The Gallery, by John Horne Burns
The Gallery by John Horne Burns
Originally published in 1947
One of the pleasures in searching through the book reviews of the late 1940s is finding a book such as this: a war novel—one highly lauded in its own time, barely mentioned in succeeding years, and the subject of revival attempts—which still stands up, and in fact exceeds its reputation, after six decades of similar works. Though Shirley Hazard claims, in a blurb on the book cover, that “no one will ever forget this book” it is not one of the more well-known WWII novels, though it was one of the first in the wave of those published by servicemen. It is likely due to the author’s inability to launch a glorious career after its publication that it is today more obscure than some lesser WWII novels from the same era—like Gore Vidal’s taut but narrowly focused Williwaw—whose authors went on to literary celebrity.
Vidal has been The Gallery’s chief champion since Burns’ death in 1953 at the age of 36. He has repeatedly called the book the finest novel of WWII, and wrote a profile of Burns in which the man comes across as a homosexual supremacist, an alcoholic, as well as “a gifted man who wrote a book in excess of his gift, making a masterpiece that will endure in a way he himself could not.”
The book was reprinted in 2004 as part of the invaluable New York Review of Books Classics series, but I couldn’t easily find a copy of this edition. I ended up getting a hold of a first edition through inter-library loan. It is less a novel than a series of short stories set in allied-occupied Italy and linked by the Galleria, an arcade in Naples where US Servicemen interface with the locals through the black market and prostitution. I’m reminded of Alfred Hayes’ All Thy Conquests, for, as in that book, the US Military is shown as a lumbering group of horny, dishonest, naïve, bureaucratic, segregated, xenophobic boy-men occupying a nation (in both cases Italy) with a culture too intricate and ancient for them to understand.
A nurse with a severe attitude toward those she’s come to help hides her valuables from her Italian maid: She knew full well that ten minutes after she’d locked her apartment door the signorina would be entertaining some fisherman from the Bay of Naples on the couch. They’d jabber at each in dialect, laugh at the Allies, hang Mr. Roosevelt’s picture upside down, and have one another til supper time. Or two clergymen with divergent views on the poor: (Father Donovan) thought of the tragedy of the children of Europe, born and passing their formative years under a rain of bombs, keeping alive by catering to the desires of soldiers. If these children grew into cold bitter reptiles, then the world would really have lost the war…
—Next week, said Chaplain Bascom, if we’re still here, I mean to bring some soap and wash these children’s mouths out.
—There are better uses for soap in Naples than that.
Burns’ perceived that America would be the reigning military behemoth of the rest of the 20th century and that though it wished to be judged by its stated values and official benevolence toward the peoples whom it sought to liberate, it would be judged by the individuals it chose to represent itself. Individuals, like the officer who sets up his own petty mail censorship empire in the conquered land.
I’m tempted to just keep reproducing passages from the book, for there are hundreds of examples of Burns’ excellent, ironic or sometimes odd prose. I’ll end with a quote that is a little of each: But often Hal thought that his only salvation would be to marry Jeanne. For she had that awareness and resignation of spirit that has sipped everything lovely in life, letting such values be her guide through some mortal experience that has purged her. The focus of her compassion was in her breasts, geometric as cones. Her nipples seemed to see.
August 12th, 2008 at 8:53 pm
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