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.

Bertie Wooster has asked if he can purchase a gift for Jeeves while he is out, and the valet replies: “‘Well, sir, there has recently been published a new and authoritatively annotated edition of the works of the philosopher Spinoza. Since you are so generous, I would appreciate that very much.” This comes in the first chapter of Joy in the Morning, published by P.G. Wodehouse in 1947. I was reading it late the other night, alone in the front room, and I started giggling and my eyes watered. The dog looked concerned. Ever since my nephew told me he had discovered Wodehouse and was going through his novels and stories like a guest at a party with an open bar, I’ve been reading Plum between more imposing volumes – including Spinoza, a thinker I discovered as a teenager thanks to a story by Isaac Bashevis Singer. (In another B&J confection, Carry On, Jeeves, Wodehouse has Jeeves say: “You would not enjoy Nietzsche, sir. He is fundamentally unsound.”) A reader tells me in a comment on Tuesday’s post that he is reading Wodehouse’s Something Fresh (1915): “Every silly yet perfectly crafted page," he writes, "was a declaration of allegiance to something more enduring than even the greatest historical catastrophe -- the unexpected pleasure potential of just being alive. God bless the man – it’s a reminder I needed right now.” An amusing scene with a clerk in a bookshop follows Jeeves’ request. While there, Bertie runs into Florence Craye, an intellectual woman to whom he was once engaged. “‘Bertie!’ she says, ‘This is amazing! Do you really read Spinoza?’” Bertie, our narrator, thinks: “‘It’s extraordinary how one yields to that fatal temptation to swank. It undoes the best of us. Nothing, I mean, would have been simpler than to reply that she had got the data twisted and that the authoritatively annotated edition was a present for Jeeves. But, instead of doing the simple, manly, straightforward thing, I had to go and put on dog.” Bertie tells Florence: “‘Oh, rather,’ I said, with an intellectual flick of the umbrella. ‘When I have a leisure moment, you will generally find me curled up with Spinoza’s latest.’” Is there a moral component here, a lesson for all good readers? I suppose so. Don’t lie. Admit your shortcomings. But all of that is irrelevant. We laugh because all of us, at least on occasion, are tempted to put on airs so we appear smarter or better educated than we are. In effect, to lie. I’m reminded of something Nabokov told an interviewer: “All writers that are worth anything are humorists.” This seems obvious to some of us. Much of the best humor implies a nuanced understanding of the world, the ability to see comedy in tragedy and vice versa – the essence of literary accomplishment. The humorless are earnest and dull and leave little room for a good laugh or an insight into human nature. “I’m not P.G. Wodehouse,” Nabokov continues. “I’m not a funny man, but give me an example of a great writer who is not a humorist. “ [Nabokov’s 1962 interview with Phyllis Meras for the Providence Sunday Journal is collected in Think, Write, Speak: Uncollected Essays, Reviews, Interviews and Letters to the Editor (eds. Brian Boyd and Anastasia Tolstoy, 2019).]