Late last year, a very close friend of mine (OK, it was me) received an unexpected royalty check in the mail. It was unexpected because the book has been out of print for two years, but what writer questions a check in the mail, no matter how small?
When such money comes into your life, one has a choice: either do something practical with it (children’s college fund, overdue utility bills, groceries) or spend it all on books and CDs. That was an easy call: books and CDs.
The check was small, small enough that I could funnel it into the general fund without getting in trouble with my wife. After cashing the check, it was time to indulge, or at least indulge as much as I could with $300.
As with many people who have loved literature and music for decades, I have most of the books I’ll ever read (including a hefty stack of those I want to read, but haven’t gotten around to yet) and more music than I have time to hear unless I give up working and parenting and just listen all day. I have less “new” to discover, deciding instead to delve deeper into writers and musicians whose work I admire, tracking uncollected Updike and Roth stories, trading Dylan bootlegs, trading bootlegs of performers who influenced Dylan. My world of favorites may be less wide than it should be, but it is getting deeper on its narrow ground. Ask me a trivia question about any of my favorites, and I’ll prove that I’m filled with, well, trivia.
However, like most people who wish to consider themselves erudite regarding books and records, I suffer enormous gaps in my knowledge. Rather than seek therapy, I’ll admit some of them now. I have never read Victor Hugo or Kate Chopin or heard any more than a radio cut by Pearl Jam or Art Blakey; I didn’t read “The Catcher in the Rye” or any Toni Morrison until I was 35 and learning to hide the gray. Even in college, I avoided Ayn Rand (this may be a blessing, I know). I know these gaps prevent me from being as knowledgeable a writer, critic or person as I want to be, but it’s more fun thinking that if I read that Nabokov story or that section of “Gravity’s Rainbow” only one more time, this time I’ll figure out what it’s about.
I think about this while I walk through the bookstore, searching. I don’t need any more books by my favorite authors; I’ve read all that’s available. I don’t want to waste time with the second tier (put that Gore Vidal book back), but maybe this is the time to fill in some gaps. And then I see it, taking up an entire shelf: Oxford University Press’ “The Oxford Mark Twain.”
My Twain knowledge is pitifully small, consisting of vague memories from reading Huck and Tom as a child, comments overheard on a radio show arguing whether the author was a racist, and seeing an ad recently for the Disney version of “The Prince and the Pauper” (Mickey plays both roles). As I look at the titles on the box, I realize I know nothing about Twain. He wrote a book about Joan of Arc? What could “Is Shakespeare Dead” be about? He wrote a sequel to “Tom Sawyer”? And that’s only from looking at the titles. “The Oxford Mark Twain” comes in a big brown box, 29 volumes stuffed with everything he ever wrote, more than 14,000 pages, priced at $395 but on sale for 25 percent off, $296.25, almost exactly the amount of the check. Twenty-nine hardcover books at pennies over $10 each? I convince myself that this is both a bargain and an opportunity to fill one of those annoying gaps separating me from perfection, and although I don’t stop to think that I have no place in my home to put 29 new hardcover books, I buy the monster.
Four months later, I can report some progress. I found a place to put the books (it involves the words “unfinished” and “basement”). I’ve read two of them and I’m hungry to read more, when I steal some time. It will be years, perhaps decades, before I ingest the whole thing (if it took Twain more than 50 years to write these books, I shouldn’t be in a rush). But when I venture into bookstores or record stores, I must admit, I’m examining the products differently. Although no more surprise royalty checks have arrived and no expected ones are forthcoming, when I look at books and CDs I’m thinking big.
Just look at these boxes! I once made a not-bad living as a CD-reissue producer (it was just like making tapes for friends in high school, except I could get paid for it), but I left because I was afraid that the population of performers who deserved a boxed set was finite and I wanted to get out before I had to do something like the Duran Duran box to pay the mortgage. But the boxes keep getting bigger. Want everything the country singer Hank Snow ever cut? It’s all yours, on 31 CDs. And existing records, even classic ones like John Coltrane’s “Live at the Village Vanguard,” Curtis Mayfield’s “Superfly” and Derek and the Dominoes’ “Layla” have gotten bigger, filled with alternate takes of familiar songs, extended jams and enough visual esoterica to command a high suggested list price.
But with few exceptions, these sets add fat, not muscle. In every case, the superior versions of the songs are the ones originally released; someone did sit down and listen to all seven versions of “Theme” that Miles Davis recorded at Chicago’s Plugged Nickel in 1965 and pick the strongest one; historians and nuts may enjoy plowing through “The Complete Live at the Plugged Nickel,” but listening to multiple alternate takes is wearying. It’s like the “Critical Edition” of Anne Frank’s “The Diary of a Young Girl,” in which three versions of the text fight for space on each page, making it unreadable. Boxes are nice to look at, but who can listen to them?
Classical-music buffs get it worst. There are dueling versions of complete Mahler symphonies, complete Shostakovich quartets and Wagner “Ring” cycles. Last year’s Big Kahuna was Deutsche Grammophon’s “Complete Beethoven Edition,” 87 CDs’ worth, available either as 20 smaller boxes (one for symphonies, one for chamber works, etc.) or all together in a large box with a handle, with a list price topping $1,000. If you buy the whole thing at once, you get a plastic display case and a hardcover book about the composer’s work that looks substantial until you notice that it repeats itself in five languages.
How can someone listen to this? The five CDs of Beethoven symphonies are outstanding, thrilling; but who will plow through seven CDs of folk-song arrangements and three CDs of lieder–10 hours of minor material, much of which has escaped the clutches of reissue producers until now? Much of this music isn’t being revived because it’s considered worthy, but simply because it exists. Is complete better? Is complete even possible? Beethoven is known to have written many drafts of some of his works. Why not release four incremental versions of a symphony if repeated drafts are available? Because no one in his or her right mind would listen to it. The existence of a recording or a text is not a sufficient artistic reason for it to be released.
Who, except for those who maintain shrines in their living room or still think they saw him at a 7-Eleven in Des Moines, wants to see the complete Elvis Presley movies? If you have several hundred dollars looking for release, you can purchase a padded custom guitar case filled with VHS versions of the King’s cinematic oeuvre. But don’t think “Stay Away Joe” or “Double Trouble” or “Clambake” is going to improve because it’s packaged as part of a cool-looking box.
Who but an obsessive wants to read the complete works of anyone? Faulkner penned many stories that deserved their uncollected status; even Shakespeare hid a few duds in his sonnets; and don’t get me started about Saul Bellow. For every “complete” or “new” version of a book that casts welcome light on the work (the expanded version of Allen Ginsburg’s “Howl” placed a great work in new, deeper perspective), we are confronted with junk like “expanded” versions of “The Stand” and “Stranger in a Strange Land” that make the originally published versions, neither of them particularly tight, seem terse. Some works should be as long as possible (the Oxford English Dictionary, most Graham Greene novels, a royalty statement from your publisher), but 50,000 extra words of Robert Heinlein are more than most readers can grok.
I’m now most of the way through reading “The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County, and Other Sketches,” the first book published under the name Mark Twain. I love the way the book looks. It’s a reproduction of the original printing of the book, including the original artwork. Roy Blount Jr. wrote an amusing, insight-free introduction for the Oxford edition, and some of Twain’s short pieces, half-stories and half-essays, ring true and witty more than a century after their composition. A few stink, though, and as I work my way through the rest of this volume and the other 28, I imagine some more stories or books will disagree with me. Perhaps the fault will be with me; perhaps it will be with Twain. Either way, I don’t feel that I have to hang on to every semicolon to learn from these books. Perhaps one day I won’t feel that I have to own the books I don’t like. That would be progress.
