by Yann Martel
BOOK 87:
SWEET HOME CHICAGO
BY ASHTON GREY
August 2, 2010
To Yann Martel
Ashton Grey
To Stephen Harper,
Prime Minister of Canada,
A genie escaping a bottle,
From a Canadian writer,
With best wishes,
Yann Martel
Dear Mr. Harper,
A few weeks ago I was at the Saskatchewan Festival of Words. It’s a friendly celebration of literature held in the pleasant Prairie town of Moose Jaw. I’m sure you’ve been (to the town, I mean). One of the days I was there, as I was leaving the public library where the festival takes place, a man on a park bench hailed me. He was holding a baby in his arms and was sitting next to another man. I might’ve just waved and walked on, but there was that baby. I have a baby. So I approached the two men. It turned out that the other man was the dad, and the genial man who had called out my name was his friend. The three of us chatted for a few minutes. I was about to go when the man holding the baby asked me if I would buy his book. I had noticed the thin volumes spread out in a half-circle on the ground in front of him. “Special Festival price, seven dollars,” he said. I gave him ten, he signed my copy, and I walked away with Sweet Home Chicago, by Ashton Grey. I saw Mr. Grey again the next day, on Main Street this time, near the Mae Wilson Theatre, still hawking his opus. Someone told me that Mr. Grey, who looked to be in his thirties, couldn’t afford the bus from Winnipeg to Moose Jaw, so he’d hitchhiked to come sell his book at the Festival of Words. Such dedication, I thought. And he had the good karma earned from holding a baby the previous day.
I decided to read his book and now I pass it on to you. Sweet Home Chicago is forty-nine pages long. I remember Mr. Grey saying on the park bench that he didn’t like calling it a novella. I didn’t ask what he had against the term, but out of respect for his wishes, let’s call it a long short story. If you look on the copyright page, you’ll see that it was “first printed” in 2009 and then printed again by Bindle Stick Publications of Hamilton, Ontario, in 2010. The number 3 appears below that information. My guess is that Sweet Home Chicago is onto its third printing. Now, whether Bindle Stick Publications is Mr. Grey’s own self-publishing operation and he lives in Hamilton, Ontario (and how he got from Hamilton to Winnipeg), or whether Mr. Grey lives in Winnipeg and does business with Bindle Stick Publications, a tiny vanity press in Hamilton, Ontario—to all these questions, your guess is as good as mine.
Sweet Home Chicago is a long short story with many flaws. There are lots of spelling mistakes. On the very first page you’ll read the sentence “He reached over the bar and ceased Ronald’s coat trying to jerk him awake.” Ronald’s coat was more likely “seized.” The dialogue is consistently wrongly punctuated:
“I guess you should call the police.” He said with a voice that expressed his sorrow that nothing else could be done.
That should be a comma after “police” and the personal pronoun that follows should start with a small letter, since the statement is all one sentence. On a broader level, some of the exposition is awkward, many details are unnecessary, and it’s not entirely clear to me what the story is about thematically. And yet it has narrative drive, the characters have their charm, there are funny parts, and underlying it all is an uncynical tenderness. It’s a booze-fuelled story, so to seek out the flaws is to soberly miss the point. Best to read Sweet Home Chicago with the unfocused, good-humoured indulgence of the slightly drunk. The story relates the consequences to the unnamed protagonist of being in a bar next to a man who has the misfortune of keeling over and dying right then and there. Our hero finds himself in an alcohol-soused pickle.
This story is no Under the Volcano. (Do you know the novel? Malcolm Lowry? It’s Canadian. The over-consumption of alcohol achieves there its greatest literary expression.) But that is another book. The attraction for me in sending you Sweet Home Chicago lies not with the quality of the work but with the intent of the author. It’s Ashton Grey’s strong desire to tell his story that struck me, a desire so strong that he self-published it and now self-promotes it, even hitchhiking from Winnipeg to Moose Jaw to share it, and all this without any serious chance of critical or commercial success. But that’s what stories do to a person and, collectively, to a people. Stories are like genies: just as a genie wants to escape its bottle, so a story wants to escape the man, woman or child in which it finds itself. A shared story is a living story. Stories are passed down through families and through history. They endure while the storytellers die. Now that Ashton Grey has committed his story to the page, it will live on. That is a good thing. We need stories, all kinds of stories, because without stories, our imagination dies, and without imagination, there is no real appreciation of life. You have the luck of owning one of the few copies of Sweet Home Chicago. I hope you realize what a rare privilege that is.
Yours truly,
Yann Martel
ASHTON GREY (1983–2011) was a Canadian writer, author of the novella Sweet Home Chicago and contributor to Bound for Glory magazine.
BOOK 88:
AUTOBIOGRAPHY OF RED
BY ANNE CARSON
August 16, 2010
To Stephen Harper,
Prime Minister of Canada,
Poetry to make you think and feel,
From a Canadian writer,
With best wishes,
Yann Martel
Dear Mr. Harper,
“Art is heart.” My uncle Vince, a photographer, said that once. What he meant is that expression that is not rooted in emotion, or that does not evoke emotion, is not art. Art can, of course, make one think. Art that aims to last should do that at least in part, since emotions tend to froth up mightily but then fade, while a thought can calmly stay in the mind for a lifetime. A thought can be fully revived simply by the act of thinking, while an emotion remembered is far more tepid than an emotion felt. A story that is all emotion, a romance, say, may move, but it will be quickly forgotten as it will leave nothing for the mind to mull over. Nonetheless, despite the perishability of emotion and the cool immortality of thought, it is emotion that marks us most. Nothing goes deeper than emotion, and after that, at a shallower level, we think. Thinking that is significant may trigger an emotion. Remember Archimedes shouting “Eureka!” (great emotion) after his discovery that a submerged object will displace its equivalent volume of water (great thought). Which do we remember most? I think it’s that cry and that image of the exultant man running down the streets of Syracuse naked after jumping out of his bath.
Anne Carson’s Autobiography of Red, then. Anne Carson is a Canadian academic. She holds a Ph.D. from the University of Toronto and is a classics scholar who has taught at UC Berkeley, at Princeton, at McGill, among other universities. Which is very impressive—but not, I would argue, an ideal background for a poet. Universities do wonders for dead poets, teaching them and therefore keeping them alive, but they’re deadly for living poets. It’s pretty well impossible to make a living as a poet, so many poets have sought shelter in universities, earning degrees from them and then teaching there. I don’t know why that is so. Why wouldn’t poets seek shelter in plumbing or farming? Whoever determined that poets should have soft, uncallused hands? The damage universities have done to poetry stems from the kind of thinking that thrives in these institutions, and which is indeed necessary if they are to produce quality scholarship: thinking that is rigorous, codified, impersonal. Such hyper-thinking tends to kill the spontaneity, the liveliness of the poetic instinct. Walt Whitman is taught in universities, but Walt Whitman would never have survived university.
Academic cleverness is on display in Red. The first five sections—Red Meat: What Difference Did Stesichoros Make?; Red Meat: Fragments of Stesichoros; and then three appendices—and the last section, Interview, are interesting but in a puzzling, cool, clever, archly droll way. You have to know who Stesichoros is. I’d never heard of him. Then you ha
ve to care. I didn’t really. Compared to some of the other poetry I’ve sent you—Ted Hughes’s Birthday Letters or Gilgamesh, for example—these sections are not memorable. Thank God they’re short.
But then there’s the meat of the book, the Autobiography of Red in question, which is by far the longest section. It’s great. It’s a novel in verse that tells the sad story of Geryon, a red monster, and his unhappy relationship with Herakles (or Hercules, as you might know him better). Geryon loves Herakles, and Herakles loves Geryon too, but in a fickle way, in a way that doesn’t accommodate Geryon’s love. So Geryon loves and suffers, while Herakles loves and cavorts about with Ancash, his Peruvian lover who loves and suffers as much at the hands of Herakles as Geryon does. The names are classical, but the setting is contemporary as are the language and the imagery. And the emotions are there. Take these lines, of Geryon and Herakles lying next to each other:
Not touching
but joined in astonishment as two cuts lie parallel in the same flesh.
And the story ends with an astonishing image that will stay with you. I won’t ruin it by quoting it out of context. You must earn the image by reading your way to it. Then it will have its emotional impact on you. And you will perhaps be left thinking.
Yours truly,
Yann Martel
ANNE CARSON (b. 1950) is a Canadian poet and professor of Classics, whose writing style crosses genre and form, combining poetry, translation, essay, fiction and criticism. Much of her work takes its cue from classical Greek literature. Carson has published fifteen books and garnered a list of accolades that includes the Griffin Poetry Prize and a Guggenheim Fellowship.
BOOKS 89:
MR. PALOMAR
BY ITALO CALVINO
Translated from the Italian by William Weaver
(AND
THREE LIVES
BY GERTRUDE STEIN)
August 30, 2010
for Mr. Palomar
To Stephen Harper,
Prime Minister of Canada,
A book of observant stillness,
From a Canadian writer,
With best wishes,
Yann Martel
for Three Lives
To Stephen Harper,
Prime Minister of Canada,
Pretty much one of the worst books I’ve ever read,
From a Canadian writer,
With best wishes,
Yann Martel
Dear Mr. Harper,
Perhaps you noticed that the last book I sent you, the poet Anne Carson’s Autobiography of Red, starts with a quotation from Gertrude Stein. That got me thinking. Every literate person has heard of Gertrude Stein. Paris fixture for forty years; friend of Ernest Hemingway and Sherwood Anderson, of Pablo Picasso and Henri Matisse; coiner, it is said, of the term “the lost generation” to designate those American writers who were born out of the disillusionment that followed the First World War; sayer of “A rose is a rose is a rose” to debunk literary pomp and pretence; and so on—Gertrude Stein is a name that has endured. I have in mind the image of a smart, genial, open-minded woman who liked to be at the centre of things. All artists need patrons and supporters, and what a nice thing it must have been to have Gertrude Stein play that role, to be admitted into her salon in Paris in rooms full of stunning modern art, and to be offered drink and food and conversation, if one were a young and poor expatriate writer or painter. If Paris was a moveable feast, as Hemingway put it, I imagine Gertrude Stein as the hostess of that feast.
But who has read Gertrude Stein? Her Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas, which is purportedly about her lifelong companion but is in fact about both of them and their lively lives in Paris, is Stein’s best-known work. Though as biography it’s fanciful, with the facts largely filtered by a cheerfully opinionated subject, it’s still not a work of fiction. What of Stein’s true fiction? I had never read anything by her, and couldn’t even think of a title. So there, my choice was made.
I found Three Lives, a collection of three long stories first published in 1909 and more recently reprinted by Penguin Classics. The introduction by an American academic whetted my appetite. In it I discovered that the style of each of the stories was highly influenced by a different modern painter. So “The Good Anna” was marked by Paul Cézanne, “Melanctha” by Picasso and “The Gentle Lena” by Matisse. How odd and intriguing, I thought. In what way could brush strokes affect the writing of words? How could the play of paint on a two-dimensional surface influence the composition of a story on a page? I settled in for a thrilling Modernist ride. I have often thought that no one has pushed and pulled the English language quite so much as the interwar writers of the last century. Hemingway, William Faulkner, James Joyce, Virginia Woolf, John Dos Passos, e. e. cummings, to mention only a smattering off the top of my head—they made English say new things in new ways. I thought I would witness such experimentation with Three Lives.
Well, I was disappointed, angrily disappointed. It’s all very well to have ideas and theories, and experiments do need to be made, in art as well as in science, and one should make allowances for risk-takers—but my God, what a boring book! I worked my way through “The Good Anna” and started “Melanctha,” but forty pages in my reading ground to a stupefied halt, and I gave up. Of what I read, I have this to say: there is no concern for realism in either setting or psychology; there is no eye for detail or ear for dialogue; nearly everything is told, not shown; the characters are only fitfully plausible; there is only the odd heartbeat of a plot; the language is plain and unappealing; and the repetition—which was announced as Stein’s great gambit—is as interesting as watching paint dry, which is the only link I can make between Three Lives and what Cézanne, Picasso and Matisse did. Most surprising to me, coming from someone I thought would be a fountain of bon mots, was the utter witlessness of Gertrude Stein’s writing. Oh yes: the racism, that too came as a surprise. I noted a few squeaks by the author of the introduction to explain it away, but I took little heed of this warning. After all, there’s that line in Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises, of the character Robert Cohn, how he had “a mean Jewish streak.” That second adjective wouldn’t pass muster nowadays. But it’s just one line among many, one line in a magnificent body of work that only there jars with its prejudice. It’s a smudge upon the timeless art made by a man who is of his time, formed and limited by its biases. And more to the point, The Sun Also Rises is not The Protocols of the Elders of Zion. The comment on Robert Cohn is a line in passing, a throwaway line in no way central to the novel. Gertrude Stein’s Three Lives is something else. See how this paragraph sits with you:
Rose Johnson was careless and was lazy, but she had been brought up by white folks and she needed decent comfort. Her white training had only made for habits, not for nature. Rose had the simple, promiscuous unmorality of the black people.
As for our heroine:
Melanctha Herbert was a graceful, pale yellow, intelligent, attractive negress. She had not been raised like Rose by white folks, but then she had been half made with real white blood.
Rose Johnson is a proud one:
“No, I ain’t no common nigger,” said Rose Johnson, “for I was raised by white folks, and Melanctha she is so bright and learned so much in school, she ain’t no common nigger either, though she ain’t got no husband to be married to like I am to Sam Johnson.”
They’re a fine pair, Sam and Rose:
The child though it was healthy after it was born, did not live long. Rose Johnson was careless and negligent and selfish, and when Melanctha had to leave for a few days, the baby died. Rose Johnson had liked the baby well enough and perhaps she just forgot it for awhile, anyway the child was dead and Rose and Sam her husband were very sorry but then these things came so often in the negro world in Bridgepoint, that they neither of them thought about it very long.
I like the “perhaps she just forgot it” and then the huffy, what-you-making-so-much-trouble-about “anyway” that follows. As for the death
of a baby not being thought about for “very long,” I’d think that’d be inaccurate even of a mother gnu who’s just lost a baby gnu to a lion on an African plain, let alone of two human beings. And this tripe appears in the first two pages alone. After that, it gets no better, it goes on and on in the same register, because “Melanctha” is all about black folks as they exist in Gertrude Stein’s mind.
You perhaps see now why I stopped reading. Whatever theory of literary composition Gertrude Stein might have wanted to bring to light is buried by a thick layer of toxic racist sludge. I’m willing to forgive the odd slip of an artist if the aim of the work is high. But when the slip is central, when the slip is all you see and get, then the high aim is lost. Gertrude Stein’s book is all the more galling if you consider that she was both lesbian and Jewish, and therefore, you’d think, slightly more sensitive to prejudice. But no, not Gertrude Stein. Stupid, stupid woman. I see now why she has survived among readers only in her incarnation as hostess to young greats.
Why then am I sending you her book when I so loathed it? Because maybe I missed the point. Every reader has his or her limitations. Clearly I’m not up to this Penguin Classic. You might have a different opinion. Perhaps you will get something out of Three Lives.
But in that order of books, of writers who try something new, there’s much better than Gertrude Stein. Take Italo Calvino, for example, an Italian writer who lived between the years 1923 and 1985. I’ve chosen Mr. Palomar for you. Here you have a book that is plotless but fascinating, that is experimental yet rewarding, that is different without becoming tiresome, that is rooted but not restricted, that is beautiful though not in a classical way. Mr. Palomar is a book that charms and stimulates in equal measure. It makes you see both language and the world in a slightly different way.