A great gift from a local librarian

By: centraljersey.com
"I’ve never had time to read book reviews." – William Faulkner
Diane Miller works in the Hopewell Township branch of the Mercer County library system. Over the years, she has become a good friend to this newspaper and to me. She’s contacted us about a number of things we wound up writing about, or taking pictures of, or both.
"I put a hold on a book for you," she told me about a month ago when I stopped in the library. "I thought you’d get a kick out of it."
"What is it?"
"The Autobiography of Mark Twain."
"Wow. Thanks a lot."
"We’ll give you a call when it comes in."
"Thanks."
A few weeks later the call came and I went to pick up the book.
I wouldn’t have looked at it if it weren’t for Diane. I had browsed a long review of that book several weeks before and wasn’t much interested. It was a very literary sort of review, if you get my drift. I take the literary establishment with a grain of salt.
Yes, I love Faulkner and Conrad and Melville and Raymond Carver and "On The Road" and "The Great Gatsby" and a lot of other stuff the establishment has given its A-1 seal of approval. And a lot of stuff that’s been given the A-1 seal of approval I find atrocious or pompous or arrogant or incredibly boring or all of the above. But then there’s always the joker in the deck. I can’t read James Joyce, but where would Faulkner be without him? And for me Faulkner is the man, the veritable Elvis of writers.
At least I thought so until I read the book Diane got for me.
I almost didn’t even start it. It’s a very big, very heavy book – 736 pages long with some of the smallest print you’ll see. (The print is of excellent quality, however.) And Twain doesn’t get to say his first word until Page 67. Before that, it’s the literati doing their thing, and I’m not interested.
I hate to start a book and not finish it, and I hate to skip the beginning of a book. I’ll read the introduction, the preface, the title page, author’s note. I feel guilty unless I read it all.
But no amount of guilt could make me plow through all those 67 pages. So, well before I got to page 10, I went straight to Twain’s own words.
It’s a great book. I couldn’t praise it too highly. If you just let yourself slow down a little and take a few pages at their own pace, you’re hooked. It’s as funny and insightful and poetic as anything I’ve ever read. It sent me straight back to "Huckleberry Finn," which I’m reading again for the first time in I don’t know how long and finding as good as anything I’ve ever read.
Here’s a short sample from the autobiography, which apparently Twain dictated to stenographers while he was in bed. It’s from a description of a man, James W. Paige, who invented a typesetting machine in which Twain invested quite a bit of money:
"I will remark here, that James W. Paige, the little bright-eyed, alert, smartly-dressed inventor of the machine, is the most extraordinary compound of business thrift and commercial insanity; of cold calculation and jejune sentimentality; of veracity and falsehood; of fidelity and treachery; of nobility and baseness; of pluck and cowardice; of wasteful liberality and pitiful stinginess; of solid sense and weltering moonshine; of towering genius and trivial ambitions; of merciful bowels and a petrified heart; of colossal vanity and – But there the opposites stop. His vanity stands alone, sky-piercing, as sharp of outline as an Egyptian monolith. It is the only unpleasant feature in him that is not modified, softened, compensated by some converse characteristic. There is another point or two worth mentioning: he can persuade anybody; he can convince nobody. He has a crystal clear mind, as regards the grasping and connecting of an idea, which has been lost under a chaos of baffling legal language; and yet it can always be depended upon to take the simplest half-dozen facts and draw from them a conclusion that will astonish the idiots in the asylum. It is because he is a dreamer, a visionary. His imagination runs utterly away with him. He is a poet; a most great and genuine poet, whose sublime creations are written in steel. He is the Shakespeare of the mechanical invention."
This book rises to that level over and over and over again. I’ve never seen anything like it. I’m going to buy me a copy for sure.
Thanks, Diane!
John Tredrea is staff writer for the Hopewell Valley News.