What is Stephen Harper Reading?

Inscription:

To Stephen Harper,
Prime Minister of Canada,
To have chatted with Thomas Hardy,
To be like Rosie,
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 cover is dreadful, but the book is good. Cakes and Ale is the first Somerset Maugham I’m sending you. Maugham, an English writer who lived between 1874 and 1965, was a prolific author of novels, plays, short stories, and travel writing. His masterpiece is Of Human Bondage. Oh, what the lovesick soul submits itself to! But Philip Carey’s misery at the hands of Mildred will be for another time, when you have more time to read: Of Human Bondage is a long book, close to seven hundred pages. So Cakes and Ale instead, at a neat 190 pages.

Maugham would not generally be placed at the forefront of English literature, I don’t think. He was too old-fashioned in his technique, too lacking in newness and experimentation. He was writing novels at the same time as his modernist contemporaries like Hemingway, Faulkner, Joyce and Woolf were rewriting the novel. But who cares, it’s not a competition. So long as the reading is enjoyable, let’s keep on reading. Maugham relied on those mainstays of the good story—character, plot, emotion—and did very well with them.

Cakes and Ale features members of my own profession. I thought you might find that amusing, seeing how scribblers operate. The main characters—Edward Driffield, Alroy Kear, William Ashenden—are all writers. The first is portrayed as at the forefront of late Victorian literature, the second as having more ambition than talent, while the last is our modest but slightly cantankerous narrator. It is said that Maugham based Edward Driffield on Thomas Hardy. Maugham mentions in his Author’s preface meeting the elderly Hardy once at a dinner party and chatting alone with him for three-quarters of an hour (imagine that: chatting with Thomas Hardy!), but explicitly denies the link. He has this surprising assessment of Hardy: “I read Tess of the D’Urbervilles when I was eighteen with such enthusiasm that I determined to marry a milkmaid, but I had never been so much taken with Hardy’s other books as were most of my contemporaries, and I did not think his English very good.” So says Maugham, but then his character William Ashenden gives the same lukewarm assessment of the fictitious great writer Edward Driffield. To give a character an aura of fame is difficult, and Maugham succeeds admirably with Driffield, but if it helps you to think of Driffield as Hardy, go for it. There’s no problem with adding fiction to fiction. It will only increase your reading pleasure.

What links these three characters, certainly the first and the third directly, is the voluptuous, carefree, beautiful Rosie Driffield. She is Edward Driffield’s first wife, William Ashenden’s former lover, and Alroy Kear’s problem. Kear, you see, has been charged by Driffield’s second wife to write the great man’s biography, and the shamelessly promiscuous Rosie is both awkward to deal with and impossible to avoid in his biography.

What is shocking to see in the novel is how considerations of class so regiment the lives of the characters. There are people whom one can know and frequent, and entire classes of others whom one should deal with strictly on a stiff professional basis. Rosie stands out as the only character who lives the life she wants, unencumbered by such notions of propriety. And that means living her emotions, no matter where they lead her.

See if you like this first sample of Maugham. His short stories are wonderful too.

Yours truly,

Yann Martel

encl: one inscribled paperback

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