101 Letters to a Prime Minister
Page 2
The key moment of the celebrations came at 3 p.m. on March 28. We were sitting in the Visitors’ Gallery of the House of Commons, waiting. To those Canadians who haven’t been, I must mention that the House of Commons, and indeed Parliament Hill as a whole, is an impressive place. It’s not just the size of the chamber, its grand design and ornate decoration; it’s the symbolism of it. A large part of the history of our nation has been played out within its four walls. While a practical venue, with functional desks, powerful, selective microphones and discreet television cameras, it’s also a space of dreams and visions where we Canadians have worked out who and what we want to be. So there I was, in the House of Commons, wowed by the place, and I got to thinking about stillness. I guess the word popped into my head because the unsettling brawl of Question Period was just coming to an end. To read a book, one must be still. To watch a concert, a play, a movie, to look at a painting, one must also be still. Religion, too, makes use of stillness, notably with prayer and meditation. Gazing upon a lake in autumn or a quiet winter scene—that too lulls us into contemplative stillness. Life, it seems, favours moments of stillness to appear on the edges of our perception and whisper to us, “Here I am. What do you think?” Then we become busy and the stillness vanishes, but we hardly notice because we fall so easily for the delusion of busyness, whereby what keeps us busy must be important and the busier we are with it, the more important it must be. And so we work, work, work, rush, rush, rush. On occasion we say to ourselves, panting, “Gosh, life is racing by.” But it’s the contrary: life is still. It is we who are racing by.
The moment had come. The Minister for Canadian Heritage, Bev Oda at the time, rose to her feet, acknowledged our presence and began to speak. We artists stood up, not for ourselves but for the Canada Council and what it represents. The Minister did not speak for long. In fact, she had barely started, we thought, when she finished and sat down. There was a flutter of applause and then MPs turned to other matters. We were still standing, incredulous. That was it? Fifty years of building Canada’s dazzling and varied culture, done with in less than five minutes? I remember the poet Nicole Brossard laughed and shook her head as she sat down.
I couldn’t quite laugh. What would the equivalent celebration of a major cultural institution have been like in France, say? It would have been a classy, year-long, exhibition-filled extravaganza, with the President of France trying to hog as much of the limelight as possible, that’s what. But there’s no need to go into further details. We all know how the Europeans do culture. It’s sexy and important to them. The world visits Europe because it’s so culturally resplendent. We Canadian artists, by contrast, were standing like dolts in a public gallery, getting in the way of more important business. And the thing is, we didn’t even ask to be there. We were invited.
From the shadows into which we had been cast, I focused on one man. The Prime Minister did not speak during our brief tribute. He didn’t even look up. By all appearances, he didn’t even know we were there. Who is this man? What makes him tick? I asked myself. No doubt he’s busy. He must be aware every waking minute of every day that he’s Prime Minister of Canada. But Stephen Harper must nonetheless have pockets of solitude and idleness during which he contemplates life. There must be occasions when his thinking goes from the instrumental—how do I do this, how do I get that?—to the fundamental—why this, why that? In other words, he must have moments of stillness. And since I deal in books, reading and writing them, and since books and stillness go well together, I decided, by means of good books, to make suggestions that would inspire stillness in Stephen Harper.
Hence the months and years of reading, thinking, writing and mailing. The books are on a shelf in an office somewhere in Ottawa, I presume. The letters are in your hands.
What was I expecting in return? That the Prime Minister would read and reply as fast as I was reading and writing to him? No, I wasn’t expecting such diligence. There will always be more books one would like to read than one will have time to read. And thank God for that. It will be a sad day, a sign of a shrunken Earth, when someone will claim to have read every book published. But I did expect that one day I would receive a response more substantial than the mechanical replies I ended up receiving. Isn’t that what democracy is about, the accountability of our leaders? As a citizen of the arts, I have a right to know what my Prime Minister thinks about reading, I have a right to know what books shaped him.
Here, for example, are a few imagined replies that would have addressed the core of my inquiry:
The haughty:
Dear Mr. Martel,
Napoleon did not ride into battle with a book in his hands. Politics is action. I will perhaps consider your books when I have won all my political battles.
Yours truly,
Stephen Harper
The principled:
Dear Mr. Martel,
What I do in my moments of leisure is none of your business. Furthermore, I cannot accept your gifts because they possibly place me in a position of conflict of interest in relation to other Canadian writers. I have therefore instructed my staff to donate the books you have sent me to World Literacy of Canada.
Yours truly,
Stephen Harper
The sly:
Dear Mr. Martel,
I cannot thank you enough for the wonderful books you are sending me. So many hours of reading pleasure. I can’t get enough. Upon reading the Tolstoy, I was deeply struck at how fragile our grip upon life is. The Orwell had me trembling at the wickedness of the corrupt, the Agatha Christie panting with suspense, the Elizabeth Smart weeping with heartbreak, and so on with each book, a roller coaster of wild emotions. More, more, please. I’ve been managing a book every three days.
Your letters are also a source of delight—but if only they weren’t so short! If they were longer, more detailed, then I would truly be a contented Canadian reader.
Yours truly,
Stephen Harper
P.S. I loved Life of Pi. But what was that strange island about? And what are you working on now?
The practically honest:
Dear Mr. Martel,
I don’t have time to read for leisure. I get what I need to know from briefing papers prepared by my staff. Occasionally I squeeze in a book on politics or economics. But after my time in office, many years from now I hope, then I will look at books of my choice.
Yours truly,
Stephen Harper
The brutally honest:
Dear Mr. Martel,
I don’t like reading novels or poetry or plays. It feels like a waste of time. If that bothers you, I don’t care.
Yours truly,
Stephen Harper
The openly honest:
Dear Mr. Martel,
I’ve never been much of a reader of novels and I’ve done fine that way. But last week I happened to be standing near the box where your books are stored and I had a free minute. I looked at them. Such a variety. It occurred to me that books are like tools. Some are ploughs, some are hammers, some are spirit levels. I’ve picked two books out of the box, the Bhagavad Gita and Maus, which I will try to read in my spare time. That will have to do for the moment.
Yours truly,
Stephen Harper
Any one of these would have would have answered my main question about the Prime Minister’s reading habits.
What makes me think that Stephen Harper doesn’t like reading literature? Isn’t that brazenly presumptuous of me? Has he actually told me that he hasn’t read a novel since high school? No, he hasn’t. Stephen Harper hasn’t breathed a word about his reading habits either to me or to any journalist who has asked (other than to say, during the 2004 election, that his favourite book was the Guinness Book of World Records). What he reads now, or if he reads at all, or what he’s read in the past, remains a mystery. But if I see a man fiercely beating a horse, I feel reasonably confident in concluding that he hasn’t read Black Beauty. If Stephen Harper were shaped and informe
d by literary culture, if he read novels, short stories, plays and poetry, he would love them, he would defend them, he would celebrate them. He would not try to scuttle the public means of sustaining our nation’s artistic culture, retreating from doing so only when it’s politically expedient. If Stephen Harper is informed by literary culture or, indeed, by culture in general, it doesn’t show in what he says or what he does. The elimination of the Department of Foreign Affairs’ budget for arts promotion abroad, the closing down of the CBC Radio orchestra, the skeletonizing of the CBC as a whole, the exclusion of funding to many of Canada’s small literary and arts journals, the imposition of Bill C-32, which aims to loosen copyright protection … the list, sadly, goes on. And most of this occurred when Stephen Harper was at the helm of a minority government. What will he do now that he has a majority?
Perhaps the man beating the horse has read Black Beauty, but he still wants to beat it. Maybe he thinks the horse will be fine despite being beaten. He may even think it should be beaten for its own good. All the more reason to send him good books, then, in the hope of changing his mind.
But the question still nags and needs to be answered: is it anyone’s business what Stephen Harper is reading, has read, or if he reads at all? Is reading not rather like stamp collecting or watching hockey, an activity that resides entirely in the domain of his private life? Shortly after I started my campaign, that’s exactly what someone intimated to me. Actually, he barked it in my face. He was furious. This is a gentleman I know in Saskatoon, where I live. He kept repeating that what I was doing was an objectionable “ad hominem attack.” And this was no Conservative shouting at me, not at all. He also happens to be a keen reader. An ally, I expected. At home, shaken up, I looked in the dictionary to see what ad hominem meant: Latin for an attack on someone’s character rather than on a position or belief he or she might hold. Is asking Stephen Harper to account for his reading habits irrelevant? Worse: is it improper and dishonourable, attacking the private man rather than his public policies?
The answer is simple. As long as someone has no power over me, I don’t care what they read, or if they read at all. It’s not for me to judge how people should live their lives. But once someone has power over me, then, yes, their reading does matter to me, because in what they choose to read will be found what they think and what they might do. If Stephen Harper hasn’t read The Death of Ivan Ilych or any other Russian novel, if he hasn’t read Miss Julia or any other Scandinavian play, if he hasn’t read Metamorphosis or any other German-language novel, if he hasn’t read Waiting for Godot or To the Lighthouse or any other experimental play or novel, if he hasn’t read the Meditations of Marcus Aurelius or The Educated Imagination or any other philosophical inquiry, if he hasn’t read Under Milk Wood or any other poetic prose, if he hasn’t read Their Eyes Were Watching God or Drown or any other American novel, if he hasn’t read The Cellist of Sarajevo or The Island Means Minago or The Dragonfly of Chicoutimi or any other Canadian novel, poem or play—if Stephen Harper hasn’t read any of these or any works like them, then what is his mind made of? How did he get his insights into the human condition? What materials went into the building of his sensibility? What is the colour, the pattern, the rhyme and reason of his imagination? These are not questions one is usually entitled to ask. The imaginative life of our fellow citizens, like their finances, is by and large none of our business. But once these citizens are elected to public office their finances do become our business, and politicians routinely have to account for their financial assets so that we can be assured that they are not acting in self-interest. It’s the same with their imaginative assets. Once someone has power over me, as Stephen Harper has, it’s in my interest to know the nature and quality of his imagination, because his dreams may become my nightmares. The novel, the play, the poem, these are formidable tools to explore people, the world, life. And a leader must know about people, the world, life. And so to citizens who aspire to be successful leaders, I say: if you want to lead effectively, you must read widely.
I wasn’t quite alone in my guerrilla book campaign. For years a complete public record of it was on display on the internet in English and in French. Steve Zdunich set up and maintained these blogs for me for longer than he should have, and then Dennis Duro showed me how I could run them myself. To them I am grateful for their freely given help. I must also thank my parents, Émile and Nicole, who stepped up to translate every letter into French, often with an unacceptably short deadline looming. They are true citizens of the arts, and to them I owe not only love but gratitude. If I love to read and write, it is because they showed me by example. I am also grateful to the University of Saskatchewan’s English Department for providing me with the ideal office in which to work. Lastly, I’m thankful to the writers Steven Galloway, Charles Foran, Alice Kuipers, Don McKay, René-Daniel Dubois and Émile Martel who stepped in for me when I went on a book tour and couldn’t keep up my correspondence with the Prime Minister.
In the letters that follow are reflected the tastes, choices and limitations of one reader. Some books I had in mind long before I sent them. Others were suggested to me by readers across Canada and even from abroad. Some books I had already read, others were discoveries. In my choices I jumped across the barriers of borders and languages. I make no claim to being a wise or perceptive judge. My hope was simply to show the Prime Minister how the literary word is rich, varied, nourishing, life-changing.
Though my book club with Stephen Harper has come to an end, if there are readers who are dying to jump in with suggestions of their own, I encourage them to do so. Books, like fish, like to move about. Communities are made and then gain by sharing books. Any book club member will testify to the meaty pleasure of talking about a commonly read book with other people. So if you have a book you think Stephen Harper should read, by all means send it to him.
His address is:
THE RIGHT HONOURABLE STEPHEN HARPER
PRIME MINISTER OF CANADA
80 WELLINGTON STREET
OTTAWA ON K1A 0A2
Books make us climb higher, and I always have my hand on a book, as if on a banister. But unlike some readers I know who effortlessly bound up the stairs four steps at a time, floor after floor, never stopping to catch their breath, I creep up slowly. If there’s an autobiographical character in my novel Life of Pi, it’s not Pi, it’s the sloth. To me, a good book is a rich lode of leaves and I can read only so many pages before my tummy gets full and I nod off. My banister is more of a branch and from it I hang upside down, nursing the book that is feeding my dreams. I read slowly but continuously. Otherwise I would starve.
Art is water, and just as humans are always close to water, for reasons of necessity (to drink, to wash, to grow) as well as for reasons of pleasure (to play in, to relax in front of, to sail upon), so humans must always be close to art in all its incarnations, from the frivolous to the essential. Otherwise we dry up.
So this is the image I’d like to finish with, the quintessence of stillness and a visual summation of what I tried to convey to Prime Minister Stephen Harper with dozens of polite letters and good books: the image of a sloth hanging from a branch in a green jungle during a downpour of tropical rain. The rain is quite deafening, but the sloth does not mind; it’s reviving, this cascade of water, and other plants and animals will appreciate it. The sloth, meanwhile, has a book on his chest, safely protected from the rain. He’s just read a paragraph. It’s a good paragraph, so he reads it again. The words have painted an image in his mind. The sloth examines it. It’s a beautiful image. The sloth looks around. His branch is high up. Such a lovely view he has of the jungle. Through the rain, he can see spots of bright colours on other branches: birds. Down below, an angry jaguar races along a track, seeing nothing. The sloth turns back to his book. As he breathes a sigh of contentment, he feels that the whole jungle has breathed in and out with him. The rain continues to fall. The sloth falls asleep.
BOOK 1:
THE DEATH Of
IVAN ILYCH
BY LEO TOLSTOY
Translated from the Russian by Aylmer Maude
April 16, 2007
To Stephen Harper,
Prime Minister of Canada,
From a Canadian writer,
With best wishes,
Yann Martel
Dear Mr. Harper,
The Death of Ivan Ilych, by Leo Tolstoy, is the first book I am sending you. I thought at first I should send you a Canadian work—an appropriate symbol since we are both Canadians—but I don’t want to be directed by political considerations of any sort, and, more important, I can’t think of any other work of such brevity, hardly sixty pages, that shows so convincingly the power and depth of great literature. Ivan Ilych is an indubitable masterpiece. There is nothing showy here, no vulgarity, no pretence, no falseness, nothing that doesn’t work, not a moment of dullness, yet no cheap rush of plot either. It is the story, simple and utterly compelling, of one man and his ordinary end.
Tolstoy’s eye for detail, both physical and psychological, is unerring. Take Schwartz. He is in dead Ivan Ilych’s very home, has spoken to his widow, but he is mainly concerned with his game of cards that night. Or take Peter Ivanovich and his struggle with the low pouffe and its defective springs while he attempts to navigate an awkward conversation with Ivan Ilych’s widow. Or the widow herself, Praskovya Fedorovna, who weeps and laments before our eyes, yet without ever forgetting her self-interest, the details of her magistrate husband’s pension and the hope of getting perhaps more money from the government. Or look at Ivan Ilych’s dealings with his first doctor, who, Ivan Ilych notices, examines him with the same self-important airs and inner indifference that Ivan Ilych used to put on in court before an accused. Or look at the subtle delineation of the relations between Ivan Ilych and his wife—pure conjugal hell—or with his friends and colleagues, who, all of them, treat him as if they stood on a rock-solid bank while he had foolishly chosen to throw himself into a flowing river. Or look, lastly, at Ivan Ilych himself and his sad, lonely struggle.