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,

One day when August Strindberg was still a student at the University of Uppsala, he received a surprising summons: King Karl XV wanted to see him. Strindberg put on his best suit and made the short trip to the Royal Palace in Stockholm. The twenty-two year old was from an undistinguished family, he was very poor, and his academic achievements were perfectly average, but the King of Sweden had his reasons for wanting to meet him: he was keen on the arts and he had seen a performance of an historical play that Strindberg had written, The Outlaw, and he had liked it. In fact, he had liked it so much that he promised the young man a quarterly stipend so that he could finish his university studies. Strindberg was delighted. Alas, after only two payments and without any explanation, the royal bounty dried up. So it goes. Strindberg dropped out of university.

By all accounts, Strindberg was a miserable sod. He had a boundless capacity to be unhappy, especially in his relations with women. But he also had a mind of immense energy, intelligence and originality, and he wrote brilliant plays.

A brilliant play is something very peculiar. Drama is the most oral of literary forms, far less of an artifice than the short story, the novel or the poem, and far less reliant on publication to fully come into its own; what really counts for a play is not that it be read, but that it be seen, in the flesh. In many ways, life has all the trappings of a play: when you, Mr. Harper, enter the House of Commons, for example, you are walking onto a stage. And you are there because you are playing a role, the lead role. And it is because you are playing that role that you rise and speak. And then in Hansard the next day it reads like a play. It is the same for all of us in life: we move about on various stages, we take on various roles, and we speak. But there is a crucial difference, of course, one that goes to the core of what art is: in a play there is structure and meaning, put there by the playwright, while in life, even after many acts, the structure and meaning is hard to find. Some claim to know of a great playwright who has authored our existence, but even for them structure and meaning remains an ongoing challenge.

So while a play approximates life to a great degree, it is in other ways nothing like life. No one speaks with the concise completeness of the dramatis personae of a play, neither in ways that so quickly yet subtly reveal their character, nor with a tempo that so rises and falls until a climax, nor, usually, in a space so confined as a stage’s. In a phrase: life is a play that doesn’t make sense, while a play is life that does.

(Admittedly, there are people for whom life makes perfect sense, their vision of things forever untouched by doubt, the entropy of time seeming to have no more effect on them than a gentle breeze on the face. They are the type who will not go for the questioning of life that is a play, indeed, that is all great art. But that is a separate matter.)

The knack for writing plays is a knack I don’t have. I have tried to move plot entirely through dialogue, I have tried to express my thoughts on life within the strictures of speech, I have tried to develop an ear for the way people speak—to laughable, unpublishable result. Notice how the word is playwright; it may sound like write, but originally the act of writing a play struck the English as more akin to the work of a carpenter than of a writer. The world of letters is indeed easily divided between those who write and those who wright. There are exceptions—Samuel Beckett, for example—but those who can do both successfully are not many.

There are three plays in the volume of Strindberg that I have sent you. It is the middle play, known either as Miss Julia or Miss Julie, that I recommend to you. In it you will read dialogue that is so brilliant, so crackling with tension, so straightforward on the surface yet hinting at such turmoil and complexity, that it will, paradoxically, all seem perfectly natural to you. That is the sign of a great play in the naturalist tradition: how easily it flows. One gets the sense that the playwright just sat down with a good, simple idea and it all came out in an easy afternoon’s work. I assure you that that is like thinking that all Michelangelo had to do was chip away from the block of marble everything that didn’t look like David.

Miss Julia, which was first performed in 1889, is about confinement, principally the confinement of sexual roles and the confinement of class. Miss Julia and Jean, her servant, meet, match and clash, with tragic consequences. I would love to see the play actually performed on a stage. The alchemy of great play, great director and great actors is rare, but when it happens—I am remembering now a performance long ago at Stratford of Eugene O’Neill’s Long Day’s Journey into Night, with Hume Cronyn and Jessica Tandy—it makes for an experience of an intensity that is, in my estimation, unmatched in the literary arts.

You will notice that the previous owner of your copy of Strindberg wrote copiously in the margins. This annoyed me at first, this defacing of Miss Julia. But finally I was charmed by the intruder’s thoughts and opinions. The handwriting is large, clear and loopy; I think it is a young person writing, likely a young woman. Above Jean’s comment that “on the way back by the barn I looked in and joined the dancing,” our hypothetical young woman writes “joie de vivre”. When Jean impudently tells Miss Julia that he knows that Kristin, the cook, talks in her sleep because “I’ve heard her,” our young woman observes “Kristin’s his mistress”. She variously thinks Jean to be “practical” or “realistic”, while Miss Julia is “totally impractical”. Other short notations of hers are “dramatic moment”, “flirting”, “bourgeoisie”, “gives her warning”, “seduction” and “trag. everyth falling apart” (sic).

One last thing, to elucidate a point easily missed: the “Turkish pavilion” on page 90 that Jean mentions sneaking into as a child, the “finest building I’d ever seen”, the walls “covered with pictures of kings and emperors”, his first time “inside a castle”, is just a fancy outhouse—and the way out he is forced to take when he hears someone approaching is the exit you’d least like to take if you were in an outhouse.

Yours truly,

Yann Martel

encl: one inscribed book

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