Assistant Executioner

ROCKING THE BOAT [300 pp.)--Gore Vidal--Little, Brown ($5.00).

With the publication of this wistfully titled collection of literary and political essays, Gore Vidal must be acknowledged the nation's foremost boy of letters. The office is an honorable one, having been held previously by Truman Capote, Scott

Fitzgerald and Stephen Crane--although it is true that both Crane and Fitzgerald relinquished the honor in their mid-twenties and went on to man's literary estate, while Vidal, at the moment of his elevation, is 36. The new boy earned his rank by writing, before he was 30, eight throbbing novels (the most notable, The City and the Pillar, was the warmly sympathetic apologia of a tennis player who liked tennis players much better than he liked playing tennis), and then chucked it all to write for television. This dramatic renunciation--Rimbaud would never have gone into gunrunning if there had been television to write for--had its purgative effect, and Vidal soon became the author of three successful Broadway farces (Visit to a Small Planet, The Best Man, Romulus).

Constant Grin. Now, once again, Vidal shows exceptional promise in a new literary line. His reviews and essays do not, of course, rock the boat enough to alarm the passengers. But to politics, for instance, Vidal brings the useful viewpoint of a fascinated outsider-insider (he is the grandson of the late Thomas P. Gore of Oklahoma, U.S. Senator from 1907 to 1937, and in 1960 he himself ran for Congress as a Democrat in a Republican upstate New York district). He observes that since F.D.R. set the fashion, all U.S. politicians must grin constantly in public; he recalls having a thoughtful conversation with Harry Truman at a public dinner, when suddenly, "though his tone did not change, his face jerked abruptly into a euphoric grin, all teeth showing. I thought he had gone mad, until I noticed photographers in the middle distance." An interview with Barry Goldwater is an excellent example of that 20th century refinement of reporting, the fairminded, objective machine-gunning.

Vidal can be even better writing about literature. He ticks off one of Broadway's more annoying current mannerisms: "Just name your problem, sit back, and let love solve it: race prejudice, foreign relations --even Job reeling beneath the unkind attentions of a dubious Yale God gets off the hook at the end through Love, which has now replaced the third-act marines of a simpler time." And in a piece lamenting a supposed decline in satire, he proposes an excellent canon for satirists in an age that has gone mushy with tolerance: "As long as any group within the society deliberately maintains its identity, it is, or should be, a fair target for satire, both for its own good and for society's."

Skimped Work. This is his best, and if his average were anywhere near his best, he might stand a chance of becoming the assistant official-- executioner of belles-lettres--a kind of minor Mary McCarthy. But the odds are not favorable. No essay in the book glitters from beginning to end. There are large patches of swampy thinking and flaccid writing; what the reader sees is not Vidal the reformed television hack, but Vidal the unregenerate TV personality, amiably paying for skimped work in the false currency of charm. Example: "Politically, to make an atrocious pun, Dos Passes is for the Byrds."

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.