From the Dictionary of Midwestern Literature Volume 2 published by IU Press July 27, 2016
RAINTREE COUNTY
Set
in a fictionalized Indiana county, Raintree County (1948),
the only novel by ROSS (FRANKLIN) LOCKRIDGE JR. (1914-1948),
narrates the life of John Wickliff Shawnessy through a series
of flashbacks prompted by events within the passing of a single
day, July 4, 1892. A small-town schoolteacher and aspiring writer,
fifty-three-year-old Shawnessy relives his own life, deeply embedded
in the larger historical events and cultural forces of nineteenth-century
America. Though most of the 1,060-page novel was written in the
East, when Lockridge was supposedly writing a Harvard doctoral
dissertation on Whitman, the principal setting is the Midwest.
Many of the characters have counterparts in Lockridge's mother's
forbears, and Raintree County itself is modeled on Henry County,
INDIANA, where they were born, raised, and lived out most of
their lives. The novel is structured around the celebratory homecoming
to Waycross of notable Raintree County denizens who have made
their fame beyond its borders: a United States senator, a railroad
magnate, an army general, and a columnist for THE DIAL.
Only Shawnessy, still obscure, is living in the county of his
origin.
Lockridge
hand-delivered the unsolicited twenty-pound manuscript in a battered
suitcase to a junior editor at Houghton Mifflin, Boston, on April
24, 1946, the day before his thirty-second birthday. Just as
it was about to be rejected, two friends with Houghton Mifflin
connections convinced senior editors to take a look. Generating
much in-house enthusiasm, the novel was accepted on May 27. Lockridge
immediately resigned a $2,500 teaching position at Simmons College
and moved with his wife and four children to a lakeshore cottage
in Manistee, MICHIGAN, where he undertook an extensive revision.
During this period he renewed ties with his cousin, Mary Jane
Ward (1905-1981), author of the best-selling novel, The Snake
Pit (1946), based on her incarceration for mental illness
at Rockland State Hospital, New York. He also engaged in a bitter
contract dispute with his publisher and visited Hollywood.
Not
unlike Shawnessy himself but no longer obscure, Lockridge returned
to his hometown Bloomington, Indiana with his family in time
for the much-heralded publication of Raintree County on
January 5, 1948, the same day fellow Bloomingtonian Alfred Kinsey
published Sexual Behavior in the Human Male. The novel
had already been excerpted as "The Great Footrace,"
in the September 8, 1947 issue of Life magazine (108-27).
It was the main selection of Book-of-the-Month Club, had secured
a very lucrative movie contract with MGM, and had sold out a
pre-publication edition of 50,000 copies. On March 6, 1948, just
as his novel reached the top of the New York Times best-seller
list, Lockridge took his own life by carbon monoxide poisoning
in the family garage. He was thirty-three years old.
The
initial popularity of the novel owed much to the post-war letdown
and a widely felt need throughout America for renewal of its
cultural mission in a world that had witnessed the Holocaust
and Hiroshima and was then settling into the Cold War. Many early
reviews of Raintree County emphasized its idealism, vitality,
anchorage in American history, and affirmation of American values.
But the novel was also deemed controversial for its eroticism
and blasphemy. In the prepublication run, Jerusalem Webster Stiles,
a Mephistophelean character, remarks, "Nature puts no premium
on chastity. My God, where would the human race be if it weren't
for the bastards? Wasn't Jesus God's? Pass the perfectos, John"
(152, 1994 edition). In the remaining first edition run, the
Book-of-the-Month Club edition, and all subsequent printings
until 1994, "Wasn't Jesus God's?" was deleted. Prominently
condemned by a Jesuit professor at Fordham, the novel was seized
in late March, 1948 by the Philadelphia vice squad in bookstores
throughout the city. Houghton Mifflin won an injunction against
further seizures and eventually prevailed in United States District
Court (Houghton Library, Ross Lockridge, Jr. Correspondence and
Documents).
The
title Raintree County is familiar to Americans more for
the movie version MGM released in 1957 than for the novel itself.
Frequently shown on television, the movie-directed by Edward
Dmytryk, with a screenplay by Millard Kaufman, and starring Elizabeth
Taylor, Montgomery Clift, and Eva Marie Saint-bears slight resemblance
to the novel, whose length has limited any potential for college
course adoption. Though it has occasioned a fair number of critical
essays and one monograph, Raintree County has had to date
few serious readers in academe and has been on the fringe of
the American canon.
Lockridge's
ambition was encyclopedic, and the resulting novel might best
be termed "encyclopedic" in Northrop Frye's sense of
a work that attempts to embody the life cycle and culture of
a people. It explicitly incorporates a large number of well-known
works, from the Bible, Oedipus Rex, and The Republic
to Uncle Tom's Cabin, the Gettysburg Address, Leaves
of Grass, and The Golden Bough. The plot is based
on Hawthorne's short story, "The Great Stone Face."
Its single-day framework comes from Joyce's Ulysses-though
unlike Joyce's novel the flashbacks are fully narrated episodes.
Lockridge felt that Joyce's novel, which he deeply admired in
other respects, was inaccessible to the common reader. "The
emotions are there, but not for the reader, who is too busy deciphering."
(This comment, as well as all comments below on Midwestern writers,
is taken from Lockridge's unpublished notes made on his reading,
ca. 1939-1943.) Lockridge attempted a polyphony of voices, prose
styles, and subgenres, but early critics heard mostly Thomas
Wolfe. Having read the southern novelist, Lockridge disliked
this comparison because of what he took to be Wolfe's egotism
and formlessness. He thought of his novel as epic, even cosmic,
and was dismayed when Hamilton Basso in The New Yorker treated
it as the raw produce of a Hoosier hick, mistakenly calling him
"Lockwood" throughout.
Lockridge
did pay his respects to Midwestern writers, taking notes on his
reading of them as he geared up to write American Lives,
an earlier 2,000-page manuscript he began in 1941. He abruptly
turned it over one summer evening in 1943 and started writing
Raintree County on the other side. American Lives,
of which some two hundred pages survive on versos of the fragmentary
Raintree County manuscript, was set in twentieth-century
instead of nineteenth-century Henry County. It was more single-mindedly
agrarian and small-town than Raintree County, which has
portions set in New York City, Philadelphia, Washington, D.C.,
Indianapolis, New Orleans, and many Southern sites associated
with the Civil War.
For
American Lives he opportunistically read The Story
of a County Town (1883), by EDGAR WATSON HOWE (1853-1937),
calling that work, "A punk book, without even the historical
importance generally ascribed to it." He wrote ten pages
of non-judgmental notes on A Son of the Middle Border (1917)
by (HANNIBAL) HAMLIN GARLAND (1860-1940) and plot summaries of
the stories in WINESBURG, OHIO (1919) by SHERWOOD ANDERSON
(1876-1941). Of (HARRY) SINCLAIR LEWIS's (1885-1951) MAIN
STREET (1920) he commented: "An American version of
Madame Bovary, but lacking the intensity and classic effect
of Flaubert's masterpiece."
Responses
to other Midwestern writers suggest that Lockridge rarely felt
they lived up to the ambitions he had set for himself. He thought
An American Tragedy (1925) by (HERMAN) THEODORE DREISER
(1871-1945) "very impressive, though the reader is nearly
drugged to sleep in the first few hundred pages. Style and artistic
presentation as bad as ever . . . A very depressing book."
Of The Bridge of San Luis Rey (1927), by THORNTON (NIVEN)
WILDER (1897-1975) he wrote, "Certainly a second-rate book
and scarcely worth the popularity it has attained." Of Oil!
(1927) by UPTON (BEALL) SINCLAIR (1878-1968). He wrote, "The
usual strong socialist doctrine. Artistically weak . . . but
a noble book, and of course on the right side."
Lockridge
had a higher estimate of U.S.A. (collected 1938) by JOHN
(RODERIGO) DOS PASSOS (1896-1970), writing a lengthy impassioned
defense of the novel when he ran into trouble at Simmons College
for assigning portions to female undergraduates. Among Midwestern
works, U.S.A. had the single greatest influence on Raintree
County, more for its journalistic and cinematic techniques
than for its literary sensibility. Not much taken by Faulkner,
Lockridge read most of ERNEST (MILLER) HEMINGWAY (1899-1961)
up through For Whom the Bell Tolls (1940), admiring the
"tough, honest writing" and dialogue. He envied Hemingway
for his war experience. Declared 4-F for the draft, Lockridge
wrote to his publisher that "while the Republic was bleeding,
I hid behind a thousand skirts and let J. W. S. bleed for me
all over the thousands of MS. pages of Raintree County."
He fought World War II from his writing desk.
Apart
from growing up in it, Lockridge's greatest debt to Midwestern
culture came by way of his parents. Ross Sr. (1877-1952) was
known throughout the state as "Mr. Indiana," a state
historian who wrote middle-school biographies of George Rogers
Clark, ABRAHAM LINCOLN (1809-1865), and the standard textbook
of Indiana history. He was better known for his "Historic
Site Recitals," in which he told stories of the famous dead
and orated their words on the very spot where great events had
taken place. As a boy and high school student, Ross Jr. participated
in these recitals and other historical pageants arranged by his
father. But he began to chafe at the tasks his father set for
him and, in time, developed a more critical view of American
history.
He
had small interest in the Lockridge side of the family and found
his main character Shawnessy in his maternal grandfather, John
Wesley Shockley (1839-1907), a Hoosier schoolmaster who wrote
belletristic poetry and dreamt of a larger life. Lockridge dedicated
his novel to his mother, Elsie Shockley (1880-1961), who told
him many stories of her Henry County childhood and of her revered
father, who had died seven years before Ross Jr. was born.
Lockridge's
mysterious suicide, which prompted a spate of editorials, encouraged
darker readings that emphasized the novel's pervasive sense of
loss. Its critical stance toward racism and slavery, as America's
"original sin," toward commercialism from the Gilded
Age on, and toward a loss of mythic consciousness began to lead
some critics to find in it the makings of cultural critique.
Lockridge unabashedly attempted the Great American Novel. His
novel has twice been termed at least the "Great American
Studies Novel"-by Joel M. Jones in "The Presence of
the Past in the Heartland: Raintree County Revisited"
in Myth, Memory, and the American Earth, edited by David
D. Anderson, 53; and by Charles Trueheart, "The Great American
Studies Novel" in the September 1994 Atlantic Monthly,
105-11.
The
novel's dominant themes of homecoming, attachment to the land,
eros, time and mortality, memorials, racism, FEMINISM, politics,
war, religion, and the power of myth are large and perennial
at the same time that they are anchored in nineteenth-century
Midwestern culture. Asked by his publisher for promotional material,
he wrote in July 1947 that, among other large aims, he wished
to "embody in fiction a profound analysis of the social,
anthropological, and sexual characteristics of Nineteenth Century
American life" and to "provide a living document of
the religious and political 'rites' of the American People"
(Houghton Library, Ross Lockridge, Jr. Correspondence and Documents).
Raintree County is an album of Midwestern county fairs,
grand patriotic programs, revival meetings, county atlases, courthouse
and marketplace culture, footraces, saloons, picnics, buggy rides,
rough country weddings, temperance dramas, and outdoor sex. Lockridge
spent untold hours in the journalistic archives of the Boston
Public Library, reading old newspapers of Henry County and environs
to get a better sense of the immediacy of events, both local
and national. He revisited the old family sites in Henry and
Miami counties with a historian's passion for repossession of
the past. He read the manuscripts of his grandfather Shockley's
poetry and pondered the Illustrated Historical Atlas of Henry
County (1875).
John
Wickliff Shawnessy is the rememberer, but one so weighed by the
past that he cannot get on with the epic he has in mind to write.
Jerusalem Webster Stiles, the "Perfessor," tells Shawnessy
that the past cannot be repossessed, sadly so since "all
lovely things are old things." And all myths of homecoming
are myths of death. The Perfessor enters into philosophical dialogue
with Shawnessy in the "Day" sequences throughout the
novel. He himself had left Raintree County for the East after
the death of his mother, then returned as a philologist and classicist,
heading up Pedee Academy where Shawnessy became his student.
Learning the trade as a war correspondent, the Perfessor then
becomes a successful Eastern journalist. The novel's large element
of classical allusion sustains Lockridge's evocation of nineteenth-century
Midwestern classicism, whose gentility attempted to civilize
rubes by means of extracts from Cicero and Virgil. While he's
a Hermes-figure, a messenger of the gods spreading such culture,
the Perfessor is also a skeptic and debunker of the very myths
he peddles. He is deeply anti-Christian. His dark humor owes
something to the writings of SAMUEL LANGHORNE CLEMENS (1835-1910),
writing as Mark Twain, which Lockridge was teaching at Simmons
College. Clemens's Gilded Age (1873) influenced the novel's
"City section."
Shawnessy
amicably counters with the values, convictions, and dreams of
an American romantic visionary. Much of what he says and feels
has its source in eros and worship of the land. Raintree County
has been called an "ecological novel" by Fred Erisman,
in his "Raintree County and the Power of Place"
in Markham Review 8 (Winter 1979): 36-40. The Great Swamp,
the Shawmucky River, the Raintree, and even Danwebster graveyard-overrun
by myrtle, wild carrot, blackberries, and poison ivy-affirm the
continuance of life amid tragic loss. Nell Gaither, Shawnessy's
first doomed love, is seen by him rising naked from the Shawmucky,
suddenly transformed from a fig-leafed Eve into a seductive Venus.
The Shawmucky, whose original is Miami County's Eel River, the
Kenapocomoco, is symbolic of the male life force just as the
Great Swamp is female. That the eponymous Raintree, symbol of
fecundity, renewal, and beauty, actually exists in Raintree County
is only a legend Shawnessy would like to believe. There is no
doubt raintrees exist in New Harmony, Indiana, site of two early-nineteenth-century
utopian experiments. In his mid-twenties, for fifty dollars,
as arranged by his father, Ross Jr. had written A Pageant
of New Harmony (1937), some thirteen hundred lines of blank
verse. He was ashamed of this work and did not attend the performance,
but material produced under coercion fed later into his representation
of the erotic life. It is under the raintree in the Great Swamp
that Shawnessy loses his virginity to Susanna Drake, his second
doomed love, a Southern woman haunted by the probability that
she is the daughter of a mulatto.
Throughout,
the erotic life is hedged in by hoopskirts and disrupted by death,
but erotic yearning persists. "Raintree County was itself
the barrier of form imposed upon a stuff of longing, life-jet
of the river" (116). Having lived through tragic loss, the
Civil War, and a thwarting of professional ambition, Shawnessy
settles down with his second wife and three children in a Victorian
gingerbread house. His wife Esther, a former student and part-Native
American, always addresses him as "Mr. Shawnessy."
Eros has been domesticated but lives on in the strong current
of feeling that dominates even the Day episodes.
Beyond
eros, Shawnessy argues another value against the Perfessor's
clever, affable pessimism: the constructive power of myth. Shawnessy's
own life has borne out the truth of the old stories. In beating
frontier braggart Flash Perkins in the great Raintree County
footrace, he lives out James Frazer's thesis that one hero will
usurp another, often killing him. In having sex with Susanna
under the raintree and paying quite a price, he lives out the
truth of Genesis. In coming home from the war after being reported
dead, he lives out the story of Lazarus. In being almost tarred
and feathered by a righteous mob near the end of the Day section,
he lives out the myth of Christ. The old stories still have power
over us, but they need to be remembered and recited, and Lockridge,
not unlike his father, recites them in his novel.
The
Perfessor laments, "I wish I could believe in sacred places.
. . . But beauty and the gods can't survive the era of Darwin
and the Dynamo" (912). Shawnessy disagrees, drawing on a
tradition of cultural humanism that Lockridge is implicitly tapping
into: from Vico and Schiller to Carlyle and Emerson, and anticipating
Northrop Frye's "myth of freedom." New myth-makers
are much needed. We think up our institutions, and, as Schiller
had argued, it is only through the strong imaginings of aesthetic
culture that a new politics is possible. As America's representative
"dreamer," Shawnessy sees at the day's conclusion the
possibility of a new Republic that will connect with America's
original promise. Whether he will now be able to write the great
epic of the American people is unresolved, but in a real sense
Lockridge has attempted to write it for him.
Shawnessy's
is, of course, a fragile idealism that post-1892, not to mention
post-1948, history has not treated kindly. Where is the evidence
that "courageous dreamers" are prevailing? But for
the duration of his novel's composition, Lockridge tried to believe
Shawnessy was getting the better of the argument with the Perfessor.
Subsequent
writers have rarely acknowledged a Raintree County influence.
Pablo Neruda (1904-1973) mentions Lockridge in a 1948 poem, "Que
despierte el leñador." Lynne Doyle's The Riddle
of Genesis County (1958) is an explicit brief adaptation.
Paradise Falls (1968) by DON ROBERTSON (1929-1999) parallels
Raintree County in some respects and was initially publicized
with references to the novel. John (Hoyer) Updike (1932-2009)
has on occasion referred to it, as in In the Beauty of the
Lilies (1996). Thomas Mallon (b. 1951) makes Lockridge's
suicide a leitmotiv in Dewey Defeats Truman (1997),
but his narrator is critical of Raintree County itself.
Tears of the Mountain (2010) by John Addiego (b. 1951)
is a direct homage, utilizing a single day, July 4, 1876, with
flashbacks beginning in 1831, and set in Sonoma County, California;
it makes use also of the technique of one chapter leading linguistically
into the next. Some important novelists and poets have indicated
to this writer a felt, if indirect, influence: for instance,
Herman Wouk (b. 1915), Marguerite (Vivian) Young (1908-1995),
Thomas (Michael) Keneally (b. 1935), Philip D. Appleman (b. 1926),
and Joseph (Prince) McElroy (b. 1930). Edna Rydzik Buchanan (b.
1939), a Pulitzer Prize winning novelist-journalist, has said
that Raintree County is her all-time favorite novel, but
her own genre is crime fiction.
MGM/Turner
has thus far blocked many initiatives by producers for a new
film adaptation. Lockridge reserved only live stage rights in
his confining 1947 contract with MGM; and all attempts at operatic,
musical, and dramatic adaptation have failed as of this writing.
Raintree
County was initially published by Houghton Mifflin in 1948.
Concurrently, a Book-of-the-Month edition was issued. In 1949,
a British hardcover was published by Macdonald. In connection
with the MGM movie, a paperback was released in 1957 by Popular
Library, and an abridged version by Dell. The novel was issued
in a 1984 Arbor House paperback with a preface by Joseph Blotner.
Book-of-the-Month Club printed a facsimile hardcover edition
in 1992. The 1994 Penguin Books paperback, edited by Larry Lockridge,
corrected a few typos and restored the censored words, "Isn't
Jesus God's?" A new edition of Raintree County was
published by Chicago Review Press in 2007; it features a notable
foreword by Herman Wouk. Raintree County has been translated,
in abridged form, into Japanese, Spanish, Dutch, German, French,
and three Scandinavian languages, Norwegian, Swedish, and Finnish.
The
first book-length study of Lockridge's novel is Fred Waage's
Raintree County: The Foremost American Environmental
Novel: uncovering the Deep Message of an Undervalued Text (2011).
This volume was published with a foreword by Barbara Stedman
by the Edwin Mellen Press in 2011. Other extended discussions
include Larry Lockridge's "The Author in the Epic,"
chapter 8 of Shade of the Raintree: The Life and Death of
Ross Lockridge, Jr. (1994), 271-309. DAVID D(ANIEL) ANDERSON
(1924-2011) has edited two collections of critical essays: Myth,
Memory, and the American Earth: The Durability of Raintree County
(1998), with essays by Ray Lewis White, Gerald D. Nemanic,
Joel M. Jones, Park Dixon Goist, Dean Rehberger, Douglas A. Noverr,
David D. Anderson, and Larry Lockridge; and Midwestern Miscellany
26 (Spring 1998), with new essays by some of these critics
as well as essays by Patricia Ward Julius and Theodore R. Kennedy.
See also Twentieth-Century Literary Criticism 109 (2001),
316-74. Raintreecounty.com, maintained by Ross Lockridge, III,
contains many manuscript materials, photographs, and links to
other sites. The small portion of the original Raintree County
manuscript that Lockridge did not burn is in the Lilly Library,
Indiana University. In late 2011 the four Lockridge heirs-Ernest,
Larry, Jeanne, and Ross, III-donated forty-seven organized cartons
of Ross Lockridge, Jr.'s papers and related materials to the
Lilly Library. Containing 75,000 items, the archive is inventoried
in a two-volume 457-page descriptive bibliography, compiled by
Larry Lockridge, available in the reference room at the Lilly
Library, which has also made it available online. An inventory
can be found on the Lilly Library website: www.indiana.edu/~liblilly/,
see Lockridge mss. III. This archive and other Ross Lockridge,
Jr. papers are available without restriction to scholars and
critics. An exhibition, "Raintree County: A Celebration
of the Life and Work of Ross Lockridge, Jr," containing
about 300 items from the Ross Lockridge, Jr. Collection, occupied
the Main Gallery of the Lilly Library, January 21 through May
19, 2014, marking the centennial of the author's birth. In conjunction
with this exhibition, Indiana University Press reissued Larry
Lockridge's Shade of the Raintree, with a new preface
by the author. For a fuller bibliographical
survey, consult The Dictionary of Midwestern Literature
l (2001): 328-29.
LARRY LOCKRIDGE
NEW YORK UNIVERSITY
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