The Fortnightly Interview: The Past Can Come at You Like a Dagger
Susan Blumberg-Kason in conversation with Robin Hemley, author of How to Change History: A Salvage Project
Robin Hemley is the author of sixteen books and his latest, How to Change History: A Salvage Project, just came out in March of this year. He has a long tenure of directing nonfiction writing programs around the world. For a decade he was the Director the Nonfiction Writing Program at the University of Iowa. He went on to become the Inaugural Director of The Writers’ Centre at Yale-NUS, Singapore and served as the Inaugural Director of the Polk School of Communications at Long Island University-Brooklyn. He also founded the international conference, NonFictionNOW, and has received dozens of awards and fellowships. I interviewed him in January about his new book and why history matters. He is currently Professor Emeritus at The University of Iowa and he splits his time between New York City and Iowa City. You can subscribe to his Substack here.
Susan Blumberg-Kason: Your latest book, How to Change History, could not be more timely in our current era of misinformation, censorship, and book banning. You write that history is dependent on memory, but sometimes our memories don’t reflect reality. Also, sometimes we suppress our memories, which keeps others from learning this history. I was really taken by your father’s story. After World War II, he ran a gallery in Provincetown, Massachusetts and all but launched the careers of Mark Rothko, Jackson Pollock, Robert Motherwell, and other abstract expressionists. In the Smithsonian’s archives, an art dealer didn’t give your father credit and he was not remembered for being so instrumental in putting together this show. And then your father went on to found The Noonday Press, where he not only published Isaac Bashevis Singer, but also translated his work along with your mother. Your father died from a heart attack when you were just starting to form your own memories. Are you worried you have missed some of his other achievements or even more minor parts of his history once he was no longer around to tell you these stories?
Robin Hemley: There’s no way to capture anyone’s life in its entirety, no? Not even your own. You naturally forget, misremember, and elide events entirely. Last night, I watched the film My Old Ass (great film, btw) and I was struck how one character asked another if they remembered the last full day of their childhood, the last day they spent the whole day just running around with their neighborhood friends, immersed in inventive play. The character couldn’t remember that day, though she remembered days full of play, but not that exact day. This made me pause the film and I tried to remember such a day but of course I couldn’t do so either. Sometimes it seems so sad to me that I can’t remember months, weeks, and certainly not days from my distant past, because that means of course that the day I’m living now will also be obliterated most likely from my future self’s store of events in his life. There’s nothing to be done about that, not even for diarists. I’ve kept a diary before but reading it doesn’t necessarily make me remember the day in the way that I once lived it.
So, no, haha, I don’t worry much about what I’m leaving out of my father’s life and achievements. I simply know that I have indeed left some things out that he might have liked me to mention, or perhaps I messed up a detail or two of the things I was able to recount. Still, I’m lucky that for many years, his old friends, including Isaac Singer, would tell me stories about him when we met. Once, many years ago, I gave a reading in Easton, Pennsylvania, and an elderly woman approached me after the reading and told me that my father had taught her her first “bawdy song.” I asked her to sing it for me and she did. I wrote down the lyrics and then wrote a story which I published in the literary magazine, Ploughshares, “My Father’s Bawdy Song.” So that was a gift. Throughout my life, I’ve felt he was with me in some way through these stories and such documents as the Smithsonian interview you referenced.
SBK: I mentioned above that your mother Elaine Gottlieb also translated Isaac Bashevis Singer, but she was an accomplished writer herself. You write about photography in your book and in an essay about your mother—one that I read when it was published on its own previously—you feature a photo of her with her cohort at Yaddo, including William Carlos Williams. Also in the photo is the poet Karl Shapiro. Decades later when you were already an established author and professor, you brought up Karl Shapiro in passing and your mother dropped a bomb: he had raped her at Yaddo. Do you feel that you knew more of your mother’s history because she lived so much longer than your father? And do you ever wonder if she kept other parts of her history hidden?
RH: My mother didn’t like to talk about the past. She always said it was too painful. When I was young, I was a little critical of her for this refusal, but now that I’m older, I know that the past can come at you like a dagger, no matter how cautiously you approach it. Even so, I do, of course, know more of my mother’s history than my father’s, because she was in my life for so much longer. He died when I was nearly eight and he was only fifty-one. She died when I was over forty and she was eighty-seven. There are undoubtedly things she hid from me, but we had the time to revisit them. So, while the first time she mentioned the rape, she left it at that, she later returned to the subject of her own accord. But she also left a vast archive of letters, manuscripts, and ephemera, that I’ve barely touched the surface of (though I’m trying to collect her short stories and I sometimes write about her history in my Substack). Still, there’s much of her history that I’m hazy on, even where she went to college. She certainly traipsed around a lot, but I know that she attended a school in Miami (the University of Miami, I believe), and I know she attended the University of Southern California (this was all in the 1930s, btw), and I believe she graduated from NYU. I recently found her yearbook from USC that featured the school clubs – there she was as a member of the Quill Club: Elaine Gottlieb.
I also have many photographs from her life, including the inevitable ones of relatives and friends whom I am unable to identify. There’s one lovely portrait in particular of a female friend of hers (undoubtedly a fellow writer or artist) whose identity is a complete mystery to me. I would love to know who this is, but I doubt I’ll ever find out. For this reason, as much as possible, I try to label my photos (the physical ones, before digital photography) for my descendants, if they care.
SBK: I also enjoyed reading about your time in the Philippines, especially in Corregidor with its war history. It was not surprising to read that Japanese travelers are given a separate tour that doesn’t go into the details of the Japanese military’s brutality during World War II. Do you think there will be a point when this history won’t be censored? And who are we really protecting when we don’t look history in the face, no matter where it takes place?
RH: I love Japan, was an exchange student there, and studied Japanese in college. I also love the Philippines, where the Japanese Imperial Army massacred 100,000 civilians in one month at the end of the war. This is almost never talked about, not in the Philippines, and I’m almost sure, not in Japan either. Knowing this fact does not make me love Japan any less. I do hate the people who committed these atrocities, but these are not the Japanese people of today. I don’t blame them for the actions of their ancestors, but I do blame them for not holding their ancestors responsible.
I have never understood why nations and the people who live in those nations refuse to look honestly at their own histories and at least admit what their ancestors did, even if they don’t take full responsibility for those actions. But nations are great myth makers and people will give up their lives to preserve those myths or persecute others. There are so few countries without shameful episodes in their histories, and I fervently believe that unless people collectively understand and come to terms with these episodes, they will be haunted by them forever. I’m Jewish, but the one country I know of that accepts fully its most shameful episode is Germany (though with the rise of ultra-nationalists, this might change). South Africa is another. Belgium “regrets” but does not apologize for its brutal colonization of the Congo. Acceptance of one’s history is not a one-and-done sort of thing. There are so many countries that should accept the darker parts of their past (and in some cases, present): Turkey, Japan, Israel, And of course, the U.S., which now has public figures who say that slavery wasn’t so bad and who excuse the genocidal doctrine of Manifest Destiny, which asserted a “God-given right” to “settle” the West by displacing and massacring native peoples. The argument from the nationalists is that by focusing on these epochs of history, we teach young people to hate their countries. I disagree. I think that love of humankind as a whole is a much greater ideal than love of country, and I love my country all the more when it admits its mistakes and tries to do better. I’m ashamed of my country when it makes excuses and says, “Move along! Nothing to see here!”
SBK: Toward the end of your book, you write about curses and this part really resonated with me. I’ve only put a curse on one person and it happened after I spoke it out loud; silent curses don’t seem to work. I almost felt relieved to read that you have done the same and I don’t feel so bad now. (To put it into context, my older son’s middle school principal mocked me when I told him that a kid in the lunchroom was threatening to shoot other kids at the table, so I put a curse on the principal years ago. He went on to get into a messy divorce and left our school for a pay cut in another district. My work was done!) You had a knack for putting curses on people when you were younger, but you had a difficult time undoing a curse when a woman in India put one on you in your adult years. You tried to reverse it in the Philippines and eventually went to Cuba where you received Santeria beads. I have a Santeria necklace, too, from a trip to Havana 21 years ago. So many cultures take pride in curses and you mention Yiddish curses you learned from relatives years ago. Do you ever feel that these traditions are in jeopardy of disappearing? Or has the current state of the world—where it seems that people are more tribal than ever—will preserve traditions like curses and may even render them more useful now than ever?
RH: Curses tend to be super creative, intense, and sometimes funny. They are mini-purveyors of cultural memory and even the political forces affecting a particular society. Some of the best curses are those spoken by those who have the least power in society. I mention some of these in my book, such as the powerful curse from New Orleans that Zora Neale Hurston recorded. That curse will knock your socks off whether you believe in it or not. In our current age, everything is both preserved on the internet as well as disappeared, buried under a glut of attention-grabbing feeds. It’s hard sometimes to remember what happened a week ago under the circumstances. So, preservation of curses, books, anything that’s lost its immediate currency, takes not so much effort as intellectual curiosity, and the will to sit on the riverbank a while rather than continue to be pulled inexorably downstream.
I love the preservation of these curses because they speak directly to our powerlessness in the face of the things in life that bulldoze us (powerless, not because we were cursed but because we exist). In the first anthropology class I took in college, my professor told us how in many “primitive” societies, there was always a cause for something bad happening. If you were sick, it was because your neighbor cursed you. Having a reason for something bad befalling you is almost as good as a cure because you then have a potential way out – find someone to lift the curse and put one on your neighbor in retribution. Ultimately, I’m not sure that I believe in curses (though a part of me will always believe in them). I just don’t want to relinquish my fate to invisible forces. Your son’s middle school principal sounds like a rather awful person. No wonder he got divorced. But maybe he thinks someone cursed him, too. In my case, I’ve found that my own hard luck (at times, though largely I’ve been fortunate) can best be blamed on my own dumb actions. I also went through a divorce and had to take a pay cut a couple of times. If you cursed me, Susan, please remove it. I’m begging you.
But as I said, there’s that side of me that does believe in curses. I was both serious and not serious when I tried to remove my curse. And sometimes I entertain the idea of returning to Shimla, India and giving another old woman with a basket of cobras some money.
SBK: I swear I’ve only cursed that one principal and would never put a curse on you! I also went through a divorce, but who hasn’t these days? I want to stick with curses for a bit more. In this essay, you mentioned you were in Hong Kong and asked Xu Xi if she knew someone who could take away the curse from India. She didn’t, but in that section you wrote that you really like Hong Kong. Can you share a captivating story from one of your visits to Hong Kong? I feel that anyone who has been there has one (or more)!
RH: I do love Hong Kong as I love many of the places in China I have visited. There are so many memories to choose from, but one that stands out is a time when the writer Madeleine Thien and I decided to go for foot massages. I believe this was a place that was recommended by Xu Xi or one that Maddie had heard was especially good. We sat in chairs while the masseuses worked for about an hour on our feet. This was the most painful massage I’ve ever had in my life. It was excruciating. But when I looked over at Maddie, she seemed completely composed. Well, if she was fine with it, I decided I wasn’t going to be a baby. Only afterwards, when we compared notes, Maddie told me hers had been excruciating, too. But when she looked over at me, my face seemed serene, and she thought, well, if it doesn’t bother Robin then I’m not going to be a baby about it. We laughed about that and bring it up almost every time we see one another. The difference is that she still loves foot massages while I’ve sworn off them completely.
SBK: That’s funny and reminds me of hiking up the Peak in Hong Kong with our mutual friend, Tiffany Hawk. We were with a couple other friends. On our hike, I started to feel fatigued and jetlagged and wanted to stop and sit in the shade for an hour or three. I kept quiet because I didn’t want to spoil the hike for the others. Well, it turned out Tiffany and one of our other friends felt the same but didn’t want to say anything because the rest of us seemed fine! Tiffany indirectly introduced us and we were both registered to attend a writing retreat you were going to teach with Xu Xi in Luang Prabang the summer of 2020. As inferred from this date, the retreat never took place in Laos. But you did conduct it online and it was the most useful week I spent in 2020 once the pandemic erupted across the world. I was just starting to write a biography of Bernardine Szold Fritz, a 1930s Shanghai salon host and incidentally a good friend of Sherwood Anderson. So I was delighted to read about Sherwood in your new book. You write, “Mention Sherwood Anderson these days, as I did recently at a dinner for a writer visiting my university, and it’s as though you’ve mentioned something quaint and nostalgic, akin to the old Burma Shave ads along the roadside.” I also find it sad that writers like Anderson and Glenway Wescott, another of Bernardine’s friends, are all but unknown now. I also see this with Chinese writers like Lin Yutang, who was a best seller in the U.S. ninety years ago and very close to Bernardine, but is not remembered very much in the west today. Do you think we’re at risk of forgetting important writers from a century ago? And what will we lose by forgetting these writers?
RH: Yes, we’re continually forgetting writers, but I also think this is natural. Over the centuries, so many writers have been forgotten and then revived and forgotten again. I love discovering writers whom others have forgotten or never known about at all. There aren’t many writers who are household names around the world. Hemingway is one, and while he’s fallen out of favor in the U.S. by and large, he’s still a familiar name almost anywhere you go. But there are so few writers like that. The lucky writers are well-known for a time in their country of origin, maybe around the world, but then their readership diminishes over time. There are so many writers around the world whom I’ve never heard of, but who are definitely worth reading and remembering. When I taught at Yale-NUS in Singapore, I was exposed to many authors I likely would not have read otherwise. I had not even heard of Lu Xun, super famous in China, but virtually unknown among my writer friends in the U.S. I love Lu Xun’s work and maybe he doesn’t have a wide readership in the U.S., but he has me. I had also never heard of Sudanese writer, Tayeb Salih, but his novel Season of Migration to the North, is an amazing book. I know that a lot of people have read Salih, but many well-read people in the West know neither him nor Lu Xun. The Pulitzer-Prize winning author, Robert Olen Butler and I both like the work of the early 20th century Chicago writer George Ade, who was famous in his day, but who is largely ignored today. When we discovered that we both were fans of Ade, Butler, whom I was visiting at the time, pulled one of Ade’s books from his bookshelf and gave it to me – also signing it to me as acknowledgement of our book bond. Fame as such can be fleeting or completely inaccessible. What matters is the reader, the lone reader who discovers a work, loves it, and tells others about it. I have been fortunate to be able to share some of my loves with others through anthologies I’ve edited. So, for instance, I anthologized “Liompa,” a story I love by the Russian surrealist writer Yuri Olesha (and I’ve taught the story, too). Have you heard of him? Likely not. Is he worth reading? Definitely so. In the book I co-wrote and edited with Xu Xi, The Art and Craft of Asian Stories, I likewise included stories by writers whose work might not be known widely. Unfortunately, Lu Xun did not make the cut because we decided to focus on contemporary writers. I love sharing works I love with others. My choices are always eclectic and don’t depend on trends. Give me a forgotten writer. There’s so much pleasure in rediscovering them.
SHK: I haven’t heard of Yuri Olesha but will look him up now! Thank you very much for taking time to discuss your engaging and important new book!
RH: Thank you, Susan! I really enjoyed the questions.
Susan Blumberg-Kason is the author of Bernardine’s Shanghai Salon: The Story of the Doyenne of Old China; Good Chinese Wife: A Love Affair with China Gone Wrong; and When Friends Come From Afar: The Remarkable Story of Bernie Wong and Chicago’s Chinese American Service League. She also co-edited Hong Kong Noir.
