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PARTISAN REVIEW
torical experience of man, because Europe's culture was the product of an
entirely different set of conditions and must undergo a process of severe
adaptation before it can shed American light.
We should practice the same relation between European culture and
American experience as the Europeans, in creating their culture, did
between their new conditions of life and the ancient cultures of Rome and
Greece. To help us in this purpose, we have a new book-from the hands
of an able representative of the culture of Europe-which attempts to
define the unique quality of American experience. Wyndham Lewis
believes that it is "the destiny of America to produce the first of a new
species of man," to replace the now moribund "Western Man." This
new creature he has "seen and talked with in America." He calls him
"Cosmic Man," meaning internationalist or universalist, a person un–
rooted in class, race, nation, or any narrowly defined community. The
product of the American "melting-pot," Cosmic Man-not fully "melted"
into universality as yet-will be the kind of human being fit to leave our
present desert and enter the Promised Land of a world socialist state.
No one to my knowledge has ever made as much out of the "melting–
pot" notion of America as Mr. Lewis does. Or, for that matter, out of
the "pot" itself-the American urban environment. As he says: "My
remarks have had for their object the provision of a philosophic back–
ground for my running panegyric of that 'rootless Elysium' of the Amer–
ican city: irresponsible, dirty, corrupt, a little crazy.... " The core of
this "philosophic background" is contained in the chapter called "The
Case Against Roots," a brilliant and original defense of what we
have gotten into the bad habit of calling "alienation." He calls this
rootlessness, more correctly, freedom: "Freedom and irresponsibility are
commutative terms." (This is certainly half-right; whether it is altogether
correct, is a more difficult question.) Moreover: "The United States
is full of people who have escaped from their families, figuratively." This
and more is all the result of the melting-pot, the fact that America is
an inverse empire that takes the world into itself rather than going out
and conquering it. America "can only be something more universal than
the Roman Empire, because its metropolitan area is coterminous with
its imperial area." We are either a "disorderly collection of people ...
a sort of wastepaper basket"; or we are "a human laboratory for the
manufacture of Cosmic Man." Mr. Lewis is certain that we are the latter.
This is a very rich book. There is not only the superlative expression
of a new and fundamental perspective, but also much exciting and
realistic analysis of contemporary American life: for example, Mr. Lewis'
appreciation of the "American Appetite for the Incongruous"; his rare
