BLACK SPRING (243 pp.) — Henry Miller — Grove ($5).
There is a kind of man who will tell wonderfully funny, dirty stories in a bar and make everybody happy and not a bit ashamed of themselves until the moment comes when he lowers his voice an unctuous octave and reads from a little card on which is printed an inspirational message by, say, Dr. Norman Vincent Peale. The curious effect is to make religion seem a dubious, off-color business, and this is just the effect produced by Henry Miller's divagations into theology that...