Billy Connolly is one of the most original and one of the funniest comedians in the world. He was born in a working‐class area of Glasgow, Scotland, in 1942. He struggled through school, which he mostly disliked, and left as soon as he could to become an apprentice welder in the Glasgow shipyards. He served his time there, learning his trade and also absorbing the ways and customs of working life on the banks of the river Clyde. From an early age, Connolly loved music and taught himself to play the guitar and the banjo. Like Bob Dylan, growing up at the same time and an ocean away, he was captivated by folk music and spent whatever time he could listening and playing at folk clubs around Scotland. He also loved the pubs and the banter of Glasgow nightlife, and made regular visits to the cinema, to Saturday‐night dances, and to occasional live theater.
One night Connolly was watching the comedian Chick Murray on television. For more than forty years, Chick Murray had been a legend of comedy and music hall. His droll, acerbic wit epitomized the laconic take on life that typifies Scottish humor. Billy took his seat, ready for a riotous session with the great man. He had all of that. But he had something else—an epiphany. As he rolled around in his seat, he was acutely aware of the hysterical pleasure, the emotional release, and the lacerating insights that Murray was detonating around himself. For Billy in Glasgow, this was as much of a turning point as listening to Woody Guthrie was for Bob Dylan in Greenwich Village. He realized that it was possible to do this, and that he was going to do it. He began to separate from the crowd and to merge with his tribe.
Billy had always talked to his own small audiences between songs. Increasingly, he found himself talking more and singing less. He found too that the audiences were getting bigger. For many comedians of his generation, he went on to become the doyen of freewheeling stand‐up comedy. His work has taken him far from the shipyards of the Clyde into packed theaters around the world, into award‐winning movies as an actor, and into the minds and affections of millions of people.
Like most of the people in this book, he found his way not only when he found his Element but also when he found his tribe.
CHAPTER SIX What Will They Think?
FINDING YOUR ELEMENT can be challenging on a variety of levels, several of which we’ve already discussed. Sometimes, the challenge comes from within, from a lack of confidence or fear of failure. Sometimes the people closest to you and their image and expectations of you are the real barrier. Sometimes the obstacles are not the particular people you know but the general culture that surrounds you.
I think of the barriers to finding the Element as three concentric “circles of constraint.” These circles are personal, social, and cultural.
This Time It’s Personal
Given the way his life has worked out, it’s interesting that several of Chuck Close’s teachers and classmates considered him a slacker when he was a child. The kids thought so because he had physical problems that made him poor at sports and even the most rudimentary playground games. The teachers probably thought so because he tested poorly, seemed lazy, and rarely finished his exams. It turned out later that he was dyslexic, but the diagnosis for this didn’t exist when he was younger. To many outsiders, it didn’t seem that Chuck Close was trying very hard to do anything with his life, and most thought that he wouldn’t amount to much.
On top of his learning disorder and his physical maladies, Close also faced more tragedy than any young boy should ever encounter. His father uprooted the family regularly and then died when Chuck was eleven. Around this time, his mother, a classical pianist, developed breast cancer, and the Close family lost their home when the medical bills overwhelmed them. Even his grandmother became terribly ill.
What got Close through all of this was his passion for art. “I think early on my art ability was something that separated me from everybody else,” he said in an interview. “It was an area in which I felt competent and it was something that I could fall back on.” He even devised innovative ways to use art to overcome the restrictions of his conditions. He created puppet shows and magic acts—what he called “entertaining the troops”—to get other kids to spend time with him. He supplemented his school‐work with elaborate art projects to show teachers that he wasn’t “a malingerer.”
Ultimately, his interest in art and his innate gifts allowed him to blossom into one of the singular talents in American culture. After graduating from the University of Washington and getting his MFA at Yale—several of his earlier teachers had told him that college would be out of the question for him—Close set off on a career that was to establish him as one of America’s most celebrated artists. His signature style involved a grid system he devised to create huge photorealistic images of faces alive with texture and expression. His method has drawn widespread attention from the media, and his paintings hang in top museums around the world. Through ceaseless dedication to his passion and his craft, Chuck Close overcame considerable constraints to find his Element and rise to the pinnacle of his profession.
But that’s only the beginning of the story.
In 1988, Chuck was making an award presentation in New York when he felt something wrong inside his body. He made his way to the hospital, but within hours, he was a quadriplegic, the victim of a blood clot in his spinal column. One of the greatest artists of his generation could no longer even grasp a paintbrush. Early rehabilitation efforts proved frustrating, and this latest roadblock in a life filled with roadblocks seemed to be the one that would at last stifle his ambitions.
One day, however, Close discovered that he could hold a paintbrush with his teeth and actually manipulate it well enough to create tiny images. “I suddenly became encouraged,” he said. “I tried to imagine what kind of teeny paintings I could make with only that much movement. I tried to imagine what those paintings might look like. Even that little bit of neck movement was enough to let me know that perhaps I was not powerless. Perhaps I could do something myself.”
What he could do was create an entirely new form of artwork. When he later regained some movement in his upper arm, Close began using rich colors to make small paintings that fit together to create a large mosaic image. His new work was at least as popular as his older work and earned him additional acclaim and notoriety.
Throughout his life, Chuck Close has had endless reasons to give in to his problems and to give up as an artist. He chose instead to push on beyond every limit his life presented and to stay in his Element no matter what new obstacles reared up in his way. He would not let any of these things prevent him from being who he felt he was meant to be.
Chuck Close is not alone in overcoming physical obstacles to pursue his passion. We’ll meet some other people who’ve done this, and some of them may surprise you. The problems they face are not only physical, though physical disabilities can be torturous and aggravating in themselves. They also faced problems arising from their own attitudes to their disability, and from the effects on their feelings of other people’s attitudes to their disabilities. To overcome these physical and psychological barriers, people with disabilities of every sort must summon enormous reserves of self‐belief and determination to do things that other people can do without a second thought.