101 Letters to a Prime Minister (17 page)

And yet it will speak to you. Read, read beyond the first few pages, plunge into the story the way you might dive into a chilly lake—and you will find that it’s warmer than you expected, that in fact you’re quite comfortable in its waters. You will find
that the characters—Claudia, Frieda, Pecola—are not so unfamiliar, because you were once a child yourself, and you will find that the cruelty, the racism, the inequality are not so alien either, because we’ve all experienced the nastiness of the human heart, either in being the one lashed or the one lashing out.

The making of art, as I may have mentioned to you before, involves a lot of work. Because of that, it is implicitly constructive. One doesn’t work so hard merely to destroy. One rather hopes to build. No matter how much cruelty and sadness a story may hold, its effect is always the opposite. So a glad tale is taken gladly, and a cruel tale is taken ironically, with feelings of pity and terror, pushing one to reject cruelty. Art then is implicitly liberal; it encourages us towards openness and generosity, it seeks to unlock doors. I suspect this will be the effect of
The Bluest Eye
on you, with its many lives blighted by poverty, stifled by racism, dashed by random cruelty. You will feel more keenly the suffering of others, no matter how different you thought they were from you at first.

Yours truly,

Yann Martel

T
ONI
M
ORRISON
(b. 1931), born Chloe Anthony Wofford, is an American author of novels, short stories, children’s literature and non-fiction. Some of her most famous publications include
The Bluest Eye, Song of Solomon
and
Beloved
. She is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters and has won multiple awards, including a Pulitzer Prize and, in 1993, the Nobel Prize in Literature. Beyond her career as an author, she has been a literary critic, lecturer, editor, professor and chair at several universities.

Dear Mr. Harper,

Your latest book will be late this week. I’m sorry about that. The delay is not due to the long weekend. Like most self-employed workers, I’m willing to work on weekends and during holidays because if I don’t do the job, no one will do it for me. The problem lies elsewhere. The book that accompanies this letter,
Under Milk Wood
, by the Welsh poet Dylan Thomas (1914–1953), is such a lyrical work that it demands not only to be read but to be heard. So I thought I’d send you an audio version in addition to the text. There is a famous performance recorded in New York with Dylan Thomas himself reading several of the parts, done hardly two months before his death, and my family owns an LP of that recording, but I’m not willing to part with it, and even if I were, I doubt you have a record player at hand. The more recent performance that I’ve found for you, on CD, is a BBC production and it’s been slow to arrive in the mail. Hence the delay.

A word about audiobooks. Have you ever listened to one? I went on a road trip to the Yukon a few years ago and brought
some along to give them a try. I thought I’d dislike having a voice insistently whispering me a story while Canada’s majestic northern landscape surged before my eyes. A three-minute pop song I can handle—but a twelve-hour story? I thought it would drive me crazy. I was wrong. Be forewarned: audiobooks are totally addictive. The origin of language is oral, not written. We spoke before we wrote, as children but also as a species. It’s in being spoken that words achieve their full power. If the written word is the recipe, then the spoken word is the dish prepared, the voice adding tone, accent, emphasis, emotion. As I’m sure you will agree, the quality of oratory in Canadian and American public life has deteriorated in the last few years. Barack Obama is where he is, on the cusp of the US presidency, in part, I believe, because of his skill in making his words lofty, inspirational and convincing. His ability is unusual. Most public speakers nowadays are plodding. Actors are the great exception. Their public speaking is superb because it is the very basis of their trade. And it’s actors who read the stories on audiobooks. The combination of a writer’s carefully chosen words and an actor’s carefully calibrated delivery makes for a package that is spellbinding. Time and again on my trip to the Yukon I wouldn’t get out of the car until a chapter had ended. And then the next morning I couldn’t wait to get on with the next. As soon as one story was done, I hastened to start another. Every time I go on a car trip now, I stop by the public library to pick up a selection of audiobooks.

There’s talk of an election this fall. That means a lot of travelling for you. I suggest you pack a few audiobooks for those long bus and airplane trips you will have to endure. My only advice is to avoid abridged versions. Otherwise, select as you please. Murder mysteries are particularly effective—as is poetry.

Which brings us back to
Under Milk Wood
. Dylan Thomas is no doubt one of the world’s most famous poets. He had a rare quality among modern bards: a persona. His aura as a hard-drinking, hard-living writer—one who died young, to boot; always a boon to one’s immortality—has helped his poetry, which is of genuine quality, achieve a cult status. His poems are endlessly anthologized. You’ve no doubt heard of “Do Not Go Gentle into That Good Night.”

Under Milk Wood
is a radio play. That might make you think it’s a tight, fast-paced affair in which a few distinctive voices are aided by clear sound effects. Not at all. There’s no plot to speak of, just a day in the life of a Welsh village named Llareggub. Read that name backwards and you’ll get an idea of what Dylan Thomas thought there was to do in Welsh villages. But life is still good, and that’s what
Under Milk Wood
is at heart, a celebration of life. With an astounding sixty-nine different voices, it’s symphonic in effect. What carries the whole piece, its melody so to speak, is Dylan Thomas’s gift for language. His words describe, imitate, bubble, scintillate, run, stop, amuse, surprise, enchant. This is verbal beauty at its purest.

Beauty—the word is much bandied about. But like many words that we use all the time—
good, fair, just
, for example—if we look a little closer, we find that behind the cliché lies a philosophical odyssey that goes as far back as human thinking. Clearly, beauty moves us, motivates us, shames us, shapes us. I won’t in this letter even try to define what beauty is. Best to leave you to think on it, or to look it up. If you are serious in your curiosity, you’ll find yourself following a strand of Western philosophy that goes as far back as Pythagoras (who associated beauty with symmetry), and of course all of visual art concerns itself in one way or another with beauty. There’s much there for the mind that wants to study, a lifetime’s worth of material.

I’ll limit myself to a much narrower focus, and that is the question of beauty and the prose writer. A writer has many tools to tell a story: characterization, plot and description are some of the obvious ones. Tell a gripping story with full-blooded characters in a convincing setting and you’ve told a good story. Depending on the writer, one element may prevail more than another. So John Grisham or Stephen King will have much plot to show, with some description, but the characters may be there mainly to serve a narrative purpose. A writer like John Banville, on the other hand (do you know him? Irish, an extraordinary stylist), will tend to be less driven by plot, but will have characters and descriptions that are startling in their richness. And so on. Every writer, depending on his or her strengths and interests, will bring some different ratio of ingredients to the making up of a story.

One notion that is constant in all writers, though, is that of beauty. Every writer, in some way, aspires to literary beauty. That might mean a beautiful plot device, elegant in its simplicity. Or it might mean an ability to paint with words, to create such vivid portraits of people or settings that readers feel that they are “seeing” what the writer is describing. More commonly, the writer of serious ambition aspires to beautiful writing; that is, to writing that by dint of apt vocabulary, happy syntax and pleasing cadence will make the reader marvel. I promise you, if one day you are glad-handing and you end up shaking the hand of a writer and you’re at a lost for words, if you say, “You’re a beautiful writer,” you will please that writer. They will know exactly what you mean, that you’re not talking about their shoes or their tie or their complexion, but that you’re talking about how they lay their words on the page, and they will glow, they will beam, they will nearly wilt under your praise.

But—there’s always a but—one has to be careful about beauty. In all walks of life. In our overly visual society, we tend
to be too easily won over by beauty, whether it be in a person, in a product or even in a book. A beautifully written book, like a beautiful person, may not have much to say. The beauty of substance often loses out to the beauty of appearance. A good writer knows that beautiful writing can’t substitute for having something to say. The best beauty is that in which beauty of form is held up by beauty of content.

Beauty, in another words, can be a mask hiding a vacuum, hiding falsehood, even hiding ugliness.

No danger here, with
Under Milk Wood
. The lyricism of the language rests solidly on Dylan Thomas’s gut knowledge that life is good, however bad it may be at times. It is said that Dylan Thomas wrote
Under Milk Wood
in reaction to the atomic bombing of Hiroshima. I doubt that’s factually true. It sounds too conveniently perfect. But opposing a radiant symphonic poem against the darkness of a mass killing of civilians does hark to a spiritual truth: that beauty can be a road back to goodness.

Yours truly,

Yann Martel

D
YLAN
T
HOMAS
(1914–1953) was a Welsh poet, prose writer and playwright. His poems were characteristically dense, lyrical and exuberant, often reflecting on the themes of unity in the natural world and the cyclical nature of life and death. His most famous works include the short story
A Child’s Christmas in Wales
and the poem “Do Not Go Gentle into That Good Night.” After World War II, he went to the United States on a series of celebrated reading tours, during one of which, while in New York City, he died of a drinking overdose.

Dear Mr. Harper,

The work now in your hands is the quintessential used book. The cover looks old, both in style and in condition. A number, a price, has been written directly on the cover: $4.50. Someone put a line of tape along the spine to keep the cover from falling off. There’s the dash of a black marker along the bottom of the book, the telltale sign of a used book. The pages inside are yellowed with age along their outside edges. You’ll notice a further yellow mark along the left side of the first pages; it looks like the book was accidentally soaked once and a watermark has remained. The book unmistakably shows its venerable age. The edition now yours, a first paperback printing, was published forty-one years ago, in 1967. I was four years old, you were nine. Not bad for an assemblage of flimsy elements: cheap paper and thin cardboard.

The book has lasted this long for two reasons: it is good, and so it has been treated well. Inexpensive in price, it has glowed with value in the eyes of all who owned it, and so they
handled it with care. As I mentioned to you in an earlier letter, the used book is economically odd: despite age and lack of rarity, it does not depreciate with age. In fact, it is the contrary: if you take good care of this book, in a few years, because it is a first paperback printing, it will go up in value.

That undiminishing richness is of course due to a paperback’s inner wealth, all those little black markings. They inhabit a book the way a soul inhabits a body. Books, like people, can’t be reduced to the cost of the materials with which they were made. Books, like people, become unique and precious once you get to know them.

That cultural glory, the used paperback, is perfectly represented here by Flannery O’Connor. Neither new nor aged, but rather enduring, she is the typical glittering treasure to be found in a used bookstore. Imagine: for $4.50 I got you her collection of short stories
Everything That Rises Must Converge
. The discrepancy between price and value is laughably out of whack. What it really says is this: the object you are now holding is of such worth that to give it any price is ridiculous, so here, to emphasize the nonsense of the notion, we’ll charge you $4.50.

Flannery O’Connor was American. She was born in 1925 in Georgia and she died there in 1964 of lupus. She was only thirty-nine years old. She was religious, devoutly Catholic to be exact, but her faith was not a set of blinkers. Rather, it charged the world with God’s grace and made apparent to her the gap between the sacred and the human. By my reckoning, what O’Connor wrote about, over and over, was the Fall. Her stories are about the ruination of Paradise, about the cost of listening to snakes and reaching for apples. They are moral stories, but there’s nothing pat about them. By virtue of good writing, fine dark humour, rich characterization and compelling narrative, they sift through life without reducing it.

And so their effect. Each story feels, has the weight, of a small novel. And with no dull literariness, I assure you. You’ll see for yourself. Start on any one of them and a character will quickly reach out from the page, grab you by the arm and pull you along. These stories are engrossing. After each, you will feel that you have lived longer, that you have a greater experience of life, that you are wiser. They are dark stories. In every one, either a son hates his mother or a mother despairs over her useless sons, or it might be a grandfather or a father who is despairing. And the end result, besides highly entertaining, is invariably tragic. Hence the wisdom given off. It’s nearly a mathematical equation: reader + story of folly = wiser reader.