What is Stephen Harper Reading?

Inscription:

To Stephen Harper,
Prime Minister of Canada,
Have you made a mistake?
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,

Politics is the art of compromise, the saying goes. When a newspaper prints a photograph of two politicians shaking hands and smiling broadly, whether in Washington, the Middle East, or elsewhere, it’s likely that a compromise is being celebrated, a breakthrough in which opposing parties have reached an agreement by making concessions. The fruitful compromise is the great enabler of social peace, whether between competing groups or of a lone person relating to others. Any individual or group that stands too firmly, that is unwilling to negotiate in any way with another, is soon at the heart of incessant social friction and loses any peace it might wish to have. To compromise, on the other hand, helps not only to establish social harmony, it also helps to build relationships, since a compromise is normally the result of open dialogue and increasing familiarity with one’s adversary. Such relationships, in addition to making a compromise possible, may also go to diluting the differences that provoked the antagonism in the first place. In politics, the fruitful compromise often makes the difficulties go away. Take Northern Ireland, for example. The Troubles, as they came to be called, started in the late 1960s, and for three decades Protestant unionists and Catholics nationalists were at each other’s throats, killing men, women, and children, some actively involved in the Troubles, others mere bystanders. The hatred couldn’t be more intense. Yet eventually, by dint of slow, unremitting effort, the warring parties signed a truce, the Good Friday Agreement of 1998, and now peace generally prevails in Northern Ireland. A compromise ended the Troubles and, over time, as peace becomes part of the social fabric, the root causes of the Troubles will, one hopes, disappear. The compromise of the Good Friday Agreement has made, and continues to make, the difficulties go away. That is good politics.

Now, compromise is not your way. You went into politics early on, without any entrepreneurial or significant work experience to teach you the value of yielding. There was the National Citizens Coalition, of which you were president for a few years, but being an advocacy group, it’s hardly the place to learn the motto “Let’s talk”. You stand by your principles and ideology and wait—expect—the country to come round to your views. To be honest, I doubt that’s going to happen. You’ve been in office for over four years now, at a time when the opposition has been fragmented and, in the case of the Liberals, discredited, and still you’ve only managed two minority governments in a row, and polls don’t show your fortunes improving significantly.

Let me introduce you then to Yevgeny Yevtushenko. Yevtushenko is a Russian poet who was born in 1933. He was twenty years old, and coming of age as a poet, when Stalin died in 1953. Yevtushenko profited from the let-up in repression in Soviet life  that followed under Nikita Khrushchev and quickly became the poetic voice for a post-Stalin generation that yearned for greater freedom (it’s at this time that Alexander Solzhenitsyn’s One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, which I sent you a while a go, was also published). Yevtushenko wrote poems that no poet living under Stalin would have dared to write, not if that poet wanted to stay alive. An example is Babi Yar, which is included in the collection of poems I’m sending you this week. Babi Yar is a ravine on the northern edge of Kiev, in Ukraine. An estimated 100,000 innocent people of all ages were murdered there by the Nazis. The victims were Roma and POWs but overwhelmingly they were Jewish. Yevtushenko, who is not Jewish, wrote the poem to protest the proposed building of a sports stadium by the Soviet authorities on the site of the massacre. The poem mourns the Jewish deaths, but also excoriates the Russian people for their Jew-hatred. It’s a moving poem, and also, in taking on explicitly the victimhood of the Jews as the poet’s own, affirming his common humanity with them, a brave poem coming from a citizen of a land so notoriously inimical to Jews.

Yevtushenko gained great fame and honour both East and West in the 1950s and 60s. He travelled extensively to the West. If you look him up on Wikipedia, you will see a 1972 picture of him chatting with President Richard Nixon (which reminds me that President Obama wrote to me—who knew American Presidents had such a history of paying attention to writers). “Here,” the Soviet Union seemed to saying, “is proof that we are not a repressive society. We too can produce great poetry that is critical of us and here is our poster boy.”

How does his poetry measure up? Well, in this slim volume, it fares quite well. Except for Babi Yar, politics intrudes very little into it. Or no more than politics might in a collection of American or Canadian poetry. Much of it is quite bucolic, reminding me that Russia, the largest country in the world even without its former Soviet satellite states, is, ipso facto, mostly rural. Many of the poems exude a common sense and an approachable humanity that brings to mind Robert Frost.

But did he compromise himself? The Soviet Union was from start to finish a repressive state where every freedom was, if not outright curtailed, then under constant surveillance. In such a state, was it possible to be a free poet? Yevtushenko was criticized by many, including by no less than the great Russian-American poet and critic Joseph Brodsky (have you heard of him?), as a duplicitous fake, as a poet who had around his neck a collar that was tied to a leash held by the Kremlin and that he barked and growled only when and so much as it suited them.

Clearly, some writers paid a greater price for their writings, being forced either into exile, like Solzhenitsyn or Brodsky, or, worse, into jail in the Soviet Union. Was it perhaps the case that Yevtushenko hoped his country would change and open itself to greater civil liberties? Maybe he simply loved his country, including its communist ideals? Maybe the idea of permanent exile, of living forever in a country whole language, ways and food would be foreign, chilled his soul. In other words, did Yevtushenko simply believe in his country in a way that Solzhenitsyn and Brodsky did not?

I have no position on the matter. I don’t know enough about Yevtushenko or Soviet history, and so cannot judge. His poetry is a pleasure to read, but the political man behind the poems remains elusive. What is certain is that Yevtushenko has been accused of compromising himself in his dealings with the Soviet state. His standing has paid a price. Compromise, you see, does not have in the arts the worth that it has in politics. The compromised artist is likely to be seen as a failure, while the compromising politician, as a success. If politics is the art of compromise, then art is the politics of uncompromise. Artists need and fiercely defend their freedom. It is precisely from that freedom, from that individuality, that art springs. To compromise, to conform, to give in is to kill the creative impulse. True art is uncompromising. The great artist lets rip, saying “This is where I stand, this is my vision—take it or leave it!” In the arts, there is no parliament to which the artist is accountable, no Question Period to which he or she must submit. Art is the place for those who do not accept compromise.

Hence my question to you, Mr. Harper. Have you not chosen the wrong profession? Could it be the case that you are a frustrated artist? 

Yours truly,

Yann Martel

encl: one inscribed paperback

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