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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.

Chapter 4 examines how the conventional gendering and sexualization of redemption is revised in John Horne Burns’s internationally beloved novel The Gallery (1947) as Naples—long described in terms of “porosity”—becomes a queer, trans-national space. The Gallery rejects the heteronormative encounter culminating in reproduction, dismissing it as the basis of a nationalistic egotism that lays the groundwork for war. Instead, the novel favors a momentary communion between Allies and Italians as the Dantean narrator’s rebirth culminates in an orgasmic encounter with a genderless Italian. Moreover, I show how the narrator’s redemption depends on a trans-national dimension that crisscrosses the Mediterranean, moving between the U.S., North Africa, and Naples, and a metonymic slippage between the Galleria Umberto I, Naples, Italy, and the universe. As it dehistoricizes Naples versus colonial Africa and materialist America, The Gallery erases all local identities, including the queer spaces and bodies that preface his redemption.

This chapter analyzes Norman Lewis’s Naples ’44 (1978), the text that most widely perpetuated the gendered redemption paradigm traced in this book. As a British “wedding officer” in Naples, Lewis judges Neapolitan women, distinguishing war brides and rape victims among a sea of prostitutes. This work is not about determining the women’s status but about staging his redemption: starting as a hard-nosed officer, Lewis’s character “dies” and is reborn as the Dantean narrator, making his supposedly anti-fictional diary a conversion narrative, much like John Horne Burns’s The Gallery. As the chapter charts Officer Lewis’s conversion, it puts his diary-novel in dialog with The Gallery and Curzio Malaparte’s La pelle (The Skin), whose spectacles Naples ’44 rewrites in more direct prose. Treated as anti-fictional by historians, Naples ’44 has arbitrated the sexuality of Neapolitan women and the men who love, purchase, or violate them. Lewis represents all Neapolitans as whores and all goumiers “as sexual psychopaths” and yet still emerges as the authoritative narrator. The chapter ends with a reflection on the contemporary cinematic adaption, Naples’44, directed by Francesco Patierno.