The Gallery

by John Horne Burns

John Horne Burns brought 'The Gallery' back from World War II, and on publication in 1947 it became a critically-acclaimed bestseller. However, Burns's early death at the age of 36 led to the subsequent neglect of this searching book, which captures the shock the war dealt to the preconceptions and ideals of the victorious Americans.

Set in occupied Naples in 1944, The Gallery takes its name from the Galleria Umberto, a bombed-out arcade where everybody in town comes together in pursuit of food, drink, sex, money, and oblivion.

A daring and enduring novel—one of the first to look directly at gay life in the military—'The Gallery' poignantly conveys the mixed feelings of the men and women who fought the war that made America a superpower.


"The first book of real magnitude to come out of the last war." —John Dos Passos

Genres: Fiction, Italy, Classics, War, Historical Fiction, World War II, LGBT

368 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1947

About the author

John Horne Burns was a United States author. He is best known as the author of the 1947 story-cycle The Gallery, which depicts life in Allied-occupied Naples, Italy, in 1944 from the perspective of several different characters. In this work he explores the themes of material and class inequality, alcoholism, relations between the sexes, and sexuality in general, including homosexuality, with the encounter between American and Neapolitan culture as a general thematic backdrop. The "Gallery" referred to is the Galleria Umberto I in down-town Naples.

Burns's works often feature homosexual themes, and he is known as a gay novelist. As recorded by his contemporary Gore Vidal, Burns said that "to be a good writer, one must be homosexual, perhaps because his or her marginalized status provides the gay or lesbian author with an objectivity not attainable within mainstream culture." Burns's fiction though, is not exclusively restricted to gay themes. Some of his fictional pieces use a heterosexual female perspective, and conformity to class as well as gender expectations plays a large role in these texts.

Reviews

[Tony · Rating 4 out of 5]

Southwest Airlines is different from other airlines. They don't charge a fee for baggage, they don't have assigned seating, and whoever is speaking over the intercom system likes to crack jokes. I boarded one of their flights last week, holding my carry-on in one hand and this book, 'The Gallery' by John Horne Burns, in the other. The pilot -- the pilot -- was greeting us, the passengers, as we stepped on board. Warmly, too. When the pilot -- the pilot -- saw my book, he grabbed it, and said, "Hey! What's this about?"

What's this about? I spend a good chunk of my life writing about what any given book is about; and I bemoan the fact that I don't get asked that very often in real life. So here I was being asked what a book was about when all I really wanted was to get to my seat, so my new best friend -- the pilot -- could get to his seat; and he could fly and I could read. But he asked. So, I hurriedly said, "It's a World War II novel. An nyrb-classic. It's kinda weird." "This looks great!" he said, handing the book back. "I'll have to get this."

Well, won't he be surprised!

Now. No line behind me, and no place to go. Ask me again, Captain.

"Hey! What's this about?"

Yes, It's a World War II novel. But there are no battle scenes. It's a gay novel. But there are no sex scenes. It's a novel of disillusionment. And there's plenty to be found.

It's Naples, 1944. The Nazis have just left, though they still loft some shells, switching roles with the Americans, now in town as liberators.

There is an interesting structure to the novel; the chapters rotate as Promenade and Portrait. The Promenades are by our narrator, our thinly disguised author, I presume, who had a similar experience. The Portraits tell the same story from a farrago of characters treading the same path.

My heart finally broke in Naples, our narrator says. But it's not love that broke his heart. 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. ... 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.

(Which, by the way, I learned a certain hotel, just north of Naples, Florida, does not.)

There were phonies, and cowards, and military pedants. Sounds like Catch-22, my pilot might have chirped in. Yes, I'd say, but 'The Gallery' came first:

--I'm going rapidly mad, the lieutenant said.
--If you think you are, it's a sure sign you're not. . . . Take the afternoon off and go to the movies.

There is a scene, one of the Portraits, in the VD ward. One African-American soldier deplores the cure, and yet says, like a blues: Ah cain't do thout mah lovin. The white soldier, whose Portrait it is, imagines writing the truth back home:

Dear Mother:

You'll be surprised to know that I am writing you from the syphilis ward of the Twenty-third General Hospital . . .

Another Portrait is called 'Father Donovan and Chaplain Bascom'. It is Father Donovan of whom it is said that: Never in his life had he raised his voice except to call for the murder of the umpire. Some sins are very understandable. This Portrait can stand on its own and is absolutely superb.

Oh, you know, the usual, Captain. A place in Naples, almost after the fighting. Not so much a clash of cultures as a rubbing against each other. Italian honor and hunger. American purchase, and a different hunger. All descending to the Galleria Umberto, The Gallery. Soldiers find solace, sometimes with each other. Sometimes in Louella's Bar, full of queens.

Oh, okay, well thanks for my book back. You okay to fly?

[Mariel · Rating 3 out of 5]

I might read everything the same way. Maybe I have some social anxiety lens like a toy view finder with stills all from the same movie. Click the handle and there's a GI soldier who can't talk to a girl. Click it again and a GI soldier is about to get scammed by a hot young Neapolitan lad (there is no other kind, I'm gathering). It's screwing bunnies and horny priests. I try to do something different. Last week I read a crime novel (The Friends of Eddie Coyle)! I rarely read those. You can't trust people. Okay, a WWII novel. Oh no. It's me. It has to be me! You would think it would be so easy in a war zone. If you can't know who your enemies are when people are shooting at you...

I liked these short stories. They are meant to be like slices of life or little episodes in the lives of Americans in Italy and North Africa. Burns is good at the unease, the shift in what used to be a comfort and now isn't. When faces look happy without you and the romance of what's not really meant to be yours. It did get tiring that there was a tacked on moral at the end way too many times that Americans should think about different cultures. Burns, you did not need to do that. Sure, 1947 but still. I think that a good reader of any time would be capable of putting two and two together if they cared about what they were reading in the first place. Considering that there are a lot of stories in this book it got pretty old. Still, I liked The Gallery a whole lot better than The Moon and the Bonfire that I read last year about an expat returning home to Italy after the war. It was so pompous like a man who would sob over his raped daughter like she was dead and it was all about him and she was no good to HIM anymore. Despite the message! to possible American readers Burns was pretty good about not assuming too much about every person. I liked his tongue in cheek humor about how they took themselves seriously as if everyone around them noticed every thing they were doing when they probably didn't (just another American, right?). I liked the bittersweet edge to those impossible romantic dreams because of that humor. It's too bad that Burns probably did take him too seriously, if the biography is anything to go by. He allegedly drank himself to death after his writing career didn't take off. Too bad! I want to say: Burns you didn't put yourself out there THAT much. Didn't you read your own book? No one is going to pay that much attention to you! Dream a little and pull back to walk a little sadly on your way home. Maybe smile a little if you think they'll remember you. They probably won't. It's a sad sigh. Maybe he would walk on the bridge of sighs. Where in Italy is that? My geography sucks. Italy can put its boot up my ass if I'm wrong.

Paul Fussell wrote the introduction for my NYRB copy. It took me way too long to remember where I know that name from. I used to stare at his name for hours and hours in my ex boyfriend's bedroom. Fussell wrote The Great War and Modern Memory (that giant book about pop culture in WWI). I can't tell you how many times I looked at that book and wanted to be somewhere else. Talk about noticing things when you are some place that you don't belong. Words cease to look like words. I could remember where every book goes. I never feel like I belong in someone else's home. See, that's the feeling that The Gallery needed more of... Mariel, you said you weren't trying to read social anxiety books. I lied! What else could this book possibly be than that? It's a war out there! There are other books but I wouldn't belong in them.

Is anyone interested in this book? It's not popular by any means. I suppose I'm probably off putting with my "It's good but it's a lot". Burns is hornier than Barry White. He writes really good about kissing... Vicarious kissing. You know, not yours but lick your lips and it almost could be. You could move somewhere else.

[Gary the Bookworm · Rating 4 out of 5]

John Horne Burns' The Gallery isn't always pretty, but neither is life. It takes us on a journey into the hearts and minds of an unlikely mix of American servicemen and vanquished Neapolitans after the Allied invasion of Southern Italy. In a series of nine portraits, we meet a few honorable Americans, some desperate Italians and a mountain of moral ambiguity. American greed complements Italian ingenuity in this caldron of destruction and despair which is Occupied Naples in the summer of 1944. Not surprising, corrupt officers, effete clergy and hypocritical support staff are eviscerated, but a few of the Americans, the ones who can look beyond their prejudices and prerogatives, experience the rewards of perceiving life from a unique perspective.

Each portrait reads like a short story and they are connected by a series of promenades, Burns' term for short, evocative descriptions of time and place. He is scathing in his depiction of widespread American callousness toward the starving Italians, but equally dismayed by the opportunistic perfidy of those Italians who benefitted from the corruption and incompetence of the occupiers; Naples, at the foot of Mt Vesuvius, is a powerful metaphor for the complexities of what Burns calls the worst war in history. He uses slang and dialect to humorously define his characters and the prose is as hard-boiled as anything written by Raymond Chandler. There are moments off unforgettable sweetness, like two scoops of gelato on a summer day, and of heartbreak as bitter as a swig of grappa, but in the end this is about human beings struggling to survive a series of catastrophic events beyond their control.

[Doug · Rating 4 out of 5]

Although popular back when first published in 1947, this novel has pretty much fallen into neglectful - and unfortunate - obscurity (the copy I borrowed from the library had been there four years - and was brand new - I was the first to check it out!). I'd heard of the author, who is actually a semi-major character in the execrable recent novel Leading Men - but this book actually came back onto my radar, as it was mentioned in the introduction to another early gay classic (Finistère) I've recently read, as another lost masterpiece.

I wouldn't go quite that far, but it is an interesting, sui generis novelty. Burns, who was indeed stationed in Naples towards the end of the WW II, structures the book as a series of vignettes, mainly set in the bombed-out black market arcade the Galleria Umberto Prima, from which it takes its title. Alternating between 'promenades' and 'portraits' - the former are shorter, more memory/think pieces (many of the paragraphs begin with the phrase 'I remember ...'), apparently narrated by the same American GI as he reminisces about his thoughts and feelings during the waning years of the war - and making his way in thought from Casablanca and Algiers to Naples itself. The final one is a beautifully written and melancholic meditation on love that is alone worth the price of the rest of the tome.

The nine portraits are longer pieces - some almost novella length - all set in August, 1944, focusing on one individual who either works or frequents the Galleria. These are all very well done - Burns' turns of phrase and similes/metaphors are surprising and often lyrical - but the content varies in interest, at least to me. Unsurprisingly, the one story which actually forefronts the gay content I found the most intriguing - the outstanding 'Momma', which details the life of the middle-aged Italian woman who finds herself inexplicably running a gay bar in the Galleria. A few of the others have coded and subliminal gay themes/content, but are much more subtle.

To even call this a 'gay novel'' is stretching things a bit, but considering its publication date, was far more forthright about such matters than most others back then. Burns died young at 36 of a cerebral hemorrhage, thought to have been brought on by his alcoholism, and none of his three subsequent books made much of an impression - but this novel definitely deserves more of a contemporary readership.

[John · Rating 5 out of 5]

If this suggestion seems to come out of left field, that's fitting, since my rediscovery of this mid-century American masterpiece swept me away from out of nowhere, recently. The novel appeared in 1947, widely hossana’d, though considerably ahead of its time in its jaundiced view of World War II — not the battlefield itself, but the terrible toll for those anyway near the shooting, the people we’d now call part of war’s “collateral damage.” Then, though, THE GALLERY fell from notice. Part of the problem was Burns himself: deep in the bottle & conflicted about his sexuality, he never brought off a worthy followup & died at 36. Still, his debut had insights too acute, sympathies too effulgent, to stay buried. Norman Mailer, among others, championed the novel, & so I rediscovered it, in paperback again. The setting, most of the way, is Naples, Italy, impoverished & blasted, just after the city switched from German hands to Allied in the fall of ’43. Nine “portraits” unfold, a series of chapter-length tragedies — galling, stark portrayals of human failing. Come to think, doesn’t Dante’s INFERNO spiral down through nine circles? In Burns, the “portraits” share the motif of prostitution, actual or figurative, in search of security & decent comfort. Each has a different perspective, yet each returns to the actual “Gallery” in downtown Naples, Galleria Umberto Uno, “a cross between a railroad station and a church.” Also a place of myth: “like that city in the middle of the city that rises every hundred years to dry itself in the sun.” In the barely-legal watering holes of the Galleria, nowhere do we encounter an idealized G.I. band of brothers. Rather, Burns prefers the company of outcasts. Many of its major actors are Neapolitans, derided as "rats" and worse by the swaggering Americans. The city has “a taste at once modern and medieval, all grown together in weariness and urgency and disgust.” Other chapters consider a Jew in the U.S. infantry, an African-American saddled with VD and trying out the experimental new drug penicillin, and — in what may be the most astounding, most moving portrait — the tumultuous crowd in the Galleria’s gay bar, one evening in summer '44. The party proves glum & unfulfilling, no more than a liquor-soaked peek out of the closet, yet still “even in her half-death Naples is alive and furious with herself and with life... very tender in her ruin.”

[Daniel · Rating 5 out of 5]

One of the pleasures in searching through the book reviews of the late 1940s is finding a book such as this: a war novel—one highly lauded in its own time, barely mentioned in succeeding years, and the subject of revival attempts—which still stands up, and in fact exceeds its reputation, after six decades of similar works. Though Shirley Hazard claims, in a blurb on the book cover, that “no one will ever forget this book” it is not one of the more well-known WWII novels, though it was one of the first in the wave of those published by servicemen. It is likely due to the author’s inability to launch a glorious career after its publication that it is today more obscure than some lesser WWII novels from the same era—like Gore Vidal’s taut but narrowly focused Williwaw—whose authors went on to literary celebrity.

Vidal has been The Gallery’s chief champion since Burns’ death in 1953 at the age of 36. He has repeatedly called the book the finest novel of WWII, and wrote a profile of Burns in which the man comes across as a homosexual supremacist, an alcoholic, as well as “a gifted man who wrote a book in excess of his gift, making a masterpiece that will endure in a way he himself could not.”

The book was reprinted in 2004 as part of the invaluable New York Review of Books Classics series, but I couldn’t easily find a copy of this edition. I ended up getting a hold of a first edition through inter-library loan. It is less a novel than a series of short stories set in allied-occupied Italy and linked by the Galleria, an arcade in Naples where US Servicemen interface with the locals through the black market and prostitution. I’m reminded of Alfred Hayes’ All Thy Conquests, for, as in that book, the US Military is shown as a lumbering group of horny, dishonest, naïve, bureaucratic, segregated, xenophobic boy-men occupying a nation (in both cases Italy) with a culture too intricate and ancient for them to understand.

A nurse with a severe attitude toward those she’s come to help hides her valuables from her Italian maid: She knew full well that ten minutes after she’d locked her apartment door the signorina would be entertaining some fisherman from the Bay of Naples on the couch. They’d jabber at each in dialect, laugh at the Allies, hang Mr. Roosevelt’s picture upside down, and have one another til supper time. Or two clergymen with divergent views on the poor: (Father Donovan) thought of the tragedy of the children of Europe, born and passing their formative years under a rain of bombs, keeping alive by catering to the desires of soldiers. If these children grew into cold bitter reptiles, then the world would really have lost the war…

—Next week, said Chaplain Bascom, if we’re still here, I mean to bring some soap and wash these children’s mouths out.

—There are better uses for soap in Naples than that.

Burns’ perceived that America would be the reigning military behemoth of the rest of the 20th century and that though it wished to be judged by its stated values and official benevolence toward the peoples whom it sought to liberate, it would be judged by the individuals it chose to represent itself. Individuals, like the officer who sets up his own petty mail censorship empire in the conquered land.

I’m tempted to just keep reproducing passages from the book, for there are hundreds of examples of Burns’ excellent, ironic or sometimes odd prose. I’ll end with a quote that is a little of each: But often Hal thought that his only salvation would be to marry Jeanne. For she had that awareness and resignation of spirit that has sipped everything lovely in life, letting such values be her guide through some mortal experience that has purged her. The focus of her compassion was in her breasts, geometric as cones. Her nipples seemed to see.

[Márcio · Rating 4 out of 5]

I believe that there is a couple of reasons that resulted in the success of "The gallery" when it was published in the late 1940s. Its structure is made up of chapters called either "Portraits" or "Promenades". The "Portraits" consist of short stories about American men and women enlisted to fight for America. The "Promenades" are almost like personal thoughts about the places the narrator has been sent to serve, wartime, and goodness and evil perpetrated by humans. One after the other, it breaks away the tragedies of the war, though in no way does Burns sugarcoat it.

The "Portraits" and "Promenades" do also happen far from the battlefield, and mostly take place in Morocco (Casablanca), Algeria (Algiers), and Tunes (Tunisia) on the North shores of Africa, but also in the Italian city of Naples. This gives the possibility for Burns to write stories that are far away from the tragic atrocities happening in the trenches, allowing the author to take a look at the human heart, from both perspectives, of the victorious and the defeated.

In these stories and walkings, Burns can be very critical of his own fellows, and indeed, he does not sugarcoat anybody. He is very tough with his compatriots, who, in many situations abused their own kind, not to mention the horrible ways they treated the defeated Italians. Take, for instance, the second and sixth portraits; Louella and Captain Motes, and their horrible way of acting on account of their moral contempt.

But then, there is Moe and the Ninth Portrait, which feels like an angel soul, to a certain extent. Also quite worthy of mention, The Seventh Portrait, "Giulia", and the Eighth Portrait, "Queen Penicillin".

As a gay man, Burns dedicated the whole Fifth Portrait, "Momma", to writing about the many kinds of gay men that served in the war and Momma herself, oh, such an interesting and funny character, one to be reminded!

All in all, "The Gallery" is a very nice piece of writing, one that reminds us how beautiful, but also ugly and tragic our world can be, that we can be.

[J.M. Hushour · Rating 5 out of 5]

I have a tendency to ruthlessly divide art dealing with war into two categories which dovetails nicely with my experience in what people like when it comes to portrayals of war: you're either a "Full Metal Jacket" kind of war person, or a "Thin Red Line" kind of war person. That is, you like it brutal or you like it thoughtful.
"The Gallery", probably one of the most expressive and darkly sublime portrayals of war I've ever encountered, falls into the second category. It's thoughtful, beautiful, philosophical, and downright disturbing. For all that, there's not a single moment of war in the entire novel (except for a single scene). No, this novel is about everything that goes sour, that shatters one's illusions, that drives the narrator at one point to discover about himself that there is absolutely nothing to love about being an American in "liberated" Italy in 1944. It points up the corruption and often hilarious incompetency of officers, the greed of the common soldier, and the blindness with which one blunders through war's aftermath, rapine and insatiable.
The novel's structure is wonderful. It's based around the bombed-out Galleria Umberto in Naples, center of the black market and lasciviousness in the occupied city, we are treated to nine portraits of people out of the Gallery: a recuperating soldier goes to the opera; a WAC nurse tries to "bolster morale" among officers; an upper-class officer is tormented by the ghost of war slain; a Catholic priest and a Baptist preacher get drunk and argue; a matronly Italian woman runs a gay bar for soldiers in the Gallery; an insane and racist Virginian officer runs the censorship office into the ground in occupied Italy; a young Italian woman looks for true love; a sergeant with syphilis recuperates in a medical clinic; and, finally, a Jewish officer searches for meaning at the feet of death.
Outstanding.

[Brett Glasscock · Rating 4 out of 5]

"This is the age of toothbrushes and war bonds and depilatories. Shakespeare and Dostoyevsky are dead... spirituality was something to console people when they couldn't buy medicine and life insurance..."

a novel about the psychic destruction of world war ii. deeply homoerotic, but the chapter actually about gay people is somehow the least homoerotic one

[Zach · Rating 5 out of 5]

A series of vignettes connected mostly by the crushing dread of the machinery of war. Brave to write a book about war that features almost no combat, but also perfect and often times just as violent. Took me a long time to finish because there was no hurry.

[Liam Ostermann · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is not a great lost gay novel, this is a lost great novel of WWII. If anything its 'gay' profile has masked the genius of John Horne Burns wonderful novel (although it is perhaps to episodic to be a called a novel). I would rank it with two other great, but overlooked and under-appreciated books on WWII, Norman Lewis's 'Naples '44' but that wasn't published until thirty years after 'The Gallery' and 'The Skin' by Curzio Malaparte of 1949 (though a fully unexpurgated English language version wouldn't be available until 2016). They are also about the American occupation of Naples and what war means for both the conquered and the conquerors. It is not a pretty picture that any of these authors paint but it is important to remember Burns as part of a larger literary effort, that of war, and not simply as a 'gay' novel.

That 'The Gallery' contains one of the most iconic descriptions ever printed of a 'gay' bar when that had a very specific meaning (this is not the gay bar of 'Gay Bar : Why We Went Out' by Jeremy Atherton Lin) is of utmost importance. That it was written and published in 1947 is extraordinary because it describes a way of life for many, never all, gay men in the USA and UK, and probably elsewhere, that would remain true for forty odd years. I don't know of a representation of 'gay' life and a 'gay' institution that was so non judgemental. It is unique and the fact that there was, apparently, never was such a bar in the Galleria Umberto doesn't mean Burns wasn't describing reality. It is a wonder that no one has picked up on the relationship between the name of the gallery, Umberto. and the gay bar. Umberto was the name of the crown prince and later last king of Italy a man whose homosexuality was an open secret. Although the Umberto the gallery was named after was a different Umberto I still believe Burns was making a point.

I have heard 'The Gallery' and Burns described as forgotten - but I remember reading the chapter 'Momma' in one of the great early anthologies of gay writing 'The Other Persuasion' edited by Seymour Klienberg in 1977 and when I did I remembered that I had tried reading 'The Gallery' as a 12 year old after finding it on my father's book shelves. I didn't finish it, but I am glad no one thought to try and stop from reading it.

I never regarded this novel as forgotten. Meretricious writers and compilers of instant 'gay' history like Christopher Bram in 'Eminent Outlaws' might ignore Burns but there are more ways of being recognised or being important then featuring in the tittle-tattle of Greenwich village parties.

Burns, along with Lewis and Malaparte, discovered something important and timeless about the reality and ugliness of war that is as eternal as what earlier writers discovered on the Western front. It would be a pity if this novel's true grandeur is lost by confining it to a ghetto audience. No one thought in 1947 that this was a 'gay' novel. It was a novel about Americans at war, it was universal. Limiting it to importance for only one aspect of one chapter is the greatest insult that you could do to Burns or this novel. If it its 'gay' tag is the only reason you turn to it then I hope you are disappointed. You deserve to be and maybe it would be better if the novel and Burns were forgotten.

There is an interesting article about Burns and this novel at:
https://www.nytimes.com/2013/06/16/ma...

[T · Rating 5 out of 5]

When the family tombstone finally has my name on it, I'm fairly certain this book will rank as my all-time favorite. And if I spend eternity thinking about The Gallery, I think I'll be content. The structure of this book, the vivid characters, and the historical significance of it make it truly a heartbreaking work of staggering genius.

Burns did us a solid to note for the future that among the millions of soldiers from World War Two: some of them were gay, some of them fell in love, and many of them were lonely. But they were present, and their unique point of view is only one of many, which the uniquely creative narrative points out to us.

But while the wealthy or famous, the Generals and statesmen would have countless books written about their point of view, that of the socially marginalized would be infinitely more rare; and therefore more precious. I appreciate that Burns is to be noted as a pioneer of gay literature. I am thankful that he had the balls to tell this story, and the imagination to do it so beautifully.

If you haven't read The Gallery, do it now. But don't ask to borrow my copy, I will read it again and again.

Phew! Is it obvious that I'm extremely passionate about this book?

[Daniel Polansky]

Interesting. Burns worked in intelligence during WWII, and his job appears largely to have been trying unsuccessfully to keep his fellow soldiers from selling their equipment and rations to the starving Italian population which surrounded them. In this curiously structured novel – consisting mostly of sketches of characters that might have been found in Naples during the US occupation, smugglers, down on their luck GIs, syphilis victims, arrogant officers, club owners, etc. – Burns presents a vision of the war which seems utterly unfamiliar, miserable and resolutely unheroic, the mindless destruction of an ancient civilization by the brute force of modernity, and the human wreckage left behind. A closeted homosexual, Burns also offers a distinct view into the gay subculture which (flourished? Existed?) around the army at that time. His experience provides some really fascinating insights, and he’s a skilled writer, but he was also like 25 when he wrote this, and it reads like it. He tries to do to much, and actually one gets the sense that this would have been more effective if it had eschewed the peculiar format for a straighter narrative. It’s not at all bad, but it’s also pretty miserable and quite difficult, and so I can only offer a sort of mixed-recommendation.

[Kim · Rating 4 out of 5]

I found it helpful to be reading the biography of John Horne Burns while I was reading The Gallery to get some insight into the writer's life while he was writing the book and after it had been written. The Gallery is very unsympathetic to the American soldiers of WW2. Many of the men (and some of the women) stationed overseas during this time are portrayed as arrogant, selfish, and downright ugly. This is not the greatest generation Tom Brokaw spoke of. There are some wonderful glimpses of the claustrophobic life of a serviceman here and Burns does a great job of showing the despair many of these men felt. There's also a lot of homosexuality going on within these pages, but it's often covert. (This book was published in the 1940s.) Everyone talks about the chapter "Momma" that focuses on a gay nightclub, but both "The Leaf" and "Queen Penicillin" focus on male relationships that border on the homoerotic and, to me, are equally as interesting. It's a fascinating book.

[Ed · Rating 5 out of 5]

A 1947 WWII novel by a gay American officer. Centered around the Galleria Umberto Primo (The Gallery) in Naples of August 1944, the chapters alternate between portraits of people in Naples, American officers and Neapolitan citizens, and first person recollections of travel through Northern Africa and Naples.

Being used to the "Greatest Generation" narrative, it was surprising to read a work so critical of the American perspective. And the gay content, though heavily coded, was surprisingly prevalent. With the exception of one chapter, it could probably be missed.

I thought it was a compelling read - dark and depressing, but very engaging and sadly very relevant today. A thoughtful look at the effects of war.

It reminded me, in structure, of one of my favorite books, Perec's "Life: A User's Manual", in that a number of separate stories are put side-by-side in painting a larger picture and a fuller world view.

[Julian Gray · Rating 4 out of 5]

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. 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 and you will have a thoroughly rounded picture of this fascinating period in the history of Naples.

[Ryan · Rating 1 out of 5]

I will begin by saying that I didn't even finish a third of this book, so yes, I will own up to the criticism of not being capable of accurately reviewing this book without having completed it.

That being said, I have never encountered a book that is so mind-numbingly dull that simultaneously asks so much of the reader at the same time. I, at no point in time, found even the slightest moment of interest in what was a series of disjointed, erratic, and haphazard ramblings.

No, I'm not afraid or hesitant of stream of consciousness style; my background is Modernism. I immersed myself in this. Certainly the disjointed, stream of consciousness style can be productive and novel...when it happened as a result of the FIRST great war. Joyce, Woolf, Remarqe, Barbusse, and Junger have already been there. The fragmented structure of the novel as a representation of the fragmented soldier/warrior has been done *successfully*.

This novel did nothing but alienate the reader with it's painfully esoteric military jargon and bits of broken French. This possibly could have been forgiven if any of the characters were interesting, but what little I could excavate from the superficial interior monologues didn't seem like it was worth my time anymore.

Again, I concede, I did not finish this book. I'm ok with that. There are plenty of other worthwhile reads out there.

[Misha · Rating 4 out of 5]

"There's an arcade in Naples that they call the Galleria Umberto. In August, 1944, everyone in Naples sooner or later found his way into this place and became like a picture on the wall of a museum. The Americans came here to get drunk... or to wrestle with the riddle. It was the riddle of war, of human dignity, of love, of life itself. Some came closer than others to solving it. But all the people in the Galleria were human beings in the middle of a war. They struck attitudes. Some loved. Some tried to love."

John Horne Burns came back from WWII disillusioned and struggling deeply with his sexuality. The Gallery almost reads like an auto-fiction at times. Set mostly in Naples during the Allied Occupation of the city, this is an anti-war, war novel where we never actually see the war. Instead we dive into the inner worlds of several characters which include American servicemen, and Neapolitan civilians and Prisoner of War. 

It's very hard to write about this book. It's so painful in the questions it raises which are so relevant today. What was meant to be liberation of Naples ended being another occupation. The author tears apart the American sense of capitalizing everything including war, suffering and utterly devastating poverty, exploiting already fallen people. There is a sense of exhaustion and anger as if each character has given up on any semblance of humanity. Almost feels dystopian in its coldness, harshness. Yet, even within this collective cruelty, the author posits that kindness and generosity can spark in unexpected places. That while nations and the collective are no better, no matter what their political alliance, individuals are capable of more. There is this constant call for taking back one's individuality, break free from propaganda generated by Government and the military, so as to claim back one's inherent humanity. What powerful ideas these are for a book written in 1947.

Reading The Gallery feels dreamlike because of its fragmentary nature but not something safe and comforting. This book takes you to some really dark places which are not physical, these places exist in the minds of these characters and what they have seen/ experienced in the war. Characters come and go. Despair slips through the pages to the readers. Cruelty, so much of it in the book, but also moments of redemption and hope. Naples of 1944 comes alive like a vivid character of its own - its bombed harbor; the constant danger of Mount Vesuvius; its dark alleys where the fallen people sell their 'wares'; the smell of hopelessness and poverty; the middle class trying to maintain  some form of 'decency'; the occupiers mingling with the Neapolitans.

The Gallery is an indictment of war, yes, but it is ultimately about retaining one's human core in the middle of something devastating. It's beautiful, existential, and for a book with its theme, it's so quietly moving.

[Kathleen · Rating 5 out of 5]

The most moving "war book" I've ever read, something it achieves by just about never showing any actual combat. The structure of the whole collection is compelling and the writing is brilliant on a sentence level, too. Burns is amazing for the way he shows how everyone is devastatingly affected by war--civilians, women, children--everyone.

[Macartney · Rating 4 out of 5]

Pretty gosh darn phenomenal. A few of the sections run on and drift aimlessly, but power through because overall it is an acute and devastating portrayal of humanity and war and love and identity (national, cultural, sexual) that eerily resonates even to this day.

[Matt Ross · Rating 4 out of 5]

I first encountered John Horne Burns as a character in Eugenio Corti's novel The Red Horse. I decided to read The Gallery in order to better understand this character in Corti's novel and to better understand the situation in life of WW2 Italy. Although The Gallery is a dramatically different novel than The Red Horse, it definitely did not disappoint.

In many ways The Gallery is more like a collection of short stories than it is a novel. Each chapter in the book is alternatively arranged as "Portrait" and a short "Promenade." This arrangement makes the reader feel as if he is strolling through an art museum to examine an exhibit that is tied together by theme, but each individual work of art is unique. The promenades share a common narrative voice of a soldier who traveling from Northern Africa to Naples. The war has made the soldier disillusioned with the ideal of the American dream. Instead he comes to view America to be the same as any other country–a country full of people with both dignity and perversity.

The portraits in the novel are tied together by setting rather than characters. In each of the portraits the characters encounter the Galleria Umberto, the cross-shaped cultural center of Naples. "The Gallaria was jammed with Allied soldiers and sailors, women sweeping, bars, art shops, small booths selling jewelry, columns, tattered flags and standards, lights suspended from the vaulted room as though this were some vast basketball court." Its vaulted glass ceiling had been shattered by the recent bombing of Naples. The Gallaria serves as a microcosm of the world in which soldiers and citizens together wrestle with the complexities of life.

Each of the portraits encourages the American reader to see their shortcomings and to view those from different linguistic and cultural heritages with dignity. The criticisms of American life in the 1940s are excessively and brutally repeated in each promenade and portrait. This repetition of criticism can be difficult to stomach at times. However, the violence to the ego created by this repetition may be necessary to wake the American "automaton" from his pragmatic slumber so that he may develop a deeper appreciation for art, culture, relationships, and God. After reading this novel, it is difficult not to see otherness with new eyes-to search for dignity in the foreign and to find the beauty in the impractical. Despite these calls to dignity and beauty, The Gallery also serves as a constant reminder that dignity and beauty are situated in a brutal world in which death and destruction are constant companions and the beautiful things are frequently trampled upon in the filthy streets.

The novel concludes with this description of the Gallaria Umberto. "The Americans came there to get drunk or to pick up something or to wrestle with the riddle. Everyone was aware of this riddle. It was the riddle of war, of human dignity, of love, of life itself. Some came closer than others to solving it. But all the people in the Galleria were human beings in the middle of a war. They struck attitudes. Some loved. Some tried to love." The Gallery invites the reader to wrestle with this same riddle. There seems to be an admission that the riddle is ultimately unsolvable, but the pursuit of solution and resolution is nonetheless the most important quest of our shared humanity.

[Elizabeth Sprague · Rating 4 out of 5]

okay here we go

-if i were more annoying i would say this book was gay baiting, but fortunately for you all, i am normal
-i now know way too much about military abbreviations
-a wwii book that is actually interesting and not the same old slop we americani are inundated with
-translating some french/italian/german/etc. was kinda annoying bc it forced me into my phone and away from the book. obviously not a fault of the book but did slightly affect my enjoyment and pacing
-parts where it jumped from realism were not my favorite
-the symbolism (or, as burns says, synecdoche) of the galleria was effective and not laid on too thick imo
-themes got a bit repetitive towards the end
-really feel like i got a deeper understanding of this time period in the Mediterranean front (often neglected) and the different power dynamics interpersonally and internationally
-The Leaf was probably my favorite part. distills this minor motif of a descent into authoritarianism through various iterations of Motes’ outfit. It perfectly balances the deeply serious and moderately silly.
-i really really enjoyed burns’ prose. it’s alliterative and not afraid of simile, but still incredibly lucid. you can smell his smells, see his sights, and hear his sounds in a way that feels almost Cubic. so cool!!!
-all in all, learned a lot and enjoyed it, but took a bit longer than i hoped to get through

[Frederick · Rating 4 out of 5]

I read this on a Kindle. I am convinced I pay attention better when I'm reading a bound book, but this is neither here nor there. I will only say I'd have rather had a book in my hand, with pages I could have turned. You don't get a sense of when a book will end when you're reading it on an e-reader. Even if the page number is at the bottom of the screen, that is not a good approximation of seeing your progress as you read a book made of paper. In any case, THE GALLERY, John Horne Burns's 1947 bestseller about American soldiers in a city they'd liberated three years before, is powerful. Paper or Kindle, it is worth reading.
It is not really a novel, but I have to say it is something more than a themed volume of stories. Its chapters about individuals are connected by general thoughts expressed by an anonymous American soldier. Most of the chapters about individuals are from the point of view of any given American soldier, but this is not always the case. One chapter is from the point of view of a middle-aged woman from Naples who survives by running a gay bar. Another is from the point of view of a young woman who winds up working behind a counter at a US army dance club. These stories are very straightforward while, at the same time, surprising. Taking place mostly in August, 1944, in the ruined yet surviving social center of Naples, Italy, the overarching tone is ironic sorrow. This was the turning point of the war in Europe. Paris was liberated at the same time as the action in THE GALLERY, and parts of Italy had thrown off the German yoke - a serious Italian Resistance had weakened the Nazis in Naples at the end of September, 1943, and the Allied occupation began on October 1st. But THE GALLERY does not go into this history. There is no need. It is clear that Naples is officially occupied by the Allies when the book takes place and the town is a ruin after the bombings it has suffered under the opposing forces. THE GALLERY describes US soldiers at what passes for leisure. They are stationed in a ravaged city.
But of great importance is the fact that war itself has not yet ended in August, 1944. The soldiers await other battles. Italy is not out of the war yet. Naples is under the Allies, but regions to the North are not. The stories in THE GALLERY need to be read in order. The meditative, connecting passages are designed to guide the reader toward the book's conclusion. Phrases from earlier stories are repeated to emotional effect in later stories. The one phrase which occurs throughout, and quite often is "in August, 1944."
Highly realistic novels about World War Two came out shortly after the war. Norman Mailer's THE NAKED AND THE DEAD came out in 1948; James Jones's FROM HERE TO ETERNITY in 1951. Mailer is famous for gritty detail. Jones is especially good at acute observation. But John Horne Burns, largely forgotten now, was briefly lionized before either Mailer or Jones. Not a combat soldier himself (unlike the other two authors, who had the whole hand-to-hand combat experience) he nevertheless managed to convey the abject horror of war. His soldiers see the conditions the citizens of Naples live in. The soldiers are not free of misery either. A chapter about a syphilis ward is only lightened by the fact that these are among the first people on earth to be treated with penicillin. It is significant that a crucial chapter takes place OUTSIDE of Naples. The outer world impinges.
One amazing thing about THE GALLERY is its frankness about gay soldiers. While there is a chapter set in a gay bar, there are gay characters throughout the book. Burns is more realistic about this than almost any writer of his time. The fact that he was gay himself does not explain his realistic attitude, though. Many gay writers of his generation wrote negatively about gay life. This is not to say that Burns was trying to cause the reader to be compassionate toward gay people. He ASSUMES the reader is compassionate toward everybody. This makes him different from almost any writer I've ever read.
There was one chapter I did not understand. It is about a petty tyrant in charge of censoring letters. I wasn't certain what Burns wanted me to make of him. Parts of this chapter were brilliant, but I didn't get it.
I am not of the opinion that Burns was deep. But THE GALLERY is honest. That is a virtue.

[Joyce Zhu · Rating 5 out of 5]

it is obvious after reading this book that burns was a man who saw and loved the beauty in other men; some of his descriptions of male beauty i would ascribe to his being male.

[ALEARDO ZANGHELLINI · Rating 4 out of 5]

I decided to read this after finishing Christopher Castellani's Leading Men, a fictionalised account of the relationship between Tennessee Williams and Frank Merlo: J H Burns features in Castellani's book's cast of characters. I am very glad I did.

To say that the book is an ode to Naples and Neapolitans against the backdrop of WWII is oversimplifying, if only because the war is less than a backdrop than the force that shapes both the Naples of which the author writes, and the narrator's love for the city and its inhabitants. Besides, the book is also other things: an indictment of (as the author saw them) American smugness, philistinism, and rapacity; and, of course, of the folly of war itself.

The structure is made up of 'portraits' of characters that we encounter only once: their lives do not intersect, despite the fact that they are all based in Naples in 1944, so each portrait-chapter could be a self-standing short story. These 'portraits' alternate with 'promenades' in which the narrator reports his wartime memories of North Africa and Naples. It's a daring concept for a novel, but the unity of the book does not suffer for it -- in fact, one thing I particularly admired is how well and effortlessly it all hangs together.

The book is not perfect: occasionally the tone is a little didactic or melodramatic, or the characterisation verges on caricature. But it is also a profound, lyrical, moving, and brutally honest work, with plenty of overt or oblique references to same-sex desire. The anecdote at pp 322-24 (Hogart Press edition, 1988) is particularly gorgeous.

[Steve Anderson · Rating 4 out of 5]

The Gallery was a successful first novel when it came out in 1947 and went unknown until recently when it was re-released. Author John Horne Burns, by most accounts troubled and alcoholic, hit his peak with this work and died relatively young.

It's been touted as a WWII novel, but this is not a novel. The narrative doesn't have an overriding plot, and there's only one brief combat scene, which transpires more like a murder. The book is rather a series of character vignettes, of various soldiers and locals behind the lines in North Africa and near Naples, Italy. The author served there and knew his story.

The book gives great insight into the true mindset of the WWII era. You'll find no Greatest Generation-style acounts here. It's surprisingly dark. Most had little idea what they were fighting or suffering for. It delves deep in ways a combat novel could never do, except possibly in homefront scenes. The mindsets of the relatively coddled rear-line officer, the desperate and nearly starving local civilians, and the battle-scarred and doomed Joes on leave from the front line are vastly different if not in direct conflict. They're all there, men and women, officers and noncoms and grunts, the locals down and out or suddenly in clover, straight or gay, drunk and depressed, each trying to wrap their minds around the sick repercussions of World War and apply morals that have run dry. The author put all he had into this work. It's got great language and writing, and captures a sad and tragic time.

[Dan · Rating 3 out of 5]

Overall, this was a pretty good book with some outstanding stories. "Mama" and "Queen Penicillin" in particular make this a worthwhile read. Burns has a spotty legacy, but The Gallery is generally considered his best book, and an important, oft overlooked work in the WWII canon. I especially liked the concept. The book is a series of portraits and musings on and about the various types that find their way into the Galleria Umberto in Naples. Some are about American GIs, others are Italians, but all of them have a sad kernel of ennui for the modern world, a theme that pervades much of 20th century literature.

Much is made of the fact that Burns was gay, but with one or two exceptions these stories aren't explicitly homosexual. Instead of focusing on any one group, Burns turns his pen on a larger sense of failure. A lot of this feels old hat, but no doubt it was pretty fresh for it's day.

If you liked this, make sure to follow me on Goodreads for more reviews!

[John · Rating 4 out of 5]

A very impressive novel by a now-unknown author. This was one of the first US novels after WWII and depicts, in vignettes separated by "Promenades", nine persons who end up in Naples in August 1944. Two things are especially fascinating: the very bleak portrayal of the "Greatest Generation," and the (to a modern reader) blatant gay themes throughout. The NYRB edition contains two introductions which provides helpful background, and notes the fact that no reviewer when the book came out (1947) commented that one chapter takes place in what obviously is a gay bar. This book is also one of the only WWII novels I have read that deals almost exclusively behind the front lines. One notable section is "Queen Penicillin" which deals with a stay in a VD ward that I have never seen described.

I was seriously considering a 5 star review--the vignettes are that good, but I felt the "Promenades" which connected the stories were variable. I found myself rushing through these sections to get to the vignettes. I would highly recommend this book.

[James Henderson · Rating 3 out of 5]

This is truly a neglected classic from the years just after World War II. More a series of character sketches than a novel it is nonetheless a brilliant evocation of soldiers in Italy, and Naples in particular, during the war. The section called "Momma" has rightly been noted as an outstanding depiction of gay men in war, but the rest of the novel does not fall far from the standard set in this section. Burns uses a realistic style to expose the foibles of men at war. For example, he shows the buffoonery and foolishness, if not outright criminal behavior, of many officers. This is almost a decade before the more famous shot taken by Joseph Heller in his Catch-22.
Given the inventive structure and vivifying prose I consider this novel deserves a place of honor among the best of post-war American literature.

[Liz Goodwin · Rating 5 out of 5]

The Gallery turned out to be a masterpiece of WWII literature I wasn’t expecting and didn’t know I needed. Burns alternates brief recollections of his travels in the military bureaucracy trailing the American forces, with longer stories about a generation certainly no greater than any other. Set against the morally murky backdrops of Allied-occupied Casablanca, Algiers and finally Naples - in the mess halls, censorship mills, a gay bar and a VD clinic - these are portraits of Americans (and a few Italians), some better, some worse, but all whose selves are boiled down to their essence by war, except when they evaporate completely. Burns’ unsparing vision pierces hypocrisies, but he never misses moments of harmony. And with the sequencing of his unconnected vignettes, he artfully traces an arc bending toward, if not Justice, at least the possibility of Justice.