Jill Lepore on the Past and Present, the Personal and Political

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Brian Lehrer: It's The Brian Lehrer Show on WNYC. Good morning again, everyone. With us now the amazing Harvard historian and New Yorker staff writer Jill Lepore. We used to have a slogan that we used on the station that said, "Radio for the perpetually curious." Well, reading Jill Lepore's body of work is like reading into the mind of one of the most perpetually curious writers I could imagine, which is one of the nicest things I could say about someone. You can tell by the range of essays in the new collection of 46 Jill Lepore pieces from the last 10 years, most of them from The New Yorker, a few of them previously unpublished, called The Deadline Essays.

They all inform the present in some way relating to the Obama, Trump, Me Too, George Floyd, Guantanamo, pandemic, artificial intelligence, climate altering Barbie era in American history that we've all been living through, but by exploring events and people from history, ranging from Mary Shelley, author of Frankenstein to Jane Franklin, sister of Ben who perhaps should have had a place at the table when they wrote the Constitution, because maybe we'd be better off today. She also does some personal essay writing, including about her late parents and a dying friend. Besides her New Yorker work, Jill Lepore hosts the podcasts The Last Archive and the one called Elon Musk. Again, the book is called The Deadline. Jill, always inspiring to have you on the show. Welcome back to WNYC.

Jill Lepore: Hey, thanks so much. It's really lovely to be here.

Brian Lehrer: In the introduction, you say, "I never set out to study history. I only ever set out to write." How'd you become a historian?

Jill Lepore: [chuckles] Totally by accident. I always wanted to be a writer. I wrote was mostly [inaudible 00:02:04] beginning when I was a really little kid. I don't have any degrees in history, I'm always embarrassed to point out, though I teach in the history department. I majored in English in college, and I had to finish a year early because I ran out of money, and I worked as a secretary for a few years, and I tried to write novels and I couldn't figure out what to do with them. Then I decided to go to graduate school because it seemed like something I knew how to do. I could fill out those forms and I could probably get in. I went to graduate school in American Studies, and in somewhat--

Brian Lehrer: That's close to history.

Jill Lepore: It's pretty close, yes. I think, I'm really interested in the relationship between the past and the present, but that's not usually what animates most academic historians, but it does animate most writers, right? People are just interested in questions about the relationship between the past and the present. That's what most novels are interested in.

Brian Lehrer: Do you think someone who comes to history through their interest in writing tends to communicate differently about the past than someone who comes to writing through their interest in history?

Jill Lepore: I think maybe. There's an unfortunate aspect of PhD education wherein you have beaten out of you your interest in what happened, because what you're taught matters is what meaning you make of what happened, and so you just lose, I think, the sensibility that's like, "What the hell? What happened? Why does this matter?" So much is about making meaning for other scholars, and that doesn't generally lead to great writing, sadly.

Brian Lehrer: You also, in that introduction, contrast the genre of the historical essay with the genre of the personal essay, which you say you love a lot of, but also despise a lot of. Can you talk about that love hate relationship with personal essays?

Jill Lepore: The memoir is a rich and varied genre, so I don't mean to put it all even into one category. It's a weird category as it is. It's a catchall, and this incredibly beautiful writing that people do within that genre. I think what really troubled me as a young writer in particular, was how much pressure there was, and I think still is, on women writers to write in that genre, even if their interests are different. Part of this comes from feminism, right? The personal is political. You should write about your personal experience. The consciousness raising, self-exposure, self-revelation as a political argument as well as, whatever, self-actualization.

I saw a lot of young very exciting intellectuals who happened to be women, who were pushed into writing very personal pieces, and the cost that had for them was undermining their intellectual authority and their academic expertise. Which doesn't need to come to that. That doesn't need to be the necessary cost, but just the way the publishing industry works, the way academic life works, you write about yourself at your own expense if you're a woman. If you're a man, I think you can get away with it. [chuckles] You can get away with it without diminishing your authority.

It really bothered me, it's hard to name with female intellectuals who have a place in modern intellectual discourse that's beyond their academic specialty. There's just not a long list of those people. I wanted that, and I didn't want to give that up for the sake of doing more personal writing. That I also wanted to do, but I just thought I wasn't willing to pay that price.

Brian Lehrer: I'll use that as a jumping off point to ask about some of the content. Why did you choose Mary Shelley, author of Frankenstein as a historical subject?

Jill Lepore: Oh, well, a lot of the essays in this book were assignments. I wrote this piece, it would've been 2018, the 200th anniversary of the first edition of Frankenstein.

Brian Lehrer: Wait, can I just jump in on that? When people think of you, I'm sorry, you have a lot of fans out there, the great Jill Lepore in The New Yorker, David Remnick calls you on the phone or sends you an email and says, "Jill, I want you to write about this," rather than you generating them?

Jill Lepore: Oh, I don't know. It's maybe half and half. I do a lot of what The New Yorker calls critics at large pieces, right in the back of the magazine that are roundups of a bookshelf worth of new books or that are occasional. I think there's also a piece about Melville. Maybe that's not in the book. [unintelligible 00:07:01] anniversaries, I remember I wrote a piece about Edgar Allan Poe on the 200th anniversary of his birth, so a lot of those are [inaudible 00:07:12]

Then a lot of them are myself pitched. There's a piece about the anniversary of Dr. Who, the BBC TV show that I'm a rabid fan of. I pitched that. No one particularly wanted to hear about Dr. Who, but I really wanted Dr. Who, so it's a mix. I would say most pieces are negotiated. There's an initial assignment. "Could you write about this?" "I don't know. Yes, but not that way. There's a different way that I want to write that piece."

Brian Lehrer: I'm sorry for that aside. Mary Shelley.

Jill Lepore: Mary Shelley. Oh, my God. I read Frankenstein. I think I'd even taught Frankenstein at that point, but I actually never had read Mary Shelly's diaries, but Mary Wollstonecraft, her mother, a great English feminist, political [inaudible 00:08:01], because I taught Wollstonecraft's, A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, but I really had never really thought about Mary Shelley herself, and I went and read her journals, which are reading journals. She's really keeping track of what she's reading. She is a very literary figure, people will do that all the time, but there was another whole lot dimension journals, which are really a chronicle of her pregnancies, and of those pregnancies through miscarriage, and still birth, and the death of her children in infancy, and later--

Very similar in a certain way to Jane Franklin's Book of Ages, which is this tiny little diary that Benjamin Franklin's sister kept chronicling births and deaths of her children. There's this whole female form that is really just a litany of suffering of women in pregnancy and the loss of their children, and just put Frankenstein-- so that essay tries to read Frankenstein the novel, which is about the abandonment of a child. The betrayal of a child by the father [crosstalk]

Brian Lehrer: Hey, Jill, I'm going to jump in again because I think you can't tell from where you are, but the line that you're on is breaking up and we still have most of our conversation to go. I think we're going to try to call you on your phone and try to get a better line here so that we can have this conversation in full appreciation by the listeners. Listeners, we're going to pause here for just a second as we continue with Jill Lepore, The New Yorker magazine staff writer and Harvard historian who has a new book out now of 46 essays from the last 10 years called The Deadline. I was also listening to her podcast series, which is over now, I think on Elon Musk. Maybe we'll be able to get to that. It's interesting because I think that whole podcast series on how we're living in Elon Musk's world was all done before he bought Twitter. That's an interesting other thing that Jill Lepore has been involved with that maybe we'll get to. I think Jill is back now. Jill, are you there?

Jill Lepore: Yes, I am.

Brian Lehrer: Good. I think that sounds a lot better. Frankenstein was science fiction. Do you see it as foreshadowing our real-life debates and anxieties today about artificial intelligence?

Jill Lepore: I do and I don't. When I was working on that piece, there had been a special new edition of the book published that was aimed and marketed at people working and thinking about artificial intelligence. One of the things that troubles me about artificial intelligence is the way that it erases mothering. That's the whole lesson of Frankenstein. There is no mother. Artificial intelligence, it's this creation of new creatures without mothers or fathers or any parents of any kind and absent parenting. Yes, but not maybe in the way that people like to talk about Frankenstein as foreshadowing that problem.

Brian Lehrer: Was there a historical context, before we move on to some of the other essays, for Frankenstein that had to do with new technologies of that time in the 1800s that people were trying to come to terms with?

Jill Lepore: Yes, I do. You can read it that way. There, certainly, were incredible technological revolution and there was a lot of-- but I think one of the more provocative ways to read Frankenstein is instead through the lens of slavery. Mary Shelley and her husband Percy Shelley were abolitionists. There's a whole Black Frankenstein tradition in the United States in which Frankenstein's monster is read as this essentially enslaved creature who is created and then abandoned by the doctor who's the British Empire. I think that's actually a more historically appropriate reading than the technology reading that Tech Bros want to give to Frankenstein. I think that's harder for Tech Bros to think about, so is the child who is abandoned by its parent. These are things that Tech Bros don't want to think about. They really want to use Frankenstein as a proto-Oppenheimer story.

Brian Lehrer: Listeners, our phones and text message feed are open for anything you always wanted to ask Jill Lepore after reading her books or reading her essays in the New Yorker, but you could never audit her classes at Harvard. Call or text us at 212-433-WNYC, 212-433-9692. I'll say, judging from Jill's body of work topics are limited to the era from the dawn of human history to the 2024 elections. Let's keep it within that era. 212-433-WNYC, 212-433-9692. First priority to Jill Lepore readers today. All right, Barbie, that wasn't a movie review. It was more about intellectual property?

Jill Lepore: Yes. There's an essay in the collection called Valley of the Dolls that was a New Yorker piece that was an examination of [chuckles] really honestly hilarious series of lawsuits between the makers of the Bratz doll, those googly-eyed sexy shopping dolls, and Mattel, the maker of Barbie, as an intellectual property dispute. The guy who created the Bratz dolls was working at Mattel when he designed these Bratz dolls with these oversized heads and Ken boots. They're a Franken Barbie.

The intellectual property dispute is really, really interesting. One of the things that was just hilarious to me about it was the judge comes around to the idea that there's only so many ways that you can create an ideal female form, and so therefore, is the Bratz a copy of Barbie in some way or are they both just copying an idealized version of the female form? I don't know. I look at both of those dolls. I'm like there's nothing ideal in either of these female forms. They're just freaks. They're just bizarre creepy corporate manifestations of ways to basically torture girls. I don't know. I have very [chuckles] strong views about the dolls.

Brian Lehrer: I guess.

Jill Lepore: The lawsuits were really interesting though.

Brian Lehrer: Well, since you have those strong views about the dolls, did you see the movie and do you have thoughts about Barbie's place in American history or feminist or anti-feminist history now after the film and the debates about how Greta Gerwig made the film?

Jill Lepore: Yes, I did see the movie. I think one has an obligation as a historian. I know that it has huge fans and followings and extraordinary success. I'm myself a big Greta Gerwig fan. I did not like the movie at all. I found the movie unbelievably depressing.

Brian Lehrer: Depressing?

Jill Lepore: Yes. It's really essentially a remake of Charlotte Perkins Gilman's 1915 feminist utopian novel Herland. Barbie Land is Herland. That was a novel written about a women-only society where women ruled and then it's invaded by men at a time before women had the right to vote during the First World War when women believed that if only they had the right to vote, the world would be a better place, there would be no more wars. It was a really important feminist intervention in 1915, but if that same, same story can be told a century later and still seem to people like a fresh and exciting feminist intervention, then what can be said of feminism over the last 100 years? That was what really just destroyed me.

Brian Lehrer: You wrote in your Barbie and Bratz essay that empowerment feminism is a cynical sham. For listeners who may not even know that term, empowerment feminism, what were you getting at there?

Jill Lepore: Oh, it's a corporate product. Let's sell things to girls by way of their parents and to teenage girls by way of whatever is in their pocketbooks by telling them that it is empowering to them. Commodity items are not empowering. Ways to convince you that there are certain ways that you need to appear and dress and act and adorn yourself are ways that you've become powerful, miss the whole point that the same set of requirements are not placed on little boys who are your age. It's understood that they have power without buying it. It's creepy to me. It was a big deal.

I wrote a piece that's actually not in this book called Baby Food a few years ago about the history of the breast pump because I was completely perplexed. At the time I was using a breast pump. It seemed like the most absurd thing. Medically, in a medical situation, lifesaving and vital and important and wonderful. Thank God it has been invented, but why just in order to keep my job and also feed my child did I need to pump milk from myself in this way?

It turns out, really, that the corporate breast pump situation, it really was just a way to avoid having to provide maternity leave for women. "Oh, you come right back to work. We'll give you a breast pump," or, "We'd like to hire you for this job in our law firm. One of our benefits is we'll freeze your eggs." These are things that I associate with corporate feminism, with empowerment feminism that are just different ways of exploiting people.

Brian Lehrer: Deforest in Yonkers wants to pick up on your reference to Black Frankenstein a few minutes ago. Deforest, you're on WNYC with New Yorker, SAS, and Harvard historian, Jill Lepore. Hi.

Deforest: Listen, I want to thank you, Jill, for reminding me of that. I attended a session at Columbia University where the author was talking about the notion of Frankenstein being black. I did not know at the time, and it's been founded out, listening to you today, that Shelley was in fact an abolitionist, which puts a completely different spin on this notion of what you call empire being this enslaver, in this case, Dr. Frankenstein, and the enslaved, in this case being the monster, being the one who is in fact victimized. I've always thought, when looking at the film and reading the book, that the notion of Frankenstein, the monster was far more sympathetic in my view when I read the book than the actual doctor was.

It seemed to me that he was the monster. I would like you to talk a little bit more about the notion of that whole thing and the way in which Black people continue to be demonized in our society. People don't really talk about that. It was shocking to hear it in the classroom that day, but I'm glad that she said it, and I am glad that you're bringing it up, and I want you to talk a little bit more about it, if you will. Please, ma'am.

Jill Lepore: Yes. Thanks so much. Yes, I hadn't really thought that through myself before I was working on this piece, and I read a great book of literary criticism, I believe it's called Black Frankenstein, that reconstructs the 19th century idea and makes a very good case for that is how audiences read the book at the time. In fact, Frankenstein was made into a play almost immediately upon its publication. The monster wore blue makeup and also was often dressed in African dress, or what the London stage considered to be some version of African dress. It was realized in the dramatic production of Frankenstein.

Even when James Wales of the famous film, the Boris Karloff film that everyone has seen from 1931, I think it is, at the end, the final scene is essentially a lynching. Frankenstein is lynched. That would have had a really powerful resonance for audiences in the 1930s, which really the numbers of lynchings happening in the Jim Crow south in the 1930s, an anti-lynching act that FDR won't support, can't get through the New Deal Congress is very much on people's minds. It's not just that in the 18-teens it was read that way and then performed that way across the 19th century, also in the US to American theater audiences who read it that way. It has a whole different life in the 1930s in the US.

Brian Lehrer: Deforest, thank you for your call prompting that response. Janet in West Orange, you're on WNYC with Jill Lepore. Hi, Janet.

Janet: Hi. Thanks for taking my call. I, first of all wanted to thank Dr. Lepore for the wonderful book I read that she wrote about Augusta Savage on an African-American woman sculptor. This book is, I don't think, as well known as a lot of her other works, and it was so useful for me in putting together a talk I did on Augusta Savage. I knew about Augusta Savage, but I didn't know all the details that came out in the book, and I was just blown away by it.

I wanted to ask her about her process. How did she-- I had done research on Augusta Savage. I read books and I knew a lot about her, but I didn't know about this intersection with Joe Gould, and I knew about Alice Neel's relationship with Joe Gould because she had painted him, and then when I read your book it just blew my mind. It really did. It just-- I just admire your scholarship so much and I wanted to know how you put it all together.

Brian Lehrer: Janet, thank you. [crosstalk] Can you bake into that answer, Jill, just a little bit of Augusta Savage 101 for a lot of listeners who never heard the name?

Jill Lepore: Yes, absolutely. I wrote a book a few years ago that also there's a New Yorker version essay of it called Joe Gould's Teeth. Augusta Savage was born in Florida and had a child, and then like so many Black Americans in the 1920s moved to New York where she was a leader of what is sometimes called the Harlem Renaissance. She was a sculptor and a teacher. She opened an art school for kids in Harlem. She was also a poet. She married a Marcus Garveyite who then died, and she lived in New York and was really maybe the most famous sculptor of the Harlem Renaissance.

She did this very important commission for the 1939 World Fair. Then in the middle of the 1940s, she completely disappeared, and somewhat mysteriously seems to have destroyed a lot of her own artwork. In some ways became written out of the Harlem Renaissance, because her work didn't really survive. She also left no papers behind, so something of a mysterious figure. I came across her. I was obsessed. I got obsessed. I always get obsessed with things. You introduced me as curious, but I mostly just perplexed and obsessive.

Brian Lehrer: [laughs]

Jill Lepore: I got obsessed with this question. Joe Gould is this guy who lived in Greenwich Village the first half really of the 20th Century and was a famous Bohemian who was said to be writing the longest book ever written in oral history of our time. Then it was later said that he had made it all up. He was essentially homeless, and he lived in these flop houses, and he went from restaurant to restaurant with these dime store notebooks, allegedly writing down anything anybody ever said, and then apparently the whole history of our time disappeared.

I got obsessed with the question of whether really it had existed and could be recovered, and I went on this just mad months-long, wild goose chase trying to find it. I ended up discovering that most of it was about Augusta Savage whom he, I believe had likely raped possibly multiple times, but certainly harassed viciously. He was arrested several times for sexual assault on Black women in Harlem. He spent most of his time when he wasn't in Greenwich Village in Harlem, and the oral history of our time was apparently mostly about Augusta Savage, who fled New York in 1945 to get away from him. We would have called him a stalker.

He was later committed. He was really clearly insane his whole life, but he was later committed and lobotomized and died in 1957. I just was totally haunted by this utterly unknown and deeply hidden account of Gould, who was often presented as a charming clownish there'll always be a Greenwich Village figure, when really he was a person responsible for the near destruction of this really important Black artist's work and life. That's what Janet is asking about. My method was I followed lead to lead. I actually rented a city bike and went from archive to archive across New York, just trying to find scraps of paper that could possibly reveal what really happened.

Brian Lehrer: That could be the quote of the week on the show. "I rented a city bike and went from place to place looking for scraps of paper to-

Jill Lepore: [laughs]

Brian Lehrer: -find what really happened." The way you characterize yourself, Jill, maybe we'll change the catchphrase from radio for the perpetually curious to radio for the perpetually perplexed.

Jill Lepore: [laughs] Fair enough.

Brian Lehrer: But my guest enough is Harvard historian and New Yorker essayist, Jill Lepore. The new collection of 46 essays from the last 10 years is called The Deadline. I have to note that you frame the collection in part by writing, "There's no real way of avoiding stating the obvious. I wrote these essays during a period of terrible, tragic decline in the United States. Decline in what ways, mostly?

Jill Lepore: I think in the functioning of daily civic life, between the pandemic and Trumpism, people's ability to understand one another, to have a chance to see one another, really just thinking about polarization and political violence. The tragic consequences of the rise of social media and what it does to people's ability to belong in a polity or in any kind of a community, those things. I don't have the, having watched the Republican national debate last week and everyone's screaming about decline, decline, decline, and Trump's whole 2016 American carnage, I don't believe in that. I perceive, and this is just my perception, but, from where I sit, a much quieter, less violent, but sad fraying at the edges of people's tolerance for one another and ability to be with one another. That kind of decline.

Brian Lehrer: In the press release for the book, there's a line that says, "Challenging both conservatives and liberals, Lepore objects to censorship on the right and left, making the case for an open-minded democratic society free from book banning and trigger warnings in equal measure." I'm curious how you would put that thought in your own words, and how much of an equivalency or not equivalency you see in those things.

Jill Lepore: I think that political tolerance is extraordinarily important. It's foundational to living in civil society, and it historically is a descendant of religious toleration so people come to believe, "Oh, well, you and I can have different views about religion, and we can agree to have different views and that can be okay." We don't actually have to have religious wars. We don't have to try to exterminate one another. On the basis of that grow outgrows of this historical version of liberalism, the idea that we can have different political views, and we don't have to try to kill each other over them.

That political tolerance is in short supply, both on the left and on the right and in different ways. Call out culture on Twitter is corrosive and poisonous to civil life, and so is the banning the banning of books, whatever kind of books you want to ban. I'm fairly an absolutist on that question. I think it's important to recognize, sure, there are conservative book bans that go on, but there's extraordinary amount of political intolerance on the left as well. I didn't write that press release. [chuckles]

Brian Lehrer: I realize.

Jill Lepore: I can't be responsible for its phrasing. I absolutely do believe that unless we can rekindle the spirit of political toleration, I don't see how democratic polity holds itself together without it.

Brian Lehrer: Jennifer, in East Harlem, you're on WNYC with Jill Lepore. Hi, Jennifer.

Jennifer: Yes, good morning. I am admittedly a Jill Lepore writing huge, huge fan. Thank you so much for taking my call. Actually, Lepore, I was curious since you yourself admitted, and I knew that you were not trained as a historian. Since your work is so expansive in terms of breadth and depth of subject matter and analysis, do you not find it somewhat confining to be defined as a historian? Would cultural studies or some interdisciplinary genre not be more appropriate for you? I'll take your response off the air. Thank you.

Jill Lepore: Yes, thanks so much, Jennifer. Thanks for the kind words. Maybe I'm an American Studies person, but I guess I will write about anything. Honestly, what I swear by is I have a commitment to delight in prose which is one of the things-- There's an essay in this collection called Just the Facts, Ma’am that explains how it is that historical writing came to prohibit suspense, joy, delight, passion, humor, sexiness. All the things that I might value in a piece of writing are not allowed in historical writing, as it is understood by the academic discipline of history. I don't think any of those things are particularly celebrated by cultural studies or other allied interdisciplinary fields either. It's so sad to say. I appreciate the notion of--

Honestly, I don't really like being identified as a historian because I don't think I have a lot in common with how historians understand the precepts of historical writing, or I don't really subscribe to all of them. What I do love about history as an academic discipline, is the discipline. I love the method of investigation. I love the rules of evidence, the standards of proof. You need to corroborate whatever you find. You need to get to the original document. You need to interview the person who's still alive that remembers it. You have to weigh oral history against this. I'm a rule-monger.

What I love about history is getting into an archive, trying to figure out what actually happened, who explains it, letting a reader hear that person's voice, trying to animate some long-dead person for a reader who doesn't think they're interested in that person. Trying to use a person's life to animate a reader's interest in an idea that maybe they wouldn't think they're interested in that idea, but they are interested in the person. Characters drive a story so that you can use a character to reveal a whole intellectual gesture. I love this kind of thing. I think of that as how I do history, but I'm not sure it's really how historians think about it in having to do history.

Brian Lehrer: You write so much about people. Closing question then. How history is taught is itself a centerpiece of the culture wars, maybe more explicitly than ever before, especially about race and racism. Are there historical precedents for this, or how would you place this moment in the history of history? Then we're out of time.

Jill Lepore: Yes. There's an essay in the collection called The Parent Trap, where I write about the debate in the 1920s over the teaching of evolution. People know about the 1925, the Scopes Trial, the famous so-called Monkey Trial, that emerged out of years of local school boards trying to ban the teaching of Darwinism. That notion Darwinism was just too threatening an idea to be offered in American schools at a time when compulsory education was first made compulsory. This is where Parents Rights come from. It comes from this debate. People would say, "As a parent, I have a right to tell the school not to teach my child about Darwin." I think that it's a weird and misaligned antecedent, but it's interesting. I think it is revealing about the nature of some of our current really rotten and destructive debates.

Brian Lehrer: Jill Lepore's new book is called The Deadline Essays. Thank you so much for sharing it with us.

Jill Lepore: Thank you so much.

 

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