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

by David Margolick

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...