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Miller’s Crossing
When Henry Miller Learned to Stop Nailing Whores and Start Hating California
by Andrew Hume
The purpose of this column will be to report on books that somehow relate to Southern California and Los Angeles. So, then, all the books will be about the genius of our greatest American poet, Jim Morrison! The hottest poet ever! My God, just think about that soft hair brushing against your taut nipples, as he whispers vomit-scented nothings into your ear: “You are a burro(w)-mouthed mistress, erupting profane into the carousel of our lust…Blaspheme................................. Blassssspheeeeeeeeme.............BLASPHEMY….......................
.......................BLASPHEME ME!”
No, I’m kidding. Dude wrote some good songs, but if you’re on acid all the time, pretty much anyone’s profound.
This first column is actually about Henry Miller’s 1945 book, Air-Conditioned Nightmare. Now some may argue, after my attack on one that I deem to be a low talent, that Henry Miller is hardly more of an outstanding ability among American letters. Some people don’t like Henry Miller, don’t think his work is worthy of the title Literature at all.
Well, I just wanted to make fun of Jim Morrison. And Air-Conditioned Nightmare makes nary a mention of whores. Does that sweeten it up for you?
Henry Miller left Paris, where he’d been living for years, when the war broke out in1940. He took a year sabbatical in Greece hoping that things would get better. When they didn’t, he decided to return to the US, travel it by car and write a book. Air-Conditioned Nightmare is essentially about his search for the artist’s life among the greed and sightless determination of American values.
While he did find some hope in the Louisiana swamps and the Arizona deserts, and in the works and lives of people like the composer, Edgar Varese; painters, John Marin and Hilaire Hiler; and an excited young writer, known to us only as Dudley, Mr Miller’s trip was generally a depressing one. Mr Miller begins the book with his trepidatious return to New York. He assails the US for its lack of interest in artistic endeavors. He’s spot on, and it’s amazing how accurate his commentary still is today. He’s angry that many of his contemporaries have sold out to commercial art or Hollywood. He laments the swift passing of American relevance:
“Try to think of the life the Indians once led here when you are on a lake, a mountain or river bearing the names we borrowed from them. Try to think of the dreams of the Spaniards when you are motoring over the old Spanish Trail. Walk around in the old French Quarter of New Orleans and try to reconstruct the life that once this city knew. Less than a hundred years has elapsed since this jewel of America faded out. It seems more like a thousand. Everything that was of beauty, significance and promise has been destroyed and buried in the avalanche of false progress. In the thousand years of almost incessant war Europe has not lost what we have lost in a hundred years of ‘peace and progress’.”
Mr Miller’s rightfully angry about horseshit American ideals, I think. He becomes irritated speaking of the plight of America’s forgotten poor. Despite the valiant attempts of Roosevelt’s New Deal and Johnson’s Great Society, little change has been permanent. Americans are as unconcerned about each other now as ever. We stab our brother in the back, only to pull out the binoculars and look over his slumped shoulders with feigned concern for “those poor children” thousands of miles away.
Despite the fact that it’s dedicated to Margaret and Gilbert Neiman of Bunker Hill, Air-Conditioned Nightmare actually has very little to do with Los Angeles (sorry, I was misguided when I chose this one). Mr Miller stops in Burbank, though, where it becomes apparent that he thinks very little of Southern California: “The real California began to make itself felt. I wanted to puke. But you have to get a permit to vomit in public.” The only other real mention of the Southland comes from his chapter, “Soirée in Hollywood”, in which he mainly expresses his disgust with the company. He dismisses them as a bunch of old bourgeois drunks and dismisses himself from the party to walk through the hills and contemplate LA’s slow destruction of human morality.
Although the book itself deals little with California, it apparently had a large impact on the 1950’s bohemian culture of Los Angeles. And is one that seems to be very relevant to America’s current state of affairs:
“It has become so to-day that when you see the [American] flag boldly and proudly displayed you smell a rat somewhere. The flag has become a cloak to hide iniquity. We have two American flags always: one for the rich and one for the poor. When the rich fly it it means that things are under control; when the poor fly it it means danger, revolution, anarchy.”
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Volume 2, Issue 2 contents
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