Books: Aphrodite Ascending

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Chicago was "a vast, unorganized lunatic asylum." There Author Miller saw an Indian, in full regalia, selling snake oil in the shadow of "the great monument to chewing-gum lit up by floodlights." On a wall was chalked, in letters ten feet high: GOOD NEWS! GOD IS LOVE! In Milwaukee and St. Louis (where "the true morbidity of the American soul finds its outlet"), the houses "seemed to have been decorated with rust, blood, tears, sweat, bile, rheum and elephant dung." Pittsburgh was "the crucible where all values are reduced to slag." Detroit "can do in a week for the white man what the South couldn't do in 100 years to the Negro." "The most typical American city" was Cleveland. "Possessing all the . . . prerequisites for life, it remains . . . dead."

Ghoulish Sororities. Americans, Author Miller found, were much like their cities. The young men were "mild, bland, pseudo-serious ... as though turned out by a university with the aid of a chain-store cloak and suit house." The middle-aged were "puffy, wattle-faced, [filling] the land with prosperous, restless, empty-headed, idle-handed widows who gang together in ghoulish sororities. . . ." The aged were "horrible living examples of the embalmer's art."

"The most boring group in all communities were the university professors—and their wives." American mural paintings were "even below the esthetic level of the Arrow collar artist." The work of 1941's successful applicants for Guggenheim Fellowships included: "The recording, translating and annotating of the Hudhud, a series of epics chanted as work songs and at death wakes by the Ifugaos, a pagan, terrace-building people of the Philippine Islands"; "A comparative cyto-histological study of the meri-stems of buds and of tropical ferns, gym-nosperms and woody angiosperms"; "A comparative investigation of the neuropsychological determinants of the phenomena of dissociation"; "A spectroscopic study and analysis of gases of the volcano Mauna Loa." Says Miller (who was refused a Guggenheim): "A corn-fed hog enjoys a better life [in the U.S.] than a creative writer, painter or musician. To be a rabbit is better still."

Ray of Hope. But one section of his native land pleased Miller: the South. There he discovered America's only "characters." No other people of any age, concludes Author Miller, have woven "such a dull, monotonous fabric of life as 'here in America. . . ." But there is a ray of hope: "We have a few years ahead of us, and then . . . the whole planet will be in the throes of revolution. . . . Fires will rage until the very foundations of this present world crumble. Then we shall see who has life, the life more abundant."