Two Interviews with Michael Ondaatje
Michael Ondaatje has been interviewed by Scrivener twice. Scrivener spoke with Ondaatje in 1993, a year after his Booker Prize win, and in 2009, sixteen years later. The two interviews with one of Canada’s greatest writers, never before available online, are published together here.
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An Interview with Michael Ondaatje by Michol Zarb (1993)
Michael Ondaatje was born in Ceylon (now Sri Lanka) in 1943 into a family of Indian, Dutch and English ancestry. He subsequently moved to Canada, where he eventually completed an M.A. at Queen’s University, writing his thesis on Edwin Muir “because there was very little stuff written on him.” This curiosity and passion for researching uncommon topics is characteristic of Ondaatje’s writing. At present, he lives in Toronto where he teaches literature and creative writing at York University. His works of poetry and prose include The Works of Billy the Kid, There’s a Trick with a Knife I’m Learning to Do, Secular Love, Coming Through Slaughter, Running in the Family and In the Skin of a Lion. His writing has won him three Governor General’s Awards, and his latest novel, The English Patient, shared the 1992 Booker Prize.
Ondaatje was recently featured in TIME magazine’s article “The Empire Strikes Back.” This cover story explores the new movement of “World Fiction” that has emerged in the English language by writers such as Ishiguro, Rushdie and Ondaatje, whose ancestral languages were not necessarily English.
I talked with Mr. Ondaatje on a Sunday afternoon in November, shortly after he had accepted the Booker Prize. Having spent the morning taking his cat to the vet, he relaxed and chatted openly while sipping Ceylon tea.
SCRIVENER
Your writing includes a blend of historical fact and creativity. Do you see yourself more as a detective and a reporter or as a creator and a storyteller?
MICHAEL ONDAATJE
I think that all those things are there for a writer. I’m not a reporter in the sense that I don’t have a responsibility to the public. As for the detective thing, it’s quite possible that what you detect and discover may be completely irrelevant to the main plot or the main reason for you doing the detective work. But both those things are there in your work. You may start writing a book that will last, say, four or five years and you think you're writing a book about this, but it turns out that you’re writing about something else and you kind of veer off.
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SCRIVENER
So for you, the plot evolves as you do your research.
MICHAEL ONDAATJE
Yes, you don’t really know what you’re going to discover until you start writing and then you start digging. It’s more sometimes like digging for something and then finding that “Oh, so it's a vase after all!”
SCRIVENER
During your reading of The English Patient at the Place des Arts in Montreal, you mentioned that you did a lot of research at the Royal Geographic Society in London. You said that just by standing there amidst so much information, it sort of rubbed off on you.
MICHAEL ONDAATJE
It wasn’t so much the mood of the place. Everything was quite serious and very specific; there really was a mood of history there, an aura that you stepped into. The way the people talked and wrote had an effect in some ways on the way the patient spoke. I would begin to react against that aura, which he does sometimes, but there was no boasting in that world; it was just “give me the facts” and that’s it.
SCRIVENER
What was the feeling like there when you were researching?
MICHAEL ONDAATJE
I’m quite amateurish when it comes to that. I didn’t have a whole 85 books to read, I would meander around. But they didn’t really like you to just wander and pick books up at random. I like that way of going into a library and stumbling on things.
SCRIVENER
For Coming Through Slaughter you did a lot of primary research on the life of Buddy Bolden which included going to hospitals and talking to family members. At what point did his life become a story in your mind?
MICHAEL ONDAATJE
It is difficult to tell when you think it’s going to work as a book. In fact, you don’t think that it's going to work as a book until pretty near the end, so you’re not sure if you’re wasting your time or not. For the Bolden book, I just heard about him and then I started to read up on him a little bit. I started to write from the few things I’d found—three or four articles and information about the music in the period. At that point, I actually went to New Orleans though I’d already written to the archives and asked them to send me stuff. You don't really think about whether this is a story now or, “Have I got a story?” You’re just trying to find out about the person; it was simple curiosity in researching someone. What you don’t even realize is that while you’re researching, you’re actually writing the book. That is why I guess there's a sense of the detective in it.
SCRIVENER
Do you prefer writing novels to poetry? Do you think that you will go back to writing more poetry or has your writing moved definitely in one direction?
MICHAEL ONDAATJE
I don’t really know what I’m going to do next. I would hate to believe that I was not going to write poetry again because I do like it very much and I do believe it is important as a major art. It’s a form that is very difficult to either leave or come back to but sometimes it’s good to do that because you can come back with a new attitude to it all. The thing about poetry is that you do start again every time unless you get into the habit of just writing a certain way, which is often a problem.
SCRIVENER
Poetry appeals to fewer people. Do you enjoy the fact that you are now catering to a wider audience?
MICHAEL ONDAATJE
I don’t know if I enjoy it. That really isn’t important to me and, in fact, it can probably make it more difficult to write. But I’ve sort of managed to ignore that element, not to think about the audience too much when I’m writing. That self consciousness is pretty deadly. You’re really kind of a psychopath when you’re writing, you know. (He says this with a warm grin.) You have to forget all kinds of social rules and things and you invent some horrible story or nice story, but you aren’t thinking about the effects on the public, which is a kind of form of being a psychopath. So the idea of a larger audience is more of a problem than a virtue, I think.
SCRIVENER
How has your experience with critics been, especially with stories like Coming Through Slaughter and Running in the Family? You write about people's lives and sometimes alter historical fact. Have you encountered any problems with that?
MICHAEL ONDAATJE
I think it is a problem, you know, I think it’s a dodgy area. It’s very important for me to say that these are novels and these are fictions. They are based on some historical events but I obviously do improvise; even in the lives I improvise, but I do have a sort of private duty to the person I'm writing about. I don’t want to make them more foolish or less complicated than they really are. To really try and understand someone stops you from making them too simple and that becomes important to me. I think about that a lot when I’m writing, whether it's justified or not.
SCRIVENER
That detective side in you seems to be a form of inspiration—to take an event that has happened and extrapolate on it to create your own historical ending. You seem to love adding the “Ondaatje ending.”
MICHAEL ONDAATJE
I don’t think that we’re in an age when we can spend our time inventing stories. If we talk about a genuinely invented story, we mean that the writer had to sit down and imagine the kind of story. But whatever you imagine these days, you cannot make it as profound as what is going on in the real world. A lot of factual stuff is so interesting in the real world that none of us really know about. I think that the painter Jack Chambers maybe kind of realized that, just being in London, Ontario. He would just paint a scene out of his window and make it come alive and in that sense it would be like taking a moment out of history and discovering all the kinds of wealth that there is in that. Wiliam Carlos Wiliams talks about that, saying that when you see a beautiful flower you don’t have to invent it, you give the form over to the flower. I think that is why I was fascinated by the real world and writing about it in some way. I don’t write in that kind of “invented art.”
SCRIVENER
With The English Patient you took a very big risk in taking Hana and Caravaggio from In the Skin of a Lion and using them as characters. Did you think of them immediately when you started to write the novel?
MICHAEL ONDAATJE
No, I really didn’t. I had no idea that they were going to be in it even when I had begun it. It was very difficult in the book to make these characters complete for someone who hadn’t read the earlier book. I like the idea that there is something going on between the two books, a kind of third story. D.H. Lawrence's The Rainbow and Women in Love, the character Ursula is completely different in each book, it was a complete separation and in fact totally illogical.
SCRIVENER
Do you think of all of your characters in later life?
MICHAEL ONDAATJE
Yes, my head is full of what Buddy Bolden is doing right now. That is one thing that I wanted to do in my books, not to end them so that the characters were completed in any way.... left standing frozen in time on the last page.
SCRIVENER
You are now accomplished as a Canadian writer, but you are Sri Lankan–born, and that is a very big part of you.
MICHAEL ONDAATJE
I think that is true and in an odd way the last two books, partly because they have been set in Europe or North America have separated me even more from Sri Lanka, so it was difficult to incorporate Sri Lanka.
SCRIVENER
You did manage to incorporate India, so as to include an Asian mentality.
MICHAEL ONDAATJE
Yes I was glad about that, but it’s almost like I've been in exile for ten years, I haven’t been able to go back for ten years because these stories took over. I would like to go back. We all are doubles, we all have two sides to ourselves and most people in the world's states have that. We are all migrants, it’s a migrant generation.
SCRIVENER
After you received the Booker Prize, you made a comment to the Globe & Mail regarding the Canadian literary audience, saying that it was a shame that the Governor General's Award was less highly esteemed within Canada than the Booker Prize. I was wondering whether you think that this stems from an apathetic view on the part of Canadians towards their own writers or whether there is just not enough funding for Canadian writers. Is it the fault of the government or the Canada Council or is it just that people don't see the importance of Canadian writers since our literature is relatively recent?
MICHAEL ONDAATJE
I think that it is all of those things. The trouble is that we don't really trust our culture yet. It is a pretty sad thing that a book has to be reviewed elsewhere for us to think that it must be good. The idea that you can’t be that good because you’re a Canadian. That is one of the most annoying things for a lot of writers. It has gotten a lot better though. What has been great about the Governor General’s lately is that a lot of young writers, like Nino Ricci winning the Governor General’s, has had a tremendous effect in sales.
SCRIVENER
The issue of sales brings us to another problem, the taxation of books.
MICHAEL ONDAATJE
I know, there have been a lot of protests, letters to the government from the Writers Union, bookstores. It is outrageous really. The government talks about literacy and the damage that has been done is long-reaching now.
SCRIVENER
What is your view of the Canada Council?
MICHAEL ONDAATJE
I think it’s pretty good. I don't know how much money is spent on the administration of the Council and, as with all things, too much money goes to the administration and not enough to the individual artists. But I think that the idea of being judged by your peers is a good thing. I haven’t done it for a long time, but I think that it is usually writers who are reading the manuscripts. I hope the Council can keep separate from the government in many ways and I don’t think it can. I think that that has been the bad thing about it in the last few years. There seems to be more appointments by the government, a lot of conservative presence, and I think that it is appalling that someone who is head of the Canada Council is someone who sued a writer for libel. I think that is shocking and says it all.
SCRIVENER
In both The English Patient and In the Skin of a Lion, there are definite social messages. In the latter you discuss the role of immigrant workers within Canada and in the former you discuss the role of an Indian Sikh working for the British army as a bomb defuser. It seems to be a way to celebrate the lives of those within society who don't receive enough recognition. You give the reader insight into what their lives are like and how important their work is. Do you find yourself more interested in the underdog?
MICHAEL ONDAATJE
Not so much the underdog, but people being ignored in their careers and lives. Quite honestly, I don't go out of my way to go and choose those subjects. In fact, when In the Skin of a Lion was finished, everybody was saying “Oh, this is a novel about immigrants” and I thought to myself, “What do they mean?” Obviously it is a book about immigrants, but I hadn’t realized that everyone in the book was an immigrant. It just wasn’t something that I conceived as an idea. It just happened that way. Now, I’m not that stupid and naive, but it does show that I’m not as interested in an issue as I am in individual people, such as Kip and Hana and all those. I'm more interested in people that have been kept outside of history in a way. I’m not interested in writing about politicians. In fact, that's one thing that I've promised myself—that no politician would ever enter my books! They get too much press already.
SCRIVENER
What about your fascination with mythology that is present both in your poetry and prose?
MICHAEL ONDAATJE
I think that when I was at university I became interested in Greek mythology and found it very exciting. I had to work it out of my system in a way. The first book was full of Greek myths and Troy. I think that it was David McPhadden who said to me at one point “what are you writing about these guys for? Write about your own life” and I think that I was very angry at him, but in some ways it sort of jerked me out of writing stories about the Greeks. One of the things that you want to try to do with a book is to make sense of your world. In your book, you are kind of clarifying things for yourself, not for other people. You are not a myth-maker for other people. What you have to do is just clarify things for yourself and not worry about the other big themes that are out there, the social themes. If you do that then I think that others can read your book and discover something about themselves. If you start talking to them right away, then you are just parroting the usual things we say in public speech. What's nice about writing is that it is a private act and other private people recognize themselves in what you're writing. So it is not a public thing. When books become public in the sense of giving a lecture, thesis or an attempt to create the mythology of Canada it is not intimate at all.
SCRIVENER
There is a strong paternal presence surrounding the character of the English patient. The characters open up to him and discover themselves through him. Also, Kip talks about adopting a father-figure when he is in England. Since your parents divorced when you were 12, did you adopt a father-figure to fill a void?
MICHAEL ONDAATJE
I don't think I did, I adopted friends more than parental figures and some of them were from school. I had an older brother and sister and so there was that connection. So the searching part may be there in all the books but I don't think that it necessarily applies to my own life. The English patient is different things to all of the characters, for Hana he sort of replaces her father and Kip, well, they were both “international bastards.” The main story is between Kip and the English patient in a way. He acts as a pool, that mirror you know, that we look at and see ourselves in.
SCRIVENER
You mentioned not wanting to leave the reader with a sense of incompletion, so why did you decide to leave Caravaggio literally “up in the air?”
MICHAEL ONDAATJE
It is a bit perverse actually. Although there are four characters in the book, for me, I really see that the patient and Kip are the two that take the center stage and Hana and Caravaggio are the watchers in this book. Although their healing is crucial to the book, they are sort of the watchers to the story. For Caravaggio, it was just the last image I wrote and it was enigmatic and I thought "My God, this is the last time I'll see him and in fact someone said, “That’s an odd way to leave this character, you know, mid-air, it’s raining.” But it sort of made sense because he’s been trying to get his balance through the whole book and he’s a very balanced person in the other book and now he's lost his balance. That he's curing himself in some way, creating himself in some way, is important.
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An Exchange with Michael Ondaatje by Aditya Badami (2009)
SCRIVENER
Looking back, can you pinpoint the moment when you decided that you would be a writer? Is it something you had always wished to do?
MICHAEL ONDAATJE
I came to writing later than most. It was at university in fact. And I was lucky to have a great and enthusiastic teacher in English named Arthur Motyer. Essentially he introduced me to poetry as well as to theatre. So I wanted to be an actor and I wanted to be a poet. And I was a terrible actor, forgetting nearly all my lines on stage. So it was in those classes that made me want to write. I had never thought of it till then. But it was a time when I was in a new country and 18 and wanted and needed to understand what was happening to me. So I turned inward. But it was mostly the joy in discovering one could express oneself in art.
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SCRIVENER
Describe your relationship with your characters: is it possible to separate yourself from them, or do they always reflect some element of your own psyche? Do you find yourself living through them? Take Cooper for example, one of the protagonists in your most recent novel Dividadero. Who is he to you?
MICHAEL ONDAATJE
It is an odd relationship one has with those invented characters. You are so close to them and yet you are watching them interact with strangers at a distance and are willing to do anything – give them a limp or a certain kind of behavior. Still you are so very close to how they are thinking but it is not how you think, for you are wearing a partial mask. So you are partly living through them but they are distinct from you. The characters barely exist when I begin the book. They get created during the process of it, as Coop was created. When the book is over I do see someone like Coop or the English Patient or Anil as part of myself that exists now, but that part did not exist before I began those books.
SCRIVENER
For me as a reader, there is a lot of poetry in your prose and elements of prose in your poetry. But when you sit down to write one or the other, do you find you approach each differently? Is one more planned than the other? Do you feel that poetry gives you more freedom in terms of narrative flow or structure?
MICHAEL ONDAATJE
I have tried to bring the freedom and intimacy I found in poetry into fiction. I do not think I could have done that without reading someone like William Faulkner who gave himself that freedom and allowed that inner voice to be fully at ease in a novel. But when I write prose or poetry I am very conscious of the difference. It is almost a completely different language, and the form and intent and purpose is different. It’s the difference between walking across a field and flying across it. I certainly don’t try to have a poetic voice in poetry either. With a novel you just know it will take about 4 or 5 years. It is a large landscape and period of time you are going to have to cover.
SCRIVENER
Do you find yourself changing the way you approach writing with each new novel or book of poems? Is it a process of honing a craft, perfecting certain methods, manipulating language with greater and greater facility? Or is it not as self-conscious as that—do you just write, reflexively almost?
MICHAEL ONDAATJE
Every book feels like a new stage in life. For instance I have to feel I have a new vocabulary in my hands. I have no desire to repeat what has been done before. I could never write a Coming through Slaughter again, or Divisadero again, or Secular Love again. I still feel very close to those books but I am another person now. And with each book I don’t really believe or feel I am any better than what I was. I am just in another place on the map and dealing with a different thing in a different way. You do have a terrible feeling always that with the last book you may have written your last book. You are not sure that you can do it again.
SCRIVENER
Even though The English Patient was a complex book with a non-linear plot, it translated very well into film, in spite of the fact that, perhaps necessarily, much was left out of the adaptation. Which of your other books would you like to see translated into film?
MICHAEL ONDAATJE
I am still not sure about that. So far it has been The English Patient at 2 hours 40 minutes and Elimination Dance at 7 minutes.
SCRIVENER
What is more difficult, and which is more satisfying: starting a novel or finishing it?
MICHAEL ONDAATJE
Oh every stage is a killer. Every stage feels uncertain when you are in it. Writing is like one of those seven-stage Olympic sports where you have to swim a mile, then shoot a target from a moving horse, and then skate without breathing too frantically. Each stage demands something else from you.
SCRIVENER
How do you choose your next novel or project?
MICHAEL ONDAATJE
I wish I knew. You just loiter for a long time and then tentatively walk into what you hope is the right bar.
