American Men


        And against this chaotic and littered background I visualized the figure of my elusive American. I saw him as a lean, humorous, drifting personnage; facetious but melancholy, fatalistic but free from any bitter cynicism; a spendthrift, a wanderer, a gambler, generous and nonchalant; possessed, moreover, of some vast secret rapport with nature — with that disordered landscape whose formless untraditional poetry touched a similar strain in his own perverse yet patient soul.
        My American is not of necessity either rich or poor, either a knave or a fool. He is a man like the rest. But he is a man who has the good luck to live in a world where two and two can make five; and this gives both to his pleasures and his sufferings that feeling of bon espoir y gist au fond which I caught on the face of that berry-picker in the Ozarks.
(John Cowper Powys, 'Elusive America' in Elusive America)

        You must remember that every American man is a Jack of all Trades. In the midst of his towering cities, in the forlorn and woefully standardized 'residential sections' he has built for himself, you will find this cheerful, nervous, restless, humble-minded person, without mental recreations, without aesthetic interests, without spiritual or sensuous contemplation, hammering, sawing, chopping, brushing, cleaning, polishing, improving, pulling down, building up, like a competent, shrewd, cynical, kindly, but quite mad, super-artisan.
(John Cowper Powys, Autobiography)
  
          There is real democracy in America; and in spite of all the wicked power of money you feel it all the time. A man is a man in America, and a woman a woman, though the former may be called a 'guy' and the latter be ever so 'emancipated' and 'highbrow'....
        Vaguely conscious of the psychic and sensual sterility of his native air the American's attitude to Old World values is shown in his troubled, half humorous, half bewildered restlessness. Seeking he knows not what, he rushes about in ever-improving automobiles, drugging himself, distracting himself, exhausting himself, in a blind sub-conscious struggle to find that psychic-sensuous Absolute of human satisfaction which the basic conditions of his life deny him. As long as he can be a pioneer, all is well! Any primeval wrestling with Nature solaces him while it numbs and atrophies him. But the tragedy of an American begins when his pioneer-psychology has no further outlet. Desperately then does he hunt the wind, recklessly then does he rake the dust! To say he worships the dollar is a preposterous lie.... What the American worships is not even power. It is some will-o'-the-wisp idea of power, bringing with it the prestige, the reputation, the glow, the glory of being the one who has 'huffed' the other, in the great cosmic game.
(John Cowper Powys, Autobiography)