The Glorious Disorder of Michael Ondaatje’s Early Work
In an interview with the Times, earlier this year, Clint Bentley, the Oscar-nominated director and screenwriter of the film “Train Dreams,” was asked to name his “favorite book that no one else has heard of.” Bentley’s answer? Michael Ondaatje’s “The Collected Works of Billy the Kid,” from 1970. Bentley described the book, which combines prose, poetry, and photographs, as “hard to categorize.” He added that, despite its obscurity, he had eventually come across someone else who had read it.
I must be in the minority, because all my friends (each one of them, for good or ill, writers or visual artists) have read that book. We routinely talk about its boldness and inventiveness. But Ondaatje’s best-known work, the first of his that I read, the one that made him an international star, was the novel “The English Patient,” published in 1992. It won the Booker Prize that year, and the marvellous screen adaptation, by Anthony Minghella, won the Oscar for Best Picture in 1997.
I got my first job as an assistant professor around the time that “The English Patient” came out—in those years, for people of the “tinted persuasion” (the phrase is Salman Rushdie’s), it was easy to find an entry into English departments in the U.S. if you wanted to teach post-colonial literature. “The English Patient” was a gift to my curriculum. The novel allowed me to foreground the politics of otherness artfully. My students and I discussed its critique of narrow nationalism—the conviction, expressed by the explorer Almásy, that “we are deformed by nation-states.”
What makes this idea more powerful, and even poignant, is the appearance, in the book, of Kirpal Singh, an Indian combat engineer, or sapper, who goes by Kip. He is defusing bombs that the Germans have left behind in the Italian countryside, the immediate setting for the novel. In this drama of war between the imperial powers, Kip acts as a moral agent. He is devastated by the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. When reminded that the English patient isn’t really English, Kip replies, “American, French, I don’t care. When you start bombing the brown races of the world, you’re an Englishman.” In other words, there is difference, and then there is difference.
There was another way that “The English Patient” was of help to me. I was still young when I read it, and falling in love. “The heart,” the novel taught me, “is an organ of fire.” Ondaatje’s language was piercingly lyrical; I was keenly attentive to its precision regarding what, in academic seminars, got called “the representation of desire.” Theory, much of it unintelligible, was enjoying its moment of dominance in literature classrooms; “The English Patient,” in contrast, was about bodies, at war and in love; it dealt with emotional conflict and striking sensual details. I carried in my head bits of the novel, such as the question that the English patient asks his fellow-explorer: “Madox, what is the name of that hollow at the base of a woman’s neck? At the front. Here. What is it, does it have an official name? That hollow about the size of an impress of your thumb?” (Late in the novel, the answer that I had been curious about arrived: the hollow was, in the world of the book, called the vascular sizood.) Kip and a Canadian nurse, Hana, fall in love in an abandoned Italian villa; they are “discovering that in lovemaking there can be a whole civilisation, a whole country ahead of them.” I was a new immigrant in love, and, reading such words, I imagined sexual love as a new country.
Born in Sri Lanka to parents of Tamil, Dutch, and Sinhalese ancestry, Ondaatje is alert to his mixed identity and, it can easily be argued, has made it a part of his literary output. As a young boy, he immigrated to England and then, in his late teens, moved to Quebec. Still later, he taught in London, Ontario, and then in Toronto. In the decades prior to the publication of “The English Patient,” he was involved in collaborative literary publishing in Ontario, as a participant in the work of the avant-garde Coach House Press, and in the editing and production of the literary magazine Brick. Long before I learned of him, his poetry and fiction had received some of Canada’s major literary prizes, such as the Governor General’s Award, which he won multiple times, for both poetry and fiction, including “The Collected Works of Billy the Kid.”
In the years after the success of “The English Patient,” I, like many others, began to read Ondaatje’s earlier work. I cannot recall exactly my first response to “The Collected Works of Billy the Kid.” Did I find it disorienting? Perhaps I did. It was different from “The English Patient,” although there were continuities, such as in the use of archival materials. In “The Collected Works,” the reader encounters period photographs and brief poems and vignettes shaped from found objects and history. The sentences here are often short, with flinty speech seemingly farmed from Westerns: gory bits mixed with a kind of native poetry, a ground-level mythology that makes rough music on the page. Here, for instance, is how the outlaw known as William H. Bonney, or Billy the Kid, describes the killing of a man named Gregory:
For some archival photographs, the image itself was missing, but a description was included. There had been a portrait that may have depicted the real-life Billy, and it could have been used, but Ondaatje was advised by his poet friend bpNichol to leave the space blank. In an essay for Brick, Ondaatje described bpNichol’s telling him, “Keep the lines, but take out the photo—let the reader imagine him”—advice that immediately appealed to Ondaatje’s aesthetic. But all this I learned much later; when I first read the book, I had to imagine not just what Billy the Kid looked like but also the author’s motivations and choices.
The next book of Ondaatje’s that I read was his first novel, “Coming Through Slaughter,” from 1976. It tells the story of one of history’s legendary jazz players, Buddy Bolden, in New Orleans at the turn of the last century. Bolden works as a barber during the day, and as a cornet player at night. Here again, in this slim book, the narrative unfolds in fragments, every sentence drawing you deeper into the delights of language. I didn’t entirely grasp its movements, and I’m not embarrassed to admit that, despite my incomplete understanding, I put the book on the syllabus for a course on novellas. I wanted my students to get in touch with the book’s defiant incompleteness—and also its wholeness. It was important that they understood how lovely and improvisatory and unexpected everything was, page after page.
Academia teaches order. It wants conventional form; it rewards linearity (preferably accompanied by footnotes). In the first paragraph, you state what you are going to explore in the rest of the paper, and you repeat things when you reach your conclusion. Also, you are required to be consistent; you are not allowed to switch from prose to poetry to photographs. Even when I didn’t fully understand “Coming Through Slaughter,” I felt that Ondaatje could teach my students how to break the mold into which they thought all writing had to be poured. And, in teaching, I also wanted to teach myself to be audacious in my own writing. For me, the early challenge and lesson was always to try to grasp the poetic mystery of the collage form—the elusive instinct that guided Ondaatje to paste torn strips of narrative to make a surprising whole.
And then I read his memoir, “Running in the Family,” from 1982, the pages of which are peopled with characters of exquisite and eccentric charm. The book enacts, as if on a stage, the wild antics of Ondaatje’s alcoholic father, and his grandmother’s adventures during his childhood in Sri Lanka (“the island as we know it now, a pendant off the ear of India”). Its narrative takes the form of travel writing mixed with other reminiscences and interviews. There are old photographs, as if from a family album, and poems. It was in this book’s pages that I first read Ondaatje’s superb love poem “The Cinnamon Peeler,” which must rank as one of the most aromatic and ardent statements of sexual intent in the history of literature. (I’ve heard that this poem has been read at weddings, and has led, in at least one instance, to a grandmother fainting as she listened to the display of passion, a story that itself seems to have come right out of the pages of “Running in the Family.”) I began to see how each of Ondaatje’s books—poetic, expert, insouciant—pushed at and past the formal limits of expression.
And so, readerly understanding began to work in the other direction: the early work became the lens through which I understood later works, such as “The English Patient.” I had been drawn to that novel’s collision of origins and backgrounds (Ondaatje’s own word for this is “mongrelism”), but I came to value ever more the brilliance, the daring of its narrative structure, its risky use of gaps and mystery and silence.
Years later, I read a distillation of this principle in another book of Ondaatje’s, “The Conversations,” from 2002, a series of discussions with the film editor Walter Murch, who had won two Academy Awards for his work on “The English Patient.” In one passage, Ondaatje describes watching a film in which the cuts between scenes are done in such a way that each scene is “complete,” each one whole in itself. This, he writes, was dissatisfying. The reflections that follow reveal a near-mathematical formula through which Murch cuts a given scene—he holds back about one-fifth of the narrative, making a story that suddenly feels much more compelling because it requires our careful attention in order to be understood.
“The Conversations” clarified, for me, the fact that editing—the cutting of scenes—has been a, perhaps the, crucial part of Ondaatje’s writing. Cuts are even more visible in his poetry than in his fiction, more necessary to it. The whole business of poetry, the line breaks and stanzas, puts emphasis on imaginative edits and collaging. What Ondaatje went on to do was to smuggle such techniques into prose fiction, concealing them in plain sight, so that we move forward in our seats and listen more carefully.
Ondaatje’s interest in editing may also have roots in another facet of his career: the low-budget, experimental documentary films that he made in the nineteen-seventies. The most accomplished of these, “The Clinton Special” (1974), follows a group of actors from the Toronto-based Theatre Passe Muraille (Theatre Beyond Walls) who go into a rural Ontario community and produce a play based on what they see and hear from the people there. The actors are engaged in a difficult but heady experiment, and we get so caught up in watching them that we are liable to forget that Ondaatje is doing the same in his film.
A writer’s beginnings are obscure, and often banal. In “Running in the Family,” Ondaatje recalls his earliest encounters with writing. At St. Thomas’ College Boy School in Sri Lanka, he had been made to write lines, in Sinhala, as punishment for some schoolboy infraction or another. A hundred and fifty times: “We must not urinate again on Father Barnabus’ tires.” A hundred and fifty times: “I must not throw coconuts off the roof of Copplestone House.” Rote learning, repetitive writing, the curse of a colonial education. From those unpromising beginnings, Ondaatje found, in his writing, newness and, in language, a certain freedom. Later, for writers like me, who had crossed borders to arrive in the West and often made that crossing the subject of our work, Ondaatje’s example, particularly his disregard for the established boundaries through which genres were defined, taught us to spell out our own liberation in a similar fashion. It wasn’t enough to exchange one passport for another—to be a real writer you had to take risks and invent new forms. ♦