Robert McCrum profiles Michael Ondaatje to coincide with the publication of
Ondaatje’s latest novel, The Cat’s Table.
‘The eyes of Michael Ondaatje, prize-winning author of The English Patient, are a baffling window on the inner man: the brilliant, pale sapphires of a witty Dutch burgher set in a 68-year-old
Tamil frame. As he says of himself and his work, “I am a mongrel of place. Of race. Of cultures. Of many genres.” An interview with Ondaatje is a playful compendium of anecdote,
on-the-hoof cultural criticism and crafty conversational shape-shifting. “Charm” is a dangerous word, but an hour or two with Michael Ondaatje is a beguiling experience.
The more you look, the more dizzyingly kaleidoscopic he seems to become: a Canadian citizen who remains profoundly Sri Lankan. A winner of the Booker prize who first made his name as a poet. An
admirer of Robert Browning and Thomas Wyatt who finds his deepest inspiration in the aesthetic traditions of the East. A writer whose 2007 title, Divisadero, encrypts a double meaning, derived from
the Spanish word for “division”, or from divisar, meaning “to gaze at something from a distance”.
If Ondaatje, the man, is divided and detached, then Ondaatje, the writer, is militantly opposed to western habits of narrative. This is partly because he was raised in Ceylon’s oral tradition:
“tall stories, gossip, arguments and lies at dinner”. He quotes the critic John Berger with approval: “Never again will a single story be told as though it were the only one.”
This, he adds, “is the possibility of our age. A person grows up in Colombo or Wichita and their true mentor or touchstone could be Calvino or Miles Davis, or it could be a political gesture
or act in a far away place.”’
The Times’ Erica Wagner has delved into Martin Amis’ new introduction to Larkin’s
poems.
‘In 2008 we here in Books asked ourselves a question. Who was the greatest postwar British writer? After a great deal of debate, we came up with 50 names — and at the top was Philip
Larkin.
As Martin Amis writes in his introduction to his new selection of Larkin’s poems, this kind of ranking is “a fool’s errand”. “Evaluative criticism is rhetorical
criticism,” he writes. “It adds nothing to knowledge, it simply adds to the history of taste. After all, when we say ‘Shakespeare is a genius’, we are joining a vast
concurrence; but we are not quite stating a fact.”
It is only, Amis says, “Judge Time” who can give a verdict of greatness or otherwise; time allows judgments based on an artist’s life to pass away, letting the work stand alone.
In the decade after Larkin died in 1985, his selected letters (edited by Anthony Thwaite) and a biography by Andrew Motion revealed aspects of the poet’s character that made modern readers
and critics uncomfortable; Amis quotes Tom Paulin’s castigation of Larkin’s “racism, misogyny and quasi-fascist views”.
David Blackburn
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