The Dark Side Of The Soul

On Timothy Atkinson's Help me I am in Hell

Dear Republic,

We officially launch The Depot with Ramya Yandava’s review of Timothy Atkinson’s novel Help me I am in Hell. You can buy the book here. It seems to be Timothy Atkinson Week at The Republic of Letters! — and with good reason. Timothy, I should say, is one of the writers I’ve been most excited about recently. He is brutally honest, absolutely serious, and writes with a high purpose that’s reminiscent of somebody like Hubert Selby and that is sorely missing from what’s usually on offer.

-The Editor

THE DARK SIDE OF THE SOUL

Suicide, misogyny, crystal meth, and prostitutes—everything you’ve ever wanted in a novel is all there in Timothy Atkinson’s Help me I am in Hell. The book is aptly named because halfway through my thoughts began to run in a similar vein. Reading this book gave me the same feeling you get when, driven by some wretched impulse, frowned upon by the Fates for some crime you are ignorant of, you catch a glimpse of the bottom of your shoe and recoil in horror at the piece of gum, someone else’s strands of hair, a sticky candy wrapper, an unholy consortium of dust and debris, all Picasso’d into some hieroglyph of primal Disgust on which you can sense, viscerally—even if you can’t see it—the 421,000 units of bacteria leading to pneumonia, meningitis, intestinal infections, UTIs, and probably hepatitis.

Such an experience typically happens to the sole; Atkinson made it happen to my soul. After reading the book, I needed to drag my soul out into the backyard and powerwash it, then, gingerly holding it by a corner with a gloved hand, take it to the nearest sink, pour a gallon of dish soap on it, and give it a good scrubbing with steel wool under the hottest possible water. All of this is not to say that Help me I am in Hell is a bad novel. On the contrary, the sentiments I’ve expressed only illustrate how thoroughly it accomplishes its purpose.

I have written before on “the light side of the soul,” and, to be honest with you, dear Reader, I must declare that is where I prefer to spend most of my time. As you get older, you realize that life is too arduous to purposely subject yourself to further misery. Don’t we encounter enough chaos and calamity as it is? The weather is bad, the economy is bad, the people running the country (it doesn’t matter what country) are bad, sometimes (the greatest calamity) the food is bad, the trains won’t run tomorrow, the plumber hasn’t called back today so the toilet is still clogged, life “is a perfect graveyard of buried hopes,” and it is three in the morning and one hasn’t reached one’s potential and mosquitoes exist. Why seek out the ugly, darkness-loving bat when you could exult in the bright flight of the flower-flitting butterfly?

But everything that basks in the light of the sun has a shadow. The soul has its dark side, too, and though we are too often afraid to push open the door—how it creaks!—and venture down the steps into that sunless, airless, dank basement—a cobweb catches on our fingers, unseen spiders seem to scuttle at our feet—that is all the more reason we owe the unflinching topographers of that region our utmost thanks. Atkinson is one such topographer, and I can assure you that—like Sade, like Bataille, those great transgressors—he is unflinching.

Transgressive literature is a study of boundaries and edges. That is why its protagonists are necessarily outsiders, living on the margins, ejected (usually of their own volition) to the fringes of society, where they are best positioned to push its limits. The unnamed protagonist of Help me I am in Hell is an alcoholic, hypochondriac, anxious-depressive, self-destructive, self-loathing man who lives in LA, a setting that, at least based on my own vague memories of living there in early childhood, does do a terrific job of approximating Satan’s warm principality. But as Milton reminds us, H-E-double-hockey-sticks is really in our own minds; we create it. Atkinson takes us there by bringing us, painfully, claustrophobically, inside the protagonist’s mind, sliding us spiraling down his series of crises right to the inevitable thud.

The novel begins with a reference to Dostoyevsky’s Notes from the Underground, whose Underground Man is our hero’s spiritual ancestor. Both are bitter and take a perverse pleasure in crawling to the bottommost depths of their badness, their hatred, their cynicism. The narrator reminds me of myself when I had depression as a teenager, so it was hard for me not to feel slightly sorry for him at first. I remember when it seemed as though there was a glass partition between myself and the rest of society, between me, the “crazy,” and them, the “normal.” I remember being on the outside looking in, equally longing and loathing. Even passing somebody in a hallway could set off a thousand anxieties, insecurities, minute convolutions of thought, wrenchings of the heart. Like the narrator, “I knew at once that life had something awful in store for me, and the only thing I could do was wait for it.” Then I could no longer wait, attempted to kill myself, failed, and became miraculously normal. I realized that I was loved and lovable. I realized that the world was not so bad, actually. I realized that I did not have to suffer fools. I realized that I had been a bit of a fool myself. I realized that life could be what I wanted it to be. I realized that the light of the sun was beautiful and that I was blessed to bask in it.

No such thing happens to our hero. Nobody saves him from himself. No amount of love will ever be able to stanch the wound of his self-hatred, which is bottomless, gaping, infinitely bleeding. It is a sad fact of life that those who hate themselves succeed, marvelously, in making others hate them, too, when they are the ones most in need of a little love and kindness. But give them this love and kindness, and their self-hatred will only make them hate you. Why are you stooping so low as to soil yourself by mixing with such a wretched, such an abject, such a pitiable creature? What is wrong with you?

So it goes without saying that the relationships our hero has with women are tortured at best. Women who will sleep with him are either wretched, paid, or suspicious; women who won’t sleep with him are “curmudgeonly slut[s].” Perhaps the most shocking thing about this novel was not the drug use or the sex scenes (“there are tumors all up in her cunt and when I feel the tumors brushing the tip of my dick it really gets me going”) or just how miserable things get for our protagonist but the fact that he is able to find women (multiple!!) who are willing to sleep with him, one of whom is even willing to love him. A woman, no matter how contemptible, will always be able to find a man who wants to fuck her, but the same cannot be said in reverse. Nevertheless, our protagonist has lots of sex.

It is not the sex exactly that is transgressive about Help me I am in Hell. After all, what is there to flinch at today, when everyone’s seen everything? Walk into any bookstore, go to the romance section, pick a random book, open it where you will, and you are more likely than not to find a sex scene that would have led to a Boston banning sixty years ago, when transgressive classics like Naked Lunch were put on trial. Nearly a century has passed since the publication of Georges Bataille’s Story of the Eye, a novel in which eggs and—later on, similarly orbed and white—dead priests’ eyes are inserted into orifices. The exploits of Simone seem tame when compared to today’s female eye-gulpers, today’s lady fetishists of cannibalized human flesh. Sex is everywhere in literature now, bared in all its fleshy glory; books with covers that look like children’s book illustrations teem with steamy scenes. Literary fiction, for all its lofty pretensions, can’t help the chokehold that threesomes, BDSM, affairs, age-gap relationships, and polyamory have on it.

What, then, is being transgressed? I came to Help me fresh from a reading of Nathaniel Hawthorne’s Tales and Sketches. Hawthorne was born and raised in Salem, Massachusetts, where his Puritan great-great grandfather John Hathorne had once presided over the Salem Witch Trials. Nathaniel added a “w” to his surname and embarked on a career of dismantling Puritanism. But unlike the capotain, Puritanism never went out of fashion, it just kept evolving, shape-shifting over the centuries. Take a look at the previous decade, and you will observe the emergence of a new form of Puritanism. Certain things became “problematic;” people who were “problematic” were “canceled.”

Thus, as with Tony Tulathimutte’s Rejection, the depiction of a loser male character’s sexual foibles and frustrations—and increasing rage and insanity as those foibles and frustrations mount—allow for any number of problematic things to be said with gleeful abandon (political correctness be damned!). Yet at the same time the author can distance himself from these problematic things, can even say that—because of the very loser-like nature of the protagonist and the sexual catastrophes that meet his inability to conform to social norms—he is only pointing out the problematic nature of these problematic things. Is the limit questioned, then? Is it only reinscribed? But why should it be one or the other? After all, doesn’t crossing a limit only help you see it more clearly?

Help me’s best transgressions occur in its parodying of contemporary poetry; I love any book that forces me to take a pause to cackle. Our hero finds himself in a bookstore and, after a short interlude where he reminisces about masturbating in books, attends the poetry reading of his primary love interest, Molly. Molly is a successful “poet.” She makes a living off of writing and performing such timeless verses as “I will be a SLUT if I want to be a SLUT. I will be a WHORE if I want to be a WHORE” that end in an orgiastic frenzy of moans that transgress the limits of language. The audience laps it up. The narrator’s dick is hard. Molly “foams at the mouth.” But “are they really poems though?”

The narrator ignores the badness of Molly’s poetry because he just wants to fuck her, and then their relationship morphs into something unexpectedly more meaningful. He feels “warm and fuzzy.” He makes the closest thing to a sincere declaration of love he will ever make: “I think to myself: this woman is really wonderful. I can see myself spending the rest of my life inside of her.” He is inspired to pretend to give up drinking. Underneath the tawdry bawdiness and the rotten misogyny, his desperation for sex attains a kind of poignancy. His wanting to be good and his shame at not being good, his wanting to connect and his inability to connect, his half-joking projections of himself as a famous writer and his distance from being that writer—haven’t we all been there before?

Help me I am in Hell may not go as far in its perversity as some of its transgressive predecessors. Instead, it uses that perversity as a portal into a consciousness we’d be loath to entertain in any other context. The katabasis may be dark, terrifying, stony, steep. But at the end of it lies a world so unlike our own that it can’t help throw off its own kind of light, a light by which we may see stranger, spookier, but perhaps truer. Help me doesn’t lack in sordid material, but it does it with a kind of knowingness and humor and wit and even elegance that elevates its flights of filthy fancy. I am tired of reading the same kind of anodyne prose that populates the pages of so much literary fiction. I want exaggeration and insanity and parody and full belly laughs and surprise, damnit.

All fiction should aim to be transgressive. All fiction should push past the boundaries of what we know or what we think we know, should force us to confront the emotional limits we so often place around our own lives, should disturb the staid, neatly laid out parterres of our moral landscapes. The history of literature is a history of murderers and rapists, outlaws and inbreds, weirdos and psychos, strangers, foreigners, thieves, villains, madwomen, maniacs. We sit there on our normal chairs in our normal skins living our normal lives and think we have nothing to do with such people. But deep in our nooks and crannies, down in the basement, far into those places where the rays of the sun dare not stretch, who knows what reams of rage, shame, grief, or rampant lust we may find, as yet unexplored? There is a realm of our inner kingdom where it is always 3 a.m. Lost, wandering there, we might be glad for a companion.

Ramya Yandava writes the newsletter Soul-Making where she publishes book reviews, cultural criticism, and essays on topics like orchid-hunting, balloons, and living on the moon.

Painting by Francis Bacon