"Burns became an important, even a unique, chronicler of gay life in the military, reminding us in real time how, in astonishingly high numbers, homosexuals- or ”dreadfuls," as he called them in his typically camp code- were serving their country at a time when they were officially banned from the military, and long before another generation of traditionalists pretended they’d never been in there. Here, too, Bums’s letters are as important a part of his legacy as his novels, offering forgotten snapshots of GI life-gay GI life abroad, a life that seems quite inconceivable today. Without Burns's letters, how else would we know of soldiers performing Schumann, Brahms, and Gilbert and Sullivan for their fellows in the middle of the North African desert?
But I learned, too, of the peculiarly erratic combination of explicitness and evasion, high art and clumsy artifice, with which Burns wrote about his own sexuality in those works, and how he so often resorted to the subterfuges of gay men of his time. Bums’s homosexuality simultaneously marked his greatest work, limited his artistic range, hastened his downfall, and, decades later, aided his reemergence as a literary figure of note. With breathtaking speed, he went from being one of the brightest literary lights of his generation-published by a prestigious house, much sought after for blurbs and speeches, photographed by Life and Harper’s Bazaar-to an embittered drunk, living in exile, his talent eroded or blocked, his work brutally ridiculed or rejected, downing cheap cognac and soda prodigiously every night at the bar of a Florentine hotel until, at the age of thirty-six, under murky circumstances in an Italian sea~ side town, he died. His editor at Harper and Brothers, Frank MacGregor, summed it up best: ”A lot of authors don't go any where, but you don't get the extreme that he was-from the top to the very bottom.”
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When he was eight years old or so, MacMackin’s parents divorced. In the manner of the British, his mother took his sister, while young David went with his father- only his father never came for him. After some time had passed, a concerned neighbor contacted his father’s older sister, Olive Templeton, a star of silent pictures. She and her husband took him in, but shortly thereafter-for how long, it’s unclear- MacMackin’s uncle began molesting him. Sometime after that Aunt Olive who had an estate called Trailsend in Canton, Connecticut, not far from Hartford -sent her nephew to Loomis.
David MacMackin was eccentric, musical, precocious, and effeminate; in a poll the Log once ran for ”Girls I’d Like to be Marooned on a Desert Island With,” he had placed third. He won great fame on the campus by transforming his room, through items picked up in local thrift stores, into a Victorian salon. At some point early on he fell under Bums’s sway, becoming his most devoted disciple. And Burns was his devoted mentor.
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He never tired of the monastic images, tedious as they became over several years of correspondence. One particular neologism-a nun’s horrified cry upon hearing one of her sisters collapse at the altar-became Burns all-purpose exclamation, connoting excitement, revulsion, pleasure, resignation, or surprise: Brwaugh! It could also signify something more mundane: Brwaugh. And it could be a noun, appearing in mid-sentence to mean assorted gay activities, or just about anything else: brwaugh. But without a doubt the most crucial word in their private vocabulary wasn’t new at all, but simply repurposed. It was ”dreadful” -in this instance a noun, or more often an adjective, meaning ”homosexual.” Its origins were unclear. Maybe it emanated from Bums’s vast storehouse of literary learning; in one poem Shelley wrote about ”deeds too dreadful for a name”-code, some believe, for homosexuality. Or perhaps it was another of Bums’s playful coinages. But it wasn’t all play: along with the rest of their esoteric vocabulary ”dreadful” was a word that would elude priggish but unimaginative military censors. ”My letters may be censorable, but not for military secrets,” Bums confessed to the Eatons.
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He'd grown serlous.
A letter to MacMackin suggested how he’d sobered up. Suddenly; it was no longer ”Dear Giaour”* or ”Mon tres cher Priapus!" but ”Dear David.” Then he went on to lecture MacMackin on the various foibles of dreadfuls, whom he now and for the first (and only) time in their correspondence called ”homosexuals.”
Speaking of the army of belles that Plato suggests in the Phaedo, Konrad Heiden has a stinging sentence to the effect that the 20th century homosexual is rarely completely honest with himself. Even If he ever arrives at the point of accepting his bias as merely an incident in his personality, he sets up all sort; of pitiful little compensations. Camping is after all the essence of the tragic spirit contorted into a leer no Greek mask ever knew. He sets up for himself a tinseled world that has nothing to do with any reality, believes himself a golden and divine spirit, gifted beyond other men, and frequently goes over into the realm of art, which soothes the feminine ganglia in him. Unless he has a first-rate mind, merciless self-appraisal, and honesty too large to force his world on a larger one he becomes an artist as warped as his own psyche; and you get ugliness, negation, and nonessentials substituted for the blood of great art.
In Sodom et Gomorrhe,‘ he went on, ”Miss Proust” had also exposed the dishonesty of modern homosexuals. ”It was a pose which used to irk me in you,” he scolded. (Only once before had he shared his ambivalence about gay culture with MacMackin; it happened a year earlier, after describing his hyperactive dreadful existence in the army. ”With a few exceptions," he wrote, ”the life strikes us as centrifugal, horrifying, and deathmaking.” Still, Burns suggested he had become a kind of guru to other gay soldiers. ”Our sense of empathy is said to be just out of this world by the many dreadfuls who for some reason or other look to us as to an obelisk,” he wrote a month later. “They believe that we’ve happened upon some secret of life lost since the Ptolemies.”)
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Burns became a sort of literary landmark in Florence.
"Florence fiddles while John Horne Burns" is how the local paper put it.
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