101 Letters to a Prime Minister (36 page)

This is why Yann writes to you. Like Charlotte the spider, he believes that the written word can shape lives and save lives. I hope by reading about E. B. White and, more importantly, by reading his books, you’ll be reminded that as we need politicians and prime ministers, so we need books and writers.

And if reading
Charlotte’s Web
does not do that for you, I’m hopeful that it will evoke a time and a place that stays with you. You’ll be there with Wilbur as he tries—ridiculously—to spin a web. With Charlotte as she makes the ultimate sacrifice. With Fern as she tries to pull the axe from her father’s hands. And with E. B. White as he shows us Wilbur for the first time:

And so now this book is yours.

I hope you enjoy it.

Yours respectfully,

Alice Kuipers

E. B. W
HITE
(1899–1985) was an American author, and a frequent contributor to
The New Yorker
. He wrote
Charlotte’s Web
and
Stuart Little
, and the popular writing handbook
The Elements of Style
(a.k.a. “Strunk and White”).

A
LICE
K
UIPERS
(b. 1979) is the author of three novels for young adults:
Life on the Refrigerator Door, The Worst Thing She Ever Did
and
40 Things I Want to Tell You
. Her first picture book,
The Bookworm Book by Violet and Victor Small
, is coming out in 2013. She lives in Saskatoon.

Dear Mr. Harper,

It’s me again. I hope you enjoyed the last book I sent you,
King Leary
. Even if you haven’t yet read it, or don’t intend to read it, I still hope you enjoyed receiving it. Unexpected and free books arriving in the mail have become, now that Santa Claus’s cover has been blown and the Easter Bunny unmasked, one of the few joyous gifts that come my way.

The book I have enclosed for you is another one of my favourites. I was in university when I read it for the first time, and it became one of the books that made me want to become a writer. David Adams Richards’s novel
For Those Who Hunt the Wounded Down
has one of the best titles of any Canadian novel, or any novel, period.

I’m sending you this novel for several reasons. For starters, it’s a wonderful book. Few writers capture working-class life as well as Richards, and few are as able to make seemingly
ordinary lives feel extraordinary. Richards has written thirteen novels, most of them set in New Brunswick. He was recently made a Member of the Order of Canada, and has won about every possible prize for his writing.

I think that one thing Canada is good at is being able to productively discuss ideas where there is disagreement. Tomorrow, I’ll be getting up before the sun and flying from Vancouver to New Brunswick where I’ll be taking part in Moncton’s Frye Festival. All across Canada, literary festivals are organized by people making little or no money. They are attended by readers of all political stripes, who happily part with some of their hard-earned money to spend an afternoon or evening talking about and thinking about books and the ideas contained within them. Even when they don’t like the book. And the best festivals, the ones where people are the most energetic, are in places like Moose Jaw, Campbell River and Sechelt. These festivals are often supported in part by the federal government. For this I am thankful. It makes us a better country.

Going to festivals is not about meeting the authors, though some people like that. But often meeting an author is a terribly disappointing event. Often the person’s not what you expect, isn’t as clever as their books, says something not so brilliant. And sometimes it’s the festival-goer’s fault. A few years ago, I was in my publisher’s office in Toronto for some reason or another, and I was told that David Adams Richards was in the building if I would like to meet him. Well, of course I would. We met as he was coming out of the lunch room, and he had a cup of coffee in his hand. I shook his free hand with too much gusto, which made him spill his coffee all over his shoe. It was completely my fault, and I felt like an idiot. Since then I have scrupulously avoided running into him again in the hope that he
didn’t catch my name and that by the next time we meet I will have aged enough that he won’t recognize me.

Why do I mention this in a letter to the elected leader of my country? In a roundabout way, I’m trying to show you that writers aren’t elitists. We often sound like we are, and occasionally we even act like we are—when you spend most of your time in a room by yourself, misunderstandings are bound to occur. But on a base level, we’re ordinary people who happen to be good at writing down stories. And I think our stories are a big part of this country. Go to Moncton or anywhere else and you’ll find a lot of people who think so too.

With sincere regards,

Steven Galloway

D
AVID
A
DAMS
R
ICHARDS
(b. 1950) is a Canadian novelist, poet, non-fiction writer and screenwriter. His novels include the Miramichi Trilogy and
Mercy Among the Children
, which was a co-winner of the Giller Prize (with Michael Ondaatje’s
Anil’s Ghost
) in 2001. His book about fishing on the Miramichi,
Lines on the Water
, won the Governor General’s Literary Award for Non-Fiction. His newest novel is
The Lost Highway
.

Dear Mr. Harper,

I read a newspaper article about a poll conducted by the largest online media company in China. The poll produced a list of the country’s ten most significant cultural icons of the twentieth century, as chosen by the Chinese themselves. A full five of them were writers and three more were singers/actors. One, curiously, was a rocket scientist, while the final cultural icon was an obscure soldier who became the focus of a propaganda campaign.

The names on the list were familiar to me from fifteen years of reading and writing about China, and five years of living in Beijing and Hong Kong. Three of the choices, author Louis Cha and singers/actors Leslie Cheung and Faye Wong, were alive until shortly before the poll was conducted. Others, such as author Lu Xun and opera singer Mei Lanfang, continue to exert influence many decades after their deaths. I noticed strong
patterns to the selections and remarked on how difficult, and extraordinary, these lives had been. I decided as well that, while far from definitive, the list was sound, and a window onto the values and sentiments of the Chinese people.

I also had a thought: imagine replacing these names with equivalents from the West. For Faye Wong, substitute Madonna; for Leslie Cheung, Elvis Presley with a twist. Mei Lanfang has been called China’s Paul Robeson, and scientist Qian Xuesan’s impact was akin to that of Robert Oppenheimer. Further back, Lao She’s novel
Rickshaw
asserted the same kind of moral force as John Steinbeck’s
The Grapes of Wrath
, while Qian Zhongshu’s
Fortress Besieged
could be likened to a Shanghai version of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s
The Great Gatsby
. Louis Cha’s populist
wuxia
novels are the match of Zane Grey’s westerns and John Ford’s films. As for Lu Xun, the oldest and most revered of the ten, he has no exact parallel. To appreciate his significance, it is necessary to look to Tolstoy’s importance to nineteenth-century Russia or Victor Hugo’s to the Europe of his age.

The exercise left me wondering to what extent most of us really know China. Can someone claim to know the United States, say, if they’ve never seen a western or heard of
The Grapes of Wrath
? If they are oblivious to how Elvis Presley and Madonna altered the pop landscape? Our understanding of China remains stubbornly imprisoned by the most obvious markers: its rapacious economy and repressive political system, a population of staggering size and expectations. Yet a country is foremost a culture and a culture is the sum of the values and efforts, dreams and yearnings, of the people who dwell in it. To understand a nation, you must be intimate with its dreams and with its dreamers.

As it happens, Lu Xun has been a touchstone for me since I first started thinking about China. To the extent that this towering figure is known in the West, it is for his short stories,
which literally birthed modern Chinese literature in the 1920s, and which remain vivid, unsettling examinations of a crumbling society and an enduring psyche. I hope you enjoy this sampling of Lu’s most essential work.

Best wishes,

Charlie Foran

REPLY:

May 20, 2010

Dear Mr. Foran,

On behalf of the Right Honourable Stephen Harper, I would like to acknowledge receipt of your recent letters, with which you enclosed a copy of
Century
, by Ray Smith, and one
of Diary of a Madman
, by Lu Xun.

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

Yours sincerely,

S. Russell

Executive Correspondence Officer

L
U
X
UN
(1881–1936) was a Chinese essayist, short story writer, poet, teacher, editor and translator. His works were approved by the Communist Party, though he was never a member. He is considered one of the major Chinese writers of the twentieth century.

Dear Prime Minister Harper:

As everyone on the planet probably knows by now, Yann Martel is busy touring with his new book, and has asked other writers to take over in his absence. Today it is my pleasant duty to present you, and readers of his website, with a classic of Canadian writing, John Steffler’s
The Grey Islands
.

When I say “classic,” I am placing it among other masterpieces of environmental writing like Thoreau’s
Walden
, Aldo Leopold’s
Sand County Almanac
and Gary Snyder’s
The Practice of the Wild
; it is a book that engages wilderness in an intense way that alters our way of perceiving it. Unlike those texts,
The Grey Islands
is, technically, fiction, but it is based on John Steffler’s actual experience alone on the uninhabited Grey Islands off the coast of Newfoundland’s Great Northern Peninsula. It contains some of the most vivid, and varied, writing anywhere, including prose narrative, lyric poetry (which frequently registers aspects of the place in acute close-up), tall tale, ghost story, essay, dream sequences, maps, census charts and songs. What emerges is an unforgettable evocation of this remote windswept island and a record of one man’s difficult passage into wilderness. But along with this, there’s an increasing focus on the former residents of the island and the fishermen who still visit it, the narrative opening itself to include their voices in the many-threaded weave.

I’d be hard pressed to say whether I love this book more for its central story (the progress of the protagonist from town planner to pilgrim) or for its wonderful nooks and crannies. There is such economy in the language, and such a sure musical sense in Steffler’s ear, that each of the passages—whether in the voice of a Newfoundland fisherman or the narrator-as-poet—hums with its own energy. When I first read it, back in the eighties, I found it hard to believe he was really pulling it off, making a book so various, with such diverse parts, yet working as an organic whole. It still seems unlikely, as unlikely as Confederation, another structure whose mysterious strength—as Canadians discover over and over—lies in its diversity.

I realize that this gift may be redundant—John Steffler having been the Parliamentary Poet Laureate a few years ago. (If you already have a copy, perhaps you wouldn’t mind passing this one along to another parliamentarian.)
The Grey Islands
should be as inescapable for Canadians as
Walden
is for those south of the border, an iconic book that sets dramatically before us, in a way that is richly complex, at once meditative and entertaining, the difficult and essential encounter with wilderness.

As a bonus, I’m also including the talking-book version, published by Janet Russell of Rattling Books, the intrepid Newfoundland publisher of such distinguished books as Mary Dalton’s
Merrybegot
and Michael Crummey’s
Hard Light
—two more books that should be included in any Canadian’s reading repertoire. On the CD, narrated by John Steffler himself, you will also hear Frank Holden speaking the part of Carm Denny, a deceased resident of the island, thought to be mad. It’s a passage not to be missed, and includes the greatest bath scene anywhere. Eat your heart out, Hollywood. My thought is that, given what I’m sure is a very tight schedule, you might
squeeze the CD in now, and reserve the book for a time of greater leisure.

Strong writing enables us to live imaginatively as well as practically; it enlarges the scope of life. When it engages the theme of wilderness, it can also enhance our understanding of ourselves as citizens of the world, as well as of a country. Of course such understanding will embrace not only our hardihood and courage, but our disgraceful blindness to the value of wilderness in and for itself. While that blindness was certainly part of the colonial experience, it remains a lamentable feature of some current attitudes, attitudes often registered in government policy. In the end, reading books like
The Grey Islands
can help make us better, more thoughtful, inhabitants of the planet.