A lot of people think "The English Patient" is Michael Ondaatje's best-known book, mostly on the strength of the 1996 film version, but they're wrong.

	Jeff Nolte Michael Ondaatje: "My book was a way of de-mythifying" Billy the Kid. Click photo for larger image.

The literary life of "The Collected Works of Billy the Kid: Left-Handed Poems," first published in Toronto in 1970, remains the Canadian-based writer's most enduring work.

Quantum Theatre's latest production is just another in a long line of "Billy the Kid" stage versions, Ondaatje said this week. Some of them, like Quantum's, have his blessing. Others have not.

"Oh, there's been a lot of 'gypsy versions' of it, so many I've lost track," he said. "I learn of some of them by rumor only, like an all-female version done in Halifax or something."

Ondaatje said he was so impressed by a production of director-adapter Dan Jemmett's work in France, he was happy to give Jemmett the go-ahead for his version of "Billy the Kid" here.

Talking by phone from Los Angeles, where's he's promoting his new novel, "Divisadero," Ondaatje recalled one of the early staged versions of his book.

"Gerald Ford was president then when it was being done in Washington, D.C., and his son Jack wanted to see it," he said. "So, some Secret Service men went to a performance to see what it was all about. The play was so full of gunplay, guns being fired from the balcony and so on, that they told Ford, 'Absolutely not.' "

"The Collected Works of Billy the Kid" is an extended verse poem inspired by the short and violent life of Southwest gunslinger William Bonney, who was killed in 1881 at age 19 or 20 (his birthdate is uncertain) after a bloody jail escape.

"As a kid, I grew up on the sanitized versions of the Old West in movies and comics," said Ondaatje, who was born and spent his childhood in Sri Lanka. "That's where I first heard of Billy the Kid.

"It was only when I grew older, that I learned how dangerous a man he was. My book was a way of de-mythifying him. Now, he seems to have taken on a new myth."