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.

The Gallery by John Horne Burns - this was the first and last time he’d be at the center of the world

John Horne Burns’s The Gallery (1947) is I guess one of those lost classics.  Myself, I prefer the found classics, but this one is interesting enough.  Interesting because:

1. It is one of the first serious American fictional responses to World War II.  It was published a year before The Naked and the Dead, for example.  It prefigures Catch-22 and other later war fiction.  It has almost no combat, none until the very end.

2. Burns was gay, and some of the content is gay, sometimes subtly, sometimes directly.  This is unusual for any American novel circa 1947, and more so for a war book.  A lot of the book is about sex.

The structure is unusual, too.  The gallery in the title is the Galleria Umberto in Naples, a shopping center, but in the book, after the American invasion of Italy, full of bars and prostitutes, every pane of glass shattered.  Here is the protagonist of the last story, “Moe,” when he enter the Galleria:

He walked till he was in the very center of the Galleria, under the dome.  Slowly he spun round in his boots as though he were the needle of a compass orienting itself on the grid lines of a map.  Thus he was at the very center of that afternoon crowd in the Galleria.  He was the nub of hundreds of persons, American, British, French, Polish, Moroccan, and Neapolitan.  He smiled and said to himself that this was the first and last time he’d be at the center of the world.  (315)

There is also a gallery of characters presented in a series of vignette-like short stories.  Portraits, Burns calls them, so it’s a portrait gallery.  Between the Portraits are the Promenades, where a Burns-like (although in some ways -unlike) narrator makes his way, along with the U.S. army, from Casablanca to Naples.

This is quite like Dos Passos, and Burns’s prose is generally in Dos Passos or Hemingway territory:

The sailors were ubriachi and the lieutenants were icily sober.  (147)

The Gallery is full of untranslated Italian and French, which I think of as a Hemingway touch.  I don’t know who this sounds like:

He simply drawled at everyone, and all the things he said lay around in gluey pools like melted lavender sherbet.  (146)

Lavender because this, “Momma,” is the story of one typical night at a Galleria bar that has turned into a pickup spot for gay servicemen.

First came an Aussie in a fedora hat, to which his invention had added flowers and feathers.  Tonight he was more than usually drunk.  He slunk in with the slow detachment of a mannequin modeling clothes.  He waved a lace handkerchief at all:

– Oh my pets, my pets!  Your mother’s awfully late tonight, but she’ll try and make it up to you! (143)

That’s Ella the Aussie; a couple of British sergeants who act as a chorus call themselves, while in the bar, Esther and Magda.

At least the gay soldiers are having some fun.  The first story, “The Trenchfoot of Michael Patrick,” is about a soldier getting himself drunk enough so he has the courage to pick up a prostitute.  Somehow this involves drinking a bottle of cognac during a performance of La Bohème.  I guess that might be fun, too.  Not “Queen Penicillin,” though, the most Hemingwayish story, about life as a syphilis patient in the American army VD hospital, with one penicillin shot “’[e]very three hours, rain or shine, for a hundred and eighty hours’” (277).  Absolutely miserable, and not exactly something I ever wanted to read about, but fascinating in its own way.  The officer is lucky, in a sense, because penicillin has just been introduced as a treatment.  It at least works.

I have to mention “Father Donovan and Chaplain Bascom,” in which an army minister and army priest wander the Galleria arguing theology and everything else until they are simultaneously hit by a truck and killed.  I might well have laughed out loud.  Occasionally, The Gallery is actively bad.

All of this should suggest that the ethos of The Gallery is itself interesting, but I’ll save that for tomorrow.

I will mention here that I bought The Gallery for five dollars from the book room at a Mennonite quilt auction.  Don’t skip the Mennonite quilt auctions.