A Thousand Points of Spite : WITH CHARITY TOWARD NONE; A Fond Look at Misanthropy, <i> By Florence King (St. Martin’s Press: $17.95; 194 pp.) </i>

Florence King is the woman I’d most want to be stranded with on a desert island, because I know she’d leave me alone. I’m talking about the lady who wrote: “As long as you remain a stranger, we will be your friend forever.”

Still, she doesn’t always keep to herself. This sourest of pusses suffers from what she calls Tourette’s Misanthropy, “Idealism with a short fuse.” As proof of her affliction, she relates a story of how she once “raised hell about a favorable review” that had been poorly written. In a letter to the culprit, she said, “You concentrated on too many minor points and in general farted around without ever stating fully the two things that must be in every review: what the book is about, and what the reviewer thinks of it.”

Like most peasants, I don’t want to get on the King’s bad side--although it’s hard to tell exactly which side of this multi-faceted misanthrope is worse than the others. Fearsome Florence is a woman whose earliest memorable public statement, shortly after she learned to talk, was “I doan yike you.” Maybe her next book ought to be called “Everyone I Really Need to Loathe, I Spurned in Kindergarten.”

So starting with her second dictum, I’ll tell you that, for me, reading “With Charity Toward None” was like being given intellectual alms. How can you not draw succor from a book that refers to the man-hating but gorilla-loving Dian Fossey as “a blip on the radar screen of Smile Button America,” that speaks of our country as a place “where Occam’s razor wouldn’t cut butter”? Where else could you find a writer who brands the anti-tobacco crowd “Smokists,” who compares an ex-President to the protagonist of Moliere’s “Le Misanthrope”: “The American electorate, who assuage their own insecurity by demanding Nice Guyism of their leaders, have no idea what years of spurious warmth can do to someone like Alceste Nixon.” There’s a lot of meat in this lean volume, and I savored much of it; not only that, but I think its creator is delicious. Being somewhat of a misanthrope myself, I hope that my gesture of affection really pisses her off.

As for King’s Critical Rule Number One, here’s what her anti-inspirational book is about:

* The Republic of Nice and the Republic of Mean.

* The feminization of America and the Rumpelstiltskin Complex.

* Afrocentrist hatred of the truth.

* Ty Cobb.

* The dashing G. Gordon Liddy, spiritual twin of Edmond Rostand’s Cyrano de Bergerac.

* “Oprah’s Guest” syndrome.

* Huggable furry bunny rabbits forced to wear eye-shadow.

I just put that last one in to see if you were paying attention. If you can’t figure out what the book is about by reading its subtitle, you’ve wandered into the wrong section of the bookstore. You didn’t think this was a biography of Mother Teresa, did you?

Speaking of the subtitle, where does that adorable word “fond” come from? I hope it was foisted on the author by a cuteness-loving publisher, since King takes the trouble to distinguish her genuine heroes from “pseudocurmudgeons whose function is to give Americans someone we love to hate, but love anyway.” These are people like Andy Rooney: I’m not really a misanthrope, I just play one on TV. The members of the book’s rogues’ gallery, on the other hand, are all honest-to-badness despisers of mankind. “Fond” is not the appropriate F-word for them.

To the writer’s credit--and aside from her passion for the occasional cuddly phrase--she remains a model of misanthropic decorum, being neither lovable nor hateable, but just someone who clearly appreciates ideas a whole lot more than she goes for people.

So why did this Grande Dame of “Grrr” publish her book at all, when it’s obviously intended to be read by--ugh--you and me? “An examination of misanthropy,” King writes, paradoxically by way of an apologia, “has value for Americans who do not necessarily hate everybody, but are tired of compulsory gregariousness, fevered friendliness, we-never-close compassion, goo-goo humanitarianism, sensitivity that never sleeps, and politicians paralyzed by a hunger to be loved.” This little volume, she says, is her attempt to “cut through some of the confusion and win one for the Sonofabitch.”

Because she’s so frequently laugh-out-loud-rageous, one could easily classify Floscar the Grouch as just another right-wing humorist with a mean-spirited pose. But the author affects a more serious purpose: All of her characters, she claims, “portend or illuminate some contemporary American problem.” In true election-year spirit, this is, perhaps, stretching it a little; King is occasionally pulled off-course by her own torrent-of-consciousness. It’s tough to figure out, for instance, what current social ill she means to bring to light by her discussion of Irving Berlin--maybe she thinks we all sing “White Christmas” too much. Nevertheless, for us grumpy folks who already tend to share her philosophical viewpoint, this Survey of Scurrility contains plenty of astutely phrased--if also comfortably familiar--political observations.

Take this example. “The tender misanthrope despises humanity in general but is ever ready to make an exception for the real people. He feels certain that he could love them if only he could find them--or failing that, transform existing false people into his idealized real people through social and political programs of his own making.” Her paradigm for this fellow is Jean-Jacques Rousseau, but if you give him a red AIDS-is-the-Republicans’-fault ribbon and an 800 number, he turns into Jerry Brown.

I do have one quibble, though. How could King’s editors have succumbed to the six self-indulgent pages of doggerel verse they allowed the author to include--and as her final summation, yet? This truly is an act of misanthropy. After guiding us through the Sturm und Drang of the cosmic hatreds of Celine and Coriolanus, of the earth-shaking animosities of Ayn Rand and Ambrose Bierce, she picks as her own personal targets of witless rhymed razzing such worthy opponents as--you’ll never guess--the timid women who write unsigned letters to Ms. Magazine. Or how about the single person responsible for everything wrong with society today, the squeal-a-meal boy, Richard Simmons! Gee, Miss King, your end doesn’t justify the meanies. I really expected worse of you.

Yet, for those of us who think there’s something better to do with our leisure time than to spend hours and hours listening to the somnolent Ted Koppel analyze the role of the media in the selection-of-the-Elvis-stamp process, this book is a welcome, malevolent diversion.