101 Letters to a Prime Minister Read online

  In that, Roman society was much like the modern democracies of today, with an educated, principled elite that sought to perpetuate the system and, with it, itself. The Rome of then, in some ways, doesn’t seem so different from the Ottawa, Washington or London of today. After the alien abyss, frankly, that is much European history, with the Europeans thinking and behaving in ways that are close to unfathomable by contemporary standards, it is a surprise to see, nearly two thousand years ago, a people who thought and fought and squabbled and had principles which they squandered, and so on—why, a people seemingly just like us. Hence the endless interest of Roman history.

  So Marcus Aurelius was a man of great ability selected to be Roman emperor. In other words, he was a politician, and, like you, a busy one; he spent much of his time battling barbarian hordes on the frontiers of the empire. But at the same time, he was a thinking man—with a penchant for philosophy—who put his thoughts down on the page. He was a writer.

  Emperor Marcus Aurelius was a Stoic and some of his pronouncements are on the gloomy side: “Soon you will have forgotten the world, and soon the world will have forgotten you,” is a fairly typical pronouncement of his. There is much made in these meditations on the ephemerality of the body, of fame, of empires, of pretty well everything. Over and over, Marcus Aurelius exhorts himself to higher standards of thinking and behaving. It’s bracing, salutary stuff. In many ways, it’s the perfect book for you, Mr. Harper. A practical book on thinking, being and acting by a philosopher-king.

  It’s also not the sort of book one reads right through from page 1 to page 163. It has no continuous narrative or developing argument. The Meditations are rather self-contained musings divided into twelve books, each book divided into numbered points that range in length from a single sentence to a few paragraphs. The book lends itself to being dipped into at random. My suggestion is that each time you open and read it, you put a dot next to the meditations you read. That way, over time, you will read all of them.

  Yours truly,

  Yann Martel

  MARCUS AURELIUS (121–180 CE) wrote his Meditations in Greek while on military campaigns during 170–180 CE. In them, he stresses the importance of government service, duty, endurance, abstinence, surrendering to Providence and achieving detachment from things beyond one’s control.

  BOOK 23:

  ARTISTS AND MODELS

  BY ANAÏS NIN

  February 18, 2008

  To Stephen Harper,

  Prime Minister of Canada,

  Hot stuff,

  From a Canadian writer,

  With best wishes,

  Yann Martel

  Dear Mr. Harper,

  Valentine’s Day was just a few days ago and we’ve had a long cold snap here in Saskatchewan—two good reasons to send you something warming.

  Anaïs Nin—such a lovely name—lived between 1903 and 1977 and she was the author of a number of novels that remain unknown to me: Ladders to Fire, Children of the Albatross, The Four-Chambered Heart, A Spy in the House of Love and Solar Barque form a five-volume roman-fleuve entitled Cities of the Interior (1959). She also published the novels House of Incest (1936), The Seduction of the Minotaur (1961) and Collages (1964), and a collection of short stories, Under a Glass Bell. The only pleasure these have given me has been to wonder what they are about. What story would a novel called Solar Barque tell? What was the Albatross and who were her Children?

  Nin is better known for her published diaries, which covered every decade of her life except the first (and she missed that one only by a year, since she started her diary when she was eleven years old). She was born in France, lived in the United States for many years, she was beautiful and cosmopolitan, and she came to know many interesting and famous people, the writer Henry Miller among them, all of whom she discussed and dissected in her diary. Her diary’s importance lies in the fact that female voices have often been silenced or ignored—still are—and an extended female monologue covering the first half of the twentieth century is rare.

  And Anaïs Nin also wrote erotica. Hot stuff. Kinky stuff. Pages full of women who are wet not because it’s raining and men who are hard not because they’re cruel. Artists and Models, which contains two stories from her collections of erotic writings Delta of Venus and Little Birds, is the latest book I’m sending you. It may leave you cold, Mr. Harper, reading about Mafouka the hermaphrodite painter from Montparnasse and her lesbian roommates or about the sexual awakening of a painter’s model in New York, but it bears noting that while covering our loins and our hearts with clothes is often useful—it’s minus 23 degrees Celsius outside as I write these words—there is the risk that they are also hiding, perhaps burying, an essential part of us, one that does not think but rather feels. Clothes are the commonest trappings of vanity. When we are naked, we are honest. That is the essential quality of these lustful stories of Nin, embellished or wholly invented though they may be: their honesty. They say: this is part of who we are—deny it, and you are denying yourself.

  Yours truly,

  Yann Martel

  ANAÏS NIN (1903–1977) was born in Paris, raised in the United States and identified herself as a Catalan-Cuban-French author. Nin was a prolific novelist, short story writer and diarist, best known for her multi-volume Diary. She was also one of the greatest writers of female erotica, and is famous for her affairs with notable individuals including Henry Miller and Gore Vidal.

  BOOK 24:

  WAITING FOR GODOT

  BY SAMUEL BECKETT

  March 3, 2008

  To Stephen Harper,

  Prime Minister of Canada,

  A modernist masterpiece,

  From a Canadian writer,

  With best wishes,

  Yann Martel

  Dear Mr. Harper,

  Curiously, the book that I am sending you this early March, a play, only the second dramatic work I’ve sent you, is one that I don’t actually like. It has always irked me. Which is not to say that it is not a good play, indeed, a great play. In fact, that it continues to irk me confirms its greatness in a way, because if I said to you confidently, “This is a masterpiece,” that would imply I had a settled view of it, a fixed understanding, and that the play stood for me like a statue on a pedestal: lofty, staid and undisturbing. Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for Godot is none of these.

  To further confirm that I’m wrong in my view of Godot, I’ll say that despite being written in the late 1940s, the play will not feel dated when you read it. This is a significant achievement. Plays, to state the obvious, are made up of dialogue. There is no surrounding prose to supply context. You might think the setting of a play would be the equivalent of the description in a novel that sets up the story, but that is not the case. Many historical plays and operas are restaged in settings that their playwrights and composers would never have imagined, and no meaning is lost. Shakespeare’s Macbeth does not need a castle in the background to make sense to theatregoers. The meaning and development of a play is entirely carried on the shoulders of its dialogue. But the way we speak changes over time, and quickly words and expressions that were current to the playwright sound old-fashioned to us today.

  Moreover, plays are exclusively concerned with relationships, with the feelings between characters, revealed in what they say to each other and how they behave, and some relationships have also changed over the course of history. Lastly, plays are precisely, literally situated, the actors wearing costumes and moving about settings that we actually see, as opposed to imagining them in prose. How these last two points make most plays a more perishable product than most prose will be made clear if you think back to old television shows. Do you remember the 1970s American television series Bewitched, Mr. Harper, about a witch named Samantha who lives in suburbia with her husband, Darrin, and their daughter, Tabitha? I lapped it up when I was a kid. A few years ago I happened to see an episode again—and I was appalled. The sexism struck me as egregious, what with Darrin always trying to prevent Samant
ha from using her magic and Samantha, being the good, docile housewife, always trying to comply. And the way they dressed and their hairdos—that at least was innocently laughable. You get my point. What was fresh and funny then is now old and embarrassing. Women are now more free to use their magic, and we dress differently. By capturing so exactly a time, a place and a lingo, many plays are as fleeting as newspapers.

  It is a mighty playwright who manages to speak to his or her time and also to ours. Shakespeare does it, toweringly. That a student doesn’t know what a “thane” is, that kings don’t rule in 2008 the way they ruled in 1608 in no way affects the power and meaning of the Scottish play today. Waiting for Godot has also managed to speak to all times, so far. Despite premiering in 1953, the antics, musings and worries of Vladimir and Estragon will likely strike you as funny, puzzling, insightful, maddening and still current.

  The play is about the human condition, which in Beckett’s pared-down vision of it means that the play is mostly about nothing. Two men, the ones just mentioned, Didi and Gogo familiarly, wait around because they believe they have an appointment with a certain Godot. They wait around and talk and despair, are twice interrupted by two crazies by the names of Pozzo and Lucky, and then they go back to waiting around, talking and despairing. That’s pretty well it. No plot, no real development, no final point. The setting is also mostly nothing: just a single, solitary tree along an empty country road. The only props of note are boots, bowler hats and a rope.

  Essentially, two hours of nothing that’s good and deep, pessimistic and funny. Beckett meant to strip away at the vanities of our existence and look at the elemental. Therein lies what makes Waiting for Godot both great and eye-rolling as far as I’m concerned. There is this line, for example, said by I can’t remember which character: “We give birth astride a grave.” I suppose that’s true. Death interrupting life, what value can life have? If we must eventually let go of everything, why take hold of anything to start with? This sort of pessimism is the burden of those who have witnessed terrible times (Beckett lived in France during the German occupation) and the delight of undergraduates in the throes of youthful angst. I realize that my life is no more durable than a leaf’s, but between when I’m fresh and gloriously atop a tree and when I’ll be yellow and raked away by Time, there are some good moments to be had.

  Samuel Beckett was with the same woman, Suzanne Beckett, née Deschevaux-Dumesnil, for over fifty years. And he was apparently an avid fan and player of tennis. In these two attachments, I see a contradiction between what the man wrote and how he lived. If he had the joy and energy to whack a bouncy yellow ball over a net, if he had the joy and comfort of knowing that someone was there for him at the end of each day, what was he so desperate about? A wife and tennis—how much more did he expect from life? And this is aside from exploring the ideas of those who dismiss death as a mere threshold, just a gap you have to mind between the train of life and the platform of the eternal.

  Still, I know Waiting for Godot is a great play. You’ll see that when you read it. It’s a masterpiece. It does what no play did before it.

  Yours truly,

  Yann Martel

  SAMUEL BECKETT (1906–1989) was an Irish author, playwright and poet, and is considered one of the last modernists or possibly one of the first post-modernists. Beckett’s writing was characterized by minimalism and black humour. He lived in France, and worked as a courier in the French Resistance during World War II. He was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1969. His best-known novels are Molloy, Malone Dies and The Unnamable.

  BOOK 25:

  THE DRAGONFLY OF CHICOUTIMI

  BY LARRY TREMBLAY

  March 17, 2008

  To Stephen Harper,

  Prime Minister of Canada,

  This play to defeat silence,

  From a Canadian writer,

  With best wishes,

  Yann Martel

  Dear Mr. Harper,

  It’s about time I sent you the work of a writer from English Canada’s twin solitude. It’s a play again, the second in a row, the third in all. And for the second time—Le Petit Prince was the first—I am sending you a book in French. Mind you, the French of Larry Tremblay’s The Dragonfly of Chicoutimi is a bit peculiar. Not that it’s joual, or any other variation of Quebec French; that wouldn’t be peculiar, it would be expected from a Québécois play. Rather, if you glance at the text, you will think it’s just English, plain and simple. Well, it’s not. Tremblay’s play is a play written in French—that is, thought, felt, ordered, and expressed by a French mind—only using English words.

  What’s the point of that? Is this a bit of stand-up comedy, some party trick drawn out into a play? It’s not. The cover of the book will tell you as much. Do you recognize the man on it? It’s Jean-Louis Millette, the great actor who died just a few years ago, far too soon. His arms are raised, his face expresses anguish, the background is black: this play is no joke, says the cover. The Dragonfly of Chicoutimi is indeed a serious work of art, premiered and reprised by a master.

  Is the point of writing a play that is French in its nature but English in its appearance political? The answer to that question might be yes, but a tenuous yes, in that any work of art can be taken to have political implications. In this case, to read the play politically I think diminishes its scope. Larry Tremblay’s play is both far too personal—it’s the monologue of a man opening up his heart about a private matter—and far too universal to be reduced to a political tract about the survival of the French language in Quebec.

  I think Tremblay means to signal the political neutrality of his play when Gaston Talbot, the man who is opening up his heart, says of himself:

  once upon a time a boy named Gaston Talbot

  born in Chicoutimi

  in the beautiful province of Quebec

  in the great country of Canada

  had a dream …

  In describing both entities, and with adjectives of equal banality—if not cliché in the case of Quebec, officially “La Belle Province”—my guess is that Tremblay sought to place his play’s linguistic dualism beyond a merely political interpretation. The dream mentioned, by the way, is not a political dream, but a dream about Gaston Talbot’s mother, whose love he seeks.

  So what has Gaston Talbot from Chicoutimi got to say, and why is he saying it in French rendered in English?

  I would suggest that The Dragonfly of Chicoutimi is a play about suffering and redemption, about what we have to do to get back to ourselves. Gaston Talbot is an adult French-speaking man struck with aphasia who, when we meet him, suddenly begins to speak again, only in English rather than in his native tongue. And what he recounts is how, long ago, he was a sixteen-year-old boy in love with a twelve-year-old boy by the name of Pierre Gagnon-Connally and how the two went by the river bank to play and Pierre asked Gaston to be his horse and Pierre

  … catches me

  with an invisible lasso

  inserts in my mouth an invisible bit

  and jumps on my back

  he rides me guiding me with his hands on my hair

  after a while he gets down from my back

  looks at me as he never did before

  then he starts to give me orders in English

  I don’t know English

  but on that hot sunny day of July

  every word which comes

  from the mouth of Pierre Gagnon-Connally

  is clearly understandable

  Get rid of your clothes

  Yes sir

  Faster faster

  And then something happened, it’s not clear what, an accident, an inexplicable burst of violence, and Pierre Gagnon-Connally dies and Gaston Talbot falls into silence.

  The play is a web of self-confessed lies and inventions. The first thing Gaston Talbot says is “I travel a lot.” Later, he admits that he hasn’t travelled anywhere. In recounting a dream, he first says that he had one face, a “Picasso face,” then admits that it was
another face. Gaston Talbot holds these lies up like a shield, and with them he edges forward towards the truth. English words are thus just one more of these truth-revealing lies that allow him to address what pushed him into the worst abyss of all: silence.

  As I did for the fourth book I sent you, By Grand Central Station I Sat Down and Wept, by Elizabeth Smart, I would suggest that you read The Dragonfly of Chicoutimi aloud. Even better: that you read it silently a first time, as if you were Gaston Talbot before the start of the play, and then read it a second time aloud, as if you were Gaston Talbot gasping for expression.

  The play of course raises the question of language and identity, of what it means to speak in one language rather than another. Languages obviously have cultural reference points, but these can change. Witness English, spoken, taken on fully, by so many people around the world who are not of English culture. But the play puts the question on a more personal level. Gaston Talbot manages to reach back into his painful past and say what he has to say thanks to a bilingual subterfuge. That is the startling and moving conclusion of the play: the sight of truth found through a mask.

  Yours truly,

  Yann Martel

  LARRY TREMBLAY (b. 1954), born in Chicoutimi, is a Québécois poet, novelist, non-fiction writer, playwright, stage director, actor and teacher. His plays often explore psychic and social violence, and showcase his use of vivid imagery and his signature crisp, rhythmic style.

  BOOK 26:

  BIRTHDAY LETTERS

  BY TED HUGHES

  March 31, 2008

  To Stephen Harper,

  Prime Minister of Canada,

  This collection of great poems to celebrate

  the one-year anniversary of our book club,