The Gallery is a book with no overall narrative – a series of vignettes really, all based on the author’s experiences in North Africa and, chiefly, Naples in the period of Allied occupation during World War Two. Burns was an American soldier, with aspirations to be a writer, realising this ambition in this book, his one masterpiece. The Gallery is the Galleria Umberto, the centre for much of the action that Burns describes. I focus here on the material set in Naples.

The vignettes cover a variety of characters, all of them in some way illustrating the tensions of the occupation. Burns calls them ‘portraits’ or ‘promenades’. The first portrait concerns a frazzled GI in an alcoholic stupor trying to pick up an Italian girl in a bar, his inner torment conveyed in visceral terms. A second concerns Louella, a haughty female Red Cross officer who patronises Italians while experiencing the loneliness typical of all who consider themselves to be a cut above their fellow human beings. A couple of army chaplains carry on a jealous debate about morality, end up in a strip joint by accident and then, bizarrely, are run down and killed in a street accident, as if by divine punishment. An air of cynicism and disappointment pervades these portrayals – cynicism about the possibility of finding goodness anywhere in this fallen city, and about the impossibility of finding, or keeping, love.

One of the more unusual vignettes is set in a gay bar, with its characters portrayed in a fascinating detail that clearly derives from Burns’ own deep familiarity with this scene. Two British ‘queens’, both army sergeants,  carry on an enjoyably camp banter; a female officer sits in a corner, reading, every evening, free from the unwanted attentions of men; soldiers and sailors from different nationalities come together, presided over by ‘Mamma’, who watches the passing crowds in a state of benevolent fascination. Then military police enter the place and aggressively break up the scene. Another portrait describes the punitive medical regime meted out to soldiers who acquire sexually transmitted disease, using the newly discovered penicillin.

Then there is the story of Giulia and her brother, Neapolitans whose middle class dignity is eroded and finally destroyed by the necessities forced on the family by the acute lack of resources, including food, that require both of them to engage in demeaning behaviour, theft, near prostitution,  in serving the desires of various Americans.

Much of the book is descriptive of characters, their situations and their dilemmas, but every now and again Burns reflects on the meaning of what he sees. His analysis of the occupation, of the delusional nature of American ideals, of their casual oppression and stigmatisation of Italians, arising from thoughtlessness and ignorance of the true nature of the culture in which they temporarily occupy, does not, in fact, differ a great deal from that of Curzio Malaparte, whose book The Skin I have also reviewed (here). But Burns expresses himself, and his criticisms of the occupation, so much more gently than Malaparte, and is the more believable for it. Read this book in conjunction with Malaparte’s and alongside Norman Lewis’s wonderful Naples ’44 (reviewed by me a couple of months ago, here) and you will have a thoroughly rounded picture of this fascinating period in the history of Naples.

                                                                       John Horne Burns in uniform

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