. But he is good entertainment and ideal for reading on the daily helicopter trips and between shots on the film – something I was never able to do before. [...]

Having seen Tito on Tuesday we were more than interested in the report in yesterday's
Tribune
of the meetings between Tito and Brezhnev.
¹⁷⁹
Looks like the old man is as tough and intractable as ever. He refuses to accept the idea of ‘limited sovereignty’ which is an absurd contradiction in terms anyway. Sovereignty is sovereignty and limited is limited and never the twain shall meet. The Orwellian double-think is evident in every arrogant word that Brezhnev says.
¹⁸⁰
He denies that he meant by ‘limited sovereignty’ the status under which Czechoslovakia lived and the excuse for the invasion. It says that Mr Brezhnev and Tito were going on a hunting trip but owing to ‘a slight cold’ affecting Brezhnev the trip had been cancelled. How the Russian bosses must hate Tito and how they will exult when he dies. And there is no ear nose and throat specialist who can prescribe for the kind of cold that Brezhnev has. [...]

Monday 27th, Cavtat
[...] Flew by copter to the location – took about 40 minutes. Then were asked by Popovi
to go to Sarajevo to have a look at the inevitable ‘Tito’ house. It is the usual thing. A house divided into two floors the top one of which is two suites comprised of bathroom, bedroom with two single beds stuck together, and two minute sitting rooms for each suite. Why two? The helicopter attempted a landing in the grounds but it was impossible so we went off to the airport. [...] Knocked off three scenes as fast as I could and we were back on board the copter by 8.30pm. [...]

Tuesday 28th, Sarajevo
Sitting here in my ‘suite’ in the house in Sarajevo. It is as far as one can get from the city without being in the country. The mountains go straight up a couple of hundred yards away. It is, this house and the surrounding ones, again one of those little estates which we have found by now everywhere we go which contain hotels and adjacent houses for the exclusive use of VIPs of the Party. Last night, for instance, one of the boys said that two men appeared unexpectedly and were shown into rooms on the ground floor. That floor has about 8 small bedrooms. So I suppose the VIPs don't bother to book into hotels when on business outside the big cities; they simply report to the nearest Commie-complex.

I finished work ridiculously early [...] about mid-day and was back here in the house by 1pm. Called E immediately at the house but it appears that she'd decided to stay on the
Kalizma
. Called again this evening after I'd been out shopping but couldn't get through. Will call again later. I feel terribly lonely without Elizabeth. Last night I had dinner as already said in previous entry and today I had lunch – wienerschnitzel, not bad, – just one course when Poppo [Popovi
] [...] turned up again with a very splendid brochure of an exhibition here called ‘Art on the soil of Yugoslavia from prehistoric times to the present.’ He is most insistent that E and I should pay a sort of state visit to it. I loathe the idea of a conducted tour around a museum. I loathe museums anyway and in my case they are a waste of time. The last one I went to was the big one in NY called the Metropolitan I think – it's on the east side of Central Park.
¹⁸¹
There were a lot of large Rodins about I seem to remember and I wandered about dutifully enough and was stopped by only one thing – a painting of a large forest, the shot, as ‘twere, taken from one mountain top to another and in the far tree-covered mountain was a long thin waterfall. It was so excellently done that one wasn't sure whether it was smoke coming up from the bed of the valley or water streaming down. The woman I was with, a journalist who was supposed to be an aficionada, said it was a ‘nothing picture’. And by a ‘nobody’. So that was that. Next time I'm in New York I'll see if I can find it again.