America and cosmic man

by Wyndham Lewis

Wittily and with amiable historical inaccuracy Mr. Lewis suggests that it is the destiny of America to produce the first of a new species of man, the new Cosmopolite.

Genres: Philosophy, Nonfiction

Hardcover

First published January 1, 1948

About the author

(Percy) Wyndham Lewis (1882-1957) was a novelist, painter, essayist, polemicist and one of the truly dynamic forces of the early 20th century and a central figure in the history of modernism. He was the founder of Vorticism, the only original movement in 20th century English painting. His Vorticist paintings from 1913 are the first abstract works produced in England, and influenced the development of Suprematism in Russia. Tarr (published in 1918), initiated his career as a satirical novelist, earning the praise of his contemporaries: "the most distinguished living novelist" (T.S. Eliot), "the only English writer who can be compared to Dostoevsky" (Ezra Pound).

After serving as an artillery officer and official war artist during the First World War, Lewis was unable to revive the avant-garde spirit of Vorticism, though he attempted to do so in a pamphlet advocating the modernisation of London architecture in 1919: The Caliph's Design Architects! Where is your Vortex? Exhibitions of his incisive figurative drawings, cutting-edge abstractions and satirical paintings were not an economic success, and in the early 1920s he devoted himself to study of political theory, anthropology, philosophy and aesthetics, becoming a regular reader in the British Museum Reading Room. The resulting books, such as The Art of Being Ruled (1926), Time and Western Man (1927), The Lion and the Fox: The Role of the Hero in the Plays of Shakespeare (1927) and Paleface: The Philosophy of the Melting-Pot (1929) created a reputation for him as one of the most important - if wayward - of contemporary thinkers.

The satirical The Apes of God (1930) damaged his standing by its attacks on Bloomsbury and other prominent figures in the arts, and the 1931 Hitler, which argued that in contemporary 'emergency conditions' Hitler might provide the best way forward in Germany damaged it yet further. Isolated and largely ignored, and persisting in advocacy of "appeasement," Lewis continued to produce some of his greatest masterpieces of painting and fiction during the remainder of the 1930s, culminating in the great portraits of his wife (1937), T. S. Eliot (1938) and Ezra Pound (1939), and the 1937 novel The Revenge for Love. After visiting Berlin in 1937 he produced books attacking Hitler and anti-semitism but decided to leave England for North America on the outbreak of war, hoping to support himself with portrait-painting. The difficult years he spent there before his return in 1945 are reflected in the 1954 novel, Self Condemned. Lewis went blind in 1951, from the effects of a pituitary tumor. He continued writing fiction and criticism, to renewed acclaim, until his death. He lived to see his visual work honored by a retrospective exhibition at London's Tate Gallery in 1956, and to hear the BBC broadcast dramatisations of his earlier novels and his fantastic trilogy of novels up-dating Dante's Inferno, The Human Age.

Reviews

[oswald · Rating 3 out of 5]

Precisely what would be expected of Mr. Lewis under the circumstances. Mellowed by age and harassed by the Second World War and the dismal times that succeeded it in England, he gives himself over to reveries about the imminent mulatto utopia under the aegis of universal Americanism, with the appropriate metaphysical conceits (all human empires have hitherto pursued an outward course, but the USA, naturally occupying its continent from coast to coast, will be a magnet or sinkhole drawing delegations from all of humanity into its bosom, thereby stabilizing the rest of the world).

There are few friendships in America such as exist in Europe. Every man is a little bit your friend, and will call you Bill or Fred or Jim after he has known you half an hour. But you will never become his Bill: there are too many other Bills for that. Friendship is a responsibility!

I am quite serious when I say that this is what Heaven must be like—agreeably inhuman, naturally; a rootless irresponsible city . . . where the spirit is released from all the too-close contacts with other people (others who get 'in your hair,' or are all the time 'underfoot') but where everything is superficially fraternal.

In order to indulge in these speculations in good conscience, he first makes a lot of noise about how farcical American political history has been so far. Sundry cadavers of hallowed memory are exhumed, dissected, and reinterred, in a quasi-geometrical demonstration of how the best intentions, most brilliant talents, and loftiest rhetoric have been powerless against the spirits of Party and Capital. Hamilton, the conscientious would-be Bonaparte; Jefferson, whose fine phrases have been just as widely adopted as his agrarian ideals have been generally abandoned; Roosevelt, the boy-minded man; Wilson pedantic and pathological; Roosevelt (bis), - well, he actually does have very high praises for this one, but thinks that his success was inversely proportional to the sincerity of his ideological commitments.

He also does not spare the contemporary American cultural scene, as represented by the Museum of Modern Art: this giant stands with gaping jaws on the island of Manhattan, eager to engorge the newest fashions of the Old World, while behind it the backwards prairie churns out nothing but sentimental tableaux that would have won a blue ribbon from the Reichskulturkammer. An American book (as opposed to one Missourian or Kentuckian) can only be written in Paris.

A lot of this is standard fare for anyone familiar with our philosophic admirers on Ocean's yonder side. Americans are a bunch of stupid louts; America is the universal destiny of mankind. What gives this book a special flavor among such literature is the atmosphere of postwar despair (the volume was produced in complete conformity with the Authorized Economy Standards: 5 x 7&3/4"; 3/4" margins; 9-point font; probably something inferior about the paper, but not by 21st century standards). Instead of this being merely an amusing possibility, it is the only hope of a weary and haggard human race.

[Laurens van der Tang · Rating 3 out of 5]

As with many other books of political thought, the quality of the predictions in America and Cosmic Man falls far behind the quality of the analysis. There are many good ideas in this book: America as an endpoint of historical development, the Hamilton-Jefferson tension, the sketches of Wilson and the Roosevelts, America's rootlessness and inherent cosmopolitanism - all finely penned down.

But when Lewis, in the second part of the books, predicts a globalized world-state, or 'cosmopolis', deplete of all national feeling, he just is plain wrong, in several respects. A socialist state, as Lewis wants it, needs solidarity. It is not clear at all where this solidarity will come from if not from national feeling. Lewis also expects massive social change on account of atomic energy. He hardly could have been more wrong. The strange thing is that both things are openly admitted: the latter in the last chapter, the former in chapter 26. A more modest man might have restrained his utopianism when two of his most important predictions turned out wrong.

The other great utopia, Plato's Republic, receives ridicule in America and Cosmic Man, but Lewis's world is hardly an improvement. Strong friendships are suspect (too much responsibility), and larger communities are entirely anathema:
"(...) permanently to banish the parochial or tribal spirit, that would be the best course."
Note that this suffers from self-referential incoherence, in order to push for this change, one would need at least some tribe or 'parish'. It is hyper-idealistic in another way: it requires the complete and certain absence of conflict and war. Now Lewis indeed expects war to disappear, but a political ideology which rests on the assumption that war will not exist anymore can rightly be dismissed as utopian dreaming.

The ultimate irony of this book is that it is so very American. The exceptionalism, the strong belief in the American state-religion and in progress, the predilection for freedom bordering irresponsibility, all of these are not cosmopolitan, but a succinct statement of the central tenets of Americanism.

[Nathan Duffy · Rating 2 out of 5]

Am a fan of Lewis' prose and his fiction, but this is weak, especially with the benefit of having seen his prognostications of a quasi-Fukuyaman end of history collapsing before our eyes.