by Yann Martel
From a Canadian writer,
With best wishes,
Yann Martel
Dear Mr. Harper,
We are celebrating a birthday, you and I. The book that accompanies this letter is the twenty-sixth that you have received from me. Since I have been sending you these literary gifts every two weeks, that means that our cozy book group is celebrating its first anniversary. How have we done? It’s been a most interesting odyssey, taking more of my time than I expected, but the pleasure has kept me keen and motivated. The result, so far, is a folder with copies of twenty-six letters for me and a shelf with twenty-eight slim books for you (a discrepancy owing to the fact that I sent you three books for Christmas). If we look over your new, growing library, we see:
13 novels
3 collections of poetry
3 plays
4 books of non-fiction
4 children’s books, and
1 graphic novel
written (or, in one case, edited) by:
1 Russian
5 Britons
7 Canadians (including 1 Québécois)
1 Indian
4 French
1 Colombian
2 Swedes
3 Americans
1 German
1 Czech
1 Italian, and
1 Irish
of whom:
16 were men
9 were women, with
2 books authored by both sexes, and
1 book authored by writers of unknown sex (though my guess is that the Bhagavad Gita was written by men)
Too many novels, too many men, not enough poetry, why haven’t I sent you a Margaret Atwood or an Alice Munro yet—at the rate of a book every two weeks, it’s hard to be representative and impossible to please everyone. But we’re getting there. Glenn Gould once said, “The purpose of art is the lifelong construction of a state of wonder.” There is time yet.
It seemed appropriate on this anniversary occasion to offer you a book entitled Birthday Letters. It has the celebratory word in the title, even if the tone of the book does not exactly evoke a cake with a small lit candle on it.
The facts are as follows. In 1956, a twenty-six-year-old Englishman named X married a twenty-three-year-old American woman named Y. They had two children. Their relationship proved fraught with tensions, made worse by X’s affair with a woman named Z, and in 1962 X and Y separated. In 1963, Y, mentally unstable since her teenage years, committed suicide by gassing herself. Six years later, in 1969, Z, who by then had a child with X, a little girl nicknamed Shura, also killed herself, unpardonably taking Shura with her. Two last facts: first, by virtue of being still married to Y when she died, X became her testamentary executor, and, second, X was constant throughout his life in his infidelities.
The amount of pain contained within these anonymous facts—the torment, the heartache, the sorrow, the shame, the regret—is barely conceivable. What life would not be overwhelmed, utterly destroyed, by such pain? And would that pain not be made worse if it were displayed for the whole world to see and comment upon?
X was Ted Hughes, Y was Sylvia Plath and Z was Assia Wevill, and their collective pain, the terrible mess that was their lives, would have been lost and forgotten had not the first two been superb and well-known poets who gave expression to that pain. Further notoriety was added by the fact that sides could easily be taken with this tragedy. Why does tragedy so often make us take sides? I guess because strong emotions move us, and we move to one side or another, so to speak, as if fleeing a car that is out of control, and it takes the passage of time, the examination of memory, for us to look back with calm sorrow, standing steadily, no longer so inclined to move and take sides. At any rate, it doesn’t take a lawyer to detect conflict of interest in Hughes being the literary executor of Plath, her pained posthumous collections of poetry and her pained journals being edited by the very man who caused a good deal of her pain, some say editing her works with an eye to improving his reputation. That he furthermore destroyed the last volume of her journal, the one chronicling the last months of their relationship, only makes the charge against him more credible. And what to think of his incessant promiscuity? Who could imagine that shame and regret would so little curb libido?
Sides were taken, vociferously. Hughes was scorned and hated until his death by feminists and Plath-lovers, and I doubt the controversy of their relationship will ever slip from public interest. What stands in Hughes’s defence? That question has an easy answer. His poetry.
That the author of Birthday Letters might be portrayed as a callous philanderer, arrogant and remorseless, is irrelevant in the face of the magnificence of his poetry. It reminds one of the fact that great art is, in its essence, not moral but testimonial, bearing witness to life as it is honestly lived, in its glorious heights as well as in its turpitudinous depths.
Great poetry tends to shut up the novelist in me. It takes so many words to make a novel, reams and reams of sentences and paragraphs, and then I read a single great poem, not even two pages long, and all my prose feels like verbiage. You will see what I mean when you read these poems. They are narrative poems, the tone intimate, usually an “I” speaking to a “you,” the language quicksilver, extraordinarily concise, simple words arranged in an original and forceful way, and the result, poem after poem, is not only a clear image but an unforgettable impression. Take “Sam,” or “Your Paris,” or “You Hated Spain,” or “Chaucer,” or “Flounders,” or “The Literary Life,” or “The Badlands,” or “Epiphany,” or “The Table.”
The evidence from Birthday Letters is clear: X really did love Y, so if art can redeem, here is redemption.
Yours truly,
Yann Martel
TED HUGHES (1930–1998) was a children’s writer, dramatist, short story writer, critic and acclaimed poet, holding the position of British Poet Laureate from 1984 until his death. Hughes’s earlier poetry, including his first collection, Hawk Roosting, focused on beauty and violence in nature, while his later collections, like Crow, were existential, satirical and cynical. He wrote more than ninety books, and received a Guggenheim fellowship, the Whitbread Prize for Poetry and the Order of Merit.
BOOK 27:
TO THE LIGHTHOUSE
BY VIRGINIA WOOLF
April 14, 2008
To Stephen Harper,
Prime Minister of Canada,
From a Canadian writer,
With best wishes,
Yann Martel
Dear Mr. Harper,
Your classic this week is a somewhat harder read than most of the other books I have sent you. Many books are direct and frontal in their approach; immediately upon starting them, a reader senses what the author wants to talk about. To take an example from the books on your shelf, we are immediately familiar with the setting of George Orwell’s Animal Farm, even if we’ve never lived on a farm, and we see right away his allegorical intent. We appreciate that a real event, the tragedy of Soviet Russia under Stalin, is going to be examined by means of a fable set on an imaginary farm. Armed with that understanding, animated by certain expectations, we read on.
Books such as these, the majority of books I’d say, create a subtle interplay of familiarity and strangeness. The familiar brings the reader onboard, and then the strange takes that reader somewhere new. The two elements are necessary. A book that proves to be entirely familiar is boring. Even the most formulaic of genre fiction attempts to convey some feeling of uncertainty and then, only at the very end, reassures the reader that everything is as he or she would wish it to be, the boy getting the girl or the detective catching the murderer. Conversely, a book can’t be entirely strange, otherwise the reader would have no entry point, would flounder and give up.
Virginia Woolf’s To the Lighthouse, published in 1927, will have you floundering a bit. Please don’t give up. For me, it starts working, it takes you in, on about the twentieth page (that is, on page 29 of the edition I’m sending you). Before that, you’ll b
e puzzled, perhaps even vaguely annoyed. So many characters coming and going, no clear plot in sight, tangents and digressions aplenty—where is the clarity and pace of good old Victorian literature? What is Woolf up to?
Well, it’s anyone’s guess—good literature is forever open to interpretation—but by my reckoning Woolf is exploring at least two things here:
1) She is exploring the mind, how consciousness interacts with reality. Woolf’s experience of it, one that I’m sure will be familiar to you, is of intent buffeted by intrusion, like a salmon swimming upstream. Her characters think, but their thinking is constantly interrupted by events that are either external in their origin—other characters coming up—or internal, the mind distracting itself from its own thinking. I’m sure you’ve heard of the term “stream of consciousness,” Woolf’s narrative technique is like that. What she is exploring in To the Lighthouse isn’t so much an ordered series of events—although those are present in the novel—as the mind filtering those events.
2) She is exploring time, the effect and experience of it, which explains why the novel is given its cadence not by the regular, objective tick-tock of a clock, but instead by the subjective reactions of the characters to time, which goes by slowly when the characters are engrossed, and then seems to leap forward years in a blink. Isn’t that how time is for all of us, both crawling and leaping, like a frog’s progress. Those two animal images might help you as you read the book. Try to recognize the salmon and the frog in To the Lighthouse.
Woolf’s prose is dense, detailed and repetitive, but in a mesmerizing way. Not surprisingly, another of Woolf’s novels is called The Waves. Her novel is like that, lulling and mysterious.
It’s always nice to know a little about the author of a book. Virginia Woolf was English. She was born in 1882 and she died in 1941 by suicide. She was mad at times and mad most of the time; that is, she was periodically plagued by mental illness and she was always angry at the limitations placed upon women. Virginia Woolf was a bold, experimental writer and a feminist figurehead of great importance.
One indication both of Woolf’s literary approach and of her character is her fondness for the semi-colon. The period is final and unsubtle, might be termed masculine. The comma, on the other hand, is feminine as some men might want women to be, indefinite and subservient. Woolf instead favours the punctuation mark that most resembles where she wanted to be as a writer and as a woman, a mark like a sluice gate, one that is more open than the period but more in control than the comma, a feminist punctuation mark. Woolf famously wrote an essay called A Room of One’s Own, in which she describes the difficulties of being a female writer in a field dominated by men. Well, her prose is like that, full of thoughts that are related but wouldn’t fit in the oppressive big room of a single sentence; they rather inhabit the many smaller rooms of a sentence punctuated by semi-colons.
I invite you to enter slowly, mindfully, taking your time, the many rooms of Virginia Woolf’s prose.
Yours truly,
Yann Martel
VIRGINIA WOOLF (1882–1941) was a prolific British writer, publishing over five hundred essays and dozens of novels, short stories and non-fiction books. A Room of One’s Own, her most famous non-fiction composition, discusses the issue of women writing in a male-dominated society and why few women in her time were successful novelists. Other celebrated works include To the Lighthouse, The Waves and Orlando. She was married to the writer Leonard Woolf, and together they founded and operated the Hogarth Press, which published works by T. S. Eliot, Katherine Mansfield and John Maynard Keynes, and introduced British readers to Sigmund Freud’s work on psychoanalysis. Woolf committed suicide when she was fifty-nine, most likely because of undiagnosed bipolar disorder.
BOOK 28:
READ ALL ABOUT IT!
BY LAURA BUSH AND JENNA BUSH
April 28, 2008
To Stephen Harper,
Prime Minister of Canada,
A book from two pillars of society,
From a Canadian writer,
With best wishes,
Yann Martel
Dear Mr. Harper,
This is an unusual book I am sending you, for a number of reasons. For starters, it’s fresh off the press. I bought it the day it was published. None of that pleasing, comforting wornness to it, like an old friend coming for a visit. Instead, a shiny, spine-cracking, new-smelling newness. And it’s a children’s book, not something I’d normally send to an adult.
What won me over to this book was its theme and the profession of its authors. Read All About It! is about the appeal and the importance of reading. Tyrone Brown, the protagonist, a student at Good Day Elementary School, is good at math, good at science, good at sports, but he doesn’t like reading. When Miss Libro brings the kids to the school library to read to them, Tyrone is soooooo bored. He’d rather daydream. But one day, when Miss Libro is reading from a book about an astronaut, he pays attention—and he’s taken in. Suddenly his world changes. It becomes populated by ghosts and dragons and historical figures like Benjamin Franklin (this is an American book) and, most endearingly, by a pig. Tyrone comes to realize that books are a fantastic way to dream. I won’t tell you the rest of the story. You’ll have to read all about it yourself.
The authors, Laura Bush and Jenna Bush, a mother-daughter team, are teachers and, according to their bios on the backflap, “passionate about reading.”
A word about teachers. I love teachers. I always have. If I were not a writer, I’d be a teacher. I cannot think of a more important profession. It has always struck me as odd that lawyers and doctors should have such high standing—reflected not only in their salaries but in their social prominence—when, in the course of a normal, happy, healthy life, one should only exceptionally have to consult either. But teachers—we’ve all met and needed teachers. Teachers shaped us. They came into our dark minds and lit a light. They taught us both explicitly and by example. To teach is a magnificent verb, a social verb, implying someone else, whereas the verbs to earn, to buy, to want are lonely and hollow.
I could name so many of the teachers who marked my life. In fact, I will. Miss Preston and Mrs. Robinson were two of my early homeroom teachers. Mr. Grant taught me biology. Mr. Harvey taught me Latin. Mr. McNamara and Sister Reid taught me mathematics. Mr. Lawson and Mr. Davidson taught me English. Mr. Van Husen and Mr. Archer taught me history. The amazing Mr. Saunders taught me geography. And so on. Three decades have gone by, and still I remember these people. Where would I be without them, what frustrated, angry soul would I be? There is only so much parents can do to form us. After that, our fate lies with teachers.
And when we are no longer full-time students, there are all the informal teachers we meet as adults, the men, women and children who know better and who show us how to do better, how to be better.
Pity, then, that we live in a society that so little values teachers and schools. We have, alas, Mr. Harper, fallen upon times in which the common thinking seems to be that societies should be run as if they were corporations, with profitability as the guiding imperative. In this corporatist view of society, those who do not generate dollars are deemed undesirable. So it is that rich societies become unkind to the poor. I see this mean attitude in my own beloved province of Saskatchewan, where the new government is waging, as I’ve heard it put, a “war on the poor,” and this, at a time of unprecedented prosperity [which is ongoing in Saskatchewan, despite the global economic crisis; we are a “have” province]. As if the poor will just disappear if ignored enough. As if there will be no broader consequence to the poor becoming poorer. As if the poor aren’t citizens too. As if some of the poor aren’t helpless children.
Well, in this race in which they are left behind, the poor are joined by students. Because investing in the education of a six-year-old, with a return that will be seen only in fifteen years or so, once that student has got a job and has started paying taxes, is not an investment worth making if one is looking to make quick mon
ey. And so we fund our schools minimally, burdening university students with levels of debt that neutralize their ability to be wealth-generating citizens. How can you buy a car, a house, appliances, how can you contribute to the economy, if you’re crushed by a massive debt? The corporatist agenda is thus defeated by its own ideology.
Teachers are at the forefront of resisting this negative trend. With whatever means they are given, until they burn out, as they too commonly do, they continue their effort to produce intelligent, knowledgeable, caring citizens. Teachers are pillars of society.
Most teachers are women, certainly at the elementary school level, just as most readers are women. Laura Bush and Jenna Bush, teachers and readers both, are in that way typical. One is left wondering: while wives and daughters are teaching and reading, what are husbands and fathers doing? In our society, does the left hand know what the right hand is doing?
Yours truly,
Yann Martel
LAURA BUSH (b. 1946), wife of former president George W. Bush, taught elementary school and worked as a school librarian. She is a founder of the National Book Festival, and honorary chair of the Laura Bush Foundation for America’s Libraries. During her husband’s presidential terms, she was honoured by the Elie Wiesel Foundation for Humanity and the American Library Association. Her daughter JENNA HAGER (née Bush) (b. 1981) is also an elementary school teacher. In 2007, Jenna wrote Ana’s Story: A Journey of Hope, chronicling her experiences with UNICEF in South America.
BOOK 29:
DROWN
BY JUNOT DÍAZ
May 12, 2008
To Stephen Harper,
Prime Minister of Canada,
A bottle with ten genies in it,
From a Canadian writer,
With best wishes,
Yann Martel
Dear Mr. Harper,
