101 Letters to a Prime Minister (39 page)

Yours truly,

Yann Martel

A
SHTON
G
REY
(1983–2011) was a Canadian writer, author of the novella
Sweet Home Chicago
and contributor to
Bound for Glory
magazine.

Dear Mr. Harper,

“Art is heart.” My uncle Vince, a photographer, said that once. What he meant is that expression that is not rooted in emotion, or that does not evoke emotion, is not art. Art can, of course, make one think. Art that aims to last should do that at least in part, since emotions tend to froth up mightily but then fade, while a thought can calmly stay in the mind for a lifetime. A thought can be fully revived simply by the act of thinking, while an emotion remembered is far more tepid than an emotion felt. A story that is all emotion, a romance, say, may move, but it will be quickly forgotten as it will leave nothing for the mind to mull over. Nonetheless, despite the perishability of emotion and the cool immortality of thought, it is emotion that marks us most. Nothing goes deeper than emotion, and after that, at a shallower level, we think. Thinking that is significant may trigger an emotion. Remember Archimedes shouting “Eureka!” (great emotion)
after his discovery that a submerged object will displace its equivalent volume of water (great thought). Which do we remember most? I think it’s that cry and that image of the exultant man running down the streets of Syracuse naked after jumping out of his bath.

Anne Carson’s
Autobiography of Red
, then. Anne Carson is a Canadian academic. She holds a Ph.D. from the University of Toronto and is a classics scholar who has taught at UC Berkeley, at Princeton, at McGill, among other universities. Which is very impressive—but not, I would argue, an ideal background for a poet. Universities do wonders for dead poets, teaching them and therefore keeping them alive, but they’re deadly for living poets. It’s pretty well impossible to make a living as a poet, so many poets have sought shelter in universities, earning degrees from them and then teaching there. I don’t know why that is so. Why wouldn’t poets seek shelter in plumbing or farming? Whoever determined that poets should have soft, uncallused hands? The damage universities have done to poetry stems from the kind of thinking that thrives in these institutions, and which is indeed necessary if they are to produce quality scholarship: thinking that is rigorous, codified, impersonal. Such hyper-thinking tends to kill the spontaneity, the liveliness of the poetic instinct. Walt Whitman is taught in universities, but Walt Whitman would never have survived university.

Academic cleverness is on display in Red. The first five sections—
Red Meat: What Difference Did Stesichoros Make?; Red Meat: Fragments of Stesichoros
; and then three appendices—and the last section,
Interview
, are interesting but in a puzzling, cool, clever, archly droll way. You have to know who Stesichoros is. I’d never heard of him. Then you have to care. I didn’t really. Compared to some of the other poetry I’ve sent you—
Ted Hughes’s
Birthday Letters
or
Gilgamesh
, for example—these sections are not memorable. Thank God they’re short.

But then there’s the meat of the book, the
Autobiography of Red
in question, which is by far the longest section. It’s great. It’s a novel in verse that tells the sad story of Geryon, a red monster, and his unhappy relationship with Herakles (or Hercules, as you might know him better). Geryon loves Herakles, and Herakles loves Geryon too, but in a fickle way, in a way that doesn’t accommodate Geryon’s love. So Geryon loves and suffers, while Herakles loves and cavorts about with Ancash, his Peruvian lover who loves and suffers as much at the hands of Herakles as Geryon does. The names are classical, but the setting is contemporary as are the language and the imagery. And the emotions are there. Take these lines, of Geryon and Herakles lying next to each other:

And the story ends with an astonishing image that will stay with you. I won’t ruin it by quoting it out of context. You must earn the image by reading your way to it. Then it will have its emotional impact on you. And you will perhaps be left thinking.

Yours truly,

Yann Martel

A
NNE
C
ARSON
(b. 1950) is a Canadian poet and professor of Classics, whose writing style crosses genre and form, combining poetry, translation, essay, fiction and criticism. Much of her work takes its cue from classical Greek literature. Carson has published fifteen books and garnered a list of accolades that includes the Griffin Poetry Prize and a Guggenheim Fellowship.

Dear Mr. Harper,

Perhaps you noticed that the last book I sent you, the poet Anne Carson’s
Autobiography of Red
, starts with a quotation from Gertrude Stein. That got me thinking. Every literate person has
heard of Gertrude Stein. Paris fixture for forty years; friend of Ernest Hemingway and Sherwood Anderson, of Pablo Picasso and Henri Matisse; coiner, it is said, of the term “the lost generation” to designate those American writers who were born out of the disillusionment that followed the First World War; sayer of “A rose is a rose is a rose” to debunk literary pomp and pretence; and so on—Gertrude Stein is a name that has endured. I have in mind the image of a smart, genial, open-minded woman who liked to be at the centre of things. All artists need patrons and supporters, and what a nice thing it must have been to have Gertrude Stein play that role, to be admitted into her salon in Paris in rooms full of stunning modern art, and to be offered drink and food and conversation, if one were a young and poor expatriate writer or painter. If Paris was a moveable feast, as Hemingway put it, I imagine Gertrude Stein as the hostess of that feast.

But who has
read
Gertrude Stein? Her
Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas
, which is purportedly about her lifelong companion but is in fact about both of them and their lively lives in Paris, is Stein’s best-known work. Though as biography it’s fanciful, with the facts largely filtered by a cheerfully opinionated subject, it’s still not a work of fiction. What of Stein’s true fiction? I had never read anything by her, and couldn’t even think of a title. So there, my choice was made.

I found
Three Lives
, a collection of three long stories first published in 1909 and more recently reprinted by Penguin Classics. The introduction by an American academic whetted my appetite. In it I discovered that the style of each of the stories was highly influenced by a different modern painter. So “The Good Anna” was marked by Paul Cézanne, “Melanctha” by Picasso and “The Gentle Lena” by Matisse. How odd and intriguing, I thought. In what way could brush strokes affect
the writing of words? How could the play of paint on a two-dimensional surface influence the composition of a story on a page? I settled in for a thrilling Modernist ride. I have often thought that no one has pushed and pulled the English language quite so much as the interwar writers of the last century. Hemingway, William Faulkner, James Joyce, Virginia Woolf, John Dos Passos, e. e. cummings, to mention only a smattering off the top of my head—they made English say new things in new ways. I thought I would witness such experimentation with
Three Lives
.

Well, I was disappointed, angrily disappointed. It’s all very well to have ideas and theories, and experiments do need to be made, in art as well as in science, and one should make allowances for risk-takers—but my God, what a boring book! I worked my way through “The Good Anna” and started “Melanctha,” but forty pages in my reading ground to a stupefied halt, and I gave up. Of what I read, I have this to say: there is no concern for realism in either setting or psychology; there is no eye for detail or ear for dialogue; nearly everything is told, not shown; the characters are only fitfully plausible; there is only the odd heartbeat of a plot; the language is plain and unappealing; and the repetition—which was announced as Stein’s great gambit—is as interesting as watching paint dry, which is the only link I can make between
Three Lives
and what Cézanne, Picasso and Matisse did. Most surprising to me, coming from someone I thought would be a fountain of bon mots, was the utter witlessness of Gertrude Stein’s writing. Oh yes: the racism, that too came as a surprise. I noted a few squeaks by the author of the introduction to explain it away, but I took little heed of this warning. After all, there’s that line in Hemingway’s
The Sun Also Rises
, of the character Robert Cohn, how he had “a mean Jewish streak.” That second adjective wouldn’t pass muster
nowadays. But it’s just one line among many, one line in a magnificent body of work that only there jars with its prejudice. It’s a smudge upon the timeless art made by a man who is of his time, formed and limited by its biases. And more to the point,
The Sun Also Rises
is not
The Protocols of the Elders of Zion
. The comment on Robert Cohn is a line in passing, a throwaway line in no way central to the novel. Gertrude Stein’s
Three Lives
is something else. See how this paragraph sits with you:

As for our heroine:

Rose Johnson is a proud one:

They’re a fine pair, Sam and Rose:

I like the “
perhaps
she just forgot it” and then the huffy, what-you-making-so-much-trouble-about “anyway” that follows. As for the death of a baby not being thought about for “very long,” I’d think that’d be inaccurate even of a mother gnu who’s just lost a baby gnu to a lion on an African plain, let alone of two human beings. And this tripe appears in the first two pages alone. After that, it gets no better, it goes on and on in the same register, because “Melanctha” is all about black folks as they exist in Gertrude Stein’s mind.

You perhaps see now why I stopped reading. Whatever theory of literary composition Gertrude Stein might have wanted to bring to light is buried by a thick layer of toxic racist sludge. I’m willing to forgive the odd slip of an artist if the aim of the work is high. But when the slip is central, when the slip is all you see and get, then the high aim is lost. Gertrude Stein’s book is all the more galling if you consider that she was both lesbian and Jewish, and therefore, you’d think, slightly more sensitive to prejudice. But no, not Gertrude Stein. Stupid, stupid woman. I see now why she has survived among readers only in her incarnation as hostess to young greats.

Why then am I sending you her book when I so loathed it? Because maybe I missed the point. Every reader has his or her limitations. Clearly I’m not up to this Penguin Classic. You might have a different opinion. Perhaps you will get something out of
Three Lives
.

But in that order of books, of writers who try something new, there’s much better than Gertrude Stein. Take Italo Calvino, for example, an Italian writer who lived between the years 1923 and 1985. I’ve chosen
Mr. Palomar
for you. Here you have a book that is plotless but fascinating, that is experimental yet rewarding, that is different without becoming tiresome, that is rooted but not restricted, that is beautiful though not in a classical way.
Mr. Palomar
is a book that charms and stimulates in equal measure. It makes you see both language and the world in a slightly different way.

It’s a hard book to describe. I suppose one could say that it’s a collection of short stories. But that’s not quite right. It is indeed divided into sections that can be read in any order, like a standard collection of short fiction. But they’re not stories, not really. They would be better described as fictional meditation pieces. In each one, the discreet, attentive, concerned Mr. Palomar has an encounter or an experience upon which he dwells. His name is the same as that of the famous observatory in California. That gives you some idea of the scale of Mr. Palomar’s musings. And yet his scale is also very small, so that sometimes his telescopic viewing becomes microscopic. There’s a pleasing harmony to that, as the very, very small, the molecular, has much the same layout as the very, very large, the cosmic, and both, to the mind, are quite dizzying in their vastness. But I’m not being concrete enough. In “The naked bosom,” Mr. Palomar is walking along a beach and he sees, up ahead, a woman lying on the sand, topless. How is he to deal with this, what should he do with his gaze, where should it go? The piece, three and a half pages long, describes the choices that come to Mr. Palomar’s mind and their ramifications. In “From the terrace,” Mr. Palomar looks out upon Rome and contemplates the significance, from a bird’s perspective, of that vast panorama of variegated roofs. In “The
albino gorilla,” Mr. Palomar wonders about the meaning of a gorilla holding onto an old tire. In “The order squamata,” the variety of reptiles, and how they live in time, is mused about. In “Serpents and skulls,” the meaning, or lack thereof, of pre-Columbian Mexican architectural motifs is discussed. And so on. The settings are varied (Rome, Paris, Barcelona, Japan, Mexico), sometimes the very large is looked at (night skies, planets, oceans), sometimes the very small (a gecko, a Japanese sand garden), throughout the language is apt and intensely evocative, and always there is a concern for the meaning of things, how
this
is related to
that
. Italo Calvino is like a spider and with his words he links the most incongruous elements so that finally everything is linked by the thin thread of a web, and order and harmony are thereby established in the universe.
Mr. Palomar
is both whimsical and philosophical, an odd mix. It’s a book that assures the reader that his or her gaze upon the world is not only important, but essential, because only in watching, in observing closely, can things be seen.