eastside living LA

THE END OF THE GREAT AMERICAN ROAD TRIP?

Henry Miller’s Prescient Journey.

By Eric B. Ross

Photo by Kathleen Hirai

Henry Miller definitely had a reputation. He was best known, by those who didn’t read him, as a writer of pornography – but he himself said, “I am for obscenity and against pornography,” and most people probably never actually read him. His most famous book, Tropic of Cancer – which Nobel laureate Samuel Beckett described as “a momentous event in the history of modern writing” – was not even published in the United States until 1961, when he was 70 years old. (To be fair, though it was probably being read for “the good bits,” Tropic did hit the New York Times’ bestseller list at the time). In his books such as The Rosy Crucifixion and Quiet Days in Clichy, he revealed himself to be a veritable Margaret Mead of copulatory rituals – in which, as a participant observer, he was an unrepentant empiricist. 

Others thought of him as apolitical, but this was not entirely true.  Politics per se certainly didn’t interest him and he could sometimes be a bit obtuse about its complexities, but he could observe the emptiness and despair of capitalist society like no one else in his time, in a way that should earn him a permanent place in the critique of modern capitalism. It may seem strange (but, perhaps not; Miller was apparently a member of the Socialist Party in his youth) but we can see decided parallels between Miller’s vision of the States in the thirties and some of Marx’s most prescient observations in the Communist Manifesto. Think of his comment on how, under capitalism, “All fixed, fast frozen relations, with their train of ancient and venerable prejudices and opinions, are swept away, all new-formed ones become antiquated before they can ossify. All that is solid melts into air, all that is holy is profaned, and man is at last compelled to face with sober senses his real condition of life and his relations with his kind.” Enter Henry Miller, writing almost exactly a century later, on the heels of his return to the U.S. after a decade in France.  

Miller and a friend set off in late 1940 in a used Buick sedan to cross America, from New York to Los Angeles. His description of that surreal road-trip, in a book he called The Air-Conditioned Nightmare, may be the greatest road trip ever described. Certainly the chapter, “Automotive Passacaglia” is an astonishing piece of writing about the psychological perversities of the automobile as a metaphor for America. But, precisely because the car symbolized the realities of “the American dream” for Miller, it is also a fleshing out of Marx’s terrifying picture of a world in which “all that is solid melts into the air.” Thus, Miller says, at one point, that, while  foreigners saw in the car the icon of modern paradise in the United States, “they don’t see the bitterness in the heart, the skepticism, the cynicism, the emptiness, the sterility, the despair, the hopelessness which is eating up the American worker.” Driving across the continent, Miller saw a world where, “without a Coca-Cola life is unthinkable.” He was unimpressed by the material side of American life, with its superficial hopes and aspirations. “What have we to offer the world,” he asked, “besides the superabundant loot which we recklessly plunder from the earth under the maniacal delusion that this insane activity represents progress and enlightenment?”  When the ad one day said, “I’d like to buy the world a coke,” he would have seen it as a threat, not a kindness.

Miller saw this personified by the car – and by Walt Disney, whom he described as “the master of the nightmare…Disney works fast –like greased lightning. That’s how we’ll all operate soon. What we dream we become. We’ll get the knack of it soon. We’ll learn how to annihilate the whole planet in the wink of an eye – just wait and see.” It took a while, but we may just about have done it. Imagine what he would have written if he had encountered Ken Lay or Bernie Madoff. But, he didn’t have to. As each of their pernicious, conceited scams came to light, our newspapers have reacted as if a new planet had been discovered somewhere beyond Pluto. But Miller always knew they were there. “We have two American flags always,” he wrote, “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.” 

Two flags and, needless to say, two types of automobile. According to a recent story in the business section of the Dallas Morning News, “at least 40 million used vehicles are sold annually in the U.S. – a huge, lucrative market that’s three times the size of the new-vehicle market.” What did Madoff drive? The New York Times reports that his brokerage firm – through which he stole more loot that GM needs to restore itself to financial stability – leased six cars, including a 2007 Land Rover Range Rover, a 2008 Cadillac DTS, a 2009 Mercedes, a 2007 Mercedes S550, a 2008 Mercedes GL450 sport-utility vehicle and a 2006 Lexus. 

Janis Joplin knew what was going on when she sang a hillbilly’s lament, “Oh lord, won’t you buy me a Mercedes Benz?” In this country, if you’re poor, you may end up living in a car (as Dennis Kucinich’s family once did). If you’re rich, an expensive car is less about mobility than it is a traveling advertisement of your apparent success.  So, Henry Miller drove cross-country in a second-hand Buick, wondering how to pay for gas, worrying when it over-heated as he crossed the Rockies, accused of being a pornographer, while con-men like Madoff – who truly embody the American dream – drive around in other peoples’ life savings. That’s how our system has worked until now. But, the great American road trip may soon be over…

An anthropologist who has recently returned to the States after 27 years, Eric B. Ross is currently a Visiting Professor of Anthropology and International Development Studies at The George Washington University in Washington, D.C.  He is also the editor and chief author of The Porcupine, a new on-line magazine of irascible political commentary.

He can be reached at ross@iss.nl

www.theporcupine.org