Books: The New Look

AMERICA AND COSMIC MAN (247 pp.)—Wyndham Lewis—Doubleday ($2.75).

When a girl has spent a lot of time and money fixing her face, it is tough to run slap into a wacky stranger who declares that he has fallen in love with her at first sight because she has the world’s muddiest skin and largest pores. Should she decide that any compliment, no matter how disconcerting, is better than no compliment at all? Or should she tell the adoring stranger to mind his own damn business?

U.S. readers will find themselves facing this uncomfortable decision again & again as they read (Percy) Wyndham Lewis* passionate hymn of praise to the face of their country. For Lewis, who once edited a ferocious avant-garde magazine entitled Blast, is Britain’s quirkiest, most anarchical man of letters, and his point of view is always so unconventional that most people would feel safer at being in his bad books than in his good ones. In The Apes of God (1932), Lewis flailed phony British “culture” with rip-roaring violence; in Time and Western Man (1928) he sought to “heal and reinvigorate” the ailing body of Western civilization with bursts of high-voltage shock treatment. But now, aged 64, Lewis has decided that most of the Western species is as far beyond succor as Cro-Magnon Man, and he has fallen madly in love with “that wonderful country,” the U.S.A.

Great Big Promiscuous You. Lewis’ new book, based on a number of trips to the U.S. and a great deal of reading, may serve as a handy companion to Poet T.S. Eliot’s recent Notes Towards the Definition of Culture (TIME, March 21). The two men agree in their diagnosis of contemporary cultural trends—and draw totally opposite conclusions. The religious decline deplored by Eliot does not ruffle Lewis, who believes that “Christianity, as a unifier, became a bad joke long ago.” The loss of regional differences and “roots,” lamented by Eliot, is a joy to Lewis, who holds that “no American worth his salt should go looking around for a root.”

He regards the U.S. as destined to be a “great big promiscuous grave into which tumble, and there disintegrate, all that was formerly race, class, or nationhood.” Many Americans share with Eliot his fear of the standardizing power of technology and mass education; Lewis relishes the prospect of “one intellectual and emotional standard” which he hopes will soon make “the inhabitant of Mexico City . . . indistinguishable from the dweller in Montreal.”

Love that Dirt. One thing wrong with Americans, in Lewis’ view, is that most of them fail to realize what a magnificent future they are building. Tied to petty, European standards of measurement, Americans keep thinking that they are a great nation, instead of “an advance copy” of the “rootless Elysium” that is to come. They worry because their cities are “irresponsible, dirty, corrupt,” when in Lewis’ opinion such conditions are “like nature,” and therefore highly admirable. Americans even suspect their gregarious habits and glad-handedness, when, as Lewis sees it, they should be reveling in their “beautiful human impulse to befriend, to treat all men as brothers.”

In the Raw. No American, Lewis holds, will ever appreciate his great country if he insists on thinking of it as a more or less finished product. In Lewis’ view, the U.S. has a definable past and a predictable future, but so far as the present is concerned it is essentially a shapeless chaos of “raw material,” packed to bursting, “vibrating” with potentialities that will ultimately remodel the universe.

This being so, Lewis cares little how raw the rawer aspects of American material may seem today. In the U.S., he experiences “the electric intoxication of . . . air breathed by prisoners set free.” In U.S. homes he finds the “innocent egoism” of people who have bid farewell to “the nightmare of austerity—duty ruling each man’s life from the cradle to the grave.” To Lewis, even the U.S. radio represents “a wealth of talent,” the raucous publicity is “a bizarre fairyland,” and the looseness of human ties a suggestion of “what heaven must be like.”

*Not to be confused with D. B. Wyndham Lewis, British humorist and biographer.