Joshua Buhs's Reviews > The Air-Conditioned Nightmare

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.