The disillusioned ethos of The Gallery - And what was this war really about?

John Horne Burns was not a combat soldier during World War II, but worked in military intelligence and censorship.  For a while his work was investigating crimes committed by American troops.  This kind of work, at least for a sensibility like Burns had, gives a writer an unusual perspective on war.  Thus he writes a book that is satirical, often contemptuous, and sordid.

I’m with the narrator of the “Promenades,” the sections between the short stories in The Gallery that are the wartime memoir of an author-like fellow:

I remember that my heart finally broke in Naples.  Not over a girl or a thing, but over an idea.  When I was little, they’d told me I should be proud to be an American.  And I suppose I was, though I saw no reason I should applaud every time I saw the flag in a newsreel.  But I did believe that the American way of life was an idea holy in itself, an idea of freedom bestowed by intelligent citizens on one another…  And I found that outside of the propaganda writers (who were making a handsome living from the deal) Americans were very poor spiritually.  (259)

I’ll stop here to note that long before this point I had concluded that the narrator was not the author but a parody of the author – “holy,” huh? – created for purposes as propagandistic as those of the “propaganda writers” he condemns.  He means “outside the writing of the “ etc., yes?  Not that the propaganda writers were spiritually rich, although see below.

And what was this war really about?  I decided that it was because most of the people of the world didn’t have the cigarettes, the gasoline, and the food that we Americans had.  (259)

Still, it seems to really bother this narrator that American servicemen buy cigarettes at the PX and trade them with prostitutes for sex, or that married men take up Italian girlfriends, or that officers in the censorship department spend most of their time scheming for promotions (“The Leaf,” the story I mean, is an insightful of bureaucratic literature that, like the one about syphilis treatment I mentioned yesterday should be much better known).  If American ideals are violated, Burns concludes that they must be false; if the ideals are false, the war – World War II – has no meaning.

A few pages later, after complaints about GI’s drunkenness and sexual rudeness:

And I remember seeing American MP’s beating the driver of a horse and wagon because they were obstructing traffic on Via Roma.  I don’t think the Germans could have done any better in their concentration camps.  I thought that all humanity had gone from the world, and that this war had smothered decency forever.  (262)

“[D]one any better” in cruelty!  That is a strange, strange sentence to see in 1947.  I was ready to forgive quite a few stolen cigarettes, even some cruelty, if it helped the American armed forces get on with the liberation of France and the camps.  But I was under the influence of another work of propaganda that I was reading around the same time, Joseph Kessel’s Army of Shadows, his of the moment (1943!) about the difficult, doomed heroism of the fighters in the French Resistance.  Kessel himself was not getting too rich flying a bomber for the Free French air force.  I should write more about that book.

So, I take The Gallery, like much fiction, as the exploration of a sensibility, sometimes expressed in new and surprising ways, and at other times less original and more ethically dubious.  It is of high period interest, at least.