101 Letters to a Prime Minister (42 page)

How does his poetry measure up? Well, in this slim volume, it fares quite well. Except for
Babi Yar
, politics intrudes very little into it. Or no more than politics might in a collection of
American or Canadian poetry. Much of it is quite bucolic, reminding me that Russia, the largest country in the world even without its former Soviet satellite states, is, ipso facto, mostly rural. Many of the poems exude a common sense and an approachable humanity that brings to mind Robert Frost.

But did he compromise himself? The Soviet Union was from start to finish a repressive state where every freedom was, if not outright curtailed, then under constant surveillance. In such a state, was it possible to be a free poet? Yevtushenko was criticized by many, including the great Russian-American poet and critic Joseph Brodsky (have you heard of him?), as a duplicitous fake, as a poet who had around his neck a collar that was tied to a leash held by the Kremlin and that he barked and growled only when and so much as it suited them.

Clearly, some writers paid a greater price for their writings, being forced either into exile, like Solzhenitsyn or Brodsky, or, worse, into jail in the Soviet Union. Was it perhaps the case that Yevtushenko hoped his country would change and open itself to greater civil liberties? Maybe he simply loved his country, including its communist ideals. Maybe the idea of permanent exile, of living forever in a country whose language, ways and food would be foreign, chilled his soul. In other words, did Yevtushenko simply believe in his country in a way that Solzhenitsyn and Brodsky did not?

I have no position on the matter. I don’t know enough about Yevtushenko or Soviet history, and so cannot judge. His poetry is a pleasure to read, but the political man behind the poems remains elusive. What is certain is that Yevtushenko has been accused of compromising himself in his dealings with the Soviet state. His standing has paid a price. Compromise, you see, does not have in the arts the worth that it has in politics. The compromised artist is likely to be seen as a failure, but
the compromising politician a success. If politics is the art of compromise, then art is the politics of uncompromise. Artists need and fiercely defend their freedom. It is precisely from that freedom, from that individuality, that art springs. To compromise, to conform, to give in, is to kill the creative impulse. True art is uncompromising. The great artist lets rip, saying “This is where I stand, this is my vision—take it or leave it!” In the arts, there is no parliament to which the artist is accountable, no Question Period to which he or she must submit. Art is the place for those who do not accept compromise.

Hence my question to you, Mr. Harper. Have you not chosen the wrong profession? Could it be the case that you are a frustrated artist?

Yours truly,

Yann Martel

Y
EVGENY
Y
EVTUSHENKO
(b. 1933) is prolific in many roles—poet, essayist, novelist, film director, screenwriter and actor. He is the best-known poet of the post-Stalin generation, and appeared on the cover of
TIME
magazine in 1962. He now teaches Russian and European poetry and film at the University of Tulsa and the City University of New York. His honours include the American Liberties Medallion and the Ovid Prize.

Dear Mr. Harper,

Three years ago (yes, that long ago) I sent you the novel
Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit
, by the English writer Jeanette Winterson. If you remember—and hopefully enjoyed—it was the story of a girl, Jeanette, who is caught between two worlds, the world of evangelical Christianity and the world of her nascent lesbian sexuality. She must choose the world to which she wants to belong. It is one or the other. She cannot be both Christian
and
lesbian, not at that time, not where she lived.

The novel I’m sending you this week,
The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian
, by the American writer Sherman Alexie, plays out a somewhat similar conflict. Junior, the protagonist, a teenage Spokane Indian, lives on a reservation in Washington State. It’s a lousy place. Most of the adults are poor, miserable alcoholics, and most of the kids are poor, miserable and on their way to becoming alcoholics. Junior decides one day to switch schools. He’ll leave the school on the rez and go
to the high school in Reardan, the small farming community just down the road. But there’s a hitch: Reardan is an all-white school. The only other Indian there is the school mascot. And many on the rez see Junior as a traitor to his people for leaving. But Junior feels that if he stays, a part of him will die. He goes ahead and starts attending Reardan High School.

True Diary
is a very funny book in a sad sort of way. The prose, simple and effective, is aimed at teens. The story will speak to any reader, teen or adult. It asks difficult questions. How do you get on with life when your life really sucks? What keeps you going when the going gets tough? Alexie’s answer is that earthly salvation depends on one’s spirit, on the ability to find inner resources to endure and overcome adversity. But there is a cost to every battle, even the ones that are won. So Junior does well at Reardan High, but he’s also now living in a white world and leaving behind the Indian self he knew. Unlike Jeanette’s dilemma in
Oranges
, which demands an exclusive choice, Junior’s dilemma is less radical. It’s not a question of one identity or another, but of two identities uncomfortably merging, white and Indian, hence the title: a
Part-Time
Indian. In saving one part of himself from dying on the rez, will another part of Junior die in the white world?

It would be nice to think that one day Junior will stop being tormented by these perceived existential opposites, that his Indian self will be enriched by becoming a little bit white (whatever that might mean) and his white world will profit by becoming a little bit Indian (whatever that might mean), until there is no longer any friction between the two worlds. It’s good, after all, to be something only part-time. Part-time Indian, part-time white, part-time writer, part-time father, part-time this, part-time that—isn’t that just another way of saying that Junior has grown into a normal, twenty-first-century
hybrid human being, a rich world unto himself, varied and complex but still whole?

Yours truly,

Yann Martel

S
HERMAN
A
LEXIE
(b. 1966) is a novelist, filmmaker, poet and comedian. He adapted the screenplay for the award-winning film
Smoke Signals
from a story in his first collection,
The Lone Ranger and Tonto Fist Fight in Heaven
. Alexie is also renowned for his writings on basketball. He lives in Seattle with his wife and two sons.

Dear Mr. Harper,

The cover is dreadful, but the book is good.
Cakes and Ale
is the first Somerset Maugham I’m sending you. Maugham, an English writer who lived between 1874 and 1965, was a prolific author of novels, plays, short stories and travel writing. His masterpiece is
Of Human Bondage
. Oh, what the lovesick soul submits itself to! But Philip Carey’s misery at the hands of Mildred will be for another time, when you have more time to read:
Of Human Bondage
is a long book, close to seven hundred pages. So
Cakes and Ale
instead, at a neat 190 pages.

Maugham would not generally be placed at the forefront of English literature, I don’t think. He was too old-fashioned in his technique, too lacking in newness and experimentation. He was writing novels at the same time as his Modernist contemporaries like Hemingway, Faulkner, Joyce and Woolf were rewriting the novel. But who cares, it’s not a competition. So long as the
reading is enjoyable, let’s keep on reading. Maugham relied on those mainstays of the good story—character, plot, emotion—and did very well with them.

Cakes and Ale
features members of my own profession. I thought you might find that amusing, seeing how scribblers operate. The main characters—Edward Driffield, Alroy Kear, William Ashenden—are all writers. The first is portrayed as at the forefront of late-Victorian literature, the second as having more ambition than talent, while the last is our modest but slightly cantankerous narrator. It is said that Maugham based Edward Driffield on Thomas Hardy. Maugham mentions in his author’s preface meeting the elderly Hardy once at a dinner party and chatting alone with him for three-quarters of an hour (imagine that: chatting with Thomas Hardy!), but explicitly denies the link between Hardy and Driffield. He has this surprising assessment of Hardy: “I read
Tess of the D’Urbervilles
when I was eighteen with such enthusiasm that I determined to marry a milkmaid, but I had never been so much taken with Hardy’s other books as were most of my contemporaries, and I did not think his English very good.” So says Maugham, but then his character William Ashenden gives the same lukewarm assessment of the fictitious great writer Edward Driffield. To give a character an aura of fame is difficult, and Maugham succeeds admirably with Driffield, but if it helps you to think of Driffield as Hardy, go for it. There’s no problem with adding fiction to fiction. It will only increase your reading pleasure.

What links these three characters, certainly the first and the third directly, is the voluptuous, carefree, beautiful Rosie Driffield. She is Edward Driffield’s first wife, William Ashenden’s former lover and Alroy Kear’s problem. Kear, you see, has been charged by Driffield’s
second
wife to write the great man’s biography, and the shamelessly promiscuous
Rosie is both awkward to deal with and impossible to avoid in his biography.

What is shocking to see in the novel is how considerations of class so regiment the lives of the characters. There are people one can know and visit and be at ease with, and entire classes of others that one should deal with on a stiff, strictly professional basis. Rosie stands out as the only character who lives the life she wants, unencumbered by such notions of propriety. And that means living her emotions, no matter where they lead her.

See if you like this first sample of Maugham. His short stories are wonderful too.

Yours truly,

Yann Martel

W. S
OMERSET
M
AUGHAM
(1874–1965) was an English novelist, short story writer, travel writer and playwright. He always wanted to be a writer and, with the success of his book
Liza of Lambeth
, he walked away from his position as a medical doctor. His novels include
Of Human Bondage
,
The Painted Veil
and
The Razor’s Edge
, all of which have been adapted for the screen.

Dear Mr. Harper,

One of the great monuments of twentieth-century European theatre is
Six Characters in Search of an Author
, by Luigi Pirandello. A few biographical details, quickly: Italian; 1867 to 1936; short stories, novels, plays; Nobel Prize for Literature in 1934.

Six Characters
was first performed in 1921. Like many daring works, it divided before conquering the public. It made Pirandello famous around the world. It was a play like none before. It starts with a bare stage, a space not pretending to be a living room or a garden or anywhere else, but only that: a bare stage. Eventually some actors wander on, soon joined by a director, a prompter, a prop man and the various other members of a theatre company. They are about to rehearse a play. Now, the device of a play within a play is not so revolutionary. Shakespeare used it in
Hamlet
, for example. But that is a finished play within a finished play. Here, at the start of
Six
Characters
, the inner mechanics of that artifice called theatre are displayed with complete nudity, so to speak; the actors appear as themselves, standing around, chatting, smoking, reading a newspaper, and the normally hidden director and others are out in full view. It all has the appearance of real, ordinary life. Then—and this is where the Pirandellian revolution starts—the doorkeeper apologetically interrupts the director to inform him that some people are here to see him. The director is annoyed. A rehearsal is never to be interrupted! But these people, they’re insisting, says the doorkeeper. In fact, they’ve already made their way to the stage, six of them, a man, a woman, a young woman, a young man and two children. The director asks impatiently: Who are you, what do you want?

The Father replies: “We have come in search of an author.” They—that is, the Father, the Mother, the Stepdaughter, the Son, the Boy and the Child—are characters abandoned by an author. They’ve come to this stage hoping that the director will become the author who will allow them to fulfill their purpose. The director and the actors react with disbelief and consternation. After all, the Father and his family are not ghosts; they are flesh and blood. Yet they insist that they are characters. Do they apologize for their strange status? Not at all, because, “you know well that life is full of infinite absurdities, which, strangely enough, do not even need to appear plausible, since they are true.”