Billy the Kid

Staying on the trail of Michael Ondaatje I would like to get in to The Collected Works of Billy the Kid (1970). If you have come into contact with Ondaatje’s work through his novels you will probably be a bit surprised by his poetry and books like this one, which is a sort of prose poem combining differnt styles and modes of expression.

The main character is the outlaw gunman Billy the Kid (1859-1881) also known as William H. Bonney or Henry McCarty. Undoubtedly you’ve seen some cowboy western featuring Billy, there have been a few made of varying quality (I wont pass judgement on Young Guns or even Billy the Kid v.s. Dracula). He is one of those iconic figures that loom out of the myths of Manifest Destiny along with Wild Bill Hickok, Calamity Jane, Black Elk and so on and so forth.

Ondaatje takes hold of his subject with a mixture of scholarly intensity and poetic verve. Some passages read like newspaper articles, others are short lists (people that have been killed, for example) again others are copies of the Penny Dreadfuls of the time featuring wild west characters. There’s a rough kind of humor in some passages, lyrical descriptions of a love interest, sex, death, horses… And the wide landscape Billy travels through. The descriptions are intense and slightly dreamy. They are the kind of distant musings you’d expect from someone who spends the entire day on horseback staring at the horizon.

Ondaatje also changes perspecitves in the sense that the narrative voice shifts, quoting Miss Sallie Chisum for instance. I like the diversity of the many voices and different types of text. It creates a collage of thoughts and impressions surrounding the iconic figure of Billy giving the reader a different image of what he was like as well as what the times were like. History is often recited as a given truth and this accentuates that you can never really know what actions and events are really like when you depend on eye witness accounts and the impressions of others. You get a kind of historical event refractured through many minds and voices – and this realates to the novle I wrote about previously Coming Through Slaughter.

I would say that this idea of history, disjointed accounts and fractured voices is a central theme in all of Ondaatjes work. Just like the lyrical passages and the obvious romance with language which is ever present in his body of work. He not only takes care to find the right word, he also creates a voice for each character which is distinct and clear. This care of language and voice is one of the reasons I keep coming back to his material, pouring over it and tracing the lines with my curious mental fingers. Touching the words tentatively, moulding their shapes, turning them over and over.

This is one of my favourite passages in The Collected Works of Billy the Kid.

You know hunters

are the gentlest

anywhere in the world

they halt caterpillars

from path dangers

lift a drowning moth from a bowl

remarkable in peace

in the same way assassins

come to chaos neutral.

It’s terse, lyrical and nicely exemplifies the duality of the characters. Violence and poetry in a balanced blend – my favourite.

MULE