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[applause]
Michael Ondaatje: That was very embarrassing because I didn't understand a single word
I said.
Eleanor Wachtel: I remember once before, we played your voice, and the whole rest of the
evening you said, "I'm still trying to figure out whose voice that was."
MO: Yeah, well one of the problems I think I've mentioned to you before, about being
interviewed by you shortly after a book comes out, is that I don't usually know what the
book is about yet, in some serious way, looking bird's eye view or God's eye view. So, usually
when you're talking to me, I'm still trying to figure out what exactly was being put together
in a way, so... It has often been difficult, so I think I suggest we wait six months or
10 years before... And I was listening to an interview with you and where she was wonderful
when she was talking about something she had written 40 years ago. She was very clear,
and she could remember it, which would be my problem. She remembered every detail, every
sentence...
EW: So, you think we should wait 20 more years?
MO: A little bit longer, yeah. Okay, I'm going to introduce Eleanor. Eleanor Wachtel was
born and raised in Montreal. She started her career in journalism in Vancouver, and just
over 20 years ago moved to Toronto, to work full time for CBC Radio for shows such as
State of the Arts, The Arts Report, and The Arts Tonight. In fact, she was the host of
The Arts Tonight for 12 years alongside Writers and Company, and now, she also hosts Wachtel
on the Arts for ideas. She's published four book of interviews, including Original Minds
and Random Illuminations: Conversations with Carol Shields. Eleanor has received many honours
for her contributions to Canadian cultural life, including the Jack Award, for the promotion
of Canadian books, eight honorary doctorates, and the Order of Canada.
EW: As is always the case the greater the person the less introduction they need. Michael
Ondaatje was born in Sri Lanka and came to Canada in 1962. He's written five novels,
a memoir, an interview book on film, and 11 books of poetry. He's won virtually every
literary award including the Giller, the Governor General's more than once, the Booker prize,
the Irish Times International Fiction Prize, and the Prix Médicis. He also has the Order
of Canada, but he keeps turning down honorary degrees.
[laughter]
MO: So, are you nervous?
EW: Yes.
MO: Good. You've become in these last years, a very essential tradition in radio, not just
for writers, but also for readers in Canada, and also in the States through Sirius Satellite
Radio. Through you, we've discovered so much about writers from all over the world, and
so first of all many congratulations, and thank you.
[applause]
MO: How many writers do you think you've interviewed?
EW: It's hard to count. When I was asked to estimate I said about 1,000, but I don't know
if that's precise or not.
MO: There's no precision involved tonight, so don't worry.
EW: Oh good, oh good.
MO: And you've been grilling writers for over 20 years, so it's a great pleasure to turn
the tables on you. So let's go back to the beginning, the way you usually do. What's
your earliest memory?
[laughter]
EW: I remember when I asked you that, you said you couldn't remember anything before
you were 11, but that didn't seem fair. Well, the earliest memory is, actually I grew up
in Montreal, and my first couple of years were in the area of Montreal... I'll just
move this... The area of Montreal that Mordecai recently described as St. Urbain Street, it
wasn't actually St. Urbain Street, but it was in that neighbourhood. I remember crawling
down a very long hallway. Subsequently, I never really knew how to describe that environment,
but when I interviewed Maureen Forrester who also grew up in Montreal, she called it a
railway apartment. And that's what I realized it was. There was this long hallway and there
were rooms off the railway.
MO: Yeah.
EW: Like apartments. And I just remember it seeming very far away and crawling down there.
But I have an adjacent memory, which is pulling out pots and pans from the bottom cupboard
of the kitchen and playing with them. Certain percussion, that sort of thing. But this all
had to be before I was two and a half, because then we moved to a different neighbourhood.
MO: And what about the German measles?
EW: The German measles? That was later.
MO: Yeah I know, we're progressing slowly through your life.
[laughter]
EW: Well, the German measles is actually funny, because it has a lot to do with memory. And
that's a subject that comes up frequently with a lot of writers, but I remembered that
my sister had the German measles and then she gave it to me. So I had a milder case
and could spend a lot of time just reading and having my friends come. I used this, I
mentioned this in an introduction to Original Minds, because I was thinking about that period
when I started reading about people's lives, and biography and some of these original thinkers.
And when I checked with my sister, it turns out it was the other way around. And that
I had the really bad measles, and she had a great time with her friends who came and...
[laughter] And I remember once interviewing Frank McCourt, and he also said he had sort
of appropriated somebody else's memory. [laughter] He'd heard this vivid story about a runaway
horse, and he wrote it as if it was his own story, but it wasn't.
MO: So was there anything between that first memory of the pots and pans and the German
measles that I...
EW: That you should know about?
[laughter]
MO: That we should know about or... [laughter] A crucial influence?
EW: Yes.
MO: Okay.
[laughter]
EW: Yes. Well, what happened was... I think the crucial influence there, and this is in
some ways related to my sister and the measles is I that I think in a sense the biggest influence
in my sort of formative shaping of my life I think were my two older siblings because
they were the readers in the family and they... So I was introduced to the idea, this is what
you did, you read. On Saturday mornings, you lie in bed and read and you wouldn't get up
and do errands and things. And they won scholarships through high school, so I knew that's what
I would have to do and they took Honours at McGill and so I knew that's what I would do.
And so it was a very shaping... It was very influential that way and... But in terms of
actual books, there weren't a lot of books in the house, but I don't want to...
MO: You said there weren't too many books in the house?
EW: No, well my parents weren't big readers. I think my mother did, as far as I know, she
read one book which was Gone with the Wind because she loved Clark Gable. [laughter]
And so the books, there weren't a lot of books. There was Reader's Digest. There was Reader's
Digest Condensed books. There was a big, sort of Omnibus fairy tale book that my sister
and I shared that had a big yellow cover, and it had Hans Brinker with his Silver Skates
and Heidi and Grimm's Fairy Tales and Black Beauty. And we read it a lot, a lot, a lot
and then the cover came off and then we read it some more. It was a big thing. But books
came from the library, so it is a certain sense in which it is extremely appropriate
to be doing this, having this conversation in a library because libraries were the source
of all reading.
EW: There were school libraries, but those were just little, but there was a large...
And Montreal did not have a very good public library system, so initially my mother would
take my sister and me on the street car and then a bus to go to the library and then when
there was a local branch of the library that opened up around the corner from where I was
living that's where we would go, and in fact when I put together a first book of interviews,
I dedicated it to the Snowden Branch of the boys, NDG Boys and Girls Public Library because
then I could go there myself and take out books and at that point, I would be reading
things like Sue Barton: Student Nurse [laughter] and so I had a very erratic kind of... I remember
interviewing people whose childhood reading is sort of scrappy. There are a lot of gaps,
and I'm hoping that you won't know about them because there were a lot of gaps in terms
of classic children's reading. There were a lot of books I didn't read because I just
went to the shelves and just pulled stuff out.
MO: I remember your interview with Jane Goodall where she was talking about the two books
that influenced her when she was young. Do you remember what they were?
EW: One was Dr. Doolittle because I love that one also.
MO: Yeah, and the other was Tarzan.
[laughter]
EW: Well that's because Jane Goodall thought that she already had ambitions to go to Africa,
and she loved Tarzan and her name was Jane, and she thought she would have made a better
Jane.
[laughter]
MO: So did you ever interview anyone as a child?
[laughter]