Sarah Lewis Anna Deavere Smith

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)

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.