The Noise of Typewriters by Lance Morrow

Author:Lance Morrow
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Encounter Books

CHAPTER 20

The story of the Luces’ escape from the Boxers had biblical touches—Moses in the bulrushes, the flight into Egypt.

It was a good story, with an atmosphere of myth and a hint of miracle: A child was plucked from danger in order that he might grow up and do great things in the world.

All of this happened at the dawn of the twentieth century. At that moment, another Henry—the aging Henry Adams (a Washington journalist in his youth, by the way)—surveyed the world and feared that the new era, however bright and noisy and smug and overconfident might be its mood at the moment, brought with it unreadable and terrifying complexities.

He was the great-grandson of President John Adams and grandson of President John Quincy Adams, and he professed to be a remnant of a more intelligible and congenial age—the eighteenth century. He predicted that the twentieth century’s new energies would be satanic and would carry mankind over into a universe of the meaningless, presided over by new forces, which he summarized in his metaphor of the Dynamo—soundless and terrible.

Darwin had done his work to shake the foundations of religious faith, Freud debunked the innocence of childhood, and Einstein abolished Isaac Newton’s heavenly clockwork. The old empires collapsed. Electricity turned night into day, the telephone annulled distance; the automobile, the airplane, the movies—all altered the experience of reality. They changed the nature of nature—turned the world’s operating systems upside down. Predominantly rural and agricultural America morphed into industrial and urban America. Electric elevators made skyscrapers possible, and cities pivoted ninety degrees, from horizontal to vertical, and the country’s genes and culture and politics were altered forever as waves of immigrants swarmed in from Eastern Europe and Italy and elsewhere. Americans who had arrived in earlier years, people with old names and embedded identities, began to feel like strangers in their own country.

But Harry Luce had also arrived from elsewhere, from the other side of the world. He, too, in a way was a stranger: an immigrant with all the advantages of the old American stock but with the fresh eye of a kind of greenhorn—and also the ambition and the hope and the connections. Luce came as an “immigrant” with all possible advantages.

“Progress” had acquired a dark side. At Ypres and the Somme, long-range artillery collaborated with machine guns that fired several hundred bullets a minute. They achieved an unthinkable productivity of death—a premonition of what was to come. A generation of Europe’s young men went under. Karl Marx’s new religion, its missionaries more numerous and ruthless than those of the Christians, would overturn empires (in Russia and China) and start an imperium of their own.

The nineteenth century’s intellectual solidities broke up and dissolved into incoherence, or into novel, infidel meanings, or anyway a new bewilderment, motifs of disintegration and disillusion reflected in the works of Picasso and James Joyce and Stravinsky and T.S. Eliot and Lytton Strachey and distilled in whatever lessons were to be drawn from terrible actual fragmentations—corpses at Ypres and, decades later, ashes of Auschwitz and Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

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