A first step towards reviving a lost genre

By MICHAEL KING

Much attention has been lavished in my professional lifetime to the so-called Death of God. Less attention and less anguish has accompanied a far more real tragedy: the Near-Death of the Essay, those short, reflective meditations that so delighted readers in the 17th, 18th and 19th centuries.

Where has the essay gone, and why? Some blame film and television for the genre's demise, others the contraction of leisure time which spawned the more focused and more urgent forms of feature writing, to say nothing of the tabloid press and the thriller novel.

In the late-20th century we came close to essays surviving only in school examinations, like curious fossils trapped in inert cliffs of limestone. Now an endangered species' survival programme has been launched.

These small but perfectly formed books represent an effort on the part of Wellington author Lloyd Jones to "encourage and develop the essay genre". Jones is the publisher, with his Four Winds Press.

And just as the kakapo has been saved by the sponsorship of Comalco, this exercise in literary CPR is supported by Montana Wines, whose logo adorns the covers and pre-title pages of these first volumes. How do they stack up? Very well indeed.

Vincent O'Sullivan's On Longing has the advantage of being able to draw on a wide canvas.

"There is not much you can think of that would not squeeze under longing's vast shading arch," he notes.

And he yet manages to construct the essay on highly specific applications of the concept which ensure that interest - and amusement - are ever present.

This, for example, under the heading "junk longings": "The writer whose novel is a fair-ground mirror that enlarges his longing for himself, so that with a little tinkering he appears as sky diver, Sanskrit scholar, chess wizard, lover to end them all, mountaineer, successful artiste, lover to end them all over again, in case you missed it first time round."

O'Sullivan is also master of the aphorism, our very own Clive James: "The gift of good advertising is that we are free to seduce ourselves." And: "A human story that ends itself is incomprehensible from the outside ... Because it is not told to the end, the puzzle of it is endless. And that is what we cannot take in."

Reviews are apt to reduce such writing to a series of Reader's Digest bullet points, and that is grossly unfair in this instance. O'Sullivan's contribution is original, clever and thoroughly entertaining, everything an essay ought to be.

There is, too, a degree of universality about Kate Camp's On Kissing - although some variations of the practice that she discusses are far from universal. "Every kiss is a breach of borders," she warns, and enumerates the ways this is so.

Camp has much of interest to say about the origins of the habit ("researchers have theorised that the mouth-to-mouth kiss is just an excuse to get within smelling distance, the sense of smell being the main mode of identification among mammals"); and about its physiology ("a passionate tongue kiss uses all 34 facial muscles and can burn up 6.4 calories a minute").

She writes an especially engaging and erudite section on the cinematic kiss, beginning with Thomas Edison's The Kiss, one of the first films made, and she concludes with the strange phenomenon of the number of people who have rushed forward to claim they were the couples featured in famous photographic kisses, when clearly each picture could accommodate only two candidates. Who, one wonders, will eventually claim ownership of the lipsticky, sensual mouth decorating the cover of this book?

The essay I found least convincing was Damien Wilkins' When Famous People Come to Town. It, too, is well written and funny, but the humour leaves me uncomfortable.

In regaling the inept and inappropriate things New Zealanders have said to or done for famous visitors - royalty, Rudyard Kipling, Mark Twain, D.H. Lawrence - Wilkins is in effect sneering at the peculiarities of his ancestors. And he does this by judging his targets according to the values and customs of his day, not theirs.

"[The] Queen is bad for us not because she makes us dismally submissive but because she makes us dismally active. She makes us the victim of our own boosterism, and draws from our feelings of inferiority the spectre of our vanity and pride. In such a mood we are likely to do anything - sling a couple of lamb carcasses up at Ashburton Railway Station; claim we have bigger fish than you, better scenery."

Really? And all this in the present tense?

All these things have happened, but they happened in our past and they are intelligible only in that context.

To judge things that happened historically by post-1960s standards is reminiscent of Peter Mayle telling us what quaint and silly people the Froggies are for not being English. All good clean fun, perhaps, but not quite fair. Images of sitting ducks come to mind. Now if the essay had been called When Famous People Came to Town ...

But none of this is intended to suggest anything but admiration and encouragement for this Lloyd Jones/Four Winds Press/Montana Essay initiative.

The advance guard of the series generated thought and pleasure in equal measure. My appetite is hugely whetted. I look forward to what is to follow.

Vincent O'Sullivan: On Longing

Kate Camp: On Kissing

Damien Wilkins: When famous people come to town

Four Winds Press

$14.95

* Michael King is the author of many books on New Zealand history.

* Michael King and Lloyd Jones appear at the Going West Festival, Titirangi Memorial Hall, on Saturday, September 14, at 1pm and 4.30pm respectively. For booking information phone (09) 836 8000 ext 8780.