Pittsburgh Left
In 1940, in Pittsburgh, at fifty years old, Henry Miller began his “endless nightmare” across America. Having lived abroad for a decade (spent mostly in Paris, where he wrote his major autobiographical novels The Tropic of Cancer, Black Spring, and The Tropic of Capricorn, among other writings, and then a year in Greece, which produced The Colossus of Maroussi), then forced to return home due to the outbreak of the war, Miller devised a plan to travel extensively throughout the country. His intended goal was to forge a kind of reconciliation with his native land, a people whose values, culture, and lifestyles he despised. The American “way” forced its people to submit constantly to the status quo, as Miller saw it. The Air-Conditioned Nightmare, published in 1945, and the second part, Remember to Remember, published two years later, are his accounts of that road trip. He did not realize his purported goals: by the end of the journey, he had not changed his opinion of America one jot. If anything, he loathed it even more, though the pages upon pages devoted to railing against the American way in the rest of his work after the Nightmare are, compared to the Tropics and Black Spring, tempered pages, as if he had come to a temporary truce with certain elements of American life. By the time of Nightmare’s publication, he was living in Big Sur, among the idyllic cliffs off the northern California coast, before the tourists and daytrippers had really discovered it. Never again would Miller live outside of the U.S. He had seen a hell of a lot of the land by the end of his American road trip in 1941: Pittsburgh, Detroit, Jacksonville, New Orleans, the Wyoming badlands, up and down California, Utah, Arizona, Virginia, Biloxi, Chicago, to name a few places in no particular order. His travels, after all, took no particular order or route; he seems to be zigzagging everywhere, haphazardly, getting the feel of the place, searching out for something, nothing in particular, with mostly abstract plans to find some good among the vulgar and synthetic American qualities.
The Air-Conditioned Nightmare is, in a sense, the opposite of Dante’s Inferno. Whereas Dante is led deeper and deeper through the circles of hell, inching towards that very heart of cosmic evil, Henry Miller started his American trip in just the place he considered to be the ninth and final circle of hell on Earth, Pittsburgh. Upon looking at the city he proclaims that Pittsburgh is the black, malignant nucleus of all of the bogus, bloody, rotgut values that govern American life – its wholehearted belief in progress, in industry, in the dollar, in individual gain over the larger good; its anti-intellectualism, its anti-art atmosphere that constantly threatens to kill and bury anyone with the will to create, its destruction of the creative will of every visionary it has ever produced. But America’s gravest crime is its exploitation of every single individual in the guise of progress and freedom. Miller is an enemy of our market economy: “Whatever does not lend itself to being bought and sold, whether in the realm of things, ideas, principles, dreams, or hopes, is debarred. In this world the poet is anathema, the thinker a fool, the artist an escapist, the man of vision a criminal.” His vitriol is clear and widespread. It is tough, at times, to be exposed to such rampant disgust at such an alarming pitch; if one does continue to read the Nightmare past its first hundred pages or so – pages which are spent almost entirely in the industrialized North: Chicago, New York, Pittsburgh – I suspect it is in order to discover with Miller what he might ultimately find worth salvaging; that is, we want Miller to offer us alternatives, in order that we might see with him those things or people that might offer some hope, some redemption. And he does offer up such people – it is indeed always people, not places – that make America, to some degree, tolerable. These are the people on the fringes, the genuinely creative individuals, to be found almost entirely in the deep South and the Southwest. Unfortunately, he found no such salvation in Pittsburgh.
At the time Pittsburgh was one of America’s largest cities. It was still very much the nation’s industrial center, and it was thriving on its steel industry. Miller, though, felt nauseated by its every aspect, and derides it with spiteful and bitter words. But the Pittsburgh that Miller drove into was not only one of America’s largest cities, it was also one of its dirtiest, tremendously so. Although in 1941 the city passed a large-scale ordinance to begin curbing pollution, when Miller arrived in 1940 its air would have been choked with soot and dirt and smoke, so that a man who parked his car at nine in the morning in Oakland could return to it, at five in the evening, covered with a thick layer of grime. The pollution in the “Smoky City” was so dense and so ubiquitous that it must have felt like every molecule of clean air had been eradicated by the hanging dirt. (I recommend a visit to the Duquesne Incline’s small collection of photographs and various funicular memorabilia, where there are pictures of Pittsburgh in the first half of the century that, though they seem to have been taken at midnight, were actually snapped in the morning hours). But really, it isn’t the air that bothers Henry Miller. In fact, the problem seems to be just the opposite. His hotel room is spotless; everything a patron could want is provided for; it is thoroughly sterilized. These are precisely the aspects of the room that drive Miller mad:
I am depressed, depressed beyond words. If I were to occupy this room for any length of time I would go mad – or commit suicide. The spirit of the place, the spirit of the men who made it the hideous city that it is, seeps through the walls. There is murder in the air. It suffocates me.
A few moments ago I went out to get a breath of air. I was back again in Czarist Russia. I saw Ivan the Terrible followed by a cavalcade of snouted brutes. There they were, armed with clubs and revolvers. They had the look of men who obey with zest, who shoot to kill on the slightest provocation.
Never has the status quo seemed more hideous to me. This is not the worst place, I know. But I am here and what I see hits me hard.
For Miller, his spit-spot, lifeless hotel room and the rest of downtown Pittsburgh that surrounded it represented the epicenter of a Northern culture of progress, of industry, and of wealth, but, unlike so many of his native countrymen, he saw no good in these things, only repugnant ills. Pittsburgh is nothing less than “the symbol of brutal power and strength.” It is “the very quick of the nightmare, in the crucible where all values are reduced to slag.” If Paris for Hemingway is a moveable feast (Miller, who is probably America’s greatest Francophile, would most likely agree), then Pittsburgh for Miller is a moveable $4.99 buffet. Here one could get a taste of all the trite, materialistic, quotidian, mediocre, monotonous, unimaginative dullness that defines the American spirit. I suppose the best thing Miller might say about Pittsburgh is that one would have a considerable choice of bridges from which to jump, if one was so inclined.
Miller had become famous (or infamous, depending, essentially, on whether one considered his “broaches” of decency literary or pornographic) in the thirties for publishing his first autobiographical novel, Tropic of Cancer (1934), which focuses on his first few years in Paris, in his mid-forties, trying to write, and Black Spring (1936) and Tropic of Capricorn (1939?), both of which shift back to New York, from youth in Brooklyn to the time he finally left, with ten dollars in his pockets, to France (none of these books were officially published in the U.S. until the sixties, when a Supreme Court ruling overturned claims against their obscenity). His writing in these earlier books is wild, flitting hurriedly from subject to subject, from screw to screw, not quite in a so-called “stream of consciousness,” but in something more like springs of consciousness. Jumping unexpectedly, almost wildly, from thought to thought, fairly tripping over himself to get to the next memory, to the next encounter with the next crackpot schemer, a skittish, volatile, zealous (if not one-sided) conversation he is having with the reader, Miller will burst forth regularly with an exuberance, un unmistakable joyousness when he has really hit on something that enraptures him. His voice (in virtually all of his work, but in the Tropics and Black Spring especially) is that of a man always teetering on the edge between the monotonous, in his daily searches for food and money, and raw and total transcendence.
In the Tropics and Black Spring Miller explored the almost total submersion of fiction into autobiography. Of course, writing novels subjectively was nothing new. Robinson Crusoe, after all, was written from the poor shipwrecked man’s perspective. More recently, though, one of the central tenets of what we recognize as “Modernism” was the move towards psychological realism, most prominently in the form of the “stream of consciousness” of writers like Joyce, Virginia Woolf, and, perhaps to a lesser extent, Henry James. But Miller does something quite different. He no longer feels the need to put up fictive pretences; his novels would be told from his own point of view, culled from scattered memories, so they wind up being themselves scattered, somewhat random affairs, leaping without notice from one memory to the next, commenting on them, then suddenly going in a completely different direction, only to come back to the idea he was originally on.
But more than anything, Miller breaks away from Modernism and other literary pretences by presenting himself as a man, entirely, and thoroughly, with all of the sex and all of the desires that make up a man, no matter how much more literary authors, no matter how daring, might rather keep out of literature. What Miller wants is life, through and through. But life is not ordered or rational, and the best we can do to make sense of it, Miller’s writings suggest, is to stick with the Socratic dictum for transcendent self-knowledge.
It is in Capricorn that Miller begins to be direct and explicit about his loathing of America, because he sees it as having fostered no artistic abilities in him, having discouraged every last shred of individual creative will he might have had and constantly trying to submerge him into the death world of work and family and buying and selling:
I can think of no street in America, or of people inhabiting such a street, capable of leading one on toward the discovery of the self. I have walked the streets in many countries of the world but nowhere have I felt so degraded and humiliated as in America. I think of all the streets in America as forming a huge cesspool, a cesspool of the spirit in which everything is sucked down and drained away to everlasting shit. Over this cesspool the spirit of work weaves a magic wand; palaces and factories spring up side by side, and munition plants and chemical works and steel mills and sanatoriums and prisons and insane asylums. The whole continent is a nightmare producing the greatest misery of the greatest number.
Essentially, The Air-Conditioned Nightmare is a further exploration of this sort of landscape. In Capricorn America, or more accurately, New York (in Nightmare he calls it “the most horrible place on God’s earth,” though he hadn’t been to Pittsburgh yet) is a menace, to be sure, but it is a kind of lurking menace, eclipsed by the (mostly) lusty history of the author-character Henry Miller. His everyday thoughts, reminiscenceses and ideas, not to mention his worries, are the focal point of the novel, forming a disconnected web of many genres, whose breadth (if not always its intellectual content) is astounding. In his earlier works, Miller is willing to have his narrative become subsumed by its excesses; but it is never entirely submerged. That is, what I am calling the excesses of the novel – his wide-ranging, complex network of memories, philosophies, rants, dreams, and, most famously, elicit sexual escapades – constantly threaten to render the overarching narrative moot. And yet he always comes back to the narrative, even if he has to kick himself to remember to get back to the story. Nightmare, though, puts aside the author-character Henry Miller and instead approaches America as the main character, as a living monster, breathing out the polluted fumes of “fatuous optimism” and phony democracy. America is the antagonist always lurking in the wings, and the few good guys Miller finds are the aesthetes, the artists, the visionaries, who constantly struggle against it, mostly in vain. The whole work is, in a sense, excess. There is no proper narrative in Nightmare, the author-character Henry Miller is now just the author, and there is, probably to some readers’ dismay, no sex whatsoever.
Miller places the pretenses (as in the Tropics and Black Spring) towards fiction – or at least a kind of fictive mode – aside in Nightmare. More or less, the book alternates between poetic, fairly rapturous appraisals of some of the colorful individuals whose paths he crosses, and acidic condemnations for the rest of humanity, for their lack of such ingenuity, such mettle.
Though Miller does exude a crotchetiness in Nightmare that can wear even the heartiest fan down, the joyousness – his happiness is that of a relatively average guy with a knack for words that is pretty well in love with living – that can be found all over his earlier works does come through here, when he really gets going. And anything can set Miller going: exclamation points abound if he even thinks about Jewish rye bread; or his unconditional, wholehearted appraisal of Beauford DeLaney’s life and paintings; or the way he can’t ever get quite enough of Ramakrishna, a nineteenth century Bengali regarded by many of the Hindu faith as a prophet. Those close to Miller cannot say enough about his joie de vivre. Alfred Perlès, in his account My Friend, Henry Miller, covering his years in Paris, fairly gushes over Miller’s infectious zest for really living which, according to Perlès, includes a lot of wine, a lot of sex, and a whole lot of talk.
Nightmare’s esteem for the truly happy life, the aesthetic life, the one lived outside the boundaries of middle-class normalcy, is also lived outside of politics, even outside of history. Miller avoids these subjects, and the steadfast, fervent apolitical stance that he maintains throughout his career renders that very apoliticalness political. Reading through the Nightmare, you’d never know the second world war was on, just as reading Cancer, you’d never know the Depression was hitting Europe at all. In Nightmare, he essentially brushes off America’s history of slavery, ignores the scope of the war that caused him to leave Europe, and even, quite unbelievably, praises to high heavens France’s bravery, of all things – and this in 1940-41! Most of his contemporaries lambasted him for his pacifism and his refusal to allow current events to infiltrate his art in any way. It was George Orwell who was the first major critic to realize Miller’s worth in his excellent essay in 1934, “Inside the Whale.” Orwell himself, just a year earlier, had published his first novel, Down and Out in Paris and London, which resembles Cancer in that it is an autobiographical novel about living in poverty, though it has none of the sexual sordidness of Cancer, and Orwell is actually willing to get a job. So Orwell saw in Miller a natural ally, someone who was willing to describe the “ordinary man” in all of his glory, or, perhaps more realistically, his lack of it. Orwell defends Miller’s distaste for politics by posing Miller as just such an ordinary man, as a representative for the masses of people who are, by and large, relatively unaffected in their daily lives by war. The artist need not be concerned with politics and with history because, if his art is to convey the life of the ordinary man, then detailing sex, wine, and food cannot be morally reprehensible – it is merely being honest.
If Miller is not dealing with history in the sense of a sequence of large public events, he is dealing with a new kind of history – the history of the individual, a sequence of private, personal events. He works not with a history of man, but with the history of a man. In Black Spring he writes, “I can not forget that I am making history, a history on the side which, like a chancre, will eat away the other meaningless history. I regard myself not as a book, a record, a document, but as a history of our time – a history of all time.” Miller chronicles himself. Charting his own life, giving the fullest picture of himself, shaping, editing, adding to the totality of the portrait of a man-character named Henry Miller, is the object of his life’s work; to sketch, as fully as possible, the life of an individual, from youth to death. Miller exposes, as his life (that is to say, his art) progresses, an increasingly clear portrait of Henry Miller. It is in the private life, and all that comes with it, where we can find the human history that happens beneath the cold facts of public events, told in conventional history books. For Miller, these things – wars, elections, revolutions, strikes – will pass. With time they will become academic. What really matters, all that really matters, is being able to convey the events of the creative mind.
In this sense, perhaps ironically, Henry Miller carries a classic American Emersonianism, in his self-reliance, and his insistence on the transcendence of the aesthetic mind. In his essay “History,” Emerson writes, “All history becomes subjective; in other words, there is properly no history, only biography.” Influenced by the Hindu notion of atman, or the collective self that is common to all the world, Emerson here means that history is not the story of some aliens, foreign in place and time, unconnected to us; rather, we are all connected by our humanity. At the very end of “History” Emerson calls for the future necessity of someone like Miller:
Broader and broader we must write our annals – from an ethical reformation, from an influx of the ever new, ever sanative conscience – if we would trulier express our central and wide-related nature, instead of this old chronology of selfishness and pride to which we have too long lent our eyes. Already that day exists for us, shines in on us unawares, but the path of science and of letters is not the way into nature. The idiot, the Indian, the child and unschooled farmer’s boy stand nearer to the light by which nature is to be read, than the dissector or the antiquary.
Miller is very much the kind of “historian,” in certain significant ways, that Emerson prophesies here. Despite Miller’s apparent “anti-American” perspective, he is nonetheless a sort of classic American: he is tired of the traditional ways of doing business, so to speak, and looks forward, much like Emerson did, to a future “Kingdom of Man,” a Nietzschean revaluation of all values, which he calls for in Nightmare. It seems apparent that Miller sees himself as one diplomat for that future kingdom. In such a place, only the creative individual matters, and all people have overcome silly things like war and violence, so as to focus on the more resilient and lasting creation of art.
Pittsburgh, though, is certainly not the place where this Kingdom of Man would be founded. But it is not just Henry Miller who thinks of Pittsburgh as the epitome of infamy, or of indecency: Orwell too seems to agree. In Down and Out, the narrator, working in the impossibly hot kitchen of a fancy Parisian hotel that caters mostly to foreigners, is disgusted by many of the patrons:
I imagine that the customers at the Hôtel X were especially easy to swindle, for they were mostly Americans, with a sprinkling of English – no French – and seemed to know nothing whatever about good food. They would stuff themselves with disgusting American “cereals,” and marmalade at tea, and drink vermouth after dinner, and order a poulet à la reine at a hundred francs and then souse it in Worcester sauce. One customer, from Pittsburg (sic), dined every night in his bedroom on grape-nuts, scrambled eggs and cocoa. Perhaps it hardly matters whether such people are swindled or not.
While I am not suggesting – tempting though it may be at times, especially considering the drivers – that Miller’s disgust with Pittsburgh would still be justifiable today, I do want to suggest that his quasi-mystical vision for a new way of life, for overcoming things like wars and even nations in favor of the genuinely spiritual life of the mind, is actually useful in forging a kind of future vision for a small city like Pittsburgh. For my own part, I think the best way to distinguish ourselves from other small, struggling cities is not to try to appeal to suburban crowds; that is, Pittsburgh doesn’t need casinos and it doesn’t need monstrous municipal projects – I refuse to call them “improvements,” like South Side Works, which is just a suburban mall without a roof, or the proposed underground tunnel connecting Downtown and the North Side when they’re already connected by three pedestrian-friendly bridges – but rather, to invest the resources that we have into young artists and younger urban planners to work on projects and real improvements (let’s start with cleaning the garbage off the sidewalks even in neighborhoods where white people don’t live) that appeal to the citizens of Pittsburgh that actually live in the city. While Miller’s characterization of Pittsburgh might be unfair today, let’s not prove him right, in the long-run, but replacing the old soot and smoke with ignorance and defeatism. While we’re on the subject of Henry’s: to borrow from Henry VI, the first thing we do, let’s kill all the Pittsburgh old guard, and get completely fresh, new blood in town, and to run it.
Daniel Wollenberg is an ordinary man. At several months old, he had a starring role on One Life to Live and had a kissing scene with Judith Light. He is a doctoral candidate at the University of Pittsburgh for medieval romance and some other fourteenth-century stuff. He anxiously awaits the Kingdom of Man, hoping to find it in Brooklyn, where he is currently relocating. While he will miss Pittsburgh, he really can no longer live without decent bagels.