101 Letters to a Prime Minister (35 page)

As you’ve probably figured out by now, I’m not Yann. My name is Steven, and I’m a writer from Vancouver. Yann sent you one of my books,
The Cellist of Sarajevo
. I hope you liked it. If you didn’t, thanks for not letting on. Our friend Yann is out on the road promoting his new book,
Beatrice and Virgil
, and he’s asked me to fill in for him. I’m happy to do so, because
I fancy myself a helpful sort of guy, and because even though a lot of writer types think Yann is tilting at windmills in sending you these books, I like to think that maybe you look at some of them, and maybe you read or have already read some of them, and that no one, anywhere, would think that receiving seventy-five free books in the mail with a letter from an internationally renowned author would be a bad thing. In a way, you’re in what must be the world’s most exclusive book club, albeit somewhat unwillingly. I bet Mr. Obama is jealous!

There’s a band from Winnipeg called the Weakerthans that I really like. They have a song called “Night Windows,” written by John K. Samson, that is about the sensation you get when you think you see someone who’s died, and for a moment, before you remember that person isn’t alive any more, you feel about them the way you felt when they were alive, you see them as they were when they were alive, and for that moment it’s as if they never died. This sensation, which is rare and wonderful and sometimes sad, is why I love reading. It’s also for this reason that I’ve chosen to send you Paul Quarrington’s novel
King Leary
.

It’s a hockey novel. One of our best ones. I read somewhere that you like hockey, and recently saw you on TV at the gold-medal game sitting next to Wayne Gretzky. That must have been a fun experience. I was at home sitting next to my aunt and a guy named Jay and it was still pretty great. Anyhow, in the novel, Percival “King” Leary was once the best player in the NHL. He won the cup in 1919, scoring the winning goal after dodging Newsy Lalonde and executing a perfect St. Louis Whirligig. Except for a glass of champagne on that occasion, he has never in his life drank alcohol. His beverage of choice is ginger ale, which he maintains makes him drunker than anything else ever could. The novel opens with him as an old man in a rest home with his pal, newspaperman Blue Hermann. He’s
offered a whopping sum of money to go to Toronto to make an ad for a ginger ale company. The story unfolds from there, and I don’t want to ruin it for you, but our King is in poor health, and he has demons in his life that he’s been trying to keep at bay but which are catching up to him. He has many moments where he sees the dead, and in his case the dead have much to say about the way in which he’s lived his life. It’s a funny novel, a sad novel, and the sort of novel that only a Canadian would write.

Paul Quarrington died recently of cancer. He was only fifty-six. He was a terrific guy. Sometimes, reading his work, I feel for a second like he’s still alive. Most people never knew Paul, or any living or dead author for that matter, but when you read a book you often have that moment Samson describes—I bet the Germans have a name for it—with a voice in your life, or the collective lives of everyone. I suppose a cynical person would call it a sort of nostalgia, but I like to think of it as a reminder. A reminder of how things were or are or could be.

Sometimes these reminders cost billions of dollars. Take the Olympics. Though I’m not a fan of the cronyism that accompanies them, I think the stories they create, and their illustration of the bond we share as Canadians, make that money well spent. But there are other ways to do this as well, ways that don’t fizzle if Crosby doesn’t score in overtime (phew). Books are one of the best examples of this, and they’re a whole lot less expensive. Sometimes free. I hope you like
King Leary
.

Sincerely,

Steven Galloway

P
AUL
Q
UARRINGTON
(1953–2010) was the author often novels, including
Whale Music, King Leary, Galveston
and
The Ravine
. He was also a musician (most recently in the band Porkbelly Futures), an award-winning screenwriter and filmmaker and an acclaimed non-fiction writer.

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,

Books, like people, can get overlooked. I’d like to use this slot, so generously offered by Yann, to tell you about a wonderful Canadian work of fiction that still awaits real discovery. Ray Smith’s
Century
first appeared back in 1986, and didn’t cause much fuss. It had a decent publisher, and Smith had already released two books that had won him a small but noisy crowd of admirers:
Lord Nelson Tavern
and the humbly titled
Cape Breton Is the Thought-Control Centre of Canada
. These were charming, off-the-wall fictions, of a cheerful piece with the prankster stuff then emerging from the coastal regions of the United States. Smith, a Cape Bretoner exiled to Montreal, had his own coastal vibe, but it wasn’t stoner/surfer cool: it was late-night FM radio, chill and iconoclastic, joshing of mainstream tastes with bite but no malice.

Still,
Century
didn’t launch. It took Ray Smith a long time to finish, and it wasn’t as easy in its literary skin as his earlier work:
more moody and anxious, less sanguine about the triumph of light over dark. It was also set mostly in Europe, and spanned a near-century in just 165 compacted, almost pointillist pages. Things had changed in Canadian culture and literature in the interim, and Smith responded by, in a sense, going even further offshore than the island he comes from (and where he now lives again, in retirement). Whatever
Century
was, it wasn’t “CanLit,” as the impulse or industry was being dubbed.

I called it a “work of fiction” for a reason. The book, which has six parts linked by a single character and regular tonal overlaps, could be classified as a novel of the, yikes, postmodern variety. But, besides having no interest in any desiccated academic trope, the stories are all self-contained, as in a collection. Even Smith’s one discernible theme—how art must embody the morality largely absent from a corrupted world—isn’t writ in BLOCK LETTERS so everyone will get it.
Century
defies categories and shrugs off expectations. Look, says the text, of course this isn’t life; of course it’s just a book. Allow these elegantly arranged words to fall over you, confetti at a wedding, and then decide what the marriage is composed of.

“Matter of fact,” one admirer recently observed, “the textures [of the prose] may be the meanings; Smith has too much respect for language, and too little patience with theme-speak, to insist any overarching concerns upon these smart, bright words. At moments, he may even be counting on musicality to serve as medium and message alike.” Actually, I wrote that about
Century
, for a preface to a new edition published in 2009. Dan Wells, editor of Biblioasis in southern Ontario, has been both reissuing old Ray Smith books and supporting his newer ones. I won’t say Biblioasis has been overlooked as well, but both these men are original, nervy literary sorts, operating from either the margins, if you insist on drawing the cultural map
that way, or simply from where they need to be, as artists and publishers, in order to consider their day’s—or life’s—work worthwhile. I’m most happy to include my last copy of the Biblioasis
Century
with this note.

Sincerely,

Charlie Foran

R
AY
S
MITH
(b. 1941) is a novelist and short story writer. He was born in Cape Breton, Nova Scotia, and taught English in Montreal. Smith is also the author of
Cape Breton Is the Thought-Control Centre of Canada, Lord Nelson Tavern
and
The Man Who Loved Jane Austen
.

C
HARLES
F
ORAN
(b. 1960) is the author of ten books, including the novels
Carolan’s Farewell
and
House on Fire
, as well as an award-winning biography of Mordecai Richler, a biography of Maurice Richard and the award-winning non-fiction work
The Last House of Ulster
. Born and raised in Toronto, he holds degrees from the University of Toronto and University College Dublin, and has taught in China, Hong Kong and Canada. A former resident of Montreal, he currently resides with his family in Peterborough, Ontario.

Dear Mr. Harper,

Yann came up with the idea to send you a book every two weeks nearly three years ago. I remember the moment it happened. We were walking together along the river in Saskatoon. He’d just got back from his visit to Ottawa and was deeply troubled that the anniversary of the Canada Council had been so unimportant to Canada’s politicians. Yann, like most writers, lives and breathes books—both those he reads and those he writes. He wanted to share that passion with you.

And so we walked along the river, the sun shining as it so often does in Saskatchewan, when Yann came up with the thought that perhaps if he sent you a book every two weeks, you might read one or two of them. He was excited and I was disparaging. I thought it would take up too many hours. Yann decided to choose short books out of respect for your time, and
to include a letter with each book explaining why he chose it. He reads, or rereads, every book he sends you and carefully writes his letters to you.

Along the way, I think Yann has rediscovered the joy of reading widely. As a successful writer, he often only had time to read for research. But now I see him sitting up late at night, turning the pages, kidnapped by Pearl S. Buck or dazzled by Zora Neale Hurston. He sent you my own personal favourite—
Property
, by Valerie Martin—fairly recently. My own bookshelves have been somewhat depleted by Yann’s ferocious hunt for books.

It took me a while to know what to choose to send you, as many of the books under two hundred pages that I’d already discussed with Yann have long since left the house and arrived in Ottawa. But I notice that Yann hasn’t given you much children’s literature, and so it seemed to me that
Charlotte’s Web
, by E. B. White, would perhaps interest you. I suspect you’ve already read it, but it certainly bears rereading. I’d say most of E. B. White’s words hold up well to being reread.

Elwyn Brooks White was born in the final year of the nineteenth century. The son of a piano manufacturer, he went to Cornell University where he took a course with Professor William S. Strunk Jr. Years later, White edited, revised and added to Strunk’s
The Elements of Style
—an extraordinary book that every writer should have close to hand. It is full of bossy tips on how to write well. I’m lucky enough to have an illustrated edition. It has stood on my bookshelf for years. Writing to you now reminds me that I’d like to read it again. One of the joys of reading books is that, inevitably, they lead you to read other books. They are road maps to onward journeys. Just as
Charlotte’s Web
leads me to
The Elements of Style
, so, hopefully, it will lead you to another book.

It’s not entirely clear when White decided he wanted to be a writer, but it’s known that he turned down a teaching job with the University of Minnesota to pursue that goal when he was in his early twenties. By 1927, he was a contributing editor at
The New Yorker
, the magazine with which he was associated until his death. His wife was an editor there. He wrote many brilliant essays (a collection of which lies next to my bed) and from there went on to write
Charlotte’s Web
(among other books). All this to say that writing was his life. It permeated White’s family, his work and his thoughts. Writing does that to some people. He wrote, “All that I ever hope to say in books is that I love the world. I guess you can find it in there, if you dig around.”

I love that he wrote that. I love it because it speaks directly to the pleasure you will get from
Charlotte’s Web
. White worried that the book would be too low-key for most kids with its simple, delightful evocation of life (and death) on a farm. Yet every carefully placed word (heeding Strunk’s demand in
The Elements of Style
that we O
MIT UNNECESSARY WORDS!)
hums with White’s pleasure at being alive.

The story is about Wilbur the pig and Fern, an eight-year-old girl, and their animal friends, Templeton the rat, a goose, a sheep and, above all, Charlotte the spider. Wilbur is a sweet, innocent pig who discovers that he is being fattened up to be killed. He doesn’t want to die. As he says, “I just love it here in the barn.… I love everything about this place.” And so Charlotte puts her mind to working out a way to save him. She uses her web to write words to the people in Wilbur’s life. Words such as TERRIFIC or SOME PIG. The image of the farmhand coming to pour the slops, stopping in disbelief as he stares at the dewy web inscribed with the words SOME PIG, is etched into my mind, as the words on the web are etched into the consciousness of those who control Wilbur’s destiny.

Don’t be fooled. The simplicity of the language, the bucolic setting, the folksy animals, all build to Charlotte’s swan song—a swan song to her friend the pig which is, at the same time, White’s swan song to a way of life, written in the most elegant language. Charlotte using her strength to write those words in the web reminds me of how essential words can be.
Charlotte’s Web
is a testament to the power of language, both in its tale and its telling.