by Eric Byrd Maybe I’m inclined to what Nietzsche called “impure thought,” that is to say, a kind of thought where abstractions are so mixed with the facts of life that you can’t disentangle them. I feel thought in general, and in particular what is unfortunately called “philosophy,” should lead a sort of clandestine life…

by Eric Byrd This half-memoir, half-history is one of those bleak books that illustrate Sartre's remark that a victory described in detail is indistinguishable from a defeat. On June 4, 1942, US Navy dive-bombers sank four Japanese aircraft carriers – all of which had been present at the attack on Pearl Harbor seven months prior…

by Eric Byrd John Keegan and Geoffrey Perret have repackaged the essential arguments of The Generalship of Ulysses S. Grant, first published in 1929, in more politically palatable prose. But I was interested by the book's datedness, the view it offers of the odd personality and ominous historical situation from which the reevaluation of Grant…

by Eric Byrd Cyril Connolly was depressed by biographies of unlucky poets. Reading yet another life of Baudelaire “we know, with each move into a cheap hotel, exactly how many cheap hotels lie ahead of him.” Mr. Lincoln's Army (1951) made me feel that way about armies – in this case the Army of the…

by Eric Byrd Three Wogs (1973) is Alexander Theroux's first novel – the fruit of a Fulbright year in London, and a National Book Award nominee. It is the work of a verbal sorcerer and deep-seeing satirist unafraid of prolixity or obscurity in the pursuit of a complex effect: the grotesque real, the situations in…

by Eric Byrd His poetry emerges out of dreams – of a very special kind that abide wholly within the realm of art. (Blok, on Mandelstam) Guy Davenport's essays are more read than his stories – and so would begin a critical lament, if Davenport's use of the modes were more distinct; if his stories…

by Eric Byrd Angelo Maria Ripellino (1923 – 1978) was a poet, Slavicist, translator of the great Russian Symbolists and Silver Agers (Bely's Petersburg into Italian, a transmutation as arduous and heroic as any of Ulysses, from what I've heard Nabokov say), and, most memorably, a servant of Czech letters whose devotion extended, in one…

by Eric Byrd As a teenager who just wanted battles, I tried to read The Face of Battle and was baffled by the historiographic argument of Keegan's introduction, a long essay that, I now see, echoes Virginia Woolf's manifesto “Modern Fiction” and applies its prescriptions to historical prose. Keegan called to writers of military history…

by Eric Byrd Reading To the Lighthouse I was especially struck by her treatment of what Henry James calls, in his preface to The Tragic Muse, “the artist-life,” as a “human complication and social stumbling block.” The tension of contemplative withdrawal and selfless attention, the janicular simultaneity of egoism – egoism as a revelation of…

by Eric Byrd Having nothing better to do…I read two old journals. High spirits and weather reports recede into the background, and what emerges are two astonishing contests, one with alcohol and one with my wife. (1968) That sounds like what I read. Until Cheever gets sober – 1975 – the entries of this 5%…

by Eric Byrd Defeat: Napoleon's Russian Campaign is the graspable handle New York Review of Books Classics has given David Townsend’s translation-abridgement of General Philippe-Paul de Ségur’s Histoire de Napoléon et de la Grande-Armée pendant l’année 1812, published in 1824. In his original two volumes, Ségur interleaved tedious statistics and technical disquisitions in archaic military…

by Eric Byrd Orlando's biography spans five centuries but I think Woolf endows but two, the sixteenth and the nineteenth, with a full measure of her erudite brio and critical fantasy. Nothing in the novel surpasses the Renaissance fantasia of the first chapter – sixty pages of enchanting, festive, parti-colored prose. Orlando opens his/her eyes…

by Eric Byrd Barbarian that I am, my knowledge of the classic Latin poetry, excepting Ovid’s exilic Epistulae, and what bits of the Metamorphoses an English major might meet in footnotes to the Fairie Queene and Paradise Lost, amounts to no more than names on a timeline. Poets in a Landscape is the remedial introduction…

by Eric Byrd Fitzroy Maclean, over Yugoslavia, in Eastern Approaches: “With a jerk my parachute opened and I found myself dangling, as it were at the end of a string, high above a silent mountain valley, greenish-grey and misty in the light of the moon. It looked, I thought, invitingly cool and refreshing after the…

by Eric Byrd A few years ago I found a copy of the 1990 English translation of Guido Ceronetti's The Silence of the Body: Materials for the Study of Medicine in a used bookstore's Humor section. Those are usually dead zones of joke books, cartoon compilations and political jesters, over which the eye skims. I…

by Eric Byrd Like Ségur's account of the retreat from Moscow and Grant's mostly martial memoirs, Pushkin's History of the Pugachev Revolt narrates a welter of suffering – axe-armed mobs, corpulent gentry flayed alive, a total civic breakdown in which “the simple people did not know whom to obey” – in an coolly “classical” style;…

by Eric Byrd A few years ago Slate's culture editor David Haglund posted a piece called “Marilynne Robinson, the Terrence Malick of the Literary World.” Malick and Robinson, he said, are kindred artists. They share a pattern of striking debuts, mid-career hiatus, and late fertility; also, an unfashionable theological seriousness, and a deep attention to…

By Eric Byrd Journey to the Abyss: The Diaries of Count Harry Kessler, 1880-1918 The Belle Époque cosmopolitan, after bidding Rodin adieu at the Gare du Nord the day of the Austrian ultimatum, returned to Germany and donned the feldgrau tunic, to battle for the fortunes of the Reich. The 1914-18 entries of this famous…

by Eric Byrd There's a subgenre of military memoirs produced by elderly emeriti, the crew-cut close readers of postwar English departments, who in late career published personal recollections of they and the other terrified teenagers who mostly fought World War Two. Alvin Kernan (Shakespeare editor, torpedo bomber crewman) is like Paul Fussell (Johnsonian, infantry officer)…

by Eric Byrd On Facebook I follow a number of the US Department of the Interior's National Battlefield Parks, National Battle Sites, and Military Parks. In the progress of the Civil War's sesquicentennial each of these sites has had their day in the social media sun, their special anniversary posts with pictures of the commemorative…