Visiting Englishman

AMERICA, I PRESUME -- Wyndham Lewis -- Howell, Soskin ($2).

Visiting Englishmen almost invariably have a lot to say about the U. S. Almost invariably it is pretty stale stuff. Wyndham Lewis may have an advantage in being half American; in any case his America, I Presume is a bracing exception to the general rule. Some of it is obvious, some misfires, a good deal is so good it inspires keen regret that it is not a great deal better. Taken as a whole, America, I Presume can be guaranteed neither to bore nor blindfold any U. S. reader.

Too many British observers are not really observant; Wyndham Lewis has an eye of his own. He hands a stiff spanking bristles down, to a type of U. S. business woman who has never had half enough of it; he writes sharply of the foetal sculpture -- "these unspeakably bumpy, lowbrowed titans" -- which clutters the New York World's Fair grounds.

Lewis sets himself up as a middle-aged Major Archibald Corcoran, lecture-touring the U. S. as "The Pukka Sahib." A visit in Nineveh, N. Y. furnishes him with several chapters on the newly decaying, depression-struck, provincial "Aristocracy." The thin red Anglo-Saxon line, by his observation, is wearing thinner very fast; for Lewis the U. S. has no more to do with the little island from which he came than it has with Timbuctoo. The one foreigner to whom the U. S. citizen is unaccustomed is the Englishman.

Major Corcoran strongly admires Franklin Roosevelt and "that remarkable woman who is his wife," as strongly deprecates the U. S. male's rabbitlike divorcing habits, his "I-can-take-it creed." Of the touted U. S. vitality he remarks: "No one was ever less of a born go-getter than the American. He is almost saurian in his sloth." Nervous instability is quite another matter: "I have never seen so much St. Vitus dance as since I've been here." For some years Wyndham Lewis has been one of the toughest, most provocative satirists alive. It is something of a tribute to the deep hold England has on her sons that in this book he plays several skillfully muted patriotic solos, better contrived to win U. S. warmth than whole symphonies of the more usual stuff. But America, I Presume is best as a casual exercise in a rare sort of anthropology.

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