Two Hells

What is the temperature in Hell? Is it hot or cold?

Whichever novelist or poet we’re studying, I encourage my students to ask what the author’s vision of Hell consists of. For many authors, Hell is a moveable site and a variable landscape; all sorts of unpredictable forms may emerge when they set about creating a nightmarish scene. With others, though, Hell seems reliably one thing or the other. It’s hot or cold.

The heat I’m talking about has little to do with traditional hellfire. It’s the hell of overheated emotions. Wind is a prevailing weather condition: gusts of storming rage. Molten waves of unrequited lust break and sprawl on its rocky shores. It’s a place where rationality collapses. Nothing is predictable. You can’t count on your adversary for anything—even to act in his own self-interest. His fury may be such that he’d embrace mutual destruction before seeing you escape his wrath. It’s a hell Huck Finn knows well, embodied in the ragtag shape of his drunken father. There’s no reasoning with Huck’s old man, so suffused is he with bigotry and outraged indignation. (“But when they tell me there’s a State in this country where they’d let that nigger vote… I says I’ll never vote agin.”) He’s forever subjecting Huck—and, hence, the empathizing reader—to a beating with his hickory stick (“making it warm for him”), and eventually goes after his son with a knife.

Rationality flourishes in the other literary hell, the cold one. There is little shouting within its precincts; voices are rarely raised. Cruelty is the dominant emotion. Your enemy is patient and calculative; the world is undergirded by bitter scheming and malicious plots. It’s a hell Melville portrays in “Billy Budd,” in which young, trusting, comely Billy (nicknamed Baby) simply cannot compass the wickedness of the ship’s master-at-arms, John Claggart. Struck literally speechless when Claggart’s treachery is abruptly, brutally revealed, Billy, in self-defense, reaches out by the only means left—his fists—resulting in a summary court proceeding and an order for his immediate execution. Our fair Baby Budd (both names suggesting youth and tenderness) experiences a single, scarifying glimpse into Hell before, both mercilessly and mercifully, he’s removed from the stage. He is yanked heavenward—hoisted up by a hangman’s noose.

Hot Hell is, in myths and fairy tales, a land of giants or trolls or monsters—creatures whose very dimensions are menacing. It’s a hell that Odysseus and his men enter upon meeting the drink-loving Cyclops, who enjoys picking their brains—literally—as an hors d’oeuvre. Or it’s the aerial hell of Jack and his giant, a mad-for-revenge, booming colossus who recognizes no boundaries and would pursue Jack back down the beanstalk and onto the everyday earth. It’s the subterranean twelve-foot-tall proto-human that Professor Lidenbrock and his crew encounter in “A Journey to the Center of the Earth.” It’s Grendel. It’s the drunk-on-blood crocodile that shadows Captain Hook throughout Neverland; not content with having eaten his hand, this croc means to finish its meal.

The evil genius of Cold Hell typically takes the form of a designing schemer. It’s a spider—or a wizened, dark, spidery wizard. It’s Sherlock Holmes’s nemesis, Moriarty. It’s Fu Manchu. It’s the flattering, unctuous creature that proffers a tainted apple, whether the Bible’s serpent or Snow White’s witch.

Henry James constructs a memorable Cold Hell in “Washington Square,” where, under the eye of a father who supplies supervision but no warmth, Catherine Sloper, doomed by him to a loveless spinsterhood, picks up her lonely knitting at the book’s close, “for life, as it were.” But James’s imagination also brooded over a Hot Hell image: a big, ferocious creature poised to spring. The image shows up here and there in James, perhaps most memorably at the close of “The Beast in the Jungle”: the “lurking Beast” that awaits John Marcher, rising “for the leap that was to settle him.” (It shows up likewise in Thomas Mann’s “Death in Venice,” where our doomed aesthete Aschenbach, before leaving Munich for his chosen destination—the feverish, torrid death-city on the Adriatic—beholds a vision of a tiger crouching in a tropics of “crass vegetation, fat, swollen, thick with incredible bloom.”) Before all hell breaks loose in James’s “The Turn of the Screw”—with a pair of ghosts and the satanic possession of two angelic children—the governess-narrator feels a stillness, a “hush in which something gathers or crouches.” It’s the moment before “the spring of the beast.” One can imagine why the image held James transfixed. No writer ever put between himself and the unregulated perils of the outside world a more artful, protective screen of language, but the imagined beast would rip through any web of words as effortlessly as it would slash through a scrim of mosquito netting. James kept perversely contemplating a situation in which his finest defensive weapon—a rhetoric of exquisite gradations—would be of no use.

James’s great friend Edith Wharton was a specialist of frigid damnations. Her “Ethan Frome” may well present the coldest hell in American literature. The novella’s landscape—a nineteenth-century western Massachusetts lying prone under the thick heel of a blizzard—is itself bleak and forbidding. But for poor Ethan, painfully handicapped after a sledding disaster, it’s colder inside his house than out. He is trapped forever in a small, cold room where embittered female voices carp at him.

“Hell is other people,” Sartre advises us, though Wharton seems to be saying, “Hell is having to listen to others.” She takes a sort of malevolent relish in pointing out just how poisonous those female voices surrounding Ethan are: the “flat whine,” the “querulous drone,” the “monotonous mildness” of somebody who “spoke only to complain, and to complain of things not in his power to remedy.”

If Hell has, like Heaven, many mansions, the wonderful short-story writer Jean Stafford may inhabit an unheated cabin beside Wharton’s. She’d have agreed that Hell is having to listen to others, day after day. She, too, was a connoisseur of noxious voices. Her dark mischief comes to a head in “Beatrice Trueblood’s Story,” in which the lovely, penniless Beatrice, whose childhood was “positively hideous,” beside a father who “could use his tongue like a bludgeon,” eventually undergoes a stretch of hysterical deafness. Something within her simply closes down her sense of hearing, so she won’t have to endure the cruel, cavilling, incessant corrections and complaints of her “indefatigably vocal” fiancé. Beatrice feels grief and horror at the prospect of a soundless future, and yet, when her hearing is restored, she contemplates a renewed life of spoken bullying and censure with resigned despair. The story’s final image is of a beautiful, sunshiny day in which the Atlantic is reduced to a “mass of little wrathful whitecaps.”

Of course, poets are the true aficionados of Hell (Dante having charted it more thoroughly than anyone else). Two marvellous modern American poets depict Hell, both Hot and Cold, in especially keen relief: Theodore Roethke and Anthony Hecht. As an artist who often took early childhood as his subject matter, Roethke came naturally to a land of irate giants. Even his poem titles convey a sense of smallness underneath vastness: “Big Wind,” “The Storm,” “The Pure Fury,” “The Beast,” “The Meadow Mouse.” There’s a good deal of love and tenderness in one of his best-known poems, “My Papa’s Waltz,” but also precariousness and terror. Although the poem ends peacefully, with father having danced son off to bed, the stanzas careen around in alarming fashion. Here’s the first:

The whiskey on your breath
Could make a small boy dizzy;
But I held on like death:
Such waltzing was not easy.

Roethke’s empathy with small creatures frequently extended to the minute life-forms of the insect world. If somebody in one of his poems turns over a rock, exposing the squirming shapes underneath, Roethke clearly identifies not with the human observer but with the worms and slugs and beetles thrown open to a chilling, scorching sun. Ultimately, his is a world where even a small child, set loose in a garden, can become a terrorizing giant.

Hecht gave us a number of hellish vistas, mostly of the chilling sort. This is hardly surprising from someone who, as an American soldier and a Jew, was among the troops that liberated the Flossenbürg concentration camp. His devotion to German culture ran deep, but deeper still was a sort of dazed incredulity at the realization that a glorious nation had purposefully devolved into an efficient killing machine. There was something appropriately ghastly in the Nazis’ being led by a small tyrant who had once seriously pursued the art of watercolor painting. Hecht’s Hell is a place where the arts, the checks and balances of the law, and the quality of mercy have no sway: all stand impotent before a Luger in a glove, a blueprint for a gas chamber—“the strange room / without windows.”

Robert Frost famously surveyed both sorts of Hell in one of those crystalline short poems that demonstrate why he was to the twentieth century what Emily Dickinson was to the nineteenth: the American master of the compressed yet expansive lyric. Here is “Fire and Ice” in entirety:

Some say the world will end in fire,
Some say in ice.
From what I’ve tasted of desire,
I hold with those who favor fire.
But if it had to perish twice,
I think I know enough of hate
To say that for destruction ice
Is also great
And would suffice.

In its balanced willingness to entertain both varieties of destruction, of damnation, the poem achieves a kind of tranquility. The poem exudes both an astronomical detachment and a philosophical calm. It seems to say, “What does it matter how we go?” To say, “Isn’t the real question what lies beyond our often self-created suffering?” There’s solace to be had in looking beyond pain. In the end, in either case, the world vanishes, and our worldly cares vanish with it. Here’s an unexpected peace beyond the grave.

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Brad Leithauser’s most recent novel is “The Art Student’s War.” His collection of new and selected poems, “The Oldest Word for Dawn,” has just been published. He is a frequent contributor to Page-Turner.

Illustration by Lorenzo Mattotti.