From, Myth, Memory, and the American Earth: The Durability
of Raintree County
© Copyright 1998 by the Society for the Study of Midwestern
Literature
ROSS LOCKRIDGE, RAINTREE COUNTY,
AND THE EPIC OF IRONY
By
GERALD C. NEMANIC
William Carlos Williams may be the only important
writer of our time who persisted in believing that an American
epic might still be written. His own Paterson, an answer
to Greek and Latin with the bare hands," was not to be that
work. Williams knew it; indeed, he visualized his efforts as
a necessary preliminary, "a gathering up" of raw materials
into a foundation on which later poets might build epic structures.
The successful dramatization of American experience
would result not from sophisticated commentaries on the nature
of the American and his institutions. It would follow from the
direct knowledge of objects, a simple apprehension of and generous
acceptance of the "beautiful thing." "No ideas
but in things" and "beautiful thing" are refrains
echoing through Paterson. They aid in building a motif
central to the meaning of the poem. One reflection of that meaning
is the knowledge that any reification of the national experience
must begin at the sensuous level, in that world most simple and
yet baffling.
Perhaps the implication of Williams' stricture
is that the only worthwhile "epic" of American life
must of necessity grow from an endearment which might never be
associated with "ideas," but only with the destructable
world of time and space. If so, how could any one man possibly
know enough "things" of this sprawling, chaotic nation
to allow for, in his sensibility, the evolution of a metaphorical
frame suitable to the demands of an epic vision? Williams thought
long on this dilemma and set it before us in his art. He not
only believed in the dilemma, he was thoroughly convinced that
it could be solved. A quarter century after Book I of Paterson
issued its challenge to future poets we have not yet seen
the fulfillment, nor perhaps even those first halting steps toward
the realization of his prophesy. Our best instruction still lies
in pondering the import of "pre-epic" poems like Paterson
or Hart Crane's The Bridge, and, in the genre of prose
fiction, reflecting on the lessons taught by valiant failures,
one of which, Raintree County, is the main subject of
this essay.
II
Ross Lockridge's mammoth "epic"
novel was published, to much fanfare, in 1948. It was the author's
first novel, a work more than eight years in the making. Within
months of its first printing the obscure English instructor who
wrote it had become a wealthy celebrity. A number of prestigious
critics had reviewed Raintree County with enthusiasm.
Howard Mumford Jones went so far as to declare the appearance
of this novel as marking the end of a serious slump in American
fiction. The motion picture industry, searching everywhere for
new filmscripts which might help mine another bonanza like Gone
With the Wind, provided the author with increased public
exposure and a whopping sum for the rights to film his novel.1
At that moment it seemed quite possible that another youthful
and brilliant novelist was coming out of the Midwest, as Dreiser,
Lewis, Hemingway, and Fitzgerald had done before him, to reshape
the forms of American fiction.
But there were immediate and disturbing side
effects resulting from this public display. Lockridge, a highly
sensitive and private man, was finding the role of instant celebrity
difficult. Despite strong public and critical acclaim for his
work, he raged at the minority of nay-sayers who pointed out
the shortcomings of his style and formal conceptions.2 A young
man of thirty-three, after eight years of exhausting work on
what he believed to be his magnum opus, was being churned
through the mill of public opinion in a fashion he could hardly
have anticipated. With a part of his movie money he purchased
a new home in Bloomington, Indiana, his home town. There he brooded
and drove his new Kaiser automobile up and down the driveway.
Not three months after the first appearance of Raintree County,
Ross Lockridge had committed suicide. While many groped for
reasons his mother said simply that "the boy put his heart's
blood into the book, he had nothing left."
III
In the more than twenty-five years since Lockridge's
death his novel has steadily lost visibility to the point where,
by 1974, it had gone out of print entirely. Lockridge's work
has not, it seems, interested many literary critics beyond that
initial excitement engendered by its publication. There are some
good reasons for this neglect: like many young writers, Lockridge
may have attempted to write too much, too soon. His ambition
not being matched by his experience, the style and formal qualities
of the novel are flawed. The author's romantic conception of
the American epic experience, a part of that "Great American
Novel" syndrome associated with the first half of the twentieth
century, has by now lost a good deal of literary caste. And the
fact remains that Lockridge wrote only one novel, and this has
not been sufficient to establish a literary reputation.
Yet to the student of American cultural life
this one novel is arrestingóa literary curiosity which
exasperates us with its turgidity while as often luring us forward
with its beauty. One is tempted to regard it as The Final Experiment
with the Great American Novel and to discern, inextricably interwoven
through its images, visions and sentiments, the stamp both of
its successful vitalism and of its inevitable failures.
IV
Williams' opinion of Raintree County has
not been recorded, but his stricture, "No ideas but in things,"
penetrates to what is both good and bad in the novel. For an
immediate insight into the methods Lockridge will use to dramatize
the essential experience of America, we need look no farther
than the title page and dedication. There the author introduces
us to Raintree County, Indiana, which has "no boundaries
in time and space.... You will hunt for it on the map, and it
won't be there.... For Raintree County is not the country of
the perishable fact. It is the country of the enduring fiction."
At the outset we are told not to expect the dull, stubborn facts
of the real world of rural Indiana but an imaginative vision
wherein "ideas" are father to the materials
they create and not, as Williams would have it, vice versa.
In the accompanying dedication we find: "For
My Mother/ Elsie Shockley Lockridge/This book of lives, loves,
and antiquities." Here is revealed the obverse of Lockridge's
attitude toward his materials. A "book of . . . antiquities"
seems much different than one which has been ascribed "no
boundaries in time and space." And this dichotomy informs
the entire novel. Much care is taken to recreate the artifacts,
tenor, and style of life in nineteenth century Indiana. These
"antiquities" are evoked with deep feeling for that
fading fabric of life. They delight, and are their own reason
for being. And yet, for Lockridge this is hardly enough. He is
bent on discovering the principles of American development, the
foundation of American character. Raintree County will also have
a metaphorical reality, and the author will lead us through interminable
Platonic dialogues and prolix theorizings on the nature of history
and art in his determination to fully develop that metaphor.
V
In Raintree County Lockridge details
the life of his epic hero, John Wickliff Shawnessy, from his
youth in antebellum Indiana ("that mirror of the ancient
republic now lost in time") through the Civil War and into
a later life amid the trappings of a "Gilded Age."
Mostly we are in Raintree County, the boundaries of which will
delimit the existence of Shawnessy, but significant scenes range
from the battle of Chickamauga to Ford's Theatre on the night
of Lincoln's assassination. Shawnessy's life span has been determined
strategically, for into this representative American hero must
be woven strands of American experience both old and new. There
is the pre-war dream of an Edenic republic; then the chaos of
internecine warfare; and finally the increasingly impersonal
life of industrial America. "The greatness of Lincoln,"
says the seasoned Shawnessy of later years, "was the greatness
of America in his time."3 And with this comment Shawnessy
passes judgment on himself and his times, for it was that first
half of the nineteenth century which was "capable of creating
a great man," a man of mythic proportions. The remainder
of that century molded the complicated and ambiguous American
hero, that prototype of the anti-hero which we may all recognize
as contemporary.
VI
Through Shawnessy, Lockridge attempts to mirror
the essential American experience. As a Midwesterner, the hero
exists at the geographical and cultural middle ground of the
nation. The Raintree County culture he absorbs is stable and
traditional enough to maintain a strong grip on the hero's moral
self. Instinctively vital and curious, young Johnny is fully
able to mount a critique of the mixture of puritan and bourgeois
values which permeates this society, and yet he is not capable,
in the last analysis, of washing them from his conscience.
The isolate purity of the County is lovingly
examined in all its "antiquity," and yet it is, at
the same time, traversed by the Great National Road, that main
artery to the West which carries a steady stream of pioneers
past the Shawnessy home. In his earliest recollections Johnny
is stirred by the promise of freedom and adventure symbolized
by the wagonloads of ebullient emigrants. The young hero is torn
by conflicting impulses. He yearns to understand a tribal past
and to clarify his own position within the framework of his circumscribed
culture.
Thus he clings to that place, Raintree County,
which promises answers to his insistent questions. Simultaneously,
he is excited by the epic sweep of national experience and dreams
of contact with the innocence he associates with westering. A
crucial dilemma associated with the production of the American
epic is reflected in Shawnessy's quandary. Named 'John Wickliff"
for that old hero of the race who translated sacred documents
into the vernacular, Shawnessy becomes the potential American
Homer. The undoing of the pure vision of an American republic,
through war and greed, will nullify his efforts to compose the
American Odyssey. Not only will it be impossible for Shawnessy
to absorb the discordant and protean elements of post-war American
life, but the maiming experience of his own guilt will sap his
resolve to continue.
Raintree County is a
novel conceived in paradox, for it is an epic structure which
reveals that the artistic realization of the true epic is no
longer possible, at least not in America. Shawnessy's epic poem,
this epic within the novel, is the work of a lifetime. It is
begun in the first enthusiasms of youth and carried on doggedly,
sporadically, and, finally, perfunctorily, into the last years
of the century. As art, this epic poem is fated to remain inchoate
and fragmented, a mere literary curiosity. Shawnessy finds that
he can hope to succeed ultimately not through his literary efforts
but in "the legend of my life, with which I refute all sophistries.
By a myth of homecoming and a myth of resurrection." (988)
This legend is the fabric of Raintree County and it is
Lockridge, viewing from the artists's perspective, and not Shawnessy,
his creation, who strives to indite the ironical American epic.
VII
Raintree County meanders
through more than one thousand pages of flashbacks, dream narratives
and philosophical disquisitions, yet the basic outline of the
novel is simple, for it is essentially a bildungsroman. Here
is played out the story of John Shawnessy's education, symbolized
by his search for the mythical Rain Tree, the tree of knowledge.
He was born in April, 1839, and the novel's literal action takes
place on one day, July 4,1892. From that point in time Shawnessy
reflects, through reminiscence and flashbacks, on his life as
an American hero.
The hero's first concrete memories are of
1844ópioneers passing his home on their way to Oregon.
At that point Johnny first feels a longing for the western star.
But youth in rural Indiana is idyllic. In memory, "the clock
in the Court House Tower . . . is always fixed at nine o'clock,
and it is summer and the days are long." These endless days
are spent musing and wandering by the river. John Shawnessy husks
corn in the autumn and secretly adores Nell Gaither. He imagines
himself a young Adonis and her an airy river nymph. The senior
Shawnessys are kindly folk, yet imbued with the implacable moral
values of middle America and Scotch Presbyterianism. The father,
T. D. Shawnessy, is a doctor, preacher, and mixer of botanical
medicines. His wife Ellen is a hardy woman, but softly lyrical
as well, the fine fruit of a pioneer heritage. This portrait
of the early life of an American hero is one of warmth and security.
The occasional vicissitudes are not atypical; indeed the conception
is remarkably similar to those of the earlier Indiana masters
of sentimental fictionóBooth Tarkington, Maurice Thompson,
et al. 4
But troubling undercurrents complicate this
idealized picture. Johnny is moved by the restlessness of America
in the 1840s and 1850s. Lockridge views these pregnant times
as an inevitable climax of two hundred years' history. The westering
spirit of a nation catches Shawnessy in its wave; he longs for
a free and glorious life which the limits of Raintree County
cannot supply. His first fascination with literature stems from
a vaguely felt need to rise above the limitations of place. Another
shadow is cast over the hero's youth by the building fury of
fraternal enmity which will culminate in a civil war. Even before
the out break of fighting he is caught up in the fate of the
South. Seduced by Susannah Drake, an exotic Southern visitor
to Raintree County, Johnny is determined to fulfill his responsibilities
to the "fallen" girl. They marry and travel South in
the troubled days before the firing on Fort Sumpter. Susannah,
at once incredibly sensual and puritanical, is Lockridge's somewhat
stereotyped symbol of the South. She is, finally, a schizophrenic
driven to madness by a moral and racial ambiguity. Her derangement
results in a desperate flight from her husband and an attempted
suicide which brings about the death of their young son. Thus
for Lockridge the South represents an American tragedy which
destroys both its own and the sons of the Republic.
Once Susannah has been safely institutionalized,
Johnny is free to fight for the Republic. He is transformed into
the typical American foot soldier: after being wounded in action,
he spends weeks in a military hospital near Washington where,
among his wounded countrymen, he is visited by President Lincoln
and Walt Whitman. Back home in Raintree County, Johnny has been
erroneously reported killed in action. Heartbroken sweetheart
Nell in turn marries Johnny's boyhood rival, Garwood Jones, and
then dies in childbirth.
Having had enough of historical melodrama,
Lockridge settles his hero into the life of Raintree County.
Except for an ill advised foray into politics and a few minor
adventures in the iniquitous East, Shawnessy leads a model life
in tranquil obscurity, remarries, rears a family, teaches school,
and works fitfully on the epic poem he can never finish. Occasionally
former friends return, sons of Raintree County who have moved
into the larger world of the post-war Republic. There is the
famous journalist, Jerusalem Webster Stiles, who serves as an
intellectual mirror image for Shawnessy. Garwood Jones, coward
and opportunist, has become a U.S. senator and a candidate for
President. Cash Carney was once a local hustler but now, in an
age favoring manipulative genius, he has become a financial power
and molder of political personalities, a character modeled perhaps
on another Midwesterner of obscure roots, Mark Hanna. The "Gilded
Age" glitters forth boldly and John Shawnessy, heir of the
heroes of old, has in it no place of honor.
VIII
Within the framework of the bildungsroman
the protagonist becomes life's initiate; he experiences marriage,
lost love, death, war, and remorse while his personality slowly
ripens. There is a thematic questóthe hero's desire to
explore the secrets of the exotic Rain Treeówhich is compatible
with the growth principle of the novel and helps unify the action.
It would seem that the melodramatic paraphernalia
of the plot could be brought forth as evidence of the novel's
inherent weakness. And yet Lockridge's melodrama is so self-conscious,
so mannered and obviously exaggerated, that we are forced to
examine its possible intent. The work, which from one angle seems
so romantically earnest, yet from another can be viewed as ironical
and satiric. We see that Shawnessy's life story, replete with
classic analogues, describes the development of an heroic American
prototype. But the novelist often reminds us of another viewpoint:
from it we can see that Shawnessy has evolved into a sententious
wind bag who rocks sleepily toward death in an obscure corner
of the Midwest backwater. He mutters of a 'lost republic"
and timorously mollifies the harpies of the local PTA in order
to keep his job. In the crucial decisions of his lifeómarrying
Susannah instead of Nell, rejecting the impulse to move Westóhe
has chosen wrongly. His moral earnestness becomes a maddening
prudery; his heroic attempt to forge the American epic seems
merely the scribbling of an aging schoolmaster who clings pathetically
to youthful dreams of glory.
This other, or anti-epic, which coexists with
the first is best illuminated in a comparison of the novel's
hero and his antagonist, both of whose initials are "J.W.S."
John Wickliff Shawnessy is not the exclusive alter ego of Ross
Lockridge. As much a part of the author's sensibility is the
cynical, bumptious intellectualóJerusalem Webster Stiles.
Shawnessy and Stiles are antagonists, and yet they represent
divided segments of that personality which is close to Lockridge's
own. Stiles enters the novel when Shawnessy is an adolescent.
The "Perfesser" come from the East to open an "Academy"
in Raintree County, the place of his birth, and it is in Pedee
Academy that Shawnessy is introduced to the learning of the ages:
English poetry, the classics, philosophy, the new science of
Darwin, and the new skepticism in religion. Stiles, the jaded
aesthete, exercises a powerful hold on Shawnessy's pliant imagination.
Representing the "stile-ish" East, Europe, and modern
intellectual taste, Stiles is the primary formal educative force
in Shawnessy's youth. It is as if Lockridge splits his own identity
in two. The author had, like Shawnessy, grown up to an innocent
and powerful idealism in the quietude of pastoral Indiana. We
can imagine that Lockridge's father, a college professor, was
much like T. D. Shawnessyóearnest, conscientious, kind,
and morally upright. The Lockridge family, ensconced in a rambling
old house amid the towering elms of a college town, probably
lived in much the same warm, wholesome atmosphere as did the
Shawnessys of Raintree County.
But for young Lockridge there was also the
inevitable move to the state university, and then on to Harvard.
We can also imagine some of the disillusionment, the hardening,
that most young men suffer when removed from the idyllic life
of a small Midwestern community. He was thrust into a competitive,
lonely world and was suddenly responsible for a wife and children.
Shawnessy also ripens through experience, but his pastoral nineteenth
century world still provides enough ballast to maintain him upright.
Shawnessy does not sink under the weight of modern life, whereas
Stiles, and Lockridge, too, are not so fortunate.
Stiles represents not only the intellectual
avant garde of the East, but a deeper kind of debilitating
knowledgeóthe finality of death known to young, when psychological
defenses have not yet been developed to combat despair. Late
in the novel, in a drunken moment, Stiles tells Shawnessy:
Years ago . . . I was a child in Raintree
County. He paused as if the words just said were full of labyrinthine
meanings. My father died before I was old enough to remember
him. When I was only ten years old, my mother died. In that death,
Jerusalem Webster Stiles knew the secret of life which is deathóand
never added to his wisdom though he added to his words. And with
that act, also, he left Raintree County and went East.... He
learned early with the bitterness of the homeless child, that
the earth cares nothing for our grief, and that even our mother
who cared for us in life cares nothing for us in death. (986,
987)
Stiles, who from one angle appears to be merely
the hero's foil, is, in another way, the hero's mirror image,
and indeed the two characters, both J.W.S., can be seen as a
composite figure which may reflect the complex personality of
the author. Accepting this, we could explain the perplexing doubleness
of the novelóthat tendency to both rhapsodize and satirize,
to both believe in the epic heroism of John Shawnessy's
life and to judge so severely its limitations.
IX
This curious duality, or the depth of Lockridge's
irony, if indeed it is conscious irony, brings us inevitably
to speculation about the role of the artist's personality in
his creation, and, in this case, to consideration of his suicide.
It is surely possible that Lockridge's suicide had nothing to
do with his literary career, or that the concerns of art played
only a minor part in a highly complex situation. Yet in retrospect
we can see signs of forboding in the novel itself. The double
vision spoken of previously was not necessarily an "enriching
ambiguity." Perhaps the doubleness of Raintree County
is not so much the artistic weaving of an ironic vision as
it is the sign of a perilous personal dilemma, one which may
have eventually led to the tragic denouement of the author's
self-destruction.
In Midwestern fiction we have seen the development
of a romantic schoolóthe Hoosiersóand a subsequent
reaction toward realism. While neither movement was the exclusive
property of Midwestern writers, there were, between about 1870
and 1930, a disproportionate number of writers from the region
who took on the key roles in the evolution of literary fashions.
Complicated spirits like Theodore Dreiser and Sherwood Anderson
showed elements of both romanticism and realism in their fiction.
Winesburg, Ohio is a fine example of how an ostensibly
objective piece of writing can be enriched through an infusion
of pathos and human sympathy.
Lockridge, like Anderson, exhibited a complicated
relation ship to his Midwestern roots. Both writers wished to
write the truth about life in the Midwest they had known, and
yet the need to confront the facts came into deep conflict with
an emotional need to charge that world with significance, whatever
these "facts" might show. It is perhaps ironic that
Anderson's simpler vision may have benefited him as an artist.
He wrote the Winesburg stories much as Twain wrote Huckleberry
Finn, directly from the heart and with a minimal self-consciousness.
The ironies and beauties abiding in those books are inherent
in the tangible, dramatic conceptions of their makers.
Lockridge, on the other hand, was an intellectual
as well as an artist and his novel is partly conceived in intellectual
terms. Although Raintree County is brilliant in parts,
it fails in its intellectualismóin the abstracted Platonic
dialogues which take up too much of its last half. In these debates
Shawnessy, the idealist, combats Stiles, the cynic, on subjects
ranging from love, marriage and the family to politics, religion,
anthropology and myth. We find here a rough analogue to Anderson's
conflicting vision of Winesburg. Objectivity clashes with a sense
of personal involvement, despair combats hope, elemental hatred
strives in no less elemental love. Anderson can present the reader
with a moving dramatization of these conflicts; Lockridge too
often can only talk about them.
And so we come to face, finally, a clear illustration
of art's value, the force of its humanism. The gift of the artist
is to be able to confront us with dilemma in a tangible form
and through this presentation to reap, for himself and his reader,
a spiritual harvest. The imperfect, though valiant, attempts
of Lockridge to reach that consolation result in the frustrating
ambiguity which is Raintree County, a novel which reveals
our bewilderment as well as our vitality as a culture.
Northeastern Illinois University
NOTES
1. Raintree County was winner of the
Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer Semi-Annual Novel Award for fiction suitable
for adaptation to the screen. The award provided a minimum of
$125,000, with bonus clauses which could bring the total to $275,000.
The studio, of course, gained film rights to the novel.
2. Hamilton Basso, writing in The
New Yorker, simply dismissed Lockridge as a "second-hand
Wolfe." Newsweek pegged the book as "sprawling,
exasperating, tedious."
3. Lockridge, Ross, Jr. Raintree County.
Boston: Houghton, Mifflin, 1948, 455. All other references
in the novel are indicated parenthetically after the quote.
4. Ross Lockridge, Sr., was a scholar of Indiana
history and lore while teaching in the Speech Department at Indiana
University. He wrote A. Lincoln (1930) and Old Fauntleroy
Home (1939), the latter concerning a well known house in
New Harmony, Ind. His son was probably quite familiar with the
Hoosier writers.
5. We discover, partly through some heavy
handed symbolism and foreshadowing, that Susannah is a mulatto.
The scar she bears in a particularly delectable location is the
result of a fire which killed her father and his black mistress.
Note that the surname "Drake" was a]so used by Faulkner,
several years earlier, to designate the neurotic Southern heroine
of Sanctuary.
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