A ‘Minor’ Author Gets the Last Laugh
A conversation with Robin Hemley, author of the brilliant new novel "Oblivion," a hilarious and poignant exploration of the life—and afterlife—of a “minor” author.
By Michael Judge
I first met Robin Hemley through email. It was 2005, four years after 9/11, and my office in Lower Manhattan had a birdseye view of The Pit, as we called it back then, the massive construction site where the Twin Towers once soared.
I was about to leave my job with The Wall Street Journal and move back to beautiful Iowa City, Iowa, home to the University of Iowa, my alma mater, and the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, where I studied poetry in the early 1990s. Hemley was the director of the UI Nonfiction Writing Program at the time, and I was hoping to meet with him upon arrival, and, who knows, maybe teach a class or two.
My email began: “Dear Ms. Hemley …” And went on from there in the kind of ingratiating way such letters do, praising “her” work and requesting a meeting after my wife and I settled into our new home.
Hemley wrote back almost immediately: “Dear Mr. Judge, I’m a Mr. not a Ms. But not to worry, it happens with surprising frequency.” He then graciously said he’d love to meet in person someday, and to call at my convenience so we could arrange a time to get together for coffee or something stronger.
I took him up on the latter, and we’ve been friends ever since.
The winner of a Guggenheim Fellowship, the Nelson Algren Award for Fiction from The Chicago Tribune and three Pushcart Prizes in both fiction and nonfiction, Hemley is the author of countless articles and essays and 15 books, including memoirs, novels, short story and essay collections, writing anthologies, and—teacher that he is—instructional and inspirational books for writers.
There’s a certain dread associated with reading a friend’s book. Not this one. Hemley’s new novel, Oblivion: An After Autobiography, intoxicates, I’m relieved to say, from the first sip to the last page. One part family history, two parts fabulist memoir, with a healthy shot of Yiddish ghost story thrown in, Oblivion takes readers on a spectral journey to the Prague of 1911 and the Bohemian haunts of the undiscovered Franz Kafka, complete with wandering spirits—dybbuks and ibburs—that possess the living, if only for a few moments, changing their fate forever.
Yet most of all, the novel is a loving attempt to rescue a “minor” author’s soul, and the souls of his family members reaching back to his great-grandmother Hanna—who, according to family lore, was a great beauty, an acquaintance of Kafka’s, and a mesmerizing actress in a Yiddish theater troupe—from oblivion.
At the same time, Oblivion is, as we discuss in the interview, a “shoutout” to all the writers out there who, despite their best (and oftentimes brilliant) efforts, never land a life-changing publishing deal, never enjoy the rewards of critical let alone commercial success, and thus never graduate from the realm of “minor” to “major” writer—at least not while they’re above ground.
I reached Hemley by phone a few hours before his reading at Iowa City’s Prairie Lights Bookstore, a must-stop on any respectable book tour. He’s just flown in from New York, where he currently teaches writing and heads the George Polk School of Communications at Long Island University in Brooklyn. Despite a tight schedule, he was kind enough to find the time to speak to an old friend.
MJ: I have to say, I absolutely love Oblivion.
RH: Thank you. I’m really glad you like it.
I don’t remember the last time I read something where I was laughing out loud like I did, but also just the gorgeous writing. It reminds me of that great Mel Brooks quote, “Tragedy is when I cut my finger. Comedy is when you fall into an open sewer and die.”
That’s so funny. I love that. I don’t think I’ve ever heard that one.
I don’t want to give too much away, but the book opens with this unnamed, minor author getting an email from his agent saying his new book was just auctioned off for an astronomical amount, and this is going to change everything. Then he gets a text and it says, “I’m sorry, that was meant for another client.”
Yeah. Yeah.
And that’s when he has a massive heart attack.
Right.
That’s funny enough. But then he falls face-first into his “celebratory slice of pecan pie with French vanilla ice cream.” Such a great detail. And the music of that is just plain funny. It reminds me that good writing is like a good joke—it’s all in the timing.
Timing is everything for sure. But it’s not something that can be taught. You kind of either have it or you don’t. It’s not something you think about, or at least should think about. I know how important it is, but I feel like it’s kind of a blessing. I don’t want to investigate it too much.
If you’re conscious of the rhythm while you’re writing it, you can’t write.
Yes. Exactly.
How did this story come to you? A writer gets a huge break that turns out to be a miscommunication. Did this happen to a specific writer you know, or was it a story you had heard?
Oh, no, no. It’s like the story of every writer’s life, except for the really famous ones. It’s a series of getting your hopes up and then getting them dashed. Oblivion is sort of the worst possible scenario. But I’ve had equivalents, of course, in my career. My first book that was accepted, a collection of short stories, was picked up by an editor at Knopf. Remember, this is my first book. I’m 29 years old or so. After my agent tells me that they’ve got an offer on the table from Knopf, which is a big dream, the editor writes back to her a week later and says, “I think I’ve changed my mind.” Imagine what that does to a young writer. Luckily, the book was picked up by Grove Atlantic a couple weeks later. But that kind of thing happens a lot to a lot of people. It’s not just me. So, there are the writers who have meteoric careers or amazing breaks or whatever, and then there’s kind of the rest of us who have ups and downs.
And that’s where the humor comes in. I talked about Mel Brooks at the beginning, but the whole book, it seems to me, is a kind of modern-day Yiddish folk tale.
Mm-hmm. Yeah.
In Yiddish folktales and Jewish mythology there are demons and dybbuks and golems and ghosts and all these things. You have a person, like you said, an unknown kind of minor author, who’s resigned to this Dante-like purgatory for minor authors. The Yiddish stories are laced throughout the thing and you discover your great-grandmother, Hanna, performing with a Yiddish theater company, which I thought was a very beautiful scene. Did you consciously think of those things when the story came to you?
Yeah. I would also say that the Yiddish atmosphere wasn’t super conscious, but it was something that comes from my literary lineage. A frequent person in my household when I was growing up was the Nobel Laureate Isaac Bashevis Singer. My parents [writers Cecil Hemley and Elaine Gottlieb Hemley] were both very influential in his career, especially my father. My father and he were kind of like best friends. My father was his main editor and translator for a long time. I grew up around Singer, and there’s hardly a writer more associated with Jewish folklore and mysticism. So I think it kind of seeped into my bones.
“I always think that as a writer, I’m in communication with other writers and with writers of the past. I feel a real connection to them whether I can see them or sense them or not. Sometimes it’s just a connection to one other person, but for that moment, that’s wonderful. That’s enough.”
As far as the story and how it happened, and the consciousness of the setting of these scenes with my great-grandmother, she’s been a very important part of my life from a very young age, though I never met her. All those stories about her—most of them, anyway—are what were handed down to me as truth, including her being an actor in the Yiddish theater. So, in some ways, it’s very much a memoir, even though it’s very speculative and takes place partly in the afterlife and with time travel and all that. But that character bears a lot of resemblance to me. So I didn’t have to search really hard for that character or Hanna.
Though I will say that when I was writing that scene that you were talking about in the theater, in the Café Savoy, that scene took me a long time. The Café Savoy really was a Yiddish, well, a place where people like Yitzchak Lowy and Kafka went. In fact, the play that I write about in the book, Shulamith–I believe Kafka did see that play that night. And some of the things that happened in the scene actually happened, according to Kafka’s diary. So I was taking historical fact, and also family fact or myth, and my own love of Kafka, and mixing them all together.
In the book the main character’s father, like yours, was Singer’s translator. And he says he wishes his father had been mentioned in the Nobel acceptance speech or recognized in some way. I was curious, did Singer say something in his acceptance speech about your father and his role as translator?
No, I don’t think he did. I’m pretty sure he didn’t because that was a pet peeve of my mom that she didn’t feel that Singer gave his translators enough credit because my father just was very dogged about those translations and he was a poet himself and was very dedicated to crafting the words just right. Of course, Nobel judges read the books in English and they were often my father’s translations. So no, he didn’t get that kind of recognition. But I think now he would get it for sure. Today, when a translated book wins an award, the translator is also a winner. But I think back then they just didn’t mess around with those fine points.
This whole issue of recognition, of who gets recognized and who doesn’t, obviously it’s a large part of the book. But one of the subthemes of the book is this notion that there’s almost always someone on whose shoulders, let’s say, the person who gets all the acclaim is sitting. So, with Kafka, it was his friend Max Brod—and Kafka never would’ve been Kafka without Max Brod. For Singer, it was, maybe, my father. Most of us are not fortunate enough to have a Max Brod or a Cecil Hemley in our lives, but I love the idea of honoring them.
There’s a beautiful passage where your “minor” writer talks about regretting all the time he spent alone in his study writing, away from his children. Did you feel that with your parents growing up, or your children now?
Well, that’s funny because I don’t really feel that. My father died when I was nearly 8. I was still 7. So I didn’t know him that well. I have some memories of him playing with me and doing some stuff, but it was really more my mother who raised me. And she would go off to Mexico every summer and leave me with my grandmother. I was happy as a clam though. I was fine with that. She just explained to me what she was doing. I loved being at the beach with my grandmother and my friends. So I didn’t really feel her absence that much. What I felt was that when we were together, she was very much there for me.
I’ve tried to be that way with my own children, but there’s inevitably some guilt that comes when you’re in the middle of something and one of your children comes knocking on the study door and says, “Can you do this?” And maybe you can’t. You’re home. But for some reason, for various reasons, you’re not able at that moment to do it. Many writers experience that.
But on the other hand, I feel very much part of my children’s lives and we have a very good relationship. I did my best to make up for when I wasn’t always present, in various ways. We do a lot of travel together, for example, and that’s always been one of our hallmarks as a family.
We both had children later in life. You had children at a young age, and then again later in life. I’m 55, my son is 10. I sometimes have the feeling that because I might not have that much time with him, my son will know me through my work.
Right.
Do you ever have that feeling? I could see your children reading Oblivion and seeing it not only as a pathway into your life, but into your family history and the literary culture you came from.
Yes. In some ways, I think of many of my books as almost family testaments as much as something for the public. I have two previous memoirs in addition to my other books, and my two older daughters would often give my books to their boyfriends so they could know what they were getting into…
That’s hilarious.
So their boyfriends all read my books. And those books do give readers a sense of my family history. My great-grandmother Hanna was in at least one other book of mine. Not such a big role, but Hanna shows up in my book Nola about my older sister. She was just there for maybe a couple paragraphs or something like that, but she makes an appearance.
When I was researching I.B. Singer’s Nobel and your parents, searching for some mention in his Nobel speeches, I found this wonderful Nobel Banquet speech, where Singer gives 10 reasons why he began writing children’s stories. The final reason is: “They don’t expect their beloved writer to redeem humanity. Young as they are, they know that it is not in his power. Only the adults have such childish illusions.”
Wow. Great.
I think there’s something really beautiful about that. I mean, my son knows how flawed I am and when he eventually reads some of the things I’ve written, he’ll probably say, “Yeah, right, Dad.” But there’s something beautiful about that idea. I think it runs through your book. Somehow it seems to me that this is at the heart of the way you tell the story, that you’re not expecting to redeem humanity. You’re just showing humanity as it is, and it’s beautiful enough.
You’re right. I don’t aim to redeem humanity at all. There’s that line of Kafka’s—I think it’s in The Trial—where the character says, “There is an infinite amount of hope in the universe, but not for us.” I love that line because that’s how I view the book in a lot of ways. That in the end, these two characters are kind of damned, as it were, but there’s still hope in the book, hope in the notion—I don’t want to give too much away—but hope that comes from the notion “admire everything.” That was one of Max Brod’s little dictums in one of his books. So I feel that for me, the book, while not redemptive, is oddly hopeful in the end.
Speaking of hope, your main character says he never accepted the notion that, when it comes to writers, the cream will always rise to the top. “I believe there are more Kafkas than we’ll never know,” he says, “writers of exquisite beauty who were somehow missed, overlooked.”
I firmly believe that. I know it’s true, and I know from experience it’s true. One of the writers I mentioned in Oblivion, James Hughes, was a great writer who published maybe two or three stories in his lifetime. We were at the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown together. He was full of demons and insecurities. But he sent one of the first stories he ever wrote to The New Yorker and they took it. You can still read that story today. It’ll be there as long as The New Yorker’s there. But how many people know or read James Hughes? He didn’t leave a big enough body of work, for one thing. But he was an exquisite writer. For every writer who’s discovered after their death or promoted despite being shy or insecure, there’s probably a thousand others who are perhaps as deserving.
Kafka died at 40, never receiving the acclaim he deserved. In his will he ordered Brod to burn all his work. But Brod, thank God, didn’t. Emily Dickinson is another brilliant writer—sadly, among so many—who died before she was considered a “major” writer. But that’s OK. It’s about the writing, right?
Yes.
You have this wonderful Charles Bukowski quote in the book: “There's nothing to stop a man from writing unless that man stops himself. If a man truly desires to write, then he will. Rejection and ridicule will only strengthen him. And the longer he is held back the stronger he will become, like a mass of rising water against a dam. There is no losing in writing, it will make your toes laugh as you sleep, it will make you stride like a tiger, it will fire the eye and put you face to face with death. You will die a fighter, you will be honored in hell. The luck of the word. Go with it, send it.”
Yeah. I love that Bukowski quote. And I think he’s right. I love the idea that there’s no losing in writing.
I like to say the poem is enough. I guess my James Hughes was Kevin Eldridge, a brilliant poet and fiction writer from Southern Illinois who was one of my first teachers. Kevin passed away in 2011 at the age of 50 with several manuscripts but no publishing deal. I love how Oblivion is a shoutout to all the great, undiscovered writers out there.
That’s actually one of the better descriptions of the book. It is a shoutout to all the writers who are not ever going to be famous, but are still wonderful writers in their own way. I mean, who are truly wonderful writers, end stop. They’re out there. In some ways, I feel like the book is a handbook for them because it’s something that... We hear a lot about how misery loves company. But I’m not talking about misery now; I’m talking about the joy that comes from writing. Joy loves company too.
Recognition is something altogether different. I got a poem the other day. Someone posted it online and it was such a beautiful poem. I never would’ve read it otherwise. I had never read this poet before, though I gather she’s fairly well-known. But it was just the right poem for the right moment. It wasn’t like this writer will be immortal or something like that. It was like this writer’s poem spoke to me at this moment. Those connections are so important for writers, those person-to-person connections. I always think that as a writer, I’m in communication with other writers and with writers of the past. I feel a real connection to them whether I can see them or sense them or not. Sometimes it’s just a connection to one other person, but for that moment, that’s wonderful. That’s enough.
Impactful as Shakespeare is, no one will ever convince me his work was more important than the way he treated his cat. Probably. Assuming he was a he who kept a cat. Can't wait to read this. Thanks for another friendly and engaging interview!
Thank you. I love these interviews and the writers you recognize.