101 Letters to a Prime Minister Page 13
But—there’s always a but—one has to be careful about beauty. In all walks of life. In our overly visual society, we tend to be too easily won over by beauty, whether it be in a person, in a product or even in a book. A beautifully written book, like a beautiful person, may not have much to say. The beauty of substance often loses out to the beauty of appearance. A good writer knows that beautiful writing can’t substitute for having something to say. The best beauty is that in which beauty of form is held up by beauty of content.
Beauty, in another words, can be a mask hiding a vacuum, hiding falsehood, even hiding ugliness.
No danger here, with Under Milk Wood. The lyricism of the language rests solidly on Dylan Thomas’s gut knowledge that life is good, however bad it may be at times. It is said that Dylan Thomas wrote Under Milk Wood in reaction to the atomic bombing of Hiroshima. I doubt that’s factually true. It sounds too conveniently perfect. But opposing a radiant symphonic poem against the darkness of a mass killing of civilians does hark to a spiritual truth: that beauty can be a road back to goodness.
Yours truly,
Yann Martel
DYLAN THOMAS (1914–1953) was a Welsh poet, prose writer and playwright. His poems were characteristically dense, lyrical and exuberant, often reflecting on the themes of unity in the natural world and the cyclical nature of life and death. His most famous works include the short story A Child’s Christmas in Wales and the poem “Do Not Go Gentle into That Good Night.” After World War II, he went to the United States on a series of celebrated reading tours, during one of which, while in New York City, he died of a drinking overdose.
BOOK 36:
EVERYTHING THAT RISES MUST CONVERGE
BY FLANNERY O’CONNOR
August 18, 2008
To Stephen Harper,
Prime Minister of Canada,
From a Canadian writer,
With best wishes,
Yann Martel
Dear Mr. Harper,
The work now in your hands is the quintessential used book. The cover looks old, both in style and in condition. A number, a price, has been written directly on the cover: $4.50. Someone put a line of tape along the spine to keep the cover from falling off. There’s the dash of a black marker along the bottom of the book, the telltale sign of a used book. The pages inside are yellowed with age along their outside edges. You’ll notice a further yellow mark along the left side of the first pages; it looks like the book was accidentally soaked once and a watermark has remained. The book unmistakably shows its venerable age. The edition now yours, a first paperback printing, was published forty-one years ago, in 1967. I was four years old, you were nine. Not bad for an assemblage of flimsy elements: cheap paper and thin cardboard.
The book has lasted this long for two reasons: it is good, and so it has been treated well. Inexpensive in price, it has glowed with value in the eyes of all who owned it, and so they handled it with care. As I mentioned to you in an earlier letter, the used book is economically odd: despite age and lack of rarity, it does not depreciate with age. In fact, it is the contrary: if you take good care of this book, in a few years, because it is a first paperback printing, it will go up in value.
That undiminishing richness is of course due to a paperback’s inner wealth, all those little black markings. They inhabit a book the way a soul inhabits a body. Books, like people, can’t be reduced to the cost of the materials with which they were made. Books, like people, become unique and precious once you get to know them.
That cultural glory, the used paperback, is perfectly represented here by Flannery O’Connor. Neither new nor aged, but rather enduring, she is the typical glittering treasure to be found in a used bookstore. Imagine: for $4.50 I got you her collection of short stories Everything That Rises Must Converge. The discrepancy between price and value is laughably out of whack. What it really says is this: the object you are now holding is of such worth that to give it any price is ridiculous, so here, to emphasize the nonsense of the notion, we’ll charge you $4.50.
Flannery O’Connor was American. She was born in 1925 in Georgia and she died there in 1964 of lupus. She was only thirty-nine years old. She was religious, devoutly Catholic to be exact, but her faith was not a set of blinkers. Rather, it charged the world with God’s grace and made apparent to her the gap between the sacred and the human. By my reckoning, what O’Connor wrote about, over and over, was the Fall. Her stories are about the ruination of Paradise, about the cost of listening to snakes and reaching for apples. They are moral stories, but there’s nothing pat about them. By virtue of good writing, fine dark humour, rich characterization and compelling narrative, they sift through life without reducing it.
And so their effect. Each story feels, has the weight, of a small novel. And with no dull literariness, I assure you. You’ll see for yourself. Start on any one of them and a character will quickly reach out from the page, grab you by the arm and pull you along. These stories are engrossing. After each, you will feel that you have lived longer, that you have a greater experience of life, that you are wiser. They are dark stories. In every one, either a son hates his mother or a mother despairs over her useless sons, or it might be a grandfather or a father who is despairing. And the end result, besides highly entertaining, is invariably tragic. Hence the wisdom given off. It’s nearly a mathematical equation: reader + story of folly = wiser reader.
I especially recommend to you the stories “Greenleaf,” “A View of the Woods” and “The Lame Shall Enter First.”
I have another matter I would like to raise with you. The cancellation of PromArt was recently announced. The program, administered by the Department of Foreign Affairs, helps cover some of the travel costs of Canadian artists and cultural groups going abroad to promote their work. The grants to individuals are small, often between $750 and $1,500. The budget of the entire program is only $4.7 million. That’s about 14 cents a year per Canadian. For that small sum, Canada shows its best, most enduring quality to the nations of the earth. To remind you of what I’m sure you already know, a country cannot be reduced to the corporations it happens to shelter. Businesses come and go, following their own commercial logic. No one feels deep, patriotic feelings for a corporation, certainly not its shareholders. They will vote where the money leads them. So while Canadians can feel proud about such global players as Bombardier and Alcan and hosts of others, we should not pin our identity to them. Canada is a people, not a business. We shine because of our cultural achievements, not our mercantile wealth. So to cut an international arts promotion program is to vow our country to cultural anonymity. It means foreigners will have no impressions of Canada, and so no affection.
The PromArt program is a vital part of our foreign policy. I ask you to reconsider the decision to shut it down. The value-added worth of this modest program is akin to, well, the value-added worth of a paperback.
Yours truly,
Yann Martel
FLANNERY O’CONNOR (1925–1964) was an American essayist, novelist and short story writer whose work is often called grotesque, disturbing and typical of Southern Gothic literature. Her writing is characterized by blunt foreshadowing, irony and allegory, and generally explores questions of religion and morality. Among her best-known works are her novels Wise Blood and The Violent Bear It Away, and her short story collections Everything That Rises Must Converge and A Good Man Is Hard to Find. After spending time in New York City and at an artists’ colony, she was diagnosed with lupus and returned to her family farm, where she lived for the last fourteen years of her life, raising peacocks and writing. She was posthumously awarded the National Book Award for The Complete Stories of Flannery O’Connor.
BOOK 37:
A MODEST PROPOSAL
BY JONATHAN SWIFT
September 1, 2008
To Stephen Harper,
Prime Minister of Canada,
A cookbook of sorts,
From a Canadian writer,
With best wishes,
Yann Martel
Dear Mr. Harper,
So, more cuts in arts funding. In my last letter I mentioned only the PromArt program, not having got wind yet of the other cuts. Nearly $45 million in all. That will bite, that will hurt, that will kill. With less art in the future, I wonder what you think there will be more of. What does $45 million buy that has more worth than a people’s cultural expression, than a people’s sense of who they are?
This calls for a special book. How we administer ourselves—the people we elect, the laws they enact—finds itself reflected in art. Politics is also culture. A Modest Proposal, by the Irish writer Jonathan Swift (1667–1745), is a good example of an artistic reflection upon politics. It is a piece of satire, admirable for its humorous ferocity and brevity. At a mere eight pages, it is the shortest work I’ve ever sent you.
The key paragraph, enunciating Swift’s suggested solution to Ireland’s poverty, the modest proposal in question, goes like this:
I have been assured by a very knowing American of my acquaintance in London, that a young healthy child well nursed is at a year old a most delicious, nourishing, and wholesome food, whether stewed, roasted, baked or boiled; and I make no doubt that it will equally serve in a fricassee or a ragout.
The question is simple and pertinent, Mr. Harper: are you preparing a ragout?
Yours truly,
Yann Martel
JONATHAN SWIFT (1667–1745) was an Irish satirist and essayist, and a founding member of the Martinus Scriblerus Club, whose members included Alexander Pope and Thomas Parnell. Swift was politically involved, writing pamphlets first for the Whigs, then for the Tories, before championing Irish concerns. He studied in Ireland and England, earning an MA from Oxford, and was an ordained Anglican minister. Swift’s style is playful and humorous while being intensely critical of the objects of his satire. His best-known works include Gulliver’s Travels, A Modest Proposal and The Battle of the Books.
BOOK 38:
ANTHEM
BY AYN RAND
September 15, 2008
To Stephen Harper,
Prime Minister of Canada,
Ayn Rand wanted us to be selfish,
but democracy asks us to be generous.
From a Canadian writer,
With best wishes,
Yann Martel
Dear Mr. Harper,
You’ve called an election. Appropriate then to send you Ayn (rhymes with Pine) Rand, whose books are highly political. It’s very easy to dislike Ayn Rand, not only the writer, but even the person behind the writing, and many readers and intellectuals do indeed dislike her, intensely. However, more than a quarter century after her death (she lived from 1905 to 1982), Ayn Rand still has her dogged followers, a cult nearly, and her books continue to sell in great numbers. There is clearly something both attractive and off-putting about her writing. Her brief novel Anthem, just 123 pages, is a useful work to discuss in the context of an election. You will see in what follows that I fall on the side of those who dislike Ayn Rand.
Anthem, first published in 1938, is a dystopia with a utopian heart, a portrayal of a future where everything has gone wrong but where the reader is shown how things can be made right. The novel starts well. The language is simple, the writing understated, the cadence engaging. The story is told entirely from the point of view of the main character, whose name is Equality 7–2521. (Ayn Rand gives her characters names that clearly indicate the notions, the ideals, she wishes to debunk.) Equality 7–2521 does not live in good times. He has no significant freedoms. He has chosen neither where to live nor what to do for a living. He has no family and no real friends. In that, he is like every other man he knows, living a life of rigid conformity that is socially useful but grinding. The reader accepts this premise willingly because of a clever and effective linguistic device on Ayn Rand’s part: the complete absence of singular personal pronouns. Equality 7–2521 does not speak as an “I,” nor is anything ever his with a “my” or a “mine.” Such individualistic concepts are banned from his society and he is a “we,” as is everyone else, and all are at the service of the collectivity. As Equality 7–2521 says:
We strive to be like all our brother men, for all men must be alike. Over the portals of the Palace of the World Council, there are words cut in the marble, which we repeat to ourselves whenever we are tempted:
“We are one in all and all in one.
There are no men but only the great WE,
One, indivisible and forever.”
Union 5–3992 and International 4–8818, fellow street sweepers, manage to endure such conformity, but:
There are Fraternity 2–5503, a quiet boy with wise, kind eyes, who cry suddenly, without reason, in the midst of day or night, and their body shakes with sobs they cannot explain. There are Solidarity 9–6347, who are a bright youth, without fear in the day; but they scream in their sleep, and they scream: “Help us! Help us! Help us!” into the night, in a voice which chills our bones …
As for Fraternity 9–3452, Democracy 4–6998, Unanimity 7–3304, International 1–5537, Solidarity 8–1164, Alliance 6–7349, Similarity 5–0306, and especially Collective 0–0009 (they are a nasty one), they are the oppressive system’s prime defenders, and they will collide with Equality 7–2521, who is pushed irresistibly to think on his own and pursue his ideas, no matter where they lead him.
There are women. They live separately. Only once a year, for a single night during the “Time of Mating,” do men and women come together, in pairs matched by the “Council of Eugenics.” It is not then, but earlier, on the City’s limits one work day, that Equality 7–2521 meets Liberty 5–3000. He falls in love with her, committing “the great Transgression of Preference.” He calls her—they call them—“The Golden One.”
This love of his, combined with his independent thinking, eventually forces Equality 7–2521 to flee the City for the Uncharted Forest. The Golden One joins him there. Far from dying in the forest, as he had expected, they find pastoral relief from the oppression of their urban lives. Better yet, they come upon an abandoned house in mountains beyond the forest and they find happiness. They find it because of books left in that house, relics from the ancient times before the “Great Rebirth.” Equality 7–2521 begins to read and he comes upon a word, a concept, a philosophy, that gives expression to all the confused mental yearning he has been going through, the word “I.”
That discovery—it is revealed on page 108 in the edition I am sending you, fifteen pages before the end of the book, the very beginning of Chapter 11, starting with the words “I am. I think. I will”—is where Anthem goes to pot. The point of Ayn Rand’s fiction, as I’m sure you will have seized, is a critique of collectivism, typified at its most terrible by the horrors of communism under Stalin in Russia, the country of Rand’s birth (she became an American citizen in 1931). And there, the reader, certainly this reader, is with her. Bloodthirsty dictatorships are repulsive to every sane human being. But Ayn Rand makes two mistakes in her allegory of life in the Soviet Union. First, she sees only the worst in collectivism, throwing out wholesale the good with the bad. To her, the Gulag and socialized health care, for example, were instances of one and the same evil. Second, in rejecting Stalin and his damnable system, she goes to an absurd opposite libertarian extreme. Rand posited that humanity would be happiest if we lived as autarkic individuals, beholden to no one, unbounded, unfettered, free, free, free. The virtue of selfishness, that’s what Ayn Rand is all about. It’s even the title of one of her books. No wonder Rand appeals mostly to two disparate groups of readers: adolescents in the throes of carving out their individuality, and right-wing American capitalists bent on making and keeping too much money.
Back to the novel. Equality 7–2521, on page 108, has bust free thanks to the word “I.” What follows is an orgy of I-ism, of me, me, me, mine, mine, mine:
My hands … My spirit … My sky … My forest … This earth of mine …
You know you’re in trouble when some
one claims to own the sky. As much as Equality 7–2521 was appealing when he was oppressed, once he is free he becomes annoying, pretentious, repelling. While his strange speech in the City—we this, we that—came off as noble and incantatory, his free speech in the mountains is dull and pompous. The struggling hero whom we cheered on has become just another self-righteous, domineering male who thinks he knows everything. We sympathized with his plight, but now we shudder at his solution:
I wished to know the meaning of things. I am the meaning.… Whatever road I take, the guiding star is within me; the guiding star and the loadstone which point the way. They point in but one direction. They point to me.… I owe nothing to my brothers, nor do I gather debts from them. I ask none to live for me, nor do I live for any others.… And now I see the face of god, and I raise this god over the earth, this god whom men have sought since men came into being, this god who will grant them joy and peace and pride.
This god, this one word:
“I.”
You are a religious man, Mr. Harper. You will know that the essence of every religion, of every god, is precisely the opposite of what Ayn Rand is speechifying about: God is about the abandonment of the self, not its exaltation. But that is an aside, a minor point. The main problem with Rand’s libertarianism, this über-Nietzschean cult of the heroic individual standing on a mountaintop, is that it makes not only society unworkable, but even simple relations. An example jumps out in Rand’s own novel. Equality 7–2521, now drunk with his own uniqueness, has naturally tired of his name. He says to the Golden One: