Michael Ondaatje spoke this afternoon to a small group of students in a Vassar classroom; he said he missed teaching, and that though he had been a good teacher, he was a bad marker. He hated marking. “A for teaching, C for marking.” The students had come prepared with questions. In response to one, Ondaatje said, “What I love about English is that it is revived every fifty years by someone who is not English.” He mentioned G.V. Desani’s All About H. Hatterr as an example. Another student asked about Ondaatje’s characteristic “non-linear” writing style, what it enabled him to do, and he said that it wasn’t a part of a plan. Rather, he got irritated when he found himself “hand-cuffed to the sky” and prefered “another version of things.” In other words, non-linearity is useful in ensuring the condition described by one of his heroes, John Berger: never again will a single story be told as if it was the only one. Another part of this non-linear schema, of course, is Ondaatje’s use of the collage. The first time he did it, his then publisher said, “Three poems mixed with the prose? You are going to lose half the audience.” The book wasn’t going to be published, and then the film “Gandhi” was released, and that somehow justified the book’s release. A student had a question about the film “The English Patient.” Let’s remember, this was the book that made Ondaatje famous; it was also responsible for taking him out of the classroom. He didn’t mind what had happened to his novel in the film version. It was impossible to be faithful to the book when making the film. He said, “The book is about a badly burnt man and about a depressed nurse taking care of him for three hundred pages. It wasn’t a sell-out.” The changes that Minghella had introduced, Ondaatje said, freed him from his own story.

In the evening, Ondaatje delivered the annual William Gifford lecture–reading from The Cinnamon Peeler, Running in the Family, The English Patient, Anil’s Ghost, and Divisadero. After the lecture, I counted the books being held by those who were standing in line for the book-signing–a small smattering of folk with just-purchased copies of Divisadero, one Cinnamon Peeler, one The Man with the Seven Toes, and almost ninety percent of the others holding their copies of The English Patient.

For the record, Ondaatje didn’t have a copy of The English Patient to read from and had to borrow it from the bookseller present at the event. He was carrying copies of the other books.

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