Successful People Who
Overcame Obstacles
They tried and failed. They tried again, and sometimes again and again. They
are some of the most renowned names in business, technology, media and retail.
These
captains of industries had to start somewhere. Obstacles were many, yet they
persevered, believed in themselves and refused to give up. Some had rough
childhoods, some suffered huge financial losses and some were simply told they
weren’t smart enough.
The one
thing they all have in common is that they failed somewhere along the way. But
failure would not be an obstacle. It would be a step toward success.
The
Innovators
Although Henry Ford is credited with inventing the automobile and the assembly
line, the fact is he didn’t invent either. However, more than any other
individual, he transformed the automobile from a simple invention into an
innovation that dramatically changed the 20th century.
When Ford
was 15, his father, an immigrant from Ireland, gave the young man a pocket
watch. Ford took the watch apart and put it back together again. A year later,
he left the family farm and got a job as an apprentice machinist in Detroit. It
was the beginnings of the Henry Ford that would go on to become one of the most
successful men in American history.
But Ford
would fall on his face more than once before his ideas finally stuck. His first
failure was Detroit Automobile Company, which was founded in 1899 and dissolved
by 1901. It took Ford four more tries before the Ford Motor Company began with
a $28,000 investment in 1903.
Thomas
Edison was told he was stupid in school. He only attended organized school for
three months before the headmaster labeled him “addled” and sent him home.
Although many around him thought he was a simpleton, his mother saw something
special in him and home schooled him. He became an avid reader.
Edison was fired from his first two jobs, including one with Western Union. He
worked as a telegrapher during the night shift, which allowed him to dabble
with his first love – experimenting. But one of his experiments went awry,
bubbled over and ruined his boss’ desk. He was fired the next day.
As an
inventor he made hundreds of attempts before he came up with something that
changed the world: the light bulb! Edison holds more than a thousand patents.
In addition to the light bulb, his inventions include the phonograph and the
motion picture camera.
From Rags
To Riches
Oprah Winfrey was born into poverty to a single mom in rural Mississippi. She
experienced a number of hardships as a young girl, including being raped at age
nine and becoming pregnant at 14. (Her baby died just days after birth.)
Growing
up, her family was so poor that she wore potato sacks to school sometimes and
was chastised by the other children.
But by
17, she knew her calling. She had started co-hosting a local radio show while
in high school; it continued after graduation and for two years into college.
During her moves toward TV talk show icon, she was fired from a job as a
reporter and told she was “unfit for TV.”
Today,
she is one of the most successful – and richest – women in the world. Winfrey
has been ranked as the richest African-American of the 20th century, the
greatest Black philanthropist in U.S. history and is currently North America’s
only Black billionaire. She is also, considered to be the most influential
woman in the world.
R.H. Macy
failed five times at starting his own business. He didn’t give up, and more
than 150 years later, the Macy’s name still stands as a retail giant.
Macy
worked on a whaling ship as a teenager and had a tattoo inked on his hand in
the shape of a star and colored red. Later in life, that tattoo would become
the logo of Macy’s that still stands today.
By the
time Macy was in his early 20s, he has switched gears and become a retailer. He
opened his first dry goods store in 1843. It failed. But he tried again and
again and again. By 1855, he had made four attempts and failed four times.
He was
undaunted. In 1858, he moved to New York City and opened the first Macy’s at
Sixth Avenue and 14th Street. Macy had obviously learned from his mistakes as
the business grew and he opened more stores.
Today,
Macy’s has 850 stores nationwide, revenue in excess of $24 billion and employs
more than 167,000 people.
An
American Tradition
It’s become a family tradition to go to Disney Land or Disney World. And the
name Disney is synonymous with animation, movies and loveable and memorable
characters, such as Mickey Mouse, Pluto and Donald Duck.
But its
beginnings in the early 1900s were rocky at best. In fact, Disney’s founder,
Walt Disney, was once told that he “lacked imagination and had no good ideas.”
He met
with financial failure and bankruptcy several times, beginning in 1920 with
Iwerks-Disney Commercial Artists. Disney and then partner Ubbe Iwerks had to
abandon the company and go back to regular jobs when it wasn’t making any
money. Disney would try again with a company called Laugh-O-Grams Studios,
which couldn’t keep up with the cost of operations and went bankrupt.
Disney
attempts at business were taking place in Kansas City. He heard about Hollywood
and its burgeoning film industry and decided to take his ideas there. Walt and
his brother Roy pooled their resources and headed to Hollywood. This time, the
company – called the Walt Disney Company – stayed alive and began to grow.
Today,
Disney brings in billions via movies, theme parks and merchandise.
What do
they all have in common? They failed or hit obstacles, but they did not let
failures and setbacks stop them from eventually reaching the pinnacle of
success in their fields.
What drives
writers to drink? Tell us
what you think
Tennessee
Williams, F Scott Fitzgerald, Hemingway, Cheever, Carver, Berryman… Six giants
of literature – and all addicted to alcohol. In an edited extract from her new
book, The Trip to Echo Spring, Olivia Laing looks at the link between writers
and the bottle
The poet
John Berryman (bearded) shares beer and conversation with drinkers in a Dublin
pub in 1967. Five years later, in 1972, after several failed rounds of
treatment for alcohol addiction, he took a train to the Washington Avenue
bridge in St Paul and threw himself 100 feet into the Mississippi. His
body was identified from a blank cheque found in his pocket and the name on his
broken glasses. Photograph: Terrence Spencer/Time & Life Pictures/Getty
Image
The next
day, the New York Times ran an obituary claiming him as "the most
important American playwright after Eugene O'Neill", though it had been
two decades since his last successful play. It listed his three Pulitzer prizes,
for A Streetcar Named Desire, Cat on a Hot Tin Roof and Night
of the Iguana, adding: "He wrote with deep sympathy and expansive
humour about outcasts in our society. Though his images were often violent, he
was a poet of the human heart."
He was
also a kind, generous, hard-working man, who rose at dawn almost every morning
of his life, sitting down at his typewriter with a cup of black coffee to
produce what would amount to well over 100 short stories and plays. At the same
time, he was a lonely, depressed alcoholic who managed by degrees to isolate
himself from almost everyone he loved. A sample entry from his diary in 1957
reads: "Two Scotches at bar. 3 drinks in morning. A daiquiri at Dirty
Dick's, 3 glasses of red wine at lunch and 3 of wine at dinner. Also two
seconals so far, and a green tranquillizer whose name I do not know and a
yellow one I think is called reserpine or something like that" – an
itemisation made more troubling by the fact that he was in rehab at the time.
Things
got worse in 1963, when Williams's long-term partner Frank Merlo, nicknamed the
Little Horse, died of lung cancer. After that, he was far gone and out, barely
perpendicular against the current, buoyed on a diet of coffee, liquor,
barbiturates and speed. Hardly any wonder he found speech difficult, or kept
toppling over in bars, theatres and hotels. Each year he put on a new play, and
each year it failed, rarely lasting a month before it closed.
Two years
before he died, Williams was interviewed in the Paris Review.
He talked about his work and the people he had known, and he touched too, a
little disingenuously, on the role of alcohol in his life, saying:
"O'Neill had a terrible problem with alcohol. Most writers do. American
writers nearly all have problems with alcohol because there's a great deal of
tension involved in writing, you know that. And it's all right up to a certain
age, and then you begin to need a little nervous support that you get from
drinking."
Tennessee Williams sitting in a bar in Turkey,
c1948. He was plagued by depression and self-loathing, and yet produced
some of the great American plays. Williams fought his alcohol addiction
all his life. He choked to death in his hotel suite in 1983. Photograph: Hulton
Archive/Getty Images
While not
all of this statement is wholly to be believed, it's true that Williams was by
no means the only alcoholic writer in America, or anywhere else for that
matter. Ernest
Hemingway. F
Scott Fitzgerald. William
Faulkner. John
Cheever. Patricia Highsmith. Truman
Capote. Dylan Thomas. Jack London. Marguerite Duras. Elizabeth
Bishop. Jean Rhys. Hart Crane. These are among the greatest writers of our age,
and yet, like Williams, their addiction to alcohol damaged their creativity,
ravaged their relationships and drove many of them to death.
Why do
writers drink? Discussing Edgar Allan Poe, Baudelaire once commented that
alcohol had become a weapon "to kill something inside himself, a worm that
would not die". In his introduction to Recovery, the posthumously
published novel of the poet John Berryman, Saul Bellow observed:
"Inspiration contained a death threat. He would, as he wrote the things he
had waited and prayed for, fall apart. Drink was a stabiliser. It somewhat
reduced the fatal intensity." In Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, Williams
explains the desire even more succinctly. Towards the end of the play, Brick,
the former football hero, tells his father that he needs to keep drinking until
he hears "the click…This click that I get in my head that makes me
peaceful. I got to drink till I get it." Horrified, Big Daddy grabs his
son's shoulders, exclaiming: "Why boy, you're alcoholic."
I was 17
when I first read that sentence, and already well acquainted with alcoholism.
My mother's partner for a decade, Diana, had been a drinker, and our time
together had recently ended in disaster, when the police came to our home and
arrested her after a violent altercation. It wasn't just the fights that had
frightened me, but rather the terrifying sense that someone was no longer
inhabiting consensual reality. I was traumatised, I suppose, and it's hard to
express the relief I experienced when I opened up my pale green copy of Cat
and found within its pages a brave, brazen account of the role alcohol can play
within a family; a house. Ever since that afternoon, I've been preoccupied by
what writers have to say about drinking, especially those who have been
drinkers themselves.
Over
time, I grew most interested in six American writers whose lives intersected in
odd, sometimes uncanny ways. All but one had – or saw themselves as having –
that most Freudian of pairings, an overbearing mother and a weak father. All
were tormented by self-hatred and a sense of inadequacy. Three were profoundly
promiscuous, and almost all experienced conflict and dissatisfaction with
regard to their sexuality. Most died in middle age, and the deaths that weren't
suicides tended to be directly related to the years of hard and hectic living.
At times, all tried in varying degrees to give up alcohol but only two
succeeded, late in life, in becoming permanently dry.
These
sound like tragic lives, the lives of wastrels or dissolutes, and yet these six
men – Tennessee Williams, Ernest Hemingway, F Scott Fitzgerald, John Cheever, John Berryman and Raymond Carver – produced
between them some of the most beautiful writing this world has ever seen. As
the novelist Jay McInerney once commented of Cheever: "There have been
thousands of sexually conflicted alcoholics but only one of them wrote The
Housebreaker of Shady Hill and The Sorrows of Gin." I wanted to
know how their writing and drinking had intertwined, and so in 2011 I took a
trip across America. Over the course of a month I travelled by plane and train
across the country, drifting from New York to New Orleans, Key West, St Paul
and Port Angeles. I chose these places because they seemed to serve as staging
posts, in which the successive phases of alcohol addiction had been acted out.
By travelling through them in sequence, I thought it might be possible to build
a kind of topographical map of alcoholism, tracing its developing contours from
the pleasures of intoxication through to the gruelling realities of the
drying-out process.
I went to
New York in search of first drinks. Tennessee Williams took his at sea in the
summer of 1928: a green crème de menthe, somewhere on the greyish Atlantic
between Manhattan and Southampton. He was still called Tom back then, a skinny,
shy boy of 17, travelling with his grandfather and a party of parishioners on a
grand tour of Europe. Afterwards he was violently sea sick, later confiding in
a letter to his mother that though his grandfather was lapping up the
cocktails, his own preference was for Coca-Cola and ginger ale. The pleasures
of abstinence soon palled. By the time they reached Paris, he'd discovered
champagne.
Tom had
been a sickly, delicate boy, and as a teenager began to suffer the panic
attacks that would dog him until the very last days of his life. At first he
used to self-medicate by pacing the streets of St Louis or swimming frantic
lengths in a nearby pool. But as he grew older and moved to New York, sex and
alcohol became his preferred methods of managing stress. In his autobiography, Memoirs, he remembered how
after drinking wine "you felt as if a new kind of blood had been
transfused into your arteries, a blood that swept away all anxiety and all
tension for a while, and for a while is the stuff that dreams are made
of".
He was by
no means the only writer who used alcohol in this way. The same trick was
employed by John Cheever, one of the greatest short-story writers of his or any
century. Cheever fascinated me because he was, in common with many alcoholics,
a helpless mixture of fraudulence and honesty. Though he feigned patrician
origins, his upbringing in Quincy, Massachusetts was both financially and
emotionally insecure, and while he eventually attained all the trappings of the
landed Wasp he never managed to shake a painful sense of shame and
self-disgust.
He was an
almost exact contemporary of Williams, and though they weren't friends, their
worlds in New York often overlapped. In fact, Mary Cheever first realised her
husband wasn't entirely heterosexual when they attended the first Broadway
production of A Streetcar Named Desire. According to Cheever, Blake Bailey's
beautiful biography, there was a leitmotif associated with Blanche DuBois's
dead homosexual husband and this tune lodged in Mary's head and led to some
kind of underwater realisation that her husband's sexuality was not as she'd
assumed, though this wasn't a thought she shared with him.
Cheever's
problem, as anyone familiar with his journals will know, is that the same gulf
between appearance and interior that makes his stories – "The Enormous
Radio", "The Day the Pig Fell into the Well", "Goodbye, My
Brother" – so beguiling was also at work in his own life. Despite an increasingly
command performance as an upstanding member of the bourgeoisie, Cheever
couldn't shake the sense of being essentially an impostor among the middle
classes. Writers, even the most socially gifted and established, must be
outsiders of some sort, if only because their job is that of scrutiniser and
witness. All the same, Cheever's sense of double-dealing seems to have run
unusually deep.
John Cheever
in 1975, cigarette, drink and typewriter to hand. 1975 was the year he was
admitted to a treatment centre and afterwards declared: ‘I came out 20lb
lighter and howling with pleasure.’ He never drank again and died of cancer in
1982. Photograph: Bernard Gotfryd/Getty Images
This
burden of fraudulence, of needing to keep some lumbering secret self forever
under wraps, was not merely a matter of class anxiety. Cheever lived in the
painful knowledge that his erotic desires included men, that these desires were
antagonistic and even fatal to the social security he also craved, and that as
such "every comely man, every bank clerk and delivery boy was aimed at my
life like a loaded pistol". During this period, his sense of failure and
self-disgust could reach such agonising heights that he sometimes raised in his
journals the possibility of suicide.
Who
wouldn't drink in a situation like that, to ease the pressure of maintaining
such intricately folded double lives? He'd been hitting it hard since he first
arrived in New York, back in 1943. Even in the depths of poverty he managed to
find funds for nights that might, head-splittingly, take in a dozen Manhattans
or a quart apiece of whiskey. He drank at home and in friends' apartments, in
the Brevoort, the Plaza and the Menemsha Bar on 57th Street, where he'd pop in
after collecting his daughter from school and let her eat maraschino cherries while
he attended to his needs. Though not all these scenes were exactly civilised,
alcohol was an essential ingredient of Cheever's ideal of a cultured life, one
of those rites whose correct assumption could protect him from the persistent
shadows of inferiority and shame.
Instead,
it did just the opposite. By the late 1950s, Cheever was using the word
alcoholism to describe his behaviour, writing grimly: "In the morning I am
deeply depressed, my insides barely function, my kidney is painful, my hands
shake, and walking down Madison Avenue I am in fear of death. But evening comes
or even noon and some combination of nervous tensions obscures my memories of
what whiskey costs me in the way of physical and intellectual wellbeing. I
could very easily destroy myself. It is 10 o'clock now and I am thinking of the
noontime snort."
In order
to understand how an intelligent man could get himself into such a dire
situation, it's necessary to understand what a glass of champagne or shot of
scotch does to the human body. Alcohol is both an intoxicant and a central
nervous depressant, with an immensely complex effect upon the brain. A single
drink brings about a surge of euphoria, followed by a diminishment in fear and
agitation caused by a reduction in brain activity. Everyone experiences these
effects, and they are the reason alcohol is such a pleasurable drug; the reason
why, despite my history, I too love to drink.
But if
the drinking is habitual, the brain begins to compensate for these calming
effects by producing an increase in excitatory neurotransmitters. What this
means in practice is that when one stops drinking, even for a day or two, the
increased activity manifests itself by way of an eruption of anxiety, more
severe than anything that came before. This neuroadaptation is what drives
addiction in the susceptible, eventually making the drinker require alcohol in
order to function at all.
Not
everyone who drinks, of course, becomes an alcoholic. The disease, which exists
in all quarters of the world, is caused by an intricate mosaic of factors,
among them genetic predisposition, early life experience and social influences.
As it gathers momentum, alcohol addiction inevitably affects the drinker,
visibly damaging the architecture of their life. Jobs are lost. Relationships
spoil. There may be accidents, arrests and injuries, or the drinker may simply
become increasingly neglectful of their responsibilities and capacity to
provide self-care. Conditions associated with long-term alcoholism include
hepatitis, cirrhosis, gastritis, heart disease, hypertension, impotence,
infertility, various types of cancer, increased susceptibility to infection,
sleep disorders, loss of memory and personality changes caused by damage to the
brain. More stress, of course: to be drowned out in turn by drink after drink
after drink.
This is
where the black stories start. This is where you find the bloated, feuding
Hemingway of the later years, his liver so swollen it protruded from his gut
like a long leech. This is where you find F Scott Fitzgerald, washed up in
Baltimore in the mid-1930s, his wife in an asylum, writing bad stories drunk
and crashing his car into town buildings. And this is where you find the poet
John Berryman, esteemed professor, breaking his bones and vomiting in strangers'
cars.
Mary and Ernest Hemingway (second and third
from right) drink with friends including the actor Spencer Tracy (next to
Ernest) at La Florida bar in Havana, Cuba, c1955. Hemingway’s For Whom the Bell
Tolls speaks of a ‘deadly wheel’ on which drunkards ‘ride until they die’. The
writer shot himself in 1961. Photograph: Ernest Hemingway Photograph Collection,
John Fitzgerald Kennedy Library, Boston
I hate
these stories. They're true and they're also untrue, and profoundly distorting.
What I discovered as I travelled was how ambiguous and contradictory the issue
of writers and alcohol really is. On the one hand, there's dissolution and
degradation, and on the other there's dogged labour, compulsive honesty and the
production of enduring art. Reading Tennessee Williams's diaries while he was
writing Cat on a Hot Tin Roof reveals a man in crisis, so profoundly
addicted to alcohol that he carried a flask of whiskey wherever he went. And
yet the play he produced is a miracle of truth-telling. It seems impossible
that in the midst of such confusion and self-harm, Williams was able to produce
a play like Cat, with its uncompromising portrayal of the drinker's urge
to evade reality. And yet he retained in some unobliterated part of himself the
necessary clarity to set down on paper a portrait of the self-deceiving nature
of the alcoholic.
He was
not the only one, by any means. From Berryman's Dream Songs to
Fitzgerald's Tender Is the Night and
Hemingway's For Whom the Bell Tolls,
there exist dozens of works of art in which an alcoholic writer reflects on
their own disease; a disease, furthermore, that is hallmarked by distortions in
thinking, particularly denial. When I travelled to Key West to visit
Hemingway's house, I kept thinking in particular about a line in For Whom
the Bell Tolls that compares alcoholism to "a deadly wheel… it is the
thing that drunkards and those who are truly mean or cruel ride until they
die."
There was
something sickening about that image. I imagined what it might be like to ride
such a wheel: the confusion, the gathering sense of entrapment. Impossible not
to think of what lay ahead for Hemingway: the long depression, ECT at the Mayo Clinic,
the loss of his home in Cuba, his manuscripts and letters, his beloved boat
Pilar. He said it was as if he'd lost his life, and on 2 July 1961 he shot
himself in Idaho, 19 days before his 62nd birthday. John Berryman, too, who
after several failed cycles of treatment for alcohol addiction caught the
morning bus to the Washington Avenue bridge in St Paul on Friday 7 January
1972. He climbed the railing and let himself go, falling 100 feet on to a pier
and rolling partway down the embankment of the Mississippi river, where his
body was later identified by a blank cheque in his pocket and the name on his
broken glasses.
These
stories weigh on me, and yet an alcoholic can stop drinking. I knew it from my
own childhood, and I knew it from my reading. My mother's ex-partner got dry at
a treatment centre she still describes as a hellhole, and came back into our
lives sober. John Cheever also managed it. "I came out of prison 20 pounds
lighter and howling with pleasure," he wrote in a letter to a Russian friend
on 2 June 1975, a few weeks after his release from the Smithers Alcohol
Treatment and Training Centre in New York City, and though no cure had been
found for his loneliness or sense of sexual confusion, he never drank again.
Even when he was dying of cancer, even when all but one of his doctors said he
might as well go back on the bottle, he elected to stay dry. For the last seven
years of his life he was stone cold sober: still depressed, still at the mercy
of his erections, but also in possession of his wit, and the old, magical
capacity for being unsprung by joy.
The
writer whose sobriety most interested me, however, was Raymond Carver. I'd come
across his poems long ago, and been struck by the praiseful way he wrote about
his second life: the one in which alcohol was no longer the dominating force.
When I'd first thought of taking a trip to America, I knew immediately I wanted
to end in Port Angeles, the town on the Olympic Peninsula that had nourished
his sobriety.
It's
almost impossible to overestimate the hardship of Carver's early adulthood, in
which he struggled to educate himself and get food on the table while stealing
every spare minute in which to write. In such straitened circumstances, it's
not difficult to understand why alcohol might have begun to seem like an ally,
or else a key to a locked door. His father had drunk to escape the monotony of
work and to ease the pressures of survival. For Ray, there was also bitterness
to choke back; bitterness and self-reproach and a sense of spoiling time. These
are the sort of things that can sour in your head if you're still working as a
janitor at 27, swabbing corridors in Mercy hospital. And these are the sort of
things you might try to soothe in the Fireside Lounge on H Street, knocking
back a boilermaker at the end of the night shift, readying up for another day
with your own exhausting children.
There's
no doubt the odds were stacked against him; but nor is there much doubt that he
became, six days out of seven, his own worst enemy. The things Carver did seem
so senselessly self-destructive. One Raymond – Good Raymond, I suppose – would
get on to a master's programme, or find a decent job, and the other Raymond,
the perverse, malevolent one, would somehow conspire to mess it up. He
published three volumes of poems during his drinking years, and wrote almost 40
short stories, among them "Will You Please Be Quiet, Please?",
"Tell the Women We're Going", "Dummy" and "So Much
Water So Close to Home". At the same time he was unreliable, paranoid and
violent; by his own description a bankrupt, a cheat, a thief and a liar. As for
creativity, as he approached the nadir of his drinking he could barely write at
all.
Good
Raymond emerged from the wreckage slowly, like a man struggling from a sm ashed
car. He spent a long time shuttling through recovery, getting dry and then
going straight back out to drink. Early on, during the bad years in California,
he had a seizure on the floor just as he was about to leave a treatment centre,
smashing his forehead open. The doctor warned him that if he ever drank again
he risked becoming a wet-brain, a graphic term for alcoholic brain damage.
According to his wife, he spent that evening "sucking brandy from a bottle
as if it were Pepsi, his stitches concealed under a bandage, indifferent to the
doctor's warning".
Unsurprisingly,
he was back again weeks later, checking himself in on New Year's Eve. It was
his last pass through formal treatment. That spring he left his family and
rented a house alone, overlooking the Pacific. For the next few months he went
to AA meetings and tried, not always successfully, to maintain his balance on the
wagon. The turning point came in May, when he was offered an advance of $5,000
for a novel. He was in the midst of a bender at the time, but four days later
took his final drink in the Jambalaya bar. "June 2nd 1977", he
remembered in the Paris Review. "If you want the truth, I'm prouder
of that, that I've quit drinking, than I am of anything in my life. I'm a
recovered alcoholic. I'll always be an alcoholic, but I'm no longer a
practising alcoholic."
Slowly,
over the next two years, he backed away from his family, whose ongoing troubles
he felt certain were capable of scuttling his recovery. For a while he barely
wrote, and then the new stories started coming; stories infused with
"little human connections"; stories he'd "come back from the
grave" to write. In the summer of 1978, he fell in love with the poet Tess
Gallagher, the protector and companion of his second life. At the time, she'd
just built a house in her home town of Port Angeles, and at the tail end of
1982 Ray moved in. It was in this period that he produced – though he might
have preferred caught – clutch after clutch of poems, slippery and pristine as
the dream salmon he sometimes encountered on his nights in town.
I'd read
one of them so many times I'd almost worn a track in it. It's called "Where Water Comes Together With Other Water".
"I love creeks and the music they make," the narrator begins, and
then lists, exultantly, all the other waterways he knows, and the enlarging
effects they have on his heart. He describes how barren his life was 10 years
back, and ends with a characteristically heartfelt, sawn-off sentence, a kind
of credo or manifesto: "Loving everything that increases me."
You could
live like that all right, especially if you'd once felt, as he did, that every
action you took was poisoning further the wellsprings of your life. It could be
read, in fact, as a kind of boiled-down, idiosyncratic version of the third step
of Alcoholics Anonymous – Made a decision to turn our will and our lives over
to the care of God as we understood Him. It has the same faith in enlargement,
in the possibility of benediction from oblique and unexpected sources.
On my
last day in Port Angeles, I went out to Ocean View cemetery to visit Carver's
grave. There were pines at the edge of the field, and beyond them the land
dropped away, falling 400 feet or so to the water beneath. I could hear the
waves moving very softly, a lush, lulling, impossibly rich sound. In September
1987 Carver was out there on his boat with a friend when they looked up and saw
a group of people on the bluff. "I think they're planting somebody up
there," he said, and turned his attention back to the sea. He'd been coughing
all month but wouldn't know for another few weeks that there were malignant
tumours in his lungs.
The sky
was glazed with clouds, like curds and whey. I saw his headstone immediately. I
recognised it from photographs: black marble, with the poem "Late Fragment"
carved on it. It's a poem about love and self-acceptance; about gratitude and
miracles. Carver once said he didn't believe in God, "but I have to
believe in miracles and the possibility of resurrection. No question about
that. Every day that I wake up, I'm glad to wake up."
I stood
by that grave for a long time, thinking about alcohol, and the trouble it
brings. There's a saying in AA that addiction isn't your fault but recovery is
your responsibility. It sounds simple enough but making that step is about as
easy as standing up and dancing on a sheet of black ice. In Cat on a Hot Tin
Roof, Brick says to his dying father: "It's hard for me to understand
how anybody could care if he lived or died or was dying or cared about anything
but whether or not there was liquor left in the bottle."
Imagine
feeling like that. And then imagine sitting down at your typewriter every
morning, day after day, year after year. It was Cheever's words I thought of
then. In 1969, when he was still in the thickets of his own addiction, he was
asked if he felt godlike at the typewriter. What he answered seemed to me to
sum up the ambiguity of writers and alcoholism, the difficulty of passing
judgment on lives at once so troubled and so blessed. "No, I've never felt
godlike," he said. "No, the sense is of one's total usefulness. We
all have a power of control, it's part of our lives: we have it in love, in
work that we love doing. It's a sense of ecstasy, as simple as that… In short,
you've made sense of your life."
At 92,
renowned poet and novelist, Gabriel Okara, Gabriel Okara is yet to write his
swansong; he still has new works in the offing. The elder stateman belongs to
the first generation of Nigerian writers who put African literature on the
global map.
Okara’s
first validation as a writer was in 1953 when his poem, The Call of the River
Nun won an award at the Nigerian Festival of Arts. By 1960, he was already
recognized as an accomplished literary craftsman. He has published, among
others, a novel, The Voice (1964), the poetry collections, The Fisherman’s
Invocation (1978) and The Dreamer, His Vision (2005), the juvenelia,
Little Snake and Little Frog (1981) and An Adventure to Juju Island
(1992).
In the
1960s, Pa Okara worked in civil service and from 1972 to 1980, he was director
of the Rivers State Publishing House in Port Harcourt. The proud winner of the
Commonwealth Poetry Prize in 1979 and the Nigeria Prize for Literature in 2005,
spoke to SOLA BALOGUN and HENRY AKUBUIRO in Port Harcourt on his
phenomenal literary career spanning six decades.
You are
regarded as a largely self-educated man. At what point in your life did
self-education become inevitable?
In those
days, there were very few educational openings. For example, secondary schools
were very few and it was not very easy to get secondary school admission and go
to university afterwards. But I was lucky I got a scholarship to go to
Government College, Umuahia, in 1935; and before we could finish, the 2nd World
War broke out. Government College, Umuahia, was used as a detention camp for
war prisoners. So, we dispersed to various colleges. I was in top class to
leave, so I went to Yaba Higher College, which was the highest institution in
Nigeria then, something similar to a university; it was up to the standard of a
university. The desire to read made one to read and read and attend workshops
all over the world, short university courses, and participate in exchange
programmes. Later, I went for programmes and training in Comparative Journalism
at Northwest University and then elsewhere at various times, off and on, not
regular university courses, like Oxford University. So, most of us did that,
and got their first degree. But I didn’t continue. That’s how it was in those
days.
You
started out by writing radio plays and features in 1953. At that time, what was
the interest?
Creative
writing, generally, was my interest generally, whether prose or poetry.
So, I started writing and experimenting on different genres. For example,
because of my writings, I became a member of PEN, a worldwide organization for
poets, novelists and essayists, in the 1950s.
You were
also a bookbinder. Did it contribute in anyway in making you bookish?
Of
course. There was something I didn’t mention, my interest in fine arts, water
colour painting. I was taught by the foremost Nigerian painter, Ben Enwonwu, at
the Government College, Umuahia, for a short period, in the 1930s. I was also
interested in water colour painting. As a matter of fact, I had an exhibition
in Lagos.
At a time
when many people would like to be lawyers, doctors and engineers, what actually
inspired you, especially under the colonial era? Was it passion or the
interest?
Umuahia
was just like any British public school; you were exposed to all facets of
education, in the sciences and arts. We had science workshops where you could
practicalize what you had learnt in physics. In fact, we had a moving train
built there.
By
students?
O yes. It
was a steam engine. We laid the rails on a large table. We did carpentry. In
fact, I did my school box from there without nail. So, we were interested in
all sorts of things, and we read widely, because there was a choice of books to
read in the library, and you made presentations once in a week on what you
read, to the class. We read Shakespeare and others. So, that made me interested
in creative writing and poetry. Then my interest in drawing and water colour
painting faded away.
When you
started writing?
I want to
tell you a story, just like a mystery. You have heard about Herbert Macaulay?
When I was in Lagos, I was working with the Government Printing Press, I could
paint portraits of people and sell, either you sit for me to draw you or you
give me your photograph to draw.
Do you
still draw?
No. So,
Umuahia exposed us to all aspects of rounded education. In fact, our principal,
Rev. Fisher, told us he was running the school as a British public school.
There was no difference. We studied everything, including phonetics, which, I
think, was one of the courses in the university then. I recall one case when a
university student couldn’t understand phonetics, and they asked him to come to
me so that I could teach him, which I did. The USIS used to run a programme,
and I was invited to go and teach in a general programme. At Umuahia, we were
given a broad education, and some of my colleagues became doctors, some
lawyers, and so forth. But I stuck to my passion for writing. So, I continued
reading and writing.
Apart
from Shakespeare and other European writers that inspired you then, do you have
Nigerian models?
Not
exactly. There might have been, but what were available to us then were foreign
writers, Europeans and Americans, the classics.
Your poem
“The Call of River Nun” launched you into literary stardom in 1960. In penning
this famous poem, what inspired you?
Then I
was in Enugu, and I saw the several hills there, and I wanted to compare it
with the landscape in which I emerged in Izonland, waters, rivers, palm trees,
mangroves, saltwater, swamps, and things like that. So, there I was in a place
almost considered a foreign land, because when I was going to Government
College, Umuahia, my father didn’t almost allow me to go to the school. He said
I was a young boy without any relative in a strange land, and that I would be
alone there and would be lost. But I saw things quite differently. At Enugu, I
was climbing Enugu hills and seeing the entire town: Uwani, the Wawa group of
settlements. So, that made me think of the call of River Nun, the atmosphere,
the flora and fauna, and so on; I quickly remembered my childhood days, the flow
of river, my growing up watching the River Nun flow down the sea others: “…Like
a strange river flowing down the sea….,” that is, imagery.
You are
also steeped in folklores in your writings. Are you always conscious of that
when you put pen to paper?
It is
full of various themes of life, forces and encounters. I used to take the
wisdom of tortoise to outwit human beings, for example, and so forth, though
small in size. Now, what does that mean? What does man mean by giving this
wisdom to tortoise? Man is trying to prove that might, physical strength, is
not all; that wisdom and intelligence are more powerful than physical strength
in the challenges of life. So, tortoise that defeated human beings was to be
defeated by a goat. When man was satisfied that he has made a point, he allowed
tortoise to be defeated by a goat.
Not many
people know you as a novelist, especially today’s young readers, who see you
more as a poet; but you are the author of the experimental prose, The Voice,
which is not as successful as your poetry; and, then, the Ijaw transliteration
has been disparaged by critiques as flawed. Do you see yourself more of a poet
than a novelist?
I am more
comfortable with poetry than prose. But I am trying to do with language in The
Voice is that, when you write out of out of experience about your culture, the
situations, encounters, the difficulties, your cultural background, ambience,
and you want to express them in a foreign language and culture, something is
lost, but not in totality. For example, if you want to go to the toilet, we say
in Ijaw, “I want to go to the waterside”, because we use the river in
everything we do. Now, if you want to express that in English, you may wish to
retain the circumstances and the ideas of the people, I wouldn’t say, “I want
to go to the toilet” –and Ijaw man would say, “What’s that?” Even in the middle
of a desert, an Ijaw man would say, “I want to go the waterside”, because
that’s his culture. The Voice may not have been successful actually. Chinua
Achebe tried to do the same thing in his novels (transliteration), but his was
more successful than mine. Mine was too direct, while Achebe’s was more
refined.
“Piano
and Drums”, one of the most lyrical poems you have ever written, is one of the
most celebrated poems of yours. Did your musical background impact in the
prosody of the poem, given the fact that you play the piano?
Then,
again, I was very conscious of culture conflict. Piano represents foreign
culture, while drums represent Africa. Piano is a very important musical sound
for those who were brought up in that tradition, but we still have our own
drums. So, when an African listens to the drum from his own area, he will
understand the meaning. We use drums to send messages. When the Igbo man beat
his own drum and the Ijaw man his, they talk to the people with different
messages. That is how it is European and African music. Those trained in
European music will claim their is better, while those in African music would
says theirs is better.
Aside the
conflicting symbols you used, does the poem subtly imply your own attack of the
white man?
Yes. That
came out well in the poem, “You Laughed and Laughed”, in which the Europeans
said we don’t have a culture at all. So, when the African spoke, the European
laughed and laughed. But a study of the African culture made him change his
mind in that poem. This subtle conflict in culture is always in my poetry.
The
protagonist in The Voice, Okolo, is a post-colonial African haunted by the
society and his ideals. To what extent is this a criticism of the post-colonial
African who has embraced foreign values?
Yes, I
depicted the encounter with the two cultures, and the owner of the voice is
trying to show the light, sort of, to the people to change. Despite all threats
and difficulties, he insisted on change and the truth. That is not the case
today when we seem to be in a coma of survival. The society there was not
comfortable with him at all. So, the protagonist is a society who said no, but
he stuck to his ideals; but, in the end, he was ostracized with an allegation
that he was a wizard and became crippled. When you are sticking to truth, the
society will want to get rid of you, thinking that would end their
difficulties. But you can never destroy the truth.
In what
circumstance did you lose your manuscripts during the Nigeria civil war?
We were
moving from place to place and, as you were moving, you were moving with your
property. If you heard the enemy was coming to a particular direction, you
would move away, even in the middle of the night. I lost the manuscripts in
that process.
How many
were they? Poems or prose?
Mostly
poems, and, then, I was making a research on the tortoise, a non-fiction; I was
trying to see what animals, objects other nations take as symbols of knowledge
and might as we take tortoise to be. So, I was writing to universities in
Africa and beyond, asking them to discuss it. All those were gone.
Did you
make any attempt to retrieve them?
No.
Again, I lost a novel I was writing recently, about two years ago, entitled The
Making of a Cynic. I had almost concluded the novel. I took it to the US,
hoping to finish it, but I couldn’t find it. You could try to rewrite, but it
can never be the same.
The
Dreamer, His Vision, which won the NLNG Prize in 2005, dedicated to late MKO
Abiola, represents a shift in your writing, because of its political bent. What
explains the thematic migration at the twilight of your writing career?
It wasn’t
a shift really. I wrote that poem as an appreciation of the ideal thing in
Abiola. The truth, again, came up about politics. He was honest and considerate
about other people. So, what the society regard at then is not what the society
regard. I was thrilled by Abiola’s statement, ‘The society has made me what I
am today, and I am going to give it back to them.’
At this
stage, do we say you have written your swansong?
No, I
have not given up writing. What I want to do now is to rewrite The Making of a
Cynic. I am also working on poems for kindergarten. You don’t sit down and say
you are going to write a poem, it comes on its own.
Why a
focus on children now after writing for adults for a greater part of your
career?
I like
children (laughs), because they are pure; they are not biased.
At 92,
you are the oldest writer from Nigeria and one of the oldest on the continent.
Has it got to do with the fish from the sea?
I don’t
know whether it is the fish…
From the
River Nun?
(laughs).
Some might say, “Always think of what you wan to do, and you will achieve it.”
Don’t just sit down and think it will work out like that, just make an effort.
You don’t sit down and say, “I want to be a president”; you have to work
towards it. On my health and longevity, it is by grace of God. Man is spiritual;
we are not really what we are; we are spiritual in the likeness of God. So,
what we call death doesn’t exist. God created man in his own image. He doesn’t
fall sick; He doesn’t die; He doesn’t think of evil. So, where will the evil
come from? Where will death come from? If you follow this teaching and live
uprightly as much as possible, you will find that you are healthy and you
hardly fall ill easily, and even if you fall ill, you appear to be healed. I
belong to the Church of God Scientists, not the Church of Scientology. This is
a Christian church, and it doesn’t attach any of the denominations. I have
worshiping in the church since 20-30 years. Before then, I was an Anglican. I
was born into an Anglican family.
Most
African writers are sold to African traditional religion. What’s your take?
Not all
religions agree with the African traditional religion. The difference between
African religion and Europeans is the mode of worship, sacrifices and so forth,
which others see as barbaric. All religions go towards the same thing, but not
the same way. I find out that European religion goes straight more to God than
the Africa in its “corner-corner” way. Even the Bible says that, in the end,
all will worship Him. We are going in different ways and routes towards the
same God.
As a
first generation African writer, what advice would you give to younger writers
coming up?
Some come
to me with their manuscripts and some for advice to recommend publishers to
them. I think the attitude or the motive of creative writing today seem not to
be the same as we. We were writing not because of making money or trying to be
famous, but we just wanted to write. I told you before I was also water colour
painter. That urge to write was there. If you have a talent, that urge to write
will be there. The same goes for music. We wanted to express something in us
and our views on society. That urge to write for writing sake is lacking in
today’s writers; they want to be famous. I know some young writers who come to
me and say they are poets, but some of them haven’t go the right motives or
expectations to write. They want to be instant Achebes. But, those who have the
talent and the urge to write will continue to write as the muse directs them.
Are you
fulfilled as a writer?
Oh yes.
Even if one poem of mine is acclaimed, I am satisfied.
Great
writers like you have written their epitaph, what would you like to be
remembered for?
That’s a
difficult question. People will give it different interpretations. I would like
to be remembered for one of my poem, “The Call of the River Nun”.
Why?
Then, I
poured out my thoughts, the journey through life and the coming deterrence. It
depicts life itself.
Mary and Ernest Hemingway (second and third
from right) drink with friends including the actor Spencer Tracy (next to
Ernest) at La Florida bar in Havana, Cuba, c1955. Hemingway’s For Whom the Bell
Tolls speaks of a ‘deadly wheel’ on which drunkards ‘ride until they die’. The
writer shot himself in 1961. Photograph: Ernest Hemingway Photograph Collection,
John Fitzgerald Kennedy Library, Boston 