What is Stephen Harper Reading?

Dedication:

To Stephen Harper,
Prime Minister of Canada,
This collection of great poems to celebrate
the first anniversary of our book club,
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,

We are celebrating a birthday, you and I. The book that accompanies this letter is the twenty-sixth that you have received from me. Since I have been sending you these literary gifts every two weeks, that means that our cozy book group is celebrating its first anniversary. How have we done? It’s been a most interesting odyssey, taking more of my time than I expected, but the pleasure has kept me keen and motivated. The result, so far, is a folder with copies of twenty-six letters for me and a shelf with twenty-eight slim books for you (a discrepancy owing to the fact that I sent you three books for Christmas). If we look over your new, growing library, we see:

13 novels
3 collections of poetry
3 plays
4 books of non-fiction
4 children’s books, and
1 graphic novel,

written (or, in one case, edited) by:
1 Russian
5 Britons
7 Canadians (including 1 Québécois)
1 Indian
4 French
1 Colombian
2 Swedes
3 Americans
1 German
1 Czech
1 Italian, and
1 Irish,

of whom:
16 were men
9 were women, with
2 books authored by both sexes, and
1 book authored by writers of unknown sex (though my guess is that the Bhagavad Gita was written by men)

Too many novels, too many men, not enough poetry, why haven’t I sent you a Margaret Atwood or an Alice Munro yet—at the rate of a book every two weeks, it’s hard to be representative and impossible to please everyone. But we’re getting there. Glenn Gould once said, “The purpose of art is the lifelong construction of a state of wonder.” There is time yet.

It seemed appropriate on this anniversary occasion to offer you a book entitled Birthday Letters. It has the celebratory word in the title, even if the tone of the book does not exactly evoke a cake with a small, lit candle on it.

The facts are as follows. In 1956, a twenty-six-year-old Englishman named X married a twenty-three-year-old American woman named Y. They had two children. Their relationship proved fraught with tensions, made worse by X’s affair with a woman named Z, and in 1962 X and Y separated. In 1963, Y, mentally unstable since her teenage years, committed suicide by gassing herself. Six years later, in 1969, Z, who by then had a child with X, a little girl nicknamed Shura, also killed herself, unpardonably taking Shura with her. Two last facts: first, by virtue of being still married to Y when she died, X became her testamentary executor, and, second, X was constant throughout his life in his infidelities.

The amount of pain contained within these anonymous facts—the torment, the heartache, the sorrow, the shame, the regret—is barely conceivable. What life would not be overwhelmed, utterly destroyed, by such pain? And would that pain not be made worse if it were displayed for the whole world to see and comment upon?

X was Ted Hughes, Y was Sylvia Plath and Z was Assia Wevill, and their collective pain, the terrible mess that was their lives, would have been lost and forgotten had not the first two been superb and well-known poets who gave expression to that pain. Further notoriety was added by the fact that sides could easily be taken with this tragedy. Why does tragedy so often make us take sides? I guess because strong emotions move us, and we move to one side or another, so to speak, as if fleeing a car that is out of control, and it takes the passage of time, the examination of memory, for us to look back with calm sorrow, standing steadily, no longer so inclined to move and take sides. At any rate, it doesn’t take a lawyer to detect conflict of interest in Hughes being the literary executor of Plath, her pained posthumous collections of poetry and her pained journals being edited by the very man who caused a good deal of her pain, some say editing her works with an eye to improving his reputation. That he furthermore destroyed the last volume of her journal, the one chronicling the last months of their relationship, only makes the charge against him more credible. And what to think of his incessant promiscuity? Who could imagine that shame and regret would so little curb libido?

Sides were taken, vociferously. Hughes was scorned and hated until his death by feminists and Plath-lovers, and I doubt the controversy of their relationship will ever slip from public interest. What stands in Hughes’s defence? That question has an easy answer. His poetry.

That the author of Birthday Letters might be portrayed as a callous philanderer, arrogant and remorseless, is irrelevant in the face of the magnificence of his poetry. It reminds one of the fact that great art is, in its essence, not moral but testimonial, bearing witness to life as it is honestly lived, in its glorious heights as well as in its turpitudinous depths.

Great poetry tends to shut up the novelist in me. It takes so many words to make a novel, reams and reams of sentences and paragraphs, and then I read a single great poem, not even two pages long, and all my prose feels like verbiage. You will see what I mean when you read these poems. They are narrative poems, the tone intimate, usually an “I” speaking to a “you”, the language quicksilver, extraordinarily concise, simple words arranged in an original and forceful way, and the result, poem after poem, is not only a clear image but an unforgettable impression. Take “Sam”, or “Your Paris”, or “You Hated Spain”, or “Chaucer”, or “Flounders”, or “The Literary Life”, or “The Badlands”, or “Epiphany”, or “The Table”. Or just this short one:

Caryatids (1)

What were those caryatids bearing?
It was the first poem of yours I had seen.
It was the only poem you ever wrote
That I disliked through the eyes of a stranger.
It seemed thin and brittle, the lines cold.
Like the theorem of a trap, a deadfall—set.
I saw that. And the trap unsprung, empty.
I felt no interest. No stirring
Of omen. In those days I coerced
Oracular assurance
In my favour out of every sign.
So missed everything
In the white, blindfolded, rigid faces
Of those women. I felt their frailty, yes:
Friable, burnt aluminum.
Fragile, like the mantle of a gas-lamp.
But made nothing
Of that massive, starless, mid-fall, falling
Heaven of granite
stopped, as if in a snapshot,
By their hair.

Ted Hughes was perhaps, if one is in the sanctimonious mood to judge, a bastard, but the bastard was also an amazing bard, his poetry dazzling. And the evidence from Birthday Letters is clear: X really did love Y, so if art can redeem, here is redemption.

Yours truly,

Yann Martel

encl: one inscribed paperback

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