CHAPTER SIX

AN OUTLAW IN FICTIONAL BIOGRAPHY: MICHAEL ONDAATJE’S BILLY THE KID 1859-1881

Ondaatje’s biography in poems Poetry is made to do a lot in Michael Ondaatje’s the Collected Works of Billy the Kid. Where Andrew Motion carefully argues questions of form in his Afterword and Foreword, where Peter Carey meticulously weaves the colonial social context of his outlaw Ned Kelly into the narrative, Ondaatje does precious little overt work on the discourse of biography. It is first and foremost the value and the quality of his poems that enable him to circumvent detailed argument regarding the facts of the case, about who did what to whom and the question of criminal guilt. This whole book puts the self-sufficiency of poetry into practice in a context in which the crime that the outsider is supposed to have committed is ignored or elided in a mass of unlawful behaviour by those on both sides of the law (more will be said about the legal anarchy of the Wild West later). If readers let themselves be guided by the subtitle of the book (‘Left Handed Poems’), then its core is the free-verse and prose poems. This is the poetic medium in which Ondaatje has Billy the Kid speak to the readers in the first-person singular. The biographical clue here, given in the course of the narrative, is that Billy the Kid was a left-handed gunman.1 From a moral point of view, this link between poetry and gun fighting is a high-risk strategy. However, the work contains an indictment of violence by realistic close focus, rather than a romanticized celebration of it.

1 According to Marcelle Brothers, co-founder of the Billy the Kid Historic Preservation Society, however, Billy the Kid was ‘ambidextrous, but primarily right- handed’ (see ‘Fact vs. Myth’ at aboutbillythekid.com, accessed 20 January 2013). A 1958 film about Billy the Kid, starring Paul Newman and directed by Arthur Penn, was called ‘The Left-Handed Gun’. 180 Outsider Biographies

Ondaatje characterizes Billy the Kid as a poet, who himself speaks to the reader directly, without explaining how he came to his language, or, like Ned Kelly, weaving into the fabric of the text the material nature of textuality, with self-reflexive references to paper, to learning to write, to the registers of language and to the exposure to literary texts. Ondaatje’s makes only one reference of that sort:

and my fingers touch this soft blue paper notebook control a pencil that shifts up and sideways mapping my thinking going its own way like light wet glasses drifting on polished wood.2

Otherwise, the poetic Billy the Kid has emerged Athena-like and speaks to the reader in mature form from the start. As poetry is so self-sufficient, the prime focus of any discussion of the Collected Works must be on analysing how Ondaatje gives Billy poetical depth. It is therefore necessary to pay careful attention to the way in which the sensibility of this left-handed poet is built up.3 The main characteristic of Billy may strike the reader as incongruous, especially for one who is seen as a nonchalant killer of men: Ondaatje’s Billy, however, displays a non-sentimental sensitivity towards the suffering of other beings, particularly that of animals. In the elaboration of Billy’s poetic voice, Ondaatje has succeeded in paring down the rhetoric in such a way that it is almost devoid of all devices and flourishes. In this way he achieves naivety in his young protagonist (at the time of his death he is only twenty-one years old).

2 Ondaatje, The Collected Works of Billy the Kid, 72. 3 However, it is important to mention the prose sections of this work, also written in the first person singular and from Billy’s point of view (ibid., 7-9, 17-18, 20, 22, 32- 35, 36-37, 50-51, 59-62 [John Chisum’s story of the inbred dogs], 67-71, 76-78 and 79). These sections provide the linear narrative momentum of the tracked down Billy, first free, then arrested, then escaping and finally assassinated. In two sections Pat Garrett also speaks in the first person singular (ibid., 42-45 and 86); and another short section, enclosed in parentheses, has unidentified subjects (it is clear that these are associates of Garrett’s) speaking in the first person plural (ibid., 88). Finally, and most enigmatically, there are three first-person-singular prose passages which can be attributed neither to Billy the Kid, nor to Garrett: the speaker is a biographer figure who may well have no other physical presence in the text (ibid., 28-29, 92-94 and 105).