101 Letters to a Prime Minister (41 page)

In its entirety?
And this is just one instance of giving. Such abundant giving happens again and again in
The Nibelungenlied
.
People are constantly giving, giving, giving, and not just to allies, which might have an element of self-interest. No, the giving also extends to guests who are strangers. This constant gifting reminds me of a book I sent you earlier. Do you remember
The Gift
, by Lewis Hyde? It too spoke of societies based not on the hoarding of wealth but on its flow; that is, societies where wealth is perceived to increase if it is kept in motion and to decrease if it lies stagnant. I did not expect to find such a dynamic in thirteenth-century central Europe. Of course, such incessant giving was probably not the norm. I imagine that many a lord sat on his bags of gold, glowering at every passing stranger. Nevertheless, it is interesting that this is the ideal portrayed in
The Nibelungenlied
, one of wealth shared over and over. The ideal noble is noble because he or she gives without restraint.

Another surprise was the degree to which characters—kings, lords, knights, husbands and wives—consult and seek advice from each other. It undermines the authoritarian image I had of those distant times. Oh, and the women are strong. Prunhilt literally: when her new husband gets too frisky she trusses him up and hangs him by a nail for the night. But also morally—Kriemhilt for example.

And lastly, the entirely secular tint of the work. Christianity is mentioned here and there, and Jesus is invoked on occasion, but overwhelmingly the world portrayed is secular, with the pleasures and torments very much earthbound. Again, my image of a medieval Europe in a Christian deep freeze was altered.

There’s a curious narrative device that occurs often: the paragraph that ends with a comment in brackets by the author. These comments often announce some future event in the story, usually tragic. The device may remove an element of suspense in the story, but a highly effective sense of foreboding is created
in its stead. Since the story was initially spoken, not read, I do wonder how these brackets were signalled. These are some of the intellectual perks of
The Nibelungenlied
. Mostly, though, the ride is just to be enjoyed.

There’s a sad postscript that needs to be mentioned.
The Nibelungenlied
vanished from notice in the sixteenth century. It was rediscovered some two hundred years later and became one of the canonical elements of German nationalism in the nineteenth century, used by Wagner in his
Ring of the Nibelung
cycle of operas. And then, alas, the Nazis exploited Sivrit’s fate, or Siegfried’s, as the name had become, as a literary warning of what might befall the Aryans if they did not resist the treachery of “lesser races.” In such ways do politicians sometimes pervert literature.

Yours truly,

Yann Martel

C
YRIL
E
DWARDS
(b. 1947) is a (largely) retired lecturer in medieval German literature and philology at the University of Oxford. His books include
The Beginnings of German Literature
, translations of Wolfram von Eschenbach’s
Parzival and Titurel
and Hartmann von Aue’s
Iwein
,
or the Knight with the Lion
, and
The Little Book of Soups & Stews
. Forthcoming:
The Allotment/The Black and the Green
, a novella and selected poems.

Dear Mr. Harper,

Do you play chess? I’m sure you have. It has a rare allure among games. Stefan Zweig puts it nicely:

(It occurs to me that Zweig’s musing could also apply to sex, except for the invocation of sterility, but that’s neither here nor there.) Chess
is
a game of stumping complexity. With the exception of go, I can’t think of another game that offers so many possible plays. And there’s another appeal to chess: the complete absence of luck. Chess is an entirely logical game in which there is no “luck of the draw.” You win or you lose entirely based on the mental powers you bring to the chequered board. And so the aura of genius that surrounds the great chess players of history. But if genius it is, it’s a peculiar one, deep perhaps but also very narrow, confined to the movements of pieces on a board. Bobby Fischer once said, “Chess is life.” Well, not really. Life very much has an element of luck to it, the luck of where and to whom we are born, the luck of our genetic inheritance, the luck of our circumstances, and so on. Nor is life logical. In fact, according to a good number of thinkers and writers, it’s not even certain that life makes sense. But chess has simple rules that yield a vastly complex game, just as life, one might argue, has simple rules that yield a vastly complex experience. And we meet opposition in life, just as there is opposition in chess, black against white. So the parallel is rough, but it pleases, this simplification of life in which only force of personality matters and fate is entirely in one’s own hands. One looks at the chessboard and imagines a battle scene—or perhaps Question Period.

Stefan Zweig’s
Chess
(also known at
The Royal Game
or
Chess Story
) was published posthumously after the author’s suicide in 1942 in Brazil, to which he had fled with his wife to escape the Nazis. Zweig is the quintessentially continental European writer of the interwar period, a man caught between bloodbaths who tried to make sense of a world gone mad. He did this by applying himself to the “real” world in a series of biographies and by “escaping” that world in works such as
Chess
. But escape
is never possible. The reality of Zweig’s life seeped into his fiction. You will see this in
Chess
. The story takes place over the course of a few days on a passenger steamer travelling from New York to Buenos Aires. Aboard is the world chess champion Mirko Czentovic. Some chess amateurs lure him into a game, him against all of them. Czentovic easily defeats them. They play again. The amateurs look like they’re once again going to lose. But then a voice from the crowd makes a surprising suggestion for the next move. They follow his advice, as they do for the following moves, each given urgently by this stranger. To their amazement, the game ends in a draw. The stranger reluctantly agrees to play a game one-on-one the next day with the world champion. But who is this stranger? Where—how—did he acquire his prowess at chess?
Chess
has that unity of time, action and place that Aristotle said was a key characteristic of the good story, and it is a good story indeed. It sucks you in. You climb aboard the ship in your mind and you hurry, like the chess players, to the smoking room where the games are being played. But despite the appealing fictional setting, so removed from the violent unfolding of history, the world and its troubles can’t be so easily forgotten. Stefan Zweig’s experience with the Nazis infuses the middle section of his novella. Chess is portrayed as a necessary escapism, an obsession that allows his character to hold on to sanity.

Because that is another appeal that chess holds: a game that is entirely logical, where wild emotions have no play, where rigorous sanity wins the day and defeat comes only from an inner lapse of reason—such a game, in a world gone mad, is a relief.

Perhaps there are days on Parliament Hill when you feel like retreating to your office and playing chess, Mr. Harper. After all, you’re still stuck with a minority government, and then there’s the uproar over proroguing Parliament, the fight over
the Afghan detainee documents, the billion-dollar summits, the furor over the elimination of the mandatory census, the fruitless effort to kill the gun registry, the fury of the veterans’ ombudsman, and other controversies—these must wear you down. You like to be in control. You have notions about how things should be, but constantly you don’t get your way. Constantly, the unpredictable happens. Wouldn’t it be nice if politics were a chess game and you could just sit down and bully your way to a checkmate?

Alas, thankfully, the political system in Canada is not so arranged. Instead, you’re playing a life game in which you’ve lost a fair number of pawns. How will the game end, I wonder?

Yours truly,

Yann Martel

S
TEFAN
Z
WEIG
(1881–1942) was a novelist, playwright, journalist and biographer. He left Austria in the 1930s, fleeing the Nazis, moving to England and then the United States before dying in Brazil. In addition to
Chess
, his books include
Amok
and
Letter from an Unknown Woman
, which has been adapted for the stage and screen.

Dear Mr. Harper,

Politics is the art of compromise, the saying goes. When a newspaper prints a photograph of two politicians shaking hands and smiling broadly, whether in Washington, the Middle East or elsewhere, it’s likely that a compromise is being celebrated, a breakthrough in which opposing parties have reached an agreement by making concessions. The fruitful compromise is the great enabler of social peace, whether between competing groups or lone persons relating to each other. Those who stand too firmly, who are unwilling to negotiate in any way with others, are soon at the heart of incessant social friction and lose any peace they might wish to have. Compromising helps not only to establish social harmony, but also to build relationships, since a compromise is normally the result of open dialogue and increasing familiarity with one’s adversary. Such relationships, in addition to making compromise possible, may also dilute the
differences that provoked the antagonism in the first place. In politics, the fruitful compromise often makes the difficulties go away. Take Northern Ireland, for example. The Troubles, as they came to be called, started in the late 1960s, and for three decades Protestant unionists and Catholic nationalists were at each other’s throats, killing men, women and children, some actively involved in the hostilities, others mere bystanders. The hatred could not have been more intense. Yet eventually, by dint of slow, unremitting effort, the warring parties signed a truce, the Good Friday Agreement of 1998, and now peace generally prevails in Northern Ireland. A compromise ended the Troubles and, over time, as peace becomes part of the social fabric, the root causes of the Troubles will, one hopes, disappear. The compromise of the Good Friday Agreement has made, and continues to make, the difficulties go away. That is good politics.

Now, compromise is not your way. You went into politics early on, without any entrepreneurial or significant work experience to teach you the value of yielding. There was the National Citizens Coalition, of which you were president for a few years, but being an advocacy group, it’s hardly the place to learn the motto “Let’s talk.” You stand by your principles and ideology, and you wait—expect—the country to come round to your views. To be honest, I doubt that’s going to happen. You’ve been in office for over four years now, at a time when the opposition has been fragmented and, in the case of the Liberals, discredited, and still you’ve managed only two minority governments in a row, and polls don’t show your fortunes improving significantly.

Let me introduce you then to Yevgeny Yevtushenko. Yevtushenko is a Russian poet who was born in 1933. He was twenty years old, and coming of age as a poet, when Stalin died in 1953. Yevtushenko profited from the let-up in repression in
Soviet life that followed under Nikita Khrushchev and quickly became the poetic voice for a post-Stalin generation that yearned for greater freedom (it’s at this time that Alexander Solzhenitsyn’s
One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich
, which I sent you a while ago, was also published). Yevtushenko wrote poems that no poet living under Stalin would have dared to write, not if that poet wanted to stay alive. An example is
Babi Yar
, which is included in the collection of poems I’m sending you this week. Babi Yar is a ravine on the northern edge of Kiev, in Ukraine. An estimated 100,000 innocent people of all ages were murdered there by the Nazis. The victims were Roma and POWs but overwhelmingly they were Jewish. Yevtushenko, who is not Jewish, wrote the poem to protest the proposed building of a sports stadium by the Soviet authorities on the site of the massacre. The poem mourns the Jewish deaths, but also excoriates the Russian people for their Jew-hatred. It’s a moving poem, and also, in taking on explicitly the victimhood of the Jews as the poet’s own, affirming his common humanity with them, a brave poem coming from a citizen of a land so notoriously inimical to Jews.

Yevtushenko gained great fame and honour in both East and West in the 1950s and ’60s. He travelled extensively to the West. If you look him up on Wikipedia, you will see a 1972 picture of him chatting with President Richard Nixon (which reminds me that President Obama wrote to me—who knew American presidents had such a history of paying attention to writers?). “Here,” the Soviet Union seemed to saying, “is proof that we are not a repressive society. We too can produce great poetry that is critical of us, and here is our poster boy.”