Some wartime casualties are time-released. Death is deferred. In his new collection, That Mad Game (Scienter Press, 2025), R.L. Barth devotes three poems to a civilian, the war correspondent Albert W. Vinson, who wrote about him leading a patrol of Marines in Vietnam in 1968. The briefest appears in a section Bob calls “Snowfall in Vietnam: Poems/Maxims,” and is titled “Stringers: i.m. A.W. Vinson”: “The newsmen with guts.” Bob is extending the logic of his devotion to concision and composing a poem of four words.  Vinson wrote a story about Barth’s patrol that was published on the Week End Feature Page of the Cincinnati Post & Times Star on November 16, 1968. Barth was from Erlanger, Ky., across the Ohio River from Cincinnati, and the story made him briefly a hometown hero. Vinson had served as a Marine during World War II and was seriously wounded by Japanese machine-gun fire. Only last year did Bob learn that Vinson had committed suicide in 1971. Bob includes “In the Mountains,” a three-poem sequence “in memory of Albert W. Vinson, who first placed these events on the record.” Finally comes “2nd Lt. Albert W. Vinson, U.S.M.C.,” subtitled “Talasea, New Britain 1944—Ononomowoc, WI 1971”:   “Those Japanese machinegun rounds That shattered shoulder, legs, and arms Killed you as surely as, years later, The freight train on that lonely night.”   Barth’s subject is not the history of the war in Vietnam. Rather, his focus is the impact that war had on the lives of young men born into safe, prosperous postwar America and thrown into a barbarous conflict without a coherent strategy, goal or widespread support at home. In his introduction to Vietnam: An Epic Tragedy, 1945-1975 (2018), Max Hastings writes “All wars are different, and yet the same.” In a section of his new collection titled “Coda: World Wars,” Bob includes poems dedicated to men who fought in previous wars. His is a poetry of remembrance, often across generations and centuries. Here is “Semper Fidelis: 1st MARDIV,” dedicated to Raymond Lawrence Barth (1921-2006), Bob’s father:   “A combat knife, web belt, some photographs, Chevrons, dog tags, and medals: epitaphs For both the recent dead and one to die. While placing his mementos where mine lie In the top dresser drawer, I contemplate The tours of duty that they recreate: Jungle terrain, twenty-six years apart, Guadalcanal and I Corps, war’s grim art. Their future dispensation? Surely lost. There will be no one left who knew their cost.”   Bob asked me to write a blurb for That Mad Game. It appears on the back cover:   “Bob Barth has said he could talk to a Roman legionary – a fellow warrior. His poems are compact, artfully crafted, unsentimental and mindful of earlier soldier-poets. They are the shoptalk of a fighting man, a Marine patrol leader in Vietnam. He takes his title – ‘War, that mad game the world so loves to play’ -- from Jonathan Swift, who reminds us of those who ‘so dearly pay.’”   Bob’s title is from Swift’s “Ode to Sir William Temple” (c. 1692):   “War, that mad game the world so loves to play,       And for it does so dearly pay; For, though with loss, or victory, a while       Fortune the gamesters does beguile, Yet at the last the box sweeps all away.”   Ours is a literary age in which most poems are stridently trivial and frequently incoherent. Bob writes with technical mastery of consequential things. Here is “Doughboys: Photograph c. 1917,” dedicated to Bob’s grandfather, Bernard Henry Benzinger (1894-1979), a World War I veteran:   “Around a folded blanket seven doughboys Intently watch the dice turn six the hard way. Like pre-noir tough guys, three or four clutch sawbucks Half curled, ready to shell out or increase A conscript private’s base pay. One, raffish, Tilts his campaign hat like an old salt. All seven would shame Bogart with the angle Of dangling cigarettes and arched eyebrows. But they're not tough guys, just heartbreakers all, Stunning the viewer with impossible youth.”

“April 17 [in 1778], being Good Friday, I waited on Johnson, as usual.”  As was the custom in school when I was growing up, I learned history as a rollcall of great men and memorized dates. “Abraham Lincoln” and “December 7, 1941” plugged leaks in my obligatory knowledge and that was the end of it. History was static, fixed like a photograph. To know it was an act of memorization, not moral imagination. Only later, as “History” and personal history blurred, and as Gibbon’s lessons slowly sank in, did I become intimate with the past. The minutiae of individual lives seemed not only more interesting but more charged with personal significance. “They” became “us.” Reading history is not unlike reading a great novel, say Daniel Deronda or Nostromo, fiction containing history and the lives of men and women not entirely unlike us. Cynthia Ozick recently referred to “the long and intertwined corridors of the past, and a conviction that a mind shorn of history is vacuous.”   Above, Boswell begins recounting yet another meeting with Dr. Johnson, 247 years ago. It’s a holy day:   “I observed at breakfast that although it was a part of his abstemious discipline on this most solemn fast, to take no milk in his tea, yet when Mrs. Desmoulins inadvertently poured it in, he did not reject it. I talked of the strange indecision of mind, and imbecility in the common occurrences of life, which we may observe in some people. JOHNSON. ‘Why, Sir, I am in the habit of getting others to do things for me.’ BOSWELL. ‘What, Sir! have you that weakness?’ JOHNSON. 'Yes, Sir. But I always think afterwards I should have done better for myself.’”   A history of religious practice and a good man’s tolerance and moral scruples is casually present in that passage. An exchange on travel writing follows. Boswell tells Johnson that A Journey to the Western Islands of Scotland (1775) contains much he possessed even before leaving London:   “JOHNSON. ‘Why yes, Sir, the topicks were; and books of travels will be good in proportion to what a man has previously in his mind; his knowing what to observe; his power of contrasting one mode of life with another. As the Spanish proverb says, ‘He, who would bring home the wealth of the Indies, must carry the wealth of the Indies with him.’ So it is in travelling; a man must carry knowledge with him, if he would bring home knowledge.’ BOSWELL. ‘The proverb, I suppose, Sir, means, he must carry a large stock with him to trade with.’ JOHNSON. ‘Yes, Sir.’”   That’s says volumes about the worthlessness of most “travel writing,” as opposed to the work of Charles Doughty, Evelyn Waugh, Rebecca West, Patrick Leigh Fermor, Zbigniew Herbert and V.S. Naipaul. Among other qualities, their travel writing attends closely to history. After attending Good Friday services at St. Clement’s, Boswell recounts the chance reunion of Johnson with an old acquaintance, Oliver Edwards, from his Pembroke Colleges days. It’s a marvelous passage and I’ve written about it before. Johnson recalls drinking ale with Edwards and sharing lines of poetry. In reply, Edwards utters his “deathless remark”:   “You are a philosopher, Dr. Johnson. I have tried too in my time to be a philosopher; but, I don’t know how, cheerfulness was always breaking in.”   Apart from Boswell’s literary gifts, think of the raw historical knowledge gleaned from a close reading and rereading of his Life of Johnson.   [Speaking of history, my youngest son, David Kurp, a senior at Rice University, has just had a paper, “Limits, Liberty, and Localism: The Shared Vision of Burke and Tocqueville,” published in the Spring 2025 issue of Rice Historical Review.]

“At bottom Chekhov is a writer who has flung his soul to the side of pity, and sees into the holiness and immaculate fragility of the hidden striver below.”  In his letters to family and friends, Chekhov can be harsh, hectoring and even smutty, though seldom in the stories except in the occasional voice of a character. His documentation of human types, after all, is encyclopedic. But Cynthia Ozick gets Chekhov, unlike his original critics and lazy-minded readers today. Without being sticky-sentimental, he is forgiving of human failing, not a wrathful prophet, unlike his friend and misguided critic Tolstoy. Ozick writes in her two-page essay “A Short Note on ‘Chekhovian’” (Metaphor and Memory, 1989):   “Chekhov is as much a master of the observed as he is of the unobserved. And he is, besides, the source of unusual states of wisdom, astonishing psychological principles. He can transfigure latency into drama, as in ‘Ward No. Six,’ which belongs with Conrad’s ‘The Secret Sharer’ among the great expositions of self-disclosure. And this too is Chekhov: he teaches us us.”   As does Ozick, who turns ninety-seven today. I admit to preferring her essays to her novels and stories. She is seldom autobiographical in the banal sense. She’s brainy and passionate and never dry. Her prose is sometimes purplish (not purple), overripe, almost over-written, as in the late manner of her master, Henry James. But it’s never passive or merely utilitarian. In my 2004 review of Ozick’s novel Heir to the Glimmering World I wrote: “The crafting of such language, potent with muscle and brain, lends objective shape to the act of consciousness itself.”   In her title essay in Metaphor and Memory, Ozick articulates what Chekhov frequently accomplished. By creating metaphors, she writes, “We strangers can imagine the familiar hearts of strangers,” which in turn “transforms the strange into the familiar.” Which sounds like both a literary and a moral obligation.   I met Ozick in 1987 when she took part in a conference on literature and the Holocaust at the state University of New York at Albany. Also on the panel were the novelist Aharon Appelfeld and historian Raul Hilberg. Ozick’s girlish voice surprised me. In person as in print, she comes off as charming and tough, not a frivolous person. She was not afraid to say she would never visit Germany or buy a Volkswagen, which bothered some people sitting near me.   Ozick signed my copy of The Messiah of Stockholm, then recently published. Appelfeld and Hilberg also signed books for me -- a memorable day. Ozick’s demeanor and everything she said confirmed my respect for her work. In his Paris Review interview, Guy Davenport said he would read anything written by Ozick, and as usual his judgment is unassailable. She may be the only living writer whose published work I have read in its entirety.

Several years have passed since I last entered a bookstore selling new books, such as Barnes and Noble or the late Borders. Long ago they stopped feeling like home and a visit usually turned out to be a waste of time. Serendipitous discovery was rare. The portion of the goods on their tables and shelves that might potentially interest me was small. Most of the good stuff I already owned or didn’t want, and I could smell the algorithms mandating the stock. I’m seldom in the market for greeting cards, coffee mugs or tote bags.  So, like thousands of other readers, I rely on the few remaining used-book shops, online dealers and the occasional library sale. Much is lost, including a sentimental attachment to “real” bookstores, with their romantically crusty proprietors and bookshop cats, though something is sometimes gained – convenience, occasionally cheaper prices. Kingsley Amis’ “A Bookshop Idyll,” from his fourth book of poems, A Case of Samples (1957), reads like a report from a vanished kingdom. That was not his intent while writing it almost seventy years ago, but time sometimes adds layers of new meaning to literary works. It begins:     “Between the GARDENING and the COOKERY     Comes the brief POETRY shelf; By the Nonesuch Donne, a thin anthology     Offers itself.   “Critical, and with nothing else to do,     I scan the Contents page, Relieved to find the names are mostly new;     No one my age.”   Amis is ever alert to the predations of ego (including his own). The anthology is not a threat to the speaker. He continues:   “Like all strangers, they divide by sex:     Landscape near Parma Interests a man, so does The Double Vortex,     So does Rilke and Buddha.   “‘I travel, you see’, ‘I think’ and ‘I can read’     These titles seem to say; But I Remember You, Love is my Creed,     Poem for J.,   The ladies' choice, discountenance my patter     For several seconds; From somewhere in this (as in any) matter     A moral beckons.”   That some works are written for and marketed to women, and the same for men, is obviously true, but the lines have blurred since Amis’ time. With the growth in interest in “spiritual” matter and pop religion, no one would be surprised if a woman bought a copy of Rilke and Buddha. I once knew a woman who said the only poet she ever read was Rilke because he was “so spiritual.” Such a silly-sounding title might be written or read today by a man or woman. The poem concludes:   “Should poets bicycle-pump the human heart     Or squash it flat? Man’s love is of man’s life a thing apart;     Girls aren’t like that.   “We men have got love well weighed up; our stuff     Can get by without it. Women don’t seem to think that’s good enough;     They write about it,   “And the awful way their poems lay open     Just doesn’t strike them. Women are really much nicer than men:     No wonder we like them.   “Deciding this, we can forget those times     We sat up half the night Chockfull of love, crammed with bright thoughts,     names, rhymes, and couldn’t write.”   Amis’ poem isn’t about books or bookstores or even poems after all. It’s about men and women and the truths and stereotypes that characterize us. Women possess certain advantages denied men, Amis suggests. With his echo of Byron’s Don Juan, he anatomizes us at our most hypocritical, vain and posturing but doesn’t dismiss us. For Amis, literature is meant to be interesting, amusing, even entertaining – qualities anathema to certain species of sticks-in-the-mud. That doesn’t mean lowbrow or one-dimensional. Consider Lucky Jim, Girl, 20, and Ending Up. He doesn’t harp but his focus is society and the social order, manners and morals. A consistent quality in Amis’ work, fiction or verse, is a comic surface with serious undertones.     Amis was born on this date, April 16, in 1922, and died in 1995 at age seventy-three.

“The Brains Trust” was a BBC radio show popular in the nineteen-forties and -fifties. A panel of “experts” – among them Desmond MacCarthy, Kenneth Clark and Rose Macaulay – would answer questions submitted by listeners. The U.S. had similar radio programs at the time, such as “Information Please,” hosted by Clifton Fadiman. In 1942, Hutchinson and Co. published The Brain Trust Book, a collection of edited transcripts from the show, one of which was devoted to the “Classical Book-shelf.” Mr. D. E. Griffith of Compton Bassett, Wiltshire, asked the panelists to recommend “eight half-crown classics for a soldier to take on active service.” As I read the responses, I wondered how “experts” would answer in 2025.  C.E.M. Joad, though described as a “philosopher,” sounds more like a dubious media opportunist. He recommends taking “a book of understandable pleasant philosophy,” specifically the World Classics edition of Selections from Plato, introduced by Sir Richard Livingstone.   Commander A.B. Campbell was a naval officer, a veteran of the Great War and a radio celebrity. He answered: “I am glad I come in second. I fancy everybody will want to say this. I certainly think that Shakespeare’s works should be one book to take with him.”   I’m reminded of the answers politicians give when asked to name their favorite or most influential book. Shakespeare is a perfectly respectable answer but one is left to wonder.   Malcolm Sargent was a British conductor, organist and composer. His answer: “If I could take only one book, I would take the Bible.”   The evolutionary biologist Julian Huxley replied: “I think it is good to have some good, long novel to get your teeth into and I should have thought that (especially for a soldier) Tolstoi’s War and Peace was unrivalled. You should also take a book of poetry and it should be a selection. If the Oxford Book of English Verse is in a cheap edition, that would be ideal. If not, The Golden Treasury.”   Joad seconds Huxley’s choice of War and Peace and adds two novels by Trollope. “They are,” he says, “both in the way of being classics and both are absolutely first-rate. History? I would like to suggest Gibbon, The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, which I think is the greatest history book ever written.”   Few would argue with that judgment but think of the enlisted man at El Alamein  carrying all six volumes -- 1.6 million words -- in his pack. Joad adds:   “One other suggestion I would like to make and it is this. I think Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels is one of the greatest books ever written [and a well-known morale-booster]. It happens to be in Everyman, price 2/6, and it is extraordinarily topical. The last satire about the Divine forces and the human being who Swift called ‘Yahoo’ is extraordinarily apt to the moment. I won't say to what nation it happens to be apt. Let the soldiers read it and find out.”   Commander Campbell gets in the last word: “It may sound dry reading, but one of the most interesting books I’ve read has been Motley’s History [Rise] of the Dutch Republic.” That’s three volumes, roughly 300,000 words.