BIRTH OF A MYTH: Ondaatje's Use of History as a Backdrop for Fiction

THE BIRTH OF A MYTH:
Michael Ondaatje’s Use of History
As a Backdrop for Fiction
(Lit 336: Lyric and Narrative, History and Imagination in Contemporary Literature)

Myth (n) - a traditional, typically ancient story dealing with supernatural
beings, ancestors, or heroes that serves as a fundamental type in the worldview
of a people, as by explaining aspects of the natural world or delineating the
psychology, customs, or ideals of society.

Michael Ondaatje has a fondness for taking real characters or real historical events and creating fiction around them. In virtually every one of his books, he has used a real event or a real person, then taken what is known and constructing a world that makes that historical figure or event seem almost surreal and larger than life. In one book, Running in the Family, the figures he elevates are his own family and the world they inhabit in Ceylon. In the other, The Collected Works of Billy the Kid, Ondaatje takes an historical figure about which little is known, and capitalizes on Billy the Kid’s already-mythic prestige in order to tell Billy’s own story.

In Running in the Family, Ondaatje uses family anecdotes told to him by relatives and friends of the family, blended with his own recollections and discoveries, and his poetry, as a way of creating his family's history. It is meant to be a memoir of Ondaatje's family and their days in Ceylon (now Sri Lanka) when his parents were young and his grandparents were still alive. His primary sources of information are his family and friends of the family, who have vivid recollections of the past – some of which may or may not be true. The verity of the stories is of only minor consequence to Ondaatje. He treats all the stories with the same respect – as if each one is the teller’s own truth, and that’s good enough for him. It makes for a more varied and interesting history, though perhaps not truly “historical” in nature. One of his aunts takes Ondaatje and his sister on a tour of the island, to places he hasn't seen since his childhood, before he was sent to England as a boy. Until then, Ondaatje admits, his memories are in bits and pieces. Stories of his father's misspent youth, his grandmother's eccentricities and of her death, all come together with relatives filling in the spaces.

Ondaatje weaves the tale of his family and their lives together using narrative prose and family pictures, some of which he never fully identifies. Each chapter moves from one memory to another, reminiscent of how family anecdotes are told, with one story inspiring another memory, which turns into another story, and on and on, until the bulk of the story gets told.

The book is a collective memory, blended with Ondaatje's memories melding with what his sister recalls, and the tales their aunt tells them. Rather than narrow the focus to factual information, Ondaatje delivers the revelations in a way that most family histories exist. Once family history gets blended into anecdote, the figures in the story become mythic. In every family anecdote, there are heroes and fools, saints and mini-gods, both in and outside of the family. Ondaatje’s is no different. He begins the book with a dream he has, one that propels him to travel from Canada back to the land of his birth and early childhood. Fantastic visions from his dream bleed into reality as, for the first time as an adult, he finds himself in Ceylon (now Sri Lanka) to explore his family and their history.

He moves into the big lie his father told as a youth, where his father pretended for nearly three years that he was attending Queen’s College at Oxford University in England, when in actuality, he was spending his father’s money on living the life of a bon vivant. As Ondaatje tells it, when his father elaborate deception is uncovered, and he is confronted by his family, Mervin Ondaatje’s way out of the mess is to go out to dinner that very night and become engaged to a young girl from a wealthy, prominent family. Already, we know that the Ondaatje family, as depicted in the book, has a fairly unusual way of dealing with conflict and dissent. We know we’re in for a fun ride, as long as we’re willing to go his way and suspend disbelief.

Interestingly, though Ondaatje tells these stories from a personal perspective, there is a part of him that remains unattached and apart from it. Some of that is understandable, as much of the history took place before he was born, or outside of his presence. He relates these stories without injecting himself much at all, other than to occasional give a first-hand accounting of something he himself experienced.

Whether the distance is intentional, in order to give him the freedom of choosing any voice he needs to at any point in the story, or subconscious, as a guard against remembering painful memories, is not altogether clear. However, his observational stance allows Ondaatje to tell some of the most harrowing stories of his youth – the loss of relatives, his parents’ checkered romance and eventual divorce, his father’s descent into alcoholism – with a sort of cool, calm collectedness that lets the reader experience the emotion.

These painful memories do more to tell us about the Ondaatje family than anything he could write. In one chapter, called Dialogues, he steps out of the way and lets the tellers tell. These stories consist solely of people’s personal recollections of Ondaatje’s father. One of his siblings relates the story of a near-fatal car accident, caused by Mervin’s drunkenness:

Once he nearly killed us. Not you. But the three older children. He
was driving the Ford and he was drunk and taking the corners with great swerves
and you know those up-country roads. We began by cheering, but soon we
were terrified. Yelling at him to stop. Finally, on one corner he
almost went off the cliff, he almost went off the cliff. Two wheels had
gone over the edge and the car hung there caught on the axle… We were in the
backseat and once we calmed down, we looked in the front seat and saw that Daddy was asleep. He had passed out. But to us he was asleep, and that
seemed much worse. Much too casual. (“Family”, 173)

He blends several types of genres – narrative, family recollections, passages of elaborate prose, and poetry – to tell the story of his family in a larger-than-life, mythical way. Ondaatje’s family may be no more eccentric or unusual than the next person’s. Almost everyone can point to a Lalla in their family tree – the person who only follows rules she makes, who shuns social constraints and lives according to her own agenda – and most people can point to a Mervin or two – someone who’s life was once so promising, but who fell victim to a hunger or an addiction over which they were powerless. What Ondaatje chooses to tell, and the way he tells it, with fluid, evocative language, unedited recollections, and even his own poetry, builds a fantastic world of odd, passionate, emotional people that become irresistible in his surroundings.

At the same time he tells us the history of the Ondaatje family in Ceylon, he is also telling us the story of Ceylon and the cultural and social battle that was being waged between Europeans and the Sinhalese. Ondaatje does this incredibly subtly, almost interstitially, by using quotes from prestigious British writers – Edward Lear, Paul Bowles, D.H. Lawrence – to illustrate the arrogance and condescension with which most Europeans treated Ceylon and its people. He calls them “Karapothas” – which he has earlier described as a large, unpleasant monitor lizard the size of a crocodile, which are generally viewed as smelly, harmful and something to be avoided by the native population of Ceylon.

Ondaatje uses subtle contrast to discount the harsh words of foreigners:

"The Sinhalese are beyond a doubt the least musical people in the
world. It would be quite impossible to have less sense of pitch, line
or rhythm.” – Paul Bowles (“Family”,76)

Immediately, Ondaatje counters this statement with his poem entitled “Sweet Like A Crow”:

Your voice sounds like a scorpion being pushed through a glass tube
Like someone has just trod on a peacock
Like wind howling in a coconut…(Family, 76)

This is how Ondaatje tells us the reality of what life was like as a European colony, at the mercy of people who had little respect or regard for Ceylon, as experienced by the Sinhalese themselves.

By contrast, in The Collected Works of Billy the Kid, Ondaatje has no source of information on his subject. Unlike Ondaatje’s family, Billy the Kid comes with his mythology “factory-installed”. Though there is very little factual information about Henry McCarty, alias William H. Bonney, alias Billy the Kid, two pictures have been drawn of him in history. He was either a cowardly thug with extraordinarily poor impulse control, or he was a dashing hero figure who represented the last vestiges of the Outlaw West, depending on which camp you side with. Ondaatje prefers the latter characterization, and he uses fictional correspondence and newspaper interviews, together with poetry from or about Billy to give Billy a voice that tells the story as Ondaatje sees it. He also writes some essays from the perspective of others – Angela Dickinson, Billy's prostitute lover, Pat Garrett, his assassin, etc. -- to further fill in the blanks, and to contrast the difference between how Billy sees himself in the world, and how the world sees Billy.

Billy’s “collected works” not only reflect the story of Billy the Kid, but of those who figured prominently in his life, such as Sally Chisum, Paulette Maxwell and Garrett.

The actual history of Billy the Kid, and some of the best known mythology that encases him, become a framework from which Ondaatje can hang his version of Billy's story. Who he slept with, who he rode with, who he robbed, who he killed, and why -- all of these known facts become pegs that support the weight of Ondaatje's story of Billy.

Ondaatje's poetry, set between his narratives, gives the events in Billy's life an ornate, grandiose feeling to them. Yet, oddly, the more Ondaatje creates the florid embellishments of Billy’s life, and the more mythical he seems to be, the more human is seems as well. Billy is no longer just a cardboard cut-out, black-and-white, good-or-evil symbol. Ondaatje raises him to mythic proportions, but imbues him with the complexity and ambiguity of a mortal human being.

In Ondaatje’s story, Billy is at once a brutal man, capable of killing with impunity if threatened with capture or harm, but also a dapper, vain youth, concerned with his physical appearance, eager to charm the ladies. In fact, the women who know and love Billy describe a different person, even from the person Billy himself presents.

It’s Paulette Maxwell, one of the many women in his life, who expresses her feelings on the most famous photo known of Billy, where he appears disheveled and unkempt, leaning on his rifle.

In 1880, a traveling photographer came through Fort Sumner. Billy posed
standing in the street near old Beaver Smith’s saloon. The picture makes
him rough and uncouth. The expression of his face was really boyish and
pleasant, He may have worn such clothes as appear in the picture out on the
range, but in Sumner, he was careful of his personal appearance and dressed
neatly and in good taste. I never liked that picture. I don’t think it does
Billy justice. (“Billy”, 19)

Ondaatje’s use of photographs – and the absence of them – only bolsters the image of Billy as a mythical hero/villain. Ondaatje uses blank pages with captions to indicate where photographs of Billy should be, but aren’t. It gives Billy almost a supernatural quality, as if he is a vampire whose image cannot be captured photographically. Other images Ondaatje uses serve to give us a glimpse into Billy’s world – a sparsely furnished room with a cot, a rough woolen blanket and a bare wood floor, such as one Billy might have inhabited while on the run; the open range, where Billy rustled cattle and did most of his killing and running; a man and woman, husband and wife, seated stiffly, posing for the photographer, whose body language indicates that, though married, these people are not close.

It’s almost as if Ondaatje has used images to show us what Billy saw, in the same way that he uses the poetry to convey how Billy felt, and yet, leaves any images of Billy himself out. We can see what Billy saw, and know what he felt, but what he looked like, save for the scratched tin-type on the book cover, is for us to imagine, the way we might imagine what Zeus or Aphrodite looked like.

The only image besides the cover image of Billy the Kid occupies a tiny corner of a mostly blank page. It is Ondaatje at about age 9, dressed in a cowboy hat and chaps, with his trusty six-shooters in hand. This is the little boy, captivated by the myth of Billy the Kid, who in the real world, may or may not have been a coward, may or may not have been a dandy, who may or may not have been a kid caught up in a world that swept him away. But in Ondaatje’s world, his Billy is so big he defies those narrow descriptions. Much as the Greek and Roman gods existed, full of jealousy and mischief, too large to pin down to a single explanation, this Billy the Kid lives in a Mount Olympus of Ondaatje’s making, where he will live forever as the legend of America’s last days of the West.

Works Cited
Ondaatje, Michael. The Collected Works of Billy the Kid. Toronto: McClelland and Stewart; New York: W. W. Norton, 1970.

Ondaatje, Michael. Running in the Family. Toronto: McClelland and Stewart; New York: W. W. Norton, 1982.

"Myth." The American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language. 4th ed. 2000.