Books: Homage to Naples

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THE GALLERY (342 pp.]—John Home Burns—Harper ($3).

"There's an arcade in Naples that they call the Gallería Umberto Primo. It's a cross between a railroad station and a church. You think you're in a museum till you see the bars and the shops. Once this Gallería had a dome of glass, but the bombings of Naples shattered this skylight, and tinkling glass fell like cruel snow

to the pavement. But life went on in the Gallería. In August 1944, it was the unofficial heart of Naples. It was a living and subdividing cell of vermouth, Allied soldiery and the Italian people."

The Gallería is the heart of this loosely constructed first novel by ex-G.L, and onetime intelligence officer, John Burns. Sooner or later all his characters drift into it to drink, love, ponder or despair. There is no plot to relate them. Whatever unity Gallery possesses comes from Author Burns's ability to convey a sense of the tragedy that war has brought into the lives of the victors and the vanquished.

Education of a G.I. Like many U.S. soldiers, Burns was shocked out of his complacency by the war. Gallery is a clear measure of his distaste for the bad manners of American troops, their black marketeering, their thoughtlessly insulting treatment of Europeans. His portraits of promotion-hungry, rear-echelon officers are often bitter and embarrassingly accurate.

For Naples and the Neapolitans Burns, as commentator, has enormous affection. At the least, it seems, they taught him how to live and how to love. His deepest resentment is reserved for those U.S. soldiers who failed to learn as much. The Italians, he writes, "were our enemies. Yet in those young men of Italy I'd seen something centuries old. An American is only as old as his years. A long line of something was hidden behind the bright eyes of those Italians. And then and there

I decided to learn something of the modern world. There was something abroad which we Americans couldn't or wouldn't understand. But unless we made some attempt to realize that everyone in the world isn't American, and that not everything American is good, we'd all perish together, and in this 20th Century."

Author Burns is at his best when remembering the shapes, sounds and smells of Naples, Algiers and Casablanca. His sections dealing with Naples' huge VD hospital and an evening spent in a homosexuals' hangout are first-rate. But too much of the best writing is descriptive reporting that does little to advance Gallery as a novel. Characters, good & bad, are used to prove a point or to support an emotional stand. With all its unevenness, Gallery shows more promise than most U.S. novels of World War II. But like many soldiers who came back itching to write a book, Author Burns has poured out his material without managing to shape it.