GRANTED WISDOM

Press, 18 August 1979, Page 15

GRANTED WISDOM

I Rode With the Epigrams. By A. K. Grant. Mclndoe, 1979. 60 pp. $5.95.

(Reviewed by Naylor Hillary)

A. K. Grant has one of the most important qualifications for a successful columnist — he is eminently forgettable. That is not intended as a slur on the work of a valued contributor to this page. Rather, it means that when confronted with a collected edition of Grant columns culled from “The Press” and the “N.Z. Listener,” this reviewer found they could be read with a sense of freshness and delight, even though almost all of them must have been seen before. Here, once more, are the all-but-forgotten gems: the night the air was made hideous with aphorisms and apophthegems as urban verbal violence hit Christchurch; the profound moment when Katherine Mansfield confessed to having accepted a sweetie from Richard John Seddon and found it bliss; the day the Hullo Party launched its programme which included putting a jet boat with ski racks in the swimming pool of every sheepfarmer. Alan Grant has a welcome ability to find the absurd core in matters which seem, often briefly, to be of great social and political moment. He punctures the pomposity of the Right and the self-rightousness of the Left with a grand disregard for political labels. Even when the occasions for his essays are well past, the humour lives on. Most of the pieces here were worth preservation in an anthology, a slim volume to add to the small shelf

of successful humorous writing in New Zealand.

Professor Skuttel-Helmut, of the

University of Darfield, whcrni A K. Grant interviewed for one of the items in this collection, remarked that “Humour, to be accepted by the New Zealand public, must possess the primal qualities of idiomaticity and demoticity.” Perceptive readers, of course, will find at Once these qualities richly displayed in the Grant collected edition. As for unperceptive readers, Mr Grant feels assured enough now to dismiss them with sage advice and gentle chiding. They “will only upset themselves by their futile and puny. attempts, to. comprehend the range and scope of my thought and would be better Off mowing their lawns.”