What is Stephen Harper Reading?

Inscription:

for Mr. Palomar:
To Stephen Harper,
Prime Minister of Canada,
A book of observant stillness,
From a Canadian writer,
With best wishes,
Yann Martel

for Three Lives:
To Stephen Harper,
Prime Minister of Canada,
Pretty much one of the worst books I’ve ever read,
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,

Perhaps you noticed that the last book I sent you, the poet Anne Carson’s Autobiography of Red, starts with a quote by Gertrude Stein. That got me thinking. Every literate person has heard of Gertrude Stein. Paris fixture for forty years; friend of Ernest Hemingway and Sherwood Anderson, of Pablo Picasso and Henri Matisse; coiner, it is said, of the term “a lost generation” to designate those American writers who were born out of the disillusionment that followed the First World War; sayer of “A rose is a rose is a rose” to debunk literary pomp and pretence; and so on—Gertrude Stein is a name that has endured. I have in mind the image of a smart, genial, open-minded woman who liked to be at the centre of things. All artists need patrons and supporters, and what a nice thing it must have been to have Gertrude Stein play that role, to be admitted into her salon in Paris, full of stunning modern art, and offered drink and food and conversation, if one were a young and poor expatriate writer or painter. If Paris was a moveable feast, as Hemingway put it, I imagine Gertrude Stein as the hostess of that feast.

But who has read Gertrude Stein? Her Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas, which is purportedly about her lifelong companion but is in fact about both of them and their lively lives in Paris, is Stein’s best known work. Though as biography it’s  fanciful, with the facts largely filtered by a cheerfully opinionated subject, it’s still not a work of fiction. What of Stein’s true fiction? I had never read anything by her, and couldn’t even think of a title. So there, my choice was made.

I found Three Lives, a collection of three long stories first published in 1909 and more recently reprinted by Penguin Classics. The introduction, by an American academic, whet my appetite. In it, I discovered that the style of each of the stories was highly influenced by a different modern painter. So The Good Anna was marked by Paul Cézanne, Melanctha by Picasso, and The Gentle Lena by Matisse. How odd and intriguing, I thought. In what way could brushstrokes affect the writing of words? How could the play of paint on a two-dimensional surface influence the composition of a story on a page? I settled in for a thrilling Modernist ride. I have often thought that no one has pushed and pulled the English language quite so much as the interwar writers of the last century. Hemingway, William Faulkner, James Joyce, Virginia Woolf, John Dos Passos, e.e. cummings, to mention only a smattering off the top of my head—they made English say new things in new ways. I thought I would witness such experimentation with Three Lives.

Well, I was disappointed, angrily disappointed. It’s all very well to have ideas and theories, and experiments do need to be made, in art as well as in science, and one should make allowances for risk-takers—but my god, what a boring book! I worked my way through The Good Anna, I started off on Melanctha, but forty pages in I gave up, my reading ground to a stupefied halt. Of what I read, I have this to say: there is no concern for realism, neither of setting nor of psychology, there is no eye for detail or ear for dialogue, nearly everything is told, not shown, the characters are only fitfully plausible, there is only the odd heartbeat of a plot, the language is plain and unappealing, and the repetition—that which was announced as Stein’s great gambit—is as interesting as watching paint dry, which is the only link I can make between Three Lives and what Cézanne, Picasso and Matisse did. Most surprising to me, coming from one who I thought would be a fountain of bon mots, was the utter witlessness of Gertrude Stein’s writing. Oh yes: the racism, that too came as a surprise. I noted a few squeaks by the author of the introduction to explain it away, but I took little heed of this warning. After all, there’s that line in Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises, of the character Robert Cohn, how he had “a mean Jewish streak”. That second adjective wouldn’t pass muster nowadays. But it’s just one line among many, one line in a magnificent body of work that only there jars with its prejudice. It’s a smudge upon the timeless art made by a man who is of this time, formed and limited by its biases. And more to the point, The Sun Also Rises is not The Protocols of the Elders of Zion. The comment on Robert Cohn is a line in passing, a throwaway line in no way central to the novel. Gertrude Stein’s Three Lives, on the other hand, is something else. See how this paragraph sits with you:

Rose Johnson was careless and was lazy, but she had been brought up by white folks and she needed decent comfort. Her white training had only made for habits, not for nature. Rose had the simple, promiscuous unmorality of the black people.

As for our heroine:

Melanctha Herbert was a graceful, pale yellow, intelligent, attractive negress. She had not been raised like Rose by white folks, but then she had been half made with real white blood.

Rose Johnson is a proud one:

“No, I ain’t no common nigger,” said Rose Johnson, “for I was raised by white folks, and Melanctha she is so bright and learned so much in school, she ain’t no common nigger either, though she ain’t got no husband to be married to like I am to Sam Johnson.”

They’re a fine pair, Sam and Rose:

The child though it was healthy after it was born, did not live long. Rose Johnson was careless and negligent and selfish, and when Melanctha had to leave for a few days, the baby died. Rose Johnson had liked the baby well enough and perhaps she just forgot it for awhile, anyway the child was dead and Rose and Sam her husband were very sorry but then these things came so often in the negro world in Bridgepoint, that they neither of them thought about it very long.

I like the “perhaps she just forgot about it” and then the huffy, what-you-making-so-much-trouble-about “anyway” that follows. As for the death of a baby not being thought about “very long”, I’d think that’d be inaccurate even of a mother gnu who’s just lost a baby gnu to a lion on an African plain, let alone of two human beings. And this tripe appears in the first two pages alone. After that, it gets no better, it goes on and on in the same register, because Melanctha is all about black folks as they exist in Gertrude Stein’s mind.

You see now why I stopped reading. Whatever theory of literary composition Gertrude Stein might have wanted to bring to light is buried by a thick layer of toxic racist sludge. I’m willing to forgive the odd slip of an artist if the aim of the work is high. But when the slip is central, when the slip is all you see and get, then the high aim is lost. Gertrude Stein’s book is all the more galling if you consider that she was both lesbian and Jewish, and therefore, you’d think, slightly more sensitive to prejudice. But no, not Gertrude Stein. Stupid, stupid woman. I see now why she has survived among readers only in her incarnation as hostess to young greats.

Why then am I sending you her book when I so loathed it? Because maybe I missed the point. Every reader has his or her limitations. Clearly I’m not up to this Penguin Classic. You might have a different opinion. Perhaps you will get something out of Three Lives.

But in that order of books, of writers who try something new, there’s much better than Gertrude Stein. Take Italo Calvino, for example, an Italian writer who lived between the years 1923 and 1985. I’ve chosen Mr. Palomar for you. Here you have a book that is plotless but fascinating, that is experimental yet rewarding, that is different without becoming tiresome, that is rooted but not restricted, that is beautiful though not in a classical way. Mr. Palomar is a book that charms and stimulates in equal measure. It makes you see both language and the world in a slightly different way.

It’s a hard book to describe. I suppose one could say that it’s a collection of short stories. But that’s not quite right. It is indeed divided into sections that can be read in any order, like a standard collection of short fiction. But they’re not stories, not really. They would be better described as fictional meditation pieces. In each one, the discreet, attentive, concerned Mr. Palomar has an encounter or an experience upon which he dwells. His name is the same as that of the famous observatory in California. That gives you some idea of the scale of Mr. Palomar’s musings. And yet his scale is also very small, so that sometimes his telescopic viewing becomes microscopic. There’s a pleasing harmony to that, as the very, very small, the molecular, has much the same layout as the very, very large, the cosmic, and both, to the mind, are quite dizzying in their vastness. But I’m not being concrete enough. In The naked bosom, Mr. Palomar is walking along a beach and he sees, up ahead, a woman lying on the sand, topless. How is he to deal with this, what should he do with his gaze, where should it lie? The piece, three and a half pages long, describes the choices that come to Mr. Palomar’s mind and their ramifications. In From the terrace, Mr. Palomar looks out upon Rome and contemplates the significance, from a bird’s perspective, of that vast panorama of variegated roofs. In The albino gorilla, Mr. Palomar wonders about the meaning of why a gorilla is holding onto an old tire. In The order squamata, the variety of reptiles, and how they live in time, is mused about. In Serpents and skulls, the meaning, or lack thereof, of pre-Columbian Mexican architectural motifs is discussed. And so on. The settings are varied (Rome, Paris, Barcelona, Japan, Mexico), sometimes the very large is looked at (night skies, planets, oceans), sometimes the very small (a gecko, a Japanese sand garden), throughout the language is apt and intensely evocative, and always there is a concern for the meaning of things, how this is related to that. Italo Calvino is like a spider and with his words he links the most incongruous elements so that finally everything is linked by the thin thread of a web, and order and harmony are thereby established in the universe. Mr. Palomar is both whimsical and philosophical, an odd mix. It’s a book that assures the reader that his or her gaze upon the world is not only important, but essential, because only in watching, in observing closely, can things be seen.

Which point was entirely lost on Gertrude Stein, but we won’t go there again. Enjoy Mr. Palomar. It brought upon me a sort of Zen peacefulness, that stillness which I mentioned so long ago to you.

Yours truly,

Yann Martel

encl: two inscribed trade paperbacks

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