101 Letters to a Prime Minister (38 page)

Rosoff’s writing is brave and moving. She writes of a teenager who is sent to England because she is destroying herself—both emotionally and, we discover, physically. It’s almost too late for Daisy, yet during her time in this country at war, she
discovers that she is so much more than she gave herself credit for. It’s a classic story of trial and redemption, and it’s a love story. It’s a story of survival and of longing. This novel is
alive
. It leaves the page and tints your imagination like water coloured with a drop of blue dye.

This year as the sky lay empty of planes, as the moors before me filled with Daisy and her story, life spilled from Rosoff’s pages and
I
felt more alive.

I hope that this novel comes at a serendipitous time for you too (although maybe without the drama of an entire country shutting down its airspace!). May it stain your imagination blue.

Yours respectfully,

Alice Kuipers

REPLY:

September 3, 2010

Dear Ms. Kuipers,

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 book entitled
How I Live Now
.

Thank you for sending this book to the Prime Minister. Your thoughtful gesture is most appreciated.

Yours sincerely,

T. Lewkowicz

Executive Correspondence Officer

M
EG
R
OSOFF
(b. 1956) is an American writer. After working in publishing and advertising in New York City in the 1980s, she moved to London, where she still lives. She has written books for children, young adults and adults.

Dear Mr. Harper,

I’m back and you’re still there. So let’s resume this lopsided duet where I read, think, write and mail, and you say and do nothing. Your silence doesn’t particularly bother me. It’s future generations who will damn you or, more likely, mock you. Me? I feel like a cowboy in a western who is about to cross a fearsome desert. To comfort myself, I talk out loud. Does my horse answer me? No, it doesn’t. Would I therefore want to do without it? No, because without it I would lose what defines me as a cowboy—and I would have to cross that desert on foot. You are my democratic horse through which I exist as a democratic cowboy. Better to ride on your sullen back than to be trampled down by a dictator. As for these troubled times, the desert that faces us? I have faith that we’ll get through it, somehow. I’ll be guided by the books I read and the people I meet. And you, our
leader? I don’t know. Do blind horses get across deserts? Are they not swallowed up by the sands?

Before I go on, I should ask: have you enjoyed the books that some fine fellow Canadian writers have sent you while I was on tour for my latest novel? I am grateful to Steven Galloway, Charlie Foran, Alice Kuipers, Don McKay, René-Daniel Dubois and Émile Martel for contributing to your burgeoning library. Those are interesting titles they sent you.

Poor Greece. It has certainly received a beating these last few months. The mismanagement of its finances has cost the country—and a number of European banks—very dearly. I’m not entirely sympathetic to their woes. By the sounds of it, the blame for the problems of the Greeks can largely be laid upon the shoulders of the Greeks—and then they were preyed upon by greedy banks, who saw profit in making easy loans to them. A real mess, an insolvency that will tar and mar the country for years to come.

Yet a country can’t be reduced to its pockets, whether deep or full of holes. Poor Greece, rich Greece, mismanaged Greece, recovering Greece—next to that monolith of a proper noun those adjectives are mere twigs. Greece is Greece is Greece, and there is much to that. For starters, the language and its alphabet, lovely and arresting. I count the Greek language as one of the most pleasing vocal instruments our species has come up with. Italian, spoken next door, perhaps has a more lissome, mellifluous form, but Greek has the staccato intensity of
content
. Western philosophy, and therefore Western civilization—since before we
do
we must
think—
started with the Greeks, specifically with the Greeks living in Ionia, in Asia Minor, now Turkey. They became known as the pre-Socratics since they were not quite weighty enough to be given their own name but rather became defined by the
illustrious philosopher whom they preceded. Nevertheless, those pre-Socks—Thales, Anaximander, Anaximenes, elsewhere the formidable Parmenides of Elea, besides others—are important because they were the first to try to understand the world by relying not on myth but on reason. They
observed
the world, something that hadn’t been done before in the West. That inspired intellectual approach, which brought Greece a blaze of renown, was such a singular achievement that when the Italians did the same some two thousand years later, inspired in part by the rediscovery of some forgotten Greek philosophers named Plato and Aristotle, it was called the
renaissance
, after the initial
naissance
brought about by the ancient Greeks.

Well, at the same time that the Greeks were thinking, some of them were also feeling. So Sappho. I haven’t sent you poetry in a long while. Sappho was a woman who lived on the island of Lesbos roughly between the years 630 and 570 BCE. She is held to be the first woman poet in literary history. Those who came before her have been lost to time. Sappho’s poetry itself—some 9,000 lines in total, it is estimated—has barely survived the predation of time and exists only in fragments. In the late nineteenth century in the Egyptian town of Oxyrhynchus, an ancient garbage dump containing vast quantities of papyrus was discovered. Much of it had been used by the ancient Egyptians as stuffing to fill the empty spaces in coffins and mummies. In one mummified crocodile’s stomach, a fragment of poetry by Sappho was found. (That must have been one happy croc, to be digesting a morsel of Sappho’s poetry for centuries.)

Though Sappho wrote on a variety of subjects, she is best known for her love poetry. It is simple and moving. Take this fragment:

Weaving was a female activity. A virginal girl who properly married would continue weaving as the head of her household. But if she was led astray … It’s interesting to note the feminine empowerment in this fragment. The girl is aware of the options that are available to her. It is for her to choose whether to take hold of the shuttle again and focus on her weaving, or turn to the boy. Another fragment gives us a clue about her choice:

Here’s another heartfelt cry from twenty-six centuries ago:

Acheron was one of the rivers of the Underworld, and the lotuses on its edge were associated with forgetfulness. The poet is so lovesick that she wants to die and eat the flowers of amnesia.

Some of the poems are surprisingly explicit:

It’s the “yielding cushions” that really makes this hot stuff. Sappho laments the ravages of old age:

She also widens her gaze to topics that might be called political, and what she has to say is pertinent to this day:

I’ll quote one last fragment, a prescient one:

Indeed. Sappho lived among people who were mostly illiterate. Amazing that poetry performed aloud and preserved initially only in the memories of her listeners should survive to this day. They are fragments, true, and who is to say what treasures were obliterated by time (or continue to lie dormant in a mummified animal lying under Egyptian sands). But what survives still speaks—and what more can one ask of a poem? The passion of Sappho’s poetry has something volcanic to it: the print may be thin and black, but just beneath it runs molten magma.

So when you have Greece on your mind, as I’m sure you have recently, I hope you manage to take the long view. Economics is a short-term concern. What endures is art. Ask any crocodile how to survive a desert and it will tell you: better to have a poem in your stomach than a number in your head.

Yours truly,

Yann Martel

S
APPHO
(
CA.
630–570
BC
) was a lyric poet in Ancient Greece, born on the island of Lesbos. Her poetry, which frequently focused on themes of love and companionship, survives mostly in fragments (potsherds and papyri).

Dear Mr. Harper,

A few weeks ago I was at the Saskatchewan Festival of Words. It’s a friendly celebration of literature held in the pleasant Prairie town of Moose Jaw. I’m sure you’ve been (to the town, I mean). One of the days I was there, as I was leaving the public library where the festival takes place, a man on a park bench hailed me. He was holding a baby in his arms and was sitting next to another man. I might’ve just waved and walked on, but there was that baby. I have a baby. So I approached the two men. It turned out that the other man was the dad, and the genial man who had called out my name was his friend. The three of us chatted for a few minutes. I was about to go when the man holding the baby asked me if I would buy his book. I had noticed the thin volumes spread out in a half-circle on the ground in
front of him. “Special Festival price, seven dollars,” he said. I gave him ten, he signed my copy, and I walked away with
Sweet Home Chicago
, by Ashton Grey. I saw Mr. Grey again the next day, on Main Street this time, near the Mae Wilson Theatre, still hawking his opus. Someone told me that Mr. Grey, who looked to be in his thirties, couldn’t afford the bus from Winnipeg to Moose Jaw, so he’d hitchhiked to come sell his book at the Festival of Words. Such dedication, I thought. And he had the good karma earned from holding a baby the previous day.

I decided to read his book and now I pass it on to you.
Sweet Home Chicago
is forty-nine pages long. I remember Mr. Grey saying on the park bench that he didn’t like calling it a novella. I didn’t ask what he had against the term, but out of respect for his wishes, let’s call it a long short story. If you look on the copyright page, you’ll see that it was “first printed” in 2009 and then printed again by Bindle Stick Publications of Hamilton, Ontario, in 2010. The number 3 appears below that information. My guess is that
Sweet Home Chicago
is onto its third printing. Now, whether Bindle Stick Publications is Mr. Grey’s own self-publishing operation and he lives in Hamilton, Ontario (and how he got from Hamilton to Winnipeg), or whether Mr. Grey lives in Winnipeg and does business with Bindle Stick Publications, a tiny vanity press in Hamilton, Ontario—to all these questions, your guess is as good as mine.

Sweet Home Chicago
is a long short story with many flaws. There are lots of spelling mistakes. On the very first page you’ll read the sentence “He reached over the bar and ceased Ronald’s coat trying to jerk him awake.” Ronald’s coat was more likely “seized.” The dialogue is consistently wrongly punctuated:

That should be a comma after “police” and the personal pronoun that follows should start with a small letter, since the statement is all one sentence. On a broader level, some of the exposition is awkward, many details are unnecessary, and it’s not entirely clear to me what the story is about thematically. And yet it has narrative drive, the characters have their charm, there are funny parts, and underlying it all is an uncynical tenderness. It’s a booze-fuelled story, so to seek out the flaws is to soberly miss the point. Best to read
Sweet Home Chicago
with the unfocused, good-humoured indulgence of the slightly drunk. The story relates the consequences to the unnamed protagonist of being in a bar next to a man who has the misfortune of keeling over and dying right then and there. Our hero finds himself in an alcohol-soused pickle.

This story is no
Under the Volcano
. (Do you know the novel? Malcolm Lowry? It’s Canadian. The over-consumption of alcohol achieves there its greatest literary expression.) But that is another book. The attraction for me in sending you
Sweet Home Chicago
lies not with the quality of the work but with the intent of the author. It’s Ashton Grey’s strong desire to
tell his story
that struck me, a desire so strong that he self-published it and now self-promotes it, even hitchhiking from Winnipeg to Moose Jaw to share it, and all this without any serious chance of critical or commercial success. But that’s what stories do to a person and, collectively, to a people. Stories are like genies: just as a genie wants to escape its bottle, so a story wants to escape the man, woman or child in which it finds itself. A shared story is a living story. Stories are passed down through families and through history. They endure while the storytellers die. Now that Ashton Grey has committed his story to the page, it will live on. That is a good thing. We need stories, all kinds of stories, because without stories, our imagination dies, and
without imagination, there is no real appreciation of life. You have the luck of owning one of the few copies of
Sweet Home Chicago
. I hope you realize what a rare privilege that is.