I read John Horne Burns` ”The Gallery” for the first time in the summer of 1947, a few months after it was published. I remember the occasion clearly not only because the book excited me but because I had returned from overseas with some strong opinions about the kind of war fiction my generation would produce, and I was eager to find out whether my expectations were being confirmed. I therefore made a point of reading all the war novels as soon as they appeared.
In late 1947, I published a critical essay in Harper`s, which turned out to be the earliest assessment of the emerging postwar fiction. In it, I offered–with the insufferable assurance of youth–my predictions about the shape that fiction ultimately would take and just how it would differ from and might even be superior to the fiction produced after World War I by such elders and inferiors as Hemingway, Dos Passos and Fitzgerald.
Much of that essay seems arrogant and immature, and all of it was clearly premature. In 1947, the most ambitious novels of World War II–Norman Mailer`s ”The Naked and the Dead,” Irwin Shaw`s ”The Young Lions” and James Jones` ”From Here to Eternity”–had not yet been published. And, indeed, if they had been they might have changed the emphasis although not, I think, the essential argument of my essay.
At the time, the only novels I could offer in evidence were, with one important exception, minor works, mostly first books by writers as young as I was and not likely to deserve more than passing reference in the literary history of the postwar period. They were Gore Vidal`s ”Williwaw,” Calder Willingham`s ”End as a Man,” Thomas Heggen`s ”Mr. Roberts,” Alfred Hayes` ”All Thy Conquests,” Robert Lowry`s ”Casualty” and the one important exception, Burns` ”The Gallery.”
This was a book that seemed to stand out as something different from the others and special. I recognized it then as a remarkable piece of work. But I did not recognize, as I do now, that it was the first distinctly major novel to come out of the war.
”The Gallery” can justly be called major because it displays the full range and depth of Burns` immensely compassionate understanding of the tragedy of war, an understanding equaled by no other writer of his generation, and because it is a triumph of literary language.
Burns had an extraordinary gift for striking an exact metaphor, the ability to evoke in a phrase or paragraph the subtle mood of a time and place or the psychological character of human being. With the exception of Mailer, who was later to show a comparably original talent for descriptive language, Burns` contemporaries seemed to have learned much more than they should have about how to write from reading Hemingway.
I think particularly of Hayes, Lowry and the early Merle Miller, all of whom produced novels that had the obligatory terseness of style and that curious effect of frigidity in the face of any emotion too intricate to be expressed in monosyllables. Yet they all lacked the quality that contained the secret of Hemingway`s special magic: the impression he gave when he was at his best that there were violent emotions kept barely under control just behind the facade of that iron prose, that chaos had been temporarily subdued only if the exactly right words were put down in exactly the right order.
Burns, by contrast, seemed to write out of an altogether different tradition, one that bequeathed him not a hamstrung economy of language but a splendid prodigality, not a fear of emotion but an almost wanton eagerness to embrace and celebrate it.
Yet his style, while full and free, was always precise, always functioning as the efficient servant of his subject. Here is his description of a morning street scene in Fedhala:
”I remember how the dawn begins. . . . Out of the heavy uterine dark a violet light begins to swirl like a soft turbine. The color mottles into gold, the sea dies still more and something seems to swish through the air like yellow torpedoes. There`s a reveille of braying from all the Fedhala donkeys, as if, fearful of the sunrise and the workaday world ahead of them with its blows and kicks, they tore off a last chunk of donkey love.”
And here is a description of Maj. Motes and his wife in the ”Portrait”
called ”The Leaf” from ”The Gallery”:
”He spent his time in his laboratory at Roanoke. He was a petroleum engineer. By nature he was a dreamer. He thought of himself as a catalyst of the aristocracy of the Old South who`d somehow made the conversion to the world of 1930. . . . And he`d married a dreamer too. She was a belle of Roanoke, belonged to the DAR and the Methodist Church. She wrote poetry with the rapt efficiency in which most women cook. And when no editor took her verses, which fluttered and sighed like herself, she published them herself. Though she had no children, each year she brought out a slim lavender or ocher or mauve book containing her thoughts on love, flowers, and life, she said she loved life with a fierceness known only to the elect. She`d married him because great loves, unlike butterflies, can be pinned down.
”Yet they saw little of each other in their Roanoke apartment. She wrote her poems and read them at women`s clubs, where she was applauded by wrenlike elderly ladies who then drank iced tea and champed on shortcake. He in his laboratory brooded on the possibilities of gasoline.”
The materials in this passage are not at all unusual. The Major and his wife might even, in a different context, be considered stereotypical: two mismatched people locked into their separateness in a marriage without passion. Yet Burns rescues them from cliche–as he does the other characters in the novel–by the freshness of his language and the extremely gentle touch of his satire. Such passages–and there are many others just as fine–make it possible to argue that his is quite simply the best written of the war novels. But ”The Gallery” is different from those novels in another and perhaps equally important respect. Nearly all of them follow the classic thematic pattern of war fiction going back at least to Ambrose Bierce and Stephen Crane: the individual soldier undergoes a process of violent initiation in combat and is forced out of his innocence into an often traumatic
confrontation of the brutal realities. He comes to learn that war is the worst of imaginable hells, and that there is finally no idealism, no romantic fantasy of heroism or noble crusade, that can disguise its hellishness.
The soldier`s manner of facing this truth, his deportment before the unspeakable, may become the measure of his courage or of his talent for self- deception. He may–although this happens rarely–be transformed, like Crane`s Henry Fleming, by a new and redemptive vision of his manhood and the world. Or –and this is most often the case–he will come to perceive himself as the dupe and scapegoat of those lying institutions within his country that have sent him out to die a meaningless death.
There is undoubtedly much truth in Yeats` observation that ”we begin to live when we have conceived life as tragedy”–if, that is, we don`t die in the course of the tragedy. But Yeats presumably meant that we come to engage life more vigorously when the tragedy of inevitable death, even of meaningless death, becomes part of our bearable knowledge of life. As so much of our war fiction has shown, such knowledge often proves to be unbearable and, therefore, destructive of life. But it may also serve to engender a new and more compassionate understanding of the pathos and injustice of all human existence.
The latter seems to have happened to Burns, with the result that the
”The Gallery” is virtually alone among war novels in arriving finally at an affirmation of the humanizing effects of the view of life as tragedy. Burns appears to have begun to live when, as an American soldier in North Africa and Italy, he saw that the horror of war is not represented solely by the death of men in combat but may be even more starkly displayed in the suffering of the civilian population in countries occupied by victorious armies–in this case, our own and those of our allies. There is only one brief combat scene in ”The Gallery.” But there are a great many other scenes that express Burns` anger and sorrow over the plight of the conquered, exploited and dispossessed.
Burns` development from a state of relative innocence to a recognition of the evils perpetrated by the victors in war is a less violent but no less traumatic form of the front-line soldier`s initiation by combat. The novel`s narrator–who is Burns speaking in his own person in the ”Promenade”
sections–becomes increasingly aware, as he moves from North Africa to Italy, of the ugly disparity between the professed high-minded intentions behind the Allied occupation and the cruel exploitation of the civilian populace by the occupying troops.
He sees that the air attacks and artillery bombardments brought unavoidable misery and death to the people we sought to liberate. But we then compounded the tragedy by treating them with the most abject cynicism and contempt. He tells of well-brought-up Italian girls forced to become prostitutes to eat, of others who are seduced by soldiers with promises of marriage and then deserted, of decent young men who become pimps and thieves because their families are starving. And all the while the Allied military plunders and ravages without remorse and entirely without need.
These atrocities force Burns to a conclusion reached by so many writers in the past and somehow always reached with a shock of the bitterest revelation: that modern America is a military and industrial giant but an emotional dwarf, that we have achieved our massive power at the great cost of spiritual impoverishment and that in our worship of the purely material we have lost our sense of honor and human decency.
In the seventh ”Promenade” Burns says: ”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 . . . 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. Yet after a while in Naples I found out that America was a country just like any other, except that she had more material wealth and more advanced plumbing. And I found that outside of the progaganda writers . . . Americans were very poor spiritually. Their ideals were something to make dollars on. They had bankrupt souls . . . therefore my heart broke.”
But to balance and finally outweigh this unhappy conclusion is the affirmative lesson the war and Europe have taught him: that there exists in the suffering victims of the Allied occupation an essential dignity and humanity that no amount of misery or exploitation can destroy, that it is still possible for them and for him to find the power to love.
”The Gallery” is thus something far more unusual than an indictment of the evils of war. It is finally a declaration of faith in the ability of human beings to survive and prevail no matter how much pain they are forced to suffer.
In other hands this could easily become a sentimental, even mawkishly wishful conclusion, and in our present age of disenchantment perhaps it inevitably must seem so. But Burns does what by definition a sentimentalist cannot do: He presents concrete justification for the intense emotions he feels through his vivid and precise rendering of the factual details of his experience, details that powerfully reinforce the conclusion he could not help but reach.
Burns died tragically young, at 36, of a cerebral hemorrhage on Aug. 10, 1953. He published two other novels, ”Lucifer with a Book” in 1949 and ”A Cry of Children” in 1952. But neither had the power of ”The Gallery,” his masterpiece and a classic among the novels of the Second World War. In it, he seems to have said all that he had to say about his experience of the war in Europe and what he learned from it. And clearly that was all that needed to be said.
