The Collected Works of Billy the Kid

"This book is another reminder, like you said, of how diverse global audiences have found interest in the Western, and they’ve also been able to develop the genre in new ways. The Collected Works of Billy the Kid, published in 1970, was written by the Sri Lankan-Canadian author Michael Ondaatje. In some ways it’s very difficult to classify this book because it draws on fragments of the past that the author collects in order to construct a story about—to help us understand the mind of—one of the most legendary outlaws of the American West. The kind of texts that Ondaatje includes are fragments from a dime novel, a play, illustrations from comic books, news clippings from the era, and historical photos. The book was published in the seventies, an era that often explored the problem of the anti-hero. Ondaatje’s book also explores themes of violence, brutality, and so-called ‘savagery’ in the West. But the problem he faces is that because the region has been so romanticized and because of all the mythology that has circulated over the past 100 years, it’s nearly impossible to determine what is fact and what is fiction about the region. In collecting these fragments, the author foregrounds that larger problem of the archive—what is there and what is not there—and points to the problem of separating fact from fiction, which is a recurring issue in scholarship about the American West. As it turns out, we really don’t know much about Billy the Kid outside of the legend. We know he was born Henry McCarty, that he went by the alias William H. Bonney, and that he was originally from New York. It was said that he killed his first man by stabbing him in the back with a knife, or maybe with a pair of scissors. So, clearly, this is a figure who is not very heroic. He’s a violent force, and violence or brutality are elements that have shaped his life from early on. We know that, later, Billy was employed as a cow hand on a ranch in Lincoln County, New Mexico, and it’s believed that the owner of the ranch where he worked was killed by a rival force while Billy looked on helplessly, unable to intervene. Billy later sought revenge, and, with a group of people, killed the man thought to be responsible for murdering their boss. Billy ran free until Pat Garrett, a man who was once his friend, became sheriff and was ordered to bring him in. Billy died at a young age—at 22, when Pat Garrett killed him in a dark room. This book is an important meditation on Western violence and brutality. It gets us into the inner mind of a killer who is consumed by violence. As Ondaatje shows us, there seems to have been no real purpose to the brutality. Likewise the divisions between hero and villain, between law and outlaw, are constantly blurred in the text. One of the interesting things for me is that the book is an experimental text. It’s poetic and artful in a surprising way that we might not associate with the genre of the Western. It received a lot of praise when it was first published and won the Governor General’s Literary Award in Canada. For me, it stands out as a landmark text because it was this really celebrated literary—even avant-garde —Western, if you can imagine that. Yes, that’s a really crucial code, trope, or convention of the form."