Dreadful

April 8, 2013
Margolick’s dutiful profile of writer John Horne Burns—whose successful 1947 novel The Gallery was followed by two ill-received titles—fills a needed hole in American literary biography. Margolick (Elizabeth and Hazel: Two Women of Little Rock) chronicles Burns’s upbringing and education in Massachusetts—where he was raised between two worlds, being both well-to-do and Irish Catholic—his prewar years teaching at a school he would later fictionally eviscerate, his war service in North Africa and Italy, his success with The Gallery and return to teaching, his subsequent literary stinkers, and return to Italy. Though the book’s fast pace accomplishes the difficult task of evoking sympathy for the generally unlikeable Burns, Margolick makes only shallow attempts to examine his subject’s contradictions. Particularly puzzling are the few supporting characters who loom large in Burns’s life: his mother; an old pupil with whom he developed a bond; not to mention—most peculiar for a book claiming to address Burns’s sexuality and the trials of mid-century life as a gay man—his lovers. All secondary characters are introduced abruptly; the boyfriend with whom Burns spent many of his final years, before his sudden and premature death, earns only two sentences of independent page time. Still, the book largely hits its mark, and an oft-forgotten literary figure receives overdue attention.

Starred review from June 15, 2013
A revealing biography of the brilliant, arrogant author of The Gallery (1947), a celebrated World War II novel. John Horne Burns (1916-1953) grew up in a wealthy New England family and attended Harvard, where he began a lifetime of drinking that ended in lonely days as a regular at a hotel bar in Italy, where he died an embittered drunk at age 36. He attended and taught at Loomis, a prep school outside Hartford, Conn. As a student there many years later, Vanity Fair contributor Margolick (Elizabeth and Hazel: Two Women of Little Rock, 2011, etc.) became fascinated by the forgotten author whose Lucifer with a Book (1949), a vicious novel about Loomis, was forbidden reading at the school. Years later, Margolick encountered The Gallery, about U.S. soldiers in occupied Naples in 1944-1945, "perhaps America's first great gay novel." Even Margolick's warning that Burns was a difficult man to like does not fully prepare readers for this story of an obnoxious, hypercritical, mean-spirited loner. For all his negativity, however, Burns was able to write his life-embracing The Gallery, a compassionate view of characters passing through a vast arcade, including gays in uniform. Always arrogant, Burns had nonetheless become more open-minded and decent as a result of his wartime experiences that inform the novel. Sensitive, well-researched and drawing nicely on the novelist's vivid letters, the book covers Burns' abnormally close relationship with his heiress mother; his years as a student and, later, disgruntled teacher at Loomis; his wartime postings in North Africa and his beloved Italy; and his career as an author, from the ecstatic acclaim for his war novel, to the poor reviews of later works, to his rivalry with Gore Vidal, who called Burns "a gifted man who wrote a book far in excess of his gift." Not a fun read, but a wonderfully crafted portrait of a tormented homosexual writer.

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