With Charity Toward None: A Fond Look at Misanthropy.

Florence King contends it's okay to be misanthropic. We live in what she calls "the Republic of Nice," in which it is important to appear pleasant and likable and caring, a pose that imposes strains and creates hypocrisy. Niceness as practiced by Americans is a festival of misanthropy denied," she writes. "Our feminized niceness has mired us in a soft, sickly, helpless tolerance of everything." In this atmosphere you're always being tested for niceness, and your politics becomes an easy index of your concern for humanity. The safest course is to subscribe to as many liberal causes as you possibly can.

With Charity Toward None is a sort of assertiveness-training course for victims of niceness. Miss King takes quick dyspeptic glances at modem manners and provides case studies of such putative misanthropes of literature and history as Timon of Athens, Fisher Ames, Rousseau, Flaubert, Alceste, Nixon, Gordon Liddy, Coriolanus, Dian Fossey, Anatole France, Ayn Rand, Celine, Ty Cobb, Irving Berlin, James Gould Cozzens, Ambrose Bierce, and Jonathan Odell. Glad to report I didn't make the list.

Bierce comes closest to her beau ideal. He despised the human race with pitiless wit-and I do mean the whole human race, and I do mean pitiless. He disowned a son, who later killed himself; Bierce kept the young man's cremated remains in a cigar box on his desk.

Today misanthropy is in disrepute, so we bottle it up, but it comes out in veiled form in such moralistic hostilities as those of environmentalists and anti-smokers and various political dogooders who, as they say, love humanity and hate people. Miss lung merely wishes they would be franker about their malevolence. She wittily offers frank misanthropy as a valid alternative lifestyle for those who have had it with perpetually aiming to please, and she detests the false "friendliness" of advertisers and politicians.

I understand. This has always been a national problem. Tocqueville noticed that in a commercial democracy like ours, where status is fluid and therefore insecure, good manners are more prevalent than in, say, a feudal society, where neither duke nor peasant can be easily demoted. But having to please everyone gets to be a psychic burden, as when Willy Loman devotes his life to being "well liked." And most of us long at times for the freedom to be a curmudgeon, a breed we envy and cherish, even if we prefer W. C. Fields to Bierce.

But there's a difference between a curmudgeon and a real misanthrope, and Miss King seems to confuse the two things. She says the real monsters of history-men like Caligula, Stalin, and Hitler-weren't true misanthropes. She may have a point, but I'm not sure what it is. I suppose political success requires social skills the misanthrope despises, and he tends to be reclusive. Anyway, bombing a city doesn't mean you hate the whole human race, or even the people you bomb. These things are usually done with professions of hope for the good of mankind, which may even be sincere. As Miss lung says, "It is not necessary to like people to respect them." And it's not necessary to hate them in order to kill them.

With Charity Toward None is a highly humorous book, maybe a little too humorous. Much of the time it wants to say serious things, but it says them with a somewhat relentless jocularity that keeps taking everything back, or at least forbidding you to hold the author to her words.

In this Miss King is like P. J. O'Rourke, another witty writer who, though often very funny, doesn't know when to quit and comes perilously close to turning everything into a gag. This tendency sounds almost ingratiating and undermines the book. The tone that says just kidding" is uncomfortably close to niceness. It shows a lack of misanthropic conviction.

The book would have been funnier if it had been less self-consciously humorous. Miss lung's remarks on Ayn Rand and Celine are especially perceptive, and suggest that she could plumb much deeper into her theme if she wanted to. Anyone with her sense of humor doesn't have to make a constant effort to amuse. She's bound to do it anyway, and the laughs might be richer if they were spaced more unexpectedly.

But she has her own way of seeing things, and every sentence is all hers. This book's flaws don't include dullness.