“The Voice of a Free People is Full of Turbulence and Grace.” Marilynne Robinson Accepts the Lewis H. Lapham Award

The Lewis H. Lapham Award for Literary Excellence was awarded earlier this month to Marilynne Robinson at a gala celebrating Harper’s Magazine’s incredible 175-year milestone of continuous publication. Named for longtime Harper’s editor Lewis H. Lapham, whose vision and independent voice shaped generations of readers, the award celebrates writers whose work exemplifies the qualities he championed: intellectual boldness, literary distinction, and a devotion to truth. It recognizes authors whose voices not only enrich the literary landscape but also advance the broader cultural conversation in the spirit of fearless inquiry.

Robinson was presented with the award by friend and former student Ayana Mathis. Their remarks are printed in full below.

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Ayana Mathis
Good evening. I want to say thank you to Harper’s for inviting me here to share in this wonderful evening. And it is such a great honor to present the Lewis Lapham Award to Marilynne Robinson.

I’d like to begin by sharing a story about how my relationship with Marilynne came to be. I met Marilynne when I was her student at the Iowa Writers Workshop in the first semester of my first year. She taught a seminar on the Old Testament. We convened weekly, 20 or 30 of us. We were our own little ekklesia, that is, a calling out of persons assembled for some purpose. Ours was to think together about the narrative and esthetic power of biblical literature as—and here I quote Marilynne from her book Reading Genesis—“a complex statement about reality.”

One evening, at the end of a particularly sublime class, she said, Well, now I shall send you all out into the wailing darkness. It was November in Iowa. The light faded by 5pm or so. Night had already come down outside of the windows of our classroom, we students went out onto the street. It was very cold and the black sky was flecked with stars. We who had been in that room understood that we had shared a rare kind of communion with one another, with the literature and, of course, with Marilynne’s extraordinary mind.

She taught us that the very nature of the literary enterprise presumes that a human being is capacious, a creature of dignity.

In that same semester, she was also my professor for a fiction writing workshop. I had been working on a novel which I had to abandon because it wasn’t any good. And Marilynne, let’s say, helped guide me to that realization. Well, after I’d spent a few weeks crying in the shower, I began to work on something new. That project became a novel called The Twelve Tribes of Hattie, which, as it turns out, was awfully biblically inflected, so much so that later in my time at Iowa, Marilynne would invite me to use the theological library in her home. She would serve me tea and cookies and talk with me about weighty subjects as if I were not at all an idiot.

The novel that I wrote is full of Marilynne, by which I mean that it attempts, as she taught every one of us apprentice writers, to avoid cliche in character and in plot. She urged us to strive for language that does not cheapen experience nor reduce it. She taught us to assume that our reader is an intelligent interlocutor whose choice to open our books ought to be met by nothing less than our very best effort.

Now, I certainly didn’t succeed in most of that, and it’s likely that I never will, but what Marilynne gave us, gave me, was a moral and aesthetic mandate. That one consciousness should meet another consciousness on the plane of written language is strange and extraordinary. It is as deeply human as anything that ever was, and sacred too, however you might define that word. She taught us that the very nature of the literary enterprise presumes that a human being is capacious, a creature of dignity.

Our work, then, must be in service of nothing less than that dignity and that complexity. This is perhaps her greatest lesson to me. All of us in this room and so many more around the globe are grateful for her work, but I would like to say this evening that I am in particular grateful for her example, and more still, for her friendship.

Please join me in welcoming Marilynne Robinson to the stage…

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Marilynne Robinson
I began my first version of these remarks by saying that our country faces problems that are novel, urgent and profound. This is still true. But now I see all this in the light of recent events in New York, the proverbial shining city, so ready to confront the problems of democracy with the power and grandeur of democracy. For many generations a world of excellence has flowed into this city and flourished here.

When I first came to New York as a published writer I felt something like the honor I feel now, having been made welcome then by Robert Giroux, Pat Strahan, and Jonathan Galassi, by Ellen Levine, and by Lewis Lapham, Christopher Carroll and Harper’s. Now I look back on my long silences and eccentric choices as my career and my life, shaped and encouraged and given actual substance by these excellent stewards of the near past and the emergent future, of our multitudinous literature, our greatest democratic art.

It is important to us now as a people, documented or not, to remember what we love and to treat it lovingly.

Harper’s has been a sagacious and elegant presence in all this for a very long time, since there were giants on the earth, Frederick Douglass and Herman Melville. The writers and editors behind Harper’s have proven the power of true witness in the face of corrupt economic forces and outright disaster. In this moment they remind us that the voice of a free people is full of turbulence and also grace, that it readily accommodates the brilliance that will arise wherever excellence is valued, that popular government should not be characterized by the worst threats it confronts, vulgar arrogance and greed, but by the fact that they are threats it must overcome. There is a beautiful certainty at the heart of it all.

Still, it is easy to forget that to experience democracy requires a little quiet and attentiveness, to understand the dignity of ordinary life, to hear the music of a new dialect. The First Amendment has its robust life in our letters as surely as in the hours of jubilant consensus we call protests. When other generations look back to see how and whether we were sufficient to the demands our times will have made of us, they will look at what we wrote and published and read, they will find truth and courage, and also, at best, that fine, egalitarian courtesy to the reader and to this precious work that is the singular elegance of democracy.

It is important to us now as a people, documented or not, to remember what we love and to treat it lovingly. The Constitution and the law are only more to be revered because they are being trammeled. Our solidarity must be cherished because attempts are being made to set us against one another. Our responsibility for the wellbeing of the world must be continuously acknowledged because it is grave and real, and we will have no way to undo the harm we are permitting. And finally we must own up to the grandeur of the project other generations have left to us. This is no small task, and therefore it is urgent, honorable and necessary.