| Title | : | The Air-Conditioned Nightmare |
| Author | : | |
| Rating | : | |
| ISBN | : | 0811201066 |
| ISBN-10 | : | 9780811201063 |
| Language | : | English |
| Format Type | : | Paperback |
| Number of Pages | : | 292 |
| Publication | : | First published January 1, 1945 |
The Air-Conditioned Nightmare Reviews
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Reading the prologue to this book by Henry Miller astonishes me. Written 70 years ago, it could have been written today. Some excerpts:
It is a world suited for monomaniacs obsessed with the idea of progress - but a false progress, a progress which stinks. It is a world cluttered with useless objects which men and women, in order to be exploited and degraded, are taught to regard as useful ... Whatever does not lend itself to being bought or sold ... is debarred
We are accustomed to think of ourselves as an emancipated people; we say that we are democratic, liberty-loving, free of prejudices and hatred. This is the melting pot, the seat of a great human experiment. Beautiful words, full of noble, idealistic sentiment. Actually we are a vulgar, pushing mob whose passions are easily mobilized by demagogues, newspaper men, religious quacks, agitators and such like. To call this a society of free peoples is blasphemous. What have we to offer the world beside the superabundant loot which we recklessly plunder from the earth under the maniacal delusion that this insane activity represents progress and enlightenment? -
هنري ميللر قد يكون أول الكارهين لأمريكا يعري وجهها من تبرجها المبالغ فيه يعري أطروحة أمريكا الحلم الجنة، بالنسبة لميللر أمريكا ليست سوى وليد مشوه من الأم الجميلة أوروبا استطاعت أن تصنع لنفسها صرحا قائم على اسس واهية و لكي تحمي هذه الأسس تبتدع ما تشاء من حروب و تقنيات في جوهرها فارغ.بالنسبة لميللر لا شيء حقيقي في أمريكا كل شيء سطحي عديم النفع بلا روح حتى جمال الجغرافيا يسقط أمام تاريخ الدماء التي بنت أمريكا عليها قوتها ،ميللر يجرد أمريكا من كذبة الحضارة فهي بالنسبة له تبيع فقط الوهم" قد ينتهي بنا الأمر أن نصير على اربع نبربر كالسعادين" يقول ميللر .
كابوس مكيف الهواء توقفت كثيرا لأفهم المقصود من هذا العنوان و لم اجد الا تفسير واحد و قد أكون مخطئة ربما قصد ميللر أن حتى في الأشياء التي تسعدنا و تخفف معاناتنا شيء يخيف و يفقدنا روحنا و ماهيتنا ,أظن ميللر بعد زيارته لأوروبا العجوز فهم أن الحضارة لا تأتي بالتقنية بل بالتاريخ و الخبرة فمقارناته الدائمة بين باريس و أمريكا تظهر مدى تفاهة الفن الأمريكي الذي يعتبر مجرد باحث عن المال الى جانب الفن الأوروبي و مع ذلك يرحل ميللر في أمريكا باحثا عن أمل يعيد له ايمانه ببلده الأصلي فيجد بعض الرجال المغمورين و ينفض عنهم التراب و يعرف بهم العالم و ربما يكون هذا الأمر ما يجعل من هذا الكتاب تكريم لرجال يرفضون بقعة الضوء التي تعشقها أمريكا. -
It's a shame that Miller didn't make it to the millennium (though he died at 88 years of age; 1891-1980), although I would imagine he lived long enough to see how right his bleak vision of our self-destructive world come to fruition - for lack of a better word. No man ever will be ahead of his time quite like Miller was, and despite his being ridiculed at the time for his vulgar outlook on the world, he has since become a legend in his own right. I can't begin to convey how enamored I am by his works, especially 'The Air-Conditioned Nightmare'... Everyone knows him of course for his Obelisk Trilogy (Tropic of Cancer/Capricorn and Black Spring), but I firmly believe he is at the top of his game in this book. It's a memoir of everything that's wrong with humanity... It's so majestically written I can't even conjure up the words to explain it. I can't recommend a better read for a realist. Do yourself a favor and read Miller; especially this volume of immaculate confusion and wayward perfection.
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Henry Miller, on a road trip. The road trip through America.
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I have always had an interest in travel books that are about times and places past. There is something about being able to see a vanished world through vanished eyes. I was astonished to learn that Henry Miller wrote a travel book about a road trip he took across America in the early 1940s. Henry Miller!, oh my god, his Tropic of Cancer is one of those books no one ever forgets; notwithstanding its position as one of the great novels of the twentieth century, it is the filthiest thing I have ever read. And yet, and yet, the sex is secondary to his masterful storytelling about what it was like to be down and out in Paris in the twenties and thirties. With just a couple of sentences Miller could vividly set a scene or describe a person so that the reader feels like he is right there.
So, I went online to search the used bookstores, and found a copy of The Air-Conditioned Nightmare. It’s not at all like his earlier works. He seems to have cleaned up his act a bit to appeal to a larger reading public – and of course, to avoid being banned again. Still, it’s not your usual travel book.
The first two chapters are Miller at his angry stream of consciousness best. He had just returned to the States from Europe, and he loathed what he saw. He hated virtually everything and everyone, piling up invectives one atop the other. Although he didn’t use these words, it came across as, “You Americans, you’re uncultured, unenlightened and miserable; ugly, stupid, ignorant, spineless, lazy, and racist; mindless drones in a corrupt and soul-crushing political and economic system – if you had souls that is, but you don’t, since you’re not French. And oh yeah, your kids are probably ugly too.” He also needed money for his trip, but shuddered at the thought of actually getting – oh horrors – a job.
The third chapter is the best in the book. It starts with Miller’s take on the American prison system, and segues into a sympathetic conversation with a man just released and trying to get his life back together. However, the man is soon forgotten, and the rest of the chapter is an extended riff on suffering as an intrinsic component of human existence. One unforgettable passage is
You crash a gate made of arms and legs only to get a butt blow behind the ear. You pick up and run on bloody, sawed-off stumps, only to fall into an endless ravine. You sit in the very center of emptiness, whimpering inaudibly, and the stars blink at you. You fall into a coma, and just when you think you’ve found your way back to the womb they come after you with pick and shovel, with acetylene torches. Even if you found the place of death they would find a way to blow you out of it. You know time in all its curves and infidelities. You have lived longer than it takes to grow all the countless separate parts of a thousand new universes. You have watched them grow and fall apart again. And you are still intact, like a piece of music which goes on being played forever. The instruments wear out, and the players too, but the notes are eternal, and you are made of nothing but invisible notes which even the faintest zephyr can shake a tune out of.
That’s good stuff, although two paragraphs later he goes off the rails into even wilder free association, with “devils who laugh like antelopes,” and “hammerclaviers fitted with cloying geraniums.” Antelopes? Geraniums? Perhaps it was time to dial back on the drugs.
After that the rest of the book is interesting, but not particularly unique. The travel parts serve as a framing device, and the chapters are mostly devoted to character studies of people he meets. There is even a charming bit about him taking two small children to the zoo in Albuquerque. Toward the end of the book it gets back to being a road trip, and the section from the Grand Canyon to Los Angeles in an unreliable car is quite good. The final pages talk about Hollywood, which, not surprisingly, he finds utterly vapid and soulless. Kind of like Hollywood today.
All in all, this is not your standard travel book, but if you like Miller, it is worth your time. -
The problem with this book wasn't that it was strictly bad. On the contrary, a reader gets a glimpse of some of Miller's talent as a writer, with pages upon pages of rhapsodic prose tumbling word upon word until the effect is less like a text and more like standing under a waterfall of imagery and ideas.
Unfortunately that doesn't constitute the bulk of the book. What Miller offers is a trip around a country with which he is disgusted and alienated. It's unfair to either blame him for the cliché that this sort of work would turn into in subsequent decades or to suggest that many of his criticisms are inaccurate. But the vast majority of the text is comprised of sweeping generalizations about vast swaths of the country (about which he seems to know little); effete, snooty, and quasi-aristocratic attitudes about the people he encounters - the sort of ex-pat elitism that he attempts poorly to counterbalance with some patronizing support for a scattered handful of salt-of-the-earth types; and blatant, unabashed racism - again, that he attempts to cast as some sort of admiration for African-Americans, but is unmistakable in the acidic tinge that it carries.
One is left wondering why, if America is the insatiable cultural vortex that Miller makes it out to be, he returned shortly after this was written and lived in California the remainder of his life.
Ultimately, while it bears some marks of the brilliance that carried his best work, this is a somewhat forgettable footnote in an otherwise remarkable body of work. -
Update: I'm abandoning this one some 50 pages in. He is far too annoying and the racism is really grating on me. If you have read it, and know that it improves, please tell me.
In this book so far, Miller goes from being a more-or-less cool sex-drugs-and-rock&roll guy (as in Sexus/Nexus/Plexus and the Tropics) to being an archetypal Grumpy Old Man. The train is ugly! I don't like the skyline! That station is horrific! That seagull shows the utter decline of the American nation! I can't stand looking at these bland office blocks a second longer! -
First of all, Henry Miller's mastery of the English language far exceeds most anyone you are likely to read. He is in that elite class of great writers. Secondly, when you read any of his books, letters, essays and whatnot, you feel is is right there in the room, cafe, or on the street with you, so conversational is he. In this book AIR CONDITIONED NIGHTMARE, he writes about a year on the road in the US, he was contracted to write about by his agent. What he found was a lot of sterile robotic buildings and people. As he said, it was a waste of a year in his life. It is an eye opening book about a land where imagination is difficult to find, sense of adventure minuscule, where the people are essentially lemmings, glomming along, while at the same time filled with a sense of arrogance because they get the sense of themselves not by intelligence, and insight, but by the fact that their country is big, robust, has a powerful military and is financially strong, which in the end has little or no meaning where the human condition, and their interaction with others, their land, is concerned. He found a country with no sense of culture, a country defining itself by how much money a person makes, which disgusted him. After having read this book, and having been back and forth in the US, the book rang so true I have not traveled it since. It is just a bunch of sameness from one end to the other. Naturally, some places are worse than others.
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Like I did last summer, Henry Miller traveled across the country beginning in 1939. Unlike me, he fucking hated it. This is not why I didn't like his book - some of the best travel writing is born of hatred and disgust. It was the structure and the tone of the hatred that really irked me.
First, the tone. Much of this book consists of the whiny laments of a starving artist against The Man. Maybe this was groundbreaking in 1945 when the book was published. But in 2013 it just sounded kind of, well, whiny. It was along the lines of: artists are the only authentic people and commercialism is ruining everything and one day the people will rise up and dispose of the tyrants and live in artistic harmony, amen. At the same time, Miller openly describes his frustrating efforts to try and secure a book deal prior to his trip. I guess he wants to have his cake, as well as eat it his cake, or however the saying goes. His generalizations were also obnoxious: all Southern people are distinguished and unique, all Northern people are soul-sucking urban dwellers, all Native Americans are at one with nature and should re-claim America, etc. There were few shades of gray in his depictions of the people of this country.
Second, the structure. The best parts of the book were when Miller took us on his journey, as a typical travelogue does. But most of the book is not like that. It is comprised of essays, and the worst are the ones entirely removed from the narrative of the trip that seem to function as filler, and that filler is mostly of the whiny starving artist kind. There were a few wonderful moments - the description of his time in a small town in the Southwest, the troubles with his car - but these were few and far between. -
I often didn't agree with what he said, but I always enjoyed how he said it. Quote from page 192: "The duck is plucked, the air is moist, the tide's out and the goat's securely tethered. The wind is from the bay, the oysters are from the muck. Nothing is too exciting to drown the pluck-pluck of the mandolins. The slugs move from slat to slat; their little hearts beat fast, their brains fill with swill. By evening it's all moonlight on the bay. The lions are still affably baffled and whatever snorts, spits, fumes and hisses is properly snaffled."
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I enjoy the way Miller pieces together bits of prose to create an intertwined journey through not only the landscape of the United States but the culture we have developed throughout this nation. It is at once both amazing and depressing.
I was refreshed to realize that for over 100 years at least people like Henry Miller have been looking for the root cause of what is wrong with us. We have collectively done many great things and are blessed with an amazing land of resources and yet not only do we readily rest on our laurels of luck, we trash the very source of that dumb luck. The Grand Canyon chapter points brilliantly to that.
I thought it interesting as well to discover little has changed since the 1930s. Literally. The story in Chicago could have happened today, as a matter of fact I've lived through it myself. Amazing!
One of my truly favorite works from Henry Miller. I recommend this to anyone interested in culture as seen through the eyes of an expatriate communicated with the color of raw language Miller is so well known for. -
I've read the many mixed reviews about this book and I must agree with the reviews that reflect how much this book relates to our current times. It's not a book to be lumped with Miller's well known Sexus, Plexus & Nexus series. Instead, the readers should be prepared to see a dark and at certain moments, a downright depressing outlook on our nation. He makes no effort to hide problems that existed when the novel was written and continue to exist today.
This book is worth reading merely for the different perspective that is presented on our nation. -
I never considered myself a patriot, until I read this book and felt so fiercely insulted by every trivial insult he flung at all things american. I was fleeing Charleston at the time, and driving through the Smokey Mountains--which were incredible. His arguments seemed extremely petulant ("the parks in america aren't as good as the parks in europe. The stores in america aren't as good as the stores in Europe," etc, etc, etc), and I knew he had no idea what he was talking about when he stopped to make an exception for Charleston, saying it was the only place in America worth going to. I beg to differ.
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Wonderful to Read. Full of world vision, realism, thoughts, humour (like in all of Miller). Most of all, of personnality. Very appropreate for the still largely Up to date criticism of the north American mentality (which i find, applies well to Canada), and of it's "individualism without individuality (or personnality)". I feel like reading it again.
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It isn’t the oceans which cut us off from the world—it’s the American way of looking at things. Nothing comes to fruition here except utilitarian projects. You can ride for thousands of miles and be utterly unaware of the existence of the world of art. You will learn all about beer, condensed milk, rubber goods, canned food, inflated mattresses, etc., but you will never see or hear anything concerning the masterpieces of art.
This is a brilliant two hundred and fifty page rant in the guise of an American travelogue. The level of detail and the word smithing that Miller exhibits here reminds me of other literary giants who penned excellent place centric non-fiction:
George Orwell - Homage to Catalonia
John Steinbeck - Travels with Charley (parts are fictional)
David Foster Wallace - Ticket to the Fair
Tom Wolfe - The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test
5 stars. I really loved this curmudgeonly read. -
بغض النظر عن أن هنري يتحدث بأسلوب رائع
عن أمريكاه..إلا أن اللغة شدتني وأبهرتني فعلاً.
وحديثه يشملنا جميعاً كبشر حين أهملنا الطبيعة
ودمرنا كل شئ طبيعي في الحياة التي نعيشها.
بحيث نخوض في فوضى حرب ضد انفسنا ووجودنا نفسه.
إنه أسلوب صريح..مباشر
إنه قريب مني..حقيقة إنه الأسلوب أو اللغة التي كنت أتسم بها حححح
في بدايات وعيي بالعالم والحياة.
أسلوب عدواني وعنيف= صريح وما فيه لف ودوران.
فلابد من تسمية الأشياء بمسمياتها
من جديد..
لغة قوية تقودك للهدف والاقوى أن يتقبلها القارئ
بصدر رحب بدون حزازيات أعني حساسيات.
فهاهو القارئ الأمريكي يقرأ عن نفسه بدون أن يعارض الكثير
أو يصدر فتوى بهدر دم الرجل..مثل عادة بعض العشائر أعني قومنا.
فكلما خرج صوت من بيننا يقدم نقدا ذاتيا ارتفعت أصوات نشاز لم تقرأ حتى المكتوب..بمحاكمة ونفي المجرم.
مع أنهم يهللون لكل أجنبي مهما ذلنا بكلمة أو كلمات.
في الكتاب لا مكان لفواصل حشو كلام..
إنها جملة وراء جملة..كلمة قوية تليها كلمة أقوى..
حقيقة تجرها حقيقة أمر.
مر وقت غير قليل لم أعجب فيه حقاً بكتاب مما قرأت..
ولذا مسرورة أني قرأت أخيراً هذا الكابوس -
I am just amazed how many Americans have not even heard about this book...but then again, many didn't hear about Depleted Uranium Weapons either.
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الهجاء الأكثر راديكالية لأمريكا
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مجموعة خواطر كتبها الأمريكي هنري ميلر يتحدث فيها عن كراهيته لأمريكا وسياستها وطبيعه مجتمعها ويقارنها بدول اوروبا وخصوصًا بفرنسا، الكتاب ممل بعض الشيء لكثرة سرد نفس النقاط وتكرارها
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This is Henry Miller, narrating from the inside of his beautiful buzzing soul, details of his personal disappointment. The US is dying having scarcely lived. He is angry.
As if he was lord of some manor come back after a decade of neglect to find his ancestral home a wasteland. He is storming with complicated personal rage about it. It is hard to see what responsibility he has himself for this outcome. Does he see himself anywhere in it? It seems as though the concept of this book was solid, but he veered so far into a refined idea and no one sought him out to salvage it. He rolls on, to where it can be hard to see where you are in it, until suddenly you are in the middle of a set piece whose characters appear and whose origins will remain obscure.
Mostly what we receive here is his unmitigated bitterness at his struggle as a man in this world without the respect or really the admiration of the powerful and mighty which he so obviously (and somewhat painfully) craves. (To drive home this point, in the afterward he makes a list of those Guggenheim Awardees that stood in front of him and received awards the year he made his application to write this book. It's mostly scientists, economists, and so forth -- lesser creatures than artists is the implication. The point is to urge you to register a written complaint about passing him over for the honor he so obviously deserved above these callow narrow academics. So confident you share his view on the matter he helpfully provides the Guggenheim director's mailing address.)
Miller is a patriarch, a dispatched, discarded and peripatetic one for sure, but he loves us, his errant readers. He is blessed with insight and understanding, and willing to generously share it with us in the form of a series of strenuously expressed warnings. He doesn't want us to be driven to insanity by the falseness of the ever encroaching commercial world which dominates the US and threatens to dumb down "civilization" everywhere. His subject is the creation of empire and it's effect on the Natural Man. We didn't do it right in America. Vive la France! He is longing to be considered prodigal and therefore potentially in receipt of some long withheld fortune to which he so obviously feels entitled. He doesn't actually want to come back and run anything. This is not James Baldwin returning to America from a fruitful career as an artist in Europe out of a sense of personal responsibility for the outcome of the fight he left behind to explore his voice. This is instead the absent father who remembers he had a family and returns to see what's become of it since he left.
There are few women in his book that merit more than a sentence or two. That is irritating. He alludes to great stories he could tell, but doesn't. That is also irritating. I could write an entire review about the racism of this book, but in the end it's like having dinner in the old folks home with your uncle Bob; what do you say to dinosaurs like this? And of course, more pertinently this particular dinosaur is actually dead. His version of racism lives on and doesn't seem to die off. But we knew that and know it better now then ever. What is the best hackneyed phrase here?: He was "a creature of his time"? He 'means well'? Like all white people in America, he fucks all this shit up from top to bottom. It could make the book unreadable for some of you.
His trip across the US is a couch surfing type affair, with him setting up with a series of boon companions (read: drinking buddies) a hateful device which allows him to quote himself liberally from their conversations. He looks often with naked adolescent hatred at America. To him what is marvelous about it is at best is ignored, at worst wrecked or at least (in his telling) spoiled. As, by implication, he was himself.
There are some passages of poignance and clarity about the many hypocrisies and lost opportunities of The American Dream and I got something out of reading it. Despite his lack of rigor, (He seems to say "Details? Why bother! You know what I'm talking about here!" *Wink, nod*) There is a recounting of a dinner party in Hollywood that he stumbled into that is priceless. There are some dark themes about American life that will look extremely accurate from this point in time but so few of them. You still need to read DeTocqueville. He tells you who his artistic heroes are and details his FEELINGS about their greatness. Trust me you've never heard of them and never will. He choses friends first and then finds the light in their work; which in itself is endearing. He probably was a generous, if occasionally domineering, friend.
Miller is a crank, a morsel of his time, the "Man Artist". Muscular, freebooting, charming, and a bit of caustic narcissism thrown in for good measure. But I'm a lifelong fan of his and won't give him totally up for all the doting on him I did in my 20's. A precursor of the Beats, he is better then most of them. He prides himself on being unabridged, idiosyncratic, a bit of a lovable monster.
This book is about him, nothing but him, wandering through a few episodes in this country which he barely fathoms. America is a mirror and what he sees in it finally is mostly Henry. -
Though Henry Miller’s book on Greece, The Colossus of Maroussi, is generally regarded as his greatest achievement, he also wrote a second travel book which should be regarded as a definite classic of the genre.
The Air-Conditioned Nightmare chronicles Miller’s return to America in 1939, hot on the heels of the Greek trip referred to above, and from what he believed would be an open-ended life in France. The journey begins on a note of hope: “I wanted to have a last look at my country and leave it with a good taste in my mouth. I didn’t want to run away from it, as I had originally. I wanted to embrace it, to feel that the old wounds were really healed.” Instead, he finds despair: a nation where giant industries deaden the lives of their workers while polluting the environment, and a population which seeks nothing greater than credit, cheap cars, and vapid mass consumerism. It says a great deal that many of Miller’s scathing critiques are just as relevant today.
And yet the book contains a note of hope. It’s also a celebration of those rare individuals—eccentrics, artists, and creative people of all stripes—whose stubborn resilience represents everything that made the nation great in the first place.
A few years after this trip, Miller finally made peace with the land of his birth. He found his paradise in Big Sur, California, and that is where he lived out the rest of his life. -
I found this to be a weak interpretation of what should be an epic road trip. There are wonderful moments of truthfulness, but for the most part the tone makes it seem like a stretch for a paycheck. I don’t believe that a man as brazen as Mr. Miller would continue a journey of this sort for such a long amount of time if he really hated it so. Why would he make this trip, come to these conclusions, and then retire in a country that banned his capstone works? He acts like he is making objective observations, but his descriptions American life are so emotive that he makes me feel like a fool for ever doubting him. That’s how I know he’s up to no good! The Tropic series is full of beauty and mystery, but this seems like he was starving in a public library scheming up ways to drum up some cash. As much as I dislike this book, I will admit that he noticed our throw-away culture before most people would have defined the beginning period: I have always heard that it was September of ’45 when everyone came back from the war with money in their pockets. We got the suburbs, and all the throw away convinces that came with them… Perhaps he was trying to write a book as throw-away as the society he found. If this was his intent –this man is a genius!
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summary: henry miller is a old man, he has aspergers, the park bench is too uncomfortable, they wont let him feed bread to the ducks at the park, theres too many negros at the park, theres too many dog at the park. hendry miller discovers yoga. henry miller eats, prays, loves.
i hate american as much as the next guy but id rather read america-hate from a real authentic french cool guy (baudrillard much??) than a wannabe french bitter expat guy, even if tropic of cancer was good, sorry henry milner. didnt even finish this book, i got like 90 pages in and accidentally tore it in twain out of boredom, RIP -
Hmm, how to rate this book. There are some absolutely great chapters focusing on places he visits as well as some strange characters he meets along the way that are fascinating. Unfortunately, it’s not long before he cannot help but wank on about Paris. We get it, you had a great time. I’ve read around ten books by Miller and half of those are based on his time in Paris. We don’t need to hear more about it. So yeah, I think the main problem is that I feel cheated as it’s half travelogue, half reminiscences of Paris.
Strictly for Miller fans. -
Henry Miller's lush prose is gorgeous, but he seems to get distracted about a third of the way through.
Regardless, The Air-Conditioned Nightmare is a great motivation to leave the US, if only I could afford... -
إذا كنت مستعد أن تفقأ الفقاعة الفكرية والثقافية التي تراها اليوم، فاقرأ هذا الكتاب
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Scorching--if ultimately flawed.
The Air-Conditioned Nightmare is Henry Miller's recounting of his trip across the United States after war forced him to leave Europe. Coming out at the end of the war, when patriotism was high, its excoriating of the country would have won him few general plaudits, even as it contributed to his cult status.
In characteristic Miller fashion, he eschews the obvious linear narrative--first here, then here--and opts for a spiral form. Even so, at first, the book shows a discipline his post-war works (at least those I've read) lacks. He drills down, avoids the simple declarations that mars his later work ("This astounded me!" "I was overwhelmed!") and is specific. He contrast his experiences in Pittsburgh and Detroit with his reading of books on mystics, seeing America as a purely plastic country, concerned with only the material. “Nothing comes to fruition here except utilitarian projects," he summarizes later int he book (157). Indeed, the book ends with him flipping a giant bird to the Guggenheim Foundation; he had applied for a grant but been turned down, and so lists the other winners as an appendix, highlighting how many of them were focused on the material and the economic rather than the spiritual and freedom.
Miller says that his view of America can be written in thirty pages--but really it can be reduced to a single sentence: “The American park is a circumscribed vacuum filled with cataleptic nincompoops" (59).
His bill of particulars is not entirely wrong, and he offers some interesting insight into the left-liberatarianism that opposed World War II. He saw small people as manipulated into fighting a battle that was not theirs, forced to put their lives on the line for someone else's mistakes. Miller wanted a world without obligations--only gratuities. And he wanted a spiritual revolution to support this new society. He hated America for showing no inclination in this way.
But one also starts to see why George Orwell turned on Miller for valuing individuality above politics. He dismisses Hitler as a madman who will pass in time as do all other dictators--and so his movements in Europe should not concern him at all. Of course, Hitler's evil was spectacular, and required a spectacular response. One imagines Miller in German would have had a very different opinion of whether other countries should have intervened. As well, he ends up celebrating the South for holing onto its culture of gentility--completely ignoring that this culture was in part myth and in total dependent upon acts of terroristic violence. He supported 'negro' culture--and saw it, as did many intellectuals of the time--as the refuge of American soul--but does not try to connect that culture to the violence which surrounded it.
Miller's admiration for American blacks is patronizing, but this affection is an important part of the point that he is trying to make. In his travels through the south and southwest he comes across a number of eccentric characters--kooks, we might call them today, creating their own systems of philosophy, creating new kinds of art--new music, new paintings. They are quiet, outside the mainstream, but--as he suggests in his epigram--Miller sees these people as true saints: it is these little people whose ideas are later synthesized by the great mystics, like Christ and Buddha. This is the foundation of a possible new world--the utopia of which he dreamed.
And I appreciate his point, but in addition to a certain amount of condescension, there is a real lack of discipline as the book continues, his chapters on New Iberia way too long and tangential. The lack of discipline ends up undermining the books natural narrative course. (Miller often imagined much better books than he wrote: this was originally to be a series of essays with accompanying watercolors, but that never came to be.)
He finally reaches California, which is a kind of resolution. He had expected California to be horrible--and Hollywood certainly had some of those aspects--but there's a different part of California, too, one where he can practice his freedom, one closer to the coast. He even came to like the Pacific, which he had not expected. In some ways, this is a coming home: he had been in California as a young man--and compares the return to his starting A.P. Sinnett's _Esoteric Buddhism_ in Brooklyn and finishing it in Paris: nothing had changed. California, too; nothing had changed, but he had. _The Air-Conditioned Nightmare_ was published in 1945, by which time he was settled in Big Sur, and falling in love with the place (though probably still planning to leave for Europe).
Rather than end here, he circles back again--one too many loop-dee-loops--back to Europe, back to artists he likes, and back to the south. The book peters out and ends on a bitter note, with him again celebrating values of the Confederacy. Miller is, of course, free to like whatever he likes, but there is no way the Confederacy stands for anything like the libertarian freedom he values. It is an overshoot, one that ultimately works agains the book and seems to make Miller nothing more than a contrarian. Which is a shame: because he had more wisdom than that. -
Truly fantastic book.
Henry Miller returns home to the USA from Europe at the outbreak of WWII and decides to spend a year traveling around the country and writing about it.
At first I was skeptical, as he had become a true Europhile and had a certain disdain for his country, so much so that I thought the whole book would turn into "Why Europe is superior." Whereas he probably did actually believe that, as soon as he escaped New York City, where he grew up, and breezed through the Rust Belt, which was booming at that point with giant factories making the industrialists rich, and arrived in the South, everything shifted.
His observations of the people, culture, and sense of place on the South were magnificent. I particularly loved "The Shadows," a story about Weeks Hall and his home in New Iberia, Lousiana. I also loved "The Soul of Aenethesia" and "My Dream of Mobile" for their character portrayal of an ex-con at the end of the Depression and for a snapshot of a city in dream form versus reality, respectively.
The great writing does not start and stop in the South, his observations of the Southwest and California are also beautiful and stunning. "Day in the Park," was my favorite from this set, for its portrayal of children living in a motor lodge along Route 66. I love the beautiful description of scenery that matched my own views from many road trips in "From Grand Canyon to Burbank." And finally "Desert Rat," was another amazing portrait of a common man living in the desert, akin to "The Soul of Aenethesia" mentioned above.
Highly recommend this one, and definitely don't skip the introduction, Miller's astute observations of the American psyche post-Depression and pre-WWII are incredible. -
I hadn't read Henry Miller since 2001 and forgot how brilliant his prose is in the service of indignation. That said, Miller's rage at American consumerism, corporatism, materialism, and all-around ignorance -- a feeling with which I duly agree -- once in a while, but far too often, sails past insightfulness and lands in the realm of self-righteousness, leading one to suspect that underneath his bohemian persona lies a secret aristocrat. This from the last chapter of The Air-Conditioned Nightmare:
"In Mississippi, near the banks of the great river itself, I came upon the ruins of Windsor. Nothing now remains of this great house but the high, vine-covered Grecian columns. There are so many elegant and mysterious ruins throughout the South, so much death and desolation, so much ghostliness. And always in the fairest spots, as if the invader aiming at the vital centers struck also at the pride and hope of his victim. One is inevitably induced to reflect on what might have been had this promising land been spared the ravages of war, for in our Southern States that culture known as the 'slave culture' had exhibited only its first blossoms. We know what the slave cultures of India, Egypt, Rome and Greece bequeathed the world. We are grateful for the legacy; we do not spurn the gift because it was born of injustice. Rare is the man who, looking upon the treasures of antiquity, thinks at what an iniquitous price they were fashioned. Who has the courage, confronted with these miracles of the past, to exclaim: 'Better these things had never been than that one single human being had been deprived of his rightful freedom.'"
In other words, the end justifies the means. (And isn't history dialectical? Cannot one look upon such marvels and think of not only their beauty but also at what price they were fashioned?)
(Also, I wasn't much interested in the chapters about Miller's artist friends. Seemed to belong to another book. I was expecting something big about America, and The Air-Conditioned Nightmare seemed to frequently run from that artistic task.)
