The Gallery Read online

  The Gallery’s gay tincture is apparent in many other places, thanks to the numerous “bobby pin” clues Burns drops throughout. “To hell with the New York stage,” declares Hal, the second lieutenant in the book’s third portrait. “I look enough like a chorus boy as it is. I don’t dare go to the beach at Fire Island.” One of the fussbudget flunkies around Major Motes wears a flowered kimono and sports a scented handkerchief. A dead captain who comes back to life was formerly a Broadway chorus boy. Even the gruff, inarticulate, syphilitic soldier in “Queen Penicillin” eventually gets propositioned—by a “gentian-eyed former dancer,” no less—into going to the ballet once his brutal hypodermic cure is complete. Of course, gay readers would have spotted all this, though few dared write down, much less circulate or publish, what they thought. In a sense, they read an entirely different book from everyone else, appreciating entirely different things about it and continuing to admire it long after the book pretty much vanished from the American mainstream.

  And why did it disappear? For one thing, Burns himself did, barely seven years after The Gallery appeared; following the publication of two disappointing and much-criticized sequels, he effectively drank himself to death in Italian exile in 1953. Additionally, other wartime novels, like The Naked and the Dead, got even more attention, pushing it into the background. Embarrassed by his homosexuality, Burns’s family discouraged anyone from writing about him, which would necessarily have led to writing about it. And, in still-homophobic academia, scholars knew that tackling gay subjects like Burns and his books was professional suicide. So The Gallery remained in the shadows—except among a chosen few. “There was nothing I could add to war literature that was not in From Here to Eternity, and had not been produced before by Norman Mailer and a very excellent novel—and it’s been forgotten now—by John Horne Burns—The Gallery,” Joseph Heller, reflecting on the long and difficult gestation of Catch-22, said in 1999.

  One of the glories of the reemergence of The Gallery in a more tolerant time is that gays and straights alike can now read it in unison and admire it in a way that Burns himself would have found quite inconceivable: that is, for all the same reasons.

  —DAVID MARGOLICK

  INTRODUCTION

  THE GALLERY IS AN EXTRAORDINARY CONTRIBUTION TO AMERICAN literature. Its structure is inventive and its prose is memorably energetic. There is nothing like it, and it thoroughly deserved the praise lavished on it in 1947, when it was one of the earliest works of fiction generated by the war just concluded. Over the years readers as varied as Edmund Wilson, Norman Mailer, and Gore Vidal have found themselves excited by this book, one which is undeniably an oddity produced by an undeniably odd author motivated by rare moral convictions.

  John Horne Burns was born into an upper-middle-class Boston family and educated at Andover and Harvard. He started a career teaching English at a prep school in Connecticut, but in 1942 he was drafted into the infantry; soon someone noticed how bright and ambitious he was, and he was commissioned a 2nd Lieutenant in military intelligence. After serving in North Africa, he found himself in 1944 performing intelligence work in the newly surrendered city of Naples. There he quickly sloughed off his boyish innocence about people in general and his fellow Americans in particular. He first noted the wartime disgrace of Americans in the crowded hold of a troop transport, where he observed soldiers stealing from each other. As he reported, “In the 19 days of crossing the Atlantic I remember that something happened to me inside. I think I died as an American.”

  Naples in 1944 (“that anthill of humanity,” one visitor called it) was a horrible place. The city and its port had been thoroughly bombed first by the British and Americans, then by the Germans, and buildings were ruined and streets clogged with rubble. Civilized living conditions were minimal: there was often neither water nor electricity, and citizens were starving. Earmarks of Naples were the infamous black market and the dramatic intensification of thievery. The occupying Allied soldiery found that a can of C-rations could purchase the services of child-pimps and their prostitutes, a group which included hungry, once-quite-respectable women. Venereal diseases were common, probably in part because both British and American deserters raped freely.

  Sometimes the local kleptomania joined the Neapolitan urge to dignity with curious results: it is reported that at one public concert, every woman wore an overcoat visibly made from a stolen U.S. Army blanket. Not all boys were pimping: some, apparently fancying futures in engineering, took charge of a damaged tank, about which Norman Lewis, a British soldier at the time, writes in Naples ’44, “although one never saw a finger laid on it, shrank away day by day, as if its armor-plating had been made of ice, until nothing remained.” But that was child’s play. More serious were cases of an army company’s vehicles vanishing forever from the train station, of a freighter which somehow disappeared from the bay. The overnight theft of all the wheels of a military company’s vehicles occurred in five minutes despite thirty-foot-high walls.

  Many of these events were traceable to denizens of the Galleria Umberto Primo, which gave Burns his book’s title and which he designated the “unofficial heart of Naples.” This was a once-grand glass-roofed indoor arcade, now full of shops specializing in stolen goods, black market restaurants, low bars and the usual prostitutes and pimps, plus mobsters and thieves. It was there that Allied troops went to sell U.S. government clothing, supplies, and food, and to trade stolen objects for sex. The Gallery was a thoroughly sordid setting and Burns seized on it as an emblem of the Second World War, a war without nobility, where women and children were without apology killed or maimed by area bombing and where “liberated” people like the Italians could be treated with utmost contempt.

  In disclosing the conditions attendant on the worst war in history, Burns chose a technique very different from the straight narrative method adopted by such other writers of “war books” as Norman Mailer, James Jones, Gore Vidal, and Irwin Shaw. For one thing, they focused on battle itself, while combat scenes do not appear in Burns’s book. And where other “war authors” offered continuous coherent narrative, Burns relied on discontinuity, like a sort of prose T. S. Eliot, thus suggesting incoherence as a contemporary social characteristic.

  Burns devised a unique structure for his novel, alternating two kinds of material. First, there are what he calls promenades, scenes a stroller in the Gallery might encounter together with memories of other European places; second, there are portraits, separate treatments of characters one might meet in the Gallery. The result is a plotless book less like a novel than a memoir, or even a travel book, or a collection of sketches illustrating a double theme—the wartime collapse of normal civilian usages and American defects of character and imagination. Of these bits of life some are more successful than others. The most successful usually aim at satire. Burns’s instincts as a satirist were doubtless intensified by experience, first as a lowly teacher at an expensive snobbish private school and then as an army intelligence officer with a duty of investigating crimes committed by U.S. troops, especially in their relations to Italian civilians.

  The war safely over, American readers were now to be let in on a morale-weakening soldiers’ secret, namely that many officers were buffoons and fools, not to mention outright criminals. In disclosing this fact, Joseph Heller’s Catch-22 (1955) was slower to exploit this useful theme than Burns, a trailblazer eight years earlier.

  As befits a gallery in another sense, Burns’s book replaces standard realistic narrative with portraits, nine in all. Few of his characters are allowed to retain their wartime pretensions: airplane pilots glorified elsewhere are here repeatedly demeaned by diction to “airplane drivers.” One of Burns’s most memorable critical portrayals is Captain (later, as a reward for his sycophancy) Major Motes, a reserve officer from Virginia who conceives of enlisted men as analogous to “nigras.” He runs a postal censorship unit where he tyrannizes all subordinates except those whose gross flattery he demands. Burns portrays him as me
ticulously dishonorable and fraudulent, rewarded frequently for his cynical servility by jobs safely well behind the battle line. (Burns exposes him in a section titled puzzlingly “The Leaf” —that is, the golden oak-leaf insignia of a major.)

  Another American target of Burns’s moral contempt is Louella, a Red Cross volunteer charged with sustaining the morale of the soldiers and officers; especially the latter, for the enlisted men “were good kids and all that . . . but the GI’s were just a little vulgar. Perhaps God had intended her for something, well, on a little higher level.” Seeing once a jeep named “Wet Dream,” she now knew what she’d long felt, “that the GI’s had frightful manners.” This naughty jeep persuaded her “that she was intellectually justified in preferring the company of officers.” Early on, she had “tried to understand combat infantrymen, but their dirtiness was repulsive and they deliberately tried to look like Bill Mauldin cartoons.” Furthermore, “she found them unnecessarily bitter and unappreciative.”

  After the war, Burns quit his teaching job and moved to Italy, where he set out to become (partly by drinking too much) the last of the “romantics.” This entailed becoming a full-time novelist. His satire of private-school machinations, Lucifer with a Book (1949), was moderately successful, but A Cry of Children (1952), a melodramatic account of sadly mismatched lovers, was a critical disaster. His third try, The Stranger’s Guise, was rejected by both his American and British publishers, who did not scruple to invoke the term trash and explained, “In parts the writing is very careless; at times it slips right over into the lurid and lush style of a woman’s magazine.” This blow deeply depressed him and it was closely followed by a breakup of a homosexual love affair and a sudden cerebral hemorrhage. Whatever the cause (some thought he managed to drink himself to death), he died at the age of thirty-six, thus depriving American writing of one of its most promising young artists.

  For a magical creative moment, in The Gallery he revealed an impressive command of setting and character as well as intense moral feelings about the worst war in history and its power to corrupt soldiers and civilians alike.

  —PAUL FUSSELL

  2004

  THE GALLERY

  All characters whose portraits hang in this gallery are fictitious. Any resemblance to persons living or dead is pure coincidence. Only the descriptions of Casablanca, Algiers, and Naples are based on fact.

  How are ye blind, ye treaders-down of cities!

  —The TROJAN WOMEN

  in memory of

  Robert B. Mac Lennan

  Germany, 7 April 1945 and for

  HOLGER & BEULAH HAGEN

  Entrance

  THERE’S AN ARCADE IN NAPLES THAT THEY CALL THE GALLERIA Umberto Primo. It’s a cross between a railroad station and a church. You think you’re in a museum till you see the bars and the shops. Once this Galleria had a dome of glass, but the bombings of Naples shattered this skylight, and tinkling glass fell like cruel snow to the pavement. But life went on in the Galleria. In August, 1944, it was the unofficial heart of Naples. It was a living and subdividing cell of vermouth, Allied soldiery, and the Italian people.

  Everybody in Naples came to the Galleria Umberto. At night the flags, the columns, the archangels blowing their trumpets on the cornices, the metal grids that held the glass before the bombs broke it heard more than they saw in the daytime. There was the pad of American combat boots on the prowl, the slide of Neapolitan sandals, the click of British hobnails out of rhythm from vermouth. There were screams and coos and slaps and stumbles. There were the hasty press of kisses and sibilance of urine on the pavement. By moonlight, shadows singly and in pairs chased from corner to corner.

  In the Galleria Umberto you could walk from portrait to portrait, thinking to yourself during your promenade. . . .

  FIRST PORTRAIT

  The Trenchfoot of Michael Patrick

  HE LIMPED HURRIEDLY ALONG VIA ROMA, BUMPING INTO THE swarms coming the other way. He kept saying scusate because he wanted to make amends for the way the other doughfeet yelled at the Neapolitans and called them paesan. Meanwhile his chin kept peeling back over his shoulder, for he had the feeling that two MP’s were stalking him. In his pocket there was a hospital pass to which he’d forged a name. He had butterflies in his stomach from last night’s Italian gin, and the sun and his sweat weren’t helping things much. The speed with which he was moving hurt the feet inside his boots: it was all too clear why the medics wouldn’t have given him a Naples pass until it was time to send him back to the line. This was why, limping more than a little he’d taken off to Naples every night this week. The nurses couldn’t figure out why his feet healed so slowly.

  Naples. The name spelled a certain freedom and relief to him, in opposition to that other idea of being flown up to south of Florence . . . .

  He saw two little concrete posts that made a stile into a covered arcade. Inside there was a crowd loitering, almost as big as that pushing along Via Roma. He sighed to be out of the relentless moving on the sidewalk. It seemed cooler in this arcade. He couldn’t see an MP, and there were a lot of bars. He preferred not to sit at one of the tables on the pavement. What he was looking for was some bar as small and tight as a telephone booth. There he could wedge his chest and swallow one vermouth after another. The butterflies would go away, and he could dwell lovingly on what he would do after the sun went down.

  To do? the important thing was to forget that tomorrow or the next day his feet would be well, and he’d be waiting for that plane at Capodichino. After that the truck ride toward Florence, with the sound of the guns getting stronger . . . .

  Perhaps his trenchfoot was something sent him by Saint Rita of Cascia, to whom his mother used to have special devotion. Saint Rita had been pierced with thorns during her ecstasies. And he, after standing in his wet foxhole for weeks and listening to the artillery go screaming toward Florence, had been pierced with trenchfoot. Perhaps it was some subconscious cowardice that had broken out in his feet. He’d thought for a long time anyhow that he was going to crack, and trenchfoot was a more honorable way of doing it than becoming a psycho. So he smiled down on the CD patch on his left shoulder and thanked Saint Rita that he’d been able to take the cure in Naples.

  First he wanted some vermouth. Then some music. At the GI Red Cross he’d picked up two tickets to the San Carlo while working a little sympathy out of Betty, rapid and abstracted behind the information desk. She was thinking about her date with a colonel tonight. She didn’t have much time for him except her hospitality song and dance. But she’d introduced him to music in Oran. So tonight he would hear La Bohème. And after the opera he hoped for that last release. He’d never been a lover in his life, but tonight he’d like to have somebody kiss him, to feel somebody’s disinterested hands going all over his body. He didn’t much care whom the hands belonged to, but he cringed at the idea of paying on Via Roma for such a rite.

  In the middle of the arcade he came upon a bar that was nearly empty. On the marble counter were two shining boilers of the coffee machines. He ripped out of his chest pocket a beatup hundred-lira note and bought some chits. His hands were quivering under their Ayrab and Italian silver rings. The fat Neapolitan behind the cashbox didn’t miss this jittering of his fingers.

  A double vermouth was set at his elbow by a girl wearing a fur-piece. She was proud of this and kept emphasizing it by stroking it in the August afternoon. She missed being pretty because she was so mouselike. As she served him, she looked at him, but then her eyes darted away. Then he decided he wouldn’t take off his cap, for he was getting bald at twenty-seven.

  —My red face, he said, isn’t from drinking, but from those C-rations they feed us.

  The look she threw at the fat Neapolitan made it evident that she was as strictly brought up as Neapolitans could be in wartime. Then her eyes went down to the two wrist watches strapped side by side on his left wrist, like twins in bed.

  —Tedeschi watches, he said, unstrapping one for her. I figured
they couldn’t use them. Stiffs can’t tell time . . . .

  Her father slithered around from behind the cash register, came over, and held out his plump hairy hand for the watch. He weighed it, smelled it, tapped it, and listened to its pulse with a flicker of love in his eyes. The deal was on.

  —You speak, Joe. Quanto?

  —O my back! Sure you don’t want to buy my cigarettes too? But I smoke two packs a day. So I can’t help your black market, except to get rid of a Tedeschi watch or two.

  The signorina’s eyes began to sparkle in a pleased way, as though her father had telegraphed her to play up to him. He began to wonder if perhaps she might come to the opera with him and how it would feel to touch her hair. Her breasts pressed the counter as she leaned over to look at the watch her father was appraising. He thought that no GI had touched her—yet.

  —Quattro mila lire, the fat Neapolitan said. Forty dollar, Joe.

  —O my aching back. And for a Tedeschi watch too.

  His elbow gave a jerk and the glass of vermouth splintered on the floor. Its smell arose in the hot air—sweet, dry, and wistful. The signorina looked disdainful but served another glass. From his cash drawer her father counted out four thousand-lira notes in Allied military currency. That left only one Tedeschi watch to be sold. He toyed again with the idea of taking the signorina to the opera, of sliding the Tedeschi watch on her wrist in some darkened box. She had slim hands with nails a little gray under their chipped vermilion paint. He leaned on both his elbows, thrusting his face a little closer to her furpiece. And the second glass of vermouth hit the floor.