Pangs and Needles

REFLECTIONS UPON A SINKING SHIP by Gore Vidal. 255 pages. Little, Brown. $5.95.

Put a toga and a wreath on Gore Vidal and he could pass as a Roman at Nero's court. You know, the cheerfully disillusioned fellow in the corner who always said the empire would come to a bad end and--now that the fire has started--is absolutely the life of the party.

Nobody can beat the exhilaration of a pessimist who thinks the end-time has come. Writing slightly bad-tasting novels (Myra Breckinridge) and bland-tasting plays (Visit to a Small Planet) is just the start for Vidal. He keeps busy as an opinion maker, staging shoot-outs with William Buckley on TV and churning out some of the liveliest doomsday journalism ever, mostly in today's essay form, the book review.

One imagines Vidal pressing these occasional pieces into hard covers, pronouncing them a book, then hurrying back to the new novel. The irony is that, like Norman Mailer and James Baldwin among others, Vidal is more "creative" at nonfiction than fiction. The tart, slight, often exquisite perceptions in this book--concentrated as sour fruit drops--are really his forte.

Decline of the Best. As he watches the sun slowly set on Western civilization, Vidal, scribbling his epitaphs in the shape of aphorisms, could hardly glow more brightly. Nothing is beyond his sardonic appreciation: the Kennedys, Tarzan, the 29th Republican Convention, Susan Sontag, pornography.

A sort of well-informed aloofness is the secret of the Vidal all-purpose style.

He writes about live people rather as if they were dead and dead people rather as if they were alive. He approaches American politics like an alert observer from a foreign--and slightly hostile--country ("American Empire" is one of his favorite phrases). On the subject of sex, he scarcely seems to belong to the human race at all, doing a marvelous impersonation of an anthropologist from Mars on a friendly but clinical visit.

Vidal is his own best act, and he does show off. He cannot defend homosexuality without name-dropping Apuleius, making sly references to the Spartans, and advising the reader to check his concept of masculinity against circuitous quotations from the Apocrypha (Il Maccabees 4: 7-15). Even in the midst of considering children's literature, the portentous generalization can tempt him: "In the last fifty years we have contributed relatively little in the way of new ideas of any sort. From radar to rocketry, we have had to rely on other societies" etc., etc. Sarcasm betrays him into rhetorical flourishes: Lyndon Johnson is "the Great Khan at Washington"; objection to John O'Hara's handling of sex is archly laid to the "Good Gray Geese of the press."

Maverick Lemming. But Vidal allows neither exhibitionism nor malice to keep him from his duties as journalist. Vidal did a flagrant hatchet job on the Kennedys; but he is also highly informative not only about the Kennedy family but about politicians in general and how they behave in the pursuit of power. He is wickedly funny about Henry Miller, who has rarely received a sharper or a fairer reading.

Vidal thinks of himself as a liberal--or, as he prefers to put it, a "maverick lemming." In fact, he is more nearly a conservative, with a taste for tradition in literature and privilege in life. He conveys the oddly patrician appeal of an elegant and unabashed snob and he has the patrician's special toughness.

If the ship does sink, don't worry about old Gore. He'll be the dandy in the stern of the lifeboat, carefully keeping his Italian shoes above the bilge water, still addressing his beautifully shaped, never-flagging thoughts to no one in particular while the rest of the survivors bail. No matter. He is useful, even if he keeps half the passengers alive by sheer irritation. No sinking ship would be complete without him.

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