Dreadful: The Short Life and Gay Times of John Horne Burns
by David Margolick
Other Press. 382 pages, $20.95
“JOHN HORNE BURNS, Novelist, 36, Dies,” began the headline of the one-column obituary in The New York Times. “Author of The Gallery, Called Best War Book of 1947, Also Wrote About Life in Boys’ School.” The year was 1953, and it was just over six years since the publication of Burns’ first book, The Gallery, which brought him tremendous acclaim. Indeed, so strong was his talent thought to be that his publisher contracted to purchase his next two books as well. As it happened, those two works—the novels Lucifer with a Book (1949) and A Cry of Children (1952)—were roundly attacked by the critics. Burns’ final novel, A Stranger’s Guise, was rejected by both his British and American publishers shortly before his death.
There, in bare outline, is Burns’ meteoric career. Here is how David Margolick describes this steep arc at the outset of Dreadful, his painstakingly researched biography of John Horne Burns:
Burns’ homosexuality simultaneously marked his greatest work, limited his artistic range, hastened his downfall, and, decades later, aided his reemergence as a literary figure of note. With breathtaking speed, he went from being one of the brightest literary lights of his generation … to an embittered drunk, living in exile, his talent eroded or blocked, downing cheap cognac and soda prodigiously every night at the bar of a Florentine hotel until, at the age of 36, under murky circumstances in an Italian seaside town, he died.
One can be forgiven for thinking that this reads like the cover copy of some lurid 1950s pulp novel. But for those who know Burns’ work, and even for those who read Dreadful with care, the facts belie some of these assertions. For example, the circumstances of Burns’ death were not “murky” at all: the doctor summoned by his lover (quoting Margolick) “attributed Burns’ death to seizures brought on either by an old brain injury … aggravated by sunstroke, or a cerebral hemorrhage.” And while it sounds dramatic to say that Burns was living “in exile”—as though he’d been banished—he was simply an expat living in his beloved Italy. One could go on. Better to quote Burns himself, who concluded one of his rare reviews with words that seem apt for this biography: “One of the book’s subtle excellences is that the reader does some of the work. He will find his toil rewarding.”
In a sense, Burns’ story begins when he was drafted in 1942—“plucked,” as he later wrote in an autobiographical statement, “by Mr. Roosevelt’s long arm into the infantry.” At the time, he had been an English instructor at Loomis, a prep school for boys, since 1937, the year he graduated from Harvard. Margolick provides a detailed portrait of these years at Loomis, where some students found Burns cruel, but on those “in whom he detected an artistic or literary or musical spark or a gay sensibility … he left a profound impression.” Then came the war, where Burns recounts his experience in the third person: “since the Pentagon heard he knew Italian, instead of being sent to the slaughter in Salerno … he sat out the war reading prisoner of war mail in Africa and Italy.”
But the wartime Burns not only read and censored the letters of others, he also composed a multitude of his own. The scholar Mark Bassett (to whom this book is graciously dedicated) previously uncovered and explored the letters to Holger and Beulah Hagen, whom Burns met while stationed at Fort Hamilton in Brooklyn, as well as those to David MacMackin, a gay former student at Loomis. Margolick’s great coup was to gain access to Burns’ letters to his family, and it is this combined correspondence that provides the foundation for the book.
Writing early on to his father, Burns quipped: “I quite agree in my modest way with my mother, that my letters merit publication.” His mother was of course correct, if not entirely for the reason she thought. A significant portion of the correspondence reveals that his stint in the army was positively “dreadful”—a word repurposed by Burns to mean “homosexual.” Margolick provides enough war correspondence to justify his claim that Burns was an important chronicler of gay life in the military. After shipping out, Burns found himself first in Fedhala, then in Algiers, then in Naples. Let one excerpt suffice. In Naples, he meets a number of survivors of the campaigns in Africa, Sicily, and Cassino, who are about to take part in the next invasion, most of them “pitifully desperate”: “Consequently the city was like a plague-town of the Middle Ages: the wildest merriment to drown the steps of Death. I knew some better in an evening than I do many of my friends. Urgency, sorrow, confusion, annihilation of everything they’d known in America.” Burns knew that he’d been spared such a fate, and that to him it fell “simply to see the effects of war after the wedge had gone through and left nothing but splinters and pain.”
“There’s an arcade in Naples that they call the Galleria Umberto Primo.” So begins The Gallery, which Burns originally subtitled “A Mediterranean Sketchbook,” since it’s not a novel but rather a book of nine portraits linked by the promenades of an unnamed GI. (As Bassett was the first to point out, it’s a sort of Pictures at an Exhibition in prose.) Begun in Naples, Burns completed it after the war when he was back teaching at Loomis, and Margolick provides a superb narrative of all this, including Burns’ humorous tussles with his publisher’s legal department. The book is justly considered a landmark for its central portrait, “Momma,” who is the proprietress of a bar in the Galleria that caters exclusively to gay soldiers—a clientele portrayed much as one British sergeant in the bar describes it: merely part of “a polite kind of anarchy … expressing a desire disapproved of by society … just a bunch of gay people letting down their back hair.” And there are, to be sure, what Margolick calls “gay undertones” in other portraits.
But, for all of that, just because Bantam issued pulp versions with pictures of GIs and women on the cover, it is simply incorrect to say, “To appeal to the masses, The Gallery suddenly went straight.” These cover images are authentically emblematic of the book’s predominant heterosexual energy. Even Margolick admits that the book’s gay content “was almost entirely overlooked or, perhaps more accurately, ignored” in almost all of the initial reviews. Had The Gallery’s content been predominantly gay, this would surely not have passed unnoticed in that repressive era.
As a journalist, Margolick is superb at setting the stage—where Burns was, who did what—but his interpretations are problematic. For example, his view that Lucifer with a Book “was really a book of, for, and by adolescent boys” is blinkered at best. Bassett called it a “Juvenalian satire,” and so it is: one that carries on unsparingly with Burns’ critique of American culture begun with The Gallery. Similarly, Margolick describes Burns’ talent as “eroded or blocked” when living in Italy, yet he wrote a beautiful prose portrait of Florence, one of eleven such pieces (not nine, as Margolick states) composed for Holiday magazine. Burns own explanation of his diminished output was that he was “too god-damned happy to write.” Perhaps this was because his life was not that dreadful. “I find everything in Tuscany,” he wrote, “good cooking, a kitten, a collie, and the love that I need.”
Richard Johns, the author of Explicit Lyrics: Poems and Hollywood Beach, lives in the Chicago area.
