101 Letters to a Prime Minister (12 page)

Yet
The Cellist
is a directed and digested take on reality, it’s not journalism. There is subtle intent woven into the realistic
narrative of its three main characters. You will see that when you read the last line of the novel, which is magnificent.

Yours truly,

Yann Martel

S
TEVEN
G
ALLOWAY
(b. 1975) is a Canadian novelist whose work has been translated into more than twenty languages. Besides
The Cellist of Sarajevo
, he has written the novels
Finnie Walsh
and
Ascension
. Galloway teaches creative writing at Simon Fraser University and the University of British Columbia.

Dear Mr. Harper,

Like you, Marcus Aurelius was a head of government. In AD 161, he became Emperor of Rome, the last of the “five good emperors”—Nerva, Trajan, Hadrian, Antoninus Pius, Marcus Aurelius—who ruled over an eighty-four-year period of peace and prosperity that lasted from
AD
96 to 180, the Roman Empire’s golden apogee.

The case of Rome is worth studying. How a small town on a river became the centre of one of the mightiest empires the world has known, eventually dominating thousands of other small towns on rivers, is a source of many lessons. That Rome was mighty is not to be doubted. The sheer size the empire achieved is breathtaking: from the Firth of Forth to the Euphrates, from the Tagus to the Rhine, spilling over into Northern Africa, for a time the Romans ruled over most of the world known to them. What they didn’t rule over wasn’t worth
having, they felt: they left what was beyond their frontiers to “barbarians.”

Another measure of their greatness can be found in the Roman influences that continue to be felt to this day. Rome’s local lingo, Latin, became the mother language of most of Europe, and Italian, French, Spanish and Portuguese are still spoken all over the world. (The Germanic hordes beyond the Rhine, meanwhile, have managed to sponsor only one international language, albeit a successful one, English.) We also owe the Romans our calendar, with its twelve months and 365-and-a-quarter-day years; three days in our week hark back to three Roman days—Moonday, Saturnday and Sunday; and though we now use the Roman number system (i, ii, iii, iv, v, vi …) only occasionally, we use their 26-letter alphabet constantly.

Despite their power and might, another lesson about the Roman Empire forces itself upon us: how it’s all gone. The Romans reigned far and wide for centuries but now their empire has vanished entirely. A Roman today is simply someone who lives in Rome, a city that is beautiful because of its clutter of ruins. Such has been the fate of all empires: the Roman, the Ottoman, the British, the Soviet, to name only a few European empires. Which will be the next empire to fall, the next to rise?

The interest in reading Marcus Aurelius’s
Meditations
, the book I am sending you this time, lies as much in their content as in the knowledge of who wrote them. European history has got us used to seeing one monarch after another reach the throne for no reason other than direct filial relation, with talent and ability playing no role. Thus the unending line of mediocre personalities—to put it charitably—who came to rule and mismanage so many European nations. This was not Marcus Aurelius’s route to power. Although he inherited the throne from Emperor Antoninus Pius, he was not Pius’s biological son.

Nor was he elected. He was rather selected. Roman emperors did pass on their emperorship to their sons, but this linkage was rarely directly biological. They instead designated their successors by a system that was authoritarian yet flexible: adoption. Marcus Aurelius became emperor as a result of being adopted by the reigning emperor. Each emperor chose whom he wanted as his successor from among the many capable and competing members of Rome’s diverse elite class. Members of that class were often related, but they still had to prove themselves if they wanted to move up in the world.

In that, Roman society was much like the modern democracies of today, with an educated, principled elite that sought to perpetuate the system and, with it, itself. The Rome of then, in some ways, doesn’t seem so different from the Ottawa, Washington or London of today. After the alien abyss, frankly, that is much European history, with the Europeans thinking and behaving in ways that are close to unfathomable by contemporary standards, it is a surprise to see, nearly two thousand years ago, a people who thought and fought and squabbled and had principles which they squandered, and so on—why, a people seemingly just like us. Hence the endless interest of Roman history.

So Marcus Aurelius was a man of great ability selected to be Roman emperor. In other words, he was a politician, and, like you, a busy one; he spent much of his time battling barbarian hordes on the frontiers of the empire. But at the same time, he was a thinking man—with a penchant for philosophy—who put his thoughts down on the page. He was a writer.

Emperor Marcus Aurelius was a Stoic and some of his pronouncements are on the gloomy side: “Soon you will have forgotten the world, and soon the world will have forgotten you,” is a fairly typical pronouncement of his. There is much made
in these meditations on the ephemerality of the body, of fame, of empires, of pretty well everything. Over and over, Marcus Aurelius exhorts himself to higher standards of thinking and behaving. It’s bracing, salutary stuff. In many ways, it’s the perfect book for you, Mr. Harper. A practical book on thinking, being and acting by a philosopher-king.

It’s also not the sort of book one reads right through from page 1 to page 163. It has no continuous narrative or developing argument. The
Meditations
are rather self-contained musings divided into twelve books, each book divided into numbered points that range in length from a single sentence to a few paragraphs. The book lends itself to being dipped into at random. My suggestion is that each time you open and read it, you put a dot next to the meditations you read. That way, over time, you will read all of them.

Yours truly,

Yann Martel

M
ARCUS
A
URELIUS
(121–180
CE
) wrote his
Meditations
in Greek while on military campaigns during 170–180
CE
. In them, he stresses the importance of government service, duty, endurance, abstinence, surrendering to Providence and achieving detachment from things beyond one’s control.

Dear Mr. Harper,

Valentine’s Day was just a few days ago and we’ve had a long cold snap here in Saskatchewan—two good reasons to send you something warming.

Anaïs Nin—such a lovely name—lived between 1903 and 1977 and she was the author of a number of novels that remain unknown to me:
Ladders to Fire, Children of the Albatross, The Four-Chambered Heart, A Spy in the House of Love
and
Solar Barque
form a five-volume
roman-fleuve
entitled
Cities of the Interior
(1959). She also published the novels
House of Incest
(1936),
The Seduction of the Minotaur
(1961) and
Collages
(1964), and a collection of short stories,
Under a Glass Bell
. The only pleasure these have given me has been to wonder what they are about. What story would a novel called
Solar Barque
tell? What was the
Albatross
and who were her
Children
?

Nin is better known for her published diaries, which covered every decade of her life except the first (and she missed that one
only by a year, since she started her diary when she was eleven years old). She was born in France, lived in the United States for many years, she was beautiful and cosmopolitan, and she came to know many interesting and famous people, the writer Henry Miller among them, all of whom she discussed and dissected in her diary. Her diary’s importance lies in the fact that female voices have often been silenced or ignored—still are—and an extended female monologue covering the first half of the twentieth century is rare.

And Anaïs Nin also wrote erotica. Hot stuff. Kinky stuff. Pages full of women who are wet not because it’s raining and men who are hard not because they’re cruel.
Artists and Models
, which contains two stories from her collections of erotic writings
Delta of Venus
and
Little Birds
, is the latest book I’m sending you. It may leave you cold, Mr. Harper, reading about Mafouka the hermaphrodite painter from Montparnasse and her lesbian roommates or about the sexual awakening of a painter’s model in New York, but it bears noting that while covering our loins and our hearts with clothes is often useful—it’s minus 23 degrees Celsius outside as I write these words—there is the risk that they are also hiding, perhaps burying, an essential part of us, one that does not think but rather feels. Clothes are the commonest trappings of vanity. When we are naked, we are honest. That is the essential quality of these lustful stories of Nin, embellished or wholly invented though they may be: their honesty. They say: this is part of who we are—deny it, and you are denying yourself.

Yours truly,

Yann Martel

A
NAÏS
N
IN
(1903–1977) was born in Paris, raised in the United States and identified herself as a Catalan-Cuban-French author. Nin was a prolific novelist, short story writer and diarist, best known for her multi-volume
Diary
. She was also one of the greatest writers of female erotica, and is famous for her affairs with notable individuals including Henry Miller and Gore Vidal.

Dear Mr. Harper,

Curiously, the book that I am sending you this early March, a play, only the second dramatic work I’ve sent you, is one that I don’t actually like. It has always irked me. Which is not to say that it is not a good play, indeed, a great play. In fact, that it continues to irk me confirms its greatness in a way, because if I said to you confidently, “This is a masterpiece,” that would imply I had a settled view of it, a fixed understanding, and that the play stood for me like a statue on a pedestal: lofty, staid and undisturbing. Samuel Beckett’s
Waiting for Godot
is none of these.

To further confirm that I’m wrong in my view of
Godot
, I’ll say that despite being written in the late 1940s, the play will not feel dated when you read it. This is a significant achievement. Plays, to state the obvious, are made up of dialogue. There is no surrounding prose to supply context. You might think the setting of a play would be the equivalent of the description in a novel that sets up the story, but that is not the case. Many historical plays
and operas are restaged in settings that their playwrights and composers would never have imagined, and no meaning is lost. Shakespeare’s
Macbeth
does not need a castle in the background to make sense to theatregoers. The meaning and development of a play is entirely carried on the shoulders of its dialogue. But the way we speak changes over time, and quickly words and expressions that were current to the playwright sound old-fashioned to us today.

Moreover, plays are exclusively concerned with relationships, with the feelings between characters, revealed in what they say to each other and how they behave, and some relationships have also changed over the course of history. Lastly, plays are precisely, literally situated, the actors wearing costumes and moving about settings that we actually see, as opposed to imagining them in prose. How these last two points make most plays a more perishable product than most prose will be made clear if you think back to old television shows. Do you remember the 1970s American television series
Bewitched
, Mr. Harper, about a witch named Samantha who lives in suburbia with her husband, Darrin, and their daughter, Tabitha? I lapped it up when I was a kid. A few years ago I happened to see an episode again—and I was appalled. The sexism struck me as egregious, what with Darrin always trying to prevent Samantha from using her magic and Samantha, being the good, docile housewife, always trying to comply. And the way they dressed and their hairdos—that at least was innocently laughable. You get my point. What was fresh and funny then is now old and embarrassing. Women are now more free to use their magic, and we dress differently. By capturing so exactly a time, a place and a lingo, many plays are as fleeting as newspapers.

It is a mighty playwright who manages to speak to his or her time and also to ours. Shakespeare does it, toweringly. That a
student doesn’t know what a “thane” is, that kings don’t rule in 2008 the way they ruled in 1608 in no way affects the power and meaning of the Scottish play today.
Waiting for Godot
has also managed to speak to all times, so far. Despite premiering in 1953, the antics, musings and worries of Vladimir and Estragon will likely strike you as funny, puzzling, insightful, maddening and still current.

The play is about the human condition, which in Beckett’s pared-down vision of it means that the play is mostly about nothing. Two men, the ones just mentioned, Didi and Gogo familiarly, wait around because they believe they have an appointment with a certain Godot. They wait around and talk and despair, are twice interrupted by two crazies by the names of Pozzo and Lucky, and then they go back to waiting around, talking and despairing. That’s pretty well it. No plot, no real development, no final point. The setting is also mostly nothing: just a single, solitary tree along an empty country road. The only props of note are boots, bowler hats and a rope.