101 Letters to a Prime Minister
Page 32
BOOK 95:
CAKES AND ALE
BY W. SOMERSET MAUGHAM
November 22, 2010
To Stephen Harper,
Prime Minister of Canada,
To have chatted with Thomas Hardy,
To be like Rosie,
From a Canadian writer,
With best wishes,
Yann Martel
Dear Mr. Harper,
The cover is dreadful, but the book is good. Cakes and Ale is the first Somerset Maugham I’m sending you. Maugham, an English writer who lived between 1874 and 1965, was a prolific author of novels, plays, short stories and travel writing. His masterpiece is Of Human Bondage. Oh, what the lovesick soul submits itself to! But Philip Carey’s misery at the hands of Mildred will be for another time, when you have more time to read: Of Human Bondage is a long book, close to seven hundred pages. So Cakes and Ale instead, at a neat 190 pages.
Maugham would not generally be placed at the forefront of English literature, I don’t think. He was too old-fashioned in his technique, too lacking in newness and experimentation. He was writing novels at the same time as his Modernist contemporaries like Hemingway, Faulkner, Joyce and Woolf were rewriting the novel. But who cares, it’s not a competition. So long as the reading is enjoyable, let’s keep on reading. Maugham relied on those mainstays of the good story—character, plot, emotion—and did very well with them.
Cakes and Ale features members of my own profession. I thought you might find that amusing, seeing how scribblers operate. The main characters—Edward Driffield, Alroy Kear, William Ashenden—are all writers. The first is portrayed as at the forefront of late-Victorian literature, the second as having more ambition than talent, while the last is our modest but slightly cantankerous narrator. It is said that Maugham based Edward Driffield on Thomas Hardy. Maugham mentions in his author’s preface meeting the elderly Hardy once at a dinner party and chatting alone with him for three-quarters of an hour (imagine that: chatting with Thomas Hardy!), but explicitly denies the link between Hardy and Driffield. He has this surprising assessment of Hardy: “I read Tess of the D’Urbervilles when I was eighteen with such enthusiasm that I determined to marry a milkmaid, but I had never been so much taken with Hardy’s other books as were most of my contemporaries, and I did not think his English very good.” So says Maugham, but then his character William Ashenden gives the same lukewarm assessment of the fictitious great writer Edward Driffield. To give a character an aura of fame is difficult, and Maugham succeeds admirably with Driffield, but if it helps you to think of Driffield as Hardy, go for it. There’s no problem with adding fiction to fiction. It will only increase your reading pleasure.
What links these three characters, certainly the first and the third directly, is the voluptuous, carefree, beautiful Rosie Driffield. She is Edward Driffield’s first wife, William Ashenden’s former lover and Alroy Kear’s problem. Kear, you see, has been charged by Driffield’s second wife to write the great man’s biography, and the shamelessly promiscuous Rosie is both awkward to deal with and impossible to avoid in his biography.
What is shocking to see in the novel is how considerations of class so regiment the lives of the characters. There are people one can know and visit and be at ease with, and entire classes of others that one should deal with on a stiff, strictly professional basis. Rosie stands out as the only character who lives the life she wants, unencumbered by such notions of propriety. And that means living her emotions, no matter where they lead her.
See if you like this first sample of Maugham. His short stories are wonderful too.
Yours truly,
Yann Martel
W. SOMERSET MAUGHAM (1874–1965) was an English novelist, short story writer, travel writer and playwright. He always wanted to be a writer and, with the success of his book Liza of Lambeth, he walked away from his position as a medical doctor. His novels include Of Human Bondage, The Painted Veil and The Razor’s Edge, all of which have been adapted for the screen.
BOOK 96:
SIX CHARACTERS IN SEARCH Of AN AUTHOR
BY LUIGI PIRANDELLO
Translated from the Italian by John Linstrum
December 6, 2010
To Stephen Harper,
Prime Minister of Canada,
From a Canadian writer,
With best wishes,
Yann Martel
Dear Mr. Harper,
One of the great monuments of twentieth-century European theatre is Six Characters in Search of an Author, by Luigi Pirandello. A few biographical details, quickly: Italian; 1867 to 1936; short stories, novels, plays; Nobel Prize for Literature in 1934.
Six Characters was first performed in 1921. Like many daring works, it divided before conquering the public. It made Pirandello famous around the world. It was a play like none before. It starts with a bare stage, a space not pretending to be a living room or a garden or anywhere else, but only that: a bare stage. Eventually some actors wander on, soon joined by a director, a prompter, a prop man and the various other members of a theatre company. They are about to rehearse a play. Now, the device of a play within a play is not so revolutionary. Shakespeare used it in Hamlet, for example. But that is a finished play within a finished play. Here, at the start of Six Characters, the inner mechanics of that artifice called theatre are displayed with complete nudity, so to speak; the actors appear as themselves, standing around, chatting, smoking, reading a newspaper, and the normally hidden director and others are out in full view. It all has the appearance of real, ordinary life. Then—and this is where the Pirandellian revolution starts—the doorkeeper apologetically interrupts the director to inform him that some people are here to see him. The director is annoyed. A rehearsal is never to be interrupted! But these people, they’re insisting, says the doorkeeper. In fact, they’ve already made their way to the stage, six of them, a man, a woman, a young woman, a young man and two children. The director asks impatiently: Who are you, what do you want?
The Father replies: “We have come in search of an author.” They—that is, the Father, the Mother, the Stepdaughter, the Son, the Boy and the Child—are characters abandoned by an author. They’ve come to this stage hoping that the director will become the author who will allow them to fulfill their purpose. The director and the actors react with disbelief and consternation. After all, the Father and his family are not ghosts; they are flesh and blood. Yet they insist that they are characters. Do they apologize for their strange status? Not at all, because, “you know well that life is full of infinite absurdities, which, strangely enough, do not even need to appear plausible, since they are true.”
The words “real” and “true” come up often in the play. They are at the heart of what the play is about. The fanciful premise of characters appearing in real life is never abandoned during Six Characters. On the contrary, it is insisted upon throughout. What Pirandello aims to do is blur the distinction between the real and the true, the concrete and the imaginary. Because what is real may not contain any truth beyond a base material factuality and what is true may not need the stamp of reality to be any more true. Such insistence is not twee literary fancy. Much of life is illusion. Who you were yesterday, Mr. Harper, when you were a Young Turk of the Reform Party, has vanished. It was real, but then it vanished. Who’s to say that who you are today won’t once again disappear into a haze as you move into who you will be tomorrow? Billions of people on Earth have similarly disappeared, their reality dissipated into nothingness, first in subtle ways as they mutated from one incarnation to the next as they grew up and then grew old, and then wholly and concretely as they were swallowed up by the oblivion of death. Compare that to the literary character. A character is always who he or she is, never changing, permanent, immortal. Every audience that has seen Hamlet has, eventually, died, but Hamlet remains, alive and unchanging in the pages of the play. As the Father says at one point, a character “is always ‘somebody.’ But a man … may very well be ‘nobody.’ ”
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nbsp; More twee fancy, you might huff. But think of it this way, then: art is the essence of life. Art is life minus the humdrum, the ordinary, the mundane. In a novel, a character never wastes the reader’s time with trips to the supermarket or with the brushing and flossing of teeth, and in a play the viewer is spared the Hellos and the How-are-yous and the other banalities that pepper our daily speech. These are left out because the novel and the play are there to relate only the essential. That being so, they do indeed have a truth greater than that of much dull and inane reality. If you continue to insist that novels and plays nonetheless lack reality, shouldn’t that be said with pity rather than arrogance? Don’t we want life to be more like art? Many, many people would like that, I suspect. And some people actually pull it off. Isn’t that a common expression, to say of someone who makes a vivid impression upon us, that he or she is a “real character.” That’s right out of Pirandello!
Pirandello’s point, as I see it, is to question the content and appearance of reality. Reality is less real than it might appear. And truth can be hard to see, let alone accept. Another way of putting it would be to say that life is more a product of the imagination than we realize. So we too, at times, are characters searching for an author, for direction, for meaning, while at other times we are actors, consciously—or perhaps unconsciously—playing our role.
I hope you get to see Six Characters in Search of an Author on stage one day. I saw a modern version a couple years ago in London. It was bracing stuff.
I’m sorry the translation I’m sending you is not very good. It’s nearly sixty years old and in dated British English. One character even exclaims, “By Jove!” It makes me cringe, but it’s the only one I could find on short notice. And the book is falling apart, too. But that’s only the passing reality of an otherwise truthful work of art.
Yours truly,
Yann Martel
LUIGI PIRANDELLO (1867–1936) was an Italian novelist, poet, short story writer and playwright. He was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1934.
BOOKS 97:
LE GÉANT DE LA GAFFE
BY ANDRÉ FRANQUIN
LE LOTUS BLEU
BY HERGÉ
PAUL À QUÉBEC
BY MICHEL RABAGLIATI
December 20, 2010
To Stephen Harper,
Prime Minister of Canada,
Three French lessons,
Three Christmas gifts,
From a Canadian writer,
Merry Christmas,
Yann Martel
Dear Mr. Harper,
The comic book is a well-established Franco-Belgian tradition. I grew up on it, having spent four years as a child in France. I adored Asterix and Obelix, Tintin, Lucky Luke, Spirou and Fantasio, Philemon and many others. When I returned to Canada at the age of twelve, I found the comic books that were most widely available here—Marvel Comics—to be compelling, but grim and humourless—and foreign, since Marvel Comics are American.
You’ve made commendable efforts to master the French language, as I mentioned in an earlier letter, so I thought I’d send you three comic books in French, Le Géant de la gaffe, by André Franquin and Le Lotus bleu, by Hergé, both from Belgium, and Paul à Québec, by Michel Rabagliati, who is from Quebec.
Le Géant de la gaffe features Gaston Lagaffe, an office boy who is nominally in charge of reader correspondence at the magazine where he works, Spirou. In fact, he does nothing but tend to his own interests, which vary from the artistic to the technological and never, ever involve letters from readers. He is prone to gaffes, which has the same meaning in French as in English. But Gaston’s gaffes are in a class of their own. He is the terror of his fellow office workers and, indeed, of his entire neighbourhood. Curiously, despite his many catastrophic misadventures, he’s never fired.
Each page in the album stands on its own, telling its own gag, so there is no continuous story. But the same characters appear throughout. The genius in the Gaston Lagaffe series is primarily visual. Take page eight, in which Gaston offers Prunelle, his boss, a ride in his ancient car. He’s just installed a newfangled device, seat belts (we’re in 1977). Prunelle is a little worried, but Gaston reassures him: he installed them himself. Alas, Gaston has accidentally attached Prunelle’s seat belt to the motor’s drive shaft, so as he drives off the seat belt starts to wind itself around the shaft, pulling Prunelle down through his seat into the frame of the car. Have a look at the middle illustration, three rows down, in which Prunelle has been completely sucked into his seat. See his raised foot, his clenched fist, hear the loud CRRRAC sound. It’s unspeakably funny. Even better: page twenty-nine, in which Gaston has given Lebrac, a colleague, a taste of his chili-pepper sauce to see if it’s spicy enough. Behold the effect on Lebrac. The drawings are extraordinarily expressive.
By comparison, Tintin is quite witless. The jokes, when there are any, aren’t particularly funny. And the drawing style is more workmanlike. But the genius with Tintin lies elsewhere, in its narrative breadth. The long Tintin series—the first one, Tintin au Congo, came out in 1930, and the last one, the twenty-second, Tintin et les Picaros, in 1976—is dramatic in intent and has endeared itself to millions of readers around the world because of the adventures told within. Le Lotus bleu, the Tintin I am offering you this week, is an early one, from 1934 (in its original black-and-white edition), but even there the adventure sweeps you along. And some of the illustrations are nonetheless startling. Have a look at the large ones on pages six and twenty-six, for example.
And we should place Hergé in his historical context. He practically invented the illustrative language of comic strips. The way the stories are told frame by frame so that the narrative is clear and fluid, with close-ups and wide shots; the details to convey emotion, for example stars circling the head for pain or beads of water for anxiety or wonderment; the ambition to tell entire stories that are memorable and gripping—all this started with Georges Rémi (he inverted his initials to create his pen name). I don’t want to venture too far, not being a historian of the subject, but I do believe that Tintin is the grandfather of the Franco-Belgian narrative comic strip. He is the giant upon whose shoulders subsequent artists stood, including Franquin and, on our side of the Atlantic, Michel Rabagliati, the author of Paul à Québec.
Paul à Québec is the sixth in a series. It tells a sad story, of the illness and dying of Paul’s father-in-law. It’s very moving. I doubt you’ll be able to finish the story with your eyes still dry. Paul à Québec speaks with a confidence that shows how the comic book has come of age, capable of telling stories as serious as any told using solely written language, with illustrative details that are as powerful as the well-chosen metaphors of an accomplished novelist. Paul is entirely rooted in the language and culture of Quebec. I read it with a degree of nostalgia, recognizing many of the elements (the strange restaurant in the opening scene, for example, that stands between Montreal and Quebec). This is where I come from, I thought. These are my people, these are my stories.
I wish you and your family a merry Christmas.
Yours truly,
Yann Martel
ANDRÉ FRANQUIN (1924–1997) was a Belgian comics artist who contributed to Spirou et Fantasio (as part of the “School of Marcinelle” in the 1950s and ’60s) and Tintin, and created his own strips Gaston and Isabelle.
HERGÉ (1907–1983), the nom de plume of Georges Remi, was a Belgian comics writer and artist. He is best known for creating the Tintin comic books. He continued to write the Tintin series during World War II. He is the recipient of the Order of the Crown.
MICHEL RABAGLIATI (b. 1961) is a Canadian cartoonist and author of the Paul series of books (Paul in the Country, Paul Moves Out, et al.). Though he read and created comics as a child, he worked as a graphic designer and illustrator for many years before drawing comics again.
BOOK 98:
SIR GAWAIN AND THE GREEN KNIGHT
EDITED AND TRANSLATED BY JAMES WINNY
January 3, 2
011
To Stephen Harper,
Prime Minister of Canada,
From a Canadian writer,
With best wishes for 2011,
Yann Martel
Dear Mr. Harper,
Why not start the new year, which we hope will be good, with something old and most certainly good? A few weeks ago I happened to bump into Doug Thorpe, the genial head of the English Department at the University of Saskatchewan. He’s very knowledgeable about Sir Walter Scott, so I asked him if he didn’t have a short Scott to propose for our reading purposes. He shook his head. “There are no short works by Sir Walter Scott. He was terribly long-winded. Every tome he wrote has at least six hundred pages.” So much for Sir Walter Scott and our busy-busy-busy-short-book club. Did he have anything else to propose, off the top of his head, I asked. He thought for a second. “Have you sent him Sir Gawain and the Green Knight?” I hadn’t. Doug invited me into his office and fished around his bookshelves for a few moments. “Here you go,” he said, handing me a copy of the book in question.
Indeed, here you go. I was doubly touched by the gift in that a name on the front cover jumped out at me: James Winny, the editor and translator. James Winny taught at Trent University, in Peterborough, Ontario, where I did an undergraduate degree in philosophy. He was my tutorial leader in a first-year introductory English course I took. I’m sure Professor Winny entirely forgot me the moment our course ended, but I still remember him clearly. Once a week, eight or so of us students would troop into his office, where he would lead us into discussion on a work of literature. He was a patrician figure in his sixties, with a resonant voice and an elegant English accent, and he was friendly in a phlegmatic way. Times have changed. Now, in a university system in Canada more geared to producing economically useful workers than critically thinking citizens, it’s unimaginable that eight first-year students would have hour-long weekly meetings with a full professor, but so it was at the time, in the early 1980s at Trent University. Those tutorials marked me. Once Professor Winny read aloud T. S. Eliot’s Four Quartets. He mastered a range of English accents and he brought the poems to life for us, did he ever. I remember another discussion we had about Joseph Conrad’s The Secret Agent, which he deemed—with an authority that nonetheless felt like a suggestion—a perfect novel. With each meeting, he made us see more in a work than our immature minds had first seized. It was a thrill to be led on such an intellectual ride.