At Heaven's Gate

by Robert Penn Warren

At Heaven's Gate is a novel of violence, of human beings struggling against a fate beyond their power to alter, of corruption, and of honor. It is the story of Sue Murdock, the daughter of an unscrupulous speculator who has created a financial empire in the South, and the three men with whom she tries to escape the dominance of her father and her father's world. The background is the capital of a Southern state in the late twenties and the promoters and politicians, the aristocrats and poor whites, the labor organizers and the dispossessed farmers, the backwoods prophets and the university intellectuals who are drawn into its orbit. Warren's picture of the South is as fresh, dramatic, and powerful today as it was when the book was first published. Its plot structure is a tour de force.

From the jacket of the New Directions (1985) edition.

Genres: Fiction

400 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1943

About the author

Robert Penn Warren was an American poet, novelist, and literary critic and was one of the founders of New Criticism. He was also a charter member of the Fellowship of Southern Writers. He founded the literary journal The Southern Review with Cleanth Brooks in 1935. He received the 1947 Pulitzer Prize for the Novel for All the King's Men (1946) and the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry in 1958 and 1979. He is the only person to have won Pulitzer Prizes for both fiction and poetry.

Reviews

[Tim · Rating 4 out of 5]

As a trial run for the great one, "At Heaven's Gate" doesn't necessarily work miracles, but it knocks on the door.

"At Heaven's Gate" is remarkably assured for a second novel, with Robert Penn Warren's strengths (and weaknesses) all seemingly already in place. Warren's way with words is, of course, excellent, and if he doesn't tie the ending together all that well, and we might wonder about the motivations of a few characters, well, small price to pay.

There is no main character here; more like about a half-dozen sharing nearly equal billing. Consequently, there's not so much a flowing central plot as a series of smaller ones, basically strong character-illuminating sketches that more or less interweave.

"There's something horrible in everybody," a character says, "till they work it out. It looks like a man's got to boil the pus out." Well, I guess there's a lot of pus among these haunted characters.

We have Sue Murdock, troubled daughter of a speculator and lumber company owner, and Sue's succession of three suitors, one a labor negotiator; Sue becomes pregnant. There's also a war hero, Private Porsum, who comes to a crossroads. Then there's the affably cynical Duckfoot Blake providing nice juice to the story.

Some of the plot spins off a dubious land deal from Bogan Murdock, Sue's father, in which he deeds what turns out to be comparatively worthless land to the government (frankly, it's not explained very well). Near the end, a handful of folks find themselves in jail. But it's their tortured struggles on the way to getting there (and perhaps getting out) that drive the novel.

Alternating with the third-person approach for most of the novel are short chapters from the narrative of Ashby Wyndham, a simple country man who leaves his home and becomes "Christ-bit" as he tries to save his soul. These first-person passages told in an uneducated rural dialect work really well, reminiscent of William Faulkner's efforts of this type.

Warren's "All the King's Men," his next novel three years after this 1943 effort, towers over everything else he wrote, of course. But one can see it coming here. "At Heaven's Gate" doesn't have the greatest plot in the world, even among Warren's works, but it has punch and is well-written; a lot of this just sings. Put it among Warren's top four, of 10, novels.

This is the eighth Warren novel I've read so far; he's terribly underrated, in my opinion, not just the author of one masterpiece and a host of also-rans. That "All the King's Men" is likely to be the only Warren novel you'll see at any bookseller is a crying shame.

[Colleen Lynch · Rating 4 out of 5]

I loved this book. I'm in love with Robert Penn Warren's mastery of language and ability to get you into his world and care about his characters though they live such different lives than my own. Coming from the northeast I fell in a trance reading about the south, as I do in all his books set there, and I cannot wait to pick up another book by him when I have more time to read. I finished this over the summer and forgot to add it to my read shelf, but I swear this is the perfect summer read because it has depth, style, and heart. I'd recommend this to fans of real literature.

[Drew Norwood · Rating 5 out of 5]

"The pore human man, he ain't nuthin but a handful of dust, but the light of Gods face on him and he shines like a diamint . . . Dust, it lays on the floor, under the goin forth and the comin in, and ain't nuthin, and gits stirred up under the trompin, but a sunbeam come in the dark room and in that light it will dance and shine for heart joy."

At Heaven's Gate shows the cloud of dust and the "trompin" in a dark world where the lights have all but been shut-out. RPW's characters are full of yearning and emptiness and are left to consider: how does man define himself, how does he know himself, when his bearings are broken and the lights are out? While All the King's Men is set against the backdrop of political corruption, this prior novel (RPW's second) has economic corruption in the background. Its main themes seem to be: self-knowledge, identity, and transcendence.

As usual, Warren's chosen title is pregnant with meaning. “At Heaven’s Gate” is taken from Shakespeare's Sonnet 29:

When, in disgrace with fortune and men’s eyes,
I all alone beweep my outcast state,
And trouble deaf heaven with my bootless cries,
And look upon myself and curse my fate,
Wishing me like to one more rich in hope,
Featured like him, like him with friends possessed,
Desiring this man’s art and that man’s scope,
With what I most enjoy contented least;
Yet in these thoughts myself almost despising,
Haply I think on thee, and then my state,
(Like to the lark at break of day arising
From sullen earth) sings hymns AT HEAVEN’S GATE:
For thy sweet love remembered such wealth brings
That then I scorn to change my state with kings.

At Heaven's Gate is cast in the same mold as most RPW novels, including the interwoven side-story providing a reproach to the main struggle/action which in this novel is supplied by the Ashby Wyndham storyline, similar to Cass Mastern (All the Kings Men), and maybe to a lesser degree to Willie Proudfit (Night Rider) and Old Tom Barron (World Enough and Time). There is not one or two main characters but a cast of central characters, which I think hamstrings the overall story a bit. The novel includes two of the best portrayals of strength in meekness, the humble triumphing over the mighty, I’ve ever read (thinking of Ashby Wyndham's conversation with Private Porsum and Porsum's conversation with Bogan Murdock). It also includes what seems like RPW's own take on Shakespeare and self-knowledge: "Bacon wrote: Knowledge is power. Bacon was thinking of knowledge of the mechanisms of the external world. Shakespeare wrote: Self-knowledge is power. Shakespeare was thinking of the mechanisms of the spirit, to which the mechanisms of the external world, including other persons, are instruments."

[Dale Boyer · Rating 2 out of 5]

I’ve never felt so conflicted about a book before. I read it mainly because I love All the King’s Men (it is unquestionably one of the greatest American novels of the 20th century). This is Warren’s second novel, the one he wrote right before it, and you can see the themes that interested him percolating: the tension between the rich and the powerful, the political machinations, etc. But, it’s tremendously unfocused, dated, casually racist and homophobic (about these points, too, I can’t tell if Warren is guilty of them himself, satirizing them, merely presenting them as a fact of that world, or what). The first 2/3 of it are very tedious, I think because it focuses on the wrong people: Sue and Gerald Calhoun. Sue is an insufferable southern debutante and again, I can’t tell if Warren is expecting us to sympathize with her and her attempts to break out of the social conventions of the day. He certainly doesn’t make it easy to like her: she’s at times a nauseating southern belle, and at other times an emasculating harpy. George is a kind of everyman, who IS sympathetic as he gets sucked into the schemes of Sue’s father, but he’s just not that interesting, ultimately. Only in the last third of the novel, when we meet a character named Sweetwater, do the tensions and the themes (and even the writing) start to really perk up. It’s like Penn Warren has suddenly hit the vein that will prove so rich for his next novel. But, this is such a mixed bag, I honestly can’t say whether I’m glad I read it or not. It’s for true devotees of his work only, and would likely only interest people interested in seeing how his talents developed, where he made mistakes, etc. (For instance, never in the history of real life has anyone ever spoken for 12 solid pages without the slightest interruption from someone else). Otherwise, sorry to say, this is a melodramatic and lurid stew that never really quite comes together.

[Timothy Roessler · Rating 4 out of 5]

Mostly worthwhile hunk of American realism with extraordinary characters. It centers on a young woman’s quest to move out from under the domination of her milieu and especially her father. Warren savages the materialism of the 1920s and the greed and corruption that inevitably accompany that lust for money and power. A second narrative is built in to the book, a first-person account that would make a fine novella on its own. This is the novel that Warren wrote just before All the King’s Men, which I recently re-read and found every bit as masterful and brilliant as I did the first time. This novel doesn’t hit that mark, but it’s still a fine piece of work with some narrative twists and those amazing sentences that Warren rolls out. Some story elements are surprisingly like an old fashioned pot boiler, though. Finally, it is satisfyingly dark with an ending that harrows you and a scorching vision of an America rotting from the pursuit of false values.

[Sam Rennick · Rating 2 out of 5]

A wonderful portrait of place and time, namely the South in the early years of the 20th century. One expects this of Warren, and he delivers. The story, however, is far less satisfactory. The main character is a woman, Sue Murdock, who is grown but nevertheless a spoiled brat. She's daddy's little girl, and daddy has a big role in the book. Sue has several suitors who come and go as suits her fancy. This is not to say their roles in the story are akin to a cameo. No. They are developed characters. But the plot loses its way, which assumes it ever had one, and - almost as if he realizes this himself - Warren takes care of matters with a preposterous conclusion. It's laughably bad. Two stars might be generous.

[Christian Schwoerke · Rating 3 out of 5]

This state-of-the-nation novel is an overwrought and sometimes lurid depiction of the Depression-era South, in which the corrupt scions of the old antebellum aristocracy prey upon the ignorant and vulnerable working man, while “outsiders” offer intellectual/cultural or unionized/socialist options. The characters are largely symbolic personifications of the several influences affecting the future of Warren’s fictionalized Tennessee, which stands in for the entire South.

There is a fabulous and fairy tale quality to this novel, represented by the “princess” Sue Murdock, daughter of wealthy, corrupt land developer, Bogan Murdock, who has the State governor and others in his pocket. Sue Murdock is wooed in succession by a young former football great, then by a self-made artist, then by a union organizer. As the son of a former Confederate officer who pled “honor” as his defense for killing a rival politician, Bogan Murdock spends his life making this self-important notion of honor respectable, even as his daughter instinctively recoils at the hypocrisy.

Though the novel includes an inflamed racist lynch mob (whose actions are averted), there is little accounting for the South’s real dishonor: antebellum slavery, Reconstruction, and Jim Crow racism. The real dishonor of the South was not just the entitlement of a slave- and land-owning aristocracy, it was the corruption of everyone to believe that their elevation depended on the semi-feudal stratification of society, where merchant class and white trash whites were themselves ennobled by their elevation over the black slaves they deemed sub-human.

[Bone2Pick · Rating 3 out of 5]

~3.5 Stars~

[Andrew · Rating 3 out of 5]

Dark, grim and strangely absorbing book about the South in the 1920s. Half domestic drama, half narrative of corruption. Didn't like it quite as well as All the King's Men but its recognizably Warren. Interesting to compare with the John Fox Jr. books - the Appalachian portions of this book are quite similar to Fox's stories. Overall, a memorable read.

[Ramsey · Rating 3 out of 5]

Robert Penn Warren's writing is mostly brilliant, and he creates some really great characters. The book has some flaws, a few places where actions or motivations don't quite jive with otherwise well crafted characterization. But it's a great read if you like dense, Southern prose and Warren's typical exploration of corruption that bleeds freely from the financial and political to the personal and moral.

[Kate · Rating 2 out of 5]

Ehh...this one was OK. Nowhere near as good as All the King's Men.