Books: The Dry Pornographer

STAND STILL LIKE THE HUMMINGBIRD (194 pp.)—Henry Wilier—New Directions ($4).

Henry Miller is still the world's most smuggled author—no Sarah Lawrence girl would think of returning to the temperate zones from her junior year abroad without a copy of his still-banned Tropic of Capricorn or Rosy Crucifixion hidden in the soiled laundry. But he is also the author most often skipped. That is to say, the almost unvarying gait for getting through one of Miller's books is: read four pages, skip four pages. Cynics will suggest that this is because the dirty passages in the Tropics or Sexus, Nexus and Plexus come...