Michael Ondaatje: Express Yourself Beautifully

W.J. Keith is a retired professor of English at the University of Toronto and author A Sense of Style: Studies in the Art of Fiction in English-Speaking Canada.

In undertaking a biography of Michael Ondaatje, Ed Jewinski must have
known that he was embarking on a virtually impossible task. Ondaatje is
one of the most private of writers. Disapproving of an emphasis on the
writer rather than the work, he declines to cooperate, denies access to
archival records, and misleads interviewers in the tradition of Leonard
Cohen (whom he admires and about whom he wrote a short book).

All this places a biographer in an impossible position. Take, as a
crucial instance, Running in the Family, Ondaatje’s tricky,
semi-fictional memoir that constitutes a technical tour de force.
Jewinski realizes that to ask “which parts are true?” is to ask a
revealingly wrong question. Yet this is precisely the question that the
conscientious biographer is bound to ask.

Given the odds stacked against him, Jewinski has done a decidedly
creditable job. It would not be difficult to raise objections. Ideally,
he should have probed more deeply into Ondaatje’s Ceylonese years, but
that was understandably impossible. Occasionally, I think, he accepts
Ondaatje’s myth a little too readily. Thus Ondaatje is said to have
been liberated from what Jewinski condescendingly calls “British
notions of culture” (which are apparently “colonial”) with the
help of “American pop culture” and “American comic books” (which
apparently aren’t). I suspect, too, that Jewinski’s account of
Ondaatje’s school years in England is in part historically vulnerable.
On the other hand, certain controversial events in Ondaatje’s life
(the Michael- Kim-D.G. Jones triangle, and the circumstances of his
leaving the University of Western Ontario) are helpfully and
convincingly treated.

Ondaatje is an enigmatic character, and, if he doesn’t explain the
enigma, Jewinski views it from all angles and casts some intriguing
lights and shadows on it. Readers may not understand Ondaatje after
reading this book, but the reasons for their uncertainty will be
clarified. We are offered a credible portrait of a strange man who has
written some powerful and strange books—and what else can we ask?