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Did Ondaatje Deal Too Leniently with the Historical Count Almasy?
In the December 6, 16 edition of The Globe and Mail, an article was published written by Elizabeth Pathy Salett, the president of the National MultiCultural Institute in Washington. In this article Ms. Salett alleged that the film The English Patient was “amoral and ahistorical”. Salett, whose family’s safety was threatened during World War II by Count Laszlo de Almasy, the real-life figure whom Michael Ondaatje based the protagonist of his book, accused the film of portraying Almasy as “an accidental spy responding to personal tragedy,” and not as the “committed Nazi collaborator” she argues he actually was. Did in fact Ondaatje dealt too leniently with the historical Count Almasy? In my opinion, no. How can Ms. Salett possibly expect an author to please his entire audience? Besides, The English Patient is in no way a history lesson nor is it a documentary. If it wasn’t for Ms. Salett’s article, I bet no-one would even know who Almasy was in the first place.
For her own personal and justifiable reasons, Ms. Salett has every right to feel the way she does about Count Laszlo de Almasy. I genuinely sympathize with her when she describes her family’s flight from Alexandria to Cairo in an attempt to escape from Almasy and the Germans. However, Ms. Salett cannot possibly expect an artist such as Michael Ondaatje to restrain and limit his creative expression for fear of offending a certain minority of his audience. With any form of art that is free to interpretation there is bound to be one or two individuals who will strongly oppose the artist’s view. But I understand where Ms. Salett is coming from. If, for example, Ondaatje wrote a story basing the protagonist on Adolph Hitler and failed to portray him as the inhumane, disgusting, racist, son-of-a-bitch that he truly was, then I’d accuse Ondaatje of being cruel and insensitive to the memories of the millions of innocent people who died in the massacre we all know as World War II.
In Ondaatje’s rebuttal to Ms. Salett’s article he writes,
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The English Patient in not a history lesson but an interpretation of human emotions love, desire, betrayals in war and betrayals in peace � in a historical time. (...) If a novelist or dramatist or filmmaker is to be censored or factually tested every time he or she writes from historical event, then this will result in the most uninspired works, or in just might be safer for those artists to resort to cartoons and fantasy.
I couldn’t have said it better myself! The film’s main objective is to concentrate primarily on the passionate, adulterous love affair of Count Almasy (Ralph Fiennes) and the married Katharine Clifton (Kristin Scott Thomas). By no means is The English Patient a historical account of the life of Count Laszlo de Almasy. Michael Ondaatje even gives fair warning at the end of his book in the Acknowledgments where he writes,
While some of the characters who appear in this book are based on historical figures, and while many of the areas described � such as the Gilf Kebir and its surrounding desert � exist, and where explored in the 10s, it is important to stress that this story is a fiction and that the portraits of the characters who appear in it are fictional, as are some of the events and journeys.
If in fact Ms. Salett read the novel before going to see the movie, she would have already known this.
Most individuals who enjoy The English Patient in either of its forms will not be aware that the character of Almasy is based, however accurately, on a real-life person of ambiguous reputation. Nor do I think will they care much. To be quite honest, if it wasn’t for Ms. Salett’s article, I would have never known that Count Almasy was such a “bad-guy”. Some historians claim he was a German spy, others say he was a double agent. In reality, the facts about Almasy’s role in Egypt during World War II are still uncertain.
There is not a shadow of a doubt in my mind that Count Laszlo Almasy was the horrible man Ms. Salett makes him out to be. However, Ondaatje’s piece is purely for entertainment’s sake. As he mentioned himself, it holds no sympathy for Nazis. The English Patient is simply about “forgiveness and how people come out of a war”. wrote it myself
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