Dreadful: The Short Life and Gay Times of John Horne Burns

by David Margolick

But another former student of Burns’s named Paul Barstow† felt very differently, for by his very example Burns had helped him and others like him come to terms with who they were.

For all his activities, at Harvard, too, Burns spent a lot of time by himself. The suite he had in Dunster House for three years, A25, he lived in alone, and it suited him. “I looked down on everything in the university as cliquish because in my own way I was the biggest minority clique of all,” he recalled. “I dwelt in a delightful superhuman elegance—delightful for me. I laughed at everything because I was above everything. It was merely unfortunate that most of the world couldn’t breathe the rarefied atmosphere that I daily inhaled.” His classmates seemed perfectly content to let him stew in his own rarefied juices. “I say I knew him; I did not particularly like him, because I found him pretentious, egotistical, and not a little scornful of others who were not like-minded,” a classmate named Sumner Willard, who went on to teach French at West Point, later wrote. “John had an original cast of mind and was not happy, not really comfortable, at Harvard.”

He carried this narcicism through his alcoholism to his death at 37.

New England’s finest private schools were rife with prejudice. That included not just his own, where the religious bias was institutionalized—Andover’s founding document provided that “Protestants only shall ever be concerned in the TRUST or Instruction of this Academy”—but, whether by official proscription or unspoken tradition, many other comparably prestigious schools. “It is perfectly true that it will be hard for you to get a place in several of the schools which I regard most highly, including Hotchkiss, Deerfield, St. Paul’s, Milton, and Choate,” Fuess conceded. He suggested, essentially, that Burns stick to his own kind. “The public schools, however, particularly in Boston and vicinity, should be open to you if you care to move in that direction,” he wrote. “Beyond that, of course, there lies the college and the university, in which the religious

“In my mind the new novel has become a symbol of the grandeur of wickedness,” he wrote another Harvard student. “Sometimes (seriously) I am afraid to write it down, for it seems I have attained to a new logic of sin. The world can’t be improved by it.” That wickedness is neatly encapsulated in Burns’s alter ego, Sard, who is not only dashingly good-looking—Burns was prone to falling in love with his own heroes—but erudite, gay (the female body “smells of fish”), pitiless, and ultimately solitary, someone who finds mankind laughable, companionship immature, and intimacy grotesque. “A body built for intensive copulation, stifled by a brain built for intensive criticism”: in describing Sard, Burns was surely characterizing himself, or at least how he fancied himself to be. The

Over his door he placed the famous words from

The Inferno: Lasciate ogni speranza voi ch’entrate.*

return engagement there for him must have seemed quite inconceivable. Despite an ostensible ban on them, at least

650,000 and as many as 1.6 million gay men served in the American military in World War II, according to Allan Berube’s landmark 1990 study, Coming Out Under Fire. Any of them could theoretically have stayed home simply by declaring their sexual orientation—“All you have to do is to tell them you’re queer, and you’re out,” a gay character explains in Christopher Isherwood’s novel The World in the Evening—but few actually did, either because they felt as patriotic, and as threatened, as everyone else, or because they craved adventure

By contrast, Burns once described Protestant services as “glorified minstrel shows.”

Once again, Burns’s greatest solace came from music. As he told the Hagens, he’d turned into “a Diaghileff”;e his letters are filled with details of the concerts, recitals, musicales, and jam sessions he organized, conducted, accompanied, or performed by himself—productions of unimaginable refinement and sophistication, particularly in a military outfit, particularly in so remote a place. Under his supervision, the music of Fauré, Respighi, Duparc, Handel, Palestrina, Bach, and Gilbert and Sullivan (and “some Victor Herbert for the rabble”) filled the North African air. So did Burns’s own compositions: once, he sang his own setting of the Edward Arlington Robinson poem “Richard Cory,” the one about the suicide of a prosperous businessman (who, he claimed, was actually the father of a friend). According to the mimeographed program, the selections for the CPI’s Fifth Musical Evening on December 2, 1943, featured Lieutenant John Horne Burns, baritone, singing two ardent and extremely difficult songs, Schubert’s “Der Erlkönig” and Schumann’s “Ich Grolle Nicht,” along with an Irish air. Then, following intermission, Burns played Brahms’s Hungarian Dances on the piano. But not all the performances were public, as he explained to Catherine Burns in January 1944. What a war! If General Patton ever got wind of some of our evenings here … somebody’s mother sent him two volumes of the Harvard University Glee Club Collection, and tonight after dinner four of us—Charles Bacharach, Bob ...

CPI’s Seventh Musical Evening. A corporal is checking the umlauts in the names of German composers and wondering whether it’s Midsummernight’s or Midsummer’s Night. The prime donne of the evening have now forgotten that they are 2nd Lts in the Army of the United States—are rushing around scratching each other’s eyes out—as though they were Tallulah Bankhead and Ethel Barrymore in the same play. The singers all secretly hope that the pianists will break a finger; the pianists that the singers will catch cold. Out of such vanity and pettiness are beautiful arts born. “Sometimes I think that the work that goes into these evenings, the high tradition of performance that distinguishes them, are a waste of the talent here,” he told his mother the next day. “But then nearly everything lovely in this world fights its way up through Cenozoic mud.” When he wasn’t playing he was listening to radio broadcasts from overseas, critically.i The incongruity and unfairness of it all became increasingly striking: around the same time, Allied troops landed at Anzio, thirty-three miles south of Rome; thousands would die in four months of fighting there.

Nothing and no one really satisfies me except myself and ideas—music, poetry, intangibles. I am a sensation-seeker of a fairly high order, and when there are no more sensations I’ll probably die in a genteel but none the less jaded manner. By this token I can’t help hurting people, of whom I always tire before they tire of me. They delude themselves into thinking that in me they’ve found some key, some secret, some be-and-end-all. Sooner or later I find that they’re boring me or sucking me dry, and I have to make a clean break with them. It’s impossible for me, like most soldiers, to have a “buddy,” for my arc is too wide and too eccentric to admit of another’s presence. This summation of my perversities, reduced ad absurdum, makes me a great genius, a fool, a misanthrope, an ascetic. Probably I’m some of all; there’s a coldness and a cruelty and a logic in my reasoning that rather terrifies me … I’ve hardly ever failed to size up a character at once, on intuition; and later experience proves me to be right. I have moments of profound depression; my nerves are so sharp that I can reduce everything and everyone to a shamblesy zero. Then when I’m convinced I’m a cool ghoul, I have a moment of icy calm, like death; and the most exquisite fire and laughter glows in me, so that there seems to be between me and God a secret shared by very few.

With Hagen, typically, he was less flippant and more pointed. “I’ve suffered no hardship whatever—physically,” he wrote. “But constantly I feel a heartbreaking malaise, a decomposition of all that I’ve known. Can’t tell you, Moe, whether it’s an added heightening of my senses of reality (or the reverse), or closer contact to the bacteria of war, or a sudden paralysis of my brain from some kind of paresis. But we do all live in a kind of cocained dream, on a level quite different from anything I’ve known outside of surrealism and the novels of the Brontë bitches.” Such brushes with the fighting remained rare. “The only thing that convinced me I’m overseas is the Arabs and their foecal smell, and the amount of French I hear,” he told his father. Even glancing references to the war are so scarce in his letters that they’re almost startling when they appear, as they did in one from January 1944 to his mother. We listen carefully to the cultivated Italian announcers, spraying German propaganda into the night. They’re incredible programs: excellent symphonic music, corny 1922 jazz, and the wildest blurbs you ever heard about American atrocities. But what we hear and what we know makes us smile at the wishful thinking in the United States. The papers that we see from Boston, New York and Chicago give us the impression that we are wrong and that this war certainly should have ended at least a month ago. But it hasn’t. The other night I met some Army Air Force pilots fresh back fro...

He saw

documentary San Pietro, which chronicled a battle in December 1943 sixty miles from Naples but had not been shown in the States because it was “almost more than any heart can stand.”

“In many respects, it’s done me good—the loneliness, the homesickness, the contact (if not with bullets and foxholes) with the misery of a very sick world.” His mother had put her finger on it: “I think I have more compassion and tenderness.” A new world had opened up to him: “I’m fond of characters here that I could never have talked to as a civilian,” he wrote his mother. “The things that used to enchain me: wit, perception, kultchah—no longer seem to matter much; they’re an accident of birth and money. The closest friendships here—and at the beach-head—are founded in tenderness, sacrifice, courage, humor, kindness.” He’d gone abroad as what he’d always been—“a very clever boy, attractive when he chose to be, palming off beautiful manners for a lack of heart.” But at some point, he wrote, “I became aware that there are millions of other people in the world, and that really they’re very much like me.” No longer, he vowed, would he live on a “beautiful little peninsula all my own.”

a The cheesy-smelling secretion that gathers under the foreskin and around the clitoris.

“Italy—the warm womby nights, the persistent armpit odor of a jump-joint—has brought a Renaissance in my arid soul,” he told Hagen. When he wasn’t living Naples, Burns wrote about it.

“I realize that to live in the most disjointed period in the history of the world, one can become either an idiot, a maniac, or something very great,” he wrote. “I’m not quite sure what the greatness will be, but myself will find the answer to that too.” Maybe, but there’d be a slight detour first. Burns’s ventures into Italian dreadfulness soon exacted a steep price.

Since the Abbess has been chosen to write our biography, we see no reason why we shouldn’t give her the reasons for our sequestration, which have been hushed as effectively as the pregnancy of a nun. It seems that the dreadful life here isn’t as free of consequence as it is under the gonfalon of the Statue of Liberty, and that in the course of our Italian brwaugh some of the sisterhood infected us with a spirochete or two. In due time these produced their fruit on our so far immaculate body and we went screaming to the dispensary to show various medical officers our now maculate skin. After a round of Kahns and Wassermans [sic]‡ we were immured in a venereal ward along with other burnt Ay-rabs, French, Italians, and Americans. We can truthfully say now that we’ve seen everything. The new treatment for syphilis is drastic, but it takes only eight days, having just been proved in the land of the free. Sixty hypodermics of penicillin were forced into us subcutaneously, once every three hours day and night. The results are more miraculous than anything Bernadette Soubirous§ saw at Lourdes; we now propose a statue to Professor Penicil on the Abbey Grounds. Just how much infected soldiers endured in Bagnoli can be gleaned only from what Burns later wrote about it in The Gallery; though it was a historic enterprise—penicillin, which had gone into mass production a year earlier, had only just begun to be administered for venereal disease—a stop in the venereal disease ward at the ...

dreadfuldreadful,” but which was also known around the place simply as “It.” Those with “the clap”—gonorrhea—had it relatively easy: four injections over a single day. But because no one was quite sure how much penicillin syphilitics required, the doctors erred on the side of excess: eight full days of injections: every three hours around the clock. Patients were jabbed with primitive blunt needles in a grim orbit around their bodies, rotating from one shoulder, and then one cheek of the buttocks, to the other. As the days passed, and with their skin reduced to hamburger, the injections of the precious, yellow, viscous fluid became even more painful. In between jabs, the soldiers slept restlessly, ate listlessly, exchanged gallows humor, and wandered catatonically around a courtyard—“a chain gang without chains.” As in Dante, jaded veterans—those a few days into the cure—explained things to neophytes. In what Burns called the “freemasonry of penicillin,” a certain camaraderie developed. At last came the final injection, followed by the “baccalaureate sermon,” when hardened doctors warned departing soldiers not to fuck up—and come back—again. Some listened, though many did not.

A letter to MacMackin suggested how he’d sobered up. Suddenly, it was no longer “Dear Giaour”† or “Mon très cher Priapus,” but “Dear David.” Then he went on to lecture MacMackin on the various foibles of dreadfuls, whom he now—and for the first (and only) time in their correspondence—called “homosexuals.” Speaking of the army of belles that Plato suggests in the Phaedo,‡ Konrad Heiden§ has a stinging sentence to the effect that the 20th century homosexual is rarely completely honest with himself. Even if he ever arrives at the point of accepting his bias as merely an incident in his personality, he sets up all sorts of pitiful little compensations. Camping is after all the essence of the tragic spirit contorted into a leer no Greek mask ever knew. He sets up for himself a tinseled world that has nothing to do with any reality, believes himself a golden and divine spirit, gifted beyond other men, and frequently goes over into the realm of art, which soothes the feminine ganglia in him. Unless he has a first-rate mind, merciless self-appraisal, and honesty too large to force his world on a larger one he becomes an artist as warped as his own psyche; and you get ugliness, negation, and nonessentials substituted for the blood of great art. In Sodome et Gomorrhe,‖ he went on, “Miss Proust” had also exposed the dishonesty of modern homosexuals. “It was a pose which used to irk me in you,” he scolded. (Only once before had he shared his ambivalence about gay culture with MacMacki...

really was.

Burns had evidently been reading Heiden’s 1944 book Der Fuehrer: Hitler’s Rise to Power. In it Heiden, a German-born Jewish journalist, discussed the homosexuality of several early Nazis, notably the head of the SA, Ernst Röhm, and wrote that “assuredly the pressure of public censure has distorted more characters, weakened more moral resistance, created more dishonesty toward oneself and others among modern homosexuals than among other people.”

Exile still had its appeal; “because I suffer from maturities and illnesses and virtues more European than American in our present stage of development, I can be happy wherever there is enough to eat, enough hooch, enough music, and enough people to prey on,” he told Hagen. But shortly before his twenty-ninth birthday, he had another medical setback. This time it was hepatitis.

After thirty-nine days on the wagon, his liver had rebounded, even though he faced another six months of abstinence. “The alternative is a relapse, convulsions, and der Tod, das ist die kühle Nacht,”‖ he noted.

He also resumed his dipsomania. “My renovated liver seems to be taking its alcohol douches very nicely,” he boasted. The Gallery remained stalled: two-thirds complete. “I wish I could sooofffer a little so I could write the last three chapters,” he complained. Meantime, Burns had met the latest love of his life. This one was named Mario.

The title of a Heine poem—in English, “Death, That Is the Cool Night”—that Brahms, among others, set to music.

“All I do is rest and finish up The Gallery, dedicated to you and Moe,” he wrote Beulah. “I’ve got to make something of my life, said he seriously.” He told her his novel was “one of the manuscripts of the twentieth century.” He told MacMackin that the book was “like nothing since King Lear.” He even showed it to strangers. A man in Boston later recalled that when he’d picked Burns up one night at Phil’s Punch Bowl, a gay bar on Piedmont Street near the Statler Hotel, he had been carrying the manuscript; when they retired to the man’s apartment, Burns read him a bit.

Perhaps worst of all, the new chairman of the English department—that is, Burns’s boss—was Norrie Orchard. And the war had only fortified Burns’s old prejudices against him: by serving in the military while the chairman hadn’t—like Frank Sinatra, he had had something wrong with his eardrum—Burns was now even more of a man than Orchard. It didn’t matter that in his letters to MacMackin, Burns was far more “swish” than Orchard ever was. Orchard was the sort of conspicuously effeminate man Burns had disdained in his unit, the old lady type more masculine gay soldiers resented for confirming the straight stereotype of the homosexual. Burns may have distanced himself from Orchard because, on some level, he feared he was so much the same. “To serve in a department headed by his chief abomination must have ignited his war-induced smoldering ire and unconcealed scorn,” Sidney Eaton later wrote. “He returned, then, to a seeming alien community in a bitter mood.”

Burns had been unusually antisocial that spring, passing brusquely by students on his corridor, then closing his door to drink (they surmised) and type (they could hear). “I felt the man had a huge chip on his shoulder,” recalled one student who, having heard about the legendary Burns, had eagerly anticipated his return. “I don’t remember ever seeing him smile. I sensed anger. He wasn’t the same man that had been described to me by other people.” And finally, sitting at his desk one night in late April, the rows of elms blossoming outside his window, Burns somehow conjured up the building, and the city, four thousand miles away, that had moved him so deeply. “Outside the Galleria Umberto is the city of Naples,” he wrote. “And Naples is on the bay, in the Tyrrhenian Sea, on the Mediterranean. This sea is a center of human life and thought. Wonderful and sad things have come out of Italy. And they came back there in August 1944. For they were dots in a circle that never stops.” At the bottom of the page he marked the remarkably short life span of so ambitious a project: 18 June 1945–23 April 1946. Then he listed the book’s long and unlikely itinerary: Naples; Caserta; Florence; Leghorn; Milan; Boston; Windsor, Connecticut. And then he was done, and on Shakespeare’s birthday at that. “I fell across my Underwood and wept my heart out,” he wrote Hagen. “The Gallery, I fear, is one of the masterpieces of the twentieth century.” “My God!” his sister Cathleen exclaimed when she re...

“Strange Fruit.”*

uncertainly—“

Quite apart from Momma, the very profusion of gay characters underlies what a breakthrough The Gallery was: unlike prior gay novels, in which the few homosexual characters are tormented, exotic, or dangerous, and invariably effeminate, here they are everywhere and, while they have their quirks, they are, collectively at least, normal. And, certainly for the first time, most of them are in uniform.

Nearly all of the most sympathetic figures in The Gallery share one trait: they sound like Burns. “I annihilated my own personality completely in producing it,” Burns told Holger Hagen. That’s not right. In fact, he cloned it. The Gallery is a gallery of Burns doppelgängers who, though varying in rank, appearance, erudition, nationality, religion, and even sex, are all empathetic, alluring, aloof, and wise.

He then turned to Freudian analysis and two-dimensional phrenology to buttress his case. “My knowledge of psychology and photography of people make it possible for me to read character from a photograph,” he wrote. And the author picture on Lucifer’s jacket (actually, a rather friendly and innocuous image) convinced him Burns was “an egotist, satisfied with himself and whatever he does regardless of the offense or results.”

wonder;

The unkindest cut, though, came from the New Yorker, where the book had the extreme ill fortune to be reviewed jointly with The Old Man and the Sea. If Ernest Hemingway’s latest was “sure to be considered one of the best-written books of the year, A Cry of Children should win a place for itself among the worst written,” stated Brendan Gill.

“It all seems like a waste of time: Burns’s writing it, Harper’s publishing it, the reader’s reading it,” John A. Lynch wrote in Commonweal.

“The only reason I now mention A Cry of Children, which has an American setting, is that so lamentably cheap and nasty a piece of work is likely to contribute in a small way to the anti-American prejudice in this country which at the moment is so dangerous,” wrote the reviewer, R. D. Charques (who had also panned Lucifer).

MacGregor was more brutal. “He settled in Florence and became an irredeemable drunk,” he said many years later. “He was at the Excelsior bar so drunk, so often, that they finally told him he couldn’t come there any more.”

Loomis has spread and opened itself up, losing—for both better and worse—the intimate, hermetic quality of Burns’s day and mine.