What is Stephen Harper Reading?

Inscription:

To Stephen Harper,
Prime Minister of Canada,
A life in books,
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,

I haven’t sent you much non-fiction since the start of our little book club, but how could a book called Books not catch my attention as I was browsing at McNally Robinson last week? (As you’ve perhaps heard, McNally Robinson, a fine independent book chain, has just filed for bankruptcy protection. By the sounds of it, their main Winnipeg store and the one here in Saskatoon will survive, but their venture in suburban Toronto has cost them dearly. But the travails of independent bookselling is another story, although not, coincidentally, one unrelated to your latest gift.) Books is about a life in books. Its author is Larry McMurtry. If you think you’ve never heard of him, I bet you’re more familiar with his work than you realize. McMurtry, a disciplined writer, ten pages a morning, every day, no exception, for years, has published many books, as you’ll see if you flip to the second page of Books, where his works are listed in a long column. So far, McMurtry has to his credit thirty-six novels, one collection of short stories, and three collections of essays. But for Lonesome Dove, which I remember hearing about when it won McMurtry the Pulitzer Prize in 1985, none of the titles were familiar to me. Well, with the exception of those that were adapted to the screen. Remember Hud, with Paul Newman? It was based on McMurtry’s first novel, Horseman, Pass By. His novel The Last Picture Show was also turned into a successful Hollywood movie, as was Terms of Endearment. More recently, McMurtry co-wrote the brilliant screen adaptation of Annie Proulx’s novella Brokeback Mountain.

So, a novelist who has done very well in Hollywood. But the book in your hands is called Books, not Movies. McMurtry, it turns out, has lived with and for and by books his whole life, writing them, reading them and selling them. He is, to use a term that comes up frequently in his memoir, a bookman. His personal library consists of approximately 28,000 volumes. His used bookstore, Booked Up, in Archer City, Texas, has over 300,000 books. He has worked in the used book trade for over fifty years, starting as a book scout, hunting for rare books, and then moving on to open his own used book store, first in Georgetown, a neighbourhood of Washington, D.C., and then in Texas. And throughout—the pretext for the scouting and the selling—he has read and reread thousands upon thousands of books. In one chapter, McMurtry makes mention of a “minor English literary figure” named James Lees-Milne (try saying that name ten times over), the author of several “not particularly good books on architecture, a few bad novels, several readable biographies, and twelve glorious volumes of diaries.” He comments: “I have read the whole twelve volumes several times and I am sure I will keep rereading them for the rest of my life.” I wonder if there’s anyone else on this planet who can claim to have read the twelve-volume diaries of James Lees-Milne several times. And it’s clear that McMurtry’s judgments on Lees-Milne’s other books, the not particularly good ones, the bad ones and the merely readable ones, are the result of having read every single one. Elsewhere, McMurtry, in discussing his interest in the world wars of the 20th century, talks about reading Winston Churchill’s massive history of World War II, all five million words of it. And so on, authors minor and major, works single and in multiple volumes—they’ve all been taken in by a mind voraciously open to the written word.

What kind of intellectual autobiography does such a mind yield? Is the reader, the average reader who’s never heard of, let alone read, James Lees-Milne, reduced to feeling ignorant or half-literate? The answer is no, as you’ll find out as soon as you start on Books. Because books, if read well, feed your humbleness, not your arrogance. Books are about life, and life is a humbling experience. Ask any old person.

Books is about McMurtry’s life with books, mostly the books he’s read and traded, and about the sub-culture—and wavering fortunes—of antiquarian book traders. The wisdom in it comes off naturally and easily. And the chapters are very short; some don’t even stretch to a full page, and very few are longer than three pages. I liked that right away. All those books read, yet the man writes these itsy-bitsy chapters. The tone is equally approachable. McMurtry was born on a ranch somewhere in Texas to parents who didn’t own a single book, and the feel of the man, as I sense it in this memoir, reminds me of the best of Prairie folk here in Saskatchewan, smart but modest.

A book asks you to measure yourself against it. The relationship is one of comparing and contrasting. Done lucidly, one emerges a little more knowledgeable about oneself and, sometimes, a little wiser. One thing I learnt from reading Books is that I’m not the bibliophile that Larry McMurtry is. He clearly loves not only the messages that books deliver, but their medium, that construction of ink, paper and cardboard, with its long history and technical lingo. I’m too much of the nomad, unwilling to weigh myself down, to attach myself in this way to books. McMurtry balks at e-books. I don’t. McMurtry loves owning old or rare books. I don’t. To me, a book is a sustained whisper and it matters not a jot whether that whisper is conveyed by an inexpensive Penguin paperback, or an incunabulum. The book that is an art object is something other than literary. It belongs in a museum rather than a library. Having said that, I’d love to visit McMurtry’s personal library and his used book store. And I love wandering about the stacks of the library at the University of Saskatchewan. Larry McMurtry and I certainly agree on this point: books, owned or borrowed, old or new, nourish and sustain the soul.

I hope you enjoy, in this new year of 2010, this celebration of book culture.

Yours truly,

Yann Martel

encl: one inscribed trade paperback

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