Seventh Biennial Conference of the
Association for the Study of Literature and Environment (ASLE)
"Confluence: literature / art / criticism / science / activism / politics"
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Ross Lockridge, Jr., son of the prolific
unofficial state historian of Indiana, spent the years 1941 to
1947 writing one of the longest U.S. novels ever published, Raintree
County (1948), whose main setting is the heart of the state
he knew so intimately. Most folks I've talked to about Raintree
County, if they are familiar with it at all, know it from
the 1957 film version starring Elizabeth Taylor and Montgomery
Clift--a disastrous foreshortening--or because of sensation:
its author committed suicide a month after its publication. The
novel has been reissued only once since 1948: by Penguin Books
in 1994, along with a powerful and moving memoir by his son Larry,
Shade of the Raintree. But these two have also retreated
from print, although, according to Ross III's website, Chicago
Review Press is about to reissue it with a preface by Herman
Wouk.
In my fifteen minutes here, I'd like to share with you the basic
argument of the text I'm writing, whose working title is Seed
of the Raintree: Raintree County and 1950's Environmental Writing,
and offer an incentive to explore what I believe, although the
claim may seem outrageous to some, to be the greatest U.S. environmental
novel of the 20th century.
Raintree County fuses the discordant aesthetics of Thomas
Wolfe and James Joyce to epicize one day in a fictional rural
county at the heart of the U.S.--July 4, 1891. Through a complex
structure that is both sensuous and self-referential, the events
of this day, from dawn to dusk, are interwoven with previous
events in the life of the county the country, and the protagonist,
Johnny Shawnessy, from Election Day, 1844 to the 1891 present.
Lockridge got his county's name from the Eastern hemisphere trees
planted by the residents of the ill-fated Owenite utopian community
New Harmony. His father wrote many books about New Harmony and
he knew it well, touring the site with fellow Indiana "ecyclopedic"
novelist Marguerite Young, for her history Angel in the Forest:
A Fairy Tale of Two Utopias (1945). The quest for, and failure
of, utopia--whether it be political, geographical, ecosystemic,
gendered--roots many of the novel's branching meanings.
Environmentalist Ross Lockridge III, according to his brother,
reads Raintree County as "environmental prophecy;"
Larry Lockridge considers it a work of "prophetic memory."
It is this paradox, in which the past national, regional, and
local environments are recreated to enlighten the present and
suggest the future, that I feel connects the novel with so much
imaginative writing in the subsequent decade--between Sand
County Almanac and Silent Spring. Ross Jr., himself,
characterized it as appearing "at the outset of the Atomic
Age. . .[as] a nostalgic farewell to the America in which so
much began that is sublime and tragic in the democratic tradition."
Thus Lockridge sites his (mainly) post-Civil War novel at a point
in the U.S. present analogous to the Civil War's aftermath, a
dawning world of ostentatious materialism, urbanization, technological
overdevelopment, environmental destruction, and death of myth
and ritual tying humans to the earth. Larry Lockridge tells me
that since the bulk of his father's novel was written before
the end of the war, the postwar typologies are not too credible.
I feel, however, that as a deep emulator of Whitman, poet and
prophet, he was, even mid-war, knowing his country would never
be the same afterwards, and writing his own view of "democratic
vistas," as were so many political economists, sociologists,
and students of international affairs in the 1940's. In fact,
a term of art for postwar prophecy at the time was "reconstruction,"
as in Elton Trueblood's Foundations for Reconstruction
and Karl Loewenstein's Political Reconstruction.
The decade+ following 1948 was one of what Michael Barbour calls
"ecological fragmentation," a complicated period when
U.S. material prosperity was vociferously championed and bewailed,
and newly-acquired economic security went hand in hand with devastating
nuclear fear. It was this oft-neglected decade of environmental
literature and history which saw the painful birth of environmental
activism in the sense we think of it now, particularly in public
response to specific threats like the Donora smog incident and
the Echo Park Dam controversy, and the more general threat provided
by cold war nuclearism. Also, "Immediately after the war,"
says Barbour, "holism in ecology and in life became unfashionable.
Ecologists experience fragmentation, revolution, rebellion, as
well as growth in their science." In particular, Barbour's
ecologist interviews suggest a paradigm shift during this decade
"from a taxonomic view of ecology to a functional view--that
is, from a community-centered science to an ecosystem-centered
one." This seems to describe a movement away from studying
natural entities separately, and toward recognizing they can
be accurately perceived only as contingent on others--e.g. the
systems ecology of Eugene and Howard Odum. Lockridge's novel
presents such a doubleness of cultural fragmentation and ecosystemic
interdependence throughout its course.
What do the above changes have to do with Raintree County's
heritage? The reader of 1950's environmental writing will find
in fiction a proliferation of stories about, or set in the time
of, small-town agrarianism, filled with the presence of nature,
and many, fiction and nonfiction, amid "small town renaissances."
Flourishing postapocalyptic fiction created a counterpart to
this kind of predictive nostalgia: a technologically-destroyed
world reverts to a "state of nature." Bioregionalism
like Lockridge's was a dominant feature of nonfiction also--the
rediscovery of distinct traditional natural/cultural spaces,
or the probing of new ones--Alaska, Hawaii, and the "new"
Florida. The urban environment was chronicled and bewailed, and,
ironically, many writers drove the steadily enhancing road system
to chronicle U.S. natural and cultural diversity. Many novels
chronicled the damming of rivers, at the same time volumes in
the Rivers of America series were eagerly perused.
A major presence in Raintree County is the undammed Shawmucky
River, whose mysterious, dangerous, and female presence flows
organically through the square county and through the novel's
entire geometry. Johnny Shawnessy comes to maturity beside (and
almost drowns in) the river, "a place of archaic lifeforms
and primitive sounds," where he can be "free...from
the geometry of fences, roads, and railroads...." The river's
antitype is U.S. 40, the totally straight National Road that
bisects the country. The Shawmucky flows to and through Paradise
Lake, in an erotic topography slowly being overlaid by commercialization,
represented by the straight lines of roads and railroads.
The railroad can be seen as representing technological invasion
of natural space. Lockridge is no anti-Crononite before the fact.
He does present the evolution of Raintree County as a series
of invasions, the invaders becoming natives. The only Native
American name left in the county is the river's. (Incidentally,
another important theme is that of naming, and its power to reduce
nature to human cultural construction: "Let there be only
the earth, which does not weep or have vanity. Let there be only
the earth and the nameless memories that the flesh has. Does
the frog have a name? Would it make the green frog happier to
know that he is frog? Only the namers have names; only the bald
mammals with the adroit hands write names on stones"). But
the railroad is qualitatively different from earlier invasions.
Johnny's ambitious classmate, Cash Carney, propounds the destructive
industrialism enabled by the railroad: "The [civil] war
is changing our ideas. We're learning how to do Big Things. The
railroad and Northern industry are coming into their own."
But to Johnny the train "doesn't know the land it passes
over," it "wounds" the earth of Raintree County.
Probably the most frequently used word in the novel is "earth."
Earth, not "the Earth," fills every cranny of the novel.
"What made the earth of Raintree County? Who holds up the
earth?" Lockridge's earth is gendered as female; the human
constructions which overlay it--names, political boundaries,
transit routes, even habitations--are created by a male consciousness
holding the illusion of control; control of the earth that in
turn represents control or denial of human inevitability--death,
the return to the earth. The human tool pierces the earth for
two main purposes: growing food and burial of the dead. Thus
Raintree County is filled with fertile fields and graveyards.
The earth of Raintree County is also "the central, streamdivided
earth of America" in microcosm, which is why the Civil War's
cultural presence is so important. In many different ways the
novel uses the Civil War to investigate American identity from
an environmental viewpoint. Whatever its causes, the war was
fought over boundaries, possession of the American earth, possession
whose achievement the author posits as male fantasy. Johnny Shawnessy
is on Sherman's march through Georgia, and witnesses vividly
the environmental destruction wrought by this temporal dividing
line of pillage. On the other hand, his marriage to Susannah
Drake of Louisiana, and their wedding trip there, reveal inherent
regional differences, both cultural and natural, so deeply rooted
that they undermine any sense of a unitary America. These unities
and fragmentations of the republic are one element of the mystery
that Johnny, and perhaps his creator, as would-be national laureates,
seek unsuccessfully to plumb.
*
Much midcentury literature of environmental nostalgia uses the
immanence of wars, as Lockridge did the Civil War, as a device
of contrast to create a preservationist view of place, region,
native earth. Therefore, much of the creative environmental writing
of the late 1940's and1950's contains characters who experience,
onstage or off, wars which affect their consciousness or their
own physical being. In many cases, retrospective novelists evoke
World War I; others, of course, World War II or the unimaginable
nuclear World War III. The fragility and beauty of the earth
is impressed on those who have experienced or imagined its destruction.
Environmentalist and Wilderness Society co-founder Harvey Broome
writes in 1957 "Every time I go to the mountains I tremble
for their security," yet "preoccupation with possible
war is coming between me and constructive activity. . ."
For example, two 1950's novels of place, bearing their places
as their titles, juxtapose harmonious environment and war. Paul
Darcy Boles's Glenport, Illinois (1956), describes the
natural presences in and around an Illinois town as the protagonist,
Tone, grows up and through adolescence. Only at the end, in the
spoken memory of a friend, do we find this sensitive young man
whose growing nature awareness we have shared deeply, has been
killed in World War II. Similarly, in what probably is
the longest published U.S. novel, Madison Cooper's Sironia,
Texas, 1700 pages (1957), World War I punctuates and redirects
the complex urban environment Cooper has modeled on Waco, Texas--his
Texas city as human ecosystem being an ironic commentary on the
open spaces of 1950's Texas oil literature.
Lockridge's kind of bioregionalism is central to many other environmental
fictions of the postwar years. Examples: in My World is An
Island (1950) novelist Elizabeth Ogilvie recreates Criehaven,
her Maine island "not so much in a geographical sense but
in a spiritual sense, for I can carry it with me wherever I go,"
despite the recent world war, "too close for a joke."
She even suggests creating a Maine community of environmental
writers that would include Elizabeth Coatesworth, her husband
Henry Beston, and Louise Dickinson Rich, author of much creative
nonfiction on nature, notably the bestselling We Took to the
Woods (1941). Bernice Harris's Wild Cherry Tree Road
(1951) is set in an ecotonal village, Pate's Siding, where human
community and wild community, while separate, interpenetrate;
Harris emphasizes that the neighborhoods, and family enclaves,
that compose the community function by analogy to ecosystems,
subregions, "a world of neighborhoods, each with a flavor
and clannishness of its own," where "the line between
tame and wild was too indefinite, and a man never knew when he
had killed a neighbor's turkey." In this period Georgia
novelist Vinnie Williams wrote four wonderful novels in which
humans are enlaced with the natural world as much as with their
own kind. Walk Egypt (1960) has, among others, one of
Raintree County's main concerns, the problematic relationship
between faith and nature, and in particular, Protestant Christianity's
separation from the "pagan" worship of nature as spiritual.
The female protagonist, Toy, listening to spirituals, thinks,
"They always got to have blood. . .She turned and walked
off. Birds were coming back; a heron waded in the shallows and
stabbed snails. A water-thrush teetered along, toes longer than
heels." George R. Stewart in Sheep Rock (1954), makes
a fictionalized Black Rock, Nevada, the protagonist, one which
endures through ecological change and changing, ephemeral, dramas
of human community. Even Edward Abbey's autobiographical first
novel, Jonathan Troy (1954), focusing on pubescent angst,
is set amid the vividly described bioregion of western Pennsylvania:
"a vision of that home which he had never seen: A dim
road. . .an old wagon trail curving, winding slowly, dust-colored,
among giant boulders shaded purple in the shade, golden in the
light . . ."
1950's nonfiction environmental writing is no less involved with
the questions that impassion Lockridge's novel. Many urbanologists
(such as Jane Jacobs) followed Lewis Mumford's lead in criticizing
the growing concentration of population and what we would now
call "urban sprawl" as fatally linked to a machine-dominated
culture. A great generic array of texts formed what I call the
literature of rustication: memoirs of (literal versus literary)
"escapes from" urbs and suburbia to a great array of
non-urban spaces--farms, woodlands, remote parts of the U.S.A.
Satiric fiction and nonfiction held "suburbs" and suburbanites
up to ridicule (John Keats's The Crack in the Picture Window)
or critical analysis (A.K. Mezerik's The Exurbanites).
What we now call environmental history began to engage expositorily
the relationship of Americans to their earth and its nonhuman
inhabitants as Lockridge did rhetorically in the famous dialogues
between Johnny Shawnessy and his alter ego, the Perfesser, Jerusalem
Webster Stiles (eg. Henry Nash Smith's Virgin Land, Bernard
DeVoto's The Course of Empire). Perhaps most important
in perpetuating Lockridge's "lyrical ecology" were
the widely-read writers of "creative nonfiction" about
nature, led, of course, by Aldo Leopold and Rachel Carson (who
seems, from Linda Lear's biography, to have known almost all
the others). These are the environmental writers who, as Harvey
Broome says, "fuse sentiment with knowledge:" Edwin
Way Teale, Sally Carrighar, Henry Beston, Louis Bromfield, Hal
Borland, Donald Culross and Roderick Peattie, Roy Bedichek, Loren
Eiseley, Sigurd Olson, and countless others.
In the shadow of the bomb, many of these writers were motivated
by an urge to cautionary reassurance, but even when writing in
celebration, their work, like that of the novelists of nostalgia,
implied a warning to take notice of how what they celebrated
was threatened. As Johnny reflects at the end of the epic he
didn't write: "A vast unrest was in the earth. The Valley
of Humanity was turbulent with changing forms. The immense dream
trembled on a point of night and nothingness and threatened explosion".
Lockridge would agree with philosopher Holmes Rolston that "we
have misread our life support system." But the efforts to
read it right, expanding as the map of misreading also expands,
are indebted to the spirit of Lockridge's earth-reading and can
be enlightened today by reading his unparalleled work of environmental
fiction.
Fred Waage is professor of English at East Tennessee State University having received his Ph.D. in English and French at Princeton (1971). He has taught at Northwestern, Cal State L.A., Douglass College & College Misericordia and was junior research associate at the Huntington Library and on the staff of Friends of the Earth. Professor Waage's extensive publications and conference presentations include poetry, fiction, and critical studies particularly in the areas of Early Modern studies, popular culture, environmental literature, and creative writing. His literary biography of George R. Stewart was published in 2006 and he is co-editor of the forthcoming second edition of Teaching North American Environmental Literature, to be published by the Modern Language Association (MLA) later this year. The first edition (1985) played a significant role in the development of the environmental literature movement.
Page last updated: 7/8/2007