Customer Reviews

The Gallery

5 star:		(2)
4 star:		(2)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

Burn's "The Gallery" was highly acclaimed when it appeared in 1946; reviewers thought they had found a superb new talent and "war novelist" to praise. "The Gallery" is set amidst ravaged, end-of-the-war Naples, and involves an average American Joe from North America coming into contact for the first time with the softer, older southern culture of the Mediterranean, and the influence it has on him. The action centers around the Gallery Umberto I in downtown Naples, a great,, glass-topped Victorian arcade where in the various run-down bars and darkened trattorias everything is for sale, from cigarettes to liquor and women. Though the setting is squalid, the transformation worked upon the main character by his location and his relationship with a local woman forced to sell her body because of the collapsed economy is both absorbing and moving. This book is much more than a "war novel," it is a great piece of lyrical literature well-worth searching out. If you like Joseph Heller's "Catch-22" or Gore Vidal's World War II novel, "Williwaw," or Kurt Vonnegutt's "Farehneheit 451," try "The Gallery," it is more lyrical (something in the style of Tennessee Williams) than any of those (good as they are).

Unfortunately Burns' next book, "Lucifer with a Book," was one of the most talked about novels of 1947 - because it dealt with the naughty goings-on at an all boys' prep school - not something America could handle in 1947. Burns was savagely attacked by the same critics who had praised him as a war novelist. Burns left for Europe and quickly drank himself to death, never taking his place along the Mailers, Vidals, Bellows and Capotes of his generation as he deserved. The detached, independant reader will find "The Gallery" a wonderful, surprise read.

The Galleria Umberto is an arcade of shops and cafés at the center of Naples, Italy. In 1944, after the Allies had taken control of the country, everyone managed to make his or her way to this galleria: the Neapolitans to watch and to take advantage of the Americans; the Americans to get drunk, to find a trick or to think.

In "The Gallery," the narrator takes us on a tour of the galleria, showing us the sights, sounds and people who frequent the area. Each of the 9 stories gives the reader a glimpse in to the social and sexual practices of the American GI in 1944: from a censorship office run by an egomaniac to an Italian girl finding love in an America officer's club to a gay bar. These portraits are linked by the narrator's own experiences from Casablanca to Naples and his realization of what love and the war mean to him.

This novel might be considered semi-autobiographical as John Horne Burns served during World War II and undoubtedly drew inspiration from his surroudings. For example, the portrait titled "The Leaf" takes place in a censorship office; Burns also served in a censorship office while in Italy. It is a wonderful book to read. My only gripe is that many of the characters speak Italian or French, and what they say is not translated. Perhaps this works to show what it may have been like for the American soldiers, most of whom went to Italy and the rest of Europe not knowing the languages. I would like to have known what was being said, though. (This last part may only reflect the copy I was reading. There may be translations in other copies.)

The definitive appraisal of Horne Burns must be that written by the magnificent and irreplaceable Brigid Brophy, herself taken from this life (in her case by MS) long before her time - the Recording Angel sometimes makes some strange decisions about mortality. Brophy's essay on Horne Burns is available in the volume "Reads", most recently re-published as a (UK) parperback in 1989. Brophy's volume also will remind you of the greatness of Jean Genet and Ronald Firbank, in whose company Horne Burns emphatically belongs. "The Gallery" is brilliant. As Brophy puts it, " The ultimate irony at the end of all the perspectives of Horne Burns's imaginative world is a kind of bisexuality not between homo- and hetero-sexuality but between sexuality at large and death". It cannot be emphasized too strongly - Horne Burns is essential reading...

Published in 1948, this novel provides an interesting view of life in wartime. Burns divides the book into 9 portraits and 8 promenades. Although not exclusively set in Naples, it is the Galleria Umberto which binds seemingly disparate characters together. The portraits each look at the life of 9 very different characters in August 1944 in Casablanca, Algiers and Naples. Five of the characters are American Servicemen, another portrait is of two American clergymen: a Catholic Priest and a Baptist Chaplain, and the other 3 of women: Louella, an American 40 year old Red Cross volunteer, Momma a Florentine woman who manages a gay bar in the Galleria Umberto and Guilia, a 19 year old intelligent young Neopolitan girl. Interspersed between these portraits, Burns uses a first person narrative of an American GI to comment in a more factual way the events of the time and the day to day activity. It is in these promenades that Burns highlights the distinct differences between the Americans and the Italians. Burns seventh promenade is especially revealing as he expresses some contempt for Americans' spirituality. "Our propaganda did everything but tell us Americans the truth: that we had most of the riches of the world but very little of its soul." The two portraits I found most interesting were Guilia and the Momma as Burns explored the views of the Italians as they tried to survive the early occupation of the Allied Forces. An interesting and informative novel of war through the eyes of 10 characters.

First off, this is NOT a novel. It ia a series of vignettes or "Promenades" as the author styles them, related only by the fact that they occur in Allied-occupied Naples during WWII. Most of the vignettes involve alter egos of Burns himself. From the onset of the first vignette, where the GI has the shakes so bad that he drops the first three glasses of vermouth before he can manage to gulp the fourth down and start to control his tremulousness, there is no mistaking the fact that Burns himself is the basis for most of the main characters.

No problem with this. Autobiographical fiction can be wonderful stuff. But this book just doesn't cut it, because the vignettes are so blasted BORING. Prime example,"The Leaf", where the reader plods on through over 50 pages and nothing happens save for the recounting of the petty tribulations of the mail censorship office. The one exception is a story where something tragic does occcur between two American clergy, one a Baptist one a Catholic. If all the stories were as psychologically acute as this one and as masterfully told, I would be giving this book 5 blazing stars. But they're not.

Essentially, Burns mines the old Henry James theme of Americans losing their sense of exceptionalism in Europe. I kept being reminded of James's The Ambassadors in slapdash form.

I think the only type of person who can probably fully appreciate this book are those, like William Zinsser, who wrote the intro to my copy of the book, who were there at the same place, same time and for whom it is "their" WWII.

Otherwise, it makes for crashing dull reading.