AMERICA . . . !
...But I was in America now, America the ideal country for mystagogues, demagogues, thaumaturgic preachers, theosophic illuminants, occultists, conjurers, table-turners, mediums, Chatauqua-culturists, Utopians, Shakers, Mormons, Second Adventists, East Indian Yogists, Red Indian "Controls", worshippers of Quetzacoatle, worshippers of Mumbo Jumbo, new-thoughtists, psychists, psycho-analysts, psychiatrists, psycho-careerists, not to speak of teleportists, telepathists and televisionists. And not only was I in the land where only the maddest of egoists scrambled to shore after the submerging of the Lost Atlantis, but as I quickly discovered, I was in the land - just as Sousa's music had predicted to me in that Liverpool café - of the most cynical and sardonic irresponsibility that the human race had ever evoked! In other words, I was in a land exactly suited to my medicine-man character. As my dear Louis laments, in a distressed and almost querulous tone, I "loved it."
John Cowper Powys, Autobiography
In his introduction to Elusive America, a collection of essays by John Cowper Powys, Paul Roberts comes to the conclusion that John Cowper spent the day of December 24, 1904, in Liverpool with his friend Tom Jones. It was in the ornate Kardomah café there that he heard Sousa's Stars and Stripes. Later that day, he went aboard the Cunard liner Ivernia for his first journey to America, as a second-class passenger.
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