To say that Michael Ondaatje is a master is bromidic. Anyone who's kept an eye on literature over the past thirty some odd years know this. And he isn't simply a masterful novelist. In addition to this worthy accolade and the laurels that come along with, he's also a talented poet, a wonderfully imaginative and robust storyteller as a whole, and he might have written one of the most damnably fine memoirs today. With the fierce tidal swarm of memoirs published these days, that's quite a feat. I tend to loathe the memoir. The whole James Frey mess and the previous holocaust memoirs written by holocaust victims who reportedly were never involved muddied the genre for me. It reeks of "truthiness." For the most part I blame Oprah. I find the memoir to be a false genre, reaching, claiming to be something that not only it isn't but something that it cannot be simply because of the frailty of human memory and subjectivity. Ondaatje writes the anti-memoir, or the honest memoir, acknowledging that he has freely fictionalized aspects of his yarn. No matter what you want to say memoirs are fiction. There's a great deal of difference between fact and truth.
Memory, the key ingredient to the memoir, is not conducive to the factual retellings. When thinking of unreliable narrators, memory is the worst, a well-intentioned but duplicitous speaker. Subject to time warpage, our memories aren't megalithic structures. They change as we change. The word "memoir" goes back to the French, mémoire, who borrowed it, like all good linguists, from Latin: memoria, both of which mean memory. The lens memory uses must go through personal filters and is then subjected to years and years of deteriorations and interlocutions where the memories are modified, not to mention an accretion of new memories that may dent the others in their struggle for dominance in the foremost regions of our thoughts.
The human animal is a natural storyteller, an embellisher. We're dramatists and excitable raconteurs with a tendency to revert to the mythic, the grand, the hysterical, the beautiful and the tragic. "True" memoirs can rarely get away without quotations coming off as dubious and suspect. Personal knowledge and subjectivity almost always make historical accounts impossible, and Ondaajte not only acknowledges this in Running in the Family but struggles against this as he attempts to discover the stories of his parents and find, for the lack of a better word, the truth. It's a personal story at most. One writer's attempt to tell a life as best he can with the only material he has to work with: memories and written accounts.
"While all these names may give an air of authenticity, I must confess that the book is not a history but a portrait or "gesture." And if those listed above disapprove of the fictional air I apologize and can only say that in Sri Lanka a well-told lie is worth a thousand facts."
"In the heart of this 250-year-old fort we will trade anecdotes and faint memories, trying to swell them with the order of dates and asides, interlocking them all as if assembling the hull of a ship. No story is ever told just once. Whether a memory or funny hideous scandal, we will return to it an hour later and retell the story with additions and this time a few judgments thrown in. In this way history is organized."
"That night, I will not have so much a dream as an image that repeats itself. I see my own straining body which stands shaped like a star and realize gradually I am part of a human pyramid. Below me are other bodies that I am standing on and above me are several more, though I am quite near the top. With cumbersome slowness we are walking from one end of the huge living room to the other. We are all chattering away like the crows and cranes so that it is often difficult to hear. I do catch one piece of dialogue. A Mr. Hobday has asked my father if he has any Dutch antiques in the house. And he replies, 'Well...there is my mother.' My grandmother lower down gives a roar of anger. But at this point we are approaching the door which being twenty feet high we will be able to pass through only if the pyramid turns sideways. Without discussing it the whole family ignores the opening and walks slowly through the pale pink rose-coloured walls into the next room."
"People's memories about Gasanawa, even today, are mythic."
"Truth disappears with history and gossip tells us nothing in the end of personal relationships. There are stories of elopements, unrequited love, family feuds, and exhausting vendettas, which everyone was drawn into, had to be involved with. But nothing is said of the closeness between two people: how they grew n the shade of each other's presence. No one speaks of that exchange of gift and character - the way a person took on and recognized in himself the smile of a lover. Individuals are seen only in the context of these swirling social tides."
"Where is the intimate and truthful in all this? Teenager and Uncle. Husband and lover. A lost father in his solace. And why do I want to know of this privacy?...I want to sit down with someone and talk with utter directness, want to talk to all the lost history like that deserving lover."
"We own the country we grow up in, or we are aliens and invaders."
"The artist is anonymous."
"Perhaps she was a shy child, for those who are magical break from silent structures after years of chrysalis."
"I arrived on a plane but love the harbour...There is nothing wise about a harbour, but it is real life. It is as sincere as a Singapore cassette. Infinite waters cohabit with flotsam on this side of the breakwater and the luxury liners and Maldive fishing vessels steam out to erase calm sea. Who was I saying goodbye to? Automatically as I travel on the tug with my brother-in-law, a pilot in the harbour, I sing, "the lights in the harbour don't shine for me..." but I love it here, skimming out into the night anonymous among the lazy commerce, my nieces dancing on the breakwater as they wait, the lovely swallowing of thick night air as it carves around my brain, blunt, cleaning itself with nothing but this anonymity, with the magic words. Harbour. Lost ship. Chandler. Estuary."
"This is the colour of landscaepe, this is the silence, that surrounded my parents' marriage."
"My mother loved, always loved, even in her last years long after their divorce, his secretive and slightly crooked humour. It bound them together probably more than anything. They were in a world to themselves, genial with everyone but sharing a code of humour."
"I showed what you had written to someone and they laughed and said what a wonderful childhood childhood we must have had, and I said it was a nightmare."
"Avoid eating food foods in lonely places, the devils will smell you out. Carry some metal. An iron heart. Do not step on bone or hair or human ash."
"Two day before he died we were together. We were alone in the house. I can't remember what we said but we sat there for three hours. I too don't talk much. You know it is a most relaxed thing when you sit with a best friend and you know there is nothing you have to tell him, to empty your mind. We just stayed there together, silent in the dusk like this, and we were quite happy."
"'You must get this book right,' my brother tells me, 'You can only write it once.' But the book again is incomplete. In the end all your children move among the scattered acts and memories with no more clues. Not that we ever thought we would be able to understand you. Love is often enough, towards your stadium of small things. Whatever brought you solace we would have applauded. Whatever controlled the fear we all share we would have embraced."
"During certain hours, at certain years in our lives, we see ourselves as remnants from the earlier generations that were destroyed. So our job becomes to keep peace with enemy camps, eliminate the chaos at the end of the Jacobean tragedies, and with 'the mercy of distance' write the histories.
Fortinbras. Edgar. Christopher, my sisters, Wendy, myself. I think all of our lives have been terribly shaped by what went on before us. And why of Shakespeare's characters do I remain most curious about Edgar? Who if I look deeper into the metaphor, torments his father over an imaginary cliff?
Words such as love, passion, duty, are so continually used they grow to have no meaning - except as coins or weapons. Hard language softens. I never knew what my father felt of these "things." My loss was that I never spoke to him as an adult. Was he locked in the ceremony of being "a father"? He died before I even thought of such things.
I long for the moment in the play where Edgar reveals himself to Gloucester and it never happens. Look I am the son who has grown up. I am the son you have made hazardous, who still loves you. I am now part of an adult's ceremony, but I want to say I am writing this book about you at a time when I am least sure about such words...Give me your arm. Let go my hand. Give me your arm. Give the word. "Sweet Marjoram"...a tender herb."
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