the ambiguous Heroes of

JOHN HORNE BURNS

by

Daniel H. Edgerton

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John Horne Burns died in Italy

in 1953 while at work on his fourth novel. His career in fiction had been spectacular then disappointing a brilliant first novel, The Gallery (1947), acclaimed by some critics as the best to come out of World War II, followed by two works either purposeless or wandering among purposes, and thus tentative, superficial, and unsatisfying. These two novels, Lucifer with a Book (1949) and A Cry of Children (1952), are similar to one another and to some episodes of The Gallery in having protagonists whose sexual orientation seems purposely left ambiguous. John W. Aldridge has diagnosed this characteristic in Lucifer with a Book as a preoccupation which narrows the range of the author's treatment of human experience and destroys the verisimilitude of the hero's heterosexual romance. In accordance with his general theory about the novelists of the 1940's. Aldridge concludes that the author is suffering from the absence of any firm values. Burns' literary salvation, it would appear, lay either in discovering values or in acknowledging their absence and building from there. I should like to suggest, on the contrary, that the sexual ambiguity of Burns' heroes lies at the core of his creative problem rather than being the symptom of an absence of values. It seems to me that an ample range of human experience would have been available to him if he had chosen to deal with this matter frankly.

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