101 Letters to a Prime Minister (8 page)

(Admittedly, there are people for whom life makes perfect sense, their vision of things forever untouched by doubt, the entropy of time seeming to have no more effect on them than a gentle breeze on the face. They are the type who will not go for
the questioning of life that is a play, indeed, that is all great art. But that is a separate matter.)

The knack for writing plays is a knack I don’t have. I have tried to move plot entirely through dialogue, I have tried to express my thoughts on life within the strictures of speech, I have tried to develop an ear for the way people speak—to laughable, unpublishable result. Notice how the word is play
wright
; it may sound like
write
, but originally the act of writing a play struck the English as more akin to the work of a carpenter than of a writer. The world of letters is indeed easily divided between those who
write
and those who
wright
. There are exceptions—Samuel Beckett, for example—but those who can do both successfully are not many.

There are three plays in the volume of Strindberg that I have sent you. It is the middle play, known either as
Miss Julia
or
Miss Julie
, that I recommend to you. In it you will read dialogue that is so brilliant, so crackling with tension, so straightforward on the surface yet hinting at such turmoil and complexity, that it will, paradoxically, all seem perfectly natural to you. That is the sign of a great play in the naturalist tradition: how easily it flows. One gets the sense that the playwright just sat down with a good, simple idea and it all came out in an easy afternoon’s work. I assure you that that is like thinking that all Michelangelo had to do was chip away from the block of marble everything that didn’t look like David.

Miss Julia
, which was first performed in 1889, is about confinement, principally the confinement of sexual roles and the confinement of class. Miss Julia and Jean, her servant, meet, match and clash, with tragic consequences. I would love to see the play actually performed on a stage. The alchemy of great play, great director and great actors is rare, but when it happens—I am remembering now a performance long ago at Stratford of
Eugene O’Neill’s
Long Day’s Journey into Night
, with Hume Cronyn and Jessica Tandy—it makes for an experience of an intensity that is, in my estimation, unmatched in the literary arts.

You will notice that the previous owner of your copy of Strindberg wrote copiously in the margins. This annoyed me at first, this defacing
of Miss Julia
. But finally I was charmed by the intruder’s thoughts and opinions. The handwriting is large, clear and loopy; I think it is a young person writing, likely a young woman. Above Jean’s comment that “on the way back by the barn I looked in and joined the dancing,” our hypothetical young woman writes “
joie de vivre
.” When Jean impudently tells Miss Julia that he knows that Kristin, the cook, talks in her sleep because “I’ve heard her,” our young woman observes “Kristin’s his mistress.” She variously thinks Jean to be “practical” or “realistic,” while Miss Julia is “totally impractical.” Other short notations of hers are “dramatic moment,” “flirting,” “bourgeoisie,” “gives her warning,” “seduction” and “trag. everyth falling apart” [sic].

One last thing, to elucidate a point easily missed: the “Turkish pavilion” on page 90 that Jean mentions sneaking into as a child, the “finest building I’d ever seen,” the walls “covered with pictures of kings and emperors,” his first time “inside a castle,” is just a fancy outhouse—and the way out he is forced to take when he hears someone approaching is the exit you’d least like to take if you were in an outhouse.

Yours truly,

Yann Martel

A
UGUST
S
TRINDBERG
(1849–1912) is best known for his plays, but he also wrote short stories, novels, poems and volumes of autobiography.
In addition to his writing, he was a painter and photographer, and experimented with alchemy. In life and in his art, he was pessimistic and his works were marked by his overt satirizing of Swedish society. Strindberg’s plays fall into two categories—naturalistic and expressionistic—and he is considered one of the pioneers of Expressionism. He wrote dozens of plays, the most famous of which are the naturalistic
Miss Julia
and
The Father
.

Dear Mr. Harper,

The great Jane Austen. She is a shining example of how art—like politics—can take the least promising ore and transform it into the finest metal. Austen had three things going against her: she lived in
rural
England, she was middle class in the age before that class exploded with possibilities, and she was a woman. That is to say, her life was hemmed in by limitations.

England during Austen’s lifetime—1775 to 1817—was in the full throes of the Industrial Revolution, and revolutions are occasions of great upheaval and renewal, both for the arts and for politics. But Austen mostly missed out on this revolution because she lived outside of the urban centres that were at its heart. And in the genteel hinterland where she lived, she was a member of a most precarious class: the landless
middle
class, with a class she wished not to join swimming beneath her, the working class, and a class she wished she could join soaring above, the nobility. This precariousness was aggravated by her being a woman, which disqualified her from whatever work a
member of the middle class might decently do: the clergy, the medical profession, the military. So all Austen’s female characters worry endlessly about financial security, yet have only a single way of achieving it: marriage. Hungry for status and material goods, but unwilling (because unable) to earn them, always on the hunt for wealthy husbands, yet having only stuffiness, rigidity and pretence to offer—I suspect that if we met the female members of Jane Austen’s class today, with our modern sensibilities, we would find them deeply disagreeable. There is this exchange between two female characters in
The Watsons
, the latest book I am sending you:

“To be so bent on marriage, to pursue a man merely for the sake of situation is a sort of thing that shocks me; I cannot understand it. Poverty is a great evil, but to a woman of education and feeling it ought not, it cannot be the greatest. I would rather be teacher at a school (and I can think of nothing worse) than marry a man I did not like.”

“I would rather do anything than be teacher at a school,” said her sister. “
I
have been at school, Emma, and know what a life they lead;
you
never have. I should not like marrying a disagreeable man any more than yourself, but I do not think there
are
many very disagreeable men; I think I could like any good-humoured man with a comfortable income.”

How sad to have the most important profession in the world thought of as worse than what has facetiously been called the oldest profession in the world. Thankfully, things have changed. Today, the middle class in Canada has expanded to absorb all other classes, so that practically everyone is of the working class, the class that works, and the sinking and the soaring is called mobility, and it is a triumph of our time that women can avail themselves of that mobility (though still not as much as men—there’s still some liberating work that needs doing).

But back to Jane Austen: boxed in, left only to play card games, look forward to the next ball and keep an eye out for eligible bachelors, surrounded by green pastures and rolling hills, does this strike you as promising grounds for great art?

Well, in the case of Jane Austen, it was. Because she had the great and good luck of having a loving and intellectually lively family, and she was blessed with a keen and critical sense of observation, as well as an inherently positive disposition.

So though limited by class and by sex, Jane Austen was able to transcend these limitations. Her novels are marvels of wit and perspicacity, and in them she examined her society with such fresh and engaging realism that the English novel was durably changed.

The Watsons
is easily Jane Austen’s least-known work. But I selected it for you for two reasons: it is short, and it is unfinished. Its shortness will I hope make you want to read some of Austen’s longer novels,
Pride and Prejudice
or
Emma
perhaps.

And though it is unfinished, an abandoned draft, there is more perfection in it than in many a completed novel. Austen abandoned
The Watsons
in 1805 as a result of personal difficulties: the death of a good friend, and right afterwards the illness and death of her own father, which left her and her sister and her mother in uncertain circumstances. Eventually, four years later, her brother Edward was able to provide his mother and sisters with a cottage, and Austen began writing again.

She let go and then started up again, able to produce novels that marked the English novel forever. In that, there is something instructive. There is so much we must leave unfinished. How hard it is to let go.

Yours truly,

Yann Martel

J
ANE
A
USTEN
(1775–1817) was an English novelist whose realist works offer strong female characters and biting social commentary. She never married, and lived with her family until her death at the age of forty-one. Several of her novels have been adapted for the screen. Her novels are still popular today, and
Pride and Prejudice
has inspired modern spoofs including
Bridget Jones’s Diary
by Helen Fielding, the Bollywood film
Bride & Prejudice
directed by Gurinder Chadha, and
Pride and Prejudice and Zombies
, adapted from Austen’s original novel by Seth Grahame-Smith.

Dear Mr. Harper,

I am sorry but you will have to endure this time a letter written in my terrible handwriting. I didn’t manage to find a printer in Oświęcim, the small Polish town where I’m staying at the moment.

Oświęcim is better known by the name the Germans gave it: Auschwitz. Have you been?

I am here trying to finish my next book. And it also explains my choice of the latest book I am sending you: the graphic novel
Maus
, by Art Spiegelman. Don’t be fooled by the format. This comic book is
real
literature.

Some stories need to be told in many different ways so that they will exist in new ways for new generations. The story of the murder of nearly six million of Europe’s Jewish people at the hands of the Nazis and their criminal accomplices is just the sort of story that needs renewing if we don’t want a part of ourselves to fall asleep, like grandchildren nodding off after hearing grandfather repeat the same story of yore one time too many.

I know I said I would send you books that would increase your “stillness.” But a sense of peace and calm focus, of what Buddhists call “passionate detachment,” must not fall into self-satisfaction or complacency. So a disturbance—and Auschwitz is profoundly disturbing—can be the right way to renew one’s stillness.

Maus
is a masterpiece. Spiegelman tells his story, or, more accurately, the story of his father and mother, in a bold and radical way. It’s not just that he takes the graphic form, thought perhaps by some to be a medium only for children, to new artistic heights by taking on such a momentous topic as exterminationist genocide. It’s more than that. It’s how he tells the story. You will see. The narrative agility and ease of it. And how the frames speak large. Some, small though they are, and in black and white, have an impact that one would think possible only with large paintings or shots from a movie.

And I haven’t even mentioned the main device, which explains the title of the book: all the characters have the heads of one kind of animal or other. So the Jews have the heads of mice, the Germans of cats, the Poles of pigs, the Americans of dogs, and so on.

It’s brilliant. It so takes you in, it so rips you apart. From there you must make your own tricky way back again to what it means to be human.

Yours truly,

Yann Martel

A
RT
S
PIEGELMAN
(b. 1948) is a Swedish-born American comic artist who was part of the underground comics movements of the 1960s and ’70s, contributing to several publications and co-founding
Arcade
and
Raw
. He was a co-creator of garbage candy and Garbage Pail Kids trading cards. Named one of
TIME
magazine’s “Top 100 Most Influential People” in 2005, he has won multiple awards for his work, including the Pulitzer Prize in 1992 for
Maus
and its sequel,
Maus II
. He continues to publish new work and promote the comic medium, and in 2004 published a large board book,
In the Shadow of No Towers
, about the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks on New York City.

Dear Mr. Harper,

In an interview some years ago Mavis Gallant mentioned an operation she underwent. She awoke from general anaesthesia in a state of mental confusion. For several minutes she couldn’t remember any details of her identity or of her life, not her name or her age or what she did, not where she was nor why she was there. An amnesia that was complete—except for this: she knew she was a woman and that she was thinking in English. Inextricably linked to the faintest glimmer of consciousness were those two identity traits: sex and language.