Letters From My Library (II)

The Only Yankee I Have Ever Rooted For

I got another book when I was pretty young – It was given to me as a present from my grandfather at or around my seventh birthday.  It was a good sized paperback and the printing on the pages was small.  There were no pictures in the book and the words, even those in the title on the cover – were big.  Bigger than any I had attempted previously.  I didn’t know if I’d be able to handle something that seemed so adult – and I said so.

“You’ll be OK” my grandfather assured me – “you can read this one”.

He’d never steered me wrong before but I was still wary – “What’s it about?” I asked.

“It’s about a man who gets hit on the head and wakes up in the time of King Arthur”. 

King Arthur I knew about – at least I thought I did.  He had a round table, a bunch of knights with funny names like “Sir Loin of Beef” and "Sir Osis of the Liver” – of course, this was only the Bugs Bunny version of the tale.  What I knew about the Arthurian legend was just what I had picked up from Loony Tunes cartoons.  But it was enough to make me think that I could probably handle a book about someone getting hit on the head and landing back in time – it seemed to line up pretty well with what I’d seen on Saturday morning television.

And so I was introduced to the world of Mark Twain not through Tom Sawyer or Huckleberry Finn but via A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court.  I ended up reading both of the former books soon after finishing Yankee, but I’m glad I took what would have to be considered the non-traditional route to Twain.  A Connecticut Yankee is not an easy book even for an adult to read and catch all of the things that are going on at once.  I’m pretty sure (having read it a number of times) that I still haven’t caught all of the little jokes and satirical barbs that Twain includes throughout.  But it is interesting enough in plot to keep anyone involved, funny enough to keep anyone entertained and, most tellingly, intelligent enough to keep any reader, no matter what age, aware that there is lots more going on with this story than just what you read on the surface.  I copped on to this fast enough when reading through the book – here, for example, is Twain’s Yankee on how easy it becomes for good people to begin to accept things which should, by all logic, be completely unacceptable – this scene takes place just after a group of religious pilgrims has come upon the sight of a slave master beating a young girl with a whip for the crime of getting tired during a long forced march:

Our pilgrims looked on and commented – on the expert way that the whip was handled. They were too much hardened by the lifelong everyday familiarity with slavery to notice that there was anything else in the exhibition that invited comment.  This was what slavery could do, in the way of ossifying what might be called the superior lobe of human feeling; for these pilgrims were kindhearted people, and they would not have allowed that man to treat a horse like that.

Even a seven year old couldn’t miss what was going on there – that if people got so used to something in the day to day run of things they can miss just how wrong those very things were.  I later figured out that Twain was trying to explain how so many people in the United States – in his own time – had deluded themselves into accepting slavery as normal.  Even later I figured out that Twain was trying to explain how he, himself, had managed to hold that position for much of his younger life.

But it wasn’t all heavy political thinking – Mark Twain’s sense of humor is justifiably famous.  It comes out in sneaky little spots – such as when an noble applicant for a royal honor is being interviewed as to his background:

"By what illustrious achievement for the honor of the Throne and the State did the founder of your great line lift himself to the sacred dignity of the British nobility?"

"He built a brewery" 

And in broader strokes such as when he bestows upon the Yankee the title of neither Knight, Duke, Earl or Prince, but instead that of “Boss”.  A Connecticut Yankee is a book about politics, technology, capitalism, religion and a thousand other heavy topics but, because it hides so well behind its tale those things never get in the way of a seven year old being able to work through the book and enjoy it thoroughly.  I now own just about every word Mark Twain ever published and read at least one of his books every year.  He’s been called a gift to American literature but to me he is primarily a gift from my grandfather, who never did steer me wrong.

Books by/about Mark Twain in my library: (Note: the “Unabridged” collections gather together the great mass of Twain’s work, The Prince and the Pauper, Life on the Mississippi, Roughing It, and so on.  They’re a great way to get a lot of Twain without having to hunt down each book.  Also – to get an idea of the darker, more cynical side of Twain I’d track down “Letters From the Earth” – basically this is a work where Twain, writing as a demon reporting back to Satan, skewers all of humanity.  Twain could be incredibly critical of what he saw as mankind’s unbearable hypocrisy and here he lets loose with both barrels.  His publisher withheld it from the public for more than a half century after Twain’s death, thinking it just too bitter to release.)

The Unabridged Mark Twain – Volume One	Mark Twain	Collection/Anthology
The Unabridged Mark Twain – Volume Two	Mark Twain	Collection/Anthology
The Adventures of Tom Sawyer	Mark Twain
The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn	Mark Twain
A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court	Mark Twain
A Pen Warmed Up in Hell – Mark Twain in Protest	Mark Twain	Collection/Anthology
Tales, Speeches Essays and Sketches	Mark Twain	Collection/Anthology
The Innocents Abroad	Mark Twain
The Complete Short Stories of Mark Twain	Mark Twain	Collection/Anthology
The Notorious Jumping Frog of Calveras County and Other Stories	Mark Twain	Collection/Anthology
Letters From the Earth	Mark Twain	Collection/Anthology
Mark Twain Himself	Milton Meltzer	Twain, Bio
Mr. Clemens and Mark Twain	Justin Kaplan	Twain, Bio

Letters From My Library

Starting a new series here today in honor of two milestones recently met, one being my fiftieth birthday, which, while not inevitable, is rather necessary for me to have achieved if I was going to be writing this sentence, and the other being the recent addition of the 2000^th book to my personal library.  Two thousand is much less than Thomas Jefferson was said to have had in Monticello (6,487 books donated to the Library of Congress), is certainly less than I have ever owned (there was the incident where lots of my favorite books were tossed out when I was off at college), and is less than what I’ve actually read since there are lots of trips to the library that aren’t factored in – but it’s still a hell of a lot of books.  So I’m going to try to pick out a representative sample and explain why I happen to like that particular one, whether and for what purpose I would recommend it and maybe just ramble on in whatever direction the words lead me.  In fact going on such rambles is what I see as one of the main functions of books.

First – no I haven’t read all of the books in the house – but I’ve read most of them, lots of them more than once – and I fully intend to get to each one.  If turning 50 is a milestone then its main purpose must be to allow you the experience and perspective to set a few goals and make a few resolutions.  One of mine is to get down to reading some of the books I’ve been holding in reserve (like Dom DeLillo’s “End Zone”).  But reading has never been a chore for me, so keeping that promise to myself shouldn’t be difficult.  In fact, 50 means that there is another milestone to be marked – 44 years of reading.  I really started picking up books from my entry into Miss Murphy’s first grade class when I was six years old.  I seriously doubt, from when I was halfway through that year, if there has ever been a time when I haven’t been reading at least one book.  Usually I’ll have a few going at once.  True – when I started I didn’t much care what I was reading (textbooks, joke books, baseball previews (one of which I still have – the 1974 pre-season review – Hank Aaron was going in to the year on 713 homeruns).  I’d just read anything for the sheer magic of seeing the words make sense.  Then I’d read it again.  And again.  And again.

That may be one of the things I miss the most about reading when I was a kid – I read all kinds of books more than once.  I’ll talk about some of them (like the Narnia series) in these essays, but there are others, like Tony Conigliaro’s autobiography “Seeing It Through”, that I’ve read about six times and can still quote from memory.  Re-reading books is tough to do now – I’ve got others waiting to be read in the on-deck circle, time is at a premium, and it is harder to justify picking up something you already read once.  But those books that I read multiple times (and some I’ve read so many times I’ve lost count) are like old friends revisited.  I think I might start to pick up the practice again.

In the meantime I’ll try, through these essays, to introduce a few of those friends around.  You might enjoy meeting up with some of them – you can never have enough friends.

First Up – William F. Gaines Sends a Present

I don’t know what the oldest book in my collection is – I have a few of my father’s old books and I’ve picked up some older books at used bookstores and the like.  I’ve got an old edition of Huckleberry Finn and a small edition of some of Chekhov’s plays – but I never have been a book collector in the sense of going after first editions or old leather bound volumes.  I get books to read them.  Towards that end I know exactly which of the books I have is the oldest in my collection in the sense of it being the oldest book I ever actually got for myself.  Not the oldest I book I ever bought mind you – I bartered for it – and therein lies a story. 

In first grade there were two primary mediums of exchange – neither of which was U.S currency.  One was desserts.  You could trade your dessert at lunch for many things – toys, other types of food, baseball cards – one chocolate pudding could get you quite a few cards.  The other item of barter was a “Whizzer” – and they were like gold.

A Whizzer was a top that seemed to be nuclear powered.  You would zip the vulcanized rubber tip along the floor and then the top would (probably aided by a gyroscope) spin on its end for about two and a half years (OK – hours).

(OK – minutes – but it seemed longer).

The entire time the Whizzer would – well – it would whizz, making a high pitched squealing sound.  Teachers must have loved the things because, at any given time, their desks would be loaded with an assortment of confiscated Whizzers, in all different colors.  Whizzers were the bomb.

You could trade a Whizzer for almost anything and I, in my first official book acquisition, traded an orange one that I had for not just one but three books.  One was so forgettable I have since forgotten it.  Another was one I would dearly love to find a copy of.  It was called “Bill Stern’s Favorite Baseball Stories” or something like that, and it was a collection of the stories that Stern, a radio personaility from the forties, would tell on air.  Woody Allen parodies the sorts of tales that would be told in Radio Days, wherein a pitcher comes back after three or four hunting accidents that gradually deprive him of his legs and arms.  Then there were the stories like the one about a catching prospect named "Bill" who had his heart broken when he didn't get signed to a pro contract  - "but don't feel too sorry for old Bill - because his full name was William Howard Taft and he went on to become President of the United States".  I still felt sorry for Bill - I'd have rather been a catcher.  I loved that book – I think it eventually disintegrated.  But it was still in second place out of the three – for the real treasure out of the trade was a book that remains in my possession, something called “Greasy Mad Stuff”.

I could tell you the history of Mad magazine, but others have already done a better job.  Check this out http://h2g2.com/approved_entry/A2116540 or just accept this even shorter version – a guy called William Gaines had published a series of comic books in the fifties along the lines of “Tales from the Crypt”.  The comics were brilliantly written, scarily illustrated and actually could frighten the crap out of you.  So, naturally, someone, in this case Congress, had to shut it down on the supposition that it was “corrupting the nation’s youth”.  The “comic code” outlawed such brilliance in favor of hard hitting works like “Little LuLu” – but Gaines refused to give up – he modified a comic called “Tales Calculated to Drive You Mad” just enough to make it a full fledged magazine rather than a comic and, in doing so, avoided the code.  Thus set free he proceeded to load the magazine with exactly the sorts of outrageous drawings and parodies that never would have been allowed in a straightforward comic.  Naturally, again, kids flocked to the opportunity to be corrupted and I was one of them.  But I never liked comics that much – books, even paperbacks, were more solid.  Because of this prejudice I attempted, whenever possible, to take my Mad magazine in book form – this meant I missed out on the fold in picture that the true magazine included on the back cover – but it was worth it.

“Greasy Mad Stuff” is not the greatest Mad book I ever had – just the oldest one - but it was still good enough – and a lot of it still stands up.  It makes fun of the advertising industry (“Mad Men” indeed), includes some great Don Martin cartoons, a parody of “The Price is Right” (they are asking the purchase price for the Queen Mary), and has a great section on “Women in Whiskey Ads”.  These are all pretty standard for Mad, and, I suppose, are actually fairly tame – but when you are reading this stuff in the first grade it is a revelation –  and even if you didn’t understand half the references (who the hell is “Fabian”) it felt like you were being written to as a grown-up.  Well, maybe not a grown up, grown up – but at least like a teenager – someone who was being allowed in to a world beyond “See Spot run.  Run Spot, run”.  Mad pushed the envelope – but it pushed you too – and books should do that more often.