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,

Your latest book will be late this week. I’m sorry about that. The delay is not due to the long weekend. Like most self-employed workers, I’m willing to work on weekends and during holidays because if I don’t do the job, no one will do it for me. The problem lies elsewhere. The book that accompanies this letter, Under Milk Wood, by the Welsh poet Dylan Thomas (1914-1953), is such a lyrical work that it demands not only to be read but to be heard. So I thought I’d send you an audio version in addition to the text. There is a famous performance recorded in New York with Dylan Thomas himself reading several of the parts, done hardly two months before his death, and my family owns an LP of that recording, but I’m not willing to part with it, and even if I were, I doubt you have a record player at hand. The more recent performance that I’ve found for you, on CD, is a BBC production and it’s been slow to arrive in the mail. Hence the delay.

A word about audiobooks. Have you ever listened to one? I went on a road trip to the Yukon a few years ago and brought some along to give them a try. I thought I’d dislike having a voice insistently whispering me a story while Canada’s majestic northern landscape surged before my eyes. A three-minute pop song I can handle—but a twelve-hour story? I thought it would drive me crazy. I was wrong. Be forewarned: audiobooks are totally addictive. The origin of language is oral, not written. We spoke before we wrote, as children but also as a species. It’s in being spoken that words achieve their full power. If the written word is the recipe, then the spoken word is the dish prepared, the voice adding tone, accent, emphasis, emotion. As I’m sure you will agree, the quality of oratory in Canadian and American public life has deteriorated in the last few years. Barack Obama is where he is, on the cusp of the US presidency, in part, I believe, because of his skill in making his words lofty, inspirational and convincing. His ability is unusual. Most public speakers nowadays are plodding. Actors are the great exception. Their public speaking is superb because it is the very basis of their trade. And it’s actors who read the stories on audiobooks. The combination of a writer’s carefully chosen words and an actor’s carefully calibrated delivery makes for a package that is spellbinding. Time and again on my trip to the Yukon I wouldn’t get out of the car until a chapter had ended. And then the next morning I couldn’t wait to get on with the next. As soon as one story was done, I hastened to start another. Every time I go on a car trip now, I stop by the public library to pick up a selection of audiobooks.

There’s talk of an election this fall. That means a lot of travelling for you. I suggest you pack a few audiobooks for those long bus and airplane trips you will have to endure. My only advice is to avoid abridged versions. Otherwise, select as you please. Murder mysteries are particularly effective—as is poetry.

Which brings us back to Under Milk Wood. Dylan Thomas is no doubt one of the world’s most famous poets. He had a rare quality among modern bards: a persona. His aura as a hard-drinking, hard living writer—one who died young, to boot; always a boon to one’s immortality—has helped his poetry, which is of genuine quality, achieve a cult status. His poems are endlessly anthologized. You’ve no doubt heard of “Do Not Go Gentle into That Good Night”.

Under Milk Wood is a radio play. That might make you think it’s a tight, fast-paced affair in which a few distinctive voices are aided by clear sound effects. Not at all. There’s no plot to speak of, just a day in the life of a Welsh village named Llareggub. Read that name backwards and you’ll get an idea of what Dylan Thomas thought there was to do in Welsh villages. But life is still good, and that’s what Under Milk Wood is at heart, a celebration of life. With an astounding sixty-nine different voices, it’s symphonic in effect. What carries the whole piece, its melody so to speak, is Dylan Thomas’s gift for language. His words describe, imitate, bubble, scintillate, run, stop, amuse, surprise, enchant. This is verbal beauty at its purest.

Beauty—the word is much bandied about. But like many words that we use all the time—good, fair, just, for example—if we look a little closer, we find that behind the cliché lies a philosophical odyssey that goes as far back as human thinking. Clearly, beauty moves us, motivates us, shames us, shapes us. I won’t in this letter even try to define what beauty is. Best to leave you to think on it, or to look it up. If you are serious in your curiosity, you’ll find yourself following a strand of Western philosophy that goes as far back as Pythagoras (who associated beauty with symmetry), and of course all of visual art concerns itself in one way or another with beauty. There’s much there for the mind that wants to study, a lifetime’s worth of material.

I’ll limit myself to a much narrower focus, and that is the question of beauty and the prose writer. A writer has many tools to tell a story: characterization, plot and description are some of the obvious ones. Tell a gripping story with full-blooded characters in a convincing setting and you’ve told a good story. Depending on the writer, one element may prevail more than another. So John Grisham or Stephen King will have much plot to show, with some description, but the characters may be there mainly to serve a narrative purpose. A writer like John Banville, on the other hand (do you know him? Irish, an extraordinary stylist), will tend to be less driven by plot, but will have characters and descriptions that are startling in their richness. And so on. Every writer, depending on his or her strengths and interests, will bring some different ratio of ingredients to the making up of a story.

One notion that is constant in all writers, though, is that of beauty. Every writer, in some way, aspires to literary beauty. That might mean a beautiful plot device, elegant in its simplicity. Or it might mean an ability to paint with words, to create such vivid portraits of people or settings that readers feel that they are “seeing” what the writer is describing. More commonly, the writer of serious ambition aspires to beautiful writing; that is, to writing that by dint of apt vocabulary, happy syntax and pleasing cadence will make the reader marvel. I promise you, if one day you are glad-handing and you end up shaking the hand of a writer and you’re at a lost for words, if you say, “You’re a beautiful writer”, you will please that writer. They will know exactly what you mean, that you’re not talking about their shoes or their tie or their complexion, but that you’re talking about how they lay their words on the page, and they will glow, they will beam, they will nearly wilt under your praise.

But—there’s always a but—one has to be careful about beauty. In all walks of life. In our overly visual society, we tend to be too easily won over by beauty, whether it be in a person, in a product or even in a book. A beautifully written book, like a beautiful person, may not have much to say. The beauty of substance often loses out to the beauty of appearance. A good writer knows that beautiful writing can’t substitute for having something to say. The best beauty is that in which beauty of form is held up by beauty of content.

Beauty, in another words, can be a mask hiding a vacuum, hiding falsehood, even hiding ugliness.

No danger here, with Under Milk Wood. The lyricism of the language rests solidly on Dylan Thomas’s gut knowledge that life is good, however bad it may be at times. It is said that Dylan Thomas wrote Under Milk Wood in reaction to the atomic bombing of Hiroshima. I doubt that’s factually true. It sounds too conveniently perfect. But opposing a radiant symphonic poem against the darkness of a mass killing of civilians does hark to a spiritual truth: that beauty can be a road back to goodness.

Yours truly,

Yann Martel

encl: one paperback and one audio CD, both inscribed.

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