America as the Future
America And Cosmic Man.
by Wyndham Lewis.
Doubleday. 247 pp. $2.75.

 

This is a curious book. We have become so accustomed to the picture of America as a cultural wasteland and to attacks on the standardization of American life, that when a writer singles out these widely deplored things for praise, he seems at first sight merely wilfully intransigent or paradoxical.

True, in recent years literary nationalism has become a familiar phenomenon represented by such figures as Dos Passos, MacLeish, and Van Wyck Brooks. But whereas the literary nationalists stick their thumbs into the American past in the hope of pulling out the plum of an authentic native heritage, Lewis is interested only in the future of America, and it is precisely its lack of a national tradition along European lines that pleases him. Far from seeking for values in the past, he devotes over half of his book to excursions into American history in order to emphasize the limited and unpromising beginnings of the nation which was “born out of that very parochial Partysystem of British origin” and founded by “bewigged replicas of English polite society.”

Lewis sees the violence, irrationality, and rootlessness of American life as positive qualities; qualities not only to be valued in themselves as exuberant proliferations of the human spirit, but also to be welcomed as the birthpangs of the world society of the future, the society of “cosmic man” (by “cosmic” he means cosmopolitan or internationalist). In effect he turns on its head the negative image which so many European and American intellectuals have of America.

It is surprising and interesting to find this idea of America advanced by a European literary man, an Englishman to boot and a close associate of the expatriates Eliot and Pound. But Wyndham Lewis has often before held original and unfashionable opinions. His name is distasteful to many American intellectuals who vaguely recall that he was considered sympathetic to fascism in the early 30’s. I recently read Lewis’s book on Hitler which was published in 1930 and which largely gained him this reputation. The book proves only that Lewis, far from sympathizing with the human and political evils of fascism, grossly misunderstood its nature: Lewis saw the Nazis as preservers of the unity and continuity of European culture against the “exotic sense” of “romantic internationalism.” A man could scarcely have been more wrong both in his estimate of the Nazis or in his predictions of the movement’s future. The Nazis’ anti-Semitism he regarded as a sort of crankish aberration super-added to their program, comparable perhaps to the prohibitionism of some of the earlier American socialist parties, but destined to disappear as the movement matured. One feels that his discussion of National Socialism simply provided the occasion for an attack on a variety of literary and philosophical fashions which he deplored. However, this episode hardly recommends him as a sound political analyst, to say the least, and necessarily adds constraint to one’s reaction to this latest book.

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The essence of what Lewis says in America and Cosmic Man is that since most of us realize that permanent peace, some form of economic collectivism, and an international political community are prerequisites for human survival in the atomic age, we must venerate America and learn from it. For the United States is the nation best exemplifying in embryonic form the world order in which these things will be established. The familiar simile of the melting pot fascinates him: he sees America as “the great big promiscuous grave into which tumble, and there disintegrate, all that was formerly race, class, or nationhood.” In a remarkable chapter entitled “The Case Against Roots,” he praises rootlessness as a necessary condition of world citizenship, and points out that no one is really rooted in America, “everyone has left his roots over in Poland or Ireland, in Italy or in Russia, so we are all floating around in a rootless Elysium.” In a similar manner he views the standardization of life with its wiping out of regional peculiarities and prejudices as the forerunner of the standardization of world culture, an irreversible trend under industrialism.

He notes the drab, dirty sameness of American cities and the “restless, polyglot herds” crowded together in “monstrous manufacturing villages,” but where other Europeans have been profoundly depressed by this spectacle, Lewis is exhilarated. It gives him “a pleasant disembodied sensation . . . the sensation of walking on air, of having been delivered of an incubus.” He senses the peculiar quality of nakedness which underlies the American’s susceptibility to a commercially produced and marketed mass culture, for in the absence of a rooted tradition, it is the shifting panorama of movie stars, popular songs, and best-selling novels that serves as a kind of common language and experience shared by all citizens. The materialism with which Americans are so frequently charged is also a reflection of this nakedness. As Mary McCarthy has pointed out, it is not a genuine craving for material and sensual satisfactions as such. Our desire to possess the new gadgets streaming out of the mammoth factories to the blare of advertising trumpets is not an integral part of an established style of life and code of values. We possess and value these objects faute de mieux: they are there around us readily available, and they help for the time being to fill up the vacuum in which we live.

It is its formless energy that makes America a vacuum, not sterility or desiccation, and Lewis is well aware of this. Hence his conviction that Americanism will creatively universalize itself, and his vision of the United States as “a human laboratory for the manufacture of Cosmic Man.” The vacuum results from the rejection of the European heritage of wars, nationalism, and racial, religious, and class loyalties, and therefore is to be relished, for in America “you are at last in the world instead of just in a nation.”

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Lewis is not oblivious to the seamy facets of American life. He comments on the treatment accorded the Negro and on the existence of anti-Semitism, which, unlike another recent English writer on America, Geoffrey Gorer, he does not blithely attribute to the Jews’ stubborn refusal “to melt in the pot.” He jeers at the absurd paraphernalia of the party system, and at our politicians who preach an “official radicalism” while practicing when in office an unimaginative conservatism. “The fact is,” he writes, “that Americans in general not only are unaware of their destiny, they actively obstruct the functioning of the ‘melting pot.’ Culturally this is very serious. There are bottlenecks of archaic prejudice everywhere.” Nevertheless Lewis sees value even in these undeniable crudities and absurdities, for America “is the place where all the irrationality is being worked out of the transplanted European system.” America is full of incongruities: anachronistic codes and never-ending innovations, insatiable political idealism and party machines founded on violence and graft manage to co-exist. Lewis finds that Americans accept the madly illogical world about them in a spirit of fatalistic amusement, surely an admirable human quality. He fails, however, to give sufficient attention to the professional reformer, another native type spawned out of these conditions.

Lewis’s knowledge of American history is probably defective. Although I am not competent to judge it so, Allan Nevins has said as much in a schoolmarmish review of the book. His dips into history are brief and too selective; he is obviously simply seeking ammunition to support his thesis or to set it off by contrast. The electrical quality of Lewis’s writing occasionally masks the banality of some of his remarks. His vague enthusiasm for World Government and his flippant repudiation of history as a mere record of barbaric wars, are instances. Now and then he is cute with the irritating whimsicality of a somewhat donnish Englishman. However, his portraits of American statesmen, which include the opposing figures of Jefferson and Hamilton, Teddy Roosevelt and FDR (“The Clubman Caesar”), and Woodrow Wilson (“The Presbyterian Priest”), are brilliantly drawn.

It is a felt rather than a systematically conceived vision of the future which animates his book and enables him to see meanings in the American experience to which American intellectuals themselves have often been blind. After all, if this is the kind of world we are going to be living in, then we had better start learning to appreciate it. That it is a world not lacking in rich and creative human qualities, Wyndham Lewis has tried to show us.

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