If you read the excerpts from Richard Burton's diaries that were serialized earlier this month in London's Daily Telegraph, you learned that he enjoyed sleeping with Elizabeth Taylor and appears to have regarded most of his other colleagues with fathomless contempt: "Marlon [Brando] has yet to learn to speak.... I love Larry [Olivier] but he really is a shallow little man with a mediocre intelligence but a splendid salesman.... Why do the audience look at Paul Scofield and not me? He walks like a pimp, he's got a patently false voice." One might well suppose that Mr. Burton had no interests other than gossip, money, drink and sex.

In fact, there's quite a bit more to "The Richard Burton Diaries" than that. Among other things, Mr. Burton turns out to have been an exceedingly literate man who had shrewd opinions about the many books that he read. Here, for instance, is what he thought of Anthony Powell's "A Dance to the Music of Time": "He gives the impression of a deliberately distant artist. His canvas is large but he stands a long way off and paints with a remote brush only in the corners and only miniatures."

Richard Burton as Shakespeare's Henry V in 1951. Getty Images

Would that Mr. Burton had felt moved to express himself on such matters at greater length. The thought definitely crossed his mind. In a 1970 diary entry, he actually confesses to having once "contemplat[ed] retirement from acting and writing instead—not for a living, not for money.... I wanted to write because I sought for some kind of permanence, a cover-bound shot at immortality and not a rapidly dating film and acting [career] to match." Had he done so, he could have become one of the handful of performing artists who've written interestingly about something other than themselves.

It's not a knock on performers to point out that they tend not to write well about anything else. To become a first-rate actor or musician requires a ruthless single-mindedness that leaves little time for secondary pursuits. In "Young Man With a Horn," her recently republished 1938 novel about a Bix Beiderbecke-like jazz musician, Dorothy Baker described Rick Martin, her gifted but ill-fated protagonist, in language that leaves the reader in no doubt of his cultural narrowness: "The only thing he ever had anything to say about was music.... His instinctive taste was infallible within the bounds of his chosen field. Outside of that he was deaf, dumb, blind, even slightly halt and more or less lame."

To be sure, such narrowness doesn't preclude writing well about other people who do what you do. The jazz pianist Marian McPartland, for instance, is deservedly well-known for her penetrating, stylishly written profiles of such esteemed colleagues as Paul Desmond, Bill Evans and Mary Lou Williams. Yet Paul de Barros reveals in "Shall We Play That One Together?: The Life and Art of Jazz Piano Legend Marian McPartland," his soon-to-be-published biography, that Ms. McPartland "had little interest in politics, the world of ideas, or even other art forms.... she had no interest in 'literature' per se." She even found "The Great Gatsby" boring!

Few things are rarer than a performer who takes a broader view of the world of art. One such artist was Alec Guinness, who published four books, all of them nominally autobiographical, that offer evidence of his aesthetic cultivation and unusually wide-ranging interests. In "A Positively Final Appearance," a 1999 volume of journal entries written toward the end of his long life, he tossed off this passing remark: "For me there are two salves to apply when I feel spiritually bruised—listening to a Haydn symphony or sonata (his clear common sense always penetrates) and seeking out something in Montaigne's essays. This morning, in spite of the promise of a bright cloudless day, I woke curmudgeonly and disapproving of the world and most of its inhabitants. Montaigne pulled me up sharply." Has it ever occurred to anyone else to yoke those two great spokesmen for the civilized virtues of the Age of Reason? If so, it's news to me.

I wish I could say with certainty that Mr. Guinness was a better actor for having had such humane interests, but I doubt it, just as I doubt that Ms. McPartland would be a better pianist had she spent her spare time reading Proust or haunting art galleries. Art doesn't work that way. In fact, I'm not sure it "works" in any particular way. It just is, and so are the men and women who make it. Some are full-fledged intellectuals, others semiliterate bumpkins. Either way, we must take them as they are and judge them by what they do. In the end, nothing else matters. I'm glad to know what Richard Burton thought of "A Dance to the Music of Time," but no matter how smart he was, he'll be remembered—or not—for his acting, not his diaries.
