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 at four-page intervals. This is shallow thinking. Actually the canny reader skips through Miller not so much to concentrate on naughtiness as to avoid what comes between. What does is ill-written blather on one of two subjects: 1) the downtrodden state of artists in the U.S. (and their uptrodden bliss in Europe), and 2) how the world's troubles would be solved if everyone would be nice to everyone else.

Stand Still Like the Hummingbird is a collection of essays written over the last 30 years, dealing with topics 1 and 2 and designed to demonstrate that Miller is really a serious thinker. But it may well ruin Miller's profitably bad reputation in the U.S. (Tropic of Cancer, free from federal restraint since 1961, is selling hugely, thanks in part to the police chiefs in some 60 communities, who hound it with a righteousness usually reserved for bookmakers who do not pay their protection money.) A random sampling produces: "Fresh from Europe, the American scene held about as much charm for me as a dead rattlesnake lying in the deep freeze. What can possibly give us the idea that we are a vital, lusty, joyous, creative people?'' "The American is an unsocial being who seems to find enjoyment only in the bottle or with his machines." "It is particularly refreshing to observe the remarkable behavior and apparent contentment, often with little, of French children. Wise beyond their years, they seem no less joyous on that account." For a writer, Europe is "undoubtedly more grim, more terrifying, more fecund, and ever so much more real."

Yet this matter of reality is perplexing. The loathsome, reptilian U.S. seems real enough, but the suspicion arises that Miller is rhapsodizing a Europe that never was. Sense and consistency are not what one asks of a polemicist. If his rotten eggs hit their target often enough, it does not matter what else they hit. And some of Miller's past eruptions have spattered the landscape marvelously, affronting puritans by proving the neglected Rabelaisian theorem that fornication can be funny. But more often, as in the present book, what Miller throws is not rotten eggs but gamy generalities (art is good, materialism is bad). His words tumble along at the same daft speed whatever the subject, but Miller, however good a pillowsopher, does not stand up as a thinker.

It is no great distance from youth's naive anger to the flatulence of age; passage of time and belief in one's own guff are all that is needed to turn one into the other. Now, at 70, living in the mountains of California's Big Sur as guru to a small colony of disciples, Miller is quite capable of prating: "It would be a grand thing for any community, large or small, to set aside even five minutes of the day for serious contemplation. If nothing more were to result than the recognition of such a feeling of 'community,' it would be a great step forward.'' The '30s chief literary threat to modesty has become the turbaned exponent of The Power of Positive Plexus.

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