The Gallery
JOHN HORNE BURNS (1916–1953) was born in Andover, Massachusetts, the son of a wealthy Irish Catholic lawyer. He graduated from Harvard and then taught English at a boys’ boarding school before being drafted in 1942. Employed as a censor of prisoners’ mail, Burns spent most of World War II in northern Africa and Italy; his experiences in Naples —including those within the gay community of American servicemen and local Italians—became the raw material for his first novel, The Gallery, published in 1947 to considerable critical acclaim. Disaffected with American culture, Burns soon moved to Italy. He published two further novels, Lucifer with a Book (a satire drawing on his experience as a boarding-school teacher, published in 1949) and A Cry of Children (1952), while supporting himself as a travel writer, but both books received scathing reviews. While working on a fourth novel, Burns died of a cerebral hemorrhage, probably caused by alcoholism.
DAVID MARGOLICK is a contributing editor at Vanity Fair and, before that, a longtime reporter for The New York Times. He is the author of, among other books, Dreadful: The Short Life and Gay Times of John Horne Burns.
PAUL FUSSELL (1924–2012) was the author of many books on war and twentieth-century culture, including The Great War and Modern Memory, which won the National Book Award. His memoir Doing Battle: The Making of a Skeptic chronicles the time he spent fighting with the 103rd infantry division during World War II.
THE GALLERY
JOHN HORNE BURNS
With introductions by
DAVID MARGOLICK
and
PAUL FUSSELL
NEW YORK REVIEW BOOKS
New York
This is a New York Review Book
Published by The New York Review of Books
435 Hudson Street, New York, NY 10014
www.nyrb.com
Copyright © 1947 by John Horne Burns
Introduction to the 2013 Edition copyright © 2013 by David Margolick
Introduction copyright © 2004 by Paul Fussell
All rights reserved.
Cover photograph: Jet pilot helmets, 1946; Charles E. Steinheimer / Time Life Pictures / Getty Images
Cover design: Katy Homans
The Library of Congress has cataloged the earlier printing as follows:
Burns, John Horne, 1916–1953.
The gallery / John Horne Burns; Introduction by Paul Fussell.
p. cm. — (New York Review Books classics)
ISBN 1-59017-080-6 (pbk. : alk. paper)
1. Italy—History—Allied occupation, 1943–1947—Fiction. 2. World War, 1939–1945—Italy—Naples—Fiction. 3. Americans—Italy—Fiction. 4. Naples (Italy)—Fiction. 5. Soldiers—Fiction. 6. Gay men—Fiction.
I. Title. II. Series.
PS3503.U6385G3 2004
813'.54—dc22
2004000089
eISBN 978-1-59017-807-2
v1.0
For a complete list of books in the NYRB Classics series, visit www.nyrb.com or write to:
Catalog Requests, NYRB, 435 Hudson Street, New York, NY 10014
FLOORPLAN
OF THE GALLERY
Biographical Notes
Title Page
Copyright and More Information
Introduction to the 2013 Edition
Introduction
THE GALLERY
Entrance
FIRST PORTRAIT
The Trenchfoot of Michael Patrick
FIRST PROMENADE
(Casablanca)
SECOND PORTRAIT
Louella
SECOND PROMENADE
(Fedhala)
THIRD PORTRAIT
Hal
THIRD PROMENADE
(Casablanca-Algiers)
FOURTH PORTRAIT
Father Donovan and Chaplain Bascom
FOURTH PROMENADE
(Algiers)
FIFTH PORTRAIT
Momma
FIFTH PROMENADE
(Algiers)
SIXTH PORTRAIT
The Leaf
SIXTH PROMENADE
(Naples)
SEVENTH PORTRAIT
Giulia
SEVENTH PROMENADE
(Naples)
EIGHTH PORTRAIT
Queen Penicillin
EIGHTH PROMENADE
(Naples)
NINTH PORTRAIT
Moe
Exit
INTRODUCTION TO THE 2013 EDITION
EVEN AS A TEENAGER, JOHN HORNE BURNS wrote novels compulsively. Every summer from 1934 or so until 1941, whether home from Harvard or from his prep-school teaching job, he’d repair to the “man’s room” in the garage alongside his parents’ home in Andover, Massachusetts, and start, then finish, another novel.
He’d work furiously—producing several thousand words a day or night, before walking over to nearby Shawsheen Village for a drink—and confidently: There’d be no crumpled pages and only occasional crossings-out. His handwriting was tiny, almost indecipherable; he’d read once that geniuses had small script and, accordingly, so did he. Emulating the English writers and poets he’d studied in college, he developed a style that was formal, flowery, a bit archaic—as were his titles. What Wondrous Life! for instance, was taken from a poem by Andrew Marvell.
To a select few—his younger sister, Cathleen; a fellow teacher named Douglas McKee—Burns would show, and show off, his manuscripts. But the books, while dazzling in parts, were impenetrable, and not just because of the handwriting. McKee later called them performances, “intellectual exercises, with no real human content at all.” “He had a tendency to overdo it,” was how the wife of another faculty colleague put it. “Each page was so full of brilliant wit that nothing stood out and it was all too much—a barrage.”
Actually, that wasn’t entirely right. Burns’s books weren’t simply nonhuman; they were inhuman. One of them, The Cynic Faun (the phrase was from one of his Harvard mentors, the poet Robert Hillyer, to whom the book was dedicated), written in the summer of 1937, was a paean to sadism, including explicit examples of sexual perversity (his “hero” allows a blind friend from boyhood to drown and nearly strangles his imbecilic sidekick simply for the fun of it), extolling heartlessness and targeting those with physical and mental deformities. “A symbol of the grandeur of wickedness,” Burns called it. Hillyer must have blanched, as did Burns’s agent many years later when he showed her another early book, this one called Learn Valor, Child. “That all of your characters are stinkers is beside the point,” she wrote him. “It doesn’t ring true. I suppose there are such people as you’ve written about, but somehow they emerge as caricatures.”
Not surprisingly, the books proved unpublishable. (When Burns showed one to Blanche Knopf, she told him to come back in five years.) And yet Burns kept churning out what his sister politely called “practice novels”—by one count, there were eventually eight of them—either because he loved doing it or because he couldn’t help doing it or because, as a clever, conceited, supercilious, almost nihilistic man with few close friends, he had nothing better to do. For all his literary aspirations, Burns was clearly going nowhere. Then something great happened to him: World War II.
Burns, who at the time was teaching teenagers at the Loomis School in Windsor, Connecticut, didn’t have to go: Declaring that he was gay would have given him an easy out. As someone who’d always floated above politics and other petty things, Burns certainly felt no great moral urge to participate. In October 1940, a reporter for the Loomis student newspaper asked him whether the United States should go to war. “Absolutely no,” he replied. “Because (a) If we go to war we will come out bankrupt. (b) We are defeating a unification of Europe which will come sooner or later anyhow. (c) I am a pacifist. (d) I don’t want to be shot.” Besides, his Irish American mother, t
o whom he was fervently devoted, was virulently anti-English; when someone had come to the Burns’s home to collect “Bundles for Britain,” she’d thrown the poor girl out on her ear.
Yet when Burns got drafted, he readily went. He’d tired of teaching students who—but for the artsy few in each class—he’d considered stolid, stupid rich kids. He found Loomis oppressive and its elderly headmaster (who’d taken him on when many other prestigious New England prep schools, including Burns’s alma mater, Phillips Andover, wouldn’t hire Catholics) tyrannical. Perhaps he craved companionship: The American military was filled with gay men, a million or more despite the prohibition against them; judging from Burns’s letters to one of his gay students—a correspondence surely unique in wartime annals (how many soldiers wrote of their gay adventures?)—he’d already found many of them stateside. Or perhaps he was simply searching for material for all those novels still to come.
Burns’s war was an adventure, though, as it turned out, a comparatively cushy one. Thanks to his fluency in German and Italian—for a war against Hitler and Mussolini, he had chosen his languages well—he was spared combat, assigned instead to army intelligence. In August 1943 he landed in North Africa where, safely behind the lines, he spent his days censoring the letters of homesick Italian prisoners of war. In his ample leisure time, Burns pursued four of his five greatest passions: reading (whatever he could find); writing (mostly letters home, though he composed some poems, novels having temporarily become unwieldy); music (many of the men in his unit were musicians and Burns, an accomplished pianist and vocalist, became both performer and impresario, staging and participating in classical programs of staggering sophistication, especially for the North African desert); and drinking. With a rate of venereal disease of “99 44/100 percent,” as he put it, in the nearby town, the fifth pursuit—sex—had to wait.
As insulated as Burns was, as much time as he spent procuring Herbert Tareyton cigarettes or sprinkling umlauts throughout the printed programs for his musicales, tales of the real war inevitably reached, and touched, him. The fighting seemed as futile and imbecilic to Burns in North Africa as it had in Connecticut; even D-Day didn’t excite him much. But the tales of carnage and suffering elsewhere, along with the loneliness, homesickness, and dislocation he felt, ate away at Burns’s cynical soul. So did various day-to-day encounters, either with Loomis students turned soldiers or working-class GIs he’d have disdained in civilian life or the local “Ayrabs” or even Italian POWs. He joked about going soft—“Am I getting like Aldous Huxley’s St. Francis of Assisi, ‘a nasty little pervert who went around licking lepers’ sores?’” he wrote with mock concern to a friend—but the ferment in him was real, and it produced unaccustomed introspection, insight, and empathy. “The things that used to enchain me: wit, perception, kultchah—no longer seem to matter much; they’re an accident of birth and money,” he wrote his mother. “The closest friendships here—and at the beach-head—are founded in tenderness, sacrifice, courage, humor, kindness.” He’d always been “a very clever boy, attractive when he chose to be, palming off beautiful manners for a lack of heart,” he went on, but now he realized “there are millions of other people in the world, and that really they’re very much like me.”
This newfound wisdom only intensified when, in late July 1944, Burns finally reached Naples. Despite the ghastly destruction wrought first by the occupying (and then retreating) Germans and later by the liberating Allies, the city dazzled him with its beauty and vitality: even the San Carlo Opera House (where he was to watch Tosca a couple dozen times) had reopened. Then there were the Neapolitans, who despite decades of Fascism and years of war and privation remained dignified and resilient. Truth be told, Burns admired them far more than his fellow GIs, whom he found almost uniformly brutal, boorish, provincial, spoiled, and prejudiced, both toward their own (that is, if they were black or Japanese-American) and toward those they’d ostensibly freed.
Burns always knew he would write about the war. For a time, he envisioned a novel based on his unit, from which, he thought, one could glean various universal truths about military life. But even in a group where aesthetes, gays, and gay aesthetes were disproportionately represented, he found himself a loner, and he abandoned the idea. Wartime Naples offered much richer possibilities. And one of its grandest buildings—the Galleria Umberto I, the once-elegant, now degraded nineteenth-century arcade at the heart of town, frequented by occupiers and the occupied alike—provided him a locus and a structure. The new book wouldn’t really be a “novel” at all but a series of portraits of GIs and Italians around the Galleria, interspersed with “promenades”—the continuous ruminations of an anonymous American soldier. Consciously or not, the model wasn’t literary but musical: Mussorgsky’s Pictures at an Exhibition, a piece Burns knew well.
With his usual grandiose sense of himself, Burns duly recorded the date he began The Gallery: June 18, 1945, six weeks after the war in Italy had ended. From the start, it was different from everything he’d written before: neither obnoxious nor perverse, like his novels; nor pretentious, campy, or self-indulgent, like many of his letters; nor abstruse and inaccessible, like much of his poetry and, he felt, too much of modern literature. “James Joyce had to resort to private symbols, but I can use English wrenched in the anguish of the world,” he explained. This book would not be mere sport but something that mattered, that had something to say, that people would understand. It was, he boasted to a friend, “a huge affair,” “like Dostoievsky, Andrew Marvell, and Voltaire,” and “so good I can’t believe I’m writing it.” By mid-September Burns, by then living in Florence, had written half of what he projected to be “800 printed pages of gorgeous marble.”
If anything, Burns now wrote even more effortlessly than usual. For one thing, he really knew his subject: While some of the characters—Luella, the officious Red Cross volunteer; Major Motes, the pompous head of an intelligence unit much like his own; Father Donovan and Chaplain Bascom, dueling clerics from opposite sides of the Christian spectrum—didn’t resemble Burns, many others (Michael Patrick, the homesick Irish American soldier with trench foot, or Hal, the tall, balding second lieutenant who grew more acute the drunker he got) did. The Gallery is a gallery of Burns doppelgängers who, though varying in rank, appearance, erudition, and nationality, are all empathetic, alluring, aloof, wise. Even Giulia, the young Italian woman out to protect her virtue from marauding GIs, and Moe Schulman, the Jewish cabdriver from Brooklyn, sound like him. All are soulful and sensitive; all are embarrassed, nay, horrified by the boorish Americans around them. One of the book’s most arresting chapters, “Queen Penicillin,” is downright autobiographical: Burns knew all about the venereal disease ward at the military hospital in “Mussolini’s Fairgrounds” outside Naples because, after a fling with a Neapolitan “dreadful”—Burns’s preferred term for a gay man—he had contracted syphilis. (Few soldiers ever wrote about this, either.)
Another bout of illness—this time, hepatitis—separated Burns from his book for a few months. In early 1946 he brought his unfinished manuscript—by now, it was “like nothing since King Lear”—back to the States and then to Loomis, to which he had grudgingly returned, though now with the expectation that imminent literary fame would soon set him free. There, on April 23, 1946, less than a year after he’d started it, he completed his magnum opus. “I fell across my Underwood and wept my heart out,” he wrote to an army buddy. “The Gallery, I fear, is one of the masterpieces of the twentieth century.” Before long the venerable house of Harper & Brothers agreed to publish it. And when it did, on June 4, 1947, things turned out just as Burns had envisioned.
The New York Times saluted Burns’s “rancorously vivid portfolio of portraits.” Two writers from the Great War—Ernest Hemingway and John Dos Passos—praised this new voice from the latest war. The Saturday Review put Burns on its cover and named him the best war novelist of the year. When Life photographed the war’s literary stars, Burns—glowering at the camera, u
biquitous cigarette in hand—sat squarely at the front. As remarkable as what The Gallery was to some was what it portended. “I feel pretty certain that Mr. John Horne Burns, when he has worked on his craft longer, will give us something both solider and more intense than this already remarkable book,” Edmund Wilson wrote in The New Yorker.
Modern readers might be surprised to learn that despite its scabrous portrait of GIs, the book prompted no outcries from veterans groups or conservative congressmen, and for one simple reason: The country knew that while he had exaggerated some, Burns essentially had it right. By 1947, Americans were fed up with propaganda and sick of war, well acquainted with the toll it had taken on the nation’s men and women. Sixteen million of them had served, too many to be sacrosanct. “The high command will agree that this is nothing but the truth,” William McFee wrote in the New York newspaper The Sun. “We have to make armies out of the material available. Kipling reported the dearth of plaster saints in the British Army long ago.” Decades would pass before the easy, revisionist deification of the “greatest generation” took hold and the GIs of World War II became officially unassailable.
But most of those who reviewed The Gallery saw, or let themselves see, only one facet of it. Entirely missed, or willfully overlooked, was something far more daring: the book’s pervasive gayness. It is clearest in what Burns’s contemporary and archrival Gore Vidal later conceded to be one of the most brilliant pieces of gay writing in the twentieth century: “Momma,” the astonishing chapter on the Galleria’s gay bar. Little that Burns had done up to this point could be called courageous. To those who didn’t know better (and even to some, like his family, who did), Burns maintained a pretext of heterosexuality. But writing so vivid and explicit an account of gay soldiers fraternizing—at a time when, officially at least, gay soldiers did not, could not exist—was gutsy indeed; Burns was essentially coming out. Remarkable, too, was his salute to the gay sensibility and his plea for tolerance, coming as it did when homosexuality remained underground and—amid the paranoia of cold war America—was increasingly under attack. So completely did straight critics ignore “Momma,” though, that it generated virtually no reaction, nor any further commentary from Burns. Readers can debate whether Momma’s bar or anything like it ever existed or even could have—or was merely Burns’s fondest fantasy.