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,

The work now in your hands is the quintessential used book. The cover looks old, both in style and in condition. A number, a price, has been written directly on the cover: 4.50. Someone put a line of tape along the spine to keep the cover from falling off. There’s the dash of a black marker along the bottom of the book, the telltale sign of a used book. The pages inside are yellowed with age along their outside edges. You’ll notice a further yellow mark along the left side of the first pages; it looks like the book was accidentally soaked once and a watermark has remained. The book unmistakably shows its venerable age. The edition now yours, a first paperback printing, was published forty-one years ago, in 1967. I was four years old, you were nine. Not bad for an assemblage of flimsy elements: cheap paper and thin cardboard.

The book has lasted this long for two reasons: it is good, and so it has been treated well. Inexpensive in price, it has glowed with value in the eyes of all who owned it, and so they handled it with care. As I mentioned to you in an earlier letter, the used book is economically odd: despite age and lack of rarity, it does not depreciate with age. In fact, it is the contrary: if you take good care of this book, in a few years, because it is a first paperback printing, it will go up in value.

That undiminishing richness is of course due to a paperback’s inner wealth, all those little black markings. They inhabit a book the way a soul inhabits a body. Books, like people, can’t be reduced to the cost of the materials with which they were made. Books, like people, become unique and precious once you get to know them.

That cultural glory, the used paperback, is perfectly represented here by Flannery O’Connor. Neither new nor aged, but rather enduring, she is the typical glittering treasure to be found in a used bookstore. Imagine: for $4.50 I got you her collection of short stories Everything That Rises Must Converge. The discrepancy between price and value is laughably out of whack. What it really says is this: The object you are now holding is of such worth that to give it any price is ridiculous, so here, to emphasize the nonsense of the notion, we’ll charge you $4.50.

Flannery O’Connor was American. She was born in 1925 in Georgia and she died there in 1964 of lupus. She was only thirty-nine years old. She was religious, devoutly Catholic to be exact, but her faith was not a set of blinkers. Rather, it charged the world with God’s grace and made apparent to her the gap between the sacred and the human. By my reckoning, what O’Connor wrote about, over and over, was the Fall. Her stories are about the ruination of Paradise, about the cost of listening to snakes and reaching for apples. They are moral stories, but there’s nothing pat about them. By virtue of good writing, fine dark humour, rich characterization and compelling narrative, they sift through life without reducing it.

And so their effect. Each story feels, has the weight, of a small novel. And with no dull literariness, I assure you. You’ll see for yourself. Start on any one of them and a character will quickly reach out from the page, grab you by the arm and pull you along. These stories are engrossing. After each, you will feel that you have lived longer, that you have a greater experience of life, that you are wiser. They are dark stories. In every one, either a son hates his mother or a mother despairs over her useless sons, or it might be a grandfather or a father who is despairing. And the end result, besides highly entertaining, is invariably tragic. Hence the wisdom given off. It’s nearly a mathematical equation: reader + story of folly = wiser reader.

I especially recommend to you the stories “Greenleaf”, “A View of the Woods” and “The Lame Shall Enter First”.

I have another matter I would like to raise with you. The cancellation of PromArt was recently announced. The program, administered by the Department of Foreign Affairs, helps cover some of the travel costs of Canadian artists and cultural groups going abroad to promote their work. The grants to individuals are small, often between $750 and $1500 dollars. The budget of the entire program is only $4.7 million. That’s about 14 cents a year per Canadian. For that small sum, Canada shows its best, most enduring quality to the nations of the earth. To remind you of what I’m sure you already know, a country cannot be reduced to the corporations it happens to shelter. Businesses come and go, following their own commercial logic. No one feels deep, patriotic feelings for a corporation, certainly not its shareholders. They will vote where the money leads them. So while Canadians can feel proud about such global players as Bombardier and Alcan and hosts of others, we should not pin our identity to them. Canada is a people, not a business. We shine because of our cultural achievements, not our mercantile wealth. So to cut an international arts promotion program is to vow our country to cultural anonymity. It means foreigners will have no impressions of Canada, and so no affection.

The PromArt program is a vital part of our foreign policy. I ask you to reconsider the decision to shut it down. The value-added worth of this modest program is akin to, well, the value-added worth of a paperback.

Yours truly,

Yann Martel

encl: one inscribed paperback.

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