Jamie Smith's Reviews > The Air-Conditioned Nightmare

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 readers feels like they are 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. The man is soon forgotten, however, 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? Time to dial back on the drugs, Henry.

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.

This is not your standard travel book, but if you like Miller, it is worth your time.