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

by David Margolick

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.