101 Letters to a Prime Minister (13 page)

Essentially, two hours of nothing that’s good and deep, pessimistic and funny. Beckett meant to strip away at the vanities of our existence and look at the elemental. Therein lies what makes
Waiting for Godot
both great and eye-rolling as far as I’m concerned. There is this line, for example, said by I can’t remember which character: “We give birth astride a grave.” I suppose that’s true. Death interrupting life, what value can life have? If we must eventually let go of everything, why take hold of anything to start with? This sort of pessimism is the burden of those who have witnessed terrible times (Beckett lived in France during the German occupation) and the delight of undergraduates in the throes of youthful angst. I realize that my life is no more durable than a leaf’s, but between when I’m fresh and gloriously atop a tree and when I’ll be yellow
and raked away by Time, there are some good moments to be had.

Samuel Beckett was with the same woman, Suzanne Beckett,
née
Deschevaux-Dumesnil, for over fifty years. And he was apparently an avid fan and player of tennis. In these two attachments, I see a contradiction between what the man wrote and how he lived. If he had the joy and energy to whack a bouncy yellow ball over a net, if he had the joy and comfort of knowing that someone was there for him at the end of each day, what was he so desperate about? A wife and tennis—how much more did he expect from life? And this is aside from exploring the ideas of those who dismiss death as a mere threshold, just a gap you have to mind between the train of life and the platform of the eternal.

Still, I know
Waiting for Godot
is a great play. You’ll see that when you read it. It’s a masterpiece. It does what no play did before it.

Yours truly,

Yann Martel

S
AMUEL
B
ECKETT
(1906–1989) was an Irish author, playwright and poet, and is considered one of the last modernists or possibly one of the first post-modernists. Beckett’s writing was characterized by minimalism and black humour. He lived in France, and worked as a courier in the French Resistance during World War II. He was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1969. His best-known novels are
Molloy, Malone Dies
and
The Unnamable
.

Dear Mr. Harper,

It’s about time I sent you the work of a writer from English Canada’s twin solitude. It’s a play again, the second in a row, the third in all. And for the second time—
Le Petit Prince
was the first—I am sending you a book in French. Mind you, the French of Larry Tremblay’s
The Dragonfly of Chicoutimi
is a bit peculiar. Not that it’s
joual
, or any other variation of Quebec French; that wouldn’t be peculiar, it would be expected from a Québécois play. Rather, if you glance at the text, you will think it’s just English, plain and simple. Well, it’s not. Tremblay’s play is a play written in French—that is, thought, felt, ordered, and expressed by a French mind—only using English words.

What’s the point of that? Is this a bit of stand-up comedy, some party trick drawn out into a play? It’s not. The cover of the book will tell you as much. Do you recognize the man on it? It’s Jean-Louis Millette, the great actor who died just a few years ago, far too soon. His arms are raised, his face expresses
anguish, the background is black: this play is no joke, says the cover.
The Dragonfly of Chicoutimi
is indeed a serious work of art, premiered and reprised by a master.

Is the point of writing a play that is French in its nature but English in its appearance political? The answer to that question might be yes, but a tenuous yes, in that any work of art can be taken to have political implications. In this case, to read the play politically I think diminishes its scope. Larry Tremblay’s play is both far too personal—it’s the monologue of a man opening up his heart about a private matter—and far too universal to be reduced to a political tract about the survival of the French language in Quebec.

I think Tremblay means to signal the political neutrality of his play when Gaston Talbot, the man who is opening up his heart, says of himself:

In describing both entities, and with adjectives of equal banality—if not cliché in the case of Quebec, officially “La Belle Province”—my guess is that Tremblay sought to place his play’s linguistic dualism beyond a merely political interpretation. The dream mentioned, by the way, is not a political dream, but a dream about Gaston Talbot’s mother, whose love he seeks.

So what has Gaston Talbot from Chicoutimi got to say, and why is he saying it in French rendered in English?

I would suggest that
The Dragonfly of Chicoutimi
is a play about suffering and redemption, about what we have to do to get
back to ourselves. Gaston Talbot is an adult French-speaking man struck with aphasia who, when we meet him, suddenly begins to speak again, only in English rather than in his native tongue. And what he recounts is how, long ago, he was a sixteen-year-old boy in love with a twelve-year-old boy by the name of Pierre Gagnon-Connally and how the two went by the river bank to play and Pierre asked Gaston to be his horse and Pierre

And then something happened, it’s not clear what, an accident, an inexplicable burst of violence, and Pierre Gagnon-Connally dies and Gaston Talbot falls into silence.

The play is a web of self-confessed lies and inventions. The first thing Gaston Talbot says is “I travel a lot.” Later, he admits that he hasn’t travelled anywhere. In recounting a dream, he
first says that he had one face, a “Picasso face,” then admits that it was another face. Gaston Talbot holds these lies up like a shield, and with them he edges forward towards the truth. English words are thus just one more of these truth-revealing lies that allow him to address what pushed him into the worst abyss of all: silence.

As I did for the fourth book I sent you,
By Grand Central Station I Sat Down and Wept
, by Elizabeth Smart, I would suggest that you read
The Dragonfly of Chicoutimi
aloud. Even better: that you read it silently a first time, as if you were Gaston Talbot before the start of the play, and then read it a second time aloud, as if you were Gaston Talbot gasping for expression.

The play of course raises the question of language and identity, of what it means to speak in one language rather than another. Languages obviously have cultural reference points, but these can change. Witness English, spoken, taken on fully, by so many people around the world who are not of English culture. But the play puts the question on a more personal level. Gaston Talbot manages to reach back into his painful past and say what he has to say thanks to a bilingual subterfuge. That is the startling and moving conclusion of the play: the sight of truth found through a mask.

Yours truly,

Yann Martel

L
ARRY
T
REMBLAY
(b. 1954), born in Chicoutimi, is a Québécois poet, novelist, non-fiction writer, playwright, stage director, actor and teacher. His plays often explore psychic and social violence, and showcase his use of vivid imagery and his signature crisp, rhythmic style.

Dear Mr. Harper,

We are celebrating a birthday, you and I. The book that accompanies this letter is the twenty-sixth that you have received from me. Since I have been sending you these literary gifts every two weeks, that means that our cozy book group is celebrating its first anniversary. How have we done? It’s been a most interesting odyssey, taking more of my time than I expected, but the pleasure has kept me keen and motivated. The result, so far, is a folder with copies of twenty-six letters for me and a shelf with twenty-eight slim books for you (a discrepancy owing to the fact that I sent you three books for Christmas). If we look over your new, growing library, we see:

written (or, in one case, edited) by:

of whom:

Too many novels, too many men, not enough poetry, why haven’t I sent you a Margaret Atwood or an Alice Munro yet—at the rate of a book every two weeks, it’s hard to be representative and impossible to please everyone. But we’re getting there. Glenn Gould once said, “The purpose of art is the lifelong construction of a state of wonder.” There is time yet.

It seemed appropriate on this anniversary occasion to offer you a book entitled
Birthday Letters
. It has the celebratory word in the title, even if the tone of the book does not exactly evoke a cake with a small lit candle on it.

The facts are as follows. In 1956, a twenty-six-year-old Englishman named X married a twenty-three-year-old American woman named Y. They had two children. Their relationship proved fraught with tensions, made worse by X’s affair with a woman named Z, and in 1962 X and Y separated. In 1963, Y, mentally unstable since her teenage years, committed suicide by gassing herself. Six years later, in 1969, Z, who by then had a child with X, a little girl nicknamed Shura, also killed herself, unpardonably taking Shura with her. Two last facts: first, by virtue of being still married to Y when she died, X became her testamentary executor, and, second, X was constant throughout his life in his infidelities.

The amount of pain contained within these anonymous facts—the torment, the heartache, the sorrow, the shame, the regret—is barely conceivable. What life would not be overwhelmed, utterly destroyed, by such pain? And would that pain not be made worse if it were displayed for the whole world to see and comment upon?

X was Ted Hughes, Y was Sylvia Plath and Z was Assia Wevill, and their collective pain, the terrible mess that was their lives, would have been lost and forgotten had not the first two been superb and well-known poets who gave expression to that pain. Further notoriety was added by the fact that sides could easily be taken with this tragedy. Why does tragedy so often make us take sides? I guess because strong emotions move us, and we move to one side or another, so to speak, as if fleeing a car that is out of control, and it takes the passage of time, the examination of memory, for us to look back with calm
sorrow, standing steadily, no longer so inclined to move and take sides. At any rate, it doesn’t take a lawyer to detect conflict of interest in Hughes being the literary executor of Plath, her pained posthumous collections of poetry and her pained journals being edited by the very man who caused a good deal of her pain, some say editing her works with an eye to improving his reputation. That he furthermore destroyed the last volume of her journal, the one chronicling the last months of their relationship, only makes the charge against him more credible. And what to think of his incessant promiscuity? Who could imagine that shame and regret would so little curb libido?

Sides were taken, vociferously. Hughes was scorned and hated until his death by feminists and Plath-lovers, and I doubt the controversy of their relationship will ever slip from public interest. What stands in Hughes’s defence? That question has an easy answer. His poetry.

That the author of
Birthday Letters
might be portrayed as a callous philanderer, arrogant and remorseless, is irrelevant in the face of the magnificence of his poetry. It reminds one of the fact that great art is, in its essence, not moral but testimonial, bearing witness to life as it is honestly lived, in its glorious heights as well as in its turpitudinous depths.

Great poetry tends to shut up the novelist in me. It takes so many words to make a novel, reams and reams of sentences and paragraphs, and then I read a single great poem, not even two pages long, and all my prose feels like verbiage. You will see what I mean when you read these poems. They are narrative poems, the tone intimate, usually an “I” speaking to a “you,” the language quicksilver, extraordinarily concise, simple words arranged in an original and forceful way, and the result, poem after poem, is not only a clear image but an unforgettable impression. Take “Sam,” or “Your Paris,” or “You Hated Spain,” or
“Chaucer,” or “Flounders,” or “The Literary Life,” or “The Badlands,” or “Epiphany,” or “The Table.”