101 Letters to a Prime Minister

by Yann Martel

  Yours truly,

  Yann Martel

  CYRIL EDWARDS (b. 1947) is a (largely) retired lecturer in medieval German literature and philology at the University of Oxford. His books include The Beginnings of German Literature, translations of Wolfram von Eschenbach’s Parzival and Titurel and Hartmann von Aue’s Iwein, or the Knight with the Lion, and The Little Book of Soups & Stews. Forthcoming: The Allotment/The Black and the Green, a novella and selected poems.

  BOOK 92:

  CHESS

  BY STEFAN ZWEIG

  Translated from the German by Anthea Bell

  October 11, 2010

  To Stephen Harper,

  Prime Minister of Canada,

  Your move,

  From a Canadian writer,

  With best wishes,

  Yann Martel

  Dear Mr. Harper,

  Do you play chess? I’m sure you have. It has a rare allure among games. Stefan Zweig puts it nicely:

  ancient yet eternally new; mechanical in structure, yet made effective only by the imagination; limited to a geometrically fixed space, yet with unlimited combinations; constantly developing, yet sterile; thought that leads nowhere; mathematics calculating nothing; art without works of art; architecture without substance—but nonetheless shown to be more durable in its entity and existence than all books and works of art; the only game that belongs to all nations and all eras, although no one knows what god brought it down to earth to vanquish boredom, sharpen the senses and stretch the mind. Where does it begin and where does it end?

  (It occurs to me that Zweig’s musing could also apply to sex, except for the invocation of sterility, but that’s neither here nor there.) Chess is a game of stumping complexity. With the exception of go, I can’t think of another game that offers so many possible plays. And there’s another appeal to chess: the complete absence of luck. Chess is an entirely logical game in which there is no “luck of the draw.” You win or you lose entirely based on the mental powers you bring to the chequered board. And so the aura of genius that surrounds the great chess players of history. But if genius it is, it’s a peculiar one, deep perhaps but also very narrow, confined to the movements of pieces on a board. Bobby Fischer once said, “Chess is life.” Well, not really. Life very much has an element of luck to it, the luck of where and to whom we are born, the luck of our genetic inheritance, the luck of our circumstances, and so on. Nor is life logical. In fact, according to a good number of thinkers and writers, it’s not even certain that life makes sense. But chess has simple rules that yield a vastly complex game, just as life, one might argue, has simple rules that yield a vastly complex experience. And we meet opposition in life, just as there is opposition in chess, black against white. So the parallel is rough, but it pleases, this simplification of life in which only force of personality matters and fate is entirely in one’s own hands. One looks at the chessboard and imagines a battle scene—or perhaps Question Period.

  Stefan Zweig’s Chess (also known at The Royal Game or Chess Story) was published posthumously after the author’s suicide in 1942 in Brazil, to which he had fled with his wife to escape the Nazis. Zweig is the quintessentially continental European writer of the interwar period, a man caught between bloodbaths who tried to make sense of a world gone mad. He did this by applying himself to the “real” world in a series of biographies and by “escaping” that world in works such as Chess. But escape is never possible. The reality of Zweig’s life seeped into his fiction. You will see this in Chess. The story takes place over the course of a few days on a passenger steamer travelling from New York to Buenos Aires. Aboard is the world chess champion Mirko Czentovic. Some chess amateurs lure him into a game, him against all of them. Czentovic easily defeats them. They play again. The amateurs look like they’re once again going to lose. But then a voice from the crowd makes a surprising suggestion for the next move. They follow his advice, as they do for the following moves, each given urgently by this stranger. To their amazement, the game ends in a draw. The stranger reluctantly agrees to play a game one-on-one the next day with the world champion. But who is this stranger? Where—how—did he acquire his prowess at chess? Chess has that unity of time, action and place that Aristotle said was a key characteristic of the good story, and it is a good story indeed. It sucks you in. You climb aboard the ship in your mind and you hurry, like the chess players, to the smoking room where the games are being played. But despite the appealing fictional setting, so removed from the violent unfolding of history, the world and its troubles can’t be so easily forgotten. Stefan Zweig’s experience with the Nazis infuses the middle section of his novella. Chess is portrayed as a necessary escapism, an obsession that allows his character to hold on to sanity.

  Because that is another appeal that chess holds: a game that is entirely logical, where wild emotions have no play, where rigorous sanity wins the day and defeat comes only from an inner lapse of reason—such a game, in a world gone mad, is a relief.

  Perhaps there are days on Parliament Hill when you feel like retreating to your office and playing chess, Mr. Harper. After all, you’re still stuck with a minority government, and then there’s the uproar over proroguing Parliament, the fight over the Afghan detainee documents, the billion-dollar summits, the furor over the elimination of the mandatory census, the fruitless effort to kill the gun registry, the fury of the veterans’ ombudsman, and other controversies—these must wear you down. You like to be in control. You have notions about how things should be, but constantly you don’t get your way. Constantly, the unpredictable happens. Wouldn’t it be nice if politics were a chess game and you could just sit down and bully your way to a checkmate?

  Alas, thankfully, the political system in Canada is not so arranged. Instead, you’re playing a life game in which you’ve lost a fair number of pawns. How will the game end, I wonder?

  Yours truly,

  Yann Martel

  STEFAN ZWEIG (1881–1942) was a novelist, playwright, journalist and biographer. He left Austria in the 1930s, fleeing the Nazis, moving to England and then the United States before dying in Brazil. In addition to Chess, his books include Amok and Letter from an Unknown Woman, which has been adapted for the stage and screen.

  BOOK 93:

  SELECTED POEMS

  BY YEVGENY YEVTUSHENKO

  Translated from the Russian by Robin Milner-Gulland and Peter Levi

  October 25, 2010

  To Stephen Harper,

  Prime Minister of Canada,

  Have you made a mistake?

  From a Canadian writer,

  With best wishes,

  Yann Martel

  Dear Mr. Harper,

  Politics is the art of compromise, the saying goes. When a newspaper prints a photograph of two politicians shaking hands and smiling broadly, whether in Washington, the Middle East or elsewhere, it’s likely that a compromise is being celebrated, a breakthrough in which opposing parties have reached an agreement by making concessions. The fruitful compromise is the great enabler of social peace, whether between competing groups or lone persons relating to each other. Those who stand too firmly, who are unwilling to negotiate in any way with others, are soon at the heart of incessant social friction and lose any peace they might wish to have. Compromising helps not only to establish social harmony, but also to build relationships, since a compromise is normally the result of open dialogue and increasing familiarity with one’s adversary. Such relationships, in addition to making compromise possible, may also dilute the differences that provoked the antagonism in the first place. In politics, the fruitful compromise often makes the difficulties go away. Take Northern Ireland, for example. The Troubles, as they came to be called, started in the late 1960s, and for three decades Protestant unionists and Catholic nationalists were at each other’s throats, killing men, women and children, some actively involved in the hostilities, others mere bystanders. The hatred could not have been more intense. Yet eventually, by dint of slow, unremitting effort, th
e warring parties signed a truce, the Good Friday Agreement of 1998, and now peace generally prevails in Northern Ireland. A compromise ended the Troubles and, over time, as peace becomes part of the social fabric, the root causes of the Troubles will, one hopes, disappear. The compromise of the Good Friday Agreement has made, and continues to make, the difficulties go away. That is good politics.

  Now, compromise is not your way. You went into politics early on, without any entrepreneurial or significant work experience to teach you the value of yielding. There was the National Citizens Coalition, of which you were president for a few years, but being an advocacy group, it’s hardly the place to learn the motto “Let’s talk.” You stand by your principles and ideology, and you wait—expect—the country to come round to your views. To be honest, I doubt that’s going to happen. You’ve been in office for over four years now, at a time when the opposition has been fragmented and, in the case of the Liberals, discredited, and still you’ve managed only two minority governments in a row, and polls don’t show your fortunes improving significantly.

  Let me introduce you then to Yevgeny Yevtushenko. Yevtushenko is a Russian poet who was born in 1933. He was twenty years old, and coming of age as a poet, when Stalin died in 1953. Yevtushenko profited from the let-up in repression in Soviet life that followed under Nikita Khrushchev and quickly became the poetic voice for a post-Stalin generation that yearned for greater freedom (it’s at this time that Alexander Solzhenitsyn’s One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, which I sent you a while ago, was also published). Yevtushenko wrote poems that no poet living under Stalin would have dared to write, not if that poet wanted to stay alive. An example is Babi Yar, which is included in the collection of poems I’m sending you this week. Babi Yar is a ravine on the northern edge of Kiev, in Ukraine. An estimated 100,000 innocent people of all ages were murdered there by the Nazis. The victims were Roma and POWs but overwhelmingly they were Jewish. Yevtushenko, who is not Jewish, wrote the poem to protest the proposed building of a sports stadium by the Soviet authorities on the site of the massacre. The poem mourns the Jewish deaths, but also excoriates the Russian people for their Jew-hatred. It’s a moving poem, and also, in taking on explicitly the victimhood of the Jews as the poet’s own, affirming his common humanity with them, a brave poem coming from a citizen of a land so notoriously inimical to Jews.

  Yevtushenko gained great fame and honour in both East and West in the 1950s and ’60s. He travelled extensively to the West. If you look him up on Wikipedia, you will see a 1972 picture of him chatting with President Richard Nixon (which reminds me that President Obama wrote to me—who knew American presidents had such a history of paying attention to writers?). “Here,” the Soviet Union seemed to saying, “is proof that we are not a repressive society. We too can produce great poetry that is critical of us, and here is our poster boy.”

  How does his poetry measure up? Well, in this slim volume, it fares quite well. Except for Babi Yar, politics intrudes very little into it. Or no more than politics might in a collection of American or Canadian poetry. Much of it is quite bucolic, reminding me that Russia, the largest country in the world even without its former Soviet satellite states, is, ipso facto, mostly rural. Many of the poems exude a common sense and an approachable humanity that brings to mind Robert Frost.

  But did he compromise himself? The Soviet Union was from start to finish a repressive state where every freedom was, if not outright curtailed, then under constant surveillance. In such a state, was it possible to be a free poet? Yevtushenko was criticized by many, including the great Russian-American poet and critic Joseph Brodsky (have you heard of him?), as a duplicitous fake, as a poet who had around his neck a collar that was tied to a leash held by the Kremlin and that he barked and growled only when and so much as it suited them.

  Clearly, some writers paid a greater price for their writings, being forced either into exile, like Solzhenitsyn or Brodsky, or, worse, into jail in the Soviet Union. Was it perhaps the case that Yevtushenko hoped his country would change and open itself to greater civil liberties? Maybe he simply loved his country, including its communist ideals. Maybe the idea of permanent exile, of living forever in a country whose language, ways and food would be foreign, chilled his soul. In other words, did Yevtushenko simply believe in his country in a way that Solzhenitsyn and Brodsky did not?

  I have no position on the matter. I don’t know enough about Yevtushenko or Soviet history, and so cannot judge. His poetry is a pleasure to read, but the political man behind the poems remains elusive. What is certain is that Yevtushenko has been accused of compromising himself in his dealings with the Soviet state. His standing has paid a price. Compromise, you see, does not have in the arts the worth that it has in politics. The compromised artist is likely to be seen as a failure, but the compromising politician a success. If politics is the art of compromise, then art is the politics of uncompromise. Artists need and fiercely defend their freedom. It is precisely from that freedom, from that individuality, that art springs. To compromise, to conform, to give in, is to kill the creative impulse. True art is uncompromising. The great artist lets rip, saying “This is where I stand, this is my vision—take it or leave it!” In the arts, there is no parliament to which the artist is accountable, no Question Period to which he or she must submit. Art is the place for those who do not accept compromise.

  Hence my question to you, Mr. Harper. Have you not chosen the wrong profession? Could it be the case that you are a frustrated artist?

  Yours truly,

  Yann Martel

  YEVGENY YEVTUSHENKO (b. 1933) is prolific in many roles—poet, essayist, novelist, film director, screenwriter and actor. He is the best-known poet of the post-Stalin generation, and appeared on the cover of TIME magazine in 1962. He now teaches Russian and European poetry and film at the University of Tulsa and the City University of New York. His honours include the American Liberties Medallion and the Ovid Prize.

  BOOK 94:

  THE ABSOLUTELY TRUE DIARY

  OF A PART-TIME INDIAN

  BY SHERMAN ALEXIE

  November 8, 2010

  To Stephen Harper,

  Prime Minister of Canada,

  From a Canadian writer,

  With best wishes,

  Yann Martel

  Dear Mr. Harper,

  Three years ago (yes, that long ago) I sent you the novel Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit, by the English writer Jeanette Winterson. If you remember—and hopefully enjoyed—it was the story of a girl, Jeanette, who is caught between two worlds, the world of evangelical Christianity and the world of her nascent lesbian sexuality. She must choose the world to which she wants to belong. It is one or the other. She cannot be both Christian and lesbian, not at that time, not where she lived.

  The novel I’m sending you this week, The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian, by the American writer Sherman Alexie, plays out a somewhat similar conflict. Junior, the protagonist, a teenage Spokane Indian, lives on a reservation in Washington State. It’s a lousy place. Most of the adults are poor, miserable alcoholics, and most of the kids are poor, miserable and on their way to becoming alcoholics. Junior decides one day to switch schools. He’ll leave the school on the rez and go to the high school in Reardan, the small farming community just down the road. But there’s a hitch: Reardan is an all-white school. The only other Indian there is the school mascot. And many on the rez see Junior as a traitor to his people for leaving. But Junior feels that if he stays, a part of him will die. He goes ahead and starts attending Reardan High School.

  True Diary is a very funny book in a sad sort of way. The prose, simple and effective, is aimed at teens. The story will speak to any reader, teen or adult. It asks difficult questions. How do you get on with life when your life really sucks? What keeps you going when the going gets tough? Alexie’s answer is that earthly salvation depends on one’s spirit, on the ability to find inner resources to endure and overcome adversity. But there is a cost to every
battle, even the ones that are won. So Junior does well at Reardan High, but he’s also now living in a white world and leaving behind the Indian self he knew. Unlike Jeanette’s dilemma in Oranges, which demands an exclusive choice, Junior’s dilemma is less radical. It’s not a question of one identity or another, but of two identities uncomfortably merging, white and Indian, hence the title: a Part-Time Indian. In saving one part of himself from dying on the rez, will another part of Junior die in the white world?

  It would be nice to think that one day Junior will stop being tormented by these perceived existential opposites, that his Indian self will be enriched by becoming a little bit white (whatever that might mean) and his white world will profit by becoming a little bit Indian (whatever that might mean), until there is no longer any friction between the two worlds. It’s good, after all, to be something only part-time. Part-time Indian, part-time white, part-time writer, part-time father, part-time this, part-time that—isn’t that just another way of saying that Junior has grown into a normal, twenty-first-century hybrid human being, a rich world unto himself, varied and complex but still whole?

  Yours truly,

  Yann Martel

  SHERMAN ALEXIE (b. 1966) is a novelist, filmmaker, poet and comedian. He adapted the screenplay for the award-winning film Smoke Signals from a story in his first collection, The Lone Ranger and Tonto Fist Fight in Heaven. Alexie is also renowned for his writings on basketball. He lives in Seattle with his wife and two sons.