What is Stephen Harper Reading?

Dedication:

To Stephen Harper,
Prime Minister of Canada,
From a Canadian writer,
With best wishes,
Yann Martel

Letter:

The Right Honourable Stephen Harper
Prime Minister of Canada
80 Wellington Street
Ottawa ON K1A 0A2

Dear Mr. Harper,

And now a book to be read aloud. I believe that’s the best way to read Elizabeth Smart’s By Grand Central Station I Sat Down and Wept. Because this is a language book, a book where language is the plot, the character and the setting. There is something else, of course, the theme, and the theme here is an old eternal one: love. So what a perfect book to read in bed at the end of the day and aloud. A book to be shared.

The links between art and life can be reductionist, but this might help you stay afloat in the wash of language: one day Elizabeth Smart read some poems in a bookshop and she fell in love—I’m tempted to say “decided to fall in love”—with the poet, who was George Barker. Good thing for George Barker, because I suspect George Barker will be remembered by posterity more for being “the poet Elizabeth Smart fell in love with” than for his poetry. Smart and George Barker eventually met, in California, and they became lovers and her essential bliss and hell began. Because George Barker was married and would have durable relations with more women than just his wife and Elizabeth Smart. The great number of children he fathered—fifteen in all, including four with Smart—might indicate that he took the consequences of love as seriously as its emotional premise, but I doubt his fathering skills were that good. I am digressing. Elizabeth Smart fell in love with George Barker, it was killing for her heart but it yielded this jewel of a book. In a way, Smart was another Dante and By Grand Central Station is another Divine Comedy, only the direction of travel is opposite: she started in heaven and made her way to hell.

So, layers of allegorical allusions and metaphorical flights, but at the core of this book is the hard diamond of a passionate love affair.

I’ll leave the love affair to your own thoughts and conclusions. What can more easily be talked about is the beauty of the language. Language is the crudest form of metaphor. It is a system of refined grunts in which, by common agreement, a sound we make—say “spinach”—is agreed to represent, to mean, that green leafy thing over there that’s good to eat. It makes communicating so much easier and effective, spares one constantly having to point at with bug eyes. I can just see a group of cave people fiercely bobbing their heads up and down and grunting and shouting for joy when they first came upon the idea. It was such a good idea that it spread quickly. What a thrill, involving a fair number of bruising fights I imagine, it must have been to be the ones who were the first to look upon the world and map it over with words. Different groups of people agreed on different grunts, and that’s all right. Vive la difference.

And so we have: spinach, épinard, espinacas, spinaci, espinafre, spinat, spenat, pinaatti, szpinak, spenót, ШПИНАТ, سبانخ, شىء بغيض, and we are the better for it. Because these utilitarian grunts unexpectedly became a world unto themselves, offering their own possibilities. We thought language would be a simple tool directly relaying the world to us. But, lo, we found that the tool has become its own world, still relaying the outer world but in a mediated way. Now there is the word and there is the world and the two are enthralled with each other, like two lovers.

The lovers in the novel were arrested for trying to cross a state border—illicit love being a customs offence at the time—and the first pages of Part Four beautifully capture the coarseness with which the world sometimes greets love.

I thought I’d quote some passages to show you what powerful stuff you have between your hands, but there are too many—I might as well quote the whole book—and to take them out of context somehow seems offensive.

You remember how I recommended Gerasim to you, from The Death of Ivan Ilych. Well, in this book, we have Gerasim’s equally domestic but petty antithesis: Mr. Wurtle.

Beware of Mr. Wurtle, Mr. Harper.

I can’t resist quoting. On page 30:

But the surety of my love is not dismayed by any eventuality which prudence or pity can conjure up, and in the end all that we can do is to sit at the table over which our hands cross, listening to tunes from the wurlitzer, with love huge and simple between us, and nothing more to be said.

On page 44:

When the Ford rattles up to the door, five minutes (five years) late, and he walks across the lawn under the pepper-trees, I stand behind the gauze curtains, unable to move to meet him, or to speak, as I turn to liquid to invade his every orifice when he opens the door.

Grandly romantic? Yes. Highly impractical? Absolutely. But as she asks one of the police officers who arrests her, on page 55:

What do you live for then?

I don’t go for that sort of thing, the officer said, I’m a family man, I belong to the Rotary Club.

She might as well have been Jesus, and the officer surely wished later that he had been more like the humble Roman centurion of Capernaum.

There is this paragraph, on page 65, after she has returned to her native Ottawa, banished there for her extraconjugal illegality:

And over the fading wooden houses I sense the reminiscences of the pioneers’ passion, and the determination of early statesmen who were mild but individual and able to allude to Shakespeare while discussing politics under the elms.

I wonder if she visited Laurier House.

By Grand Central Station is a masterly—or, better, mistressly—evocation of love. A life untouched by Elizabeth Smart’s kind of passion is a life not fully lived. About that, we can take her word.

Who would have thought that language could do so much? Who would have thought that grunts would so recall the miracle of the world?

Yours truly,

Yann Martel

P.S. Please thank Susan Ross, from your office, for replying to me on your behalf about the first book I sent you. Perhaps you could lend Ms Ross your copy of Ivan Ilych once you’ve finished with it?

encl: one inscribed paperback book

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