A Story I Loved: "In the Cemetery Where Al Jolson is Buried" by Amy Hempel

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A very famously anthologized short story, and for good reason. It’s the first short story I remember reading and loving, very intensely, and thinking, Holy crap, this is good. Amy Hempel wrote this under the careful hand of Gordon Lish, and I can easily see how his sharpness, his editorial power, sort of nudged the story along, at least terms of influence. But the voice is entirely Hempel’s own- the voice that she became famous for. The wittiness, the dryness, understated emotion. Famously, this story was written in response to the prompt of “What’s the worst thing you’ve ever done?”, which checks out. Leave it to a creative writing course to expect you to bare your human soul in exchange for some decent art.

The story is about the narrator and her friend. The friend is dying, and the narrator can do nothing to stop it. They sit in the hospital, and the story travels over the days they share together- talking about nothing. The friend asks for a distraction, and the narrator acquiesces- telling jokes and fun facts to pass the time. 

Everything here is topical here. Just like in the short story by Donald Barthelme, “The School”, in the face of Death, with a capital D, our protagonists become flippant. They tell jokes. They are clever, in spite of all, in spite of how little cleverness gets you at the end. Look at us, they seem to be trying to say. They are untouchable by nothing- not Death, not earthquakes, as if trying to spite the Earth for its complete physical indifference.

The friends here are implied to be fairly hedonistic people in a previous life, it seems, driven by that Epicurean motif of pleasure not in spite of death, but because of it. But the illness has ruined all of that. The narrator cares for a friend, but towards the end of the story, she fails in a massive way. She is unable to keep her part of the bargain of being a good friend. The story sort of ends on that note, and the last paragraph is one of the most haunting things I’ve ever read, maybe, if anything, because of the shadow of that Death, which until this very moment, the short story has been entirely preoccupied with trying to ignore. The narrator tries to wash away her sorrows in cheap pleasure, but it’s a secondhand sorrow, and she has no right to wash it away. She must endure it, and suffer it. But she finds that she cannot. That disconnect pervading the story- between love and duty, between emotion and actual sacrifice. The stories are easy to tell, the little jokes, the moments of funny humor. Being the strong one is OK. But when you have to break down alongside your friend, because the stories and chemo are no longer working, because the truth that has been right in front of you all along has become all too apparent. That’s what this story is really about. Deception, mostly self-deception. The titular cemetery refers to where the friend is buried, but even towards the end, Hempel’s narrator tries desperately to pivot, to re-assign Death as anything else, attributing even the graveyard where her friend is buried to another fun fact. As if to call Death by any other name is to negate what it is. Of course she isn’t ultimately successful. But we know this to be the case, from the beginning. She is hurtling towards discovery. But the interesting part, in stories like this, is watching her unravel towards that realization. Lives, when viewed from very far away, are very similar towards each other, in terms of emotional arcs, events, afflictions. Only when you zoom in do you see the painted details, the vivid imagery that makes us creatures capable of haunting and being haunted. A life up close can only be called fiction.

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Resources:

Read "In the Cemetery Where Al Jolson is Buried" by Amy Hempel http://fictionaut.com/stories/amy-hempel/in-the-cemetery-where-al-jolson-is-buried