How to Spoil a Dirty Story

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 punctuate the boisterously bawdy anecdotes in Black Spring.

The book consists of ten autobiographical pieces that take Miller from his Brooklyn boyhood through his apprenticeship in a tailor's shop to the hard life of a literary bum in Paris. Bits are wonderfully done with vivid scenes of jazzed-up action, like an early silent movie full of custard pies, female underclothes and slightly zany captions.

But in the 30 years since these exercises were performed, the avant-garde seems to have gone somewhere else. Surrealist painting seems to have joined the art nouveau lamp shade in the attic; surrealism in writing has fared worse. Sample Miller:

"Now I am lost, lost, do you hear? You don't hear? I'm yowling -- don't you hear me? Switch the lights off! Smash the bulbs! Can you hear me now? Louder! you say? Louder! Christ, are you making sport of me? Are you deaf, dumb, and blind? Must I yank my clothes off? Must I dance on my head?"

There are other ways of getting attention.

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