HUMANITIES

BOOKS

John Horne Burns: An Appreciative Biography

by John Mitzel. Manifest Destiny Press, Box 57. Dorchester Center Station, Dorchester, MA 02124. 135 pp.. $2.

Discovering our lost artists and heroes is one of the vital ongoing processes of the gay movement. John Mitzel, a dedicated reader and appreciator of gay writers, has compiled the first biographical work about an Irish-American, Boston-born novelist named John Horne Burns. It is the first work. about this author to appear in the 22 years since his death.

Mitzel describes Burns as "the most exciting American novelist to debut after the Second World War," basing his statement in part on the fact that his first novel, The Gallery (Harper and Brothers, 1947), was so widely acclaimed. The works that followed, Lucifer With a Book and A Cry of Children, were "savagely and unfairly" attacked. Burns became a heavy drinker, moved to Italy, and died there in 1953 at age 36, "his reputation virtually obliterated and his talent largely forgotten."

In an autobiographical statement prepared for the publication of The Gallery in 1947, Burns described himself as having been born into a family "where wisdom, poetry and realism were inextricably blended." According to Mitzel's account, Burns' development involved formative years in a heavily Roman Catholic Boston-Irish environment, followed by prep school and Harvard. The experience of World War II introduced, with incredible impact, "the real world" into the life of the sensitive writer.

Mitzel's view is that Burns' writing represent an important example of "The Gay Sensibility." which is a way of looking at the world... just an independent way of seeing things, penetrating through any current artistic convention and often mocking it. The Gay Sensibility demands, as prerequisite, if it's to be any good at all, the greatest gifts... It's the whiff of the Gay Sensibility that, once detected by the status quo critics and litterateurs, will bring on the pack attack. They're like sharks turning on one of their own." As for Burns' own gayness, Mitzel quotes from a character in A Cry of Children:

... at seventeen Sin and the World began to close in; it's not necessary to seek Evil; it will come to you like a mangy dog. In those searching and experimental days I was as passive as the leaf a bird fouls upon. I frequented places where advances would be made to me, I sitting on a bench by the river, and seeming just to have happened there. And I was never alone very long.

"What's a goodlookin' kid like you doin' alone of a Sattiday night? Ain'tcha got a date? fool around?

"-Wanna 'Twon't mean nothin', and if we see each other again, don't speak to me, understand?""

Mitzel's comment: "Typical faggot adolescent sex history. Could be a page out of the life of my youth or any of my friends. It's

going on right this very minute in fact down on the [Boston] EsplanIade on the banks of the Charles River where the above scene was set. There are men alive today who knew JHB sexually. Have I slept with any of them?"

Mitzel's research includes a look at Burns' experiences in various schools and on various jobs, as well as a careful look at reviews of his books. Critics focused on the stark realism, the four-letter words, and mention of such things as gay bars and syphilis treatments in a VD ward.

The last years of Burns' life were, no doubt, sad ones, especially since his work had been subject to so much abuse by critics. Mitzel makes it clear that Burns was one more victim of the know-nothingness of that dismal decade, the 1950s. But Burns was a man

John Horne Burns

whose devotion to the written word involved a zest for life and a love for truth. Some of his most hopeful words had to do with his art:

"In spite of the increased costs of book publishing, in spite of witch hunts for Communists among honest and independent citizens, in spite of a world which threatens a third war before the stench of the second has been exorcised, we live in a most promising period for American writers with courage, talent, insight, and invention."

Just before his death, Burns had a manuscript (The Stranger's Guise) rejected; he became despondent and his health worsened. There were rumors later of possible suicide, and, it was also rumored, rejection by an Italian lover was an additional factor in the pattern of sad events.

Mitzel admits that Burns' life was "elusive," and yet the biographer has made a valiant effort to recreate an interesting personality and to give us a picture of that personality in the context of his literary work and the world that rejected it. There is no doubt for Mitzel that the rejection of Burns. as a writer in the late 1940s and early 1950s is directly connected to the homophobia of the literary

world.

The biography ends with a lament that Burns' works are not in print at the present time. "That situation," Mitzel writes, "we can trace directly to nasty and meanspirited tactics of reviewers and

critics. It will take some time to counteract the consequences of the evil they did in their time; once achieved, the novels of John Horne Burns will find their wide, natural and waiting audience."

-Allen Young

PERIODICALS

A noted investigator of sexual behavior in animals, Frank Beach, recently set forth some of his notions which he said "might explain some sex differences on a biological basis." He developed his notions, referred to as "armchair theorizing," in a conversation with two editors of Psychology Today (March 1975).

He does not deny the importance of training and social conditioning in the development of sex differences between human beings. but states that "underneath it all there are still biological differences and I have entertained myself by dreaming up explanations for some differences in terms of evolution."

He notes that in human sexuality there is only one difference between a male and a female at the moment the egg is fertilized: one is fertilized by a sperm with a Y chromosome, the other by a sperm with an X. One fetus thus develops testes, the other ovaries. "A little later," he explains, "but still early in development, the testes start secreting some form of male hormone that triggers the development of the accessory sex organs. In the absence of this hormone, the other fetus develops a uterus, oviducts, etc." He goes on to say that the brain is quite possibly being affected at the same time.

His major point is that at the time of birth males and females are already very different. Starting with just one difference at the time of

fertilization, developmental biology "drives a wedge down between males and females." The differences then accumulate, with the two systems being mutually exclusive and unchangeable.

Beach notes that after birth society drives a second wedge between males and females. Even though it is presented with two populations of human beings that "overlap in almost all other characteristics," it acts like they are divisible into two parts. He believes this wedge, however, is changeable. Some of the basic characteristics which define masculine and feminine behavior vary considerably from one society to another. For example, what may be considered exclusively masculine work in one society may be considered exclusively feminine in another. The major exception he would make is with the taking care of babies and reproductive roles which "are pretty well dichotomized in the same direction in all societies."

With respect to the exception, Beach feels there are good reasons for the differences. But he points out that "the characteristics that were very adaptive early in man's history and had high selection pressure in favor of them in a hunting and gathering society can be extremely maladaptive in an industrialized society. A lot of things about sexual behavior that would have been appropriate for prehistoric man don't work well today." -J.M. Carrier

LITERATURE

by George Whitmore Contributing Editor.

Considering the high mortality rate of little magazines, it's gratifying and more than a bit surprising to observe that there is one around with a predominantly gay identity and which has survived to a ripe old age of seven years without a change of name, city or editorship. Like other little magazines, Richard Tagget's and Paul Mariah's Manroot seems to be regularly announcing its own imminent demise, or at the very least. making no promises as to when it will be published next. The paperback, book-sized magazine is highly respected on the literary circuit, but that's no insurance that it will survive. It has received grant money in the past. and gifts from anonymous angels, but Mariah reports that its subscribers number less than 100, an astounding (to me) fact that confirms my own suspicions about poets and other literati-most of them don't read very much.

In any event, Manroot has a wide appeal to all sorts of readers that has only partly been realized so far. The magazine has never been, as the editors say, "isolationist, segregationist, elitist," so one is likely to find straight love lyrics amidst the gay, important black writers next to Cocteau or Eluard in translation, cock and balls poetry aside lesbian feminist work. (From my own point of view Manroot's publishing of Lynn Lonidier's "Lesbian Estate" in its Womanhood issue-Number 9-constituted a major literary event.)

Perhaps the unifying force behind Manroot's eclecticism is its very inclusiveness as well as its progressiveness (a heavy concentration on modernist and experimental poetry) and its radicalism (some of it needlessly avant garde. I think). As a gay magazine it's one of the best kind: There's a lot of room for the gay voice to define itself within several already recognized modes. What seems to work best for the making of gay literature elsewhere is at work here-the urgency of the moment and an anxiety to retrieve what was lost in the past.

The most recent issue, Number 10, is dedicated to the late Jack Spicer and present a generous sampling of this important poet's work along. with the usual compliment of new poetry and criticism. Spicer is characterized by Larry Oakner in his opening essay, "The Poet as Radio," as "one of the unrecognized 'subterraneans' " of the '50s and early '60s. Indeed, Spicer's work, which is still widely read and admired in San Francisco, is not nearly as familiar to most readers as is, say, Frank O'Hara's, who Robert Peters notes might be Spicer's New York counterpart. Spicer's career didn't follow the route of his underground contemporaries. Ginsberg and Kerouac, but he is a highly influential figure. It's obvious that, given the company he traveled in, Spicer's homosexuality didn't deny him recognition. It was probably a combination of his own. determination to remain a parochial figure by not publicizing himself (most of his works were not even copywrited) and a society that values a house painter or a naked poet above one who writes well consistently and keeps his clothes on. ("I have seen the best poets and baseball players of our generation/caught in the complete and contemptible whoredom of/ capitalist society" Spicer once wrote on a brown paper bag.)

This issue contains reminiscences on Spicer by his friends and two badly needed critical essays, Oakner's and Peters', the latter which is on balance a more comprehensive view of Spicer than is the former. There are many hard-to-find Spicer works re-printed here, spanning his brief if prolific writing career. (He died in 1965 at the age of 40.) Included are "Billy the Kid" (covertly homoerotic) and "15 False Propositions About God," his masterpiece, I think, displaying to best advantage Spicer's virtues and difficulties, his romanticism and his didacticism alike.

This space is too brief to attempt anything but a superficial criticism. of Spicer as a gay poet, but I'd like to observe that it was primarily Spicer's technique that rendered him a privatistic poet rather than a political one. Much of his work is informed with what we regard to be "the gay sensibility" but it is a very minor aspect of his poetry indeed. Spicer theorized that the poet is a receptor of voices and transmitter of them. If this is a concept neither new nor particularly noteworthy, it was a concept of some importance to American poetry and Spicer was, as Peters says, one of its most accomplished practicioners..

The closest we get here to a poetics in Spicer that is more directly "relevant" to our current political experience is in the "Three Marxist Essays":

Homosexuality is essentially being alone. This is a fight against the capitalist bosses who do not want us to be alone. Alone we are dangerous.

Our dissatisfaction could ruin America. Our love could ruin the universe if we let it.

This is a Spicer most adroit and accessible. There are some love poems noteworthy for their warmth and wisdom included here, but for the most part Spicer's homosexuality remains an oblique reference in his poetry; that is, it is evident to the gay reader as a function of the poet's oppression rather than as an answer to it, as is traditional.

More should be written about Spicer and his works should be collected, needless to say. As for his biography, he was a man essentially without a past, to read these reminiscenses in this issue. As he said himself, it is difficult to capture even a dead person in writing. To fit a man "into the casket of a few paragraphs, he must be twisted and contorted; his stiff arms, his extended legs must be hacked or broken." Happily no one does such violence to Spicer here.

In any case, the importance of Spicer's poetry will not depend on his biography, but rather on his insistence on a kind of anonymity and his ability to let a poem unwind for itself... "And make each line/Cut itself. Like seaweed thrown/Against the pier." Thanks to Manroot.

Readers can subscribe to Manroot ($4 per issue) and receive the catalogue (includes offerings from Manroot Books, featuring Mariah, Duncan, Fisher, Ingersoll and others) by writing to Box 982, South San Francisco, CA 94080.

•

May 7, 1975

THE ADVOCATE

Page 33