What is Stephen Harper Reading?

Dedication

To Stephen Harper,
Prime Minister of Canada,
Music, both beautiful and discordant,
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,

Tolstoy again. Sixty weeks back I sent you The Death of Ivan Ilych, if you remember. This week it’s The Kreutzer Sonata, published three years later, in 1889. A very different book. As much as Ilych is an artistic gem, the realism seemingly effortless, the characters fully incarnate yet universal, the emotions finely expressed, the lyricism simple and profound, the portrayal of life and its fleetingness dead on, so to speak—in sum, as much as Ilych is perfect, The Kreutzer Sonata is imperfect. For example, the setting—a long train ride in which two passengers converse—comes off poorly because nearly the entire novella is taken up by the endless discourse of the main character, Pozdnyshev. Our nameless narrator just sits there, stunned into listening and memorizing the 75-page tirade directed at him. It’s as clunky a device as one of Plato’s dialogues—without the wisdom, for the most part. The Kreutzer Sonata is a long rant about love, sex and marriage, with side swipes at doctors and children, leading up to a vivid portrayal of insane jealousy, all of it told by an unconvicted murderer. Imagine that, a man telling you on a train, “I killed my wife. Let me tell you about it, since we’ve got all night.” I guess I wouldn’t interrupt him, either.

Imperfect art, then. So why the interest? Because it’s still Tolstoy. Simple people lead simple lives. Complex people lead complex lives. The difference between the two has to do with one’s openness to life. Whether determined by misfortune—a congenital deficiency, a stunting upbringing, a lack of opportunity, a timid disposition—or determined by will— by the use and abuse of religion or ideology, for example—there are many ways in which life, one’s portion of it, can be regulated and made acceptably simple. Tolstoy was unregulated. He lived in a manner unbridled and unblinkered. He took it all in. He was supremely complex. And so there was much of life in his long life, life good and bad, wise and unwise, happy and unhappy. Thus the interest of his writings, because of their extraordinary existential breadth. If the earth could gather itself up, could bring together everything upon it, all men, women and children, every plant and animal, every mountain and valley, every plain and ocean, and twist itself into a fine point, and at that fine point grasp a pen, and with that pen begin to write, it would write like Tolstoy. Tolstoy, like Shakespeare, like Dante, like all great artists, is life itself speaking.

But whereas Ilych elicits consonance in the reader, The Kreutzer Sonata elicits dissonance. In it, love between men and women does not really exist but is merely a euphemism for lust. Marriage is covenanted prostitution, a cage in which lust unhappily fulfills itself. Men are depraved, women hate sex, children are a burden, doctors are a fraud. The only solution is complete sexual abstinence, and if that means the end of the human species, all the better. Because otherwise men and women will always be unhappy with each other, and some men may be driven to killing their wives. It’s a bleak, excessively scouring view of the relations between the sexes, a reflection of Tolstoy’s frustration at the social constrictions of his times, no doubt, but nonetheless going too far, wrong-headed, objectionable. And so its effect, the scandal upon its publication, and the reaction it has to this day. Tolstoy does indeed go too far in The Kreutzer Sonata, but in it are nonetheless expressed all the elements—the hypocrisy and the outrage, the guilt and the anger—that were at the core of that greatest revolution of the twentieth century: feminism.

As an aside, this second book by Tolstoy was a last-minute choice. There’s such a world of books out there to share with you that I thought one book per author as introduction was enough. After that, if you were interested, you could look up for yourself any given author’s other books.

Only I wanted a book this week that touched on music. (I’ve forgotten to explain the title of Tolstoy’s novella. Pozdnyshev’s wife is an amateur pianist. The couple meets an accomplished amateur violinist by the name of Trukhashevsky, a man. The wife and he become, in all innocence, friends because of their mutual fondness for music. They decide to play Beethoven’s Kreutzer Sonata, for piano and violin, together. In the wings, her husband grows angrier.) Why a book on music? Because serious music, at least as represented by new and classical music, is fast disappearing from our Canadian lives. I have belatedly learned of the latest proof of this: the CBC Radio Orchestra is to be disbanded. Already our public radio’s fare of music has been paltrified. There was once, Mr. Harper, a show called Two New Hours on CBC, hosted by Larry Lake. It played Canadian new music. It’s last slot, surely the least desirable for any show, was on Sundays between 10 pm and midnight, too late for the early birds, too early for the night owls. Airing at that time, no surprise that few people managed to listen to it. When I did, though, I was grateful. New music is a strange offering. It is, as far as I can tell, music that has broken free. Free of rules, forms, traditions, expectations. Frontier music. New world music. Anarchy as music. Which might explain the screechy violins, the pianos gone crazy, the weird electronic stuff.

I have intense memories of listening to Two New Hours and doing nothing but that. Because really, it’s impossible to read while your radio is sounding like two tractors mating. I suppose I’m more jaded when it comes to writing—jaded, jealous, bored, whatever. But I listened to Two New Hours out of pure curiosity. And I was surprised, moved and proud that there were creators out there responding to our world in such fresh and serious ways. Because it was clear to me: this was serious stuff, strange as it sounded. This was music that, under whatever guise, was the voice of a single person trying to communicate with me. And I listened, thrilled at the newness of it. That is, I listened until the show was cancelled.

And now the CBC Radio Orchestra, the last radio orchestra in North America, is to be similarly cancelled. No more, “That was _____, played by the CBC Radio Orchstra, conducted by Mario Bernardi,” as I heard for years. Who will play us our Bach and Mozart now, our R. Murray Schafer and Christos Hatzis?

It amazes me that at a time when Canada is riding the commodities wave to unprecedented wealth, with most levels of government experiencing budgetary surpluses, that we are ridding ourselves of a piddly little orchestra. If this is how we are when in fortune, how will we be when in misfortune? How much culture exactly can we do without before we have become lifeless, corporate drones?

I believe that both in good and bad times we need beautiful music.

Yours truly,

Yann Martel

encl: one inscribed paperback

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