Remember to Remember

Billed as the second volume of The Air-Conditioned Nightmare, the 1947 collection actually runs on homesickness. The long title essay is Miller's love letter to France, written when the war had made return impossible and the Paris decade had begun to feel like a previous life: the streets, the poverty, the friendships, the whole education in living that America, in his accounting, could not have provided at any price. It stands with the best of his Paris writing precisely because Paris is out of reach in it.

Around the centerpiece, the American survey continues: loving portraits of artists Miller championed — the mosaic-boat builder Jean Varda, the painter Beauford Delaney — the essay 'The Staff of Life,' his half-comic, wholly serious demolition of American bread as the white-flour proof of a civilization's decline, and 'Obscenity and the Law of Reflection,' his most sustained answer to the censors who had kept his major books contraband for over a decade. The mix is the middle Miller entire: rage and reverence, bread and metaphysics, in the same shopping bag.

The title essay leads: France remembered at book length, from the vantage of a postwar America that had never felt less like home. Then the gallery — Varda the scavenger-genius of the California coast, Beauford Delaney glowing in his Greene Street studio — and the polemics: 'The Staff of Life,' in which the state of American bread convicts the entire civilization, and 'Obscenity and the Law of Reflection,' Miller's considered case against censorship, written by its most famous target.

Read the title essay when you have a quiet evening; read 'The Staff of Life' when you need to laugh at a jeremiad that happens to be right.