Books: Miller Expurgated

THE HENRY MILLER READER (397 pp.)—Edited by Lawrence Durrell—New Directions ($6.50).

Readers who know Henry Miller only by his reputation as the bogeyman of the U.S. Bureau of Customs generally are surprised to discover that in many ways the man is as moralistic as Cotton Mather, and not much more interested in writing fiction. He seems incapable of composing more than half a dozen pages of narrative without dribbling off into the cosmic. In the present collection—largely a sampling of the literary glue that holds together the naughty passages of such works as Tropic of Cancer, Sexus, and Plexus—he interrupts a...