MAKING OF CLASSIC WRITER NOT ITS JOKE

  MAKING OF CLASSIC WRITER NOT ITS JOKE

  BY FRANCIS ILAHAKA

In the past few month their had been debate on the quality of books being published in Africa Kenya being included

The readers and critic believes that unless something is done  creativity will soon die because  majority of those books are becoming dead stock due to one reason  or another.

 Some blame the tragedy to the kind of education in our Schools and the introduction of technologies because you had no time for story telling which is the source of creative writing

Most writers lived depressed lives and died humiliating deaths butp very interesting is that some of there books becomes classic when they are died like Williams Shakespeare. 

The ambition to become a great writer is evident in the vast majority of us. What with the everlasting nature of good literary works, and the idea of being counted as the genius by people of all generations. Any literate person associates the names of Tolstory, Hemingway, Frost, Dicken’s, Shake-spear, Dostoyevsky, Achebe, La Guma and Ngugi with a higher level of intelligence which enables them to study, explore, organize reality into fiction that you and I die to read over and over again. Writers are usually seen to be larger than life and the reality they reflect; they have larger eyes that they see beyond the visible character of events, people, plants and even buildings. Most readers assume that great writers have been the happiest of the mortals, always basking in the fame earned by their successful novels and poems, drinking from the reputation that results from good leadership of their books, and having a good time with money earned from royalties.

The truth, however, is that greatness for most writers were achieved at a very great emotional cost. This greatness has at least in some writers, existed alongside a series of frustrations, depressions and meaninglessness in life. A man who has spent so much of his time - perhaps his whole lifetime-understanding, exploring, studying and reflecting reality, is at long last outdone by the greatness of that reality, and dies a man sailing in a sea of confusion. One of the greatest Russian dramatists and novelist Nicolai Gogol, whose play, the government inspector, is a must for leaders of the English language and literature, fell prey to regions mania and ultimate depression before he died towards the end of his life he was in the hands of regions’ fanatic who acted as his spiritual director and who persuaded him to destroy some of his writings because they were sinful. He burned part of his great novel, the dead souls he died in 1852 after subjecting himself to fasting, believing that his work in this world had come to  end. And herein lays the smallness of the greatness.

Leo Tolstoy, the writer of what is reputed to be the greatest novel (war) and peace is about 1,500 pages)died an extreme rationalist and moralist after having led  a happy married life for fifteen years, in which he got thirteen children. a rich land owner privately educated, he had in his youth led a life of pleasure .towards the end of his life he embraced theories that bordered on the rejection of state and church,denial of demands of the flesh, private property. He earned himself innumerable followers and enemies, and was in 1901 excommunicated by the Russian Holy Synod. A man, who had devoted most of his time studying society and writing enduring work of art, was almost crushed by the time he died in 1910.

Dostoyevsky, another Great Russian writer, severally fell in debts and had to be rescued by his wife. He was once arrested and sentenced t6o death for his unpatriotic activities.Robert frost, whose poem the road not taken, has been read by almost all secondary school students in Kenya, once entertained feelings of suicide.Emily Dickson, an American poet, committed suicide. She used to stay in her home throughout, not going anywhere, not visiting or receiving friends, and she never got married. Her poems were only published after her death.   

Nobel Prize winner, Wole Soyinka, has spent some time in detentions has Ngugi.Peter Abraham's south Africa.Alex la Guma, Ezekiel Mphalei, have all had to give in exile. Dennis Brutus has been imprisoned.James Joyce never got married. Other writers had their books banned and their lives and those of their families endangered.

Perhaps the greatest sufferer from smallness during the last days of his life was earnest Hemingway, the noble prize winner for literature in 1955 .he had been a man of extreme courage, determination, literary productivity and perseverance. he was a large man, a boxer and a game hunter. Before he died he suffered from a multiplicity of sickness arising from psychological disorders and accidents. He had a ringing in his ears, high blood pressure, he was overweight, had poor sight, hepatitis and liver disorders. He was quarrelsome, cruel, had loss of memory, nervous depressions, loneliness, insomnia, guilt conscience, remorse, hypertension, diabetes, headaches and all ways thought that people were after his life. He suffered from delusions and was unable to write, a thing which maddened him even more.

Hemingway married and divorced three wives, but lived with the forth wife till he died. In his writing career, he was always at loggerheads with critics and friends who accused him of fictionalizing them in his novels and short stories. He attempted suicide twice and succeeded in shooting himself in the temple in 1961. A man who was once described as the most important writer since the death of Shakespeare, a man who had been physically and literary productive throughout his entire life, a man whose determination overwhelmed all odds, died a miserable death and was outdone by the world he had all along sought to study, fictionalize, explore and organize.

Fortunately, this smallness of literary writers is invisible when pitted against the greatness embodied by their literary works

 What is very important is that those great writers like Chinua Achebe ones worked for radio in his Country, Ngugi wa Thiong for Nation newspaper while Peter Ibrahim was also journalist something which vividly proved that there is relationship between journalism and literary

 Two years back Prof Egara Kabagi staged series of debate at Kenyatta University on the relationship between literary and journalism  but some people brushed  him aside.

               ENDS