transcript for episode 19

20_Episode_Glennn_Arbery

Ryan: My guest today is Glenn Arbery, president of Wyoming Catholic College. Born in South Carolina, reared in Georgia, Arbery grew up as a Southerner and a Protestant. His reading of Flannery O'Connor as a freshman at the University of Georgia began his journey toward the Roman Catholic Church. A convert at 25, he entered the Church at the University of Dallas, where he met his wife-to-be, Virginia Lombardo, and later took his PhD in Literature and Politics.

He is the author of Why Literature Matters, along with dozens of essays and hundreds of columns. He has edited collections on the genre of tragedy, the Southern critics and the Confessions of St. Augustine.

Recently, Glenn has been writing novels, a trilogy on small town life in the New South in the mid-20th-century, Bearings and Distances. The first installment was published by Wise Blood Books in 2015 and a second novel, Boundaries of Eden, will be out before the end of this year, also from Wise Blood.

I spent a good part of this summer camping with my family in Lander, Wyoming. While there, we became acquainted with the vibrant community that has built up around Wyoming Catholic College. With Covid cases near zero at the time, I had the pleasure of sitting down with Glenn Arbery in person for this conversation.

So Glenn, why did Allen Tate never finish his biography of Robert E. Lee?

Glenn: That's a long story. The short answer is that he came to dislike Lee. He had grown up as most of us in the South did, revering General Lee. But then, the more he investigated the last years of the war, the more he thought that Lee had valued his own reputation over the good of the Confederacy. Tate thought that Jefferson Davis was a disaster as president of the Confederacy, and he thought that Lee should have had the gumption to see that and to step in and take over the Confederate government.

All that sounds to me kind of farfetched. Lee was Lee, he was not a politician. But in any case, I think Tate found himself backing away from the figure of Lee as one to admire because he didn't have enough capacity to put his own self-regard aside, something like that.

He also got into the psychology of Lee in somewhat strange ways. I wrote an essay on this some years ago that really… Let me delve into that a bit. So, I think Tate started to psychoanalyze Lee in terms of his father's failure and abandonment of the family, Lee's relation to his mother. It all gets kind of Freudian.

Ryan: so in that context, writing to John Peale Bishop, Tate wrote,
“Like most of us, you're both inside and outside the old tradition. That, in a word, you are a modern and divided mind.” To what extent does this describe the southern writer today?

Glenn: That's a great question. It's harder for me to see it as clearly now, just because most Southern writers are more like everybody else, I suspect. When Tate was growing up, even when I was growing up in the 1950s, the South still had a kind of strong identity. It was preserving the remnants of the Confederacy and all that.

I grew up in an extraordinarily racist society, no question about it.  And so did all the Southerners of the generation, Faulkner and Tate and Caroline Gordon and Robert Penn Warren, and so on. They were struggling against what they saw as the injustices of the Old South, but they were aware of their own prejudices and struggling within. You see this, I think most clearly in Faulkner. Faulkner was working out things about contemporary race issues, for example, as early as the early thirties, Light in August, books like that.

Contemporary Southerners frankly, I haven't read that much. I don't feel like… When I talk about southern literature, I'm really talking about a kind of Southern Renaissance from the twenties through the fifties and into the sixties with Percy and O'Connor, but I haven't kept up sort of with Southern literature per se.

Ryan: Why do you think incest is such a prominent theme in Faulkner's work? Is that a way to deal with the legacy of the Confederacy?

Glenn: It's also a prominent feature in my work, and there's something about the South that leads to that question. Why is it that this turning in on family seems to be such a prominent feature?

In Old Virginia, it was considered completely in keeping with proper societal norms to marry your first cousin. These days that would just seem absurdly incestuous.

But there's also just something about the in-turned nature of a society like the Old South, I think, that that tends toward that incestuous meditation.

And I think with Faulkner, when Faulkner starts thinking about the unacknowledged children of the white plantation owner and the female slave, that question kind of comes to the fore. It could even be unknown or unacknowledged incest. He has that happen in – well, it's not unacknowledged, but has that happen in Go Down Moses, where old Carothers McCaslin buys one of the slave women from New Orleans who are sort of bred as combines. I mean, this is horrible stuff. But then, so her name is Eunice. He has a child with Eunice and then a child with Eunice's daughter with him. So, yeah, I think it's part of this… What Faulkner's really analyzing is the deep pathology of a certain kind of southern thinking.

Ryan: So sociologically, what would be the antidote to a cultural incestuousness? Or maybe not antidote, but put it more mildly, what is the sociological converse of incest?

Glenn: Another great question. Well, I mean, traditionally it's marrying outside the particular family or clan. Openness to change, openness to otherness.

I think you see it… Maybe one way to think of this is to think of Odysseus and his many travels, seeing so many different things. So when you get back to Ithaca, you have a broad range of experiences to draw on and you're not convinced that your own cultural way of doing things is the only norm. I think that's traditionally the way to do it. Whereas if you want to keep things the same, there's a deep conservatism and incest, you could say, though you can't characterize conservatism as incestuous, you know? But there's a, as we used to be told in school, “hybrid vigor” comes from crossing the strains. So, yeah, something of that seems to be the answer.

Ryan: The main character in Bearings and Distances is an English professor and he has attained whatever amount of fame you can attain as an English professor by publishing a book called The Gameme. What are the real-life origins of The Gameme?

Glenn: How do you, how do you mean that?

Ryan: Well, is this a theory…

Glenn: That somebody like me came up with?

Ryan: Yes. Right. And it's drawing together “meme,” which is a prominent theme now, and the gameme?

Glenn: So these are some ideas I was toying with in the early nineties. I was trying to think about cultural change. Figures like Aeneas come out of Troy with the past stripped away, and the whole purpose of Aeneas seems to be to combine that past with the new Latin people of Italy.

So I was thinking of it in terms of what goes on in the sexual process when each, man and woman, each carry half of the genes, or chromosomes that are necessary for the new organism.

So Richard Dawkins, who's famous for his atheism and his biological theories, came up with the idea of the meme, way long time ago. And he meant it as a kind of cultural gene. The way it's used now is pretty far from what he originally attended. But yeah, to think of a cultural gameme, what that would look like, was kind of the idea behind the gameme. And I realized after a while, “There's no way to get, really support all this, and so I’ll put it in the novel, right. Have Braxton Forrest come fine us with it.” So yeah.

Ryan: It's a good David Lodge move there.

Glenn: There you go.

Ryan: Yeah, so old tradition can mean many things. And with respect to the history of the Confederacy, one wants to be outside the tradition, even if certain aspects of agrarianism, which was – Allen Tate is one of the main proponents of agrarianism and mid-20th century.

So, some of these aspects remain attractive in the work of people like Wendell Berry or Joel Salatin.

Glenn: I don't know. Joel Salatin’s work.

Ryan: He, well, he is an actual… I mean, I guess Wendell Berry was an actual farmer too. But he's more famous for his farming and he's been the star of multiple foodie documentaries about the new agrarianism.

Do you have a take on what sustains the new agrarianism in the popular imagination and allows that to be so prominent that someone, a writer like Michael Pollan can make his name on it and yet it is able to insulate itself from the early intellectual tradition that attached itself to the Confederacy in some ways.

Glenn: Yeah. Yeah. I mean, I think agrarianism per se is just perennially attractive. There is a kind of romantic strain that runs through it, I suppose. But it's the idea of living off the land, of growing or raising your own food, having a community of like-minded people, all those things are deeply attractive in a world that's gone so virtual and technological.

So what the southern agrarians were objecting to in 1930 was the incursion of what they saw as kind of modernity, if you want to put it simply. The incursion of industrial modernity on a traditional agrarian society, which they took some pains to distinguish from the Confederacy and the meaning of the Old South and so on. Some of that was disingenuous, surely, but a lot of it, I think, was just true.

Andrew Lytle's essay called “The Hind Tit” in I'll Take My Stand is very much about this. It's about what happens to the old farm life when people start going into town to watch the movies and think that everything is elsewhere instead of where they are.

Ryan: Meanwhile, Wyoming Catholic, part of its unique training is that students are given the opportunity to work on an actual ranch. And yet one of the main obstacles to the future of the small farm in the U.S. is that land is now owned mostly by these large conglomerates, mega farms, and so to actually have a family farm is financially impossible for many people unless you… There are very few family farms that you can still inherit. And as you say, if all is elsewhere, the younger generation is not inheriting that.

What do you see as the possibilities for someone, an undergrad who comes through Wyoming Catholic, falls in love with ranching, wants to raise cattle in a sustainable way: where does someone like that go?

Glenn: Well, our valedictorian a couple of years ago is working on a ranch right outside Lander, learning to do that. But what you're talking about are all of these things now being part of what Andrew Lytle called “the money economy.” That is, if you start selling your crops, if you start thinking of what you're doing as a farmer or as a rancher in terms of a larger economy in which the prices are set elsewhere, you've already lost the impetus that he finds so attractive about the self-sustaining farm, where you grow what you need. You're not growing it to sell to somebody else.

I don't know how possible that is now, I just don't know. This is Wendell Berry's constant theme. Watching huge farms come in, grow one thing, use every available square foot of space, not thinking about the future of it or the care of it. Again, it seems part of the project of modernity. Conquest of nature, the wrenching of every last thing from nature for our benefit, but without much foresight.

Ryan: So to go back to that Allen Tate quote that someone's “both inside and outside the old tradition. You're a modern and divided mind.” But to apply that to another tradition that Tate, especially in his later life, was far more attached to as a living tradition, and that's Catholicism. The Catholic tradition. Is the modern, meaning that the Catholic mind today, necessarily a divided mind? And was it for Tate?

Glenn: I don't think in the same way that it was, say, with respect to the Confederacy.

Let me just say a little about that. For the divided mind of the modern Southerner was two things with respect to the Confederacy. One was pretty implicit rejection of slavery. I mean, it was all pretty obviously unjust, right? There's a whole tradition of southern defense of the Confederacy that tries to get slavery out of the picture and make it about states’ rights and so on.

That aside, the other dimension for Tate was that he couldn't imagine, in his Poem “Ode to the Confederate Dead” what it would be like to sort of be hurried beyond decision, to be willing to give your life in the way that Confederates did, say, charging at Gettysburg on Pickett's Charge, or same thing with the Union troops. That kind of total resolution was sort of beyond him, that kind of being given over to action.

When you think about Catholicism, whether your mind is divided, I think the division there has to come from your deep awareness of being a modern. All of us are moderns, you know? And Tate certainly recognized that in himself, for all his talk about tradition. So with Catholicism, it's as though you're trying to recover a tradition that wasn't the one that you were born into. So, like Elliot saying if you want to have the tradition, you have to earn it. You have to go back and read everything, and you have to take it on. It's not something that's handed to you simply by being here.

I'm not articulating this very well, but I think for Tate, the division would be the sense of what it must have been for Dante, what Maritain calls “Dante's luck.” Having been born when he was and having this coherent world that you've studied so much as a medieval provided a sense for the mind. Whereas, for the modern, there's so many built-in doubts simply in the way that you think about things.

Ryan: Yeah. So a friend of mine describes that eloquently as, under conditions of modern pluralism, even if you do inhabit a tradition, you're constantly looking over your shoulder, right? Because there are all these other options.

So Caroline Gordon, Alan Tate's wife, considered Jacques Maritain's Art and Scholasticism the most profound and complete aesthetic of the novel. And the line she kept coming back to, and which Flannery O'Connor also cites in her letters, is this – the line from Art and Scholasticism –

Wherever art – Egyptian, Greek, or Chinese – has known a certain degree of grandeur and purity, it is already Christian. Christian in hope, because every spiritual radiance is a promise and a symbol of the divine harmonies of the Gospel.”

So Gordon took this to mean that an Egyptian work of art can reveal just as much beauty as a Christian work of art. The Egyptian artist is “Christian in hope” because he has attained to Christianity aesthetically and must only wait for the rest to follow.

So in Gordon's view, history is full of great pagan artists who were just as Christian as artists as St. Francis was as a man, and because the highest achievements of literary art have been reached by the modernists Henry James and James Joyce, they are more artistically Christian then Francois Mauriac and Graham Green. She calls them more Catholic. Is Henry James a more Christian writer than Mauriac or Graham Greene?

Glenn: I have to confess, I'm not very fond of Henry James, so I'll defer on Henry. I mean, I'll just do more on Henry James.

Ryan: Or Joyce or Flaubert.

Glenn: I know what she means, and I think what she means is that a really beautifully achieved novel is true, it’s art. And this is what I think Maritain emphasizes so much. In other words, a novel could be correct in doctrine, but lousy as a novel. And its achievement of a certain kind of beauty is higher than its achievement of certain doctrinal points. I guess I'm putting this clumsily.

I think that Madame Bovary, for example, as such, just, I mean, there's something exquisite about that novel, despite the darkness of the ending. Caroline Gordon took that novel as a tragedy. She argued vehemently with Louise Cowan, my teacher at Dallas, about this, because Louise saw it as an informal comedy. And I think Louise is right. I think the tone of it has a slight edge of irony and mockery all the way through, even to the last moment when that black bile or whatever comes out of Emma's mouth as though it were ink, the ink were running out of her. It's a very dark comic novel, to my view.

But in any case, I think Caroline was more interested in the art of the novel then of the profess Catholicism.

Ryan: Well, Flannery O'Connor underlined this passage in Art and Scholasticism, in her own copy:

Do not make the absurd attempt to dissociate in yourself the artist and the Christian. They are one. If you are truly Christian, and if your art is not isolated from your soul by some system of aesthetics, but apply only the artist to the work, precisely because the artist and the Christian are one, the work will derive wholly from each of them.

It seems to me like there's a kind of doctrine of union with Christ at the heart of this. How do you read Flannery O'Connor’s claims to not be a Catholic writer, but to be a writer who's Catholic in these terms?

Glenn: I think the more a writer tries to be Catholic, be consciously Catholic, the less successful the writing is going to be. I think for O'Connor, the union, the sort of incarnation dimension of her art is that she writes out of who she is and out of what she's given to see. And that's one thing that she says.

I get very impatient, as I'm sure you do, with “Catholic movies,” “Catholic novels,” as though there were some way to distinguish the art from the whole nature of the artist who conceives of it.

This is such a tough question. Obviously there's Catholic art. But is it Catholic art because you set out to embody Catholic ideas or because you're Catholic, because your whole soul is informed?

Ryan: What did you learn from Marion Montgomery?

Glenn: Oh my gosh. How could I start?

First thing I learned was Flannery O'Connor. Reading those stories with Marion Montgomery my freshman year was a revelation. I had no idea he could read literature that way. I just –

Ryan: How was he reading it?

Glenn: Well, he would just make you see the patterns in the story. He'd make you see what certain things meant, so the events in the story, which seemed simply strange, began to become transparently meaningful with spiritual and symbolic ideas. I'm talking – my approach to literature when I was a freshman in college was far from sophisticated. So just kind of seeing the patterns was illuminating, to say the least.

And he was also very generous, personally. I didn't know who he was, so I took him some of my early poems and he read them without scorn and helped me see what I could do better. So he was a wonderfully generous man.

Ryan: What would be the best way for someone who wants to understand Marion Montgomery? What would be the best place for them to start?

Glenn: Well, I always think that if someone is an artist, the best place to start is by reading what they've written. He has several novels. Darrel, Wandering of Desire, Fugitive. I guess I think for someone whose soul is essentially artistic, that's where you're going to really see what's on his mind. And then the voluminous critical work that he did, I suspect, is an attempt to say in other ways what he's doing in his novels, in his poems.

Marion's work was to try to combine what he saw in Flannery O'Connor and himself, which is Thomism and a deeply rooted sense of Christianity.

Ryan: He has this really profound trilogy of Thomistic literary theory.

Glenn: Some of the best titles, right, out there.

Ryan: Yeah. What are they?

Glenn: Why Flannery O’Connor Stayed Home. Right? Why Poe Drank Liquor. What's the other one? Shoot, I can't remember the...

Ryan: How did Marion Montgomery come to Thomism?

Glenn: I take it through Flannery O'Connor and pretty much on his own. He only had an MA.

Ryan: Really?

Glenn: Yeah. And like he was like Cleanth Brooks in that respect, another great figure in 20th century criticism. They didn't really follow the traditional scholarly path. And so this was always being brought up against Marion Montgomery at the University of Georgia. “Well, he only has an MA.” Yeah, but he's written thirty books. I think his Thomism came out of his love of the tradition, his desire to understand these things better.

Ryan: Wyoming Catholic College has an integrated curriculum, like St. John's College or Thomas Aquinas College. That is, every student studies the same set of texts and disciplines in the same sequence. But in addition to the liberal arts we expect to find in a Great Books curriculum, Wyoming Catholic adds horsemanship and wilderness backpacking.

So what's different about Wyoming Catholic's understanding of an integrated curriculum that places these pursuits on par with Euclid and Dante?

Glenn: That we are embodied creatures, I mean, to put it simply.

 I think of this as an education that takes the incarnation seriously on every level. We understand the physical world through our senses and our body. One of the theorists of our education, John Senior, talks about this a great deal. How you come to know through the basically poetic faculties of taking things in.

To ride a horse, is to come to understand another creature in a way that you don't simply by reading about it. To feel that horse under you and know that the horse is reading you at the same time that you're trying to ride the horse, that's an experience our students talk about with great respect.

And it's when you go into the classroom and you’re reading The Phaedrus or something about the horses you're trying to control, or reading The Iliad, about the immortal horses of Achilles that Dolon thinks he can get if he is successful in spying on the Acheans, these are things that are alive to our students in ways that I don't think they can be anywhere else.

You're a rock climber. I mean, you know what the wilderness demands of you, what that kind of activity demands of you in terms of attention, physical presence to the exact moment of courage when you have to overcome your own fears to do it. Those things are certainly part of the way that Aristotle understands the formation of the moral virtues. You don't get the moral virtues by reading about them and grasping them intellectually. You get them by doing the things that are required to form the deeper habits that really underlie character.

I think that traditionally, many of the things that we have to put into our curriculum are simply part of the way life was lived, especially constant daily contact with the natures of things in the world. So now, in effect, we're having to supply the opportunity to do the kinds of things that simply used to be part of the texture of life.

And yeah, you would think in the ancient world, for example, that the liberal arts would be built on deep experience already of horses, of farming and slaughter of animals, all these things. Now you have to try to fill that in. Remedial reality.

Ryan: Is Wyoming Catholic College an instance of the Benedict Option?

Glenn: A question that comes up here that comes up elsewhere. I don't see us as… Let me give you two interpretations of Benedict Option.

One is that you're talking about sealing yourself off from the rest of the world, protecting your own community, making sure that nothing from “out there” is able to get “in here,” and mess up what we're doing.

The other is that you take a step back from the dominant culture so that you can have an intentional community that's ultimately intended to face outward and help transform the dominant culture.

I think of what we're doing as the latter of those. We have to have enough time and presence with these students to give them something that profoundly differs from what most people in the culture have. But the intention is not for them to protect themselves from then on, but to go out and try to help change things wherever they can, wherever they can see the opportunities to bring greater insight to bear.

Ryan: Green Mountain College in Vermont is one of a dozen or so small colleges to close in recent years and to go up for sale. And the economist Tyler Cowen recently speculated on the possibility of buying the campus for just $20 million and starting a new college that would eliminate many of the problems with higher education. He concludes that the experiment would fail because higher ed is sufficiently homogenous – incestuous – that all of the personnel and all of the financial structures would just end up reproducing themselves and the problems of the mainstream university.

But you're at the helm of a very new college. Is it fifteen years this year?

Glenn: First classes were in 2007. So we're not even fifteen years.

Ryan: Not even fifteen. Yeah.

So how is Wyoming Catholic going to buck the reproduction of the same?

Glenn: Yeah. Well, in the first place, I don't think Tyler Cowen is aware of places like ours. There are a number of smaller colleges across the country that differ pretty profoundly from the standard academic model that you see these days. The faculty here tend to be more steeped in Aquinas than in Michel Foucault, for example. And that's true of the colleges where they came from and the graduate programs where they had the opportunity to study.

In any case, I think he's overstating it. He argues that the only people you'd get would be malcontents or people who were dishonored in their professions elsewhere. There are lots of good, young faculty who really, really want the opportunity to teach real things and to get away from the pervasive politicization of everything, the ideologies of race and gender and so on in identity politics. So I think he's overstated the case.

There's also a good bit of financial support available, from people who care about real education instead of using public money to turn it to political indoctrination.

Ryan: What are the main pragmatic challenges of starting a new college?

Glenn: I wasn't here when this one was founded, but you can imagine. How do you talk – I think they had thirty-eight students – how do you talk thirty-eight students into coming to a college that doesn't exist yet? In a place where there's no dorm, there's no classroom.

So they had a lot of pragmatic challenges there. First of all, money. Going around raising the money.

Ryan: What about in the current phase? It's accredited as a campus. What are the challenges there?

Glenn: Oh, the main challenge for us has been what to do about student loans. Because the students who come here, most of them need financial aid. So we don't take federal funding because of the strings attached to that. So what we had been doing until this last year is basically extending the loan to the student ourselves. Which means the student goes through the four years and then starts paying for it, which puts us in a financial hole year after year.

This past year we were able to work out a deal with Notre Dame Federal Credit Union. This is a credit union in South Bend, not associated with the university, that gives loans to the students on our terms, meaning that anybody who asks for one, regardless of their credit rating, we extend the loan to them, but now we can get the money upfront from the credit union. And then the student pays back the credit union as they go. So this has been a huge relief from the financial haul that we had put ourselves in, trying to get any student who wanted to come here the education. So that's been huge. That's been a real benefit.

Also, we have wonderfully generous donors who care about Catholic education, who care about what we're trying to do and shaping these students. So I just feel blessed that we are – right now, God willing, this will continue. Knock on wood. We're in the best financial shape we've ever been in.

I think the fact that we're able to reopen this fall, it's been a really attractive thing to a lot of the students coming in. It's partly Wyoming, it's partly the spirit of the college. We can't exist as a virtual college. That's just not who we are. We can't have virtual horseback riding.

Ryan: So in the middle of these interviews, we like to play a flash round of the game “Would You Rather?” in which you're asked to choose between two undesirables or to choose between two very attractive options that you would never in real life want to have to choose between.

Glenn: Wow.

Ryan: Are you game?

Glenn: I guess. If you promise you'll dilute this whole section.

Ryan: Feel free to pass on any of them and answer as briefly or as verbosely as you would like.

Would you rather attend a small-town high school champ championship football game, where you know all the players and their families, or the Super Bowl?

Glenn: Small town. Yeah.

Ryan: Would you rather have Dante or Augustine?

Glenn: Dante.

Ryan: Why?

Glenn: Because he's… “Have him?” All right, clarify. What do you mean?

Ryan: However you want to take it.

Glenn: I like poets more than theologians.

Ryan: Alasdair MacIntyre or Charles Taylor?

Glenn: Alasdair MacIntyre.

Ryan: Well, I know the answer to this one. How about James Joyce or Francois Mauriac?

Glenn: Joyce.

Ryan: Interesting. Why?

Glenn: I don't particularly like Mauriac. I've read a number of his novels. I just, it doesn't click with me.

Ryan: The New South or the New West.

Glenn: I'm not sure what the New West is, I suppose. The New South is a very complex term also, so I'm not sure how to answer that.

Ryan: So moving on then…

In the opening scene of “Apocalypse Now,” a formation of U.S. helicopters flies a napalm bombing sortie over Vietnam with Wagner's “Ride of the Valkyries” blasting over loudspeakers. And the film critic Anthony Lane has described the scene as a rare instance of a “conservative high.” What did he mean by this and what would an actual conservative high look like?

Glenn: That is a very complicated question. A conservative high. Well, can I tell a little story? There was a time when I was a freshman in college that number of us on our floor in Russell Hall at the University of Georgia were making too much noise apparently, playing our music too loud or something. And a guy who was in ROTC or something started playing “The Ride of the Valkyries” at an extremely high volume to override everything that we were doing. And I can't think of the scene in “Apocalypse Now” without thinking of that moment.

Glenn: So, conservative high? Yeah, well if…

Ryan: Well, it seems to me that Lane is using a common understanding of conservatism as being synonymous with fascism. And Wagner being the architect of, a kind of template for…

Glenn: Proto-Nietzsche, proto-Hitlerian, et cetera.

Ryan: Right. And then the Vietnam War is another avatar of this conservatism. But that clearly misconstrues what most in the conservative tradition would think of themselves as being.

And so if a real conservative were to have a real “conservative high,” what kinds of artistic musical moments might accompany that, do you think?

Glenn: Geez. I'm still so stunned by the kind of almost bacchanalian or bacchic dimension of the bacchanalian moment that, I mean, I guess the conservative moment might have Bach in the background in some good cognac and good conversation. I don't know.

Ryan: Why is the dystopian novel the premiere young adult genre?

Glenn: I think there's a profound feeling right now that things are collapsing. It's not just the young adults. As you think of the films, you think of the range of popular imagination. It almost seems to long for some kind of apocalyptic collapse. So many imaginations of disaster and then what comes after disaster.

I haven't read a lot of the young adult novels. I'm just generalizing from what seems to me a kind of cultural sense now. As though there were no real hope left for the utopian schemes of the 19th and 20th centuries. No, that's not how it's going to be. It's going to be something very different from that.

So, okay. So why the popularity of socialism among young people? I don't get it. I don't see how that all works together.

Ryan: Yeah. So, Robert Hugh Benson published one of what's widely regarded as one of the first dystopian novels in 1907, Lord of the World. And it's about the coming of Antichrist and his political and social attractions. And it came to prominence recently when Pope Francis said that was his favorite novel.

But I think less well known is the sequel, in a way, to that novel, the next novel that Benson wrote, The Dawn of All, which is a utopian novel. And it's of a piece with these sort of turn-of-the-century, end-of-history projects that see the convergence of Christianity, science, art and politics as having basically been achieved. Natural reason and Christianity have converged and the rest of history is just going to be a playing out of this convergence across all aspects of human society, resulting in a kind of liberal integralism.

And so one reading of why we haven't seen more novels like this is the two world wars. They demolished that end-of-history moment. But when you think about Thomas Moore's Utopia, that emerges out of a time of relative crisis, one of its objects is a critique of an unjust economic, actually modernizing economic system with the enclosure movement.

So why don't we see more utopias? Why don't we see more Christian utopias?

Glenn: I guess I think that the sense that we have of an ineradicable evil in our social natures is part of what makes that hard to do. It's hard for us these days to imagine heaven even, much less a social utopia. I think if we could think about where a plausible heaven would be, that would be a real achievement for a Catholic writer, for any writer.

Utopia is, I just think there's a deep sense of such social dysfunction right now that the idea of getting everything harmonized, it's just kind of out reach. It is really interesting to me to think of what underlies the utopian impulse of the imagination anyway. Really? I mean, it always strikes me as sort of like the thought experiment in The Republic. Okay, so suppose we did it this way, would that work? You know, get everything worked out like this.

And that's how Moore's Utopia strikes me. Almost as a variety of satire. So yeah, given the nature of human beings, you're never going to get anything to work in the way that you imagine it will all harmonize.

I didn't know Benson written that second novel. I read A Lord of the World.

Ryan: It's really cool.

Glenn: Yeah. I'll have to read this.

Ryan: So here's another “Would You Rather?”.

Glenn: Okay.

Ryan: Would you rather a heaven as “iterative stasis,” as Paul Griffiths has recently described the Thomistic and Western vision of heaven, or as apectasy, in “further up and further in,” in C.S. Lewis' imagination?

Glenn: I guess I conceive of it as a now, but not as an iterative stasis. So maybe that's…

Ryan: “Casting down their golden crowns around the glassy sea” over and over again.

Glenn: I think more C.S. Lewis. Yeah.

Ryan: Okay. Yeah, me too.

Glenn: I hope so.

Ryan: What is the best time to write a novel? Time of life, time of year, time of day?

Glenn: Well, time of day for me is very early morning. Time of year, probably winter, because there's a lot more early morning in winter. Time of life, I think that depends on the writer. For me, it's become possible since my kids are out of the house. Which also allows for more early morning. Yeah.

Ryan: How do you learn to write a novel without going to an MFA program, without having that whole professionalization that most novelists go through these days?

Glenn: I don’t know. Reading a lot, seeing what works. It's very experimental for me.

Ryan: How do you see what works? Do you have readers that you try things out on?

Glenn: Yeah. My wife and others. But when I'm writing something, I like to finish it before I show it to anybody, you know? So it doesn't enter whatever is going on creatively too soon. So I want to have a kind of wholeness there that I can then work to modify. But yeah.

I think there's some advantages to writing things when you're older. It's a whole different dynamic, I think, for young novelists. It's a whole different way of kind thinking that what you're doing, how you're being in the world is being shaped by this imagination of things. Even the young Fitzgerald and Hemingway and those guys, how they kind of form the imaginations of the generation. I certainly don't think that way. Not like that, not writing in my sixties. But I do think of things, I think, more experience over a longer time, I guess.

Ryan: How would you compare Robert Giroux and Joshua Hren, just considered as avatars for Catholic literary publishing.

Glenn: I never read that much about Giroux, but I really admire what Joshua Hren’s been doing. He had the gumption to do what needed to be done a generation or two ago, which is to really try to start giving a voice to Catholic writers who were serious and had some literary accomplishment. So that it is not just a “safe for you to read” kind of press, but this is going to push you a little bit. This is going to challenge you.

I really appreciated his publishing my novel, Bearings of Distances because it certainly pushes some things, and it's pretty tough to read in some ways. I hope it's also funny.

Ryan: It's also very easy to read.

Glenn: Well, good.

Ryan: It's a page turner.

So Paul Elie, really talking about the period of Robert Giroux as the conductor of the Catholic literary imagination, mid-century, New York publishing. But Elie described the Catholic literary Renaissance of that time as marked by an intense loneliness of the Catholic writer. And that seems not to be the case so much today. The journal “Dappled Things,” the Joshua Hren’s imprint Wise Blood are just the most prominent examples of a thriving Catholic literary community, which also seems to coalesce online.

But at the same time, these communities exist more at the periphery of mainstream literary publishing, whereas as Farras Drav’s Dreut was and still is right there in the center of it all. So what do you think are the benefits and tradeoffs of this new community?

Glenn: I think the benefits are pretty clear, and that is it gives young writers who are different from the mainstream voice, where they can publish their work and know that they have an audience that will understand.

I think the problems are more or less what Dana Gioia pointed out about poets back in the early nineties, and that is that they write for each other. They are not reaching out into the general public. The place of the poet, Gioia was arguing, is sort of guaranteed by fellowships and creative writing positions and readings. But in the general imagination, poetry has vanished. That's changed somewhat. But I worried that that will be the case with…

So there'll be a thriving subculture, but without the breakthrough that would really make a difference into the larger culture. I'm not sure how that happens. I think if you're not doing what Joshua and Dappled Things are doing, you don’t have a shot at all. So yeah. The better they get, the better the chance will be, I think.

Ryan: How would you compare the current Catholic literary moment to, say, 1956?

Glenn: There were some giants in 1956 who had had sort of made it through a difficult process to be able to speak as Catholics, as converts.

I mean, there were precedents obviously. The conversion of Elliot to Anglo Catholicism in 1927 opened a lot for his generation, the one after him.

I just sense that there was something in that post-World-War-II moment, when the evil of the world had been so evident, that made that particularly striking for that generation, in terms of what they were trying to accomplish as Catholics. I mean, Tate and others would complain about the Catholic establishment even then. “They just want me to write this.” So I don't know. But Percy and what Tate was doing in his essays in particular Gerald Gordon's work, Flannery O'Connor. I don't see anybody like that right now. Maybe I'm wrong. I hope I'm wrong.

Ryan: Do you know Laurus by Eugene Vodolazkin?

Glenn: Yeah. I love that. I love that book. Yeah.

Ryan: How would you place Laurus and the American literary tradition?

Glenn: Gosh, is he American?

Ryan: No, not at all. He's very Russian.

Glenn: I was going to say, “that's a Russian's a revelation,” right?

Yeah. I don't think anything like that's been written for us recently. I've been a little too busy here lately. I haven't read as much as I would have.

Do you have anything you think stands at that level?

Ryan: I think your son's play is very close to that. Different dimensions, but I remember Gregory Wolfe, maybe fifteen years ago, said that he was waiting for someone to write the American Christian novel of ideas. And I think that play has achieved that.

But I think Laurus just blows everything else away.

Glenn: There's nothing like it ever in recent years.

Ryan: Well, Glenn Arbery, thank you very much. It's been a pleasure.

Glenn: Well, it's been a pleasure for me. Thank you for doing this.