A twelve-day, six-hundred-page fever dream
The essence of this extraordinary book can be found within its structure
I only know one other person who’s also read Erotic Vagrancy by Roger Lewis. So when I finished it, I sent her a message. I told her how much I loved the book, and that if she needed me I would either be out of the country for tax reasons or recuperating in hospital while my private doctor sourced a fresh supply of sleeping pills to mix with my breakfast vodka.
IYKYK.
For good measure I also sent some screenshots, of Amazon reviews by readers who didn’t get on with the book so well.
Here’s one:
And another:
Safe to say, opinions are divided on Erotic Vagrancy. Half the Amazon reviews are 5 stars, but the 20% that are 1 star are vehement and visceral. They are angry and dismissive - hurt, maybe? When I sent them to my my friend, I was positioning myself as more enlighted than the reviewers. I did this because I’m a snob, and because I’m also quite binarily evangelical about things. (When I like something, I love it, my wife once said. She meant it in a fanboy way, which I’m sure must be adorable but it does belie my middle age somewhat, as does the fact that I’m as likely to do this about Girls Aloud as, say, Joy Division, but really in either case I should be beyond this now - the idea that the noise of your love for something is an indicator of the quality of the thing is nonsense.) Any club thrives on exclusion, of course, and I figured this new club I’d just convened in my mind - the Local Readers of Erotic Vagrancy Club - might get under way nicely with a little shared schadenfreude.
Instead, my friend took the wind from my sails. She identified, would you believe, with the reviewers. “I can sort of understand the feeling,” she said, reasonably and maturely (neither of which I wanted. I wanted bitchiness and superiority. I wanted these others dismissed with a waft of the hand before we poured ourselves another drink). Then, even more shocking: she’d found the experience of reading this book “aggravating” at times, “frustrating” even.
I placed a hand over my wounded heart.
(Yes, I know I still haven’t said anything about the contents. I’m getting to it. There’s just one more detail to share, and it explains everything about this infernal, incredible book.
It is this:)
My friend is not merely the only person I know who has read this book. She’s also the person who leant it to me. She told me about it. She’s the only reason I’d heard of it.
She’d been evangelical at Christmas, when she couldn’t stop reading it. Her husband had complained that she spent the whole holiday doing so. Then, weeks later, she turned up at my door, unsolicited, to “see if I wanted to read it”.
Of course she had mixed feelings. She is also temperamentally less ‘all-in’ than me. But ambivalence doesn’t bring a book to your door. Pressing a book you found aggravating onto someone else is plain weird. Except it isn’t, because Erotic Vagrancy is that book. A hot potato. A hospital pass. Reading it you are as a moth to a flame. It is a literary chain letter. It is powerful voodoo. It is the kind of reading experience you can’t be left alone with, which is why my friend passed it to me and why you’re reading this. Erotic Vagrancy is the videotape in Infinite Jest - a book so good it will ruin you. Which is appropriate. The people the book is about were ruined too.
When she dropped off the book I was merely curious. When she dropped off the book it was Sunday and a good time to try the opening pages. What harm could it do? Plenty, it turns out. This book takes over your life. Later that night I texted to say I’d already slammed 80 pages. I texted again when I’d finished it, a mere twelve days later, at the end of a six-hundred-page fever dream, in the middle of which my wife flew to Indonesia for a week, and I was clocking consecutive twelve-hour days on a really intensive work project. Neither stopped me. Train journeys went in a flash. I hungrily turned to it first thing in the morning and last at night. I’d become Harry Goldfarb in Requiem For A Dream. Just a taste, I lied. Seeing if I “wanted to read it” was like passing me a pipe to see how I enjoyed crack.
What’s so compulsive about Erotic Vagrancy is its structure. (There is also Lewis’ singular writing style, of course, breathless and bitchy, with long, digressive paragraphs that constantly draw your attention back and forth, and which find room for circuitous cameos and minor details, and which probably account for the majority of unfavourable reviews, since its appeal is highly subjective, though I’d argue readers have made a category error here - despite its billing the book is less biography than it is an exhaustively researched piece of creative non-fiction, the extended essay stretched to its limit.) The structure is brilliant because it exerts on the reader the same obsessive pull that its protagonists exerted on each other. It mimics obsession. You are kept hungry, then sated, with titbits and flashes and allusions. A scene can leap forward and back decades at any moment, prioritising thematic links over chronological clarity. Lewis paints for us the lurid, ego-driven worlds that Burton and Taylor first inherited, then ruthlessly expanded for themselves, before detailing the explosive fusion that happened when those worlds collided. The book is structured around its characters the way a whirlpool is structured around its vortex. You’re sucked in the way they were. You can’t let go the way they couldn’t.
It goes like this:
First, the prologue - fifty pages on the Burton-Taylor phenomenon and what it all means. The explanation behind the book’s title - from a statement issued by the Vatican as the Cleopatra shoot made a temporary city-within-a-city on the outskirts of Rome, the Catholic church warning the couple about the consequences of their moral bankruptcy - lands with an epiphanic thud at the very end of this section. You know how the very last words of Roxy Music’s Virginia Plain is the very first mention of the title? The sense of drama and singular intent in that moment? That.
Then, a hundred pages on each of them individually, the spotlight first on Taylor, then on Burton; their backstory, their hinterland, their characters. As with Succession or The White Lotus, we are drip-fed the inner lives of wealthy monsters. It is appalling and addictive and sad. Come for the salacious detail, stay for the altogether human tragedy, unfolding over decades.
Next, right at the book’s centre, a section dedicated to the making of Cleopatra, the film that brought them together, the escalating madness of the shoot charted in vigorous detail. Lewis uses a diary entry format - suddenly he’s the world’s most waspish archivist, and the effect is transformative. We are actually moving forward for once, and at some speed. I was taught recently that the pace of a narrative is a matter of simple mathematics: the time of the story being told, over the time taken for its telling - and it can be calculated crudely: the number of days that pass within the story, divided by the number of pages in the book. Lewis does four years or so over a hundred pages, and after so much circling reading this section feels like being cleared for flight launch; we are cruising at altitude; we can take in the increasingly deranged shoot from above, its fattening budgets and run time, the whole story of a cinematic dog wagged by the tail of its stars’ egos.
Then, post accession, a hundred-and-fifty pages on the Burton-Taylor intermarriage: the soap opera, the art, the violence; stars gone supernova. Lewis’ examination of the films they made together is thrilling - revisionist film criticism barely bothering to masquerade as biography by this point. Look at this, it says - this gallery of films, barely remembered now, shot in opulent bedrooms and on sun-drenched terraces, seen anew as fictionalised explorations of the love affair. The soap opera version was already being played out in public, of course, and the parallel ‘realities’ fuelled each other. The circus they brought to town, which lubricated and inhibited the shoots in equal measure, was in turn expanded and made more vivid by the play-acting on screen. The more they cross the streams, the more dangerous it becomes. They become ever more removed from anything resembling real life. Too famous, too rich, too selfish for anything else, they seek respite among the very worst people in the world, holidaying with Tito in Yugoslavia, with Papa Doc in Haiti, and with David and Wallis in whatever fascist dreamland they lived in now. By the mid-70s, the Burtons had transcended Hollywood, which is to say that no one cared very much about the films that Lewis finds so fascinating, and was instead obsessed with the soap opera - their very public private lives. They’d become a kind of royauté sans frontiers, parking their absurd yacht in international waters for the duration of a film shoot, or for however long a fame-hungry fascist would have them. Fittingly, inevitably, the apotheosis of this story is also its nadir.
Then, eventually, the slow incline, towards some kind of landing, a crash - a final hundred pages on their lives post-divorce.
Followed by a short epilogue.
And breathe.
There’s a loose chronology to the book, as you can tell, but it’s rarely straightforward. In his author’s note, Lewis fears he “may be making a fatal miscalculation, but I am assuming no one wants another fat, conventional or ‘authorised’ biography, if by biography we mean a chronicle of events, where it can be made to matter what is supposed to happen next.” (I wonder if he’s read those 1 star ‘reviews’.) This book isn’t that. Instead, reading it is an almost fractal experience: we zoom further and further in, the picture an ever more detailed version of itself. The story feels inexorable, its conclusion - and our own - never in doubt. The page-turning impulse comes not from plot - we’re given the silhouette upfront, and Lewis slowly and exhaustively fills it in - but from the salaciousness and sheer poetry of its telling. Round and round we go, exhausting ourselves but unable to stop. The road to hell, as Dante knew, is circular.
Our impressions of the couple? Maybe this:
Taylor was the centre of her own celebrity universe from the age of 12, spoiled and selfish, and married twice before she was 21, which left her bruised her in every possible way. She was hospitalised a lot, sometimes as a result of suicide attempts which may or may not have been real, with a litany of private doctors ready to prescribe whatever she wanted. (It’s never quite clear with Taylor where her bodily suffering ends and attention-seeking begins.) She expected lavish gifts and fawning men and always got them. She stole Eddie Fisher from Debbie Reynolds then dropped him for Burton in an instant. She won two Oscars, lived in grand houses and hotel suites, and wherever she went, a retinue of staff were expected to feed and clothe and groom her, and to clean up after her dogs. She was as well house-trained as they were.
Burton’s mother died when he was young. He was brought up partly by his sister, not at all by his alcoholic father, and problematically by an older, theatrical Welshman called Phillip Burton, who ‘adopted’ him as a young man (it’s his surname the young actor took) and with whom it is also alleged he had a sexual relationship. At the height of his fame, Burton was drunk almost all the time, on set and off it, removed as he largely was from the place where his talent made most sense - the stage. Before Taylor, his was a milieu of Gielgud and Olivier, of playing royalty and the RSC. Self-parodically, he was desperate to play Dr Faustus, and later on he did, when he was living out the real-life consequences of his own Faustian pact. What he got was Taylor and money and global fame. What he paid with was his soul. He dropped his wife like a stone, and never saw again the ‘backward’ daughter (autistic, most likely) who he placed in care. He was dead at 58.
Maybe, in the end, those 1 star reviewers, as my friend says, do have a point. It is at times a pretty unedifying read. But I also maintain they’ve missed the point completely. Stephen Fry’s pull quote on the front has it right: “magnificent, terrible, tragic, triumphant.” It is ALL these things - and especially the terrible - because Burton and Taylor were all these things too, and whether you like the story it tells is neither here nor there.
There are, I know, many people who like their cultural history to come in a more affirming and digestible form. Cosy reminders of things they used to love, which conveniently affirm their prejudices. You know the sort of thing: a Dominic Sandbrook-type, churning out establishment defences for bitter boomers in the Daily Mail. (Imagine the cognitive dissonance required to lead with nudge-wink tittle-tattle when writing your Kissinger obituary, for instance.) This book is not for those people. (To be honest, I’m not sure history per se is for these people, so vexed are they about the idea that it is being ‘rewritten’; let them have their self-serving myths if they want.) But here’s the thing: the subjects of Erotic Vagrnacy are exactly the kind of higher-order, good-old-days celebrity beloved of those readers, which is why some of them have ended up buying the book and reading it. Which is objectively funny, because Erotic Vagrancy feels to me like the triumph of a very different kind of testimony, one defined by what we might call the Ellroy-ification of history.
In his LA Quartet books and alternate histories like American Tabloid, crime writer James Ellroy coined a noirish, second-hand take on the blurred lines between crime, celebrity and politics in the 40s, 50s and 60s. Proper underbelly stuff. He understood events to be driven by some off-the-book exchange between money, power and sex. And race. Sub-plots would involve, for example, Lana Turner’s boyfriend - the real-life Johnny Stompanato - working for the real-life mobster Mickey Cohen, who in turn was bribing the chief of police, all of them under investigation by a fictional detective. Ellroy invented scenes for JFK, Marilyn, Hoover - anyone you can mention. Every character has their peccadillos; many are abusers, often they’re corrupt, certainly damaged. Ellroy’s writing felt like a peek behind the curtain when I first read him thirty years ago. But now his secret history thing is everywhere. LA Confidential kickstarted the suffix ‘Confidential’ as a way to denote salaciousness and secretive - Shawn Levy’s Ratpack Confidential is a brilliant example, but I’m ashamed to admit the trope’s overuse stopped me from reading Anthony Bourdain’s Kitchen Confidential. (Sidenote: Strictly Ballroom had the same effect, of course, via Strictly Come Dancing. I have absolutely no intention of seeing Damian Hurley’s Strictly Confidential, which you might as well call Prefix Suffix, so vacuous is its title.) Since then, I’d argue real life has become more Ellroy-like. Bill Clinton and Donald Trump have lived out his every cliche - sex, mob bosses, cover-ups, the whole cherchez la femme thing. Right now, 45 is in court defending himself against the cover-up of hush money payments to a porn star in exchange for sex, with stories emerging about stories planted in the National Enquirer with the aim of damaging opponents and former allies. It’s all so Ellroy I bet that Jack Vincennes is back from the dead, calling jurisdiction.
The point being, the dark underbelly is front and centre now. We consume this stuff in real time, not fifty years hence. We know the seedy stuff is happening, and if it’s happening we want to know. We are sometimes prurient, and we sometimes leer, but rarely do we turn away. We stan as we judge. We’re invested in power couples, and recoil at the manipulative power of abusers we know but can’t name. We marvel at the new movie or the new video or the new interview. But we also watch the CCTV footage, or the video clip that someone surreptitioulsy took. We read the carefully worded Notes-app statement, the apology, the appeal for time or room for growth. For the endless supply of wannabe Taylors and Burtons, image control is a full-time job. Performance and reality have merged - all private life is public now. Existence is at the surface, on the screen, shiny and black and glassy, our depths merely hidden in plain sight, until they’re not.
Shortly after finishing Erotic Vagrancy, I listened to an episode of the LRB’s brilliant podcast, Past Present Future, which has done a whole series celebrating the art of the essay, from Montaigne through to Didion. This particular episode was on Susan Sontag’s Against Interpretation. I’ve not read it, but it struck me how so much of what she seemed to be advocating was present in Lewis’s book. Sontag railed against the imposition on artwork of meaning and assumed intent. That kind of thinking, she says, suffocates the work. It also misses much of what might make it interesting: what was happening at the surface, or within the form. And since the twentieth century was an age of surfaces - photography, film, celebrity - we need a form of criticism to match.
Now, it’s highly likely I’ve got this all wrong, and that Lewis’s reading of the Burtons’ films is precisely what Sontag hated - interpretation the art cannot carry. That’s certainly what some of those Amazon reviewers think he’s doing. But it occurs to me that the Burton-Taylor moment - the phenomenon - was all surface. These people felt no shame, or else they were so consumed by it that everything they did was an attempt to swallow it. Either way, appetites that you or I might hide were barely contained below the surface. Their instincts, animalistic and narcissistic as they were, shone through in everything they did. Perhaps what Lewis is telling us, in choosing to examine these monstrous, surface-level egos, to look at how they lived, their warring divorcee film roles, their appalling behaviour, their lasciviousness and their addictions and their obsession with each other, is that all this was part of the same thing. On screen they were versions of their real selves; off-screen they played the roles they craved. It was all performance. It all swirled around in one big whirlpool, circling the vortex that was their passion for one another, which is another way of saying their egos. What’s that line from Faster by the Manic Street Preachers? “Self-disgust is self-obsession, honey, and I do as I please.” That.
Our forebears watched it all, of course. They gobbled it up in technicolour and in widescreen. We still do that too, only now we watch whoever we want, whenever we want. To paraphrase Bowie, we are hooked not just to the silver screen, but many more screens besides. We watch in portait. We watch in close-up, in gifs. We zoom in, we screenshot, we share. We don’t want gods or royalty any more. We want those we put on a pedestal to be, (not so) deep down, as selfish and as ugly and as human as we know ourselves to be. We may not have staff, or dogs, or wake up drinking scotch, or appear in four-hour long epics, or in forgotten movies soaked in booze and sex, but we are, just as much as Burton and Taylor were, prisoners of our own appetites. We want what we want, even if it makes us unwell. We have become the whirlpool. Trapped in the world we have made for ourselves, we swirl around the vortex of our obsession.
It hardly matters whether you like this. The algorithm doesn’t care. Indeed, it thrives on your outrage. If something resists your demands, you can simply vent your anger and feed the machine.
Give it 1 star and be on your way. There’ll be more content along in a minute.