The Gallery

387 Pages·1985·23.625 MB·English

by  John Horne Burns

THE GALLERY
JOHN HORNE BURNS
INTRODUCTION BY JOHN W. ALDRIDGE
$6.95
THE GALLERY
Introduction by John W. Aldridge
"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 ...
There is only one brief combat scene in The Gallery. But there are a
great many other scenes that express Burns's anger and sorrow over the
plight of the conquered, exploited, and dispossessed ...
"But to balance and finally outweigh this unhappy conclusion is the
affirmative lesson the war and Europe have taught him: That there
exist 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 passionate 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 a mawkishly wishful conclusion. 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."
-from the Introduction
ARBOR HOUSE PUBLISHING COMPANY
235 East 45th Street, New York. N.Y. 10017
Cover design by Dorothy Wachtenheim
Cover illustration by Christopher Zacharow
Printed in U.S.A. 585 ISBN: 0-87795-709-6
THE
GALLERY
John Horne Burns
Introduction by John W. Aldridge
ARBOR HOUSE • NEW YORK
Copyright© 1947, 1949 by John Horne Burns.
Copyright renewed 1964.
Introduction copyright© 1985 by John W. Aldridge
All rights reserved, including the right of reproduction in
whole or in part in any form. Published in the United States of
America by Arbor House Publishing Company and in Canada
by Fitzhenry & Whiteside, Ltd.
Manufactured in the United States of America
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data
Burns, John Horne, 1916-1953.
The gallery.
(The Arbor House library of contemporary Americana)
I. Title. II. Series.
PS3503. U6385G3 1985 813' .54 84-28390
ISBN 0-87795-709-6
ATTENTION: SCHOOLS AND INSTITUTIONS
Arbor House books are available at quantity
discounts with bulk purchases for educational,
business, or special promotional use. For
details, please write to: Special Sales Manager,
Arbor House Publishing Co., 235 East 45 Street,
New York, NY 10017.
In Memory of
ROBERT B. MACLENNAN
Germany, 7 April1945
and for
HOLGER AND BEULAH HAGEN
INTRODUCTION
by
John W. Aldridge
I read The Gallery for the first time in the summer of
1947, a few months after it was published. I remember
the occasion very clearly not only because the book
excited me, but because I had at the time something more
than a casual interest in what Burns and the other new
writers were trying to do. I had myself 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. By late 1947, I felt I had sufficient
evidence that I was on the right track to put together a
critical essay, my first, which the editors of Harper's saw
fit to publish in the November issue, and 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 would
ultimately 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.
Today much of that essay seems arrogant and imma
ture, and all of it was clearly premature. In 1947, the most
ambitious novels of the second war-Norman Mailer's
The Naked and the Dead, Irwin Shaw's The Young
Lions, and James Jones's 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. But at the time the
only novels I could offer in evidence were, with one
important exception, minor works-mostly first books
Vll
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's All Thy Conquests,, Robe.rt
Lowry's Casualty, and the one important exception,
John Horne Burns's The Gallery. This· was a book that
seemed to stand out as something very different from the
others and very special. I recognized it then as a remark
able 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, I believe, justly be called major, first,
because it displays the full range and depth of Burns's
immensely compassionate understanding of the tragedy
of war, an understanding equaled by no other writer of
his generation, and, second, 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 a human being. With the
exception of Mailer, who was later to show a comparably
original talent for descriptive language, Burns's contem
poraries seemed to have learned 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 obliga
tory 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 con
tained 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 by the sternly imposed rigors of
form and could be kept subdued only if the right words
were put down in exactly the right order.
Burns, by contrast, seemed to write out of an alto
gether different tradition, one that bequeathed him not a
hamstrung economy of language but a splendid prodigal
ity, not a fear of emotion but an a,lmost wanton eagerness
Vlll
to embrace and celebrate it. Yet his style, while full and
free, was always precise, always functioning as the effi
cient servant of his subject. Here, for example, 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. When the sun is
up, the Medina opens its walls and out stream the Ayrabs
who work in the cord and sardine factories. . . . They
converse together like turkeys gobbling. They play tricks
on each other. They use the French telephone poles with
considerable liquid spite .... The faces of some of the men
are as hawklike and refined and supercilious as a ballet
dancer's; they have a feminine walk and a way of holding
themselves aloof from the others. Some of the women
have mashed noses and wide-set eyes like Nubians ....
But there are a few Ayrab girls of sharp hurt beauty,
flowers manured in a rich and poignant soil. These too
walk apart from the others like the beautiful slight men.
The handsome ones of the Ayrabs link hands as though
from some lore inside the Medina they had learned of an
aristocracy of body and face given to few in their genera
tion ....
And here is a description of Major Motes and his wife
in the "Portrait" called "The Leaf':
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 effi
cency in which most women cook. And when no editor
lX
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 wom
en'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 gaso
line.
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 "Portraits"-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 an
other and perhaps equally important respect. Nearly all
of th.em follow the classic thematic pattern of war fiction
gojng back at least to Ambrose Bierce and Stephen
Crane: the individual soldier undergoes a process of
violent iniliation 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
X
perceive himself as the dupe and scapegoat of those
corrupt and lying institutions within his country that have
sent him out to die a meaningless death.
There is undoubtedly much truth in Yeats's observa
tion 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 inevita
ble 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 Gallery is virtually alone amoqg war
novels in arriving finally at an affirmation of the humaniz
ing effects of the view oflife 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's
anger and sorrow over the plight of. the . conquered~
exploited, and dispossessed.
Burns's development from a state of relative innocence·
to a recognition of the evils perpetrated by th~ v,i~tq.r~ in.
war is a less violent but no less traumatk form of the
front-line soldier's initiation by combat. The,novel's oar;.
rator-who is Burns speaking in his own person in the
as
"Promenade, sections-becomes increasingly aware·;'
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 civil
ian populace by the occupying troops. He sees that the
air attacks and artillery bombardments brought unavoid
able misery and death to the people we sought to liberate.
XI