Nothing in “A Temple of Texts,” (Alfred A. Knopf, 432 pages,$26.95),the new essay collection from the novelist William Gass, gives a better sense of the author’s sulfurous temperament than his essay on Elias Canetti. It has been a while since any voice was raised in admiration of Canetti: Last fall, the publication in English of his wartime memoirs “Party in the Blitz” was the occasion for widespread attacks on his character and reputation.The book, with its vicious assaults on T.S. Eliot and Canetti’s sometime lover Iris Murdoch, led many eminent critics to reassess their feelings about the Nobel laureate. John Banville spoke of his “cruelty,” Michael Dirda found him “cruel and vindictive,” while Clive James discovered “limitless reserves of envy and recrimination.”

For Mr. Gass, however, writing about Canetti’s earlier trilogy of memoirs in a 1982 essay titled “The Road to the True Book,” the tincture of inhumanity that others see as a blot is a positive attraction. Canetti, Mr. Gass writes, learned from the Viennese satirist Karl Kraus how to “look for human weakness in words, and to demand a style that made no concessions to sect, sex, or marketplace in its pursuit of sincerity, honesty, and truth.” Canetti’s aloofness, on this reading, is not just a personality trait but the badge of a European modernist intensity that has grown unfashionable in our mediocre era. It is not hard to see Mr. Gass’s steely paean to Canetti as an apology for his own angry aspirations:

If he had softened his scorn, rather than giving it a hard and endless edge, or run out of anger like water while fighting a fire, instead of drawing on an abundant store with which to combat the fresh catastrophe each day presents, we would perhaps love him more; because we are flattered by the failings of others; we prefer weakness, especially in our moralists.

Mr. Gass surely remembered those lines with a grim sense of vindication when the reviewers joined in rubbishing “Party in the Blitz.” For “A Temple of Texts” is a beaker of bile, and Mr. Gass knows the pessimist’s great satisfaction of always being proved right. Here is a writer who, listing the 50 books that most influenced his own work, includes Hobbes’s “Leviathan” (where human life was first baptized “nasty, brutish and short”) and Flaubert’s misanthropic masterpiece “Bouvard and Pecuchet” (“a devastation, a blow-up total as the bomb, of our European pretensions to knowledge”).

Throughout “A Temple of Texts,” no matter what the subject, Mr. Gass can always spare the time to note some example of human folly, backwardness, self-seeking, or malice. No wonder the book concludes with an essay on “Evil,” which carries Mr. Gass’s orneriness to the point of curmudgeonly caricature. What other writer today would denounce the automobile as an instrument of evil, not just on account of car crashes and gas guzzling, but for “facilitating adolescent fornication” and encouraging the spread of “hamburger stands”? Mr. Gass, who was born in 1924, sounds here like he was born in 1854, and still can’t get used to the newfangled horseless carriage.

More entertaining and convincing than Mr. Gass’s general complaints about humanity and the age are his specifically literary grievances. Some of the best essays in the book have to do with the mistreatment, neglect, and condescension showed to the novelists Mr. Gass most admires (and resembles): 1960s-era experimentalists like William Gaddis, Stanley Elkin, and John Hawkes, all of them now unfashionable in our unstrenuous age.The belligerence of his praise is captured in the title of one essay,”Mr. Gaddis and His Goddamn Books,” where Mr. Gass delights in abusing the reviewers who failed to recognize “The Recognitions”: “Its arrival was duly newsed in fifty-five papers and periodicals. Only fifty-three of these notices were stupid.”

A more neutral observer might object that these writers were hardly mimeographing their books in some drafty garret. Gaddis won the National Book Award for “JR” (in a year when Mr. Gass was one of the judges), Elkin took home two National Book Critics Circle awards, Hawkes was a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters. Mr. Gass himself, for that matter, has a prominent place in the literary world he denounces: The author of five works of fiction and eight of nonfiction, he had no problem finding a major publisher to issue his huge 1995 novel “The Tunnel,” about the racist, scatological obsessions of a middle-aged neo-Nazi. (One gets the feeling he might have preferred to suffer the travails of Robert Coover, whose trouble finding a publisher for his Nixon satire, “The Public Burning,” are gleefully recounted in another of Mr. Gass’s essays.) Clearly, American letters are not so closed to experiment, so devoted to banality and uplift, as Mr. Gass likes to make out in “A Temple of Texts.”

Still, the point of a rant, for a writer like Mr. Gass, is less to convince the reader than to dazzle him with rhetorical excess. Two of the best essays in “A Temple of Texts” deal with Renaissance masters of such excess, the raging Rabelais and the brooding Burton, and Mr. Gass makes clear that his own prose owes much to theirs. When you read “Gargantua and Pantagruel,” Mr. Gass writes, “words multiply in your mind immediately, the way ants invade a larder. … In Gargantua’s day, [words] were revered, despised, traded, banned, liberated, loved.” That list is a nice illustration of the principle it describes – the importance of words encourages their multiplication, like coins from a mint – and listing, for comic and satiric effect, is one of the basic ingredients of Mr. Gass’s prose. Take his encomium to Gaddis, a catalog of the writer’s necessary refusals:

He didn’t cultivate the cultivated, nose around the newsworthy, network or glad-hand, sign books or blurb. He didn’t teach, prognosticate, distribute awards. He was suspicious of wanna-bes, wary of flatterers; he guarded his gates. He didn’t write the way he did to prove how smart he was, to create a clique that would clack at his every move. Or to get reviewed. Or to receive the plaudits of some crowd. Or to be well paid and bathe in a tub of butter. Or to be feared or sneered at or put down by pipsqueaks. He wrote as well as he could and as he felt the art required, and he knew he would not be thanked for it.

But of course he was thanked for it, and still is. And so Mr. Gass is and will be, for all his laments about being the last honest man.

akirsch@nysun.com