I dreamed my late brother was here in Houston, a city he never visited. He was phobic about flying and traveled by air only twice in his life, when very young. We were seated across from each other, on the couches by the front window. What I remember of the dream is brief, little more than an image without duration. He looked as he always looked – plaid shirt, blue jeans, Whitmanesque beard. The atmosphere was mundane, free of revelations. We didn’t talk though I sensed I had unformed questions. He offered no reassurance or profound knowledge from beyond.  When I woke the dream mingled with Montaigne, the writer we often talked about during his final weeks last August in the hospital and hospice. Montaigne’s father became ill with kidney stones in 1561 and died seven years later. The essayist’s closest friend, the poet Étienne de La Boétie, died of dysentery in 1563 at age thirty-two. His brother Arnaud died in his twenties. His firstborn died at two months, the second survived but the subsequent four also died as infants. In “Of Judging the Death of Others,” Montaigne writes:   “When we judge of the assurance of other men in dying, which is without doubt the most noteworthy action of human life, we must be mindful of one thing: that people do not easily believe that they have reached that point. Few men die convinced that it is their last hour; and there is no place where the deception of hope deludes us more. It never stops trumpeting into our ears: ‘Others have certainly been sicker without dying; the case is not as desperate as they think; and at worst, God has certainly worked other miracles.’”   For almost a week preceding his death, my brother was unconscious. The only sound he made was softly moaning when the nurses moved him. Before that, he never seemed frightened. I’ll never know what he knew or when.   [The quotation is from The Complete Essays of Montaigne (trans. Donald Frame, Stanford University Press, 1957).]

A longtime reader of Anecdotal Evidence has commented on my March 1 post:  “One of my worst apprehensions about my son’s college education came true in his freshman English class. The professor brought up Lamb only to highlight something he said that would strike modern progressives as racist. Such a great language stylist, and my son’s likely only exposure to him was in the villains’ gallery of his college’s CRT indoctrination. Grrr!”   By now, a familiar story. That Lamb of all writers should be Zhdanov-ized is a bitter joke. Yes, he is “a great language stylist,” but also one of the funniest writers in the language. His sense of humor, spanning the spectrum from nonsense to erudite wit, is distinctly modern. As he wrote in a letter to Robert Southey: “I was at Hazlitt’s marriage, and had like to have been turned out several times during the ceremony. Anything awful makes me laugh. I misbehaved once at a funeral.” English profs tend today to be humorless and puritanical, at least about other people's beliefs, disapproving of the pleasure we are meant to take in literature.   In Nabokov and the Real World: Between Appreciation and Defense (2021), Robert Alter reflects on a visit he made to the Soviet Union in the final year of its existence. He was there to attend a Nabokov conference, contrasting it with “the never-never land that American academia has become.” He writes:   "Literature in our own academic circles is regularly dismissed, castigated as an instrument of ideologies of oppression, turned into a deconstructive plaything, preferentially segregated by the pigmentation and the sexual orientation of the writers, or entirely displaced by clinical case studies, metaphysical treatises, psychoanalytic theories, and artifacts of popular culture.”   Let’s ask the basic question: why do academics, some of whom are intelligent and well-educated, behave this way? It seems to boil down to two things: a hunger for power (always the highest value on campus), a withered aesthetic sense and and a peculiar form of laziness. You don’t have to bother reading a book if you know in advanced you want to disapprove of it. Such descendants of the kids in grade school who complained about reading a book are now in a position to get their way. Alter bluntly states the reality for many of us: “There is something irrepressibly celebratory about Nabokov’s writing . . .”

“Maurine Smith died March 8, 1919, at the age of twenty-three years. Nearly her whole life had been one of intense physical suffering, and she knew few of the usual felicities.”  Yvor Winters is introducing us to a poet whose name you likely have never encountered.  Smith and Winters were members of the Poetry Club of the University of Chicago, along with Glenway Wescott, Elizabeth Madox Roberts and a few others. Five of Smith’s poems were published in Poetry two and a half years after her death. After another two years, Monroe Wheeler published a chapbook, The Keen Edge, containing eighteen of Smith’s poems. Winters provided the brief introduction:   “Unless one speaks of the dead from a very complete knowledge, one speaks with diffidence, and my acquaintance with Miss Smith was slight. . . . Thin, and a trifle bent, withdrawn  she surveys the autumn morning through a window. And then the lines from an unpublished poem:   “‘I dust my open book, But there is no dust on the pages.’   “A hand as fine as the lines, and that is all.”   Winters’ closing line might almost be a poem. After publication of the chapbook, Smith evaporated from literary history for sixty years. She has no Wikipedia page – one's confirmation of existence in the digital age. In 1987, poet and publisher R.L. Barth returned The Keener Edge to print, and he later gave me a copy. The poet-novelist Janet Lewis, Winters’ widow and also a member of the Poetry Club, published a critical article, “The Poems of Maurine Smith,” in the Winter 1990 issue of Chicago Review. Despite the growth in women’s studies and the revival of interest in many previously neglected female writers, Lewis’ piece remains the only substantial critical examination of Smith and her poetry I've been able to find. Lewis tells us she met Smith only once, in January 1919. I’m touched by Lewis using Smith’s first name after more than seventy years:     “I think of Maurine as having a mind well schooled in English verse. I can as easily relate her work to that of Christina Rossetti as to that of Adelaide Crapsey, who was almost her contemporary, and certainly an influence.”   Describing her sole meeting with Smith some 106 years ago, Lewis writes:   “I cannot remember if Maurine submitted any poems for discussion that evening. She was too ill to attend the next meeting, when Glenway Wescott read [Smith’s] “Ceremony.” He read it, as he read each of the poems which we dropped on the table, without giving the name of the writer. I remember, although not knowing whose poem it was, how deeply I was touched by it, the beauty of the control of both form and feeling. This is the poem. It may as well be introductory now, as it was then:   “The unpeopled conventional rose garden  Is where I shall take my heart  With this new pain.  Clipped hedge and winter-covered beds  Shall ease its hurt.  When it has grown quiet,  I shall mount the steps, slowly,  And put three sorrows in the terra-cotta urn  On that low gate-pillar,  And leave them there, to sleep,  Beneath the brooding stillness of a twisted pine.”   Lewis notes that the members of the Poetry Club were interested in free verse, the formless form then still something of a novelty: “It was not entirely respectable in 1918.” Another Smith poem reminds Lewis of Christina Rosetti’s “Haply I may remember, and haply may forget.” Here is “The Dead”:   “You, who were blind to beauty,  Unheedful of song, You have time now to remember In your quiet under the ground; And does the time seem long?   “Harken, in your silence; All things grow. Is not your heart importunate? You, too, must long again To feel the wind blow.”   As late as 1930, Winters was hoped to publish a more complete edition of Smith’s poems, with a biography supplied by her sister. He believed some forty poems were extant. In a letter to Glenway Wescott, Winters writes: “Maurine was one of our best poets, I am more and more certain.” See The Selected Letters of Yvor Winters (2000), edited by Barth and published by Ohio University Press/Swallow Press.

A librarian friend and I were talking about the similarities between library cataloguing and taxonomy in biology – the art of classification – and the sort of people such specialized disciplines attract. Formerly a piano teacher, she was attracted to library science by way of cataloging and loving books. It’s less formulaic than I would have assumed. There’s an art to it, even a creative aspect, that goes beyond author/title/subject in the catalog. The goal is to aid the reader as much as possible in locating what he wants.  Until ninth grade I planned to become a biologist. That year’s biology teacher, a bitter, unimaginative man with a crew cut and a pencil neck, changed all that. What I especially enjoyed was binomial nomenclature, the naming practice devised by Carl Linnaeus, the great eighteenth-century Swedish biologist. Binomial: Genus, species – the Latin name; for example, Homo sapiens. The idea that every life form could be named to distinguish it from every other appealed to me. So did the notion that all organisms are related, that you could literally devise a family tree, an effort which always reminds me of Borges’ Library of Babel.   The librarian and I agreed that classification, in this sense, is useful (and somehow comforting) but it also invites hubris. Any attempt to collect and systemize knowledge – a dictionary or encyclopedia, the Human Genome Project – has a comically presumptuous aspect. Biologists are forever revising categories, distinguishing sub-species from species. We’ve learned so much and know so little. Accumulating knowledge and attempting to draw lessons from it, is a handy metaphor for out state. The English poet Stevie Smith, in a September 1937 letter to the novelist and journalist Helen Mitchison, writes: “I don’t think we can pass the buck to forces of evil or to anything but our own humanity. We are bloody fools—but then, we are hardly out of the egg shell yet.”   Every human accomplishment is shadowed by its opposite. We solve one problem and it turns into another. According to the editors of Me Again: Uncollected Writings of Stevie Smith (1982), Mitchison had previously written Smith “‘a gloomy letter’ about the world situation.” During that autumn,  Hitler was in his ascendancy and rapidly rearming Germany, Stalin’s Great Terror was accelerating, the Second Sino-Japanese War was well under way and Spain was self-destructing. Smith, whose first and best novel, Novel on Yellow Paper, had recently been published, urges Mitchison to keep her cool:   “I think we want to keep a tight hand—each of us on our own thoughts. I think at the present moment you are in a state of mind that hungers for the disasters it fears. If there are forces of evil, you see, you are siding with them, in allowing your thoughts to panic. Your mind is your only province—the only thing that is.”   Around the time of Smith’s letter to Mitchison she wrote “Beautiful”:   “Man thinks he was not born to die But that’s no proof he wasn’t, And those who would not have it so Are very glad it isn’t.   “Why should man wish to live for ever?   His term is merciful, He riseth like a beaming plant And fades most beautiful,   “And his rising and his fading Is most beautiful.   “Not, not the one without the other, But always the two together, Rising fading, fading rising, It is really not surprising To find this beautiful.”   Smith died on this date, March 7, in 1971 at age sixty-nine.