Current & Various

LA BATARDE by Violette Leduc. 488 pages. Farrar, Straus & Giroux. $6.95.

Violette Leduc is 58 and, by her own admission, illegitimate, ugly and homosexual. She has managed to put all these dubious assets to some use: she is a writer of autobiographies, of which La Batarde, her fifth, was a considerable success in existential circles. It is a success based not on wit, wisdom or literary grace but on the unpleasant pleasure many people find in watching someone else behave shamelessly. Violette Leduc, shameless to the point of masochism, confesses to her greed and petty thievery, her gluttony, her love of begging and pleading, her torturing of others, her self-obsessive use of sex. "Violette Leduc weeps, exults, and trembles with her ovaries," writes Simone de Beauvoir in her introduction. Ovaries may not be exactly the word, but there is plenty of weeping and trembling.

THE SYSTEM OF DANTE'S HELL by LeRoi Jones. 154 pages. Grove Press. $3.95.

LeRoi Jones has a beard, a gigantic grievance collection, and a notion that he is the Jonathan Swift of the Ne gro revolution. But Swift's excremental visions were elaborated by his intellect; Jones's explosive expressions proceed from a simpler impulse. In The Toilet, his most effective play, the action transpires in a latrine. And in this book, described on the dust jacket as an autobiography, he announces aggressively: "This thing, if you read it, will jam your face in my --." It will indeed. On almost every page, Author Jones, who is now 31 years old, makes reference to evacuation--generally to some form of erotic evacuation. The filth is rationalized as social protest and enshrined in religious allegory: Jones explicitly identifies himself with Dante ("Dante, me") and describes his life as a Dantesque descent into a hell called America, in which the devil is a white man and his victims are all Negroes named LeRoi Jones.

CORK STREET, NEXT TO THE HATTER'S by Pamela Hansford Johnson. 274 pages. Scribner's. $4.95.

Pamela Hansford Johnson is the wife of C. P. Snow, and a novelist in her own right--mostly on the light side. In her present book, she lampoons pop culture, black comedy, lady poetasters and the criminal mind. Several of the characters appeared in her earlier books, The Unspeakable Skipton and Night and Silence Who Is Here? The comedy is very high. In fact, so high it is almost invisible.

A PECULIAR SERVICE by Corey Ford. 358 pages. Little, Brown. $6.75.

The U.S. spy apparatus now known as the Central Intelligence Agency had a Revolutionary War ancestor called the Culper Ring. America's first espionage agents--a whaler, a tavern keeper, a Quaker merchant, Schoolmaster Nathan Hale--were very ingenuous spies. The members referred to each other by numbers, wrote their messages to General Washington in disappearing ink called Sympathetic Stain, and were totally hangdog about their calling. "I've lived four years of my life in fear," one of them is supposed to have said, "and I'll live the rest of it in shame." Author Corey Ford, who is best known as a humorist (The Horse of Another Color, Never Say Diet), has conscientiously researched his story about the origins of U.S. espionage. His thoroughness is laudable. But the Culper Ring just did not do enough spying to fill a book.

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