“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.
