“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
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