Book of a Lifetime: ‘The Gallery’ by John Horne Burns

From The Independent archive: Ian Thomson on ‘The Gallery’ by John Horne Burns

‘The Gallery’ unfolds in shell-pocked Naples – pictured here in 1945 (Getty)

John Horne Burns, born in 1916 in Massachusetts, wrote one of the finest American novels about the Second World War. The Gallery sold half a million copies on publication in 1947, but Burns, an alcoholic, was unable to cope with the success. Six years later, in 1953, he died at the bar of the Excelsior Hotel in Florence after his first brandy of the day. He was 37.

The Gallery unfolds in shell-pocked Naples, where Burns served as a military intelligence officer during the summer of 1944. In the tangled wreckage of the Allied-occupied city he saw the moral and material ruins of fascism, yet formed a romantic vision of Italy, which he contrasted with the moral bankruptcy (as he came to see it) of American culture.

Naples changed his life, and The Gallery was intended, in part, as semi-autobiography. The novel takes its title from the Galleria Umberto, a Victorian-era arcade in Naples. For the nine months that Burns was stationed in Naples, the Galleria functioned as a hive of black market activity, as well as a sexual trysting place. The Allied bombings had collapsed the skylight, but beneath its shattered dome the author noted all Neapolitan life, from the card sharps and prostitutes to the barefoot scugnizzi (ragamuffins) who filched cash and rations.