Free The Collected Works of Billy the Kid by Michael Ondaatje Page A

in these I discovered a stunning range of voices and emotional angles. What if I tried to write a book that allowed all these angles and subjects and emotions, but they all came from one person? As far as I could see, one voice never really spoke only in one way: it contained multitudes.
    This was just a shadowy concept. I have never begun books with a careful plan or sure intent. But this idea propelled me into deep water. I had only a skeletal page of informationabout Billy. I had read one book called
The Saga of Billy the Kid
that began, I still remember, with the great line, “John Chisum knew cows.” I had read articles in Western magazines about Colts and Remingtons (one text was called
Triggernometry),
about safe and unsafe spurs, about desert wells, and the general consensus pertaining to lady gamblers and new sheriffs from the East. I pored over topographical maps of Western deserts. But in truth by now I had already written a third of the book, was on an unstoppable horse, just grabbing these details as I passed them, sticking them into my pannier. In this way the book turned into an improvisation on a historical figure who had by the 1960 s turned into a cartoon. I had to invent Billy from the ground up because really there was now nothing left of him. No blood or sinew or clue of character behind the known facts.
    I did have some sort of Aristotelian unity. Twenty-one killed. Dead at twenty-one. Otherwise merely a hint of a love affair and some vague friends who were known only by their names. It was perfect. I was given free rein. I invented every gesture and the choreography of every gunfight. I stole jokes from my friends and woes from people I knew less well. I was on a bus in London, Ontario, when two people behind me started chatting about Robert Browning’s son who while at university had tried to breed a mad dog, but they got off before the story was over, leaving me with the germ of an eventual tall story. (I couldn’t afford to go south, so it was an eventual delight when a review of the book in a Texas newspaper a few years later complained that a Canadian had been allowed to edit the journals of Billy the Kid.) In the summers I wrote in an abandoned barn, so the locale of that barn, the dry smell of past animals, the cobwebs on my pencils and table if I stayed away too long, became important. There were rats in the next set of stalls and so one afternoon rats entered the story. The mad dogs had already come and gone.
    I was not at all sure if any of this was good or bad. If I thought about what I had written, it was crazy content and a possibly crazy form. These Western women were dangerous, and the boys in the gang untrustworthy to the core. But Billy somehow, in all his wildness, stayed balanced, the sane assassin. I wrote. And as I finished each poem I put it away in a drawer after the first draft and never looked at it again until I had finished the whole book. So while I knew tentatively where I was going, I was not always sure where I had been. It gave me the freedom to swerve away into a new voice or character trait. Halfway through the manuscript I realised I needed to break free of the lyric voice. I needed more space for my characters to ride across the border or to stroll into town on Christmas night after being away for a while. So I suddenly began writing prose. This was the first “fiction” I had written but it did not feel like fiction to me. By now the forty or fifty poems I had in the desk drawer had created enough of a basic landscape for the language of prose, and all the unspoken possibilities poured out in a gush. Suddenly other characters spoke and thought—the enigmatic Garrett, the hesitant Sallie, the painfully shy Tom O’Folliard—and they had a specific nature in their voices that was not there until they started to speak.
    What I discovered I had at the end of two years of writing poems and prose and imaginary interviews and songs and fragments was a manuscript