< Michael Ondaatje >

family ties

By Wendy Cavenett


When a worm tied itself up into a knot on the biology bench in front of him, it opened a can of words that have made Michael Ondaatje one of the most revered writers alive—and led him back to Sri Lanka to untangle the chaos of his father’s life.

Michael Ondaatje inspires awe. When the Ceylon-born writer enters a room, sudden, hear-a-pin-drop silence falls, a response reserved for the select few living members of literary royalty. It’s old-school, Don DeLillo or VS Naipaul respect, earned by a canon of work that crosses all literary territory until it settles somewhere previously unknown. In that place, the factual and the imaginary collide, time creates secret codes and quiet revelations appear luminous. Hymns, poems, narrative fragments and conversations evolve, transmuting layers of meaning until what Ondaatje leaves on the page is left within our lives.

He can save a nun falling from a bridge (In The Skin Of A Lion) or paint the eyes of a Buddha through a mirror’s reflection (Anil’s Ghost). He promises to tell us how to fall in love (The English Patient), forges trust despite madness (Coming Through Slaughter) and finds humility in an outlaw (The Collected Works Of Billy The Kid). He even takes us to his childhood home to meet his parents (Running In The Family).

Ondaatje has always enjoyed critical acclaim, but with The English Patient, his fourth novel, his career went mainstream internationally. It won him the Canadian Governor General’s Award for fiction and more importantly the 1992 Booker Prize (shared with Barry Unsworth’s Sacred Hunger), a first for a Canadian writer. Its adaptation for film won nine Oscars, including best picture, director, and supporting actress (Juliette Binoche).

“I never imagined that I would have a book of poetry out, let alone a Booker Prize-winning novel,” Ondaatje says. “I wasn’t very ambitious in the sense of wanting to be famous or anything like that. I wanted to write poetry—to save my life! That was why I wrote. And then, with The Collected Works Of Billy The Kid, I started to write prose as well. The next book, Coming Through Slaughter, was the first novel, so it kind of just happened. I inched along, in talking about my wider world, but I didn’t really think that I was ever going to have a career as a writer.”

Now 58, Ondaatje has published more than 10 collections of poetry, five novels and several anthologies. With his wife, writer Linda Spalding, he edits the literary journal Brick and he’s even written a book on Leonard Cohen’s early literary works. After a career spanning 35 years, from his first collection of poems, The Dainty Monsters (1967), to his most recent novel, Anil’s Ghost (2000), there is no sign that his devotion to his craft is waning.

Michael Ondaatje is in a boardroom in Sydney’s Park Hyatt Hotel. He is sitting at the end of a long conference table surrounded by high-back leather chairs. It seems a strange place for our interview but inspires talk about his initial career.

“One worm changed everything!” he says, laughing. “I would have been very interested in pursuing science, but I had this experience. It was my first day at university and we were working with worms. We had to dissect it or something and I could have cut it up in a second, but my worm tied itself up into a knot and the teacher came by and said, ‘This is the kind of behaviour that should not occur in classrooms. You shouldn’t do that to worms.’ I was thrown out! So that was my beautiful biological career, lost!”

It’s hard to believe Ondaatje is the shy, reserved writer we read about. He laughs, tells jokes, talks quickly in gentle, low bursts and watches everything with those striking, blue eyes. There’s something of the wanderer about him, too; his hair is longer and greyer than in the publicity shots, and he comes across unattached yet centred, and just a little wild.

Since Anil’s Ghost, he has been working on his next book, The Conversations, based on a series of interviews with the American sound and picture editor, Walter Murch. The two met during filming of The English Patient and have kept in touch since its completion. Murch, “a fascinating and wonderful man”, edited such classics as The Conversation (1974), Apocalypse Now (1979) and The Unbearable Lightness Of Being (1988). Murch’s concise study of film editing, In The Blink Of An Eye, remains a small treasure for anyone interested in the field.

“I’ve also made a couple of documentary films in the past,” Ondaatje says, “and I really enjoyed that artform, so I watched Walter carefully during the editing of The English Patient to see the master at work. When I finished Anil’s Ghost, I realised that what I really wanted to do was talk to Walter. I wanted to see how far we could go with some in-depth conversations about editing. He said that he’d love to do it so we started and for about a year we would meet whenever we could. We would have these long, long sessions that would last a couple of days. We came up with hundreds of pages about editing: What’s it like to edit? What’s it like to edit film as opposed to editing books? Is it very different? And because he’s worked on some of the essential films of our time, all the examples he uses are ones that we know in our heads. We can recall them so we can understand what he is talking about as opposed to some obscure Jean-Luc Godard film that nobody remembers!

“It’s really a book about one individual’s craft, which is quite Zen-like in an odd way because it’s not just cutting film to the speed of the bongo drum or something like that. It’s so subtle and intricate and emotional in many ways, and it’s fascinating to see; and because he’s so articulate he can talk about it in a very addressing way. He’s not the average Hollywood person; he’s interested in physics and music, literature and stuff like that, so he’s often talking about Beethoven, Flaubert as opposed to, you know, Meg Ryan… and Walter and I realised that editing a film is the one part of filmmaking that is closest to writing; the rest of filmmaking is pure chaos and it’s utterly governed by time.”

Ondaatje’s fascination with time, revealed in part by his capacity to structure his work almost outside its limits, extends back to his own birth. In his semi-autobiographical work Running In The Family he writes, “About six months before I was born my mother observed a pair of kabaragoyas [water monitors] ‘in copula’ at Pelmadulla. A reference is made to this sighting in A Coloured Atlas Of Some Vertebrates From Ceylon, Volume 2, a National Museums publication. It’s my first memory.”

Michael Ondaatje was born in the Ceylonese (now Sri Lankan) capital Colombo on September 12, 1943. At 11, he immigrated to England to attend boarding school and seven years later, relocated to Canada. He went to the University of Toronto (Bachelor of Arts) and Queen’s (Master of Arts), and taught at York University to support his writing career.

Picturing that small boy arriving in England, Ondaatje says: “In retrospect it was okay, but at the same time it was probably hell! I was glad I went there in spite of the fact that it was like another planet. It was like Mars. There were people wearing ties and long trousers and socks, stuff I’d probably only seen in magazines. I was a complete alien and I had to adapt quickly, but I took it all ironically. And I certainly took the school days when I was in England pretty ironically as well. You know, I was getting pretty anarchic at the time. There was a Lindsay Anderson film called If… released in the ‘60s that is all about English schools. My experiences were very similar to that.”

It took Ondaatje 20 years to return to his homeland, by which time his father, Mervyn, had died. A descendent of a prominent line of Dutch burghers who settled on the island in the 17th century, Mervyn was the unconventional Ondaatje family’s equally unconventional patriarch. He had married Doris Gratiaen, a beautiful and strong-willed woman, after breaking a betrothal to a highly eligible aristocrat.

Prior to that, there had been another brief engagement (to a Russian countess) and the discovery of Mervyn’s great deception: he had pretended to study at Queen’s for more than two years until an unexpected visit by his parents found him out. He had not even passed the entrance exams to the Southampton college and had instead used his parents’ money to rent rooms in Cambridge. There he circumvented the academic element of his university education and instead befriended students, read contemporary novels and supported a healthy social life during the swinging ‘20s.

Dragged back to Ceylon, Mervyn tried to live up to family expectations. He became a plantation owner managing several estates and a major in the Ceylon Light Infantry, though his military commitment was more of a hobby than a responsibility. He was a maverick, an unpredictable soul whose brilliance was overshadowed by severe bouts of alcoholism. Ondaatje says they were crazy times; Mervyn was violent, abusive, uncontrollable, and relied on charm to get himself through his family’s emotional fallout.

It’s a family history as distinguished as it is colourful. There were copious affairs and betrayals, extravagant lives and political successes. For instance, it was an Ondaatje who first translated the Bible into Tamil; another was killed by his own horse and, it seems, thankfully so. Mervyn loved his gin and would often “take over” trains while in uniform. “He managed to get the driver of the train drunk as well,” writes Ondaatje in Running In The Family, “and was finishing a bottle of gin every hour, walking up and down the carriages almost naked, but keeping his shoes on this time, and hitting the state of inebriation during which he would start rattling off wonderful limericks—thus keeping the passengers amused.”

If the emphasis seems firmly on Mervyn, it is because he is key to Michael Ondaatje’s life and writing. Everything comes down to his search for the truth about his father, the “undiscovered man” who, in his later years, was estranged from his wife and children and died without them realising the extent of his failing health. Ondaatje’s family history will always be incomplete.

He doesn’t say why he decided to go back to Sri Lanka but the “bright bone of a dream” revealed his deepest fear. “I was sleeping at a friend’s house,” he writes. “I saw my father, chaotic, surrounded by dogs, and all of them were screaming and barking into the tropical landscape.” A friend once told him it was only when he was drunk he seemed to know what he truly wanted. Two months later at his farewell party amid his “growing wildness”, Ondaatje knew he was “already running”.

Ten years later, The English Patient altered his life direction again. I ask how the film has changed the nature of the novel. “It is different now,” he admits, “but I don’t know that version of it because I haven’t actually read the book since it came out.

“I’ve never read any of my works once I’ve finished them. I’ll probably re-read them all on my deathbed,” he laughs. “I don’t know. I feel terrified about them. What if they’re not good anymore and it’s too late to fix them? I mean, that’s why I haven’t watched The English Patient since it came out, because I’m scared that it’s become really dated.”

He laughs again. “Sometimes I see how late I can tell a joke in a tragedy. In Billy The Kid, I think the last word is of a joke, so I think I really see the world that way. I really do. It’s kind of terrifyingly disordered and uncertain and tentative.”

So writing doesn’t get any easier? “No, I would love to feel that you know,” he says. “I always thought that if you wrote two or three books at least you would know how to write a book. That’s the way I imagine painters are—that they have a confidence—but perhaps they don’t any more than writers do. I think what happens is that when I’ve finished a book I feel I’ve said everything I know in some way. I certainly felt that at the end of In The Skin Of A Lion, and at the end of The English Patient. I know how to write with a pen but that’s it. So it takes a long, long time but I’d rather write that kind of book than jump into the next one the following weekend.

“I really think that one needs to kind of replenish oneself and almost find a new way of thinking or a new language or a new vocabulary or something. So one can start something very, very, very tentatively; it’s a tentative thing that’s so scattered and so fragile that it’s almost like a little secret. Really, all you have is the hint of a character or a hint of a situation. I didn’t know any of the stuff that’s in Anil’s Ghost before I began the book. I didn’t know about archaeology or forensics. I didn’t even know who the characters were. So what did I have? I had a kind of rough time zone and I had a probable place and that was it. So it feels like luck that it came off. It’s like improvisation while you’re writing.”

His luck deserts him this day. The interview over, Ondaatje wants to leave but can’t—the glass-panelled French doors are locked. We are trapped in the boardroom with the impassive chairs. He shakes the handles, tugs at them, but it isn’t until a porter walks past and sees us that the doors are unlocked and Ondaatje, without another word, bolts. It seems a fitting finale, although I’d be hard pressed to explain exactly why. Maybe there’s a clue in his final comment.

“I’ve always known life isn’t like a Jane Austen novel. It’s not the way we think or the way we live. It seems much more random than she would have us believe. I think if you think this is your last moment, then you’ve got to watch carefully.”

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This interview was published in HQ Magazine in June, 2002. Since that time, Michael Ondaatje has had three books published: The Conversations: Walter Murch and the Art of Film Editing (2002); The Story (2005); and Divisadero (2007).

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