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...

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.