Riffing with Michael Ondaatje : A Brief Encounter with the Canadian Writer and His Imaginative Obsessions

Michael Ondaatje is wheeling me around downtown Toronto in an impressively dented Honda, looking for a new restaurant called the Angie Dickinson. The Angie Dickinson is closed; we settle for an outside table at the Boulevard Cafe, where a restaurant employee soon collars Ondaatje to tell him that her copy of his best-selling novel, “The English Patient,” has 30 pages missing. “That’s terrible,” he says, and gives her a number to call for a replacement copy.

At a dinner party the night before, I had met a number of Toronto writers and film people who fiercely claimed Ondaatje as Canadian property. Though he was born in Sri Lanka and partly educated in England, Ondaatje ( on - DAH - chay ) is a local hero in Canada, where he has produced a steady stream of poetry and prose since he moved there in the early 1960s. When “The English Patient” shared the 1992 Booker Prize, a coveted British award for fiction, it generated enormous pride in a country caught in a post-colonial bind between reverence for its Anglo American heritage and the desire to grow its own literary culture. “He was highly admired,” says Ellen Seligman, who edits Ondaatje and Margaret Atwood at McClelland & Stewart, a top Canadian publisher. “Now he’s highly admired by a lot more people.”

Evidently: During lunch our waitress hovers reverentially and apologizes for interrupting with food. Although he’s uneasy about the loss of privacy that comes with fame (“I have to take visibility lessons”), Ondaatje receives the attention with the same easy grace that earlier had him chatting with waiters about whether the new local dog-leash laws favor canines or humans.

Ondaatje considers himself a Canadian writer, whatever that means in an age when “local” has all but lost its significance and “national” may also be headed for oblivion. Only some of his poems (reprinted this year by Knopf in a handsome paperback under the title “The Cinnamon Peeler”) and his exquisite 1987 novel, “In the Skin of a Lion,” which centers on immigrant workers who built the Bloor Street Viaduct in 1920s Toronto, are set in Canada. Although a sense of place and time are crucial to all his work, Ondaatje’s books are bounded more by the geography of his imaginative obsessions than by any home turf.

“The Collected Works of Billy the Kid” (1974) rereads the American Western icon the author loved as a child in Sri Lanka, in a wild collage of prose, poetry and photographs mixed with archival material woven into fake interviews. “In Coming Through Slaughter” (1976), Ondaatje abolishes the borders between fact and fiction to put his own delirious spin on the life of Buddy Bolden, a Southern jazz musician who went mad during a parade in 1920s New Orleans. “I always wanted to be Fats Waller,” says the writer, who is a jazz fanatic. “I still want to be Fats Waller.”

Lunch with Ondaatje is like an extended surf through a vast Internet thick with bulletin boards for language, literature, world politics, pop culture and stand-up comedy, with the least-clicked icon being the collected works of Michael Ondaatje. He has a passionately associative mind that’s triggered by the slightest stimulus--everything reminds him of something else.

I remark that his writing reminds me of John Fowles’, and off he goes. “A friend of mine with a dog bought ‘The French Lieutenant’s Woman.’ He was touching it and bonding with it, and when he went out the dog ate the book. So he bought another copy, and the dog ate that one too. The third copy survived on a high shelf.” On his friend, the novelist Kazuo Ishiguro (“The Remains of the Day”): “He’s the funniest man in the world. When he was here I took him to a mad church--it’s not officially mad yet, but it’s going mad--and they had this bizarre event where they bless all the animals. We took our dog.” On Faulkner: “He’s the funniest writer in America. I wanted to write a thesis once on the animals in Faulkner.” We’re talking about media language, and he remembers that the attack on Grenada was referred to on television as a pre-dawn vertical insertion. “Someone said, ‘Oh, that sounds lovely.’ ” Which in turn reminds him of a scene in the Polish movie “A Year of the Quiet Sun,” in which an American man and a Polish woman must declare their love through an interpreter. “Honestly, it’s the most devastatingly brutal scene.” He offers to sing me the entire score of “High Society.”

And so on and delightfully on. But if I want to know why people in his novels repeatedly suffer random reversals of fortune, he tosses me a bone about the randomness of life in the 20th Century and grows terribly interested in his lamb tenderloin and Chilean Chardonnay.

*

Ondaatje’s work has been available in the United States for 20 years, but it’s “The English Patient,” which quickly became an international bestseller and was optioned for a movie by the Saul Zaentz Company, that has brought him name recognition outside Canada. His new fame keeps him so busy that pinning him down for an interview has been about as easy as drafting a free-trade agreement--which might not have been the case a year ago.

Zaentz has summoned him to San Francisco for a script conference with English writer-director Anthony Minghella (“Truly, Madly, Deeply”), who is adapting the screenplay and will direct the movie. After that, Ondaatje flies to Italy to accept an award for “The English Patient,” then on to London for the publication of his wife’s second novel and to the Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics at the Naropa Institute in Boulder, Colo., to hobnob with the likes of Allen Ginsberg and Hubert Selby Jr. Not bad for one whose end-of-term reports at an English boys’ school in the early 1960s pronounced him “a very pleasant boy, moderately able,” and predicted a glittering future as a customs officer.

It’s easy to see how Ondaatje’s teachers misread him. With his post-hippie gray beard and amused blue eyes, the handsome, slightly rumpled, slightly bashful 50-year-old writer comes across as an unassuming man, warm and responsive except when he suspects his personal life is about to be invaded or when an interviewer tries to tell him what his books mean--in which case he retreats behind a wall of affable reserve. Words tumble out of him in a soft accent evenly inflected with Canada, Sri Lanka and the more posh reaches of the English education system. “I hate him,” says Saul Zaentz, who clearly adores Ondaatje. “Because he’s good-looking, and he can talk and he can write, the attributes that I lack.”

Even now that he’s published, he has difficulty calling himself a writer. His laugh rolls out in self-deprecating gurgles as he tries out more grandiose titles. “An artiste. A scribe. A prophet. An auteur .” Still, Ondaatje is enjoying his expanded reading public; he shows me a letter from a San Francisco man who showed up for jury duty with “The English Patient,” only to find another prospective juror carrying her own copy and the judge apologizing for yawning because he’d been up all night reading the same book. Attending readings with him in San Francisco bookstores, says Zaentz, was almost like being with a celebrity. “He’s a wonderful reader, and he takes questions very seriously.”

Word-of-mouth and the Booker Prize aside, it’s no surprise that Ondaatje’s most recent book made the leap to bestseller. Though it’s every bit as innovative in form as the others, “The English Patient” is his most accessible work, a heart-stopping war yarn about four bruised psyches rattling around a bomb-damaged, abandoned Italian villa in 1945. At their center is the patient, a mystery man burned into a mass of blackened flesh, who lies prone under the obsessive care of Hana, a young Canadian nurse who holed up with him in the villa (a makeshift military hospital) when everyone else evacuated. They have been tracked down by Caravaggio, an Allied spy whose thumbs--along with his raffish elan--were torn off by Fascist interrogators, and joined by Kirpal (Kip) Singh, a young Sikh sapper trained by the British, who continues to comb the treacherous territory in and around the villa, dismantling a forest of bombs and land mines rigged with brilliant malice by the retreating Germans.

Alone and in shifting combinations, the lost souls of the Villa San Girolamo read and talk, forage for food, tend garden, shoot up morphine, make love and aimlessly stalk each other through the villa’s 20 rooms. Out of these routines grows a quietly crazed but truthful community, patched together in the dying months of a world war. And the English patient lies in a drug haze reliving, in flashback fragments, his love affair with a colleague’s wife in Egypt.

“ Sometimes when she is able to spend the night with him they are awakened by the three minarets of the city beginning their prayers before dawn. He walks with her through the indigo markets that lie between South Cairo and her home. The beautiful songs of faith enter the air like arrows, one minaret answering another, as if passing on a rumour of the two of them as they walk through the cold morning air, the smell of charcoal and hemp already making the air profound. Sinners in a holy city. “ --”The English Patient”

Reading Ondaatje for the first time can be a shock--in our disclaiming age, lyricism embarrasses. Ondaatje writes with the slow burn of a man who cut his teeth on poetry and unfolded from poetry to prose and back again; often the only difference is in how the text sits on the page. “The English Patient” is stuffed with scenes that wallow in their own wild beauty and drop away, apparently without advancing the story. “The avoidance of plot,” Ondaatje calls it, grinning.

True--if plot is narrowly understood as a straight line from conflict to resolution. For him, plot is an open-ended dance with multiple voices and languages; the burned man’s memory is also the author’s adventure with form, opening up a vast emotional and physical arena for four personal crises unfolding in the broader drama of world war.

As the patient remembers, the novel slips the restraints of the present and darts around in the time and space of memory: to London and the Sussex countryside, where Kip absorbed the casual racism of the British and the gentlemanly honor code that threatens to explode in his face even if the bombs don’t; to a dovecote in France, where Hana’s father lies critically injured; to the Macedonian quarter of Toronto, where Hana’s inchoate bond with Caravaggio first grew; and, over and over, to the African desert, where the patient’s life unravels in every sense.

“He doesn’t understand what’s happened to him until he starts to tell it,” explains Ondaatje. Neither does the author, until he starts to tell it. For him, the formal shifts--the flashes back and forward, the poetic fugues, the alternating bursts of comedy, high-octane sexuality and Faulknerian savagery he visits on his characters--all these are the tools of writing as discovery, of asking rather than telling. Ondaatje begins each book with almost no knowledge of his characters. “People write in different ways, but for me there’s absolutely nothing. Most of my books are led by a curiosity to know something about someone. I become so curious about Billy or Bolden that I try and use every form to understand all the facets.”

*

“ The first sentence of every novel should be: “Trust me, this will take time but there is order here, very faint, very human.” Meander if you want to get to town. “ --”In the Skin of a Lion”

In his novels, Ondaatje has a habit of stepping out of narrative for literary chats with the reader. It’s the meander, not the getting to town that he loves to talk about, whether in his own work or that of other artists he admires--a crafty five-minute riff from a Tom Waits album, a passage in a Don DeLillo novel that mutates into poetry, the unplotted lyricism in a single tracking shot by Sergio Leone.

Spend time with Ondaatje, and you start to see the world around you as a playground stockpiled with absurd wonders waiting to be plucked out of context, recombined and called fiction. As we look for the restaurant, I remember that a leggy Miss Angela Dickinson shows up as Billy’s sexually gifted whore-girlfriend in “Billy the Kid,” which was written in the early 1970s. Ondaatje’s work bows gleefully to a world where nothing (and no one) remains in place anymore, where bits of culture detach from their moorings and float freely, changing shape and meaning as they go. Which is how the legend of Billy the Kid became “one of those strange, migrating mythologies” that grabbed the heart of a boy in 1950s Sri Lanka, who is pictured at the end of the book, posing bashfully in his cowboy suit.

Whatever boundaries remain between fact and fiction, life and art hold little interest for Ondaatje unless he’s tearing them down or making them up. He glows over a letter from a historian of bomb disposal who had read an excerpt from “The English Patient” in the New Yorker and asked to be put in touch with Mr. Kirpal Singh. “I haven’t got the nerve to write to him and say, ‘No, I made it all up.’ ” A note at the end of “Running in the Family,” Ondaatje’s memoir of his return to Sri Lanka in 1978 and 1980, apologizes for the book’s “fictional air” and adds innocently, “in Sri Lanka a well-told lie is worth a thousand facts.”

Ondaatje talks about his life only with reluctance. “I’m a compulsively secretive person,” he confesses. Later he amends “secretive” to “private” and asks, “Is that better or worse?” I tell him I don’t care which, so long as he’s not revising himself. He laughs. “I don’t think I am secretive with people I know well. I’m more careful here in Canada, because there’s a hunger for anything about ‘Can. Lit.’ in the academic world and the media, which I don’t like. People get portrayed by their image, as opposed to their writing. Somebody like Jay McInerney, maybe he’s exactly what he’s portrayed as, but--I think that’s a real problem today.”

It’s not only Ondaatje’s insistence on privacy that makes him dismissive of biography. Valid or not, comparisons between his life and his work don’t interest him nearly as much as the process by which his characters grow into life. “I could say I was someone living in a new country and all that, and I would see myself as the outsider,” he says uncomfortably. “But after you say that, what does it mean?”

It means he’s leaving me with an open field to interpret a life that fairly teems with potential parallels. “The best art is always mongrel,” Ondaatje observed in a recent BBC documentary about his life and work. He was talking about the shaping of early 20th-Century English literature by immigrant writers like Joseph Conrad and T. S. Eliot, but the cap fits. In “Running in the Family” (“three-fifths fact, two-fifths fiction”), one of his relatives is asked by a visiting British governor what his nationality is and replies, “God alone knows, your excellency.”

Ondaatje was born in 1943, the youngest of four children in a privileged, if sporadically impoverished, family of Indian, Sinhalese, Dutch and English origin. With near-Chaucerian merriment, “Running in the Family” embroiders his enormous extended family into a comic soap opera about a bunch of Roaring ‘20s party animals with a highly developed sense of theater.

Together with Sri Lanka’s swollen physical environment--stifling wet heat and monsoon rains, with bats and snakes (so he says) taking up residence on tables and radios--the affairs and escapades of the Ondaatje clan provided drama enough to turn anyone into a storyteller. (One of Ondaatje’s sisters writes children’s books in England, and his eldest brother, a Toronto tycoon, wrote his own, much bleaker family memoir. “I think he was getting pissed off that I was writing the books,” says Ondaatje with a grin.)

Shipped around to various aunts and uncles, the Ondaatje children were somewhat buffered from the war between their alcoholic father and dramatic mother, especially Michael, who was only 5 when they separated. But the clamor of conflicting voices must also have left him with the sense that all interpretation is relative and provisional.

In person, Ondaatje is the high-spirited charmer who gets a kick out of his wacky family, the ironist who revels in making things up. What you don’t see is the wistful brooder whose “purple moods,” as he puts it in a poem dedicated “to a sad daughter,” run like a deep vein through all his work and especially the final pages of “Running in the Family,” in which he pays sorrowful tribute to his remote father. Yet for Ondaatje, the memoir is the least personal of his books because it mostly lacks the protective cloak of fiction. “It was like the voice at the dinner table as opposed to the secret scribbler. Most of the other books are the secret scribbler.”

When Ondaatje was 11, he moved with his mother to London. At Dulwich College he received what he calls an ironic education: All the learning took place on the side. “It was a set of principles from Mars,” he says with feeling. “I remember in my first class the teacher--Mr. Welsch--stared at me for about a minute as if that would tell me what a terrible crime I’d committed, which was that I hadn’t taken my cap off.” Mostly because of his mother’s encouragement, he read voraciously, and at age 17 he sent a short story to Punch. “It came back within seconds, and I said, ‘Well, that’s it then, I’m not a writer.’ ”

Invited to Canada by his brother Christopher, Ondaatje began writing poetry at college in Quebec. Though he balks at the notion that he writes “poetic novels,” poetry remains the major influence on his prose structure and style. “Emotionally I feel much closer to poetry than to the novel. I feel more comfortable with something that is small and tight and without any unnecessary parts, but it can also be completely suggestive as opposed to something with an idea or plot. With a novel you step into a very large house, and you have to live in that house for a long time. Poetry is a pacing of oneself. It’s like going underwater, and your heart has to slow down--it’s that altering of your own self.”

Ondaatje’s literary education proper began when he moved to Toronto in 1966 and joined the underground poetry scene that revolved around the tiny Coach House Press, which published much of Ondaatje’s work up until “In the Skin of a Lion.” “That landscape did not suggest audiences or even reviews, which freed me to try out things and not worry about whether this works or not, or whether it reaches an audience in some way. I feel very lucky that I didn’t have a public, so I could try anything, poetry or half-poetry, half-prose as in ‘Billy.’ ”

*

After lunch, Ondaatje drives me over to the print arm of Coach House Press, a cramped brick building whose entrance is guarded by two gorgeous, elderly printing presses. “Russell Banks cried when he saw these,” says Ondaatje, and then he disappears behind a newspaper, surfacing only to chat with assorted bearded types and fire sporadic one-liners into my conversation with his wife, Linda Spalding.

Spalding is an alert Kansas native with two novels under her belt who, with her husband, co-edits Brick, a literary magazine published three times a year using the Coach House printing facilities. Together they have transformed a resolutely Canadian, rural-populist journal into a cosmopolitan magazine where the work of local writers rubs shoulders with Edmund White on “queer” fiction, Anita Desai on the Indian poet Tagore, Fielding Dawson on Miles Davis. When I ask if they ever think of giving up the labor-intensive work of bringing out a magazine, Ondaatje rustles his newspaper and mutters, “Three times a year.”

Brick is also peppered with Ondaatje’s photographs, mostly captioned with deadpan gag lines and often starring the family beagle, Gladys (Why Gladys? “One can’t go out on the lawn and call, ‘Cosima!’ ”), playing chess, guarding an upside-down poster of the Mona Lisa or snoozing peacefully atop a copy of “From Here to Eternity.”

“One’s a bit of a ham,” says Ondaatje, whose several short films include “Carry on Crime and Punishment” (“a very bad imitation of Chaplin about kids kidnaping a dog, people running into bushes, that sort of thing, good jazz score, stolen copyright”) and “Love Clinic,” about a center for reprogramming people devastated by love.

The hamminess in his novels almost invariably slides into something more serious--and more dangerous. In “The English Patient,” Kip is drawn straight out of Chaplin, an innocent rural Indian who’s in love with Western consumer goods and hums along to big-band music on his crystal set while he dismantles bombs. But Kip also grows into the nearest thing the novel has to a hero, “one of the charmed, who has grown up an outsider and so can switch allegiances, can replace loss,” and the only one of the four with sufficient internal solidity to take decisive action when his world falls apart.

“You fictionalize things by putting them together,” says Ondaatje with wily simplicity. If this were all, it wouldn’t be much. Any smart-mouth with a literature degree and a subscription to Vanity Fair can cobble together a bunch of pop images and call the result a postmodern novel. For Ondaatje, though, the fragmented structure and the fanning out into different voices in his work create a kind of realism, a mirror to the way our minds really work. “It’s not a case of postmodernist literature, it’s a story, but the story isn’t an A-to-Z thing. I’ve always believed people think like this. I got fabulous letters from people who don’t read at all, who read ‘The English Patient’ and understood perfectly.”

Understood what? No matter how I try to draw Ondaatje into a discussion of what his work is about, he finds a hundred pleasant ways to play dead: “Maybe.” “Don’t know.” “How interesting.” “Next.” A few hours of this dance, and I’m desperate enough to mumble something about the symbolism of land mines in “The English Patient.” Ondaatje gives me a weary smile. “For me, the minefield was a minefield. Ezra Pound says the first principle of metaphor is that a hawk has to be a hawk before it’s something else. Before it becomes American imperialism or something, it’s got to be a recognizable hawk.”

Well, sure. But he can’t be that baffled when critics interpret “In the Skin of a Lion” as a novel about immigrants, or “Billy the Kid” as “a commentary on the violent myths of the American West.” “The last thing I was thinking of,” he assures me with the admit-nothing air of one who knows he’s getting away with murder. “I have great fears,” he says. “I’m terrified of guns, I’m terrified of heights, so I write about bridge-builders and gunfighters. Somebody said to me, ‘Do you get migraines?’ I said no.” He giggles. “They said, ‘When I have a migraine I can understand your work perfectly.’ ”

*

It dawns on me that if I quit pestering Ondaatje for exegesis he will come up with it in his own way, which is to let meaning grow out of form. A word he uses often--descant--best evokes the way his mind works, bouncing off received images into his own unfolding concerns. The process is more transparent in his earlier writing, which works up a lather from what’s known about public figures and shoots off sideways into new territory.

“With ‘Billy,’ I was reacting against the genre of film, where everything was so secure and obvious that nothing really was going to surprise us. I was so fed up with Westerns by the time I was in my 20s, they were so sillily romantic. A lot of the writing in the ‘60s was either very sociological about violence or a cliche. So I thought, ‘I’m just going to make him dangerous, not just for the sake of being dangerous, but because this is what the reality is.’ ”

Ondaatje may not have set out to flip a finger at the romance of Western violence, but he ends up doing exactly that. “The Collected Works of Billy the Kid” upstages the abstract, orderly brutality of Western movies and comics with its own runaway vaudeville. As the book leaps between B-movie comic horror and quiet scene-setting, between the suggestive brush strokes of poetry and the expansiveness of prose, it grows into a cantata for several voices telling their versions of Billy.

Ondaatje’s writing is always the unofficial story, a celebration of the Kips and Hanas and Buddy Boldens who walk voiceless and invisible through the history books. In lesser hands that kind of populism could fall flat on the page, but Ondaatje’s characters keep gathering layers as they go along. No other fiction I know shows workers the tough-minded tenderness of “In the Skin of a Lion,” Ondaatje’s soaringly romantic third novel. It’s impossible to know where research leaves off and imagination begins in Ondaatje’s sensuously physical descriptions of bridge-building in Depression-era Toronto.

The book began as a “descant” from the life of Ambrose Small, a wealthy Toronto financier who vanished mysteriously in 1919. One year and 200 pages later, Ondaatje decided that he couldn’t stand the man (“I felt like an official biographer of some financial scum”) and started over, relegating Small to a bit part and bringing his minor characters to the forefront. In “Skin,” the outsider role is reversed when Patrick, an all-Canadian youth, becomes an alien among the Macedonian immigrants with whom he works as a laborer on the tunnel to be used for the Toronto waterworks. As they draw him into their community, Patrick is caught up in a passionate three-way love story and a drama--part caper, part action-adventure--of class war.

“ His own life was no longer a single story but a part of a mural, which was a falling together of accomplices. Patrick saw a wondrous night web--all of these fragments of a human order, something ungoverned by the family he was born into or the headlines of the day. “ --”In the Skin of a Lion”

“Skin” is no less than a people’s history of Toronto, a euphoric hymn to the city and the dignity of labor. In Ondaatje’s novels, history matters; his characters humanize a savage 20th Century that eats itself alive with random catastrophe. At a time in our cynical literary culture, when readers are stranded between the willful obscurantism of the artistic avant-garde, which has all but declared the story passe, and the slick packages of Michael Crichton or John Grisham, Ondaatje joins a narrowing fraternity of writers who remain true to the rich, particular humanism and grand opera of the popular 19th-Century novel, while expanding its forms and its power to make things matter.

As we finish the interview, I mention a friend who once told me that she writes because writing makes her better than she is. “That’s a lovely answer,” Ondaatje says. “If there’s a callowness in you, it doesn’t survive because you live with a book for five years and go over it 200 times. I really feel that, because the best parts that are not in me before I begin are there eventually in the book. Once you get the voice, you’re saying what you know, and after that you start saying what you don’t know. When I got the voice with ‘The English Patient,’ there was stuff said about nations that I had never imagined before. It’s absolutely thrilling. Like putting two and two together and getting six.”