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The achievements of the 2012 Humanities Medalists testify to the many ways that the humanities
can influence and shape a person's life and by extension a community, a public discussion,
a debate, an institution, a discipline. In its earliest years, NEH was inspired by a
great humanist, a philosopher whose name was Charles Frankel, a man who had deeply thought
about the role of the humanities in public life and in a democratic society. And nearly
25 years ago NEH named the awards that we celebrate today as the Frankel Prize. In 1996
this concept was adopted, embraced by the White House. The Presidential Medal in the
Humanities that President Obama will confer this afternoon continues to convey the essence
of Charles Frankel's legacy to the NEH and to the nation. And now I have the privilege
of asking the first question of our medalists. I would like to ask each of you to tell us
briefly about a person or even a book or an event that was significant in shaping your
work or your career. Well it happens that it's the event occurred in this city actually
so and I remember it very distinctly. I was in college in 1960 and I was taking my first
political science course and there was this cute girl sitting in front of me in class.
And our first date—this is in 19, really, late 1960s—our first date she asked me out
which in those years was completely unheard of and our first date was to go to a John
Kennedy political rally which was I thought pretty outrageous because I was a Republican
at that point. [Laughter] But then I turned around, the next week I invited her to go
to a Nixon [Laughter] campaign cavalcade that was going by the college. Then one thing led
to another and we ended up deciding on January 3rd, January 20th of 1961, to take a train
down, we were at Swarthmore, take a train down from 30th Street Station to a station
here in town. We arrived in the middle of a terrible snowstorm—and by the way I should
say I'm still hanging out with that girl, we just celebrated our 50th anniversary a
couple of days, a couple of weeks ago. So we stood in a crowd on the then east front
of the Capitol because that's where inaugurations were held and with our own ears heard President
Kennedy say, "Ask not what your country can do for you, ask what you can do for your country."
I'm utterly embarrassed to say at this very moment the hair on the back of my neck is
now standing up because that was an incredibly powerful moment. Now you know 50 years later
it seems a little dejeune and seems very very hackneyed but at the time, at least for an
adolescent, it was not hackneyed at all. I felt he was speaking to me personally and
I changed what I was doing, I had been a scientist at that point, coming out of the Sputnik era
and I decided I wanted to work instead on social and political issues and I have ever
since. I suppose it's rare that you can ever point to a particular moment at which you
change what you're doing in life and certainly not a political science class, that's not
normally the place in which you make changes, but that's a really powerful moment. If you
told me that I was going to spend my life writing about dead people when I was young
I would have said you were crazy and I don't think I had so much as a turning point as
a timed release. I spent every summer with my grandparents, basically my grandmother,
way up in the mountains of North Carolina.
Didn't have a telephone 'till I was 15
years old, she couldn't drive, and so I was dropped back into the middle of the 19th century
every summer. And we'd go to the Pentecostal church, we would go out and watch her snap
the neck off a chicken, that was alarming. But I realized that even though she lived
in the 19th century and had not had much schooling that she was smarter than anybody else I knew.
And later on when I was, found myself in graduate school and I realized, "You know, it would
be great if we could actually reach beyond our own space in time to connect with that
lost world that I had a chance to glimpse and if we wrote a kind of history that people
of every sort might have a place within. So my grandmother, who would be deeply amazed
that her oldest grandson grew up to be a college teacher, much less a president, much less
having a chance to meet the President of the United States, I blame her for all of that.
I came out of college to Sports Illustrated not because I wanted to be a sports writer
but because I very much admired the writing in the magazine and that was largely the work
of one man, an extraordinary editor named André Laguerre, one of those larger than
life people, he had been DeGaulle's press secretary during the war. It was a Frenchman
who really made Sports Illustrated succeed. He was not a man with a great deal of advice,
twice only. Once we were standing at the bar, three or four of us with him, we were often
at the bar in those days [laughter]. If you ever watch Mad Men we were the first cousins
of Mad Men as journalists then and his advice to us was, "Boys, you have to make a choice
in life. You can either drink with your buddies or chase girls but you can't do both." [laughter]
And the guy next to me had been married three times and said, "Now you tell me André."
But [laughter] the other thing he said to me was I think all sports writers are defensive,
you know we're writing about fun and games and not something that is supposed to be important
and I was wrestling with staying with the magazine or moving into a more general field
of journalism. And he said very frankly, he said, "Don't think for a moment that it matters
what you write about, it's only how well you write it. That's all that counts." And that
was enough to convince me to stay in sports journalism at the time and it was a really
very very important turning point in my life, one man, André Laguerre on that one day.
Carole, your question is difficult for me because of the kind of history I do. Like
Ed I work on working people, peasants, Martin Guerre, I'm writing about slavery right now,
but I'm deeply committed to seeing change in even in an individual life, being shaped
by multiple forces and although events count I usually don't do the kind of history in
which a single event is life changing. So I'm immediately doing what I do as a historian,
I'm thinking about this possibility and this possibility and this possibility and I'm wanting
to tell multiples, a multiple tale. But since others here have talked about individuals
important in their lives I guess I'll do that too and talk about meeting my husband when
I was a junior from Smith College taking a summer course at Harvard. They didn't happen
to have history of science at Smith at that moment, they do now, and met my husband playing
at a political meeting, we were going to the Student Progressives and he had a ping pong
paddle under his hand and I said, "Oh you play ping pong!" And that was the start of
a 68 year marriage, from the junior year at Smith on. And he was the kind of—he was
a mathematician—but the kind of person who was very supportive of a woman—this is 1948—who
wanted to have a career of her own and came from a family where the women—I was the
first one to go to college—who believed deeply in equality and believed any time I
wanted to do something like not write about elites or the upper class he said "Go for
it!" So from the very beginning with my doctoral dissertation when I decided to work on printing
workers, rather than queens or kings or political institutions, he said "Go for it!" And that
kind of support—and go for it and be a woman and have a career, and go for it—so that
kind of support, here I keep thinking of not only at that critical moment but later on
when—I'll give this as my last example—when by accident I came across a book with the
marvelous story of Martin Guerre, a rare book from the sixteenth century and I thought—and
I'm a professor now, a reputable professor—"This should be a movie!" Because it was a movie
before it was a book supported by the NEH or at the same time, he said, "Go for it."
So that's the, I think that meeting Chandler Davis was an extremely important, life changing
moment for my work as a cultural historian of the common people. Well I think uh, we're
in a little role here on the impact of individuals and families and my story about that is, I
think, probably something that's not very common. I grew up in a very remote part of
Australia on a sheep and cattle station and my brothers, who were respectively six and
four years older than me, had had a governess. So I learned to write and read sitting under
the table while they were being taught, tying their shoelaces together, and trying to make
a lot of noise but both were taking things in. Eventually they went away to boarding
school when I was about seven. And at the time, in Australia, there was a curriculum
dictated by the state, a wonderful one they set out which required that every student
in secondary school must study a Shakespeare play during the year. So by the time they
graduated they knew at least five. Anyway, they loved the Shakespeare teacher they had
at the school they had and they always brought home the books. The little paperback versions
of any one of the plays they were studying with a note in the back about the language
and the achievements of the verse and so and so forth. And when they got home, they would
read them to me. And at the age of seven, I don't know how many people become profoundly
interested in Shakespeare but I did. And I didn't really understand the language except
in fits and starts but I caught the rhythm of iambic pentameters and I think as the result
of that, I found it fascinating to understand how words could be as powerful as this great,
great writer. So it was a mediated encounter but nonetheless very, very important in shaping
my life. I still remember that I would be sent out on the sheep station to herd sheep
or cattle and thought it boring because you go long distances and don't see anybody, so
I would recite the bits and pieces of the sonnets that I'd learned and felt that there
was nothing odd about that, that one could be involved in this extraordinary language
at a very young age. I think the person we all admired most and meant a lot to us was
Edmund Wilson. He was the author of a book called Axel's Castle, which was still one
of the great introductions to modern writing; to Rambaud, to Eliot, to Pound, to Joyce and
Proust. And then in the, we knew in the 30s that he had written extraordinary reportage,
extraordinary reflections on the Depression and is collected in works like The American
Jitters and The American Earthquake. And he wrote an astonishing variety of books including
the only great study of civil war fiction and prose: Patriotic Gold. And he was astonishing
in learning Russian to write about Russian literature; to learning Hebrew to write about
the Dead Sea Scrolls; to learning Hungarian to write about Hungarian poetry. So you can
imagine how excited we were when he wrote for us 50 years ago when we started the New
York Review. At that time everyone was doing interviews. It was a magazine called Interview.
And he did an interview with himself. And in that interview he was pretty critical,
both of a kind of promotional atmosphere in culture and a narrow atmosphere in scholarship.
And he wrote for us an extraordinary book called The Fruits of the MLA about excessive
narrowness in editing of texts. And that led to the Library of America. And the great thing
about him was his daring. He wrote about the about the Iroquois Indians. He wrote about
Haiti. And his beautiful, expository prose, which was sympathetic and yet skeptical at
the same time, and so we feel, that I feel, we still have a great deal to learn from him
and we learned a lot in getting our paper going. Well, I'll take you to the Mojave Desert.
I was raised in the southern California Mojave desert. It was a very small town, Rosamond.
There wasn't a lot of culture there. We were talking about books. I was thinking a really
important book for me was a little Signet paperback that was, that listed the books
that an educated person would have read. And that was my bible. And I didn't necessarily
know why I was reading Mill on the Floss in 8th grade, or what I had read when I read
it but I was, I knew, it was, it was my religion and it was my job to go through these books.
And I was very careful. I bought every week at the grocery store, there were, there was
a paperback rack in the larger town nearby where my mother shopped once a week. And I
would -- you could tell the quality books because they were the ones that had kind of
the dusty cover, some of them. Remember those? They had the --they weren't shiny. And I could
tell which were the classics and I would get up -- and I think they were about 60 cents
-- and I would read them -- and I keep going like this because I never opened them because
I wouldn't break the spine. You know, I had to read them and then put them on my shelf and line them
up and develop my mind and get out of Rosamond, you know. I didn't know what I was going to
do. What I did do, was actually, after I graduated from high school, I wound up -- my father
died about that time -- and I wound up going to the local community college, Valley College,
and there I met a teacher of great importance to me -- an English teacher. Her name was
Miss Evelyn Foley and she was approaching retirement and she was somewhat embittered
by this time by her junior college teaching experience and she was -- I loved her -- she
was just catnip for me. She was telling us what we were going to be studying in English,
Introduction to Literature, and she's going through the syllabus and she comes to Emily
Dickinson and she says, "I don't think that I'm going to teach Emily Dickinson this semester,"
she said. "She means much too much to me and the students brutalized her last semester
and I can't bear it." So I, so she was withholding Emily Dickinson from us. And I hadn't read
any Emily Dickinson whatsoever and so I immediately went over to the library and there was the
new Johnson edition, a big fat edition -- not very old yet -- and I looked into Emily Dickinson
and I was, I admit it now, I didn't use to admit my having been influenced by Emily Dickinson.
But I was massively thrilled with the kind of rhyming that she did. It just did something
to my brain cells. And, and I also just adored the fact that she did what it seemed like
nobody else was doing: she considered the operations of the mind a world, a fascinating
world to itself; something to be written about and, and articulated and she made a place
of it in the most exciting kind of way. And so I would say Miss Foley was, was terrifically
important in turning me on to Emily Dickinson by keeping her from me. My daughter said the
first question I should ask of you is who used to own this suit before I bought it in resale shop in New York. And
that if that person is here, thanks to you. But I say that by introduction. Because the
great influence in my life would be many people. I could speak about them at length, but the
main influence was the sense of growing up with losing things. In other words what in
Spanish is called venido a menos, is how do you get less and less and less, which some
of you probably now think that's a great thing: to have less and less and less. You know,
that's the kind of world we need today, is one where you have less and less and less.
But when you're a child, you want to own things, and have things, and be the first one with
the new shoes and the new suit. That's not so nice. So it was that sort of life, that
it -- training -- I mean I probably got the best training in the world on, you know, how
things get worse. So I came to America and I go to Notre Dame and everything is all green
and everything is well kept and everything. I feel this estrangement in the place. I just
don't belong here! I just, I'm not, it's not my place! I mean, nothing is falling apart.
It gets fixed right away, you know, so, so my epiphany came one day on the trip to Chicago.
We went through Gary, Indiana. So there, I go to Gary, Indiana, and the smoke is in the
air and you breathe it and you know you are just taking all the stuff you are not supposed
to be taking and you know you see people on the stoops playing, drinking, you know, and
whatever and it just, that's the world. That's the America that I wanted to be part of, to
see, to understand. And not only to understand. I mean my first sense was, you know, this
is falling apart and it's going to be you falling apart. But once I started going back
and going back and going back I found just that happens sometimes, most of the times,
perhaps. But sometimes, just the opposite happens and places get refurbished, fixed,
and put into shape. So it's that, I would call it in praise of failure, you know, and
of those that had plenty and the people that I really, you know, I never knew how this
happened, but there are some people out there that can see you fail and fail and fail and
yet they still look at you and they say they think you are full of promise. And you can't
understand that. You can't understand why, what are they seeing? What kind of vision
do they have? And I could mention several people on those lines but that, this would
be too long. So in any case, I guess that's how I became so interested in this thing and
the trip out here, you know, I just it almost hurt me not to be able to stop in Camden,
New Jersey. You know, I didn't want the White House. I wanted Camden, New Jersey. So, thank
you. It was a queen, so Jill, we have something in common. It was a queen. It was Queen Margaret
in Shakespeare's play Richard III. My first day of Shakespeare class in acting school,
which was a fluke, I thought I was going to do something for social change -- not acting
-- except people were changing, so I thought, why don't I stick around and see about this.
The teacher in the Shakespeare class, on the first day, said that Shakespeare should go
like this, "da-dah-da-dah-da-dah-da-dah-da-dah." Iambic pentameter, that Jill was just talking
about. And if, in the second beat, it goes "dah-da" like "da-da-Dah-da-da-dah-da-dah-da-dah,"
there's a troche. That means that the character is in some kind of psychological distress.
And the example she gave was in King Lear, at one point where he says, "never, never,
never, never, never." This nothing's going "da-dah" everything's going "DAH-da." And
she said, "Take 14 lines of Shakespeare, go home, take 14 lines of Shakespeare, say it
over and over again until something happens." I'd never had any training in Shakespeare.
I hadn't trained as an actor. I got a cheap book in the Tenderloin in San Francisco, five
dollars, I went home, I looked through to try to find a woman speaking 14 lines. It
wasn't that easy, and came upon Queen Margaret, who was very upset that Richard was on a killing
spree and was cursing his mother with words like, "That dog, that had its teeth before
its eyes, / To worry lambs and lap their gentle blood; / Thy womb let loose to chase us to
our graves." So I just said that over and over again for several hours, dutiful student
that I was, and I saw Queen Margaret. I saw her standing there, right in my basement apartment
in San Francisco, under influence of nothing whatsoever: no drugs, no alcohol. And it was
a very powerful experience because everything about acting in those days was that you have
the Hamlet in you, you are the thing, you can be anything. And so I saw that and it
wasn't me. And I wanted to know how it happened. And I thought that I could learn how it happened
by learning everything in the world that I possibly could about Shakespeare, but I just
didn't have enough time to do that. And I realized that everybody has rhythm, particularly
having come of a black community and a black theological community, I was aware of the
power of rhythm and became interested in just hearing anybody speak and taking that remarkable
transcendent experience that I had with Shakespeare and thinking about something my grandfather
was known to have said, my paternal grandfather, "If you say a word often enough it becomes
you." I thought that if I interviewed just people in life, I could start to have these
sort of Queen Margaret experiences. Years later, when I've gone back to take another
look at Richard III, I'm very interested in a moment when a younger woman says to Queen
Margaret, "please, teach me how to curse," and Queen Margaret basically says, well, if
you had woes like me, you could. And so I find myself very interested in talking to
people who have a lot to get off of their chest. Who have woes. Who are cursing something.
And so I like catastrophe and much of the theater that I create is in catastrophic places
around catastrophic events where people are cursing the life that they're in to try to
regain some dignity and control over it. That's what I've been doing. I have a brother two
and a half years older than I am. And we grew up in a fair degree of isolation -- physical
isolation -- in the first place, when we were very young and then after that, the isolation
that came from the fact that we were very used to talking to each other about things
that we did not share with other people. My brother, for some reason, was an intensely
intellectual child. And I shadowed him and I tried to do everything that he did and by
the time that I realized this was not usual, I had already become completely, you know,
addicted to his interests. And so, it would be impossible for me to imagine myself without
this very powerful, very early influence. I would like my brother to explain to me why
he was like that. You know, I know why I was like that. But in any case, I, you know, I
followed him all -- he went to Brown, I went to Brown -- that sort of thing. He had a friend,
a girl, that was in high school with him, who was very much -- this is in Northern Idaho
-- she was very much revered for her kind of caustic intelligence, and had gone to Smith
actually and come home after a couple of years for the summer. And she had a way of sort
of neglecting, you know, conventional behaviors. She stole a book out of the public library
-- King Lear -- and gave it to me. I mean the idea that she was even aware of who I
was was absolutely dazzling to me. So I was a sophomore in high school reading a stolen,
a hot copy of King Lear under the covers with a flashlight. It was a wonderful, you know,
admirable evasion of (unclear) and all this sort of thing. I was just stunned by it. And
then of course I wrote a dissertation on Shakespeare. You know, these early influences which it
seem to us as accidental is a meteor strike or something like that. Nevertheless, you
look back and just see how really important they have been. I don't know, I can't really
say beyond that. My brother would bring home books from college that were, you know, the
dialogues of Plato or something and just brought them home in his trunk, you know, and I would
read them and I had no real context by that point to put them in but I read them diligently
and so my brother. I mean, there it is.