Heat hits you like a brick, slugs you right between the eyes, and your pores start sprouting liquid and pretty soon you’re as slick as a fish. “It was overcast and extremely humid,” writes Paul Hendrickson of a Southern summer afternoon in his book, “Sons of Mississippi” (2003). “Little tears of perspiration kept gathering on his upper lip. He’d lick them off and go on with a story.”
The temperature could hit triple digits Sunday, and that’s reason enough to find a spot of shade and spend a minute thinking about heat’s imagery, about its manifestation in artworks such as John Steinbeck’s novel “The Grapes of Wrath” (1939) and Tennessee Williams’ play “A Streetcar Named Desire” (1947) and Spike Lee’s film “Do the Right Thing” (1989), about the heavy breath it expels across the culture like bus exhaust rolling toward some unlucky pedestrians at the curb.
Ninety-two degrees: That’s the point, claims a character in the Ray Bradbury short story “Touched With Fire,” at which the human brain leans inexorably toward the idea of killing somebody.
Which means, as of Sunday, we could officially be eight degrees past homicidal mayhem.
“I find heat so oppressive,” complains Luis Alberto Urrea, who teaches creative writing at the University of Illinois at Chicago. “There’s something almost magical about snow. It’s almost a religious moment when it starts to snow — it feels like grace. Snow is so transformative.
“But with heat,” Urrea adds with an audible shudder, “there’s no revelation involved.”
Urrea knows whereof he speaks, having written a gruesomely memorable heat scene in “The Devil’s Highway” (2004), his non-fiction account of Mexicans crossing the Arizona desert in search of new lives:
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Five men stumbled out of the mountain pass so sunstruck they didn’t know their own names, couldn’t remember where they’d come from, had forgotten how long they’d been lost. . . . They were burned nearly black, their lips huge and cracking, what paltry drool still available to them spuming from their mouths in a salty foam as they walked. … Their hair was hard and stiffened by old sweat, standing in crowns from their scalps, old sweat because their bodies were no longer sweating. They were drunk from having their brains baked in the pan, they were seeing God and devils. …
His scene is so dramatically evocative, yet utterly accurate in its depiction of the effects of intense heat, that a Phoenix attorney recently called Urrea, asking permission to read it to the jury in a wrongful death suit brought on behalf on an elderly victim of heat. “She had fallen down and just got hammered by the heat,” Urrea says. “He won the case.”
Urrea faced the artistic challenge of showing heat — something everybody thinks they know everything about, having lived through a number of swampy nights and sticky days — in a new way, so that people don’t flip the page with a so-what shrug. Urrea, a native of Mexico, has lived in the Southwestern United States and might be expected to sneer at a Chicagoan’s idea of a hot day. “Yes, I’ve been in `real heat.’ But that doesn’t diminish my sense of dread about this weekend. I hate all heat.”
Heat has steamed up many a page — and not just in romance novels, says Stephen Monroe, a William Faulkner scholar who is directing a conference on Southern writers this weekend at the University of Mississippi in Oxford, Miss.
Oppressive force
“The heat is an important force in Faulkner’s work and in Southern literature in general,” Monroe said by e-mail. “Faulkner talks often of summer’s `vitiated air.’ It’s just the right adjective for this heavy and oppressive force, one that carries the power to spoil, to pervert and to contaminate our social and emotional milieus.”
And here you thought a little handkerchief was all you needed to take care of that dampness.
“In many of his novels and stories — in `Dry September,’ for instance — heat, boredom and hatred are a dangerous combination, one that catalyzes violent action,” Monroe continued. “The South seems hotter not because the temperatures are unusual, but because the wind is often still and the humidity is often high.
“There’s a dampness in the air and an unrelenting calm that can change your mood, can make you feel restless and bothered,” Monroe added, and you speculate that perhaps the air conditioner in his office is on the fritz. “People walk slowly and speak slowly. . . . This is true in life, just as it’s true in Faulkner.”
In movies, heat creates nifty visuals — rampant sweat, swollen faces, droopy red-rimmed eyes, cracked lips, bodies bent under a cruel and unblinking sun. “Lawrence of Arabia” (1962) and “The Sheltering Sky” (1990) feature heat as palpable as any character, heat that presses down on the desert and its inhabitants, heat that pile-drives its point home with its pitiless glare. But the movie of which most people think when they’re thinking extreme heat is the aptly named “Body Heat,” the 1981 film by Lawrence Kasdan featuring a plethora of fetchingly sweaty shots of William Hurt and Kathleen Turner. Sometimes they perspire even when they’re not making love.
Heat communicates a number of emotional states — erotic longing; fatigue; pleasure; despair. Heat is raw and it’s personal, but it’s also public. Everybody feels the heat. Everybody sweats. But it’s more than just physical reactions, of course, that make heat matter. Extremes are always metaphors. “The aridity of small Texas towns,” writes novelist Larry McMurtry, “was not all a matter of unforgiving skies, baking heat, and rainlessness, either; the drought in those towns was social, as well as climatic.” The words come from his essay collection, “Walter Benjamin at the Dairy Queen” (1999).
Double the heat
And no one who reads Tom Wolfe’s 1998 novel “A Man in Full” will forget the “sweating” scene, when the creditors eager to see the downfall of Charlie Croker question him relentlessly, reducing the arrogant businessman to a gelatinous mass of moist anguish. The heat his enemies apply is both metaphorical and real, as unpleasantly real as a pair of damp armpits.
So heat’s a symbol, a great visual element, an evocative song lyric and a useful artistic tool. But it is also, as Urrea’s book reminds us, sometimes lethal, too, and words can only touch the very fringe of that large, awful truth. “In their state,” he writes of the hapless Mexicans, “a single idea was too complex, and they looked upon it with uncertainty. They shuffled around. It was ten o’clock in the morning. 104 degrees.”
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Some depictions of heat, hot off the griddle
“Hot town, summer in the city,
Back of my neck getting dirty and gritty;
Been down, isn’t it a pity, Doesn’t seem to be a shadow in the city.
All around, people looking half dead,
Walking on the sidewalk, hotter than a match head . . . “
The Lovin Spoonful, “Summer in the City,” 1966
“We’ve got more of everything bad since the [heat] wave started. It’s the crisis atmosphere. People dress different, feel different, sweat more. They wake up cranky and they never recover. . . . Things are just a little askew. Pretty soon people think the old rules aren’t in effect.”
Lawrence Kasdan, “Body Heat” (1981)
“A dusty track, hardly in use, enough to break the springs; a hill, a tumble of boulders, just as the sketch map drawn by Mr. Charlie Goso had predicted; and above, stretching from horizon to horizon, the empty sky, singing in the heat of noon.
. . . This was dead country; no cattle, no goats; only the bush and the stunted thorn trees . . . The sun was riding high and its light prickled at her skin. They were too far west here, too close to the Kalahari [desert], and her unease increased. This was not the comforting land she had grown up with; this was the merciless Africa, the waterless land.”
Alexander McCall Smith, “The No. 1 Ladies’ Detective Agency” (1998)
“Chicago, this night, was panting . . . mad-dog, gashing-knife weather, a rape and murder night, thousands of hydrants open. . . . “
Saul Bellow, “Humboldt’s Gift” (1975)
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jikeller@tribune.com
