The Air-Conditioned Nightmare; Remember to Remember, Henry Miller. Published by New Directions, New York, 1945; 1947. First Editions in First state dustjacket with $3.50 price and without photo on rear. 8vo up to 9½” tall. 292pp., 427pp. Tiny inked name to free endpapers. residue tape marks inside jackets from removed plastic covers. In very good condition.
The Air-Conditioned Nightmare is Henry Miller’s memoir of his year-long road trip across the United States in 1940, following his return from nearly a decade living in Paris. Miller did not form a favorable impression of America, considering it cruel and sterile. “Nowhere have I encountered such a dull, monotonous fabric of life as here in America,” he writes in the book’s opening pages. “What we dream we become,” he laments. “We’ll learn how to annihilate the whole planet in the wink of an eye—just wait and see.” “As to whether I have been deceived, disillusioned…the answer is yes, I suppose,” Miller acknowledges. “I had the misfortune to be nourished by the dreams and visions of great Americans—the poets and seers. Some other breed of man has won out.”
Remember to Remember is a collection of essays including two of Henry Miller’s greatest essays: “Murder the Murderer” (on war), a declaration which ranks with Randolph Bourne’s War and the Intellectuals, and, with particular relevance to the censorship codes which kept his Tropics of Cancer and Capricorn out of this country for so long, “Obscenity and the Law of Reflection.”
