'Essays' offers glimpse of Vidal

THE SELECTED ESSAYS OF GORE VIDAL, edited by Jay Parini, Doubleday, 458 pages, $27.

Gore Vidal is known by many as "America's premier man of letters."

He is a novelist, playwright, critic, screenwriter, memoirist, commentator and essayist. Out of perhaps 200 of his essays, the editor has selected 25 to be included in this volume — just enough to whet the appetite.

The essays display Vidal's widespread interest in just about everything and his unequaled talent in reviewing, political commentary, memoir, portraiture and occasionally, just plain "score settling."

Vidal is a man of vast learning, subtle wit and a huge ego. He was 19 years old and serving in the army when his first novel, "Williwaw," was published. Twenty-two more novels followed, including "Myra Breckenridge," plus five plays, many screenplays and a number of short stories.

Opening this book is one of his best-known essays, "Novelists and Critics of the 1940s," written in 1953, in which Vidal demonstrates his prominent prejudice against academicians acting as critics. He refers to these critics as "bookish men" who make "erratic judgments" and cultivate "a sense of complacency."

According to Vidal, there is a difference "between the reviewers for popular newspapers and magazines, whom no one interested in literature reads, and the serious critics of the Academy, who write for one another in the quarterlies and, occasionally, for the public in the Sunday supplements."

Vidal also argued that critics "go about dismantling the text with the same rapture that their simpler brothers experience while taking apart combustion engines: inveterate tinkerers both, solemnly playing with what has been invented by others for use, not analysis."

Vidal even named Carson McCullers, Paul Bowles, Truman Capote, Ernest Hemingway and William Faulkner as examples of great novelists who never graduated from a university.

In a piece written in 1973, Vidal decried the "Top Ten Best-Sellers," criticizing such books as Herman Wouk's "The Winds of War," 885 pages. Wouk, wrote Vidal, made "strange assumptions" about President Franklin D. Roosevelt, saying he "wore pince-nez glasses in imitation of his great relative, President Teddy Roosevelt" and also imitated TR's "booming manly manner and prissy, Harvard accent."