Hellenga’s Literary Life
Accomplished novelist and former professor reflects on ups and downs of writing career
By
February 12, 2014
When Robert Hellenga was on his second trip to Italy in
1989, he got an encouraging letter from his agent: a publishing deal for
his debut novel “The Sixteen Pleasures” was expected by the time he
returned stateside.
But for the next five years, he was met with nothing but rejection.
Hellenga recalls some generalities from the marketing
suits at 39 publishers — all of whom turned down the chance to print his
first novel.
“It won’t sell enough.”
“Nobody would be happy.”
“It’s a quiet novel.”
But Hellenga, then in his third decade as a professor of
classical and Renaissance literature at Knox College, had no intention
of giving up creative writing. By that time, he was already hooked.
Finally, in 1994, a small New York publishing company —
Soho — picked up “The Sixteen Pleasures.” And soon thereafter, the tale
of a 29-year-old book conservationist named Margot, who discovers in a
Florentine convent the only known copy of a rare, Renaissance-era
pornographic work, was launched to national bestseller status.
Two decades later, as the novel still sits on bookstore
shelves and first editions are considered rare books, Hellenga keeps on
writing. Though he no longer teaches at Knox, he has been met with
widespread success since “Sixteen Pleasures” was first published. A 20th
anniversary release of the debut book is in the works and Hellenga has
2010’s critically-acclaimed “Snakewoman of Little Egypt” under his belt,
with a seventh novel set for release this July.
“Snakewoman” generated plenty of buzz at Knox in 2010,
especially after it made the Washington Post’s list of top 25 novels
that year. Succinctly put by the Post tagline, it’s the story of “a
darling anthropologist (who meets) a lady convict who shot her
snake-handling husband.”
There are “three reasons to love Hellenga,” according to
a Kirkus review. “He’s a fine storyteller; he gives us new eyes; he
restores our sense of wonder. Attention must be paid.”
Hellenga is now a professor emeritus for distinguished
service to the college, a largely honorary title recognizing his
accomplishments as a professor. He is also Knox’s writer-in-residence,
and it shows. In all, the college archives hold about five large cartons
of notes, composition books and manuscripts with his name on them.
But Hellenga never imagined himself a fiction writer before Knox.
“I just thought we already had enough good fiction, and I
didn’t really feel the need to produce any more,” Hellenga said. He
started at Knox in 1968 while finishing his Ph.D. in English at
Princeton University, at a time when Knox’s creative writing program,
spearheaded by Professor of English Robin Metz, was taking off.
“Everyone seemed to make a fuss over students’ stories,
so I thought, ‘Maybe I could do that and people would make a fuss over
me.’”
So Hellenga started small. He sat in on Metz’s creative
writing courses. He got a couple of short stories published. That turned
into a $5,000 grant from the Illinois Arts Council. And after a few
applications, he was appointed director of the Associated Colleges of
the Midwest program in Florence in 1982 and 1983.
“That was a life-changing experience,” Hellenga said. He
moved to Florence with his wife, Virginia, and their three daughters.
He took intensive Italian language courses and has returned
periodically. “In a way, that became my material.”
And in that way, every part of Hellenga’s life becomes
his material. Most of his novels have some connection to Italy. In “The
Sixteen Pleasures,” Margot, the book conservationist, is modeled after
one of Hellenga’s daughters. Margot used to work at the Newberry Library
in Chicago, where Hellenga directed the ACM program earlier in his Knox
tenure.
Metz sees plenty of Knox in Hellenga’s work. “I think
there’s value in that a lot of the work has been roughly about the Knox
community,” Metz said. “I’m a firm believer in writers drawing out of
their own experience.”
Robert
Hellenga, Knox’s distinguished writer-in-residence, plays a blues song
in his Seminary Street apartment Sunday, Feb. 2. Hellenga, a retired
literature professor, has had a successful fiction writing career over
the last two decades. (Charlie Megenity/TKS)
Every novel reflects Hellenga’s love of music.
“It’s hard for me to imagine a character who doesn’t
play the guitar,” said Hellenga, himself a seasoned blues guitarist.
“When I move toward things that feel like an emotional center, I keep
coming back to the same things, like the blues. Country blues is so
important to me. It’s just hard not to include it.”
Hellenga sees danger in repetition, though, and he’s
trying to “branch out.” Though he has moved away from writing the guitar
into his novels, instruments still play a pivotal role: the Snakewoman
plays the harmonica, and the protagonist in the forthcoming “Confessions
of Frances Godwin” plays the piano.
This is not to say that every aspect of his novels has a
personal connection. For instance, “The Sixteen Pleasures” revolves
around a rare work of Renaissance-era pornography, which includes 16
sexually explicit engravings accompanied by the pornographic sonnets of
Pietro Aretino, an Italian Renaissance writer. (For obvious reasons,
most copies were destroyed by the Catholic Church.)
“I didn’t find the drawings very appealing, and I
thought the poems were mostly disgusting,” Hellenga said. “But in my
novel, Margot finds it pretty mind-blowing.”
Still, Hellenga’s tendency to write his own experiences
into his novels stems from his ideas about what literature should be.
For him, literature is about the reading experience, not the act of
interpretation.
“I don’t mean you shouldn’t ask interpretive questions,
but I don’t re-read Anna Karenina because I forgot what it meant. It’s a
certain kind of experience,” Hellenga said, hearkening to a passage in
“Sixteen Pleasures.”
“He doesn’t believe in talking too much about art,
especially while you’re looking at it,” Hellenga writes in the debut
novel, through the voice of Margot. “The pressure to appreciate is the
great enemy of actual enjoyment. Most people don’t know what they like
because they feel obligated to like so many different things. They feel
they’re supposed to be overwhelmed, so instead of looking, they spend
their time thinking up something to say, something intelligent, or at
least clever.”
As Knox’s distinguished writer-in-residence, Hellenga
writes from his own residence, a spacious Seminary Street apartment
above Chez Willy’s. There, he lives with his wife, now a retired Latin
professor at Monmouth College and part-time substitute teacher for
Galesburg schools.
The open living area in the apartment includes the
kitchen, creating a space for lively visits from his daughters and their
families, who are now scattered throughout Illinois. Bookshelves occupy
the space that might otherwise be occupied by a television. Simone,
Hellenga’s aging black lab, is never far from his side.
Hellenga, with his dog Simone at his Seminary Street apartment. (Courtesy of Robert Hellenga)
Though he has seen major success as a writer, Hellenga
misses the daily life of teaching at Knox. Hearing issues have kept him
out of the classroom in recent years. Still, he offers one big piece of
advice to Knox’s aspiring writers.
“Be open to surprises at every step of the way, even in
revising,” Hellenga said. “Don’t think everything is set. Let something
percolate up from the subconscious and take you by surprise.”
“I think you need to surprise yourself if you want to surprise the reader.”
I asked Hellenga if he imagines a point at which he would stop writing.
“Been thinking about it, actually,” Hellenga said. “I
worry about repeating myself, but now I’ve reached a turning point in a
new project. So I’m eager to get up in the morning and keep working on
it.”
“There’s still a lot of room to discover things.”