It is a world suited for monomaniacs obsessed with the idea of progress—but a false progress, a progress which stinks.
—Henry Miller, The Air-Conditioned Nightmare
Why should we tolerate a diet of weak poisons, a home in insipid surroundings, a circle of acquaintances who are not quite our enemies, the noise of motors with just enough relief to prevent insanity? Who would want to live in a world which is just not quite fatal?
—Rachel Carson, Silent Spring
Two outstanding works mark the highest point of Henry Miller’s career and, though they were both travel books of a sort, they could not be more unlike. The first, The Colossus of Maroussi, a hymn to Greece under the shadow of war, was published by Colt Press in 1941. The second, The Air-Conditioned Nightmare, a jeremiad on the folly, ugliness, and injustices of the United States, appeared first in 1945, when America was at its most triumphalist. As always, Miller’s timing was execrable—and oddly heroic.
By now, Miller knew what he was about: he had identified the enemies of freedom, not only in high places, but also in the family home, the registrar’s office, the pharmacy, the police station, and the bedroom. Any person who has been subjected to sustained societal conditioning is potentially an agent of the state. This is true of men who collaborate with the state to limit the experience and potential of their wives and daughters, but it is also true of women who do the same things—by different means—to their husbands and sons. The recruiting sergeant, banging about town with his press gang is no more heinous than the well-dressed society lady with her purse full of white feathers. A woman like Henry Miller’s mother may appear less contemptible than a violent husband, but she gets the job done, nevertheless.
Like many of us who are badly treated in childhood—collateral damage, more often than not, in the war between the man and the woman—Miller took years to recover. Some never do. We have to remember that what he was trying to protect and sustain was more than just a sense of his own masculinity; it was personhood itself. In a society that enlists mother, father, wife, husband, children, colleagues, sporting heroes, and pageant queens to limit the imaginative freedom of its citizenry, Miller was struggling for the right to govern himself and to not be manipulated by his society. In an age when most people actively coveted the new “gewgaws,” or at least saw them as innocent enough, Miller did not want to live in a consumerist society, and he dared to name it for what it was, at a time when imperialist boosterism was at its height.
Obliged to leave Paris in 1939, Miller had accepted a long-standing invitation to visit Lawrence Durrell in Greece (the Durrells were living in Corfu). Not only did he visit, he spent nine months there wandering about the country, using Athens and the Durrells’ home as his bases, visiting Poros, Phaestos, Mycenae, Crete, and Delphi and, through the “Colossus” of the title, George Katsimbalis, met the poet George Seferis and the painter Ghika (Nikos Hadjikyriakos-Ghikas). What changed Miller, however—what made him grow as a writer—was his encounter with the land itself:
It was a voyage into the light. The earth became illumined by her own inner light. At Mycenae I walked over the incandescent dead; at Epidaurus I felt a stillness so intense that for a fraction of a second I heard the great heart of the world beat and I understood the meaning of pain and sorrow; at Tiryns I stood in the shadow of the Cyclopean man and felt the blaze of that inner eye which has not become a sickly gland; at Argos the whole plain was a fiery mist in which I saw the ghosts of our own American Indians and greeted them in silence.1
There can be no overestimating the impact of Greece on Miller’s imagination—or his craft. Most important, it seems to have enriched his philosophy in ways that all the reading and conversations in Paris and New York could never have done. Now, he says, he has become “one with the Path”; now, “The Greek earth opens before me like the Book of Revelation. I never knew that the earth contains so much: I had walked blindfolded, with faltering, hesitant steps; I was proud and arrogant, content to live the false, restricted life of the city man. The light of Greece opened my eyes, penetrated my pores, expanded my whole being. I came home to the world, having found the true center and the real meaning of revolution.”2
However, as he also notes, Greece was “becoming embroiled” in the war and, now that the whole of Europe was similarly embroiled, it seemed, after those halcyon nine months, that there was only one place for Miller to go. He may have felt, in Greece, that he was coming “home to the world,” but circumstances dictated that he now return to the place he claimed to detest more than any other—and it was there, in New York, while avoiding his parents and asking friends to keep his whereabouts unknown, that Miller wrote The Colossus of Maroussi, perhaps his happiest, certainly his brightest, and, in the eyes of many, himself included, probably the best of his books.
As soon as he was done with it, however, he started thinking about the book that would seem to be its polar opposite: a vitriolic, merciless, and, at times, insanely funny attack, not just on America itself, but on the way the entire “developed” world was going. As he traveled across the United States, doing the “research” that would inform The Air-Conditioned Nightmare, Miller became convinced that “nowhere else in the world is the divorce between man and nature so complete. Nowhere have I encountered such a dull, monotonous fabric of life as here. . . . Here boredom reaches its peak.”3 Did he know, then, that, within a decade or so, the rest of the “developed” world, even France and Greece, would follow? In the preface to The Air-Conditioned Nightmare, Miller claims that the thought of “writing a book on America” had come to him in Paris “some years ago,” but he didn’t begin work, proper, until 1941, owing to lack of funds (“To do anything you need money,’ he remarks, as if somehow surprised by the fact) and an unfamiliarity with the American highway (throughout the book, Miller’s ineptitude, not only as a mechanic, but also as a driver, provides a running source of hilarity, especially toward the end of the journey, when he limps across the deserts of the Southwest in a car he was clearly far from qualified to drive in such conditions). Yet, even when he got on the road, he couldn’t write a line, so horrified was he by the return to his homeland, and it took a good deal of mental fight before the book was finally published in 1945, by New Directions.
It almost goes without saying that, if there was ever a bad year to publish a biting critique of American life, it was 1945. Emerging from what the majority felt was a just war as the most powerful nation on earth (and with the world’s first-ever weapons of mass destruction to strengthen his hand), Harry S. Truman probably felt that he spoke for all when he told Congress, in January 1946, that the previous year had been “the greatest year of achievement in human history. It saw the end of the Nazi-Fascist terror in Europe, and also the end of the malignant power of Japan. And it saw the substantial beginning of world organization for peace. . . . The plain fact is that civilization was saved in 1945 by the United Nations” (my italics).
Then, having paid tribute to “the millions of Americans” both military and civilian, who had worked together to achieve what many would soon recognize, not as a victory for the United Nations, but a Pax Americana, he continued: “The beginning of the year 1946 finds the United States strong and deservedly confident. We have a record of enormous achievements as a democratic society in solving problems and meeting opportunities as they developed. We find ourselves possessed of immeasurable advantages—vast and varied natural resources; great plants, institutions, and other facilities; unsurpassed technological and managerial skills; an alert, resourceful, and able citizenry. We have in the United States Government rich resources in information, perspective, and facilities for doing whatever may be found necessary to do in giving support and form to the widespread and diversified efforts of all our people.”4
The rhetoric is familiar, of course; but at the end of World War II, it seems likely that more ordinary working people took it at face value than at any other time in American history. Certainly, it was not the best moment for Miller to announce that, in spite of his intention to travel his former homeland “with a blessing on my lips,” his initial impression, when he got off the boat in Boston, was that this homeland had become a “vast jumbled waste created by pre-human or sub-human monsters in a delirium of greed”—and, if that wasn’t insult enough, continuing just a page or so later: “Maybe we would end up on all fours, gibbering like baboons. Something disastrous was in store—everybody felt it. Yes, America had changed. The lack of resilience, the feeling of hopelessness, the resignation, the skepticism, the defeatism—I could scarcely believe my ears at first. And over it all the same veneer of fatuous optimism—only now decidedly cracked.” And just in case any doubt remained, he presses further: “A new world is not made simply by trying to forget the old. A new world is made with a new spirit, with new values. Our world may have begun that way, but today it is a caricature. 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 gewgaws, our gadgets, all the little comforts which have made us so uncomfortable. There is nothing brave, chivalrous, heroic or magnanimous about our attitude. We are not peaceful souls; we are smug, timid, queasy and quakey.”5 There is no sense of suspense in The Air-Conditioned Nightmare; before the reader is a dozen pages into the book, she knows that America is rotten to the core, a sham, run by greedy, venial, smug men whose only values are based on property and status, men who would sell anything—the land, their souls, their history—to anyone who cared to bid for them.
At the same time, the book is full of surprises. One of my favorite chapters is the surreal “Letter to Lafayette,” in which nothing is explained and there is no background to any of the characters (John Dudley, a painter from Kenosha, whom Miller had met at Caresse Crosby’s house in Bowling Green while working on The Colossus of Maroussi; Dudley’s wife, Flo; and a writer named Lafayette, or Lafe Young, who was to become a friend and associate of Charles Bukowski). All we know is that Dudley and Young had been trying to start a magazine, Generation, that it had failed, and now Lafe was off somewhere, while Dudley set about composing a book-length letter to him that would encapsulate the concerns of their generation: “I want to wash up my own life and literature too. The book opens with a nightmare, an evacuation, a complete waste of images.” Dudley also speaks of wandering “through jungles, rivers, swamps, deserts—in search of the Mayas. We are trying to find our father, our name, our address.” Meanwhile Lafe writes nihilistic letters from Des Moines, full of hermetic phrases and declarations: “It’ll all be blue. I demit. I abdicate. I renounce,” prompting Miller to note: “Most of the young men of talent I have met in this country give one the impression of being somewhat demented. Why shouldn’t they? They are living amidst spiritual gorillas, living with food and drink maniacs, success-mongers, gadget innovators, publicity hounds. God, if I were a young man today, if I were faced with a world such as we have created, I would blow my brains out.”6
“A complete waste of images,” “trying to find our father, our name, our address”—it’s all so reminiscent of Kerouac and Cassidy and even Jim Morrison, driving back and forth across America (before On the Road gets written and—finally, after years—becomes the product America uses to kill Kerouac off, slowly, turning on him the light of the public that darkens everything). A new, wholly American variety of la fuite, in which the land, freed of the burden of landscape, or home place, and in that fleeting blessed state before the developers got properly to work, becomes time. Which is to say, it becomes a terrain in which history can be avoided, all the conclusions staved off, a space for demission, for renunciation, for the holy abdication of a Rimbaud. Meanwhile, back at the ranch—but there it was in all its drabness. There was the problem: nobody is back at the ranch. It may even be the case that the ranch itself is gone, lost long ago in a poker game with the ghost of Wild Bill Hickok, or, like as not, in some Wall Street Ponzi scheme. Nobody stayed back to say: Let’s keep it minimal, boys. It’s not cool, here—not yet—to hang loose and say nothing, and it’s certainly not okay to give up and play the real-world game with a shrug to show that you see the irony of all this, but what else can you do, you’ll never win? No: Lafe and Dudley “look at their fathers and grandfathers, all brilliant successes in the world of American flapdoodle. They prefer to be shit-heels, if they have to be.”7 Anyway, it’s not about winning. Or it wasn’t then. Now, I’m not so sure—now all you need is front, but it’s not cool and it’s not ironic at all if you never even tried for Being Beauteous. You begin and end with the pose, and after a token period of black crepe or Jungian analysis you opt for two automobiles and your own home with a pipe organ in it.
It is odd, looking back, to think that, in the 1940s and ’50s, America was full of Lafes and Dudleys (and Kerouacs, and Bukowskis, and Cassidys) but nobody knew it. It probably is now, or if not, it probably has its fair share of boys like Coyd Jr. from Rodney Jones’s poem “The Assault on the Fields.” A teenage pop singer and artist from a newly electrified holler somewhere down in the deep, late 1950s South, living blithely under the “rolling boil” of DDT (the deposits get so thick, his sister Jenny uses them to draw hopscotch lines), Coyd paints his own abstract expressionist works, inspired by the works of Joel Shapiro; his pride and joy is a black canvas in a black frame:
“I call it Death,” he would say,
then stomp out onto the front lawn to shoot his .22 rifle
straight into the sky above his head8
—oh, what energy and infantry training America expended on containing its young folk! Meanwhile, it was already busy poisoning everything else—and that would lead to the wide, and entirely unwanted public prominence of another kind of writer, but one with a great deal in common with Henry Miller, if not John Dudley and Lafayette Young.
Some years ago, on the fortieth anniversary of Silent Spring (first published in the New Yorker in 1962), I got together with poet and experienced anthologist Maurice Riordan and persuaded him to help me put a book out on the fortieth anniversary of Carson’s death in 2004. A week or so after, he reluctantly agreed (unlike me, he knew what putting an anthology together actually involved). Maurice, a generous-hearted Irish poet with social skills I have only read about in magazines, left me in a bar while he trooped off to a meeting with the Gulbenkian Foundation; by the time he got back, we had guaranteed publication and a significant sum of cash to commission new work from some of our favorite contemporary poets (to this day, I still have no idea how such things are done). The outcome of this project was a book called Wild Reckoning, an anthology of poems chosen from several centuries of what I was then calling “eco-critical” poetry, alongside twenty new works by poets as diverse as Mark Doty and Seamus Heaney, Andrew Motion and Allison Funk. One idea of the book was that the commissioned work would arise (spontaneously, and organically, we hoped) from an exchange—a lunch, a working meeting, a conversation—between our poet and a working scientist and, while some poets preferred to go their own way for inspiration, some of the best work was clearly informed by those meetings of two minds. The anthology did well and went into several editions; it was a Poetry Book Society Special Commendation and (my favorite of its badges of honor) was the book choice on Desert Island Discs of the UK government’s chief scientific adviser and surface chemistry pioneer, Sir David King.
I have written elsewhere on Carson, in an attempt to draw attention to her work in The Sea Trilogy, and I consider myself her Number One Fan—and, as my youngest son would say, I mention all this why? Well, mainly so it does not seem “negative,” or unfairly critical, or just petty-minded when I say that, contrary to the accepted wisdom, the modern environmental movement did not begin with Silent Spring, in spite of all arguments to the contrary (see, e.g., Peter Matthiessen in Time magazine, March 29, 1999: “Before there was an environmental movement, there was one brave woman and her very brave book.”). To say so would be to fail to appreciate the work of any number of her predecessors and contemporaries: Aldo Leopold, say, whose A Sand County Almanac: And Sketches Here and There was published in 1949; or Edwin Way Teale who, in the 1930s and ’40s, was already at work transforming the lay American reader’s vision of the natural world; or Loren Eiseley who, in 1957, wrote the one sentence on the living world that I most wish I had written: “There is no logical reason for the existence of a snowflake any more than there is for evolution. It is an apparition from that mysterious shadow world beyond nature, that final world which contains—if anything contains—the explanation of men and catfish and green leaves”9—but in truth the line goes way back, through Victorian writers like John Lubbock to William Cobbett (who, in 1825, said of the new mills at Chilworth, “here has the devil fixed on as one of the seats of his grand manufactory; and perverse and ungrateful man not only lends him his aid, but lends it cheerfully!”).10 In fact, it could be argued that the first book to deliver a sustained “eco-critical” examination of the damage being done by modern capitalist industrial processes, not only to our environment, but to ourselves, predates Silent Spring by a hundred years. That book was George Perkins Marsh’s Man and Nature: Or, Physical Geography as Modified by Human Action (it was first published in 1864, and in a revised edition in 1874). In many ways, it could be argued that Marsh was, in fact, the first modern environmentalist, certainly in America.
Occasional critiques by poets and others go back further still, certainly to the German and English Romantics, but, for me, the case against the industrialization of daily life is most eloquently expressed in the writings of William Morris, who saw that the machine-age paradigm was not only polluting the land and the atmosphere, but also the souls of those who had to live in such degraded conditions. Here he is, for example, in a speech titled “Hopes and Fears for Art,” given before the Trades’ Guild of Learning, on December 4, 1877:
And Science—we have loved her well, and followed her diligently, what will she do? I fear she is so much in the pay of the counting-house, the counting-house and the drill-sergeant, that she is too busy, and will for the present do nothing. Yet there are matters which I should have thought easy for her; say for example teaching Manchester how to consume its own smoke, or Leeds how to get rid of its superfluous black dye without turning it into the river, which would be as much worth her attention as the production of the heaviest of heavy black silks, or the biggest of useless guns. Anyhow, however it be done, unless people care about carrying on their business without making the world hideous, how can they care about Art? . . . Unless something or other is done to give all men some pleasure for the eyes and rest for the mind in the aspect of their own and their neighbours’ houses, until the contrast is less disgraceful between the fields where beasts live and the streets where men live, I suppose that the practice of the arts must be mainly kept in the hands of a few highly cultivated men, who can go often to beautiful places, whose education enables them, in the contemplation of the past glories of the world, to shut out from their view the everyday squalors that the most of men move in. Sirs, I believe that art has such sympathy with cheerful freedom, open-heartedness and reality, so much she sickens under selfishness and luxury, that she will not live thus isolated and exclusive. I will go further than this and say that on such terms I do not wish her to live. I protest that it would be a shame to an honest artist to enjoy what he had huddled up to himself of such art, as it would be for a rich man to sit and eat dainty food amongst starving soldiers in a beleaguered fort . . . I do not want art for a few, any more than education for a few, or freedom for a few.11
It would, of course, be convenient for the captains of industry and finance, if the environmental movement had begun with Silent Spring (and if it had only been about DDT, or even pesticides, rather than the innate corruption running throughout an entire system), but I am sure Carson would have been the first to say otherwise. This is important because those in power didn’t just ignore her holistic perspective on the natural world; they have consistently ignored warnings that, year upon year, decade upon decade, have been sounded, and proven, by generation after generation of dissenters. From the first indications that “developed” societies were moving toward the industrialization of everything (including culture, including scientia, including life itself), dissident voices have been raised and, even if those voices have been varied, all of them—Spinoza, Goethe, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, John Clare, R.W. Emerson, H. D. Thoreau, William Morris, D. H. Lawrence, Martin Heidegger, and many, many others—have offered the same warnings. We are gaining the world, materially, but losing whatever it is that constitutes the soul. We are sacrificing our place in the natural order, to dwell in a vast, ugly, and rather cheaply constructed machine. We are losing the other animals. We are accepting it as an inevitability that, as Emerson points out, “every actual state is corrupt” and so failing in our duties of citizenly vigilance. We are making cynicism and cowardice into fashion statements. Worse, we are living in the condition that Cornel West has defined thus: “Nihilism is a natural consequence of a culture (or civilization) ruled and regulated by categories that mask manipulation, mastery and domination of peoples and nature.”12 Not to acknowledge this is a profound failure in critical thinking. Since the end of World War II, however, with the rewriting, or erasure, of much of our history in “developed” countries—and most of all in America—to point this out in a public forum is considered “negative,” defeatist, and unpatriotic.
The focus, and the methods, of The Air-Conditioned Nightmare and Silent Spring are, of course, quite different, but both Miller and Carson attack the same problems. Sometimes, indeed, I can hear their voices merging, as if one. For example, who is speaking here?
The question is whether any civilization can wage relentless war on life without destroying itself, and without losing the right to be called civilized.
And here?
We tell the story as though man were an innocent victim, a helpless participant in the erratic and unpredictable revolutions of Nature. Perhaps in the past he was. But not any longer. Whatever happens to this earth today is of man’s doing. Man has demonstrated that he is master of everything—except his own nature. If yesterday he was a child of nature, today he is a responsible creature. He has reached a point of consciousness which permits him to lie to himself no longer.
Here?
The earth is not a lair, neither is it a prison. The earth is a Paradise, the only one we’ll ever know. We will realize it the moment we open our eyes. We don’t have to make it a Paradise—it is one. We have only to make ourselves fit to inhabit it.
And here?
This is an era of specialists, each of whom sees his own problem and is unaware of or intolerant of the larger frame into which it fits. It is also an era dominated by industry, in which the right to make a dollar at whatever cost is seldom challenged.13
There is too much in The Air-Conditioned Nightmare to touch on all of it in such a short space. Because it is so critical of the United States, it is less popular with a certain sector of readers than it might have been, which is a pity, because Miller’s real target was not so much America as a spirit of vapid consumerism that was bound to disgust someone who “had the misfortune to be nourished by the dreams and visions of great Americans—the poets and the seers.” Ironically, Miller was just one of those people who wanted America to be great again, an America that refused to be seduced by “a false progress, a progress which stinks . . . [or] a world cluttered with useless objects which men and women, in order to be exploited and degraded, are taught to regard as useful. The dreamer whose dreams are non-utilitarian has no place in this world. Whatever does not lend itself to being bought and sold, whether in the realm of things, ideas, principles, dreams or hopes, is debarred.”14 It is a pity that the American patriot of the 1940s, and indeed, having seen all that has gone wrong since then, the patriot of today, have been equally unable to prize this book at its true worth, because it, more than any other work published in its day, diagnoses everything that has damaged the spirit of America, as it charged onward into a Brave New World where the only visionary is the entrepreneur. There was a time, in the United States, when snake-oil salesmen were mocked, or run out of a town—now our money in their pockets makes them modern-day heroes. That Miller saw all this, and more, in the early 1940s, is astonishing; that he told the extent of America’s loss of principle so accurately is commendable. But there is more to The Air-Conditioned Nightmare than jeremiad, more than just the first thirteen or so pages of thrilling vitriol.
Having noted Miller’s concern, as a good anarchist, with careful and disciplined observation of the natural world, it is rewarding to come across those moments in The Air-Conditioned Nightmare where he encounters select individuals who still live close to nature. For example, during his stay at The Shadows, a luxuriantly wild estate in New Iberia, Louisiana, he discovers that rich borderland between cultivated garden land and wild bayou:
In the transparent black waters of the bayous the indestructible cypress, symbol of death and silence, stands knee-deep. The sky is everywhere, dominating everything. . . . Always the live oak, the cypress, the chinaball tree; always the swamp, the clearing, the jungle; cotton, rice, sugar cane; thickets of bamboo, banana trees, gum trees, magnolias, cucumber trees, swamp myrtle, sassafras. A wild profusion of flowers: camellias, azaleas, roses of all kinds, salvias, the giant spider lily, the aspidistra, jasmine, Michaelmas daisies; snakes, screech-owls, raccoons; moons of frightening dimensions, lurid, pregnant, heavy as mercury. And like a leitmotif to the immensity of sky are the tangled masses of Spanish moss, that peculiar spawn of the south which is allied to the pineapple family. An epiphyte, rather than a parasite, it lives an independent existence, sustaining itself on air and moisture; it flourishes just as triumphantly on a dead tree or a telegraph wire as on the live oak. “None but the Chinese,” says Weeks Hall, “can ever hope to paint this moss. It has a baffling secret of line and mass which has never been remotely approached.”15
Miller goes on to note that people from the north and Midwest “actually shudder when they first come upon the giant bewhiskered live oaks, they sense something dismal and forbidding about them. But when one sees them in majestic, stately rows . . . one must bow down before them in humble adoration for they are, if not the monarchs of the tree world, certainly the sages or the magi.” This entire passage is extraordinary—as is the eerily erotic scene where, coming upon a group of statues of the Four Seasons in a heavy mist while out walking the gardens at night, Miller tells us he “leaned over impulsively and kissed the marble lips. It was a strange sensation. I went to each of them in turn and kissed their cold, chaste lips.” The descriptions of The Shadows offer a startling reminder of how varied Miller’s gifts as a writer could be. Few readers of the more popular works, say, would guess that he could be a master nature writer, when he felt the occasion demanded but, in The Shadows, as in several passages of The Colossus of Maroussi, we catch glimpses of the brilliant nature writer Miller might have become, had he chosen to pursue that path.
Later, as he drives westward—the road trip an increasing source of worrying hilarity as his car troubles get worse and his ability to deal with them evaporates altogether—Miller encounters a man named Olsen whom he immediately sizes up as a “Desert Rat.” This man has been all over the Southwest, especially the Painted Desert, studying its geology, its fossils, the Indian remains, the wildlife. He is a kind of citizen scientist before his time, with a touch of seer for good measure, and Miller is enchanted, especially when Olsen lays into the reductive “scientists” he has encountered in the desert, patronizing men who dismiss his theories without a second thought: “I figure that when we get too close to the secret Nature has a way of getting rid of us. Of course, we’re getting smarter and smarter every day, but we never get to the bottom of things, and we never will. . . . We think we know a lot, but we think in a rut. Book people ain’t more intelligent than other folk. They just learn how to read things a certain way. Put them in a new situation and they lose their heads. They ain’t flexible. They only know how to think the way they were taught. That ain’t intelligent to my way of thinkin’.”
It may be noticed that this man sounds a lot like Miller himself—“The people who live the longest are the people who live the simplest. Money won’t save you. Money makes you worry and fret. It’s good to be alone and be silent. To do your own thinking” and “If [America] really set out to do something for the world, unselfishly, I believe we could succeed. But I don’t think we’ll do that. . . . We’re put to save our big business international trade, and that sort of thing”—but it would be a harsh critic who didn’t enjoy Olsen’s company even if Miller did invent him. On the other hand, this encounter, and our author’s openness to the old Desert Rat’s ideas, illustrates one of Miller’s favorite maxims perfectly: “Usually what is taught in school must be unlearned. Life is the teacher.”16 This is the real power of The Air-conditioned Nightmare, it is a supreme example of a writer allowing life, whether it be the people he meets, the land itself, the weather, or plain old car trouble, to be his teacher. Along the way, Miller does not set out to learn anything, but no lesson is lost. The adept owns nothing, but has the use of everything—and everywhere he goes, he either learns, or unlearns, something—and if they would allow the book to speak to them, even those who do not appreciate Miller’s critique of his homeland would recognize The Air-Conditioned Nightmare as the great precursor to the most rewarding of American travel books, from Tom Wolfe’s The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test to William Least Heat-Moon’s Blue Highways to Timothy O’Grady’s Divine Magnetic Lands—and even the Hunter S. Thompson of Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas.