What is Stephen Harper Reading?

Inscription:

To Stephen Harper,
Prime Minister of Canada,
A novel about where we’re all heading,
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,

Just as a new life enters my life, I thought I’d look at how an old life ends. And so I am sending you this week the novel Everyman, by the American writer Philip Roth, who was born in 1933. Roth has been writing for a long time. His first book, a collection of six short stories, Goodbye, Columbus, was published in 1959. Roth was 26 years old. In the fifty years since, he has published another thirty or so books, most of them novels. And since much of his work has autobiographical elements, it’s not surprising that Roth should eventually turn to the subject of ageing and dying.

The child is ever expanding; as its body grows in size and strength, so does its mind and its ability to take in the surrounding world. The feeling, if you remember, is rich, wondrous and chaotic, an involvement with people, animals, objects, events, places, weather and nature that results in the most intense emotions, from soaring exhilaration to wrenching anguish, from overwhelming curiosity to stupefying boredom. Those years of emotional exploration mark us for life, directing us towards who we are and what we do in our mature years.

Then we grow old. Ageing is shrinking; the body grows smaller and weaker, and the mind follows, sometimes closely but oftentimes not. The lucid mind stands over its decaying body like a great tree whose soil and roots are being undercut by the bend of a river. The pains of the body accumulate. It’s a never ending battle, with full recovery an ever receding hope. The mind starts to go too, and though forgetting names and faces is not in itself painful, it brings on mental anguish. To make matters worse, old age brings on loneliness, as the relations of one’s working life are left behind, as friends drift away, as family go on with their own lives. The world has left and forgotten us, it seems. The knowledge that the inevitable conclusion of this physical, mental and social breakdown is one’s complete disappearance brings on inescapable gloom and acute dread. To let go of life, after a lifetime of living, is there a greater challenge?

Everyman relates the life of a nameless man who is not ordinary or generic in his life particulars—after all, he lives in a specific city, practices during his working life a particular job, has relations to family, friends and lovers that are unique to him—but is an everyman by the fact of his ageing body and approaching death. The novel is in many ways a medical story, following the trials and tribulations of Everyman’s body from a biological, corporeal perspective. Ailments and medical emergencies, hospitalizations, convalescences, nurses, old people—this is the universe of Everyman.

It’s a grim tale. The conclusion is forgone. In fact, the novel starts with Everyman’s funeral. Roth pulls the reader along, so that Everyman’s demise, like that of Ivan Ilych, is horrifying at the same time as it is compelling. I couldn’t read the novel without comparing my own imagined old age with that of Roth’s protagonist. Will my heart go like his? Or will it be my back, like that of Everyman’s friend, Millicent Kramer, who suffers unbearable pain as the result of her spine’s decomposition? What will my social relations be like? Will I be attended to, or left lonely and isolated? So many tragedies in life can be avoided, some by care and consideration, others by pure luck. I have lived a life remarkably spared of tragedy and unhappiness. But one’s death, the body that falls apart, the mind that goes, that tragedy is inescapable. It is our collective and individual future.

Having said that, there are ways of approaching death that can change its meaning, if not its pain. I’m of course speaking of a spiritual approach. If death is seen as a threshold, a step up whose peculiar build requires the leaving behind of one’s body, then death becomes not an ending but a beginning, a transformation. “Religious mumbo jumbo! Ignorant claptrap!” some will cry. But one’s death, as far as the ideas one has about its meaning, is no one else’s business. It’s a private affair. And just as children’s heads are filled with imaginative mumbo jumbo that is the very colour and texture of a happy childhood, so can religious mumbo jumbo be the colour and texture of a contented letting go at the end of life. In saying this, in arguing for the practical usefulness—as well as the deep joy (and the possible truthfulness)—of a transcendent view of life and death, I am straying from the narrative of Everyman. The novel is resolutely, unflinchingly secular. There is no redemption or grace in Roth’s novel, or none that overcomes the dread of death. The ending is grim and it comes grimly. It’s a tale that yields the only moral possible from such an earthbound perspective: carpe diem, seize the day, enjoy today for tomorrow you die.

If this is your first Philip Roth, you’ll be struck at the artless simplicity of it. You don’t write so many novels that have won so many awards without learning how to tell a good story well. Even if Everyman’s particulars don’t match yours—his sexual obsession with very young women, for example, struck me as harking to a certain kind of dated ageing male who came of age in the fifties and sixties—the psychological astuteness will nonetheless bring him close to you. You may dislike Everyman in his earlier years, feeling repelled by his arrogance, his stupidity, his selfishness, but his slow, grinding end will touch you, because in that he is like you, he is like me. Everyman is so finely calibrated emotionally and so perfectly crafted that it resembles the symbolic element on the cover of the edition I’m sending you: a watch.

My father Émile, who turned 68 a few days ago, sent me a poem he wrote. By coincidence, it too deals with the anguish of ageing and I will end this letter with it:

I am the oldest I have ever been.
I may even be as old as I’ll ever get.
So I want to be left alone on the shore of this river,
to see the tide roll in and out
and watch which boats of the past will pass by,
which one will stop and pick me up
and take me back there.
This is where I am now,
this is who I am now.
Leave me alone.

Yours truly,

Yann Martel

encl: one inscribed paperback

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