henry miller doesn't appeal to me in my dirty thirties the way it did in my early twenties. i've been to many of the places he whines about at length, and i'd rather examine my own memory than to dry my eyes red through paragraph after paragraph of his rambling, static diatribes. i give up.

the title says enough...

There was a reason, however, for making the physical journey, fruitless though it proved to be. I felt the need to effect a reconciliation with my native land. It was an urgent need because, unlike most prodigal sons, I was returning not with the intention of remaining in the bosom of the family but of wandering forth again, perhaps never to return. 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, and set out for the unknown with a blessing on my lips.

—Henry Miller, The Air-Conditioned Nightmare

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!

He might have been prescient about certain aspects of the modern world, but the racism and sexism date this book terribly. Never mind how tedious a miserable, negative so and so he is. Unless you're passionate about or studying Miller, don't bother. Life's too short.

So far this book is badasss!

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.

This book is taking me forever to finish. Henry Miller can really get inside his own head and forget that half the time his reader has no idea what he's talking about or where he's coming from.

I would say that it is a book that has made me consider becoming an ex-patriot.

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?

Eloquent gonzo proto-beat type prose propping up some of the most pretentious insights into American culture. Miller can write good sentences, but that’s only half the battle. Although it is kind of funny to take yourself this seriously and cast yourself in the role of smartest person in the proverbial room just to make insights like — hmm chattel slavery seemed like it was bad, but the civil war was pointless and the north is industrial (bad) and the south is pastoral and aristocratic (good). I have little patience for this vapid flâneur

This was one of the most disappointing reads of my life. I haven't read a ton of Miller's fiction, but Big Sur and the Oranges of Hieronymus Bosch was actually sort of influential for me. I used a quote from it as an epigraph for a chapter in my dissertation, in fact. Miller, in that text, is as eloquent and optimistic as anyone I've ever read in describing the human capacity for turning our world into something beautiful and meaningful, and the influence of people like Emma Goldman on him is on full display there. This book, despite him referencing Goldman's influence a number of times in it, is as far from that as possible. It isn't that it is pessimistic (a healthy relationship between utopian optimism and apocalyptic pessimism has been critical to so many radical thinkers, including Goldman); it's that it's bitter, and small, and sad. Miller makes quite literally zero effort to find the meaning he claims to be pursuing, and mostly turns his attention back to what he at this time saw as his glory days in Paris. It comes off as the worst possible combination of a college junior returning from a study abroad period and a well-off Northerner fetishizing the South in the most base and reductive ways, talking about how much they love Waffle House and how nice Southerners are and how slow and languid Southern life is. Top it off with a bunch of discourse about cultural degeneracy, race suicide, and a literal architectural justification of slavery, and you get one of the most facile, insipid, and sometimes outright morally evil attempts at capturing American life that I have ever encountered

A great look at America post WWII, and it's throwaway society.