"Dreadful": an excerpt from the biography of John Horne Burns by David Margolick

 

In the current national mood of public and legal acceptance for gay marriage,  it may be difficult to imagine the hiding and secrecy that once was the norm for homosexuals in 20th-century America. This was especially true in the military, where long-held ideas required that gay and lesbian service members hide or suppress their sexuality.

David Margolick has written a new biography of John Horne Burns focusing attention on Burns's  episodic 1947 novel of war-time portraits, The Gallery. When the novel was published it gathered strong praise among critics and writers from Edmund Wilson to John Dos Passos  to Hemingway, who wrote a friend that the book was "wonderfully written." One aspect of the novel -- bold for the times -- was Horne's depiction of gay life, which few contemporary reviews mentioned, although the Time magazine reviewer noted the scenes of "an evening spent in a homosexuals’ hangout.” 

A lengthy recent New York Times extract from Margolick's new biography refers to Burns in its headline as "the great gay novelist you've never heard of," but it's clear that Burns -- who never expressly hid his homosexuality -- was neither a good fit in the literary world of post-war America nor comfortable in it. He died, without conclusive explanation, in 1953 at the age of 36 while traveling in Europe with his partner, which prompted rounds of curious speculation. His death was a suspected cerebral hemorrhage brought on by alcoholism, but others suggested suicide due to depression, a failed affair, or even murder. 

Some of the response was in keeping with Burns's own literary-misfit personality: one female acquaintance laughed at the cause of a cerebral hemorrhage and suggested "yes, a cerebral hemorrhage caused by a bullet in his brain." From the book Dreadful: The Short Life and Gay Times of John Horne Burns (Other Press):

...“The Gallery” was actually his ninth novel; he wrote one pretty much every summer, first at Andover, then at Harvard, then at Loomis, books that even his friends conceded were unpublishable — nasty, nihilistic and narcissistic things populated with characters his own agent once called “stinkers.” But the war had touched and humanized Burns, changing his outlook, tone and style. He told a friend that he had shed his ungenügender Selbstsucht — a term he would have learned from Goethe and Brahms, meaning unsatisfying egotism or insatiable self-love — and come, at long last, to care about someone besides himself. 

His new war novel wasn’t really a novel at all. It consisted, instead, of nine portraits, alternately caustic and sympathetic but all keenly observed — primarily of American soldiers, but also of two Italian women — and eight “promenades”: personal reflections of an anonymous, Burns-like G.I. wandering from one image and place in North Africa and Italy to another, just as Burns himself had done. ... 

Like a vast majority of G.I.’s, Burns never saw combat: thanks to his fluent Italian (and German and French), he was channeled into military intelligence, which for him meant reading and censoring the letters of Italy’s captured, homesick soldiers. The only weapon Burns ever wielded was an X-acto knife. But whether in Casablanca, Algiers or Naples, he witnessed, then chronicled, first in his letters home and then in his novel, something else: as he put it to a friend, “the effects of war after the wedge has gone through and left nothing but splinters and pain.” ... 

Undoubtedly the book’s most remarkable portrait is of Momma, the proprietress of the Galleria’s gay bar, where, every day but Sunday from 4:30 p.m. to 7:30 p.m., gay soldiers from every branch of the Grand Alliance gather to imbibe and cruise and sometimes score. Whether Momma’s Bar ever really existed or was simply Burns’s earnest dream is unclear and, in a way, irrelevant: for someone as evasive about his own sexuality as a gay man of his generation had to be — ostentatiously “dating” and pretending periodically to have a fiancée — it was more than a startlingly ringing endorsement of gay culture; it was an act of enormous and atypical, almost inexplicable, courage. 

The men in the gallery of gays (and, with only a couple of exceptions, they are all men) in “The Gallery” are alternately lonely, proud, unpleasant, sensitive, officious, effeminate, macho, offensive and lovable; in other words, reasonably normal, rather than the suicidal freaks and criminals that had populated American literature, gay and straight, up to then. And they are all in uniform at a time in the history of the United States military when, officially at least, they were not allowed and did not exist. ...

Aralee Strange, born December 5, 1943

Originally from Birmingham, Aralee Felt Strange [born December 5 1943] was a performer, poet, and literary libertine who entertained audiences in many scenes -- and who created a few literary scenes of her own from New York City to Cincinnati to Athens, Georgia. One appreciation of Strange's undeniable energy calls it "chiropractics for the soul" -- the lightning bolt on her cheek was emblematic of her creative electricity: ""The pagan version of one of those saints that are supposed to protect true believers." 

Her work included dr. pain on main, a play commissioned / produced by Cincinnati Playhouse in the Park, and Etta Stone: A Film for Radio, which aired on National Public Radio. Strange also wrote, directed and edited This Train (2001) starring Soupy Sales. Her enduring project is Word of Mouth, a monthly poetry whirlygig held in Athens, Georgia, encouraging carpenters, academics, anarchists and the reticent to get up onstage, spill their drinks, and open a creative vein. 

In June 2013 she moved on to smoke and swap stories over some knocks of Wild Turkey with  Adrienne Rich and many others. Her spirit continues to inspire us all. 

Here's an excerpt from her piece  "Waiting for Ralph at the Milner Grill." which appeared in Evil Dog and is dated  8-27-92. The full text is  posted online with the following note, and appeared after Aralee's passing in 2013: " .. there was a piece by Aralee that could be described as a prose poem or a non-fiction narrative. I remember hearing her read it at a literary event. Where that reading took place I can’t say, and visually I can’t recall a single detail. I still remember, though, what it sounded like when she read it—and I’ll bet that anyone who’s heard her read can imagine what it sounded like when she delivered these words."

... Just goes to show you the power of words why you can build bridges with them if you just believe I believe I believe in love I believe in the innocence of animals I believe in dancing one two-three one two-three to a world waltz beat I believe lame Beauty could tame the beast in me but all I can say is May I have a cappuccino please? And Ralph commences jamming bandy legged and jive in another tongue Can you clap your hands (clap our hands) Can you stomp your feet (stomp our feet) Do the right words come when you need ‘em? Well drum! jump and cook a gumbo Free! all the deep down held back among you Allow it release! the one thumb piano plunk on a Sunday tambourine thumping ring around the shakey Pole who is unafraid exposed whose language transcends All do lament! another good man gone (to hell probably)  Whose slit throat bleeds Whose black skin’s unseen bruise pains deep and overwhelms and  I may be high on cheap wine and caffeine but I swear I see pale Death flying out the win­dow flying over the used car lot flying across the unbridged flood muddy river headed west. Even Death has a home. And Ralph (yet untuckered) still stalking the wild improbable However you can man do you dig it oh ain’t it dandy (and I do) in all simultaneity and with silver tongue to sing “livid and aloud” ipso facto is allowed on the open read but try as I might I am just one more white cat on the conga line dancing to another man’s drum. Am I sufficiently engaged? Does my conscience work? When the right words come crude rude and dead on will I need ‘em? I have two good ears and listen. I have two good eyes and see. I have a mind that wanders how much pull blue yonder the wild turkey’s song (strong as gravity). ... And now Ralph’s working his way out there where the sun don’t shine and if we’re lucky he’ll come back singing looking to shake things up shaking things up better watch your back when Ralph’s around better mind your poetic skew and hew a new one everytime or why bother brother for we are Us here now and they are Them there then and the question before us is not when but How do we cross over if the bridge is blown in three sections and according to plan?

Opium, drugs, and literature: did Coleridge create homemade heroin?

DeQuncey's opium nightmares, by Christophe Huet

One of the most obvious effects of opium addiction on a writer's powers is that it induces indolence, absence of feeling, a state in which the power to observe is detached from the power to sympathize with what is observed. At it's very outset, this state of mind can be useful to a poet; there are times when he needs detachment. But in the long run it is deadly. The dislocation of objects and events from the feelings which they normally arouse is in the end destructive of poetic truth.

-- Alethea Hayter, Opium and the Romantic Imagination (1968)

In the 21st century, writing about drugs -- when it does happen -- seems to center around two conflicting poles: the confessional tell-all of the reformed, or the boosterism of the pharmaceutically relieved. The power of big pharma has ruled out most other approaches to the role of drugs in our collective health, mental, physical, or otherwise.

Back when the term drug culture meant different things to different people, however, the role of drugs (most of them now illicit in America and Europe unless under the care of a physician) on the imagination was a topic of some debate. Alethea Hayter's Opium and the Romantic Imagination is a rich study of literature's most famous, mostly British, users of opiates. Her book is a careful examination of a group of writers who had little in common besides their daily doses of opium, usually in liquid form or in combination with alcohol available as a pain-killer called laudanum.(Coleridge, c. 1810)

As the opening quote above suggests, Hayter found nothing to really surprise the general reader of Romantic literature. Although she finds that the regular ingestion of opiates created in the individual writer a paradise-like state of reveries and dreams, she does conclude with a creative paradox for the writer: Though opium may then present him with unique material for his poetry, it will take away from him the will and the power to make use of it.
In other words, the artist may fall under the spell of fantastic ideas and visions induced by drug use and then, in a diabolical twist, the drugs themselves take away the ability to transcribe these ideas through the resulting indolence and detachment. Hayter is also quick to describe the majority of Romantic writers associated with drug use (de Quincey, Crabbe, and Coleridge especially) as prodigious procrastinators -- victims of their own drug use. Creativity may be a gift, but industry is a virtue: whether or not their opium use made them indolent, the combined output of these writers is, substantially, not of the first rank:

It is the great plans that are destroyed. Writers can still write, and in fragments write well, when they have been addicted for many years; and this is not necessarily only during withdrawal periods. ... But the holding-together has gone, the great luminous images which shed light and pattern across all the wide tracts of a writer's imagination do not radiate any more. The images are still there, but some are darkened, some are luridly spot-lit, all are enclosed. The effect (is) what Baudelaire called the 'paysage opiace' ... some of these images -- the fairly obvious poppy, the honey-dew, the temptress, the buried temple -- may be conscious or unconscious equivalents for opium itself.

Fragments written well: the most famous being Coleridge's Kubla Khan (1815), which the author describes as "a vision." The writing of the poem was interrupted by a visitor, and when Coleridge sat down to resume writing he found the images had vanished. There are more detailed experiments, and expressions of the opium dream, from other lesser-known writers. Erasmus Darwin's recreation of an opium dream in The Loves of the Plants (1789) is based on his medical knowledge and is an outline of what became familiar to many readers as the imagery of opium visions: 

Sofa'd on silk, amid her charm-built towers,

Her meads of asphodel and amaranth bowers,

Where sleep and silence guard the soft abodes

In sullen apathy PAPAVER nods.

Faint over her couch in scintillating streams,

Pass the thin forms of Fancy, and of Dreams;

Froze by enchantment on the velvet ground,

Fair youths and beauteous ladies glitter round;

On crystal pedestals they seem to sigh,

Bend the meek knee and lift the imploring eye. ...

Flushed with new life, descending statues talk,

The pliant marble softening as they walk,

To viewless lutes aerial voices sing,

And hovering lovers are heard on rustling wing ...

The pinnacle of the book is an imaginative leap: Hayter describes a creative mind under the influence of opium. She imagines a writer inside Piranisi's 1790 Carceri di'invenzione (Imaginary Prisons). The result is a horror story, all the scarier if one imagines the daily frame of mind of Coleridge, de Quincey, and other addicts in their advanced state of addiction. For some this was a considerable burden, rather than a relief from pain: Hayter quotes a contemporary of Coleridge, who estimates his opium usage at "a hundred drops a day" in 1801; in 1814, when the writer was receiving surreptitious supplies from a local chemist, this was as much as two pints a day -- the equivalent of 20,000 drops of opium!

The success of Hayter's imaginative description she details in the book's postscript: "I was often asked while I was writing this book whether I had completed my researches by taking opium myself. No curiosity or wish for new experience could nerve me to enter such a world of wretchedness ... Their (the addicts') paradises may have been wholly or partly artificial; their hells were real."

Filled with great detail and an eyebrow-raising theory or two -- did Coleridge really create homemade heroin? -- Hayter's well-researched and entertaining book is a scholarly look at drug use and its role in the creation of Romantic literature. By looking at the settings, theory, and practice of drug use through the 17th-19th centuries, Hayter provides historical context to an otherwise loosely-grouped list of writers: the careers of DeQuincey, Poe, and Baudelaire are examined in detail as well as lesser lights such as Francis Thompson and Wilkie Collins. Published in 1968 when interest in the culture of drugs, its uses and effects were at a peak this book is certainly an artifact of the period, but Hayter's research is thorough enough to remain an excellent source of material, as well as debate, on the value of drug use in art. 

Brion Gysin: "What are we here for? We are here to go!"

"Of course the sands of Present Time are running out from under our feet. And why not? The Great Conundrum: 'What are we here for?' is all that ever held us here in the first place. Fear. The answer to the Riddle of the Ages has actually been out in the street since the First Step in Space. Who runs may read but few people run fast enough. What are we here for? Does the great metaphysical nut revolve around that? Well, I'll crack it for you, right now. What are we here for? We are here to go!" (Brion Gysin, The Process, 1971) 

In one late interview the writer, artist, and creative provocateur  Brion Gysin [1916-1986] put his multimedia career in perspective by saying the art world thought of him as a writer, and the writers thought of him as an artist. "I should have been one or the other," he said, somewhat ruefully. 

By the 1980s, Gysin was a performer as well -- he'd written for Broadway in the '40s, but here he was onstage singing new lyrics he'd written and describing himself as "the world's oldest living rock star." It's all the more ironic that Gysin's work remains largely undiscovered in this multimedia age his work helped create. His legacy, long overshadowed by others of more fame or infamy, remains elusive as ever.  While living in Paris at 9 Rue Git-Le-Coeur in the late 1950s, he accidentally sliced through some newspapers with a knife and became fascinated with the resulting jumble of text -- half of one sentence became the end of another, unrelated one. 

He began to experiment with this technique, slicing up newsprint, books, and other materials. He refered to these as "cut-ups," and when he demonstrated the process to William Burroughs, Burroughs asked if he could try it himself. "Go ahead, that's what it's for," Gysin replied. Describing this in an interview published in Terry Wilson's book Here to Go: Planet R-101, Gysin says:

I suggested to William that we use only the best, only the high-charged material: King James' translation of the "Song of Songs" of Solomon, Eliot's translation of "Anabasis" by St. John-Perse, Shakespeare's sugared "Sonnets" and a few lines from "The Doors of Perception" by Aldous Huxley, about his mescaline experiences.

The resulting text of Gysin's first experiment with cut-up text -- as can be expected from such diverse sources -- is at once mysterious and glorious, beautiful, and maybe the finest example of the process Gysin himself created. Unfortunately, "The Poem of Poems" was never published in its entirety during his lifetime. An excerpt appeared in the Burroughs / Gysin cut-up collaboration The Third Mind (1978) and mistakenly credited to Burroughs -- once more undercutting Gysin's contribution.

... This fair child of mine (roses and bitumen)
I make my old excuse:

He shall have the gift of song.
Praise deserves his beauty's use.
O, if thou couldst answer with studs of silver
this were to be new made!

What ease to our way
walled with silver, gold and beryl! ....

The full text finally appeared in 2001. Jason Weiss' Back in No Time: The Brion Gysin Reader helps to restore Brion Gysin's legacy, after so many of Gysin's works have become unavailable, hard-to-find, or have simply slipped out-of-print. There are excerpts from his first published novel in 1947, five chapters from The Process, a scene from Gysin's unpublished script for Naked Lunch. There is a large selection of his cut-ups, as well as uncollected magazine pieces, scores and lyrics, and reproductions of his unique calligraphy. Full texts are included of his permutated poems, "I Am That I Am" and "Junk Is No Good Baby," as well as "The Poem of Poems."

Unwittingly, Gysin handed Burroughs a writing tool the author would use extensively in his career (The Ticket That Exploded, The Soft Machine, Nova Express, and Exterminator!). He also achieved notoriety and an underground fame that Gysin neither sought nor desired. Because of this visibility Burroughs -- although he was careful to credit Gysin as often as possible -- became famous for the cut-up technique. Gysin (whose multifaceted career as a musician, writer, painter, and calligrapher contines to defy categories) went on to write The Process (1971) and The Last Museum, an edited version of a much larger work about the imagined fate of 9 Rue-Le-Coeur itself as a Buddhist zendo, published posthumously in 1986.

"Language is an abominable misunderstanding which makes up a part of matter. The painters and the physicists have treated matter pretty well. The poets have hardly touched it. In March 1958, when I was living at the Beat Hotel, I proposed to Burroughs to at least make available to literature the means that painters have been using for fifty years. Cut words into pieces and scramble them. You'll hear someone draw a bow-string. Who runs may read, To read better, practice your running. Speed is entirely up to us, since machines have delivered us from the horse. Henceforth the question is to deliver us from that other so-called superior animal, man. It's not worth it to chase out the merchants: their temple is dedicated to the unsuitable lie of the value of the Unique. The crime of separation gave birth to the idea of the Unique which would not be separate. In painting, matter has seen everything: from sand to stuffed goats. Disfigured more and more, the image has been geometrically multiplied to a dizzying degree. A snow of advertising could fall from the sky, and only collector babies and the chimpanzees who make abstract paintings would bother to pick one up." [Brion Gysin from Cut-Ups: A Project for Disastrous Success].

"Visions and Affiliations", a 1300-page history of Bay Area poetry 1940-2005

At the San Francisco Chronicle, Evan Karp writes about a new book covering sixty-five years of Bay Area poets and poetry. The resulting lavish and entertaining two-volume chronology is just part one of a continuing timeline being compiled by Jack Foley, who in the article says he and his wife Adelle struggled to find the right way to tell the history.

As he told Karp about fashioning history from so many creative strands, Foley said, "That's the problem with multiplicity: How do you find a form that will express it, but which is not totally chaotic. The right kind of chaos rather than the wrong kind."

The force of creative chaos that runs through the Bay Area history from 1940 to 2005 is less an organizing principle than, in Foley's words, a human response that defined character: "As circumstances arise we discover/invent selves to deal with them. In story, our lives tend to take on a coherence and purpose which they may well have lacked in actuality." Here's a brief excerpt from Karp's SF Gate article:

Jack Foley, 71, took a decade to write his 1,300-page book, Visions and Affiliations, which offers a timeline of poetic and social events from the years 1940 to 2005.

If Jack Foley were a book, he’d be a 1,300-page chrono-encyclopedia of Bay Area poets and poetry that spans 65 years and is written in the present tense. But that’s just the latest chapter in the rich and ongoing story of the Oakland poet and critic.

Foley, 71, describes both himself and the book, “Visions and Affiliations” (Pantograph Press), which he has spent over a decade composing, with the same statement: “In story, our lives tend to take on a coherence and purpose which they may well have lacked in actuality. As circumstances arise we discover/invent selves to deal with them. And the circumstances change in response to those selves.”

In the house in the Maxwell Park neighborhood that he has occupied with his wife, Adelle, since 1974, Foley laughs, “That means I’m crazy, right?”

“The problem with unity,” he continues, “is that in order to achieve it, you leave all these things out that might glitter around it and contradict it. So you don’t want unity, because it simplifies. What you want is to have something like the feeling of the complexity of life as it is.” ...

As Adelle Foley noted in a follow-up letter to the SF Gate article further explaining the book's wide focus: while Bay Area poetry is covered extensively the book is broadly about California poetry and features, among many others, such Angelean luminaries as “Tommy the Commie” (Thomas McGrath), Philomene Long, William Pillen, Amy Gerstler, and David St. John.

For an excerpt from Visions and Affiliations: A California Literary Timeline 1940-2005 there is more at Jack and Adelle Foley's web page.