The Necessary Antagonist
Conversation with Glenn Arbery
…in which we discuss with the writer his latest novel, Gates of Heaven, the conclusion of his Gallatin Trilogy.
This exchange has been edited and condensed for content and clarity.
LYDWINE: William Styron had a quote from Flaubert posted above his writing room door — “Be regular and orderly in your life like a good bourgeois so that you may be violent and original in your work.” With that in mind, what are your habits as a writer, both good and bad? How do you write?
ARBERY: When we had a lot of kids, early in our marriage, I would start getting up very early in the morning to do any writing because it would be a time when I was sure I wouldn’t have the blessed interventions of children. So when I’m working on a big project like this — like this novel or the other two — most of the writing happens between 5:00 and 7:00 in the morning. I would even get up at 4:30 sometimes to get a head start on the day. It usually starts by rereading what I’ve written the day before and starting to revise it; and then as I revise it, I get into adding to it or taking a new turn, something like that. But revising is as much what I do as writing. Because there’s so many new things you can imagine when you’re going over something, some detail that you add that makes it real, or some bit of dialogue that seems called for. That’s more or less the way I approach it. I don’t ever have a big outline — I mean, I guess I do in some ways, but there’s nothing specifically plotted. I often sort of see where the story goes as it unfolds and then go back and revise, and so on. So it’s not like I plot everything out in advance and then just fill in the outline.
LYDWINE: Do you write in sequence? Do you start where you start and finish where you finish, or do you sometimes realize as you revise you need to start again elsewhere, or even jump ahead to write this or that bit?
ARBERY: Yeah, I do that. I did that more with Boundaries of Eden than I did with Gates of Heaven. I had the ending to Boundaries of Eden written well in advance of finishing most of the novel. There’s a long passage at the end of Boundaries of Eden where the character Jacob Guizac is at Yellowstone and has this kind of visionary experience. I had written that and I wanted to go back and make other parts of the novel move toward that final scene. Not so with Gates of Heaven — the ending of it developed really as the end of writing it, and other parts I would write passages that would then get replaced or relocated in the novel as I wrote. They are distinct areas of the novel and so they didn’t need to be written strictly in sequence.
“A wild desperation rose in him. He closed his eyes and saw blackened fields, gutted barns, chimneys and ashes where houses had been. Women stood bitter and forlorn with their arms clutched across their chests. Ragged, hungry children. The bodies of the dead, low crawl spaces full of spiders, strange shrines and flickering candles.”
LYDWINE: Do you write on a computer? Do you write longhand? Some combination thereof?
ARBERY: Some combination — that and voice recognition. When I was a journalist back in the early 2000s, I would often take my digital recorder and go downstairs and just kind of talk an editorial into it, and then go up and transcribe it and edit it and get seven hundred words that way pretty quickly. When I’m writing a novel and I have long passages, particularly passages of dialogue, it’s sometimes easier to speak it all out than it is to try to write it out longhand or do it on a computer. But if I do write longhand, some of the best passages that I’ve written, some of the crucial places in the novels — this goes back even to Bearings & Distances — would be things that I wrote longhand. So it depends. Sometimes it’s just sort of how I do feel that day, can I just sit down at my laptop and write? Or do I need to kind of change the imaginative venue and get my hand involved in it differently? Or can I speak it, you know? I was interested to read recently a Paris Review interview with Ted Hughes, the poet, who was talking about this very thing. And he was saying how longhand is a kind of drawing, and it’s really a different experience than tapping away at keys, and certainly different from just speaking. So, yeah, anyway, it sort of depends. And the final book is certainly a combination of having been composed in all those different ways.
LYDWINE: Did you start your career as writer imagining yourself as a novelist? Or were you enamored initially with other forms?
ARBERY: I was really more a poet when I was younger. I started writing poetry pretty seriously by the time I was a sophomore in college. But even then I would write longer poems. They weren’t exactly narrative, but they were kind of longer, meditative things. They got more narrative the older I got — and I’m talking about into my mid to late twenties. By the time I really stopped writing those — I would say this is probably the late ‘80s — I was tending toward some kind of narrative form. I mentioned in the acknowledgements of Gates of Heaven that I had really thought about a long poem about [William Tecumseh] Sherman. I tried writing parts of it — this is decades ago now. I liked the way Richard Lattimore had translated The Iliad, which was into sort of a six-beat line, a long line, but without a kind of strict meter. Not trying to imitate dactylic hexameter, exactly. I wrote a poem for my wife when we first got married in that kind of mode. But I could never quite get the Sherman thing to work. I got distracted with kids and teaching and all kinds of other things. But I never wanted to leave the idea of doing something with Sherman entirely behind. This novel gave me a chance to do it. The novel was kind of an opening into a larger, more forgiving form. When I started writing fiction, I realized that I could enter into other voices and other minds and deal with stories — make them up, based partly on what happened to me and to others I know, but also, you know, change them in all these ways. It was really fun for one thing to do. And then, you know, I felt like I could get at all kinds of meaningful dimensions of my life and my thought through fiction that I probably couldn’t do otherwise.
“She gazed out at the red rock of the cliffs to the east, striations shaped by wind and water. Time without history terrified her. A thousand years were nothing, a million years, two hundred million. Animals and men and oceans were a drift of shadow across the slowly changing landscape. A vast, empty, unconscious play of elemental forces. Wind without spirit, light without understanding, ice and run and rain but no soul in all the vastness to look upon it and wonder and give thanks for the glory of God, that incalculable expenditure of being.”
LYDWINE: Bearing & Distances was your first published novel — was it also the first novel you wrote? Or were there others?
ARBERY: I had a couple of attempts earlier than that. There was one probably five years before I wrote Bearings & Distances — and Bearing & Distances included some of that, even the themes of it — but it just didn’t work, it didn’t cohere, and it didn’t really have a plot. Bearings & Distances was the first one where it felt like I really had a plot that sustained the whole book. I had written, I guess, experimentally toward a novel but I had not actually finished a whole one.
LYDWINE: Were you surprised in the writing of these novels that you were working toward a trilogy?
ARBERY: I was surprised. When I started Boundaries of Eden, which follows Bearings & Distances, it didn’t even really strike me that it was a sequel at first. I had this image of a boy standing in a field of kudzu. As I thought about that, tried to see what that was about — it turned out to be about the rest of the book. But it was not really conceived initially, I don’t think, as a sequel to Bearings & Distances, but then some of the same characters popped up, and it made sense at that point to make it a continuation. I didn’t pick up all the characters from before, but a significant number of them. Then Gates of Heaven was very deliberately conceived as a sequel to the other two.
LYDWINE: Did you have a similar image you started with for Gates of Heaven, as you did with Boundaries of Eden?
ARBERY: Not in as strong a way, no. It really started to develop that fall of 2020. The first part of the book, where Jacob Guizac gets his assignment from Braxton Forrest to write about Sherman — all that was kind of almost in real time in the fall of 2020, which is when I started writing it. I had recently finished Boundaries of Eden — I think I sent it off, the final edited versions of it, probably in May or June of 2020, and then I started working on Gates of Heaven in August or September of that same year. It was during that COVID year, there were still lots of closures. I was president of [Wyoming Catholic College], and we had to figure out how to deal with getting people back here in person, all of those things, various outbreaks on campus that fall. And it was the Trump-Biden election, you know? It was just all these things. And so I started writing with those things very much present. It sort of developed over the next few years into the form it finally took.
“The war went on and on, like a fire that flares up afresh when you think it’s extinguished. I believe it’s still going on. It might never end.”
LYDWINE: Gates of Heaven isn’t just a novel, simply — it’s a novel of ideas, a novel of recent affairs. So much has happened in our time, and so much continues to happen. Reading and remembering, it brought to mind a Philip Roth quote about novel writing in contemporary America, that “the actuality is continually outdoing our talents, and the culture tosses up figures almost daily that are the envy of any novelist.” You yourself had a great way to describe that memorable first year of the pandemic: “a sad, numb, stupid, paralyzing time.”
ARBERY: If we think back to it, there was so much pretending going on. It was kind of official pretending. We can upset ourselves about this. But it was just a very strange time, yeah.
LYDWINE: The most striking and interesting aspect of Gates of Heaven is that in answering the question of how we got to this strange place as a nation, you bring the reader face-to-face with an unexpected figure: William Tecumseh Sherman, the celebrated Union general of the American Civil War. You call him “the necessary antagonist… for the self-understanding of our time.” Why?
ARBERY: Sherman has always loomed large in my part of the South. I grew up in middle Georgia, my family was from South Carolina. If there was ever a kind word said about Sherman, it was not in my childhood. He was sort of the great demon who had ruined our land. Dealing with him, sort of coming to terms with him from the inside, seemed very important to me to do. But I don’t know that I thought he would be as large a presence in the novel as he turns out to be. I read a lot about Sherman. I read Sherman himself, in his letters and his memoirs, and sort of got inside his voice, both what he said and what he didn’t say. But it’s just that Sherman is such a figure of a certain understanding of secular modernity, of the political claim that that almost precedes anything else.
LYDWINE: For the second part of Gates of Heaven, you include as an epigraph a passage from a letter Sherman wrote to his superior, General Halleck, in 1863: “I would banish all minor questions, assert the broad doctrine that as a nation the United States has the right, and also the physical power, to penetrate to every part of our national domain, and that we will do it.. that we will remove and destroy every obstacle, if need be, take every life, every acre of land, every particle of property, everything that to us seems proper.”
ARBERY: This seems so much at odds with being endowed by our Creator with life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. Now it’s suddenly you’re endowed by your government. But if you choose not to, then you have no rights, even to your life — which is extreme. As Jacob, one of the characters, comments: it seems like it’s edging toward totalitarianism as a perspective on things. And I’m not sure Sherman was alone on this — he was encouraged in it. But there were just many fascinating things about Sherman, particularly for a Catholic. Sherman grew up in a Catholic foster home, though his father-in-law [and foster father], Thomas Ewing, didn’t convert until I think he was on his deathbed. But Mrs. Ewing was a devout Catholic who insisted that Sherman be baptized before he even lived with them. Sherman resisted Catholicism very firmly and explicitly his whole life, even as he was having eight children with his devoutly Catholic wife. So he’s an interesting figure in that regard.
LYDWINE: In your characterization of him, there’s a kind of infernal ‘no’ driving this man at his very core. So much so that in reading, his cruelty to his wife and children is almost more distressing than his cruelty as a general — or rather, the latter was simply his cruelty writ large, which was there and would have been there at work even had he never marched his army to the sea.
ARBERY: I guess what moved me most is his deep ambivalence toward his son Tom. Tom was always kind of the substitute for Willie, this son Sherman really loved. He and his wife never got over the death of Willie. But Tom was always having to kind of be as good as Willie, and Sherman’s utter rejection of [Tom] when he went into the Jesuits was profoundly affecting to him. Sherman relented later, and they ended up back on speaking terms at least. I don’t know if I’m fair to the man. I think he was good to his daughters. But I think that ‘no’ is pretty clearly there throughout everything.
LYDWINE: Toward the end of the novel, the fate of Sherman’s soul is caught up mystically with that of one of your recurring characters, Walter Peach, as Peach lies dying of COVID. It’s fascinating that you as a Southerner, and then as a writer, would worry away at the character of this man, Sherman, so diligently, finding in him not some demon figure of history, but rather a man like any other man, in need of judgment. And ultimately, as Peach says to his son, “I don’t think Uncle Billy made it… Sherman’s where he chose to be.”
ARBERY: I went back and forth, wondering whether there was some way to, so-to-speak, ‘save’ Sherman. And I couldn’t get there. He got Last Rites after he was unconscious, and his family was trying to push him over. I think if he had been conscious he would have had the priest leave. It just seemed a matter of principle to him, as with some contemporary atheists. And I’m not sure Sherman was even an atheist — he was probably a kind of Deist, or something like that. He [found] it horrible, the idea of a vocation, of having a vocation — the idea of that just [struck] him as kind of a terrible impiety against the rational universe.
“If he had to ascribe intentions to his instinct, it would be that history overwhelms you — all these souls caught up in the same moment that was unquestionably as real as this one, but that very moment was ungraspable by a single person living in it, even one person looking to his own motives. All the sufferings and small pleasures and acts of lust or greed or cowardice or mercy, all the decisions, all the desire and pain and consciousness barreling along like the trucks on the interstate: and there you were sensing it, feeling it happen with a kind of despair and madness gaining on you.”
LYDWINE: What do we do with history, particularly when it’s so troublesome, when it’s so complex?
ARBERY: I think that one of our real guides to this was Faulkner. When you look at the greatness of Faulkner, it’s particularly because he did not try to dodge the whole issue of slavery. He took on the guilt of it — how many [of the] descendants of former slaves living around him and many Southerners were relatives in the most literal sense, because of the sexual abuses that had gone on in slavery. How do you deal with that? Well, the first thing you do is acknowledge that it was the case, and try to find the story that takes you both into it and gives you some way out of it.
LYDWINE: All necessary throat-clearing aside, what do you think America lost in the winning of the Civil War?
ARBERY: There was a kind of vision, particularly of the Southern statesman, that we almost certainly lost after the Civil War. The early part of the nation was very much informed by the high civility and gentlemanly character of those leaders from the South — certainly Washington, but Madison and others — who embodied a way of dealing with all kinds of people in a way that was largely lost or became suspect after the Civil War. There were several decades of making a great hero of Robert E. Lee — Lee was venerated both by North and South for decades before a kind of turn began, probably in the ‘60s and ‘70s, against him. But I think that valorizing of Lee was the recognition of what had been lost in the war, that there were no figures of similar nobility or stature in the post-war world, which quickly became corrupt and money-grubbing, and all those things that had not been characteristics of the South. The unbridled pursuit of money always had been looked down on in the older understanding of the South — and I’m probably romanticizing it even as I speak. You know, when [Washington] became head of the Continental Armies, having to deal with New Englanders — he didn’t know what to make of them. He couldn’t stand them. You know, they just seemed so rude and self-willed and acquisitive. It’s interesting to see Washington, who does come from this traditional understanding of things, to encounter these Yankees —they’re just, my gosh, who are these people? But as [Allen] Tate says in one of his poems, nowadays, “All are born Yankees of the race of men.”
