THE SMILE AT THE FOOT OF THE LADDER (125 pp.)Henry MillerDuell, Sloan & Pearce ($5).
When Henry Miller's first novel, Tropic of Cancer, came out in Paris in 1931, it was greeted with shocked silence, snickers, or the sound of licking lips. Its admirers took its weedy profusion of four-letter words for daring wit and convention-defying "art." Miller became the hero of Bohemian barflies and Greenwich Villagers everywhere.
Actually, there were two Millers: one was a foul-mouthed exhibitionist who admitted his reputation for using "obscene language more freely and abundantly than any other living writer in the English language"; the other was...