Liberties There's nothing Artificial about our Intelligence

A couple of years ago we rented a beautiful apartment in London, a large flat where we must have stayed four or five times. It was perfectly comfortable and perfectly private, and the location, directly behind the British Museum, was ideal for visits to theaters and museums. It was decorated in the taste of a refined gay man of my parents’ generation. It had good Chinese porcelain, carefully chosen oriental rugs, witty French prints. It also contained the kind of photographs which, in that mysterious way, have grown dated without becoming quite old — gently pushed, by an accumulation of tiny changes, into the past. Some minute evolution in eyewear, some invisible reformulation of lipstick, some arcane improvement in cameras, betrayed their age. They did not look ancient. But though I couldn’t say exactly why, I knew that the pretty young bride was now middle-aged, and that a lot of the jolly middle-aged folks at Angkor Wat were now dead.  I also knew, as soon as I walked inside, that the house belonged to an American. I saw this by the shapes and colors of the books on the hallway shelves. It had never occurred to me that American books from the middle part of the twentieth century had such a specific appearance. Few had dust jackets. Their bindings came in serious colors: rusted reds, navy blues, vomity greens. Some were bound in something that looked like floral wallpaper, and that must have looked lovely when fresh; but few made the strenuous effort to be attractive that later books would. Their type was generously spaced. Their paper was sturdy, made of crushed rags.  I was unprepared for them to strike such a chord. Even before I saw the titles or the authors, I knew exactly what this library was. These were the books that my grandparents had on their shelves. In our world of painless communication and cheap travel, it was rare to see something that made my fatherland feel so distant. Here were the tastes and interests of Americans two generations removed from me, people I had known as a child: the people who came into the world around the turn of the twentieth century, and left it at its close. These were the books they had read at school, when they were young, and kept all their lives, even when moving across the ocean. They were too precious to give away — but not valuable enough to sell, not valuable enough for the kids, if there were kids, to keep. Most could be found for a few dollars in online bookstores. It was a miracle that such a collection had survived.  During my first week in the flat, I foreswore friends in order to pick through it. There was something about it that I wanted to understand. As I went along shelf after shelf, I felt an upswelling of emotion, suddenly close to people I thought I had finished mourning years before. Perhaps for the last time, I was a boy spending the night in my grandmother’s house. I wanted to chronicle it, catalog it, before it disappeared forever.  I noted its specifically national focus: overwhelmingly American. The only foreign country that was well represented was England, which was not, in literary terms, a foreign country. The American classics began with the great founders of our nationality: Travels and Works of Captain John Smith, Bradford’s History of Plymouth Plantation. There were some nineteenth-century books, including a Life and Character of Stephen Decatur, published in Middletown, Connecticut in 1821; and M. Sears’ The American Politician, published in Boston in 1842, containing portraits of all the presidents “from Washington to Tyler.” Most of the books were fairly common, or had been: two volumes of Bancroft’s History of the United States, and parts of a series called “American Statesmen,” which included Lincoln but also Lewis Cass and Thomas Hart Benton, this latter written by no one less than Theodore Roosevelt, who also wrote another volume about Oliver Cromwell. There were books about Charles Francis Adams and Seward and Sumner; Mark Twain at Your Fingertips; Mencken’s The American Language. There was a selection of books about California: Cable Car Days in San Francisco; Oscar Lewis’ The Big Four, about the railroad barons; and a book from the dawn of the twentieth century called The Wild Flowers of California by Mary Elizabeth Parsons. There were works by Stephen Crane and Walt Whitman, Melville’s White Jacket and Bret Harte’s Luck of Roaring Camp; Our Old Home by Hawthorne and Mont-Saint-Michel and Chartres by Henry Adams; The Titan by Theodore Dreiser and Lorenzo in Taos by Mabel Dodge Luhan; Frank Norris’ The Pit and Edna Ferber’s Giant and Thomas Wolfe’s You Can’t Go Home Again and Willa Cather’s A Lost Lady. There were seven volumes of the writings of John Greenleaf Whittier, and six of the Works of Edgar A. Poe.  Of the British and the Irish, the usual authors were represented. George Eliot, Sterne, Defoe; several volumes of Evelyn Waugh, The Real Bernard Shaw, books by Virginia Woolf, The Gothic Revival by Kenneth Clark, Revolt in the Desert by T.E. Lawrence. There was Tinker’s Boswell beside an illustrated Life of Samuel Johnson in a couple of dusty boxes. There was a large multivolume set of Dickens, Morley’s Life of Gladstone, Travels with a Donkey by Robert Louis Stevenson, Letters of James Joyce, Byron’s Poetical Works, Alec Waugh’s Hot Countries, Thackeray’s Vanity Fair, De Quincey’s Works, Lady Chatterley’s Lover, The Secret Agent by Joseph Conrad, Sir Walter Scott’s Life of Napoleon Bonaparte. And there was a smattering of foreign books, mostly French, alongside some Russian classics and some books from and about antiquity, in translation. There was Napoleon’s Correspondence with King Joseph, Eve Curie’s Madame Curie, Balzac, Marmontel, Molière, Dumas, Hugo, Rabelais, and ten volumes of The Complete Writings of Alfred de Musset.  I include this list as a record of something once so common that it would not have been noticed, much less