We feature each fortnight Nicholas Reid's reviews and comments on new and recent books.
“STRONG
WORDS – The Best of the Landfall Essay Competition” Edited by Emma Neale (Otago
University Press, $NZ35); “CATCH AND KILL” by Ronan Farrow (Little-Brown /
Hachette, $NZ 37:99); “MY PENGUIN YEAR” by Lindsay McCrae (Hodder and Stoughton
/ Hachette, $NZ34:99)
What is an
essay? When we were in the first years of secondary school, an essay was a
little narrative of personal experience, in the notorious “What I Did in My
Holidays” mould: so basically a first-person story. Call it confessional. Then
in the senior years of secondary school, an essay was meant to argue a case
like a lawyer, on such topics as “Was King Lear the author of his own
misfortunes?”, to be written with a neat introduction, a neat final paragraph
drawing a conclusion, and in between these, five or six paragraphs, each making
a point, each beginning with a “topic sentence”, and each using evidence, usually
in the form of quotations from the text. Call it forensic.
But as soon
as we were free of school, and free of undergraduate essays on Eng. Lit., we
discovered essays that were neither confessional nor forensic, though some
were. Essays could move in many directions, and didn’t have any firm template.
Personal experience, sure. Arguing a case, sure. But also reflecting or
reconstructing the past; or trying to get a handle on personal relationships;
or venting dyspeptic or euphoric feelings; or imagining a possible society; or
God wot. Trying to define what an essay is, the best I can come up with is “a, usually short, piece of non-fiction
prose, reflecting personal experience, personal convictions or personal
interpretations of the world.” Clumsy, but at least comprehensive.
The difficulty
of defining an essay is reflected in Emma Neale’s Introduction to Strong Words - The Best of the Landfall
Essay Competition. She quotes with approval Virginia Woolf’s statement that
whatever it deals with, anything “from
the immortality of the soul to the rheumatism
in your left shoulder”, an essay “is primarily an expression of personal opinion.” Having quoted
this, Neale herself describes the essay form as “protean”.
As judge of
the Landfall Essay Competition in
2018, Neale had the unenviable task of reading her way through the 90 essays
submitted, and choosing three winners – 1st, 2nd and 3rd
place. But she knew that many which were not so awarded were also interesting,
intelligent and engaging pieces of work. Hence this anthology, which gives us
fully 21 of the essays that were submitted, with the three winning essays as
the opening items in the book.
On the very
rare occasions when I have been called on to judge writing like this, I know (once
the real duds are set aside) that there is a final wrench when winners have to
be decided on. There is always that nagging thought that you might have made
the wrong decision, or that you are not honouring work which other experienced
judges might have considered the best. As I read Strong Words, I found a few essays which I might have given the top
spots instead of the three winners, but this is not to denigrate anything in
this anthology. In their own very different ways, each essay is engaging in the
real sense of the word – involving the reader by getting and holding the
reader’s attention.
Of the three
winning essays, Alice Miller’s “The Great Ending” is a lively reconstruction of
how it felt, at the time, to be in New Zealand at the end of the First
World War. Its sense of immediacy strips away later interpretations we may have
imposed upon that time. But Susan Wardell’s “Shining Through the Skull” and Sam
Keenan’s “Bad Girls” are both in the more confessional mode. Wardell deals with
having been misled in the most personal and embarrassing way. Keenan deals with
the brutal death of a teenage friend. Both are inevitably led to reflect on the
way young women are seen in a defective world.
As I read
the other eighteen essays, I found some that had a similar intention to the three
winners. Louise Slocombe’s “The Thorndon Esplanade”, for example, essays the
same effect as Alice Miller’s “The Great Ending”. It attempts to reconstruct a
vanished past – though in Slocombe’s case, the past is part of the Wellington
of Katherine Mansfield.
Just as
essays are idiosyncratic, so is the reader’s response. I was attracted by some essays
here simply because I shared experiences with the authors. Why was I so
interested in Bryan Walpert’s “One Eye Open”, his painful account of having
Bell’s Palsy? Because it’s an affliction I had never heard of, until I was
rushed to hospital two years ago, and found myself lying on a gurney with two
doctors standing over me and making preliminary diagnoses. They speculated that
I might have Bell’s Palsy, and described it as something that has the apparent
symptoms of a stroke, but isn’t one. As it happened, I was suffering from
Miller-Fisher Syndrome, which had me on my back in hospital for a month, and
then about three months recuperating at home. But at least I’d learnt what Bell’s
Palsy was!
Why was I
attracted to Jocelyn Prasad’s essay “Uncut Cloth”? Because she has written a
charming reflection on saris (or “sarees” as she writes it). Married to a man
of Indian parentage, my eldest daughter has adopted the sari as wear for formal
occasions, and we have heard many tales like those Prasad tells of the
complexities of donning a sari correctly.
Cait Kneller
gives a fragmentary, mildly surreal, sketch of (the North Shore Auckland suburb
of) Glenfield, which is the suburb in the next valley from where I live; and
Kneller apparently went to the same secondary school as my three youngest
daughters. And oddly enough Kirstten Ure’s essay “Puriri Moth”, wherein she
sees the ephemeral life of the “adult” moth as an image of loss, rang bells for
me. I regularly guide tourists around the bird-sanctuary island Tiritiri
Matangi and stop to examine a stately puriri tree and discuss the puriri moth’s
life-cycle to explain the black blotches that they leave on the trunk.
You see,
there are personal as well as literary reasons for being interested in an
essay.
The most
directly confessional essays in this collection are Toby Buck’s “Aquae Populus”
giving a wry view of the habitues of a small community sauna; John Allison’s
“The Way it Is”, a sketch about being old; and P.J.Stanley’s very sad “Anatomy
of Belief”, about being cut off by her father when she ceased to be a
Scientologist. The essay that comes closest to being poetry is Madeleine
Child’s “Loess”, with its evocation of the windy heights of Otago as
experienced by her father.
There are
what amount to polemics in this collection, but none of them are strident. There
is nothing that is overtly political, and even versions given of the battle of
the sexes are muted.
Those essays
that are closest to (good) polemic are by Mikaela Nyman and Jane Blaikie. In “Language Means Belonging” the Swedish-speaking,
Finnish-born New Zealander Mikaela Nyman weaves in much personal experience of
minority languages, their uniqueness and ultimate untranslatability, before
arguing strongly for their conservation, especially in promoting the teaching
of Maori. Jane Blaikie’s “Mrs Wakefield Unknown” concerns the caddish,
deceitful Edward Gibbon Wakefield and
his opportunistic scheme to kidnap and marry a rich young heiress. Much of this
story is already familiar to a wide readership, but Blaikie emphasises the fate
of the young woman, largely disregarded by history. From this she segues, not
too convincingly, into an argument that Wakefield’s name should be expunged
from all public places.
In line with
the general “linguistic turn” that much philosophy (and poetry) has taken in
the last half century, language itself is the essence of two essays: Building
on her own experience of suffering, Tracey Slaughter, in “Notes on a Scale of
Silence”, elaborates on the idea that language is simply inadequate to convey the
sense of pain. She quotes many sources to reinforce her insights here (I am
surprised that, among others, she didn’t quote Robert Graves’ “The Cool Web”),
though her ending, asserting the need to write about the experience of pain,
somehow compromises her premise. And in an
odd way Tim Upperton’s “A Lifted Stone” also turns on the matter of language
itself. He first plays variations on the unknowability of other creatures; then
on the unknowability of other people; and ends up considering the limits of
language in connecting with the world. Somewhere in the same ballpark - language and its impact on the world – is Fiona
Clark’s “Off By Heart”, on the therapeutic power of poetry.
So here I am
once again name-checking just about every item in a collection and being
careful not to make glib or dismissive comments. But I do admit misgivings
about, and a disconnection from, some selections. Derek Schulz’s “Not a Maori
Name” seems to me to examine too minutely (i.e. over-think) the texts he quotes
as he considers the meaning of a story, written about New Zealand, by an author
(Penelope Fitzgerald) who had never been here. Justine Whitfield’s reflection
on the sense of touch, “The Klimt Bubbles” is a bit nebulous and unnecessarily
circumlocutious in some of its expression. The essay that first excited me, but
ended up baffling me, was Jessica Maclean’s “Strange Harbours”. Articulate and
replete with erudite, sophisticated vocabulary, “Strange Harbours” seems to be
calling for some sort of radical re-alignment of New Zealand spirituality with
a mix of Maori and Christian references and theologies. But it becomes a rant,
shooting off in all directions. I tried very hard to find a crowning coherence here, but
was foiled.
And the positive
conclusion to this essay of my own? The real stunner in Strong Words is Becky Manawatu’s “#Mothersday”. It is so powerful
because its memoir of family tragedies is written in a deadpan, sometimes
almost ironical style: un-demonstrative and with no self-pity, and therefore
convincing us more fully of the traumas being reported.
One little footnote
to this brief assessment of varied and interesting essays: For the record, of
the 21 essays, 16 are by women and only 5 by men. I won’t complain about gender
bias or some such. I’m sure that Emma Neale isn’t the type of judge who would
make selections by any such criterion – so this means nothing more than that
more women submitted essays. This does, of course, reflect a big cultural
turn-around. Once upon a time, anthlologies of essays tended to be all-male
affairs. (To check this, I pull off my shelf a copy of W.E.Williams’ Pelican
Original A Book of English Essays dating from the 1950s, and find that the 25
authors represented are all blokes.) But the dominance of women writer does
seem to have one effect – there’s much quoting of Virginia Woolf in
many of these Strong Words.
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Very
clumsily I move from a New Zealand book to two books from elsewhere. First,
Ronan Farrow’s Catch and Kill.
You
have to wait until over three-quarters of the way through this 400-page book
(page 347 to be precise) before you discover what exactly the title Catch and Kill means, although the idea
behind it has appeared often enough. “Catch and kill” is a phrase used by the
grubbier and more dishonest news outlets. They buy, as an exclusive, a story
that has been filed, but do not ever publish it and find ways of gagging the
author, who is prevented from publishing elsewhere. Usually this means that the
news outlet has been either threatened or bribed by some powerful person to
bury the story, because it contains negative things about them.
Ronan Farrow (who, for what it’s worth, is the son of Mia
Farrow and Woody Allen) is the dogged journalist who bit by bit, in 2017,
uncovered the whole Harvey Weinstein mess. The powerful Hollywood producer had
for decades sexually harrassed, violated and blackmailed women – especially
actressses who appeared in the films of his company Miramax. The blackmail
meant threats (often carried out) to ruin the women’s careers if they ever
reported what he had done, or if they refused his (sometimes violent) advances.
Farrow gives all the details relating to the many women who trusted him enough
to go on the record and be interviewed. There were dozens of them, and most of
them had indeed had their careers destroyed by Weinstein and his confederates.
As a film reviewer for many years before 2004, I remember
seeing some actresses (Mira Sorvino, for example) making a big splash in a
couple of films, seeming on the verge of a major career, and then suddenly
disappearing from the screen. At the time I thought this was just standard
Hollywood ruthlessness – it chews ‘em up and spits ‘em out – but now I
understand what was really going on for some of them.
And yet while this whole horrible scandal is properly
detailed for us, it is not the major focus of Farrow’s book. Farrow is really
concerned with how his attempts to get his story published were constantly
blocked by the higher executives of the TV network that employed him, NBC. This
is not so much a book about Weinstein’s crimes as a book about how Weinstein
was able to twist influential people’s arms and keep his sordid affairs
unreported.
There was a paper trail of “non-disclosure” agreements
whereby aggrieved women could be threatened by the law if they made public what
had happened to them. America’s sleaziest publication, the National Enquirer, not only kept “kill” files of stories they had
never published, but was complicit in publishing negative stories about many of
Weinstein’s victims, the better to damage their credibility. In this they were
helped by the Black Cube company of “private investigators” who had been hired
by Weinstein and his lawyers, who spied on people, dug up as much dirt as they
possibly could on Weinstein’s accusers, and tried to infiltrate Farrow’s
investigation.
Farrow was repeatedly prevented from presenting his
findings on NBC, so he finally went elsewhere and got the story published in The New Yorker.
Farrow is, of course, on the side of the angels and the
detail given here is necessary. Yet I admit I did not like this book as much as
I wanted to, for all its worthiness. It is not just the (inevitable)
breathless, journalistic style, but it is a matter of its sheer length. Names
are named, as they should be in a legal submission, but in such profusion that
it is easy to forget which informant, which executive or which lawyer is being
referred to at any given time. To be blunt, Catch
and Kill would have been punchier, and could have said as much, at half the
lengtth.
Just a few closing remarks: Hillary Clinton is mentioned
three or four times, usually in a negative context. It is not simply because
Harvey Weinstein was a prime donor to her campaign for the presidency, but
because she had clearly heard of his repeated crimes long before the story
broke, but chose not to distance herself from him.
There is also the obvious, but daunting thought, that the
Harvey Weinstein story is neither unique nor new in the history of Hollywood.
Once upon a time the “casting couch” was both a joke and standard operational
procedure. All that is happening now is that it is being challenged. Look, for
example, at the story of Harry Cohn, head of Columbia Pictures in the 1940s and
1950s, and see that Weinstein is no aberration.
Very briefly, Farrow refers to Jeffrey Epstein, who is
the current best-known villain in stories of sexual abuse – so much so, in
fact, that the Weinstein story is beginning to pass out of the collective
consciousness. Sad but true - but don’t worry. Other scandals of sexual abuse will
doubtless obliterate thoughts of Jeffrey Epstein, and we will forget the days
when the jolly exploits of Prince “Randy Andy” were as much a joke as the
“casting couch.”
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I enjoyed Lindsay McCrae’s My Penguin Year more than Catch
and Kill, probably because of its subject matter. It’s equally journalistic
in style, but written by a man with real enthusiasm and therefore conveying
some of the excitement that he himself must have experienced.
As a schoolboy in the north of England, says Lindsay
McCrae, he was fascinated by wildlife and was a compulsive photographer of animals.
Over many months he photographed the lives and habits of badgers, and submitted
some of his work to producers of wildlife documentaries. He was readily
accepted as an emerging talent. So, avoiding university and formal tertiary
education, he went straight from school to a position with the BBC’s wildlife
department. He gradually became a skilled cameraman.
He was addicted to David Attenborough’s Planet Earth series and, he says, as
soon as he saw emperor penguins in a sequence of one of Attenborough’s
documentaries, he knew that he wanted to see them for himself. His dream job
turned up. He was commissioned to stay in the Antarctic for eleven months,
observing and filming emperor penguins to record their entire life cycle. One
problem – he had just married and his wife was pregnant; so there was a wrench
in parting; but off he went to a German base in the Antarctic, where he shared
his eleven months with German colleagues, he himself being kitted out with
German equipment.
One major strain of My
Penguin Year has to do with the difficulties of shooting the desired
footage. Before the emperor penguins came back from their months at sea, McCrae
had to wait through weeks of endless, and often sleepless, Antarctic daylight. The
penguins marched onto the ice in late March, in the Antarctic autumn. Extreme
temperatures had effects on even the most advanced cameras; weather (such as
long autumn and winter storms) made much filming impossible. There are two
months (62 days) when the sun is always beneath the horizon, and sometimes
there is complete darkness although, as this book’s many illustrations show,
interesting shots can be recorded in the bright moonlight. McCrae wanted to
create intimate images of the emperor penguins’ lives, but there was the
difficulty of getting at close quarters with them. He tells stories of his
perilous climb down from the ice shelf, where his base was, to the sheet of sea
ice, where penguins gathered and mated.
In the midst of this tale, there are the family moments.
His son was born when most of his mission was completed. McCrae tried to be in
daily contact with his wife and son, and he recorded for his son his readings
of all the Beatrix Potter stories.
But in the end, the most engaging element of this book is
his interaction with the emperor penguins themselves, and his verbal record of
their life cycle.
It begins with courtship rituals when the males and
females come ashore.
Even before the females
are impregnated, the males practise how to incubate eggs by holding balls of
ice on their feet and under their feathery bellies. McCrae found it difficult
to film the most intimate detail – the actual laying of the eggs. Transferring
the eggs from female to male is a delicate process. If the male is too slow in
getting the egg safely to the top of his feet, the egg could quickly be frozen
on the ice.
As soon as the transfer is done, the females head out to
sea to fish and live for some months, fattening themselves up while the males
exclusively do the incubation of the eggs. They brood for about 64 days during
the winter months. Even in good weather, the temperature is usually minus 40
degrees Celsius. For mutual warmth, there is the well-organised and tight
tribal huddle of the males until the chicks break out of their eggs. By the
time the plump and now well-fed females return, the males, having not fed for
two months, are emaciated and near starvation, and now it is their turn to go
out to sea and fatten up.
Not too surprisingly, McCrae finds that emperor penguins
suffer a high infant mortality rate. He tells many sad tales of observing eggs
mishandled in the transfer from female to male, or prematurely cracked open, or
frozen on the ice. Some penguins are trapped in a deep gully where, as a last
resort, they have to abandon their chicks before they themselves freeze to
death. Nature is prodigal, the mass production of offspring is the obvious strategy
to ensure the survival of a species, and such deaths are to be expected. Still,
for the individual, nature is cruel.
There are no frills to the style of My Penguin Year. It is good journalism, an easy read, informative,
and well illustrated, as well as having the human factor. Can’t ask more of it
really.
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