Michael Ondaatje, In Peak Form

"I just wanted to get out and leap on a horse," he says, "and, you know, have a scene."

The Right Accidental Notes

Leap he did.

The book that resulted, "The Collected Works of Billy the Kid," is sometimes called a novel and sometimes not, but it is perhaps best described as experimental collage. It mixes poems with prose of varying lengths and points of view, photographs, songs, a fictional interview, snippets of eyewitness testimony and more.

Whatever you call "Billy," it won the Canadian Governor General's Award in the poetry or drama category. It brought Ondaatje some unwanted attention as well.

A crotchety former Canadian prime minister, John Diefenbaker, hated the award-winning book and called a news conference to denounce it. This was good for sales: Poetry, as Ondaatje points out, never makes the front pages of newspapers. Yet his "little glimpse of the dangers and the weirdness" of fame unsettled him enough that it showed up in his first true novel, "Coming Through Slaughter."

"Writers exaggerate the situations of their own lives," he explains.

"Slaughter" is a fictional portrait of jazz pioneer Buddy Bolden, who left no known recordings. Little is known about Bolden except that he "began to get famous right after 1900," in the words of a friend, by merging hymns and blues into something never heard before, and that he went mad playing the cornet in a New Orleans parade when he was 31 -- the same age Ondaatje was when he was writing the book.

Reading one character's description of Bolden's improvisations, it's easy to see parallels with Ondaatje's own:

But there was a discipline, it was just that we didn't understand. We thought he was formless, but I think now he was tormented by order, what was outside it. He tore apart the plot -- see his music was immediately on top of his own life. Echoing. As if, when he was playing he was lost and hunting for the right accidental notes.

How did a Sri Lanka-born Canadian get so far inside the head of a black American jazzman?

"I'm not quite sure how I did it still," Ondaatje says -- though the fact that he always wanted to be Fats Waller may have helped.

By this point, the conversation has moved from Coach House to a nearby restaurant, a few blocks east on Bloor Street. Were you to continue east for a mile and a half, you'd find yourself just north of the Toronto neighborhood where Ondaatje lives with his wife, writer and editor Linda Spalding. Not long after that, you'd be on the Bloor Street Viaduct, a bridge whose early-20th-century construction Ondaatje describes in his second novel, "In the Skin of a Lion." That book includes an astonishing scene in which a disoriented nun goes off the end of the half-finished span, disappearing "into the long depth of air which held nothing, only sometimes a rivet or a dropped hammer during the day."