Some Thoughts on Henry Miller’s The Air-Conditioned Nightmare

I think the most remarkable thing about this book is that it’s a Henry Miller without any sex in it, although I can’t recall there being much, if any, in The Colossus of Maroussi, either. I started The Air-Conditioned Nightmare pretty directly after having put down Colossus because I was expecting them to be of a piece, but I was a little bit disappointed.

Colossus was fantastic, I thought, chronicling as it does some of Miller’s journeys around the Mediterranean while the rest of Europe is getting engulfed in what would become World War 2. I was reading it not long after the current conflict between Ukraine and Russia reached the milestone of a year, and the resonance was hard to ignore. I’ve read the Tropics, and while they go in to some detail about Miller’s feelings on the contrast between America and Europe, Colossus focuses on it. Otherwise he travels, carouses, writes, mixes with interesting locals. As far as I can tell the difference between a Henry Miller novel and a Henry Miller piece of non-fiction is that in the non-fiction, he leaves out the sex.

Miller doesn’t really say anything new in Colossus, but that doesn’t matter. As far as I can recall (I read it a year ago), he draws a distinction between a Europe with a real, ancient, tangible history, and an America that has paved over anything you might call history and indigenous culture and thrown up shopping centres and TV antennas. Not the first guy to make the point, I’m sure, but he has a kind of lyrical way of making it when he’s in full flow, and he can go from a record of a dinner party where he met interesting people to a free-flowing, prose-poetic meditation on the relevance of ancient Greece today. It’s some range and some performance.

(As an aside, here’s my paperback copy of Colossus. I think it’s the rattiest paperback I have, or close to it, anyway. I bought this on the used book stall at Peterborough City Market. Back when we had a market.)

Just look at it. No, I can’t get the sticker off.

Maybe you won’t care if you don’t like Henry Miller already; I like Henry Miller a lot and to me it’s just fine, like listening to a favourite dirty uncle talk about politics. Fundamentally you agree with him, but you’d never put it the way he does.

The Air-Conditioned Nightmare is ostensibly more of the same, picking up where Colossus left off as Miller gets deposited on a dockside in New York. If Colossus is Miller taking a last look at a Europe going up in flames, Nightmare is Miller getting reacquainted with a country he’s not seen in a decade. It’s an intriguing premise.

It just doesn’t quite come off the same way. Whether it’s the change of locale or a change in mood, the same frisson just isn’t there. I mean, at its very simplest, Miller’s idea is that Europe is a place where things (good, bad, otherwise) happen, and America is a stultified, sanitised place. It’s borne out in his work about it as well.

There is a disconnected feeling where Colossus follows a thread. The chapters of prose poetry are as marvellous as ever, but contrasted with some essays on his mates and their artistic practises, it just doesn’t hit the same. The fault might be with me; if I had more of an interest in American visual art during the war I’d probably be in love with it, but I think he wrote in a more penetrating, interesting way when he was in Europe encountering poets.

He’s still brilliant by turns, though. One of the later chapters, Soirée in Hollywood is an account of a boozy, upper class dinner party he kind of falls into when he gets to LA. The conversation is hilarious, the paranoia is thick, and Miller plays the straight man beautifully. It has the same energy as this James Acaster bit. If you know, you know:

Nightmare is still worth reading if you’re a Miller fan, but definitely read Colossus first, and before that read the two Tropics. I haven’t read the Rosy Crucifixion trilogy yet but it’s on the list.