Free The Book of Illusions by Paul Auster Page B

the time, I needed something that would get me up and down without turning every trip into an adventure. I hired a plumber and an electrician to repair pipes and wires, painted walls, laid in a winter’s worth of cordwood, and bought myself a computer, a radio, and a combination telephone–fax machine. Meanwhile, The Silent World of Hector Mann was slowly making its way through the circuitous channels of academic-press publication. Unlike other books, scholarly books are not accepted or rejected by a single in-house editor. Copies of the manuscript are sent out to various specialists in the field, and nothing happens until those people have read the submission and mailed in their reports. The fees for such work are minimal (a couple of hundred dollars at best), and since the readers tend to be professors who are busy teaching and writing books of their own, the process often drags. In my case, I waited from the middle of November until the end of March before I had an answer. By then, I was so absorbed in something else that I nearly forgot that I had sent them the manuscript. I was glad that they wanted it, of course, glad that I had something to show for my efforts, but I can’t say that it meant that much to me. It was good news for Hector Mann, perhaps, good news for antique-movie hounds and connoisseurs of black mustaches, but now that the experience was behind me, I rarely thought about it anymore. On the few occasions when I did, I felt as if the book had been written by someone else.
    In mid-February, I received a letter from a former graduate school classmate, Alex Kronenberg, who now taught at Columbia. I had last seen him at the memorial service for Helen and the boys, and although we hadn’t spoken to each other since, I still considered him to be a solid friend. (His condolence letter had been a model of eloquence and compassion, the best letter I received from anyone.) He started off his new letter by apologizing for not having been in touch sooner. He had been thinking about me a lot, he said, and had heard through the grapevine that I was on leave from Hampton and had spent some months living in New York. He was sorry that I hadn’t called. If he had known that I was there, he would have been immensely glad to see me. Those were his precise words— immensely glad —a typical Alex locution. In any case, the next paragraph began, he had recently been asked by Columbia University Press to edit a new series of books, the Library of World Classics. A man with the incongruous name of Dexter Feinbaum, a 1927 graduate of the Columbia School of Engineering, had bequeathed them four and a half million dollars for the purpose of starting this collection. The idea was to bring together the acknowledged masterpieces of world literature in one uniform line of books. Everything from Meister Eckhart to Fernando Pessoa would be included, and in cases where the existing translations were deemed inadequate, new translations would be commissioned. It’s a mad enterprise , Alex wrote, but they’ve put me in charge as executive editor, and in spite of all the extra work (I don’t sleep anymore), I have to admit that I’m enjoying myself. In his will, Feinbaum made a list of the first one hundred titles he wanted to see published. He got rich by manufacturing aluminum siding, but you can’t fault him for his taste in literature. One of the books was Chateaubriand’s Mémoires d’outre-tombe. I still haven’t read the cursed thing , all two thousand pages of it, but I remember what you said to me one night in 1971 somewhere on the Yale campus—it might have been near that little plaza just outside the Beinecke—and I’m going to repeat it to you now. “This,” you said (holding up the first volume of the French edition and waving it in the air), “is the best autobiography ever written.” I don’t know if you still feel that way now, but I probably don’t have to tell you that there have been only two complete