by Yann Martel
To Stephen Harper,
Prime Minister of Canada,
A book of concise loveliness,
From a Canadian writer,
With best wishes,
Yann Martel
Dear Mr. Harper,
You said a few years ago that your favourite book was the Guinness Book of World Records. Well, as a dedicated reader of those yearly volumes that means that at least on one occasion you read a poem. Simon Armitage, the editor of Short and Sweet: 101 Very Short Poems, the latest book I am sending you, says in his introduction that he became interested in very short poetry as a teenager when he read in the aforementioned Guinness book what was claimed to be the world’s shortest poem:
Fleas
Adam
’ad ’em
A masterpiece, isn’t it? In a single rhyming couplet of four syllables something is suggested about the ancient and intimate relations between humans and animals, about the great antiquity of small, neglected beings, about the shabby reality of our existence, divine origins notwithstanding, and the corruption of this world, inherent even in the Garden of Eden. And there’s more: in that rhyme that sounds like “Adam, Adam,” is there not a lament? Or is it an accusation? Either way, it could be that the fleas in question are us.
You can’t beat poetry for saying so much with so little.
Busy? Tired? Feeling nothing? You’re missing on the depth of life that you know is out there but you don’t have time to read a big fat novel? Then try this poem, by George Mackay Brown:
Taxman
Seven scythes leaned at the wall.
Beard upon golden beard
The last barley load
Swayed through the yard.
The girls uncorked the ale.
Fiddle and feet moved together.
Then between stubble and heather
A horseman rode.
Notice the extraordinary concision with which a narrative structure is set up, with the emotional questions and possibilities left to ripple through the reader’s mind. The marvel of poetry is that it can be as short as a question yet as powerful as an answer. For example, the following poem, by Stephen Crane:
In the Desert
In the desert
I saw a creature, naked, bestial
Who, squatting upon de ground
Held his heart in his hands
And ate of it. I said, “Is it good, friend?”
“It is bitter—bitter,” he answered:
“But I like it
Because it is bitter,
And because it is my heart.”
I envy that of poets, that ability to create something so small that nevertheless feels so complete, the vastness of existence made to fit into something no bigger than a coin purse. Look at this poem, by Hugo Williams:
Lights Out
We’re allowed to talk for ten minutes
about what has happened during the day,
then we have to go to sleep.
It doesn’t matter what we dream about.
Repetition suits poetry. Read one of these poems several times and you’ll see for yourself: it keeps getting better. In this case, familiarity breeds respect.
A last one, lovely, by Wendy Cope:
Flowers
Some men never think of it.
You did. You’d come along
And say you’d nearly brought me flowers
But something had gone wrong. The shop was closed. Or you had doubts—
The sort that minds like ours
Dream up instantly. You thought
I might not want your flowers.
It made me smile and hug you then.
Now I can only smile.
But, look, the flowers you nearly brought
Have lasted all this while.
Short though they are, I wouldn’t rush through any of these poems. Rush tends to disturb their echoing stillness. Best to read them aloud, getting the rhythm right, smoothing out the stumbles, slowly getting a sense of their sense.
It’s a marvellous exercise in—in what?—in being human, I suppose.
Yours truly,
Yann Martel
SIMON ARMITAGE (b. 1963) is a British poet, novelist and playwright known for his dry wit and accessible style. He is the author of nine books of poetry, and has written and presented works for radio and television. He has earned multiple awards for his poetry, including the Sunday Times Author of the Year Award, a Forward Poetry Prize, a Lannan Award, an Ivor Novello Award and the title of the UK’s Millennium Poet for his poem “Killing Time.” Armitage has been a judge for the Griffin Poetry Prize and the Man Booker Prize for Fiction.
BOOK 9:
CHRONICLE Of A DEATH FORETOLD
BY GABRIEL GARCÍA MÁRQUEZ
Translated from the Spanish by Gregory Rabassa
August 6, 2007
To Stephen Harper,
Prime Minister of Canada,
From a Canadian writer,
With best wishes,
Yann Martel
Dear Mr. Harper,
When I found a used copy of the latest book that I’m sending you, I was pleased that it was a hard cover—a first after eight paperbacks—but I was disappointed with the cover artwork.* Surely, Chronicle of a Death Foretold, the short novel by the great Gabriel García Márquez, deserves better than this awkward job. Who chose the purple? It’s all so hideous. But you can’t judge a book by its cover, isn’t that right?
Which is a nice way of broaching the topic of clichés.
A cliché, to remind you, is a worn, hackneyed phrase or opinion. At one time, perhaps in the Middle Ages among monks slowly copying books by hand in a monastery, the notion that nothing of substance can be judged by its surface, expressed in terms of a bound stack of paper and its protective shell, must have seemed like a dazzling revelation that had the monks looking at each other in amazement and rushing out to sing in full-throated worship to urbi et orbi: “Praise be to God! A book can’t be judged by its cover! Hallelujah, hallelujah!”
But now, even among people who don’t read a book a year, it’s a cliché, it’s a lazy, thoughtless way of expressing oneself.
Sometimes clichés are unavoidable. “I love you”—a sentence that is foundational to the well-being of every human being, the “you” being another person, a group of people, a grand notion or cause, a god, or simply a reflection in the mirror—is a cliché. Every actor who has to say the line struggles to deliver it in a way that makes it sound fresh, like Adam saying it for the first time to Eve. But there’s no good way of saying it otherwise—and no one really tries to. We live very well with “I love you” because the syntactical simplicity of it—one each of subject, verb, object, nothing else—nicely matches its intended truthfulness. So we happily blurt out the cliché, some of us repeating it several times, for emphasis, or some of us saying it all the time, for example at the end of every phone call with a family member. Lovers at a balcony, sons and daughters at war, dervishes whirling—they’re all living “I love you” in a way that is not clichéd but essential.
But otherwise clichés should be avoided like the West Nile virus. Why? Because they are stale and flat, and because they are contagious. Convenient writerly shortcuts, hurried means of signifying “you know what I mean,” clichés at first are just a froth of tiny white eggs in the ink of your pen, incubated slowly by the warmth of your lazy fingers. The harm to your prose is slight, and people are forgiving. But convenience, shortcuts and hurry are no way to write true words, and if you are not careful—and it is hard work to be careful—the eggs multiply, bloom and enter your blood.
The damage can be serious. The infection can spread to your eyes, to your nose, to your tongue, to your ears, to your skin, and worse: to your brain and to your heart. It’s no longer just your words, written and spoken, that are conventional, conformist, unoriginal, dull. Now it’s your very thoughts and feelings that have lost their heartbeat. In the most serious cases, the person can no longer
even see or feel the world directly, but can only perceive it through the reductive, muffling filter of cliché.
At this stage, the cliché attains its political dimension: dogmatism. Dogmatism in politics has exactly the same effect as the cliché in writing: it prevents the soul from interacting openly and honestly with the world, with that pragmatism that lets in fresh all the beautiful, bountiful messiness of life.
The cliché and dogmatism—two related banes that all writers and politicians should avoid if we are to serve well our respective constituencies.
As for the García Márquez book, I got it for you because of your recent trip to—and renewed interest in—Latin America. The man’s a genius.
Yours truly,
Yann Martel
GABRIEL GARCÍA MÁRQUEZ (b. 1927) is an internationally acclaimed novelist, short story writer, screenplay writer, memoirist and journalist. During his long literary career, he has been credited with popularizing the “magical realism” writing style. Márquez, nicknamed “Gabo,” sets his stories in Latin America and often addresses the themes of isolation, love and memory. His best-known works are One Hundred Years of Solitude and Love in the Time of Cholera. He is also well known for his political activism. He received the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1982. Raised in Colombia, he now lives in Mexico City.
* The cover features an unappealing drawing of a bride. She looks like a stiff porcelain doll.
BOOK 10:
MISS JULIA
BY AUGUST STRINDBERG
Translated from the Swedish by Peter Watts
August 20, 2007
To Stephen Harper,
Prime Minister of Canada,
From a Canadian writer,
With best wishes,
Yann Martel
Dear Mr. Harper,
One day when August Strindberg was still a student at the University of Uppsala, he received a surprising summons: King Karl XV wanted to see him. Strindberg put on his best suit and made the short trip to the Royal Palace in Stockholm. The twenty-two-year-old was from an undistinguished family, he was very poor, and his academic achievements were perfectly average, but the King of Sweden had his reasons for wanting to meet him: he was keen on the arts and he had seen a performance of a historical play that Strindberg had written, The Outlaw, and he had liked it. In fact, he had liked it so much that he promised the young man a quarterly stipend so that he could finish his university studies. Strindberg was delighted. Alas, after only two payments and without any explanation, the royal bounty dried up. So it goes. Strindberg dropped out of university.
By all accounts, Strindberg was a miserable sod. He had a boundless capacity to be unhappy, especially in his relations with women. But he also had a mind of immense energy, intelligence and originality, and he wrote brilliant plays.
A brilliant play is something very peculiar. Drama is the most oral of literary forms, far less of an artifice than the short story, the novel or the poem, and far less reliant on publication to fully come into its own; what really counts for a play is not that it be read, but that it be seen, in the flesh. In many ways, life has all the trappings of a play: when you, Mr. Harper, enter the House of Commons, for example, you are walking onto a stage. And you are there because you are playing a role, the lead role. And it is because you are playing that role that you rise and speak. And then in Hansard the next day it reads like a play. It is the same for all of us in life: we move about on various stages, we take on various roles, and we speak. But there is a crucial difference, of course, one that goes to the core of what art is: in a play there is structure and meaning, put there by the playwright, while in life, even after many acts, the structure and meaning is hard to find. Some claim to know of a great playwright who has authored our existence, but even for them structure and meaning remains an ongoing challenge.
So while a play approximates life to a great degree, it is in other ways nothing like life. No one speaks with the concise completeness of the dramatis personae of a play, neither in ways that so quickly yet subtly reveal their character, nor with a tempo that so rises and falls until a climax, nor, usually, in a space so confined as a stage’s. In a phrase: life is a play that doesn’t make sense, while a play is life that does.
(Admittedly, there are people for whom life makes perfect sense, their vision of things forever untouched by doubt, the entropy of time seeming to have no more effect on them than a gentle breeze on the face. They are the type who will not go for the questioning of life that is a play, indeed, that is all great art. But that is a separate matter.)
The knack for writing plays is a knack I don’t have. I have tried to move plot entirely through dialogue, I have tried to express my thoughts on life within the strictures of speech, I have tried to develop an ear for the way people speak—to laughable, unpublishable result. Notice how the word is playwright; it may sound like write, but originally the act of writing a play struck the English as more akin to the work of a carpenter than of a writer. The world of letters is indeed easily divided between those who write and those who wright. There are exceptions—Samuel Beckett, for example—but those who can do both successfully are not many.
There are three plays in the volume of Strindberg that I have sent you. It is the middle play, known either as Miss Julia or Miss Julie, that I recommend to you. In it you will read dialogue that is so brilliant, so crackling with tension, so straightforward on the surface yet hinting at such turmoil and complexity, that it will, paradoxically, all seem perfectly natural to you. That is the sign of a great play in the naturalist tradition: how easily it flows. One gets the sense that the playwright just sat down with a good, simple idea and it all came out in an easy afternoon’s work. I assure you that that is like thinking that all Michelangelo had to do was chip away from the block of marble everything that didn’t look like David.
Miss Julia, which was first performed in 1889, is about confinement, principally the confinement of sexual roles and the confinement of class. Miss Julia and Jean, her servant, meet, match and clash, with tragic consequences. I would love to see the play actually performed on a stage. The alchemy of great play, great director and great actors is rare, but when it happens—I am remembering now a performance long ago at Stratford of Eugene O’Neill’s Long Day’s Journey into Night, with Hume Cronyn and Jessica Tandy—it makes for an experience of an intensity that is, in my estimation, unmatched in the literary arts.
You will notice that the previous owner of your copy of Strindberg wrote copiously in the margins. This annoyed me at first, this defacing of Miss Julia. But finally I was charmed by the intruder’s thoughts and opinions. The handwriting is large, clear and loopy; I think it is a young person writing, likely a young woman. Above Jean’s comment that “on the way back by the barn I looked in and joined the dancing,” our hypothetical young woman writes “joie de vivre.” When Jean impudently tells Miss Julia that he knows that Kristin, the cook, talks in her sleep because “I’ve heard her,” our young woman observes “Kristin’s his mistress.” She variously thinks Jean to be “practical” or “realistic,” while Miss Julia is “totally impractical.” Other short notations of hers are “dramatic moment,” “flirting,” “bourgeoisie,” “gives her warning,” “seduction” and “trag. everyth falling apart” [sic].
One last thing, to elucidate a point easily missed: the “Turkish pavilion” on page 90 that Jean mentions sneaking into as a child, the “finest building I’d ever seen,” the walls “covered with pictures of kings and emperors,” his first time “inside a castle,” is just a fancy outhouse—and the way out he is forced to take when he hears someone approaching is the exit you’d least like to take if you were in an outhouse.
Yours truly,
Yann Martel
AUGUST STRINDBERG (1849–1912) is best known for his plays, but he also wrote short stories, novels, poems and volumes of autobiography. In addition to his writing, he was a painter and photographer, and experimented with alchemy. In life and in his art, he w
as pessimistic and his works were marked by his overt satirizing of Swedish society. Strindberg’s plays fall into two categories—naturalistic and expressionistic—and he is considered one of the pioneers of Expressionism. He wrote dozens of plays, the most famous of which are the naturalistic Miss Julia and The Father.
BOOK 11:
THE WATSONS
BY JANE AUSTEN
September 3, 2007
To Stephen Harper,
Prime Minister of Canada,
From a Canadian writer,
With best wishes,
Yann Martel
Dear Mr. Harper,
The great Jane Austen. She is a shining example of how art—like politics—can take the least promising ore and transform it into the finest metal. Austen had three things going against her: she lived in rural England, she was middle class in the age before that class exploded with possibilities, and she was a woman. That is to say, her life was hemmed in by limitations.
England during Austen’s lifetime—1775 to 1817—was in the full throes of the Industrial Revolution, and revolutions are occasions of great upheaval and renewal, both for the arts and for politics. But Austen mostly missed out on this revolution because she lived outside of the urban centres that were at its heart. And in the genteel hinterland where she lived, she was a member of a most precarious class: the landless middle class, with a class she wished not to join swimming beneath her, the working class, and a class she wished she could join soaring above, the nobility. This precariousness was aggravated by her being a woman, which disqualified her from whatever work a member of the middle class might decently do: the clergy, the medical profession, the military. So all Austen’s female characters worry endlessly about financial security, yet have only a single way of achieving it: marriage. Hungry for status and material goods, but unwilling (because unable) to earn them, always on the hunt for wealthy husbands, yet having only stuffiness, rigidity and pretence to offer—I suspect that if we met the female members of Jane Austen’s class today, with our modern sensibilities, we would find them deeply disagreeable. There is this exchange between two female characters in The Watsons, the latest book I am sending you:
