101 Letters to a Prime Minister (25 page)

As I flipped through the pages of
Burning Ice
, gazing at the artwork, reading the essays, I marvelled and I was distressed: an odd mixture, but a step up from simply feeling distress. Whether the art that Cape Farewell generates, to be seen in books and exhibitions, turns out to be elegiac, a farewell to our planet, or the beginning of real change in the way we live, will only be seen in years to come. But one thing is certain: our response to
climate change cannot be purely political. Politicians have been dragging their feet—you among them—because of the power of the carbon-fuel industrial complex. It is citizens who must move first, and art is an ideal way to help them do that. Art wrestles with its subject matter on a level that the individual, the man, woman, teenager and child on the street, can engage with and react to. Once citizens are involved in the vital issue of climate change, politicians will have to follow their lead.

You might as well get ahead of the wave. I hope you are both moved and alarmed by
Burning Ice
.

Yours truly,

Yann Martel

R
EPLY:

June 24, 2009

Dear Mr. Martel:

On behalf of the Right Honourable Stephen Harper, I would like to acknowledge receipt of your correspondence of March 30, which provided a copy of the book
Burning Ice: Art & Climate Change
.

Thank you for providing this material to the Prime Minister. Your courtesy in bringing this information to his attention is appreciated.

Yours sincerely,

P. Monteith

Executive Correspondence Officer

D
AVID
B
UCKLAND
is a British artist specializing in photography, portraiture, and set and costume design for theatrical productions. Many of his works have been exhibited in major galleries around the world, including the Centre Georges Pompidou in Paris and the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. Buckland is also the founder of the Cape Farewell Project, a community of artists, scientists and communicators committed to raising cultural awareness through artistic response to climate change.

Dear Mr. Harper,

When I started sending you books, I said they would be books that would “inspire stillness.” A book is a marvellous tool—in fact, a unique tool—to increase one’s depth of reflection, to help one think and feel. It takes a long time and great effort to write a good book, whether of fiction or non-fiction. It’s not only the preliminary research; there are also the weeks and months of thinking. When asked how long it took them to write a book, I’ve heard writers say, “My whole life.” I know what they mean by that. Their entire being went into the writing of that book, and the few years it actually took to get it down on the page were only the tip of the proverbial iceberg. It’s not surprising that such a lengthy process, akin to the maturing of a good wine, should yield a rich product worthy of careful consideration.

But the stillness that books can induce does not mean they are peaceable. Stillness is not the same thing as tranquility. You might have noticed that a few weeks ago with
Julius Caesar
. There’s hardly any peace and tranquility in that play, yet it is thought-provoking nonetheless, isn’t it?

That stillness out of turmoil continues with the two books I am sending you this week. I’m sure you are familiar with the tragic saga of Louis Riel. The English hated him, the French loved him. Of course, I don’t mean the English and French of Europe when I say that. I mean the people from that nation that materialized north of the United States. The English and Irish and Scottish of Ontario were newly calling themselves Canadians, while the French-speaking Métis of the Red River Settlement were not. In one man, the tensions and resentments of a new nation were symbolized. It was a complicated mess whose effects are felt to this day. Would the Parti Québécois have been elected
in 1976 had Louis Riel and the Red River Métis been treated more fairly by Ottawa? Or would that have led Ontarians to elect an “Ontario Party” advocating union with the United States? What is clear—and you must surely know this from your own personal experience in politics—is that once prejudice and bad faith are entrenched among a people, it’s very hard to get them to get along.

Louis Riel
, by the Canadian graphic artist Chester Brown, is a serious work that tells a serious story in a thoughtful and evocative manner. The drawings are compelling and the storytelling is both gripping and subtle. Louis Riel comes across as he likely was: a strange and charismatic man, religiously crazy at times but also genuinely concerned about the fate of his Métis people.

The description “strange and charismatic” could also be applied to the Japanese writer Yukio Mishima (1925–1970). If Riel was religiously crazy, then Mishima was aesthetically crazy. You might have heard about how Mishima died. He’s as well known for his death as he is for his writings. The life of an author should not normally be conflated with his work, but a healthy writer who, at the age of forty-five and at the height of his fame, commits suicide by ritual disembowelment and beheading—what is popularly called
harakiri
—after taking over a military base and exhorting the army of his country to overthrow the government, cannot but attract attention for reasons other than his books. In this case, life and work are intimately linked. Mishima’s end had less to do with politics and restoring Japan to a supposed former glory than with personal notions he had about death and beauty. He was obsessed by death and beauty. The characters in his novel
The Sailor Who Fell from Grace with the Sea
—Fusako, the mother; Noboru, her son; and Ryuji, the sailor—demonstrate this. They are
exquisitely realized. One gets a sense of them not only in their physical being but in their inner makeup too. All are, in their different ways, beautiful. And yet their story is riven by violence and death. I won’t say anything more.

I’ll confess that when I first read
The Sailor Who Fell from Grace with the Sea
in my early twenties, I hated it because I loved it. It and Knut Hamsun’s
Hunger
are the only masterpieces I’ve read with the breathless feeling that I possibly could have written them myself. Those two stories were in me, I felt, but a Japanese writer and a Norwegian writer got to them before I could.

I should explain why I am sending you two books this week. I’m off on a holiday and don’t want to worry about books being lost in the mail. So these are your April books,
Louis Riel
for April 13 and
The Sailor Who Fell from Grace with the Sea
for April 27.

How curious and unrelated they seem. I doubt Mishima had ever heard of Louis Riel, and there’s nothing in
Louis Riel
to make me think that Chester Brown is an admirer of Mishima. But I’ve always liked that about books, how they can be so different from each other and yet rest together without strife on a bookshelf. The hope of literature, the hope of stillness, is that the peace with which the most varied books can lie side by side will transform their readers, so that they too will be able to live side by side with people very different from themselves.

Yours truly,

Yann Martel

REPLY
:

April 29, 2009

Dear Mr. Martel,

On behalf of the Right Honourable Stephen Harper, I would like to acknowledge receipt of your correspondence, with which you enclosed a copy of
The Sailor Who Fell from Grace with the Sea
by Yukio Mishima and a copy of
Louis Riel, A Comic-Strip Biography
by Chester Brown.

The Prime Minister wishes me to convey his thanks for sending him these books. You may be assured that your thoughtful gesture is most appreciated.

Yours truly,

S. Russell

Executive Correspondence Officer

C
HESTER
B
ROWN
(b. 1960) is a Canadian cartoonist who is part of the alternative comics movement and the creator of several graphic novels and comic series. His comics are generally grim, classified in the genres of horror, surrealism and black comedy and focusing on darker subjects like mental health issues and cannibalism. His best-known work,
Louis Riel: A Comic-Strip Biography
, was five years in the making. Some of his other works include
The Playboy, I Never Liked You
and the comic book series
Yummy Fur
and
Underwater
. Born and raised in Montreal, Brown now lives in Toronto.

Y
UKIO
M
ISHIMA
(1925–1970), born Kimitake Hiraoka, was a Japanese novelist, short story writer, poet and traditional kabuki playwright.
His best-known novels,
Confessions of a Mask, The Temple of the Golden Pavilion, The Sailor Who Fell from Grace with the Sea
and the
Sea of Fertility
quartet, have insured his enduring fame in Japan and around the world. Mishima committed suicide after taking over a military base with his own private army, ostensibly as a protest over Japan’s drift away from its traditional values.

Dear Mr. Harper,

One of the strengths of non-fiction is its ability to focus. Whereas fiction can be as broad as the humanities, non-fiction tends to specialize, like a science. Writers of fiction commonly hear from their editors that they must “show, not tell.” They must do so because fiction creates new, unfamiliar worlds that must be felt and not only described. Non-fiction, on the other hand, relies on a world already in existence, our own, with its true history and real historical figures. Of course, that history and those figures must be made to breathe with life on the page; good writing is always essential. Nonetheless, that basis in the factual world frees non-fiction writers from the cumbersome task of wholly inventing characters and situations and gives them far more liberty to straight-out tell. What is gained is an ability to cover a single topic deeply. What is lost is broad appeal. With non-fiction, the reader must be more actively interested in the subject covered. For example, a history of feudal Japan will likely attract fewer
readers than a novel about feudal Japan. Such was the case, at least, with James Clavell’s novel
Shogun
and I don’t think it’s unusual.

The result of this specialization is that the world of non-fiction is more fragmented. A novel is more like another novel than a work of non-fiction is like another work of non-fiction. Proof of that is in the names we give to these categories: we know what fiction is, so we call it that, and under the label we comfortably place the plays, poems, novels and short stories of the world. But what about those books that aren’t fiction? Well, we’re not so sure what they are, so we define them by what they are not: they are non-fiction. The result of this lack of convention, with great non-fiction, is a high degree of originality.

A sterling example of how original non-fiction can be is the book I am sending you this week. In
The Gift
, Lewis Hyde looks at the meaning and consequence of a gift, that is, of an object or service that is given for nothing, freely, without expectation of a concrete or immediate return. With that single notion in mind, Hyde evokes an array of peoples, places and practices and makes a coherent whole of what would be a novelistic mess. You’ll see for yourself. The Puritans in America, Irish and Bengali folklore, the Trobriand Islanders off New Guinea, the Maori of New Zealand, the potlatch of the Pacific Coast First Nations, Alcoholics Anonymous, tales of Buddha, the Ford Motor Company, the fate of unexpected sums of money in an urban ghetto of Chicago, Martin Luther, John Calvin, the lives of Walt Whitman and Ezra Pound, to mention just a few references that I remember—all are woven together as Hyde lays out his thesis on the differences between the exchange of gifts and the exchange of commodities. The currencies involved in these trades are radically different. In the first, sentiments are exchanged; in the second, money. The first creates attachment; the second, detachment. The first creates a community; the
second, liberty. The first builds capital that does not circulate; the second loses its value if it does not keep moving. These ideas are examined in the light of the many anthropological and sociological examples in the book.

Art is at the heart of
The Gift
. Hyde sees every aspect of art as a gift: creativity is received as a gift by the artist, art is made as a gift and then, rather awkwardly in our current economic system, art is traded as a gift. That certainly rings true with me. I have never thought of my creativity in monetary terms. I write now as I did when I started, for nothing. And yet the artist must live. How then to quantify the value of one’s art? How do we correlate a poem’s worth with a monetary value? I use the word again: it’s awkward. If Hyde favours the spirit of gift-giving over that of commercial exchange, it’s not because he’s a doctrinaire idealist. He’s not. But it’s clear what he thinks: we’ve forgotten the spirit of the gift in our commodity-driven society and the cost of that has been the parching of our souls.