The publisher and date listed always refer to the edition of the book that I read; illustrations are chosen for the graphic appeal and may not correspond to the edition that is cited. Photographs are always of the author (unless otherwise indicated).
Dreadful: The Short Gay Life of John Horne Burns by David Margolick (Other Press, 2013)
While searching for other books by John Horne Burns (he only published 3) I came across this biography by David Margolick and bought it, as I thought it might be interesting to read. It was,
John Horne Burns (JHB), whose first book, the wonderful The Gallery, was published to extraordinary acclaim and success in 1947, died at the age of 36 in 1953. He was born in 1916 and grew up in and around Boston, one of the many children in an upper-middle class family. He was educated at Andover and Harvard and then taught at Loomis, a prep school in Connecticut. JHB was brilliant, and very musical, but his intellectual and creative gifts estranged him from almost everyone. He felt superior and made no attempt to hide this feeling: he was smug and mean and generally unliked.
He spent the war censoring letters in North Africa and then in Naples, where he fell in love with Italy and Italians. After the war he returned to the US and taught once again at Loomis, where he was miserable, published The Gallery to great acclaim, and then published his second novel, Lucifer with a Book, a satire of prep-school life obviously set at Loomis and skewering many of his colleagues there. The book was unmercifully (and perhaps deservedly) savaged by critics, and JHB banished himself back to Italy, where he drank himself to death — every evening in the bar of Hotel Excelsior — in three short years.
Margolick does a wonderful job bringing this tricky and unsympathetic character to life. He writes clearly and honestly (it seems) yet compassionately about Burns. His story is truly tragic — one wonders if he were able to live and love openly as a homosexual how different this sad and short life might have been.
He Knew He Was Right by Anthony Trollope (Oxford University Press, 1978)
He Knew He Was Right, first published in 1869, is a very long, many-charactered, and intricately-plotted novel about marriage. During the course of its 900+ pages, we watch while one marriage tragically unravels, three marriages are happily consummated, several engagements are broken, and a number of proposals are refused.
The marriage at the center of the book is the one destroyed by jealousy on the part of the husband (Louis Trevalyn) and willfulness on the part of the wife (Emily Trevalyn). He suspects her not of infidelity but of a perhaps compromising friendship with an older man, and when she refuses to cut all ties with this scoundrel, a gulf opens between them that cannot be bridged.
Meanwhile, Emily’s sister, the independent and spirited Nora, rejects an offer of marriage from a charming Lord-to-be because she loves a man who has no money and works as a journalist for a penny newspaper, which is considered ungentlemanly. And Dorothy, the sister of the journalist, who is living with her fiercely controlling maiden aunt, manages to avoid an arranged marriage with a foolish local cleric, instead happily marrying the heir to her aunt’s considerable fortune. A few subplots, also dealing with engagements and marriages complete the plot(s).
The book is set in England (Exeter and London) and Italy (Florence and Siena). Perhaps because we have so many main characters and so many relationships to consider, our sympathies are attenuated and the strong and pleasurable connection a Trollope reader often feels for the book’s hero and heroine is missing here. The characters have less time on the page to reveal themselves and charm us, so we must take many of these love relationships on faith. This makes the book somewhat less satisfying than those Trollope novels that are more exclusively centered on one (or two) relationships — a deprivation that is partially compensated for with the book’s richness of plot and characters.
The Far Cry by Emma Smith (Readers’ Union 1951; originally published by MacGibbon & Kee in 1949)
I’m not sure when or how I acquired this book, but it’s been on my shelf for many years. With the exception of a single blurb on the back cover (“Hers will one day be a very important name indeed” — New Stateman), the jacket reveals nothing about the book or its author — no cover image, no description of the book, no bio of the author. Only the title: The Far Cry.
It’s interesting to read a book without any of the basic information or assumptions one usually enters a book with — where, when, who, what — all of those basic orienting facts. Is this ignorance an asset or a detriment? The reader must initially work a little harder, perhaps, to establish a connection with the book, but perhaps this connection, once established, is stronger and deeper than usual. The reader must read more carefully in order to conjure a world from the blank slate . . .
For some reason I stopped writing about this book before describing its content, about which I have no memory whatsoever. Who, and what, was it about? Did I like it? I have no idea. I shall have to glance through its pages and hope that something about it comes back to me.
The Gallery by John Horne Burns (NYRB Classics, 2004; orginally published by Harper & Bros., 1947)
I’ve read about this book for a long time, I suppose because it has some gay content (and the author was gay), and I don’t know why I didn’t read it earlier. I’m glad I finally did.
The Gallery is (like so many good books) an odd book — it has a singular pattern and form that is sometimes narratively thwarting but is ingeniously suited to its purpose, which is to portray a wide-angle view of Naples (and North Africa) in 1944, when the tide is turning in WWII and the Allied forces are chasing the German’s up the Italian peninsula (an offensive that is also vividly and dramatically explored in The End of It, Mitchell Goodman’s beautiful book).
The title refers to the Galleria in Naples, which although it has been bombed during the warm and has lost its glass ceiling, is still home to bars, cafes, and shops, and teems with all kinds of civilian and military life. The title also refers to the form of the book, which is comprised of a series of “portraits” –story- or novella-length chapters that are each centered on one character, ranging from American soldiers to Italian civilians, and ultimately reflecting the extraordinary gamut of people living — and dying — in Naples in August of 1944. These portraits are interspersed with “promenades” in which a first-person narrator remembers and vividly describes various places he has been stationed during the war — namely Casablanca, Algiers, and Naples. The resulting mix of characters and places is wonderfully rich and engaging.
Burns’ portrayal of Italy and Italians is loving and sympathetic, and although the book’s tapestried form doesn’t allow it to gain much narrative momentum, it is always engaging and frequently profoundly moving. Although flawed — some of characters are cliched or simplistic — The Gallery is an ambitious and impressive book.
It’s been a while since I’ve read an Ivy Compton-Burnett novel and reading Men and Wives (the title, which isn’t perfectly reflective, seems intriguingly off — why not Men and Woman or Husbands and Wives?) reminded me how singular and scintillating Compton-Burnett novels can be.
This one is centered around Lord and Lady Halsam and their four children (Matthew, Jeremy, Griselda, and Gregory) and their assorted friends and neighbors — a large cast of 16 characters, all of whom are well-developed and figure in just about every aspect of the plot.
Harriet, Lady Halsam, is an unhappy and difficult woman who doesn’t seem to like anyone, including her husband and children. She decides to kill herself and does not succeed, although the results of her attempt are fatal. This book explores — in Compton-Burnett’s uniquely subverted way — depression, and the evanescence and artificiality of all human relationships, both familial and romantic. One of the characters, Camilla, begins the book married to one man has been engaged to be married to three others by its conclusion.
Odd, smart, funny — a book of many keen pleasures.
The True Heart by Sylvia Townshend Warner (Viking, 1929)
The True Heart is an odd book with a whimsical quality that lends it a unique tone that is both beguiling and sometimes confusing.
Suki Bond spends her first 16 years in an orphanage for girls and leaves there when one of the patronesses arranges a position for her as a maid-of-all-work at a desolate farm on an island in the coastal marshlands of England. Mr. Norman runs the farm with his three taciturn sons. Another boy, Eric, who is beautiful but strangely silent and withdrawn, also lives on the farm, but it is unclear what he is doing there. Suki befriends this gentle soul, who responds to her attention and affection tenderly and amorously, and the two youngsters fall in love. But when Eric suffers an epileptic fit it is revealed that he is considered an idiot and has been banished to the farm by his snobbish and hateful upper-class parents, who want nothing to do with their damaged and embarrassing son. He is nevertheless returned to his hateful home and when Suki goes there to rescue him, she is cruelly treated and thrown out into the street.
Steadfast in her love for Eric, she endures hunger, cold, and grueling work while she devises a plan to reunite with Eric, marry him, and give him a loving and happy life. As this plan relies upon a private audience with Queen Victoria, the reader is at first skeptical and then amazed when Suki, with the help of some very friendly strangers, executes it perfectly and successfully.
The travails that Suki endures call to mind the similarly unfortunate Tess of the D’Ubervilles, but Suki refuses to become a victim of hate or fate, and her dignified struggles and quiet triumph make for very enjoyable and heartening reading.
Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead by Olga Tokarczuk (Riverhead, 2020)
I enjoyed Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead, although nothing about it seemed worthy of the Nobel Prize for Literature, which this Polish writer was recently awarded. It’s smart and odd and funny — a sort of dark eco-murder(s) mystery set in an isolated rural Polish community, and narrated by an angry, solitary, and vengeful older lady who suffers many physical ailments. When local hunters begin to be found murdered in strange, inexplicable ways, she is sure that the animals these cruel men kill are responsible for the hunters’ grizzly deaths. She inserts herself into the police investigation, becoming a suspect in the process.
In addition to animal rights, our narrator is obsessed with astrology, and spends a lot of time pontificating on this subject, both to the reader and to her neighbors. Like her neighbors, I found her pontification to be tedious and annyoing.
A lively book, with a strong and distinct narrative voice and vivid and original characters.
The Matchmaker by Stella Gibbons (Vintage, 2012; originally published by Longmans, Green & Co. in 1949)
The Matchmaker is set in the English countryside somewhere between London and Brighton directly after the end of WWII. The war is, in fact, still very much a part of daily life — food and clothes are rationed, Italian prisoners remain in local camps, and Ronald — or is it Reginald? — our interesting heroine’s husband, is still posted in Germany.
Alda is our interesting heroine. She and her three young daughters have come to live in Pine Cottage, a ramshackle and unpleasant house, since their home in Ironborough was bombed. Alda is beautiful, confident, sensible, impatient, and bossy. Her considerable charm has a selfish edge that can be cutting. She and her daughters are soon joined at Pine Cottage by Alda’s childhood friend Jean, who is sweet and pretty and dim and wealthy, having inherited her father’s successful business. She has never been able to finalize any of the romances she naively pursues, so Alda decides she should marry Mr. Waite, a handsome but somewhat ornery local chicken farmer. Meanwhile at the nearby farm, a romance develops, abetted by Alda, between Fabrio, a handsome Italian POW and Sylvia, a charming but brazen Land Girl from London.
These two romances develop over the course of a year, and many members of the local farming community play a part in the intertwined plots. Gibbons, by paying somewhat exhaustive attention to weather, light, flora and fauna, paints a very vivid portrait of this rural and seasonal world, and her gentle exploration of character is generous and shrewd. Alda, whose beauty and vivacity initially enchants the reader, is gradually revealed to be a smug and shallow person, and Fabrio, who is cruelly jilted by Sylvia, is revealed to be the true hero of the book. A final chapter in which he returns home to Italy and his true love is moving and delightful.
The Harness Room by L. P. Hartley (Hamish Hamilton, 1971)
This intense, short novel reminded me very much of Joycelyn Brook’s The Scapegoat. Both novels are about a young, sensitive, passive boy who is entrusted to a macho military man in order to be masculinized. And both transformations end up killing the boy as a result of homosexual attraction — mostly repressed in The Scapegoat but overtly expressed in this book.
The boy’s father, a military man and a long-time widower, marries a much-younger woman from an old but insolvent family. While they honeymoon for a month, the father enlists his handsome, masculine and bisexual chauffeur to make man of his son. The chauffeur obliges by seducing the boy while teaching him boxing and bodybuilding calisthenics. When the father and his bride return, the boy suspects that his step-mother’s affections and interest are directed at him rather than his father, and decides he must run away with the chauffeur to avoid a tragedy. But before that can be achieved they have a boxing match in order for the father to witness his son’s newly acquired manliness. The chauffeur intends to hold back and allow the boy to triumph, but trips over a hole in the rug and accidentally deals the boy a lethal blow.
The brevity of the book prohibits any of the characters or themes to be successfully developed, so The Harness Room seems slight and sensational, and consequently disappointing,
(left to right) Sir Maurice Bowra, Sylvester Govett Gates, and Hartley, photographed by Lady Ottoline Morrell
Why We Never Danced the Charleston by Harlan Greene (St. Martin’s/Marek, 1984)
A southern gothic tragic novel about a group of young gay men in Charleston. They form the “Sons of Wisteria Society” and congregate nightly in Peacock Alley, a gay bar owned and managed by a dwarf. They are all attracted to the preternaturally masculine and beautiful Hirsh Hess, whose tormented inability to accept his degenerate sexuality leads to inevitable violence and death.
Greene, in his first novel, writes with sensual ripeness about the dark, haunted world of Charleston, where so much is hidden, repressed or ignored. Three of the men, including the narrator and Hess, work in the museum, which is run by Miss Wragg, a no-nonsense Yankee who seems intrigued by the gay boys surrounding her but also manipulates them.
I wasn’t entirely or consistently convinced by this world and these characters — Greene presents it all with a gothic voluptuousness that is entertaining but often unsubtle and distorting.
John Horne Burns
(left to right) Sir Maurice Bowra, Sylvester Govett Gates, and Hartley, photographed by Lady Ottoline Morrell 
