101 Letters to a Prime Minister (28 page)

M
ARGARET
A
TWOOD
(b. 1939) is a poet, novelist, literary critic and essayist. She is also known for her political and environmental activism—and her lively Twitter feed. She is the author of thirteen novels, most recently
The Year of the Flood
, and twenty books of poetry. Her books have received the Booker Prize, the Governor General’s Literary Award and the Trillium Book Award. Atwood is a Companion of the Order of Canada, and lives in Toronto with the writer Graeme Gibson.

O
LIVER
S
CHROER
(1956–2008) was a fiddler, composer, educator and producer. He recorded twelve albums and contributed to or produced over one hundred recordings. He is best known for his album
Camino
.

Dear Mr. Harper,

This week I’m sending you the French- and English-language versions of the same novel,
Bonheur d’occasion
(in English
The Tin Flute
), by Gabrielle Roy, published in 1945. I imagine you’ll want to read it in English primarily, but the novel is so rooted in its language that it would be a pity if you didn’t delve from time to time into the original version. If you are at all inclined to do so, I’d suggest you have a look at sections of dialogue in French. Gabrielle Roy, like Zora Neale Hurston in
Their Eyes Were Watching God
, which I sent you a while ago, uses two levels of language. When the author is speaking as the omniscient narrator, the French is formal, grammatically and syntactically correct, timeless and universal. But when her characters are speaking, then a very particular language, place and time are evoked, the vernacular French of Saint Henri, a poor neighbourhood of Montreal, in 1940. It’s a French that exists nowhere else and it would be a pity if you didn’t get at least a taste of it.

The title in French literally means second-hand or used happiness. The title in English expresses the same idea, but using a tiny element of the novel: Daniel, one of the Lacasse children, is sickly and always clamours for a little tin flute. It would make him so happy, to be able to toot away on one. But he never gets one because the Lacasses are too beset by poverty. With both titles and in whatever language you read it, the message of the novel, the picture it draws, is the same: one of blighted lives, of happiness denied, of unremitting misery. Quebec has changed profoundly since 1945. A younger francophone Québécois generation might even react with disbelief that such a province as Roy portrays ever existed. The Quebec of
Bonheur d’occasion
is one deeply divided between the English and the French, a gulf that Hugh MacLennan captured with the title of his novel that came out the same year as Roy’s,
Two Solitudes
. The English were the elite, generally wealthy and powerful, living in exclusive neighbourhoods like Westmount, while the French were the masses, generally poor and powerless and living in inclusive neighbourhoods like Saint Henri. In the novel, English Quebeckers are hardly seen or heard. At most, their large houses are eyed with envy and astonishment by poor Québécois who wander up the mountain into parts of the city to which they do not—and feel they never will—belong. Even the English language is barely heard, only here and there in little phrases. Otherwise, the Québécois live in total linguistic and social isolation. Their isolation extends beyond the linguistic. Though unstated in the novel, the Lacasse family are who they are and where they are in part because of their religion. They are Catholics and Catholics at that time, especially the poorer ones, had enormous families.
La revanche des berceaux
, it was called, the revenge of the cradle. The English might be richer, more powerful, but we will beat them with our numbers—that
was the idea. And so the families with eleven, fifteen, nineteen children. Those numbers have ensured that the Québécois have prevailed and beaten back the forces of assimilation, but they also meant a degree of impoverishment, as large families struggled to feed so many mouths and clothe so many bodies.

The novel revolves around various members of the large Lacasse family, principally Florentine, the eldest daughter, Rose-Anna, her loving mother who always tries her best, and Azarius, her well-meaning but hapless husband. Only Florentine brings in a steady revenue from her job as a waitress. But it’s not much and the family is forever moving from one slum dwelling to a worse but cheaper one. Their lives are squalid and wretched. They are clothed in tatters and malnourished. They are the unhappy slaves of an economic system that doesn’t need them. All they have to keep them going is their dreams. Florentine seeks refuge in love, Azarius in lofty dreams of a better future that he’s incapable of bringing about, while Florentine’s little sister Yvonne hides in religion. All of them are utterly powerless and warped by their ravaging poverty. Their suffering does not make them angels; it merely confirms their humanity. Their lot is so bad that their ultimate friend turns out to be war. The opportunity to join the army and gain the pittance that an enlisted man earns is finally their only way of making a living, no matter if it means that they might be killed or have to kill.

There is one character in the novel who is absent: a priest. The trappings of religion, in the form of kitsch reproductions of sacred figures, adorn the walls of the Lacasses’ living room and the family’s exclamations and profanities are religious in nature, but an actual servant of the Lord never appears in the novel. That puzzles me. Blame for much of the misery in the novel, certainly the spiritual misery, can be assigned
to the Catholic Church. Its message of accepting suffering in this world because of future rewards in a next world had the effect of engendering profound passivity in its followers. Furthermore, the Church’s rigid moral code meant that if an unmarried woman fell pregnant her life was ruined and her child would likely be deemed an orphan, shunned by society, despite having both a father and a mother. The Church then, as now in many ways, was anti-feminist and anti-modern, obscurantist and backward-looking. It fed its followers in Quebec rancid spiritual placebos while they rotted in material misery and stagnated intellectually. I wonder why Gabrielle Roy refrained from criticizing such an institution.

The quibble is minor.
Bonheur d’occasion
is fiction, but one solidly rooted in reality. It’s a masterly example of the novel as memory, as document. As a Québécois myself, I read it with a mixture of shame that conditions could have been so bad for my people just a few generations ago and consequent anger at the agents responsible for those conditions. You read this novel and right away you understand the forces behind that great leap into modernity that was La Révolution tranquille, which transformed Quebec from Canada’s most backward province into its most progressive.

I will end this letter abruptly. My partner Alice’s waters have just broken and our first child, a boy, Theo, is on his way. A child is the best novel, with a great plot and endless character development. I must attend to it.

Yours truly,

Yann Martel

P.S. And two more replies. Tony Clement, the Minister of Industry, sent me a complete answer to my query about SSHRC’s funding
[see
the REPLY section of Book 51:
Julius Caesar
]
, while P. Monteith in your office thanked me in a much briefer way for the next book I sent you
. [See the REPLY section of Book 52:
Burning Ice
.]

P.P.S. Please excuse the somewhat tattered condition of the French version of
Bonheur d’occasion.
I read it while I was in the Peruvian Amazon recently and the humidity got to it
.

G
ABRIELLE
R
OY
(1909–1983) was a Quebec writer whose first novel,
Bonheur d’occasion
, won the Prix Femina; its English-language translation,
The Tin Flute
, won the Governor General’s Literary Award and the Royal Society of Canada’s Lorne Pierce Medal. A quotation by Roy appears on the back of the Canadian twenty-dollar bill: “Could we ever know each other in the slightest without the arts?”

Dear Mr. Harper,

In honour of my son, Theo, who is fifteen days old (and keeping me very busy), I am sending you this week two picture books,
Where the Wild Things Are
and
In the Night Kitchen
, both by the American writer and illustrator Maurice Sendak, who was born in 1928. These are unforgettable books. You read them—or more likely they are first read to you—and they stay with you the rest of your life. I’m not exaggerating. Try it yourself: mention at random to people around you, “I was sent a book called
Where the Wild Things Are
,” and you’ll be amazed at the number of seasoned adults who break into a smile and exclaim, “Oh, that’s a wonderful book!”

There’s a lovely saying: the child is the father of the man. It applies to all aspects of an adult’s personality, but I think it does so especially with the imagination. From what the child
imagines in dreams and fantasies comes what the adult will hold up as ideals. Hence the importance of children’s literature. The fundamental role of children’s literature is to encourage children to use their imagination. Because small as children are physically, large is what they can imagine. Sadly, a relation of inverse proportion sets in for many of us: as we grow in size, our capacity to imagine seems to shrink. And so we have adults with the most leaden, literal-thinking minds, beholden to the real and the factual, adults whose imagination has so shrunk that they can’t even remember (let alone imagine) what it is like to be a child, even though that was once their real and factual condition. Being children, they knew no gravity of the mind but could float and leap to any place. If the expandable imagination of a child’s mind is not expanded, then it will shrink all the more, harden all the more, when that child grows up. The consequence is more dire than simply an adult with a dull, narrow mind. Such an adult is also less useful to society because he or she will be incapable of coming up with the new ideas and new solutions that society needs. A skill is a narrow focus of knowledge, a single card in a deck. Creativity is the hand that plays the cards. Hence, once again, the importance of children’s literature to expand the imagination at an early age.

We read (present tense) as adults because we read (past tense) as children, and we are fully alive adults in the present because in the past we were fully alive children. Books are a key link between those two states. So I encourage you not to rush through
Where the Wild Things Are
and
In the Night Kitchen
, short though they are. Let them have their slow, deep effect. In
Where the Wild Things Are
, ask yourself what Max’s state of mind is, and why that should be his state of mind, and what it might mean. Is Max’s relationship with the monsters what you would expect? Look at the illustrations of
In the Night Kitchen
.
Who do the cooks with their narrow moustaches remind you of? What then might it mean when Mickey escapes the batter and floats away from the oven? In other words, I would suggest that you not just read these books (and aloud, even better), but imagine them.

Yours truly,

Yann Martel

P.S
. Where the Wild Things Are
and
In the Night Kitchen
are the first two books of a trilogy. If you enjoyed them, you can try to find the third book
, Outside Over There.
It’s a joyful hunt, the hunt for a book
.

M
AURICE
S
ENDAK
(1928–2012) was a writer and illustrator of children’s literature. He was the author of more than sixteen books and the illustrator of many, many more books. His archives are housed in the Rosenbach Museum & Library in Philadelphia, and an elementary school in North Hollywood is named after him.

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 twenty-six 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 aging 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. Aging is shrinking. The body grows smaller and weaker. 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 physically 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 members 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 any greater challenge?