Running in the Family: Family Tree & Timeline
Timeline:
There are very few specific dates in the memoir which reinforces the impression that it is more of a gesture than a portrait – this is not a historical document.
1928 Mervyn goes to Cambridge and pretends to study
1930 / 31 Mervyn’s parents discover that he has not been studying and come to England to confront him, Mervyn’s engagement to Kaye Roseleap
1931 Mervyn’s engagement to Doris is called off and then reinstated
April 11th 1932 Doris and Mervyn Marry
Mid 30’s Mervyn starts drinking heavily
Lalla’s dairy closes and she starts visiting others
1938 Philip Ondaatje dies – funeral argument about how much to pay the coffin bearers
1942 Aelian Ondaatje dies – liver problems
1943 Mervyn’s last train ride (Michael is born?)
Mid 40’s Lalla runs a boarding house during the war
1946 Probable date of divorce between Mervyn and Doris – she stayed with him for 14 years
Doris works in the Mount Lavinia Hotel and then the Grand Oriental
Eventually she moves to England (possibly 1947 in V.C. de Silva’s account, p.195)
Late 40’s Mervyn returns to Rock Hill and runs a chicken farm
Aug 15th 1947 Lalla dies
1950 Mervyn marries again
1954 Michael moves to England (?) – he goes at age 11 which would be 1954 if born in 1943
1971 Insurgence
Running in the Family: Chapter Notes – A Fine Romance
The Courtship – Flaming Youth
The Courtship (p. 31 – 35)
· Introduction to Mervyn Ondaatje and Doris Gratiaen, the parents of Michael Ondaatje
· Mervyn Ondaatje “attends” Cambridge university while secretly living off of the money from his parents
· To please his furious parents he becomes engaged to the well-off Kaye Roseleap
· This surge of “good behaviour” is interrupted by the sudden engagement to Doris Gratiaen, the sister of his friend Noel
· As his sister Stephy writes to the Roseleaps, Mervyn becomes frustrated and lonely in Kegalle while his fiancée is in Colombo
· Doris writes to break off the engagement
· After drunken suicide threats, the problem is patched up the next day and are to marry a year later
April 11, 1932 (p. 36)
· The brief retelling of memories from the wedding of Mervyn and Doris
· Driving to Kegalle they stop the car to give the Bishop a lift and he ends up driving them there (despite his terrible driving skills)
Honeymoon (p. 37 – 38)
· A list, separated into three paragraphs, of world events coinciding with the wedding and honeymoon of Mervyn and Doris
· The events deal primarily with natural disasters, deaths, and other unfortunate incidents, but once or twice mention issues of marriage or love among the other depressing events
Historical Relations (p. 39 – 41)
· 1920s in Ceylon – the retelling of some of the stories from the era of the author’s grandparents
· Specifically stories from times spent in Nuwara Eliya, with the “constant parties, horse racing, the All Ceylon Tennis Tournament, and serious golf”
The War Between Men and Women (p. 42 – 43)
· Lalla (Ondaatje’s grandmother) takes a bus home and is subjected to a stranger trying to fondle her breast, not realising that Lalla in fact had no left breast but only a sponge
Flaming Youth (p. 44 – 47)
· The chapter focuses predominantly on the life and exploits of Francis de Saram, a friend of both Mervyn Ondaatje and Noel Gratiaen
· The reporting of the youth of these three and their friends centers around their parties
· Not only were they fond of sneaking onto boats for the cheap liquor, but Francis had developed the “perfect place for parties” at the rubber estate he worked at
· Their youth was dancing and drinking until Francis lost his life in 1935 to alcoholis
Motifs:
Letters
Letters are found throughout the memoir but often Ondaatje weaves them into the narrative structure, allowing them to tell parts of the story, the fragmented, constructed and multi-vocal effect that this creates is one way in which the post-modern nature of this text is revealed to the reader. In this chapter, the letters represent news and its communication. The news is sometimes celebratory, e.g. “writing home a month later, [Mervyn] told his parents the good news that he had been accepted at Queen’s college” (31) or “after several modest letters about his successful academic career” (31). On other occasions this news brings disruption, e.g “It was Stephy who wrote, setting off a chain reaction in the mails, one letter going to Phyllis whose holiday plans were terminated” (33), “Doris Gratiaen wrote to break off the engagement” (35). These letters are all related to Mervyn, and because of the various effects created by the news contained in them, the audience is able to see how that reflects on his personality. Mervyn is described as often “trying to solve one problem by creating another” (33), and this is demonstrated through the motif of letters.
Engagements
Engagements are a common feature only in this chapter, but they introduce the beginning of what is to be a recurring theme throughout the novel. The constant engagements, being started and stopped (and, in the case of Doris, started again) introduces a sense of fragility or instability about marriage; this is perhaps reflective of the fact that Ondaatje’s parents ultimately separated or it is perhaps indicative of the ephemeral, transient nature of magical and almost mythical impression of life that Ondaatje creates of life in the 1920’s and 1930’s in Ceylon. The presentation of these engagements – “becoming briefly engaged to a Russian countess” (32), “went out at dinnertime for a few hours and came back to announce that he had become engaged to Kaye Roseleap” (32), “came home one evening to announce that he was engaged to a Doris Gratiaen” (33) – suggest to the audience a randomness about becoming engaged, which is strange to them because marriage seems like something not to be taken lightly. When Mervyn purchases “a huge emerald engagement ring which he charged to his father’s account” (34), he comes across as reckless and unaware of consequences, suggesting that his approach to marriage (as everything else) is impulsive rather than well planned out, again revealing something not only about his character but also of the times of which he is symbolic. Finally, when Doris writes “to break off the engagement” (35) yet “the next day the problems were solved and the engagement was established once more” (35), marriage is seen as something volatile but with easy fixes. All of these ideas put forward are contrary to how the reader may perceive marriage to be, i.e. a lifelong commitment to another person that should not be taken lightly. The recurring engagements thus are significant in their development of the impression that the Ceylon of the 1920’s and 30’s was a world unlike our own.
Alcohol
At the start of the novel Ondaatje also foreshadows the destructive role that alcohol will eventually have on his father. Alcohol is Mervyn’s drug of choice and therefore crops up in the story whenever he is not doing as he should, e.g. “being able to offer [his parents] only champagne at eleven in the morning” (32) when they arrive to confront him about his life at Cambridge; or when he was misbehaving with his friends when “he would roll into the barracks, step out in his dress suit, inspect the guard, leap back into the car full of laughing and drunken friends and depart” (34-35) and again when he was doing something that is important, but that he may be fearful of “By the time they got to Colombo my father was very drunk and Aelian was slightly drunk” (35). This foreshadows not only Mervyn’s alcoholism but the drunken and exaggerated feel to many of the stories involving his father adds to theme of postmodernism that runs through Ondaatje’s memoir. Alcohol also figures prominently in the chapter entitled ‘Flaming Youth’ which centers around Francis de Saram, a close friend of the narrator’s father and Noel. He “had the most extreme case of alcoholism in my father’s generation” (44) and “lived on gin, tonic-water, and canned meat” (46). One of the aspects alcohol is that it plays a key role in creating the energy and life of the people at the parties they attended, in a sense this is the fuel that made their youths flame. However, Ondaatje also explores the downsides of alcohol as we know that Francis de Saram drank himself into an early grave.
Cars/Driving
Driving in ‘The Courtship’ is mostly conducted by Mervyn (or with Mervyn in the vehicle), and subsequently it expresses how repressed he feels in the home he lives in with his parents and how he yearns to be free. To stay with his friends and his fiancée, “He would drive down from his parents’ home in Kegalle to Colombo” (34) because he “had nothing to do in Kegalle” (34). There is one story in which “he was given the car and asked to go and buy some fish [..] Two days later his parents got a telegram from Trincomalee, miles away” (35) – in this the reader can see just how repressed he is in Kegalle because he takes advantage of even the most flimsy of pretexts to flee his home. The fact that when he drives to Colombo to rescue his relationship with Doris but arrives “very drunk” (35) suggests that both driving and drinking are seen as escape mechanisms for Mervyn, and add to his character development. In contrast in ‘April 11th 1932’ driving is related to the Bishop of Colombo and the wedding of Mervyn and Doris. The anonymous narrator remarks that on their trip to Kegalle they saw a car in the ditch and “it was the Bishop of Colombo who everyone knew was a terrible driver” (36). The people in the car are forced to give him a ride to the wedding, but because of space constraints the bishop ends up driving them all, and the narrator says, “We were all so squashed and terrified for the rest of the trip!” (36) Driving is significant here because adds to the humourous tone of the memoir, following on from the drunken journey to Columbo in ‘The Courtship’ which Aelian and Mervyn undertake which results in Aelian’s farcical attempt to hide all of the guns in the headquarters of the Ceylon Light Infantry in order to prevent Mervyn from killing himself. In later chapters, such as ‘The War Between Men and Women’, we see that Lalla takes a bus because “she did not own a car” (42). Perhaps, given that cars for Mervyn were always linked to freedom and escapism, the fact that Lalla does not have this opportunity might suggest something about the power she has in society as a women, and as the title suggests, the war between men and women in the Ceylonese society.
Death
Death makes its first appearance as a motif in the ‘Honeymoon’ chapter where there are a series of contextual references to the events around the time around of Mervyn and Doris’s honeymoon., Ondaatje’s decision to include headlines such as “Lindberg’s Baby Found – A Corpse!” (37), “The 13th President of the French Republic was shot to death by a Russian” (37), and “In America, women were still trying to steal the body of Valentino from his grave” (37) is perhaps an allusion to the unhappy marriage that is to come between Mervyn and Doris. Death continues as a motif in the ‘Historical Relations’ chapter where it helps to glamorize and romanticize the past. These deaths were regarded as “casual tragedies” (40); ranging from when “Jessica almost died after being shot” (40) to “poor Wilfred Batholomeusz who had large teeth was killed while out hunting’” (40) and when “T.W. Roberts was bitten in the leg by a dog […] Later the dog was discovered to be rabid, but as T.W. had left for England nobody bothered to tell him” (41). The ironic understatement with which these deaths, especially the last, are discussed enhances the sense of humour running through the memoir at this point creating the impression that life in Ceylon at this time was carefree and light-hearted. Interestingly, however, death also seems to invoke a revitalization of people, as shown when Ondaatje writes, “Both my grandmothers lived cautiously, at least until their husbands died” (41). Here the motif may be being used by Ondaatje to convey the post-colonial theme that colonized countries can only blossom once the colonizers have left, in the same way that the grandmothers could not be free until after the deaths of the strict colonial / patriarchal figures symbolized by the grandfathers, Philip Ondaatje in particular
Rumours & Gossip
Rumours appear explicitly as a motif in the ‘Honeymoon’ chapter: “there were upsetting rumours that ladies were going to play at Wimbledon in shorts” (37) and “It was rumoured that pythons were decreasing in Africa” (37). The somewhat arbitrary nature of these facts suggests something about the arbitrary nature of the information that Ondaatje was able to uncover in his search for the truth … and perhaps also the arbitrary nature of the events that make the news, especially given the relatively superficial nature of both facts. The concern over the shorts at Wimbledon perhaps also creates the impression that people in this time period were afforded the luxury of being shallow and flippant about real problems, once again hinting that Ceylon in the 1920’s and 1930’s was a place where real-world responsibilities were suspended. The glamorization continues in the combination of death with the sports being played; “Jessica almost died after being shot by an unknown assailant while playing croquet” (40). The casual presentation of this suggests to the reader that any danger to the lives of the characters was something so natural that it was not greeted with any surprise, and it is this indifferent attitude that gives off the idea that these times were carefree and relaxed.