On Amy Hempel's "In the Cemetery where Al Jolson Is Buried"

rude of art to make me have an actual emotion

Hello, friends!

This month, I received my second round of Until Death edits back from my editor. Once again I would like to tout Pacemaker as the best possible tool for keeping me on track. It looks like their pricing model has changed since I last wrote about them — the free version now only gives you 60 days — but for me, at least, the Premium plan has been worth it several times over. No, they don’t pay me, I just love Pacemaker.

I also wrapped teaching my six-week fiction workshop for the MetroWest Writers Guild.

As part of workshop, we always analyze a few of my favorite short stories — a sort of “look under the hood,” if you will. This year, we read Ottessa Moshfegh’s “Nothing Ever Happens Here,” Philip K. Dick’s “The Minority Report,” and Amy Hempel’s “In the Cemetery Where Al Jolson is Buried.” For the Moshfegh, we studied the deployment of character and voice; for the PKD, we deconstructed the plot.

For the Hempel, I wanted to talk about why this story always makes me cry.

I am always deeply impressed when a work of art makes me have an actual feeling. I don’t mean a neomammalian feeling, like awe, which is how I feel when I read e.g. Paradise Lost. I mean a lizard-brain type of feeling: fear, sadness, elation. The kind of thing you could normally only get from a sensory experience, except now you’re getting it from a work of art — which is really an extremely abstract representation of the human experience! And yet.

I think this is a little easier to accomplish with something like a movie or a play. I think the, shall we say, empathetic link between the heart and the story is easier to access when you’re witnessing a narrative with your eyeballs, with time passing normally, and when you’re experiencing the thing at least partly as a sensory experience, instead of a purely intellectual one. This sounds cheap, but I think it’s probably true.

Conversely, I think imbuing a feeling can be more difficult via a book or a song or a piece of visual artwork. (I would love to say it’s also harder with poetry, but interestingly I seem to have feelings much more often when reading poetry than when reading fiction! Some poems that have made me have a feeling: this one, this one, this one.) I think it is extremely hard to use words — essentially the most intellectual tool we have — to get to a place of blind emotion — essentially the least intellectual thing there is.

And yet the end of that Hempel story makes me cry every time.

This is unusual for me; I don’t cry much when reading, or even watching TV or movies. But when preparing to teach this story, I got to the end, teared up, flipped back to the beginning and started over, got to the end again, and teared up again. The ending of this story is like a fishhook in my throat, and when I read the words it’s like someone’s yanking on it.

I spent a long time trying to write a newsletter that I thought would do “In the Cemetery Where Al Jolson Is Buried” justice. But ultimately everything I wrote, even just down to analyzing individual sentences, felt like a spoiler — like I was ruining my readers’ opportunity to read the story and have the experience themselves.

So I’d love to say you should just read the story, but here’s something interesting: The version of the story that I have is from the seventh edition of the Norton Anthology of Short Fiction. However, every version of the story that I found free to read online is slightly different from that one. It’s the difference between:

I felt weak and small and failed.

Also exhilarated.

I had a convertible in the parking lot. Once out of that room, I would drive it too fast down the Coast highway through the crab-smelling air. A stop in Malibu for sangria. The music in the place would be sexy and loud. They'd serve papaya and shrimp and watermelon ice. After dinner I would shimmer with lust, buzz with heat, life, and stay up all night.

…from the free online version, and:

I felt weak and small and failed. Also exhilarated. I had a convertible in the parking lot. Once out of that room, I would drive it too fast down the coast highway through the crab-smelling air. A stop in Malibu for sangria. The music in the place would be sexy and loud. They would serve papaya and shrimp and watermelon ice. After dinner I would pick up beach boys. I would shimmer with life, buzz with heat, vibrate with health, stay up all night with one and then the other.

…from the Norton. Weird, right?

I think the Norton version is way better; I think the line breaks in the free one are clunkier, and the missing or changed words throughout the story often alter the meaning just enough that the story doesn’t hit as hard for me. I encourage you to try to get your hands on the version of the story that’s been anthologized, e.g. through your public library, but if you can’t, the slightly-off free version is still floating around, I guess.

[Edited to add:

AZ

found the right one!!! Here it is, in TriQuarterly!]

Anyway, I’m not doing a big ol’ literary analysis thing here, because I felt like I’d be ruining something if I did. But tl;dr: This story is an unbelievably accurate rendering of what it feels like to occupy the thought-space of someone who is watching someone they love die. And as I noodled on it, I realized that one of the reasons why I think it really hits is not just that the friend is dying, but that the narrator is so wracked by the whole experience that she leaves her friend to die alone.

Even without the looming death of her friend, the narrator is constantly wracked with fear. She is afraid of airplanes, of earthquakes, of the ocean. She is of course afraid of her friend’s death. But in the end, it turns out she is even more afraid of having to watch.

This story avoids ever talking about the actual fact that the friend is dying. Even after she does die, the narrator refers to “the morning she was moved to the cemetery,” as if she can still be moved, as if she isn’t already gone. That might make it seem like the story’s shying away from discussing the really hard stuff, but I think that it’s actually looking the hardest thing in the face. It admits out loud: I was not the person I wanted to be. The person dearest to me needed me in their darkest moment, and instead of showing up I left and I saved myself.

Is it bad that that’s so relatable?

I think we all want to be better than we are. I think that’s one of the reasons why this story hits so hard. It doesn’t present a neat little Hero’s Journey where we rise to meet impossible circumstances. Instead, it shows us what it’s like when we are the people we are and it isn’t enough. And, what’s more, the narrator gets away with it. She’s left with her fear and her grief, but she’s alive, which is more than her friend — quite possibly a braver, more generous person than she is — will ever be again.

All of this is working very subtly. The language in the story is so careful and fine. You don’t have to notice it. In fact the story’s designed so you don’t, which is so tricksy because all you can do with words is point stuff out!!! But that’s part of the story’s brilliance in rendering these emotions, I think. In real life, it is very hard to notice anything.

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News

An American Girl Anthology is coming out on May 15 from University Press of Mississippi! It includes my essay, “‘Selfish or Annoying’: Etiquette, Gender, and Race in Oops!: The Manners Guide for Girls,” which will be my first (and last? I’m not an academic) peer-reviewed published piece. I’m excited to see it out in the world.

And, of course, there’s always the dang book, which I will not shut up about. Subscribing here is the best way to get updates, because I refuse to get back on Instagram:

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And, to tide us over… what’s a piece of art — fiction, poetry, visual, etc. — that’s made you cry? Reply to this email or tell me in the comments. Or maybe you are a hard-carapaced human who has never cried at a short story or a poem? If so, tell me that too!

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