During the weeks since the election, I’ve kept returning to something Mona Simpson said in the immediate aftermath of 9/11. Simpson was one of several Southern California writers asked by LA Weekly to comment on how, or whether, their reading habits had changed in the wake of the attacks. Her response was that hers hadn’t, that they couldn’t, that even to ask such a question was to miss the point.
“After September 11,” she insisted, “I didn’t read books for the news. Books, by their nature, are never new enough.”
That’s true, and yet, I want to say, it’s also complicated. If literature is not news, it is (or can be) a bellwether of sorts. I think of William Carlos Williams, who writes, in “Asphodel, That Greeny Flower,” “It is difficult / to get the news from poems / yet men die miserably every day / for lack / of what is found there.” Or Percy Bysshe Shelley’s famous admonition: “Poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world.”
That Shelley was trafficking in hyperbole goes without saying—I’ve long preferred W.H. Auden: “Poetry makes nothing happen.” Still, even there, the sentiment grows complicated, since, as Auden goes on to elaborate, poetry “survives / In the valley of its making where executives / Would never want to tamper, flows on south / From ranches of isolation and the busy griefs.”
The busy griefs. Yes, with the inauguration looming, this is where we find ourselves. This describes the circumstance we face.
For me, that’s required a turning backward. For me, that’s required a reintegration of a kind. To understand how we exist now—how we got here—don’t we need to take stock of where we’ve been? The old, weird America, as Greil Marcus once described it: the United States as fevered dreamscape in which the juxtapositions, the backs-and-forths, highlight not only who we wish to be but also who we are.
“A new world,” Henry Miller observes in his 1945 travelogue, The Air-Conditioned Nightmare, “is not made simply by trying to forget the old.… Our world is a world of things. It is made up of comforts and luxuries, or else the desire for them. What we dread most, in facing the impending debacle, is that we shall be obliged to give up our gew-gaws.… We are not peaceful souls; we are smug, timid, queasy and quaky.”
The debacle to which Miller refers is World War II, which was just getting underway when he began what would become this book.
Miller would go on to become the bard of Big Sur, settling there in 1944. Yet he remains best known, perhaps, for the decade he spent in France as an expatriate before returning to the United States, by way of Greece, following the onset of the war. The Air-Conditioned Nightmare grew out of that repatriation; we might imagine it as a catalyst. What I mean is that, accompanied by a friend, the painter Abraham Rattner, Miller sought to drive across the country as a way of reacclimating to his homeland, a stocktaking of everything he had left behind.
There were complications, of course, as there always are. An expected advance did not materialize. Miller’s father was dying, a process that ended up taking three years. The trip—a precursor, in its way, to the frantic cross-country drives of Jack Kerouac and Neal Cassady—became fragmented and diffuse. Most significantly, the nation in which Miller landed not only disappointed but also saddened him. “There was a frigid, moral aspect to it,” he writes, “which chilled me to the bone.”
Reading that line nearly eight decades later, I will admit, has a similar effect on me.
As to why this is, it’s not disdain, although that remains a defining register of The Air-Conditioned Nightmare, a disgust at the shallowness Miller rediscovered, rendered with no small amount of rage. Rather, the book represents a harbinger, a reminder that, as much as I may want to believe our current circumstance to be anomalous, the truth is that it was ever thus. The United States that Miller encounters is bleak and disconnected, detached from history and heritage, awash in easy comforts and in lies. “What we dream we become,” he laments. “We’ll learn how to annihilate the whole planet in the wink of an eye—just wait and see.”
I’m reminded of Hunter S. Thompson, who in Fear and Loathing: On the Campaign Trail ’72 admits, “This may be the year when we finally come face to face with ourselves; finally just lay back and say it—that we are really just a nation of 220 million used car salesmen with all the money we need to buy guns, and no qualms at all about killing anybody else in the world who tries to make us uncomfortable.”
For Miller, though, the issue is less political than cultural. It is not a matter of ideology but of identity. Beneath his scabrous gaze, the entire country is indicted—and not only the United States but everyone. “We tell the story,” he asserts, “as though man were an innocent victim, a helpless participant.… Perhaps in the past he was. But not any longer.… Whatever happens to this earth to-day is of man’s doing.” Although Miller is addressing the war, it’s impossible to read such a passage without thinking about our contemporary travails. Climate catastrophe and the border. The Supreme Court and reproductive rights. How can we not conclude, as Miller does, that the American experiment has become—if indeed it was ever any different—an exercise in amusing ourselves to death?
“The first thing which struck me,” he recalls of a dinner party in Hollywood, “was that I was in the presence of wealthy people…who were all, including the octogenarians, already three sheets to the wind.”
Hollywood, to be sure, is an easy target. Or, maybe, a metaphor. It is also the case that after nearly 20 years in Big Sur, Miller eventually moved south, to Pacific Palisades, where he became an octogenarian himself. At the same time, what he is describing is a type of emptiness that exists not only in California but across the United States. It is this very emptiness that resides at the heart of the current crisis, which in the context of The Air-Conditioned Nightmare seems to me less a break than a continuation, a representation of who we’ve been all along.
I’m using the word “we” because I want to think about complicity. I want to think through a collective lens. I want to think about what I refused or was unable to recognize. I want to identify the clues I missed.
The Air-Conditioned Nightmare offers one such set of signifiers. That this is not reassuring or consoling is precisely the point. “As to whether I have been deceived, disillusioned…the answer is yes, I suppose,” Miller acknowledges. “I had the misfortune to be nourished by the dreams and visions of great Americans—the poets and seers. Some other breed of man has won out.”
What Miller is offering, in other words, is clarity, which we need now, in much the same way as we always have.•
