Since Jimmy Carter was defeated for re-election in 1980, he has proven to be a popular and effective ex-president. He travels the world as the head of the Carter Center, a human-rights group associated with Emory University in Atlanta. Recently he took a break from work on a novel to write “The Virtues of Aging.” Carter may cover the usual chestnuts on aging–Medicare, health, exercise–but he also writes with disarming honesty about personal subjects, including how he and his wife, Rosalynn, “give each other some space” and how they dealt with financial crisis after the White House. The book is one of the latest entries from the Library of Contemporary Thought, a series of short, provocative books on topics of current interest that includes Anna Quindlen’s “How Reading Changed My Life” and Pete Hamill’s “News Is a Verb.” Carter was in Chicago recently and spoke with Tribune literary editor Elizabeth Taylor.
Q. How did you decide to write the book?
A. I was in the midst of writing a fairly extensive novel about the Revolutionary War period, and was in effect again a college student. I was reading assigned books on creative writing with advice from professors from the University of Arkansas and Emory University. I was asked to write a fairly brief treatise, like a long theme on what I had experienced as a retiree. And I got intrigued with the subject as I began to delve into it.
I realized that Rosalynn and I, although having been First Family, which very few people are, had the same kinds of problems and difficulties and troubles living with each other in the same house for a change, not having a specific job, having isolated ourselves in a little town that had a population of only 600, being deeply in debt when I left the White House, having our last child leave home, kind of an empty-nest syndrome. How we worked our way toward an increasingly intimate relationship between the two of us, I thought, would be interesting to a reader, and would be typical of what many people experience.
Then I also began to delve into the lives of people that I knew who were sometimes 15 or 20 years older than we were, who are now in their 90s, and how they are living a very exciting and fruitful, enjoyable, gratifying life. The most difficult chapter was how we approached the end of life and the attitudes towards that.
Q. You focus on the transition from youthful retiree to senior citizen.
A. Most of us don’t prepare for it. I didn’t. There’s a lot of fear of the uncertainty of no longer having a regular job with an assured income and chances for advancement.
Q. You’ve been called America’s most effective ex-president. Do you think you would have been as effective had you not been defeated for a second term?
A. I have learned so much about the world since I left the White House that I never knew when I was in the White House that I wish I had known.
The Carter Center now is the center of our lives. We have full-time programs in 35 African nations. And we have (interests) in Latin America. We go to Africa every year and visit seven to 10 countries, desperately poor, crying out for assistance. We are immunizing children, teaching farmers how to plant more food grain. These are the kinds of things that I have found intriguing and fulfilling and adventurous.
But . . . how you actually bring an end to a dictatorship or to an authoritarian government, how you offer people, even political leaders, a chance to resolve disputes peacefully through an honest election–those are the kinds of things in which I have become deeply involved. Those are the kinds of things that I think may possibly have evolved even if I had retired from the White House at the age of 60 instead of 56. I’m not sure.
Q. You think so?
A. It’s hard to know for sure. But I was so filled with frustration and with unfulfilled agenda items when I was defeated in 1980 and left the White House that I think that was a driving force that may not have been as intense as if I had spent four more years in the White House.
Q. I understand that you really keep up with news on the Internet. Is that something you recommend for elderly people?
A. Yes–even 75- or 80-year-olds who have never used a computer. Not only for reading The New York Times every morning, which we don’t get, or the Chicago Tribune and keeping abreast of rapidly changing events, but also having an almost incredibly extensive encyclopedia available to you–history, knowing what’s happening in Sri Lanka or what’s happening this morning in Ethiopia. That’s very helpful to me.
I can basically operate the Carter Center from my home in Plains through the Internet and through e-mail. I can stay in close contact with all my children and grandchildren. I have one older grandchild who is in the Peace Corps in South Africa now. We regularly communicate by e-mail, when it would probably be almost impossible by telephone.
Another thing that the computer offers is the ability to keep records on our family. And I think many people who are not talented at all as writers, who may be grandparents now, just to write down, even with pen and ink, obviously it’s easier with a computer, their memories of their own grandparents or their own childhood.
Q. Have any authors particularly influenced you in your writing? I know you have read a lot of Andrew Weil.
A. When I went back to college–really, without going to classes–to learn how to write poems, I was lucky enough to get a famous poet and his associates at the University of Arkansas, Miller Williams. He would assign me voluminous readings of textbooks used in university courses on poetry writing and then he would critique me. . . . I learned in the process.
And now I’m learning how to do fiction writing. I’ve still got professors in Arkansas and also the professors who teach creative writing at Emory. One of the authors that they advised me to read was Patrick O’Brien, and he has just come out with his 18th in the series of novels about the same historical period about which I am writing. I have gone back and resurrected a lot of my other favorite authors.
Q. Like whom?
A. William Faulkner and others that write from a Southern perspective. My favorite book of all times, I’ve always said, is (James Agee’s) “Let Us Now Praise Famous Men,” which describes life in poverty-stricken families during the Depression years when I grew up. My favorite poet is Dylan Thomas. In fact I even wrote a poem about Dylan Thomas.
Anyway, I have gone back into an absence in my life of advanced literature. My training was in engineering and nuclear physics, but I have had a hunger to learn more about literature and poetry and writing.
