The Great (Gay) Novelist You’ve Never Heard Of

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/06/16/magazine/john-horne-burns-the-great-gay-novelist-youve-never-heard-of.html?hpw&_r=0


A portrait of John Horne Burns taken during World War II.


A paperback copy of "The Gallery" from 1950

Great war novels inevitably follow great wars, and in literary circles following World War II, everyone was wondering what would be the successors to “A Farewell to Arms” and “All Quiet on the Western Front” — and who would write them. But when John Horne Burns, age 29, in his small dormitory suite at the Loomis School in Windsor, Conn., on the night of April 23, 1946 (Shakespeare’s birthday, at that), finished “The Gallery” — “I fell across my Underwood and wept my heart out,” he later recalled — he was convinced he had done just that, and more. “ ‘The Gallery,’ I fear, is one of the masterpieces of the 20th century,” he wrote a friend.

Burns was a former soldier, now teaching English at Loomis, a prep school. By one of his counts, “The Gallery” was actually his ninth novel; he wrote one pretty much every summer, first at Andover, then at Harvard, then at Loomis, books that even his friends conceded were unpublishable — nasty, nihilistic and narcissistic things populated with characters his own agent once called “stinkers.” But the war had touched and humanized Burns, changing his outlook, tone and style. He told a friend that he had shed his ungenügender Selbstsucht — a term he would have learned from Goethe and Brahms, meaning unsatisfying egotism or insatiable self-love — and come, at long last, to care about someone besides himself.

His new war novel wasn’t really a novel at all. It consisted, instead, of nine portraits, alternately caustic and sympathetic but all keenly observed — primarily of American soldiers, but also of two Italian women — and eight “promenades”: personal reflections of an anonymous, Burns-like G.I. wandering from one image and place in North Africa and Italy to another, just as Burns himself had done. It was named after, and was centered on, the Galleria Umberto I, the bustling Victorian arcade in central Naples that Burns the G.I. had frequented, and that had come to symbolize for him the city’s beleaguered but still-beating heart; at one point or another most of his characters found themselves under its shattered glass canopy. The novel’s closest counterpart wasn’t in literature but in music: Mussorgsky’s “Pictures at an Exhibition,” a piece that Burns, a serious musician and musical scholar who had staged and performed in sophisticated musicales in the unlikeliest of places to the unlikeliest of audiences — recitals of Schubert and Debussy to fellow soldiers outside Algiers, for instance — knew well. “You’re quite right in guessing that it defies description,” Burns wrote his friend Holger Hagen about the book. “It’s not arty, clever or even recondite. But I fear (and in how many senses this may be taken!) that there’s nothing like it in literature.”

Like a vast majority of G.I.’s, Burns never saw combat: thanks to his fluent Italian (and German and French), he was channeled into military intelligence, which for him meant reading and censoring the letters of Italy’s captured, homesick soldiers. The only weapon Burns ever wielded was an X-acto knife. But whether in Casablanca, Algiers or Naples, he witnessed, then chronicled, first in his letters home and then in his novel, something else: as he put it to a friend, “the effects of war after the wedge has gone through and left nothing but splinters and pain.”