*Dreadful: The Short Gay Life of John Horne Burns by David Margolick (Other Press, 2013)

 

While searching for other books by John Horne Burns (he only published 3) I came across this biography by David Margolick and bought it, as I thought it might be interesting to read.  It was.

John Horne Burns (JHB), whose first book, the wonderful The Gallery, was published to extraordinary acclaim and success in 1947, died at the age of 36 in 1953.  He was born in 1916 and grew up in and around Boston, one of the many children in an upper-middle class family.  He was educated at Andover and Harvard and then taught at Loomis, a prep school in Connectitcut.  JHB was brilliant, and very musical, but his intellectual and creative gifts estranged him from almost everyone.  He felt superior and made no attempt to hide this feeling: he was smug and mean and generally unliked. 

He spent the war censoring letters in North Africa and then in Naples, where he fell in love with Italy and Italians.  After the war he returned to the US and taught once again at Loomis, where he was miserable, published The Gallery to great acclaim, and then published his second novel, Lucifer with a Book, a satire of prep-school life obviously set at Loomis and skewering many of his colleagues there.  The book was unmercifully (and perhaps deservedly) savaged by critics, and JHB banished himself back to Italy, where he drank himself to death -- every evening in the bar of Hotel Excelsior -- in three short years.

Margolick does a wonderful job bringing this tricky and unsympathetic character to life.  He writes clearly and honestly (it seems) yet compassionately about Burns.  His story is truly tragic -- one wonders if he were able to live and love openly as a homosexual how different this sad and short life might have been.