LIVELewisSmith 3.26transcript

Sarah Lewis | Anna Deavere Smith
March 26, 2014
LIVE from the New York Public Library
www.nypl.org/live
Celeste Bartos Forum
PAUL HOLDENGRÄBER: Good evening. Good evening. My name is Paul
Holdengräber. I’m the Director of Public Programs here at the New York Public Library,
known as LIVE from the New York Public Library. As all of you know, my goal here at
the Library is to make the lions roar, to make a heavy institution dance, and, when I’m
successful, to make it levitate.
(laughter)
LIVELewisSmith_3.26Transcript 1
I have always wished for the past years to do an evening about failure. And along came
Sarah Lewis and Sarah Lewis’s book The Rise with the wonderful subtitle: Creativity, the
Gift of Failure, and the Search of Mastery. “Gift of Failure.” That surprised me
immensely but having read the book I think I have a clue. You don’t quite yet probably,
many of you, why failure could in fact be a gift. I look forward to hearing how it is that
failure is a gift and I’m sure you do, too.
I’d like to very quickly mention to you some of our upcoming events. Next week I’ll
have the pleasure on Tuesday speaking with Malcolm Gladwell, and on Wednesday
speaking with the very great magician Ricky Jay. Then the following week Katherine
Boo will be in conversation with Adrian Nicole LeBlanc. In May I’ll have the pleasure of
speaking with George Prochnik about Stefan Zweig. Stefan Zweig has a renaissance now
due in part to Wes Anderson’s extraordinary movie The Grand Budapest Hotel. For those
of you haven’t gone to see it, I encourage you to go and see it. It’s both extremely
comical and terribly sad. And I encourage all of you to read the person who was the most
famous writer in the 1920s, Stefan Zweig. The following week, on May 20th, we have
Kara Walker, then Elizabeth Kolbert and Nathaniel Rich, and Geoff Dyer and many
others, John Waters, many other people are coming. Look at your calendar and please
come.
Sadly, Angela Duckworth had a family emergency and won’t be able to join the
conversation tonight. I look forward to hearing Anna Deavere Smith and Sarah Lewis
goad and challenge, I hope, each other as they speak about creativity, the gift of failure,
and the search for mastery. After the event, Sarah will sign copies of The Gift. We thank
once again our independent bookstore, 192 Books, for being of such good service. They
will take questions, and, as I’ve often said, in my experience, a question can be asked in
about fifty-two seconds. A mike will be put there. Ask your question and really we would
much prefer extremely good questions. (laughter) If you have a bad question, hold off, in
other words.
Anna Deavere Smith and Sarah Lewis have been asked what I’ve been asking my guests
for the last seven or eight years, to give me a biography of themselves in seven words, a
haiku if you wish or if you want to be incredibly modern, a tweet. So Anna Deavere
Smith defines herself in these seven words: “Actress, dramatist, Baltimore-bred,
appreciation for failure.” Sarah Lewis describes herself as: “Looking for what we fail to
see.” Angela Duckworth described herself as: “Trying, failing, trying, crying, trying,
always trying.” Please welcome to this stage Anna Deavere Smith and Sarah Lewis.
(applause)
SARAH LEWIS: All right. What a pleasure it is to be here. I thought we might begin by
talking a little bit about what the book is about and why I’m so excited to speak with you
about it here in particular. I grew up about ten blocks away from the New York Public
Library’s main stage here, and I would come really to dream. Not always to check out
books, I would come to the Rose Reading Room to dream, and what I never would have
expected is that I was dreaming about a book that would seem to be to do with the very
opposite of what often dreams are about—adversity, failure, and the gift of those things.
As I worked in the arts, I really wanted to write about what I saw happening in artists’
studios that wasn’t public oftentimes. These back-turned paintings that artists weren’t
going to burn or kind of throw out, but were important for what they did want to show
me. So the book is really looking at—as an atlas of the stories of the lives of so many
different entrepreneurs and inventors and artists and athletes, to understand what it is that
led to their rise. But the moment that I knew I wanted to write a book that was a little bit
off my path as a curator and an art historian was when I went in New Haven,
Connecticut, to see Let Me Down Easy at the Long Wharf Theatre.
And you I don’t think know this, maybe you do, but I sat at the end of your performance
and I might have been with my friend Julia one of the last two people to leave, I was so
struck by what I saw. What I saw beyond the beautiful portraits and stories that you
inhabited and embodied was the ability to tell the full arc of a life by showing the gifts
that come from honoring limits, by looking at limits and what can come by understanding
the grit, the gifts from adversity to do with a life story, and at that moment I wanted to
understand if I was really pushing myself to my full capacity, to my own limit. And a few
months later I began to write The Rise. Now, that’s one of the many moments that for me
connects me to your work but I hope we can discuss what creativity is fully about, what
creative mastery is fully about, as it relates to The Rise and as it relates to our lives in
general. And then we’ll open it up for questions, too.
ANNA DEAVERE SMITH: Maybe, I just found out that I had the distinction of being
the first person to see Sarah’s TED Talk that she just did to much success in Vancouver,
and you haven’t even seen it yet, right?
SARAH LEWIS: I haven’t even seen it, no.
ANNA DEAVERE SMITH: And one of the things that I think is really helpful to sort of
frame this conversation is which you did so eloquently in that talk is the difference
between success and mastery.
SARAH LEWIS: Sure.
ANNA DEAVERE SMITH: What’s the difference?
SARAH LEWIS: Right. So this is something that I came to understand by working at
the Museum of Modern Art. I was fortunate that was my first job and I went into an
exhibition of Elizabeth Murray’s retrospective, her paintings, and I was struck by the fact
that she told me that those early 1970s paintings, in her mind, weren’t really works that
met her goal, they didn’t kind of meet the mark, but that’s what kept her going, and in the
2000s and kind of at the end of her career, she would riff on those motifs in those early
paintings. And at that moment I thought, “Look at this. She has works that are heralded
by everyone now at the museum, that are seen as successful, but yet what propelled her
was a sense of the unfinished, that she still had more to do.”
It made me think about the distinction between success and mastery, really. Success
being, as I see it now, a label that the world confers on you when you say have a
retrospective at MoMA or something else like that but mastery is as I call, as I write
about it, this “ever onward almost,” you know. How many times have we seen a
masterpiece or an iconic work of art go into the world while its creator considers it
unfinished or riddled with all these different difficulties or flaws, and as I write about it,
it’s really countless times, it’s as I speak about in the TED Talk, it’s Paul Cézanne not
feeling as if he had achieved his goal to realize nature in paint. That was what he wanted
to do. So he would often leave works aside with the intention of picking them back up
again, and at the end of his life he had only signed less than 10 percent of his paintings.
You know? And it goes on and on. And so mastery requires dealing with what I call the
“near win,” really.
ANNA DEAVERE SMITH: So what’s the difference between the near win and failure?
Are they the same thing?
SARAH LEWIS: You know, I don’t think that they are. I think it’s a matter of degrees,
but it’s most vivid when we look at it in athletic competition. If you look at the difference
between Olympic silver medalists versus bronze medalists and what they feel on the
medal stand. Silver medalist, as Tom Gilovich has found up at Cornell when they looked
at this in the 1990s feel so much more frustrated with themselves because they can
envision having received goal, whereas bronze are happy to not have received fourth
place and not medaled at all, you know, so silver medalists feel that near win.
And what that study found, it’s really instructive, is that bronze medalists aren’t focused
as much on follow-up competition the way that silver medalists are because of that near-
win frustration. It’s Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky’s work, it’s counterfactual
thinking. But it’s so important because I think that ultimately this word failure isn’t
actually accurate for what we’re describing in any means, but I think what for me is a
helpful visual is to think about the gap between where we are and where we want to go.
ANNA DEAVERE SMITH: Where we are and where we want to go. But sometimes
you know the way the public signs in on what we’ve done could make us feel as though
that the devastation of failure, so I’m thinking about three parts, three characters in the
book, who seem to exemplify that, one who you go back to a lot, Morse, as in Morse
Code, and Ben, and also Paul Taylor. You know, because that whole thing. I’m pleased
that you liked Let Me Down Easy, but there were many people around me who thought
that production was a failure. And that thought really began to limit what could happen to
the play, and so, you know, that was very hard for me, but I didn’t give you know, I think
I had two more productions after that.
But that feeling of when you have, you’re not so sure, right? You give it everything you
have, you’re not so sure, and then the public weighs in and says, “well, you know, so”—
they don’t even say necessarily “almost but not quite,” depends on who. I’m sure there
are a lot of artists out here, so you know I mean, so you have, you have that which is—I
like to think about it makes me feel good to know that that Martha Graham was never
satisfied, so I sort of have that, you know, just the Martha Graham thing, and it could also
be on the one hand a real sense of where one is headed and therefore always being in this
“almost but not quite.” I mean, I don’t know, maybe it’s also a protection because of the
people who will say to you it’s just not there.
SARAH LEWIS: Right, right. There’s a difference, I think, between failing in a
performative sense, in a public way, versus something that’s more private. And I—I
gravitated in my writing towards those who were coping with their own endeavors in a
very public way.
ANNA DEAVERE SMITH: Samuel Morse, I mean, can you imagine?
SARAH LEWIS: I really can’t, actually.
ANNA DEAVERE SMITH: Say a little bit about what he went through.
SARAH LEWIS: Sure. Yeah, Samuel Morse, most people know him as the inventor of
the telegraph, but what I as an art historian knew is he spent twenty-six years in this
failed by all accounts pursuit of being a painter. He couldn’t support his—he was the
classic struggling artist story in the 1830s. He couldn’t support his family, he moved to
New York and said, “If I am to live in poverty, it might as well be there as anywhere,”
you know, he really could not handle both the career of being an artist, psychologically to
a certain extent and also financially. He went into debt when he exhibited his work.
But when he hit this kind of nadir, he was actually at NYU as the first professor of
painting there, he converted the stretcher bars out of what was a failed canvas in his
mind, painting canvas, the stretcher bars into the telegraph itself, literally took the wood
from this failed pursuit, and turned it into the first model, which is now in the Oval
Office, and to me it’s incredible when you look at his letters and you see that he
remembered the mortifying, as he recalled it, critique he would receive from these well-
known painters about his work and he would write home to his brother and his father
about this, but what you start to see, and it’s beautiful, in the twenty years it took him to
get the patent for the telegraph is that he used all those experiences—
ANNA DEAVERE SMITH: To make something else.
SARAH LEWIS: To be determined, to have grit. Exactly. Exactly.
ANNA DEAVERE SMITH: But what about, I mean, think about what it must have
been like for him—tell about the painting he wanted to have in Congress and how they
talked about that, that type of thing, all of us who are artists get these types of reviews
and letters. Say something about it.
SARAH LEWIS: So this is a time when Congress was actually commissioning painters
to make work, so that’s the first thing we should say, and he had wanted. He had spent
two sojourns in Europe learning how to be a sort of history painter, right? He spent time
in the Louvre when there were plagues that kept people off the streets for eighteen
months trying to paint every work that he could find in this one gallery, so he was really
proficient and he wanted to have a work like this in Congress. And he was rejected, the
quote was by John Quincy Adams, he was “rejected beyond hope of appeal” by
Congress.
ANNA DEAVERE SMITH: You see? I mean really.
SARAH LEWIS: Don’t even try. Don’t even. And it went on that way but what’s
interesting is that one of his paintings of Congress, showing Congress in action, has as its
center figure this man tinkering with the lights above, these kind of oil chandeliers, it’s as
if he sort of knew where he was going, that they might reject me but I have another
invention, another idea. But he took to his bed depressed when he received that rejection,
but that’s what started to turn the tide.
ANNA DEAVERE SMITH: You know, there’s so many things. I love this book.
There’s so many things in it if. Raise your hand if you’re an artist or an inventor. I have a
feeling it’s plenty of people like that.
SARAH LEWIS: It’s a lot.
ANNA DEAVERE SMITH: Raise your hand if you’re trying to do something difficult.
(laughter)
SARAH LEWIS: That’s the right question.
ANNA DEAVERE SMITH: So there are a lot of things in the book like that quote from
John Quincy Adams that you could cut out and put on your mirror. You could have tons
of these fantastic things like that.
SARAH LEWIS: That’s right.
ANNA DEAVERE SMITH: Paul had said that he wanted this to be a conversation—I
mean, I can assure I’m a lot more fascinated with you than you could possibly be with
me. But he wanted this to be a conversation, so I did bring a couple of things that I
wanted to share, that are—that are have to do with people who you interviewed and I
interviewed, and the one that I want to read I think helps us. I’m not going to perform it,
I’m just going to use the words. I interview people to perform them, but I’m not going to
do that. But so I think this person, who you talk about, I interviewed at length a couple of
years ago at his office at Harvard, and I think this helps us think about the type of mind-
set that you sort of need to have to be in that state of I’ll call it “almost but not quite,” and
you’re calling it that sort of gap between what you are and what you want to be. So this is
from an interview that I did of E. O. Wilson, the great biologist, in order to perform both
he and James Watson at an event for the World Science Festival.
You know, they didn’t speak to each other for many, many years.
SARAH LEWIS: I didn’t know that.
ANNA DEAVERE SMITH: Because when they were both in their twenties if you can
imagine, like twenty-five, they were both at Harvard, and E. O. Wilson got tenure first,
although Watson had just done the code of DNA with Crick, didn’t have the Nobel Prize
yet, but everyone knew he was going to have it, and Watson was incensed that they could
have given E. O. Wilson tenure first, and the reason that they did is he got an offer from
Stanford and they didn’t want to lose him. So for years and years as Wilson would put it
he couldn’t even get a kind word from Watson passing him in the hallway, but when
they’re—for his eightieth, you know how life is, isn’t this nice, for this when they’re
twenty-five, they have this bitter relationship, so Watson threw a big public birthday
party for him on his eightieth birthday.
SARAH LEWIS: I love it. I love it.
ANNA DEAVERE SMITH: So this is E. O. Wilson who you know as the “ants guy,”
giving—this is his frame that I think allows him to be in this state of this thing.
SARAH LEWIS: I’d love to hear it.
ANNA DEAVERE SMITH: He’s talking about when he went to Washington with his
father. Now, he’d already lost his eye, by, with a—throwing a fish hook that went back
into his eye, and he lived with an aunt, he doesn’t say much about his mother, and in
those days they just used ether, and they just took his eye out, and this is why his work is
about ants rather than birds, because he has to look closely. So that doesn’t stop him.
SARAH LEWIS: I didn’t know this.
(laughter)
ANNA DEAVERE SMITH: So his father gets this job in Washington. “We lived near
the National Zoo and spent hours and hours in an actual zoo and then I wandered in Rock
Creek Park on expeditions with my imagination developing and went to the Smithsonian
and to the National Museum of Natural History and saw the wonders that had been built
up there by our government in America’s attic, but also in these splendid displays of
natural history, great insect collection and I knew at nine and ten years old that the
museum that I was visiting and the zoo had scientists, you know, people whose careers
were studying all these wonderful things, and because they were in these august buildings
of the federal government, this must be extraordinarily important. There’s nothing I could
imagine as a boy better than being a scientist, working on these subjects and going into
the jungles and so on.
“And then when we went back to Mobile, I had already begun to collect butterflies and
study ants because there was this 1934 article I read avidly in the National Geographic
called “Ants: Savage and Civilized” (laughter) with pictures of them and so forth. I
would spend large amounts of time studying the animals and moving my way up in the
Boy Scouts of America. That was my salvation, the Boy Scouts of America, what a great
organization. You can advance, you can learn at your own pace. You know the public
schools of Alabama were not very good, to say the least. All the young men had gone to
war, and this had two effects. One was I had the woods to myself, there were no hunters
anymore, fields were growing up, there were wild pigs running around, you know that
sort of thing in South Alabama and North Florida where I stayed for a year in Pensacola,
it reinforced the sense that this was a world that belong to me. I knew the butterflies, the
snakes, I knew a lot when I was thirteen, fourteen years old.
“And the other thing was that I took my first job delivering the Mobile Press-Register. I
can see now that this guy was frantic, he didn’t have any boys old enough to deliver the
papers. I delivered every day 420 papers. I would get up at three in the morning and my
stepmother, you know, hardscrabble, this was the kind of young man she wanted to raise,
I would take two stacks of papers, big stacks, put them on my new Schwinn bicycle that
my father had bought for me, I would finish by seven, and then ride home a short
distance, get my breakfast, and go to school, and then in the afternoon, in the evening,
once a week I would go to the Boy Scout meeting, and then, you know, in spare time I
was earning merit badges, so I would go to bed somewhere around eight or nine after
supper, staying up one time a week, Saturday night, to listen to Jack Benny and Bob
Hope.”
(laughter)
And he told me all that and he said, “That’s the way I am today, I get up every morning, I
go to work, I never get depressed,” so there are people who I think, are even out of the
context almost of this “what am I and what I want to be” because they’re able to find the
joy in what they’re being, in that exploration.
SARAH LEWIS: Exactly. I love hearing her read, because you embody that joy when
you’re doing it. And I think so much of what this book is about is the question that I had
and that is what does it take to stay encouraged while you’re in this gap, and it’s that joy,
it’s that intrinsic joy of the doing, right, whether it’s exploration, having the woods to
yourself, and whether it’s Watson who when I interviewed him, it was a crazy interview,
I should show you the tape, I’d love to hear you read it. Because he was really telling me
things like this and he is there in his eighties, in his laboratory, telling me that he has
bought the same tennis racket that Roger Federer has because he wants to see if maybe he
can get a match with him and just get one point on him. He’s finding ways to just stay
gritty, no matter what it is, and it’s because of the joy of pursuit, right? So that is a lot of
the driving force of understanding these stories. But, you know, as you read you’re also
reminding me of why I chose to create an atlas of stories. For me it’s such a privilege to
be able to inhabit a life and to try and pull something out of it that maybe they don’t even
fully see.
ANNA DEAVERE SMITH: How many people did you talk to write this book?
SARAH LEWIS: Over a hundred and fifty.
ANNA DEAVERE SMITH: So what kept you going? What was your sense of—what
was your sense of “I’m not there yet,” why did you keep going? And all over the place,
you were in England, you were here.
SARAH LEWIS: Everywhere. You know, I felt that I was writing something that hadn’t
yet been addressed about something that hadn’t been addressed, and I thought that—you
know, instinct is your highest form of intelligence, I believe, and I would have an instinct
about whether I was really at the heart or at the soul of someone’s story or not, you know.
So, for example, Ben Saunders, who you brought up earlier, is another character that I
think is equally powerful to, say, a Samuel Morse. I spent two years talking to him
wanting to understand where his strength came from to be able to go to the North Pole
and back solo and on foot, South Pole and back solo and on foot, on sub-fifty degree
temperatures, moving on ice sheets that are moving backwards as you’re trying to move
forwards, in this area of the world that’s the size of the United States but completely
depopulated, and I wasn’t finding the answer, because it’s not simply strength, and
instinct told me that I wasn’t yet there, and it was only when we talked about surrender,
you know, this idea of not giving up but giving over to something much larger than
yourself and to circumstance and by releasing that resistance, finding the resources that
you need to move forward, did I realize that I had gotten to the heart of it because of how
it resonated in me. There is, I think, a sense that many writers feel, many people who
create feel, that if you feel something deeply and intensely and don’t yet see it in the
world, there might be a chance that others might want to hear it, too.
ANNA DEAVERE SMITH: Well, you know you have this wonderful. Tell us that great
quote of Toni Morrison about surrender, what is that?
SARAH LEWIS: So she says, “If you surrender to the air you can ride it.”
ANNA DEAVERE SMITH: The wind.
SARAH LEWIS: Now, I put it as the wind. It’s the air, in fact.
ANNA DEAVERE SMITH: So say it again. What did she say?
SARAH LEWIS: “If you surrender to the air, you can ride it.”
ANNA DEAVERE SMITH: Well, there’s a quote that I like of hers, I’m going to push
you, he what did he say, we should goad each other.
SARAH LEWIS: Yes.
ANNA DEAVERE SMITH: Thank you for that permission, Paul, otherwise, I’d have
been much more polite. So years ago I interviewed Toni Morrison at the 92nd Street Y
when Paradise came out and she said that she starts writing a novel when she—which
this is great for the conversation, too—she starts writing a novel when she has something
to fret about. She knows she’s ready to write when she has something to fret about.
So now in your notes at the end of the book when you’re thanking all of the wonderful
people who have encouraged you and helped you, you allude to a grieving, a two-year
grieving, that you went through that in some way was the impetus for this book. Would
you say something about that grief and how The Rise helped you get through that?
SARAH LEWIS: Sure, no. You’re such a good interviewer. Because you’re pulling out
of me the very thing I didn’t fully say about Ben. I went through a period of compound
grief, really. Over the course of a year and a half, I lost friends in quick succession. This
was when I was in my young twenties after college and due to 9/11, but others were
accidents and I hadn’t fully let myself process it. I didn’t realize that until I started to talk
with Ben about surrender, actually.
And I wrote about surrender in this chapter as it relates to grief and this need to finally let
go of what’s sort of holding you and in that moment for me at least that release that came
when I saw that I was still here, you know, and that I wanted to live my life in a way that
really showed that consciousness and appreciation that I was still here and I in that
moment felt that I would need to be free enough to do things and possibly fail in order to
become my fullest self, you know. So writing about surrender as Ben described it helped
me understand that and helped me understand other stories I write about where people
overcame some kind of impediment by surrendering to a kind of a grief or—
ANNA DEAVERE SMITH: Loss, maybe.
SARAH LEWIS: Loss or even just anticipating their own passing. Martin Luther King
here comes to mind, you know. I write about him in the sense that. I first saw, knew he
was going to be part of the book, because I saw that he received two Cs in public
speaking class, right, in seminary.
(laughter)
ANNA DEAVERE SMITH: What was that tic, exactly? I would like. Did Harry
Belafonte mimic it? What is the tic?
SARAH LEWIS: He did, he did.
ANNA DEAVERE SMITH: I’m not aware of it. What is the tic? So Martin Luther King
had a tic.
SARAH LEWIS: Yeah, he, at the end of his life he developed this tic and only a few
friends would hear it and it was this like [tongue click] that, and when he would speak
offstage oftentimes, and they didn’t know why but eventually it went away. So he Harry
Belafonte asked him in this televised interview what happened, how did it go away? And
I’m not going to imitate Dr. King, but he essentially said, “Well, Harry, I made my peace
with death, you know, and when I made my peace with that I realized there was nothing
left to fear and the tic just went away.”
ANNA DEAVERE SMITH: So the tic was some sort of a—
SARAH LEWIS: Yeah, a nervousness about what was going to come. But that really is
the ultimate, right? When you can make your peace, and that’s what I felt that I did when
I made my peace in a way that’s not clichéd, it’s really understanding the fact of it, and I
really became much more fearless, you know, in how I go through my life, whether or
not it’s apparent, because everything is relative to where you were, but that’s how grief
helped me with this book.
ANNA DEAVERE SMITH: Why’d you name it The Rise?
SARAH LEWIS: For a couple reasons. I—the book is about really the capacity of the
human spirit, you know, and the direction I think we’re always trying to move, that’s one
reason. When I was thinking about a title, I was also watching football, and there was a
quarterback who was being asked a question about what this team was going to do next,
they had a typically undefeated team and they had lost and he said,
“Well, we just have to rise up. We just have to rise up.” And I thought, “Everyone knows
what that means.” And then the final reason had to do with watching these archers that I
open the book with.
ANNA DEAVERE SMITH: Yeah.
SARAH LEWIS: Yeah. These women who—I went to go see one called May Day up on
Baker’s Field at the northern tip of Manhattan. And I was watching them for the three-
hour practice that they go through to master this arch, really. And I was watching, I
would stand behind one of those archers, and I would try to figure out how any one of
their arrows was going to hit that target seventy-five yards away, and the bulls-eye from
that distance looks like the tip of a matchstick held out at arm’s length, so it seems
impossible to do and I would watch as those arrows would take this curved-line path and
would rise and then descend and what it meant was that in order to actually hit your
target you have to aim at something slightly askew from it, so you’ve got to take into
account that rise, ultimately. So that curved-line pursuit became a metaphor for me in
thinking about mastery and thinking about the need to take into account the difficult
circumstance that, if you do, can help you actually achieve your goal.
ANNA DEAVERE SMITH: You know what, I was asking you backstage if you would
—cause this is I’m going to goad you a little bit more. I was asking you if you’d read
about Will Smith. So Angela Duckworth, who was going to be with us today and as Paul
told you unfortunately had a family emergency, as you probably know, she’s quite
famous for these ideas about grit and about self-control. For example, she’s proving
through her research that grit will get you further with your report card than IQ will.
However, IQ will get you further with the SAT, and then this idea of self-control being
really not something, doing what people want you to do, but knowing what you want to
do and therefore doing what you have to do and her favorite person or hero is Will Smith,
which I thought was very interesting. Could you just read that little bit about Will Smith.
SARAH LEWIS: Sure, sure. In honor of Angela in particular. So this is a passage where
I’ve discussed grit and am describing it. “Gritty people often sound, says Duckworth, like
one of her favorite actors, Will Smith. He once said, ‘The only thing that I see that is
distinctly different about me is that I’m not afraid to die on a treadmill. I will not be
outworked. Period. You might have more talent than me, you might be smarter than me,
you might be sexier than me; you might be all these things—you got it on me in nine
categories. But if we get on the treadmill together, there are two things: You’re getting
off first, or I’m gonna die. (laughter) It’s really that simple, right? . . . You’re not going
to outwork me.’”
ANNA DEAVERE SMITH: Now, I thought that this was a very interesting thing in
your book, in tone and everything else. Because so much of the book was about true
exploration. For example, I don’t know who said it, but it’s a little bit sad when you think
about it. That children are basically very exploratory. They want to explore. They, you
know, they want to take things apart, as whoever this was said, they might want to
explore throwing dishes down your hallway. And that sense of exploration is exactly
what you need for science, for example, and we want everybody to be good in science
and they’re not, so somehow we’re cutting that exploration off. This little anecdote about
Will Smith seems to stand out as being more about sheer competition than the type of
exploration that I see you presenting as you try to describe for us what the near-win is
and what the gift of failure is.
SARAH LEWIS: That’s an interesting point. I think the reason why I chose it is because
I was fascinated by how he was seemingly also competing with himself, even though he
was using the foil of another person.
ANNA DEAVERE SMITH: I get it.
SARAH LEWIS: You know? That’s really for me the question. The quest is about that
internal landscape, you know, that gap. What’s making someone like William Faulkner
publish The Sound and the Fury and still not be happy with it so he rewrites it five times
and then republished an appendix, even though it’s acclaimed and it’s a success. I think I
see Will Smith in that vein because I think his pursuit is about a kind of a mastery, not a
kind of success, not being happy just with box-office acclaim, but by trying to actually
push himself to be another kind of a character again and again.
ANNA DEAVERE SMITH: Oh, well, speaking of Will Smith, let’s talk about the Black
List.
SARAH LEWIS: So this was fascinating, writing about the Black List. So Will Smith is
right now the only golden ticket in Hollywood, right? The only actor who can pretty
much guarantee that a film will make a hundred and fifty million at the box office,
because of a certain formula that he’s been able to kind of decode in Hollywood. But one
of the people working for him, Franklin Leonard, when he was working actually in
another company, was curious about how to really honor excellence in screenwriting but
not go by a certain kind of formula. He had a sense that there were scripts out there that
weren’t being greenlit because they didn’t have a model they were conforming to, so
people were afraid.
The Black List came about when he asked his colleagues to submit to him the list of their
top ten screenplays that they had heard about that year that weren’t being produced and
that hadn’t been financed yet. So he then did some fancy moves on Excel, tabulated it as
a list in 2005 and then sent it out anonymously and called it the Black List and on that list
were films that we now herald as successful then were seen as duds being passed around
Hollywood desks. Slumdog Millionaire, Juno, Lars and the Real Girl, all these films that
when you think about it it would be hard to advocate for. As someone says in the chapter,
you have to read it to find out, he says, you know, imagine going to your boss and saying,
about Lars and the Real Girl, “I have a script for you and it’s about a man who falls in
love with a sex doll.” And you wouldn’t do that, you wouldn’t find the courage and the
conviction to do that, and you might not even do it about Slumdog Millionaire, really,
right?
So what the Black List was able to do was because of the amount of votes that each script
received, twenty-five, twenty, fifteen, and the people who Franklin knew were going to
vote on it, gave Hollywood studios a way and a kind of comfort to greenlight quirky,
unusual scripts, right? So when Meryl Streep was on Charlie Rose, she was talking about
Hope Springs and that’s a script that came to her that way and I remember in the
interview she was asked about why it was called the Black List. And he gave it a tongue-
in-cheek name, this idea of what’s really on the margins one day can really be
mainstream the next, so I love this, but it’s the one chapter that really starts to deal with
how a crowd can make you think that something’s a failure when in fact, you know,
there’s excellence in it, there’s something original in it and it might just be the next best
thing you’ve ever seen.
ANNA DEAVERE SMITH: Well, also speaking of the crowd, I feel like this Black List
comes together at a time when even the Four Seasons is nervous that TripAdvisor has
more power to tell the public what the Four Seasons can do or not, we’re sort of in this
time that the crowd is, as I mentioned on the phone to you, kind of like Shakespeare’s
groundlings, that we can all chime in, and that’s partially because of technology, but
we’ve also had, you know, about thirty years of trying to bring down the white male
hegemonic discourse.
So I see Franklin as bringing down, you know, the largely white discourse of studio
executives and, you know, people who basically, as you say better than I just have right
now. You know, they have a frame in which they’re working and they’re kind of nervous
about going outside of that. But I think the good news is that we’re living in a time when
even probably the idea of what’s successful and what’s failed, even with all of the type-A
people we know, but probably there’s more options.
SARAH LEWIS: Absolutely. I did though write this book in part because of this
dynamic, I think having a sense of being underestimated, you know, by not fitting into a
form that people expect success to come in was partly—
ANNA DEAVERE SMITH: You think you don’t fit a form?
SARAH LEWIS: Well, I think growing up certainly. I mean, so much has changed
actually in my own lifetime, really, as it relates to models that I had for myself going
forward, but I think there are ways, there are moments when I was very young where I
started to gravitate towards life stories of people who had built their lives on uncommon
foundations as a result of this. So Franklin is in there kind of for that reason as well.
ANNA DEAVERE SMITH: Well, he’s a good-looking guy, too. I googled him.
(laughter)
So let’s talk a little bit because I’m mindful of the time and I wouldn’t want tonight to go
by without us having a chance to talk a little bit about Frederick Douglass and this idea of
a picture in progress and the power of a picture, the power of a picture, a real picture, to
bring about, you know, social progress, especially, then, and I love that chapter on beauty
and justice, really, because it talks to us about art and the power of art to make a
difference where the law cannot.
I once interviewed Albie Sachs, a former justice of the supreme court in South Africa
after apartheid fell, and he told me that jazz musicians, because I was marveling at the
new bill of rights, and he said, “Well, actually, the jazz musicians wrote the bill of rights
before the lawyers did.”
SARAH LEWIS: Oh wow.
ANNA DEAVERE SMITH: When you think about the civil rights movement in this
country, the amount of art. It was Mahalia Jackson sitting next to Martin Luther King at
the big march who when he was losing his way talking, she said, “Tell them about the
dream, Martin!” so, you know, that comes from this august singer. So that to me so much
of what I think about all the time is the power of art to make a difference and it’s no small
thing, especially the way you’ve described what Frederick Douglass was talking about
with those pictures.
SARAH LEWIS: Well, we can’t close the night without speaking about him, and I just
came from Atlanta, where I was speaking with Kevin Young and he has a line in The
Grey Album: On the Blackness of Blackness, I love that subtitle, where he thinks of jazz
as both a noun and a verb, you know, a way that it can call us to action. Right? So maybe
I’ll speak about Douglass but maybe read about the way that jazz has impacted our lives
through the power of what Douglass called aesthetic force.
ANNA DEAVERE SMITH: Yes.
SARAH LEWIS: So, I’ll read a few, just two paragraphs here, and it’s about a moment
when we permit a new future to enter the room with these startling encounters of
aesthetic force.
“A young boy from Austin, Texas, Charles Black, stood and knew it when he was just
sixteen years old, thinking he was going to a coed social at the Driscoll Hotel in his
hometown in 1931. It was a dance, the first in a session of four, yet he remained
transfixed by an image he had never seen before. The trumpet player, a jazz musician,
performed largely with his eyes closed, sounding out notes, ideas, laments, sonnets that
had never before existed, he said. His music sounded like an utter transcendence of all
else created. He was with a friend, a good old boy from Austin High, who sensed it too
and was troubled. It rumbled the ground underneath him. His friend stood a while longer,
shook his head as if clearing it and as if prying himself out of a trance, but Charles Black
Jr. was sure, even then. ‘The trumpeter, Louis Armstrong, king of the trumpet, as it
turned out, was the first genius I had ever seen,’ Black said, and that genius was housed
in the body of a man whom Black’s childhood world had denigrated. The moment was
solemn. Black had been staring at genius, yes. Fine control over total power, all height
and depth, forever and ever, and also staring at the gulf created by the failure to recognize
kinship. He felt that Armstrong, who played as if guided by a daimon, all power and
lyricism, ‘opened my eyes wide and put to me a choice: to keep to a small view of
humanity or to embrace a more expanded vision.’ And once Black made that choice he
never turned back.
“This is what aesthetic force can do: create a clear line forward and an alternate route to
choose. Later Black would say that in many ways this is the day he began walking toward
the Brown case, ‘where I belonged,’ he said. Black would go on to join the legal team for
the 1954 Brown versus Board of Education case that persuaded the Supreme Court to
unanimously disallow segregation and he became one of the most preeminent
constitutional lawyers in the country.”
What I don’t quite go into as much depth with as I wish I had is that he held this annual
Armstrong listening concert in Columbia and Yale, where he went on to be a professor,
to remind people of the power of the arts in the field of justice and of course the one man
who caused him to have this inner life-changing shift. So I guess I’d end by saying that,
you know, that Douglass knew this. In 1861 and 1865, during the Civil War, he surprised
his audiences, which we forget were twelve-, thirteen- thousand-sized audiences.
ANNA DEAVERE SMITH: You said they were like rock stars, orators, then. He,
Sojourner Truth, Elizabeth Cady Stanton.
SARAH LEWIS: He had few equals as people knew of him and so he surprised people
when during the Civil War he spoke about what some might consider as he said, mere
trifles, you know, during this time where one out of every four men were dying. And
those trifles as he saw it were actually not that at all. They were pictures but not just that.
Pictures that had the power to arrest you and in that moment make you envision
everything in front of you differently because of what you had just seen, you know? So
he likens that to song. He anticipated that a song could have that power. He said, “Give
me the making of a nation’s ballads, and I care not who has the making of the laws.” You
know. He understood this.
ANNA DEAVERE SMITH: Right. So that’s sort of like the Albie Sachs thing, you
know, ballads versus laws, and we also know, we have more time, I just wanted to make
sure we would get to this. But I mean, you know, we also know the limits of the law.
SARAH LEWIS: Exactly.
ANNA DEAVERE SMITH: That in the end the law represents a part of the people’s
will but that the people’s will is moved by beauty. Now another person, I told you I
brought one more thing. So another person you talk about, Elaine Scarry, serendipitously
in January I went back and looked at an interview I did of Elaine Scarry in 2009 while I
was trying to make Let Me Down Easy better going into, I think, its next after what you
saw. It didn’t make it into the final play, but it made it at least to Harvard, where she was.
And here, as you allude, she’s going to talk a little bit at greater length than you did in the
book at least, but I’m sure you’re very familiar with these ideas, and I would like you to
respond, about beauty and justice.
“One thing is, just the way in which beauty does,” oh, here’s my favorite part right here,
oh my goodness, she’s talking about beauty and she says, “Beauty was for a long time,
beauty was just not only eliminated from universities, but even from museums.” I don’t
know if you know about this, Aggie. “Lots of different museum directors have told me
that for a while it was as if you weren’t supposed to be talking about beauty, which is
hard to imagine if you’re teaching literature or if you’re a museum curator, but I mean
one thing is just the way in which beauty”—and I’m not mimicking Elaine Scarry,
believe me—“in which beauty does lead people I think to be concerned with justice.”
“Beauty brings about what Iris Murdoch called a nonselfing. She said that when you
suddenly see something beautiful—her example was suddenly seeing a bird lift off—it
brings about a nonselfing. You can see beauty pressing us towards justice. There are
certain attributes that beautiful things have. Some people would say symmetry. Any
definition of justice always involves at its heart some idea of balance or symmetry. Even
if you look back over lots of philosophers who are talking about forms of justice, they
always have this idea, say, equal pay for equal work, that’s a symmetry.”
Okay, that’s my favorite part. But this is an important part. “But sometimes people will
say to me, well, first of all that they believe that it’s right, that the whole unselfing part is
right, but they don’t believe in symmetry, and I really do believe in it because—and I
think part of the reason why in this country we don’t like to talk anymore about
symmetry in art or in justice is because we’re so asymmetrical, with so much money and
so many weapons and, you know—” You can imagine, you studied with Scarry, what she
would sound like here. “You know, if we had to start saying the heart of beauty is
symmetry everybody would have to say, ‘gee, you know, we’ve got a big problem.’”
And she calls beauty a life pact. But that whole idea of the nonselfing. You see when you
talk about that you’re there but you’re not quite there, I think that’s a really creative
moment because it is that moment when you, like a bird, take that lift off. You’re not here
and you’re not there. You’re in the rise. And you didn’t say this but it seems to me a kind
of a lift.
SARAH LEWIS: Exactly. Exactly. And, you know, I start that chapter about Douglass
with this Elaine Scarry epigraph because her ideas about how vivid that description is
about the asymmetrical quality to the dynamic when you realize that you in fact have
failed to see something that you now do because of the beauty of what’s in front of you.
You know? I mean it’s why this is a timeless interest of philosophers in particular. I think
it’s why the importance of aesthetics is why Aristotle said, you know, “Reason alone is
not enough to make men good.” You know, he understood that there’s a force, there’s a
way that beauty kind of slips in the back door of our rational thought and gets us to see
the world differently, but it does often—it’s often accompanied by being off kilter in a
moment and I’m thinking now of Thomas Jefferson, whose quote is right underneath
Elaine Scarry’s where he said in response to looking at a painting. He said, “It fixed me
like a statue a quarter of an hour or a half an hour, I do not know which, for I lost all
ideas of time, even the consciousness of my own existence.”
ANNA DEAVERE SMITH: Wow. Thomas Jefferson said that.
SARAH LEWIS: Thomas Jefferson said this. You know, he was about to have his rise
but he was about to be fixed. But we do need to talk about this more. Aggie’s here so
we’ll have a way to maybe work on this. But this is central for me, understanding the way
that aesthetic force can impact us.
ANNA DEAVERE SMITH: But say a lot more about aesthetic force. Because that’s
among you have many beautiful words in your book, but you come back to those two a
lot. What does that mean to you as a curator, as a professor? What does aesthetic force
really mean?
SARAH LEWIS: This is the way I write about it. “The words to describe aesthetic force
suggest that it leaves us changed—stunned, dazzled, knocked out. It can quicken the
pulse, make us gape, even gasp with astonishment. Its importance is its animating trait.
Not what it is but what it does to those who behold it in all its forms. Its seeming
lightness can make us forget that it has weight, force enough to bring about a self-
correction, the acknowledgment of failure at the heart of justice, the moment when we
reconcile our past with our intended future selves. Few experiences get us to this place
more powerfully with a tender push past the praetorian-guarded doors of reason and logic
than the emotive power of aesthetic force.”
So I go on to describe these moments where aesthetic force has gripped us so much that
we have either inaugurated a movement, whether it’s the environmental movement, and
that occurred when people saw the image of the planet suspended in the environment that
we know it inhabits but don’t quite see as an environment and in 1968 realized that we
needed to do something to honor the way that we care for ourselves collectively
differently. Many other graphic visual moments have—
ANNA DEAVERE SMITH: Where would we have—where would the civil rights
movement have been without the photograph, without the photographs of dogs and—?
ANNA DEAVERE SMITH: In fact I wonder now with some of the more, the kinds of
problems that we have, let’s say with the great inequities in education right now. I
wonder if part of the problem of why we sort of can’t get people to that point where
they’re willing. Well, actually the mayor, at Riverside Church on Sunday, was talking
about the idea of all children are our children, right? So what’s keeping us from being
able to get to that? Is it because there is no one photograph, that there is no one song,
because where would we have been without those images? Where would we have been
without the Pulitzer-Prize-winning photographs of the Vietnam War? So I wonder if
there’s a problem now because there is so much noise out there that we can all chime in
that there are so many pictures, and you can all send everybody pictures. That there is no
one picture to grab us the way that, you know, Frederick Douglass was talking about that
picture.
SARAH LEWIS: Yeah, I think you’re on to something, absolutely. It’s why this it’s for
me that chapter is the soul of the book, although I mean, as the audience might or might
not know, it ranges, right, from so many different kinds of individuals, talking about this
moment, at this moment in time, the power of aesthetic force is critical. We have access
to creating any image that we want, but there are very few forums in which we gather
around an image, let alone an image of how we want to see ourselves.
ANNA DEAVERE SMITH: Or how we don’t want to see ourselves.
ANNA DEAVERE SMITH: Because the examples I just gave would be things that we
don’t want to believe that’s how we are. So it’s either what we want to be or what we’d
like to think we’re not.
SARAH LEWIS: Exactly. Exactly. And this is what gets us to the importance of vision
and the imagination when it comes to moving out of difficult circumstance. You know,
how is it that we actually can create an image that we hold to? I mean, Douglass’s idea, it
is about, yes, pictures, and this is a time when daguerreotype is being developed, so
everyone is excited about this new medium. The same way we’re excited about our
iPhones, maybe, to a certain degree. But he’s talking about these inner thought pictures,
as he calls it, you know, and how we share those I’m thinking also has to do with these
moments where a powerful orator, like a Martin Luther King, can get us to all focus,
right.
ANNA DEAVERE SMITH: On an image.
SARAH LEWIS: On an image.
ANNA DEAVERE SMITH: Of course we don’t live in a moment of oratory really
anymore.
SARAH LEWIS: Exactly, exactly.
ANNA DEAVERE SMITH: I mean, slam poets, and some singers, but not big long
speeches. I mean, when people do, when Obama did that first time that we ever saw him
it just grabbed everybody.
SARAH LEWIS: And then the Shepard Fairey poster really helped grab people just
because it reminded us of what hope could look like. But the power of the image I think
should not be underestimated when it comes to this idea. But I mean in the book I think,
we talked about Ben Saunders and Samuel Morse, but they were all also holding to an
image of themselves that the world didn’t yet fully see.
ANNA DEAVERE SMITH: So you think they had a sort of inner sense of themselves.
SARAH LEWIS: I do. I do.
ANNA DEAVERE SMITH: Wow.
SARAH LEWIS: There was one story, and I could have written volumes on this idea.
One story that made me think of what conviction—what the mechanism for conviction
really is and if it requires vision or not, and that’s the story of Einstein when he was,
before he was Einstein, and wanted to—actually his wife wanted a divorce from him, I
should say, his first wife. He had a vision of where he was going to be that was so strong
that when he was not able to even get a job as a substitute teacher at the time, he was not
even yet working in the patent office, he was sure he was going to win the Nobel Prize,
and so was his wife, so that, so much so that in their divorce agreement, he promised that
he would give her the proceeds from the Nobel Prize, and she agreed. I thought, what
crazy vision is this?
ANNA DEAVERE SMITH: So Sarah, then what would you say on a—sort of on a
broader, more sociological level, I know the book is mostly about individuals, what
would help when there are people who are living lives where whatever that vision they
have of themselves soon becomes not a productive sort of aesthetic force driving them
forward, but they meet so many obstacles all around them that if anything it’s a fantasy or
a whimsy and it’s not realizable. What in this wonderful work that you have done can
help us think about some of the things we could do to counteract that, the stuff that makes
it, you know, if you don’t even know enough to be competing with yourself?
SARAH LEWIS: Hmm-mmm, exactly. Well, the reason why I love the fact that his—
Einstein’s wife was kind of complicit in this is because it often takes fellowship and
support, people who remind you of that vision even when you can’t see it.
ANNA DEAVERE SMITH: Wow.
SARAH LEWIS: You know? That’s why I made sure to also speak about not just Ben
Saunders, but his coach, you know, someone who reminds him when he knows that it’s
so difficult that he might not be able to do it, that he once had a vision of himself as being
able to do this.
ANNA DEAVERE SMITH: Who got Morse through?
SARAH LEWIS: You know, he wrote to his brother oftentimes and his parents and the
letters back often have these notes of encouragement. When he would write and say to his
mother and father, “It is mortifying, I say, it is mortifying to hear Washington Allston
say, ‘that is not paint, sir, that is red dust and clay.’” His parents would write back notes
of encouragement in terms of reminding him why he was doing what he was doing and
who he could become and he at the end of his life still wanted to be that painter, still had
that vision in mind. But it was that network of support, it’s why I spent more time than
most might have in acknowledging all the other people who supported me during what
felt like a risk.
ANNA DEAVERE SMITH: So what about Shadrach, your grandfather?
SARAH LEWIS: Exactly. Shadrach Emmanuel Lee, my grandfather, whose initials I
share, Shadrach Emmanuel Lee is a much cooler name than Sarah Elizabeth Lewis, I
think, really was a foundation for me. He was a jazz musician, a bass player and a
painter, and spent his life in pursuit of what he didn’t fully, I wouldn’t say, realize in
terms of dreams, but because of that hardship and living as I remember him in this house
in Virginia that kind of seemed like it was ready to sink back into the earth, you know,
the dreams were I thought grander, or maybe that was just my imagination, because I was
very young when I spent time with him.
But it always made me wonder about this paradox of life, that the very opposite of what
you think can lead to this beautiful rise can in fact be what inspires it, you know, so I
would think of him often as I would write the book. He certainly inspired me to be in the
arts, so it’s dedicated to him. And there are many. I mean, we each have our Shadrachs, I
think, that we just don’t often speak about them, you know, so it’s important to do that.
ANNA DEAVERE SMITH: It’s that time. I am a very good timekeeper. It’s what Paul
wants, that at ten after eight, we shall have people coming up to the mike to announce
themselves and ask questions. Good questions. (laughter) A good question only lasts
fifteen seconds.
Q: Hi. I’m Maria Popova. So in 1977, decades before Facebook and Instagram, Susan
Sontag wrote in On Photography that the need to have reality confirmed and our
experience enhanced by photographs is becoming a kind of aesthetic consumerism to
which we’re all addicted. So I wonder how do we keep aesthetic force from becoming
aesthetic consumerism, both as a culture and as individuals?
SARAH LEWIS: That is a great question. (laughter) You know. Leave it to the brilliant
Maria Popova to ask a question that can stump (laughter) probably anyone. I love the
work that she does.
Q: Thank you.
SARAH LEWIS: You know. I don’t. I think that artists always have the power to
outstrip our capacity to be astonished, you know. I think part of the reason that I do the
work that I do is I believe that a student of mine say getting an MFA in photography or
painting can have the capacity to make me see the world differently in an instant. So for
that reason I don’t fear our need to constantly document what’s going on in front of us,
because I think that it can mean that we are actually capturing a moment that will
astonish and create a kind of ground clearing that will let us see things differently. I don’t
fear the ubiquity of the image as much as other people do. Because again I think that
there are always new frontiers to find, and I have a lot of trust in our artists to lead us
down those paths that we might not know that we want to actually see. Does that at all
help?
Q: It’s perfect. Thank you so much.
SARAH LEWIS: Oh, thank you.
Q: Hello. Jamie Floyd. Good to see you. I have a very small and short question but it
may be a bigger answer, and it has to do with the fear of failure. Because you’ve talked a
lot about failure leading to the rise, but have you encountered stories of failure and the
fear of it leading to paralysis? And I’m sure for even nonartists that can be the case and I
wonder what you learned about that in your work.
ANNA DEAVERE SMITH: Another good question.
Q: And if you want to address that, Anna, I’d love to hear anything you might have to
say as well.
SARAH LEWIS: Yeah, you know, it’s interesting. The fear of failure is a topic that is
kind of sub rosa in the whole book because I do write about artists who might have a fear
of failure, but they’ve found a mechanism to overcome it. In “Blankness” I write about
how crushing critique can be. Paul Taylor, renowned choreographer and dancer, in 1957
when he laid out his dances that had the germinating seed of what would become his
iconic style, audiences as he described it cantered out of the aisles. Imagine if all of you
ran out on me. You know, it’s crushing, and so the review he received was a blank
review. It was just the name of his dance company and no comment about the dance and
just the reviewer’s initials. Damning critique. How do you move forward from that? And
I would imagine that I would have developed a kind of fear of failure if I were him.
But in that chapter I write about all the ways that artists overcome it or as I sense it that
they might have. August Wilson, for example, would start many of his plays by writing
on napkins in restaurants, right? And the waitress came over and said, “Do you do that
because it’s easier to kind of get going?” And he said, “You know, yeah, I didn’t realize
that’s why I do that.” And then he’ll go home to his typewriter and then begin the work.
It’s a way of kind of tricking yourself out of having a fear of failure. I write about how
residencies help other artists do this.
ANNA DEAVERE SMITH: Because one of the wonderful things about the Paul Taylor,
story, too, is his relationship with Rauschenberg.
SARAH LEWIS: Oh, I know that’s great, that’s great.
ANNA DEAVERE SMITH: So I think that artists keeping the company of one another.
SARAH LEWIS: That’s right, because they were collaborating at the time and
Rauschenberg had these, included things like live animals in it. But Rauschenberg also
had a way of helping Paul Taylor release himself from the kind of fear of failure. They
had this ritual where they released the set of balloons after the Jack and the Beanstalk
performance as a way of kind of letting it go, you know, and moving on to the next thing.
So artists often find fellowship in how they can speak to each other.
ANNA DEAVERE SMITH: I think it’s also—I actually taught Jamie, I can’t believe
she came and took a class of mine when I was at Stanford and she was a respectable
lawyer. Right? Or in the law school?
Q: If there is such a thing, yes.
(laughter)
ANNA DEAVERE SMITH: If there is such a thing. But you know and I always think
that when people, very smart people like Jamie show up in my classroom it’s because
they actually think that the playfulness of an acting class is going to help them with a
certain sort of way that they are nervous or scared. We use the word—you know, you say
also I’m picking up about the Neil deGrasse Tyson who talk about the kids being
explorationists. And you’re really talking about exploring at the same time you’re talking
about play. You say, “Playfulness lets us withstand enormous uncertainty. The deliberate
amateur knows no other way.”
So I begin every one of my acting classes, or any class, by saying to people, “Confidence
is overrated, give doubt a try.” (laughter) You know, with this hope that they won’t feel
that they need to be confident and that this mock confidence won’t get in our way. So
we’re always talking about play in the arts. In the beginning of a rehearsal process, we
know it’s going to be dead serious in about three days and we’ll all be terrified. But
everybody says, “Let’s just play today.” I mean, they use this kind of language to help us
not be so afraid.
SARAH LEWIS: That’s right. One thing we haven’t talked about is I love this chapter
on the deliberate amateur, these two Nobel Prize winners who developed the first or
found the first two-dimensional object on the earth, which is replacing silicon, but they
are so playful in their laboratory. All of their groundbreaking inventions have come from
this Friday night experiment time, time when they permit themselves not to have the fear
of failure. You know, so there are techniques, there are different ways, but play is key to
it, I think it’s really central.
Q: Hi. My question might be bad, so if someone needs to pull me off. I love the Black
List and the idea that you said about dismantling the white hegemony and I think a lot
about privilege and its impact on an artist’s capacity to risk and to explore and to push
against that fear of failure. So I’m wondering about your thoughts on privilege and how it
impacts all of this.
SARAH LEWIS: It’s an important point, you know. So much of this book is about risk
taking, you know, what allows us to take a risk and what sometimes forces us to take a
risk. So in Franklin’s case, who’s the founder of the Black List. He had constantly moved
around. He had a background of privilege, at least in terms of education. We went to
Harvard together. But I saw in him something that I see in myself, which is despite
having worked hard enough to be privileged in the sense that you have a good kind of
educational background, not wanting to be too comfortable, you know, and I think that’s
very important for pushing yourself forward. I’m not sure if your question is about the
way in which this operates in a collective sense in Hollywood or if it’s more pointed than
that, but as a creator, I think it’s always important to, you know, stay at your leading edge
and sometimes that means being willing to withstand a bit of discomfort in order to push
yourself forward. I’m thinking about this line that Duke Ellington said, you know, when
he was asked about his favorite song in his repertoire, he said it’s always the next one,
always the one you have yet to do. So what does it mean to constantly look forward to
what’s to come? I think it means not feeling so comfortable with whatever privilege that
we might have that we are overly satisfied. Does that answer your question?
Q: Not totally.
SARAH LEWIS: Tell me more.
Q: I’m thinking more about if you’re low income, if you don’t have the privilege of
academic networks that connect you to people who know people who know people who
can help you move up. Race, culture, attractiveness, gender, size, all the different things
that can help someone lift up or not and how that impacts your ability to push against the
fear of failing and if you don’t have a support network underneath you can you try, can
you risk and explore to make something that might be crazy and visionary? So I guess
more on that front.
SARAH LEWIS: Yeah, you know, on that front, I think the same example of the Nobel
Prize winners Andre Geim and Konstantin Novoselov is instructive. They—Andre, when
he gave his Nobel Prize speech, prided himself on doing work very outside of the
laboratories that were seen as most likely to have innovated in this way. And he was very
defiant and insouciant, and he said, “You know, you don’t need to be at a Harvard or a
Cambridge, to do this work, you really have to be willing to graze, to play, to not be
afraid of taking a risk,” and oftentimes I think the complacency or the desire to stay in a
position of privilege can make us not take a risk. I actually see sometimes more of a
handicap in courting these positions of acclaim. So that chapter might be of interest if you
haven’t read it. It doesn’t relate as much to the Black List.
ANNA DEAVERE SMITH: Although I will say there’s something curious that I came
upon with Angela Duckworth, who again unfortunately we don’t have with us that it
takes as much grit to get an AA degree as it takes to get a PhD, so that these things are
relative to what your surrounding is. So to think that it takes somebody as much grit to
get through junior college in some circumstances as it takes others to get a PhD.
SARAH LEWIS: It’s an important point. I just want to underscore it because I think as I
was writing this book, I got the sense that some might see the pursuits of others as a kind
of lesser than, some of their obstacles might be less than others. And I think it’s so
important to remember that we’re all always dealing with what’s this great quote a sort of
internal battle that you know nothing about. Everyone’s got this inner gap that they’re
dealing with that might seem like it’s a war going on within them regardless of how it
looks from the outside, you know? So for me having that kind of nonjudgment was
helpful and helped me to really understand an internal landscape that was far more at
times gruesome, terrifying, than I even could have imagined despite seeming privilege on
the outside.
ANNA DEAVERE SMITH: I think we probably have time for one more, two more
questions.
Q: Hi. First of all, congratulations on the book. A quick question. So I read something
recently that they were saying that in Silicon Valley it’s now become sort of a badge of
honor, the whole idea of failure. That in Silicon Valley it’s now become a badge of
honor, something you display publicly that you’ve got failures and in fact if you don’t it
sort of devalues you. And I wonder if in your work you found some universal
environmental factors that impacted people’s ability to experience or leverage failure or
did you find that it was all really personally defined rather than impacted by the things
around you?
SARAH LEWIS: Well, it’s a great question. You’re making me flash back to being at
FailCon in Silicon Valley, which is this conference where entrepreneurs, wildly
successful ones, are only allowed to speak about their failures. And I was so struck by
being there—are you trying to envision it—it’s just mind-blowing, you have to really be
there to believe it, but what struck me as similar in all of their cases was that they were all
willing to look at their life the way an athlete might and rewind the tape a bit, you know,
find that distance required, whether it’s three months or just different mechanism to kind
of look at it differently and to have a way to extract the kind of poison out of the
experience and take the experience as information used in order to improve, or “pivot” as
they say in Silicon Valley, or any other jargon term that they have to describe how to
move out of a kind of failed pursuit.
That was one trait. I don’t go into kind of personality traits in the book and I don’t really
speak about the differences in gender, which might actually have something to do with
what we’re seeing in terms of high levels of risk taking in entrepreneurship. But, you
know, we spoke about vision and that’s the other main trait I saw on that stage, they were
always holding to a kind of vision for what they knew that they could achieve, and it’s a
kind of a confidence that came not from being successful when they were young but
maybe wanting to have something to prove, maybe wanting to strive and see themselves
as a different person than they were a few years back, that kind of inner competitiveness
we were talking about with Will Smith, that’s another trait I saw, very—really gritty you
know.
But after writing about failure for a year and a half, going to FailCon still shocked me.
You know? The stories I heard on those stages left me with my mouth on the floor so
much that a woman to my right kind of put her hand on my knee and she said, “Well,
what’s FailCon if we can’t talk about these things?” (laughter) I thought, my God, it’s so
extreme, so I kind of salute everyone who goes through what they do to find their rise.
Q: But did you find that those traits, or did you find any evidence that those traits were
more or less prevalent in particular cultures or particular geographies or was it all really
sort of personal and you could find those things occur no matter where you went?
SARAH LEWIS: Well, I didn’t write this book with an eye to looking at how studies
can kind of explain the world. I really wanted to foreground the power of story, it’s really
why talking with Anna is such a delight, because that’s how you approach the world, too.
And I think for me as I scratched the surface on many stories, I find that we all have these
capacities, these traits. I am still curious about whether or not different cultures have
more risk tolerance or more capacity or more interest in the topic of failure, that’s
intriguing to me, you know. I think in America we honor ambition and not just
achievement, and with that comes an interest in how someone might have failed, so that
we kind of honor that risk a bit more. So that remains to be seen. I haven’t quite explored
it to the degree that I’d like to. More to come, but in terms of individual traits, I believe
that we all have the capacity to overcome what we’re going through.
ANNA DEAVERE SMITH: Sara, who did you write this book for? Who’s your
audience? Before the marketing people decide.
SARAH LEWIS: They probably would be happy to hear me say what is the truth, which
is I wrote it really for everyone, you know. I wrote it first as I was thinking about what I
wanted to have in the world for the next generation as I was thinking about children and
wanting to have children. So I hope it’s for young people, I hope it’s for those who are
trying to not just create a work of art, but to create their lives differently, you know. I
think of it not just in terms of the disciplines I write about, you know, athletes, and
entrepreneurs, and artists, but really for anyone of any age, and as I look at the different
audiences I’ve been speaking with, from Philadelphia’s, you know, Constitution Center
to different museums to colleges, you name it, I think it’s kind of borne out and that’s
sort of my evidence that it is true, so it means I’ll be a little tired talking to a ton of folks
but really just joyful.
ANNA DEAVERE SMITH: Well, thank you so much.

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Sarah Lewis | Anna Deavere Smith

March 26, 2014

LIVE from the New York Public Library

Celeste Bartos Forum

PAUL HOLDENGRÄBER: Good evening. Good evening. My name is Paul

successful, to make it levitate.

failure is a gift and I’m sure you do, too.

Smith defines herself in these seven words: “Actress, dramatist, Baltimore-bred,

Connecticut, to see Let Me Down Easy at the Long Wharf Theatre.

general. And then we’ll open it up for questions, too.

and you haven’t even seen it yet, right?

SARAH LEWIS: I haven’t even seen it, no.

between success and mastery.

SARAH LEWIS: Sure.

ANNA DEAVERE SMITH: What’s the difference?

SARAH LEWIS: Right. So this is something that I came to understand by working at

“near win,” really.

Are they the same thing?

I had two more productions after that.

people who will say to you it’s just not there.

SARAH LEWIS: Right, right. There’s a difference, I think, between failing in a

very public way.

ANNA DEAVERE SMITH: Samuel Morse, I mean, can you imagine?

SARAH LEWIS: I really can’t, actually.

ANNA DEAVERE SMITH: To make something else.

SARAH LEWIS: To be determined, to have grit. Exactly. Exactly.

and letters. Say something about it.

ANNA DEAVERE SMITH: You see? I mean really.

but that’s what started to turn the tide.

feeling it’s plenty of people like that.

SARAH LEWIS: It’s a lot.

SARAH LEWIS: That’s the right question.

of these fantastic things like that.

SARAH LEWIS: That’s right.

he and James Watson at an event for the World Science Festival.

SARAH LEWIS: I didn’t know that.

party for him on his eightieth birthday.

SARAH LEWIS: I love it. I love it.

SARAH LEWIS: I didn’t know this.

the jungles and so on.

snakes, I knew a lot when I was thirteen, fourteen years old.

joy in what they’re being, in that exploration.

SARAH LEWIS: Over a hundred and fifty.

you were in England, you were here.

quote of Toni Morrison about surrender, what is that?

ANNA DEAVERE SMITH: The wind.

ANNA DEAVERE SMITH: So say it again. What did she say?

you, he what did he say, we should goad each other.

with Ben about surrender, actually.

overcame some kind of impediment by surrendering to a kind of a grief or—

ANNA DEAVERE SMITH: Loss, maybe.

speaking class, right, in seminary.

Belafonte mimic it? What is the tic?

SARAH LEWIS: He did, he did.

left to fear and the tic just went away.”

ANNA DEAVERE SMITH: So the tic was some sort of a—

helped me with this book.