John Ibson
- Published in print:
- 2018
- Published Online:
- May 2019
- ISBN:
- 9780226576541
- eISBN:
- 9780226576718
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- University of Chicago Press
- DOI:
- 10.7208/chicago/9780226576718.003.0002
- Subject:
- Society and Culture, Gender Studies
This chapter and the next one link details of one author’s life, especially his work’s content and its audience, to broad themes in midcentury America, especially themes regarding male relationships ...
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This chapter and the next one link details of one author’s life, especially his work’s content and its audience, to broad themes in midcentury America, especially themes regarding male relationships of various sorts. John Horne Burns, an Irish Catholic New Englander and World War II veteran, queer by experience and self-identification, wrote The Gallery, widely acclaimed upon its 1947 publication as one of the best novels inspired by the war. Distinctive in its innovative structure, its graceful expression, and its not needing scenes of battle to capture war’s trauma, the novel, set in Naples, was also singular in its depiction of men’s intimacy--in particular, but not only, among men like Burns himself who had sex with each other. Though some critics denounced the novel’s sympathetic treatment of homosexuality, this new topic and attitude within American fiction was largely either acclaimed or simply ignored. In contrasting American and Italian cultures, the novel was also distinctive in its sweeping critique of modern life, with Burns heralded as a rising star. The chapter is largely based on Burns’s extensive war correspondence, every review The Gallery received, and the author’s interviews with Burns’s surviving younger brother, himself also a veteran of the war.Less
This chapter and the next one link details of one author’s life, especially his work’s content and its audience, to broad themes in midcentury America, especially themes regarding male relationships of various sorts. John Horne Burns, an Irish Catholic New Englander and World War II veteran, queer by experience and self-identification, wrote The Gallery, widely acclaimed upon its 1947 publication as one of the best novels inspired by the war. Distinctive in its innovative structure, its graceful expression, and its not needing scenes of battle to capture war’s trauma, the novel, set in Naples, was also singular in its depiction of men’s intimacy--in particular, but not only, among men like Burns himself who had sex with each other. Though some critics denounced the novel’s sympathetic treatment of homosexuality, this new topic and attitude within American fiction was largely either acclaimed or simply ignored. In contrasting American and Italian cultures, the novel was also distinctive in its sweeping critique of modern life, with Burns heralded as a rising star. The chapter is largely based on Burns’s extensive war correspondence, every review The Gallery received, and the author’s interviews with Burns’s surviving younger brother, himself also a veteran of the war.
John Ibson
- Published in print:
- 2018
- Published Online:
- May 2019
- ISBN:
- 9780226576541
- eISBN:
- 9780226576718
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- University of Chicago Press
- DOI:
- 10.7208/chicago/9780226576718.001.0001
- Subject:
- Society and Culture, Gender Studies
In the aftermath of World War II, the closeness that many American servicemen experienced during the war was followed by a period of unprecedented scorn for men’s intimacy. The Mourning After ...
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In the aftermath of World War II, the closeness that many American servicemen experienced during the war was followed by a period of unprecedented scorn for men’s intimacy. The Mourning After describes and interprets this cruel irony. An outbreak of vicious homophobia was the most obvious manifestation of the scorn, but the postwar inhibition of male closeness also took its toll on friendships, the relationship between fathers and sons, and, indirectly, on men’s relationships with women. The Mourning After picks up where the author’s acclaimed Picturing Men left off, showing how everyday photographs of males together in the years after the war documented an increasing space between males, and a certain somberness found even among American boys. The book then considers literature as cultural evidence, examining the shift in how intimacy between males was received by readers of the work of John Horne Burns, a once-celebrated American novelist who was consigned to obscurity after his work’s setting shifted, from the war abroad to the postwar home front. Ibson then contrasts Burns’s fate with the postwar fortunes of Gore Vidal. In this sweeping reinterpretation of the postwar years, Ibson marshals diverse evidence-from popular culture, a notorious murder, psychiatry, child development advice, and memoirs of the children of World War II veterans, for instance-to make his case that a prolonged postwar mourning, along with pervasive guilt, occupied the very center of midcentury American masculinity, giving all too many American males a widespread sense of longing that continues into the present.Less
In the aftermath of World War II, the closeness that many American servicemen experienced during the war was followed by a period of unprecedented scorn for men’s intimacy. The Mourning After describes and interprets this cruel irony. An outbreak of vicious homophobia was the most obvious manifestation of the scorn, but the postwar inhibition of male closeness also took its toll on friendships, the relationship between fathers and sons, and, indirectly, on men’s relationships with women. The Mourning After picks up where the author’s acclaimed Picturing Men left off, showing how everyday photographs of males together in the years after the war documented an increasing space between males, and a certain somberness found even among American boys. The book then considers literature as cultural evidence, examining the shift in how intimacy between males was received by readers of the work of John Horne Burns, a once-celebrated American novelist who was consigned to obscurity after his work’s setting shifted, from the war abroad to the postwar home front. Ibson then contrasts Burns’s fate with the postwar fortunes of Gore Vidal. In this sweeping reinterpretation of the postwar years, Ibson marshals diverse evidence-from popular culture, a notorious murder, psychiatry, child development advice, and memoirs of the children of World War II veterans, for instance-to make his case that a prolonged postwar mourning, along with pervasive guilt, occupied the very center of midcentury American masculinity, giving all too many American males a widespread sense of longing that continues into the present.
