© The Society for the Study of Midwestern Literature
SML Newsletter, Vol. 34, No. 2, Summer, 1994
The Return to Raintree County
By
David D. Anderson
The most anticipated and celebrated literary
event in the years following World War II was the official publication,
on January 5, 1948, of "Raintree County", a one-thousand
and-sixty-six-page first novel by thirty-three-year-old Ross
Lockridge, Jr., a native of Bloomington, Indiana, where he had
spent much of his life. The novel had already sold 50,000 pre-publication
copies, and, although some criticism was directed at its length,
its sexual content, daring for its day, and from some its pretentiousness,
the overwhelming critical reception ranged from enthusiastic
to eulogistic. By March 1948, it led the best-seller lists, it
was a Book-of-the-Month Club selection, and it had won the world's
most lucrative literary prize, the MGM Award of $150,000 for
the screen rights to the novel, even as its young author was
hailed as the writer destined to revitalize American fiction
in the second half of the twentieth century.
Yet on March 6, 1948, the young novelist was
dead, a suicide by carbon monoxide in the garage behind his home
in Bloomington, leaving his widow and four young children. After
a season of psychological analysis, informed and otherwise, the
novel and its young writer faded into obscurity, punctuated only
by the delayed filming in 1957 of a badly expurgated, re-ordered,
and re-written "Raintree County" starring Elizabeth
Taylor, Montgomery Clift, and Eva Marie Saint and the simultaneous
publication of an abridged paperback version of the novel in
1957.
Both the film and the abridged novel are failures,
the former because the novel was simply too complex for the film
medium or the film maker, and the latter because both its scope
and its vision are narrower than the original. In the years after
1957, the novel and its author have become legends, occasionally
referred to and rarely read except by a handful of admirers,
and the novel's worth rarely attested to except by the rare appearances
of scholarly and critical essays that continue to explore its
merits.
Now, in 1994, the novel has been reissued,
by Viking Press, together with "Shade of the Raintree, the
Life and Death of Ross Lockridge Jr." a biography of its
author by Larry Lockridge, the author's second son. The event
of the double publication threatened to become a literary event
parallel to that forty-six years earlier, and a number of reviewers
proclaimed that it was, as indeed it deserved to be. But somehow,
perhaps inevitably, in an age that proclaims the universality
and worth of "The Bridges of Madison County", today
surpassed only by "I Want to Tell You" by O.J. Simpson,
it fell short.
Nevertheless the republication of "Raintree
County" and the publication of "Shade of the Raintree"
are indeed the most important literary publications of 1994,
the former because we can see, once again, through the eyes of
John Wickliff Shawnessy, on that remarkable July 4, 1892, the
vision and promise of America and its people, and in the latter,
through the eyes and mind of his son, the vision and the torment
of Shawnessy's creator. In these two publications, a remarkable,
perhaps even a great literary work will continue to live in spite
of the vagaries of literary fashion, popular taste, or literary
celebrity.
If "Raintree County" is not the
fabled Great American Novel, it will do until that unlikely work
appears. In it, in the space of about twelve hours on July 4,
1892, Ross Lockridge, Jr. recreates 48 of the most tumultuous
and changing years of the nineteenth century, those that took
America from its romantic and idealistic adolescence through
the great crisis and purging of the Civil War into a new materialistic
and cynical maturity as the nation approaches into its second
century.
Those years are not only the nation's, but
they're those of its people, of those who maintain the dream
and propagate the myth of a fulfilling America, most notably,
the years of Johnny Shawnessy as he remembers them on that eventful
July 4, 1892, the day on which he still maintains its validity.
They are the brief years, too, of the dark, married Southern
beauty that was Susanna Drake and the bright, pristine beauty
that was Nell Gaither; the years of those who had gone from "Raintree
County" to the heights of material glory: Senator Garwood
B. Jones, financier Cassius P. Carney, and General Jacob J. Jackson,
all of whom have traded faith for fortune; they are the years,
too, of Professor Jerusalem Webster Stiles, Johnny's alter ego
and the cynical interpreter of an American reality. They are
the years too, of the rise and fall of the National Road and
the Jeffersonian dream of an open society and cheap land that
it was designed to implement, and the emergence of the railroad
that destroyed it in its directed search for power and profit.
Evident at once in re-reading the novel is
not only the durability of the characters and the myth that Ross
Lockridge created, but the elements that make the novel even
more timely in 1994 than it was in 1948. Then the pollution of
the land and the dream that had been so clearly foreshadowed
in the book was not yet evident to most Americans, particularly
those flushed by victory in a "good war" they had not
yet calculated the cost of. Today the continued pollution of
both is unmistakable to all but the most insensitive, and Lockridge
celebrates even more eloquently than nearly half a century ago
the vision of what might have been and of what may yet be.
To turn from a major work of fiction to a
major biographical study demands in this case less dexterity
on the part of the reviewer than is normally the case. Just as
the two authors are father and son, the relationship between
the works is substantially as close. In a study that is at once
compassionate, compelling, and forthright, the biography gives
us insights into the talent, drive, and torment of the young
writer that we can find in no other way. The study is clear,
complete, and courageous as Larry Lockridge, who had, as he has
commented, grown up with a novel instead of his father, seeks,
for his own understanding as well as ours, the truth of the novel
and its creator as well as the man who was his father.
"Shade of the Raintree" demonstrates
clearly what a literary biography, the biography of a writer,
should be and so seldom is: a study of the man and the work at
that difficult to define place where life and art converge, often
to the exclusion of everything else, where the writer's artistic
vision and his psychic reality overlap, even threatening to become
one. But Larry Lockridge deftly extricates each from the other,
and in his pages Ross Lockridge, Jr., son, lover, father, Indianian,
and literary artist, emerges as clearly as the myth that emerges
from recreated reality in "Raintree County". In "Shade
of the Raintree" Larry Lockridge discovers the father he
had never known and he discovers too the magic with which his
father had endowed his major work. The result is not only a significant
literary event, but it is a convergence of two important works,
either of which is major in itself.
Two interesting footnotes remain, one a bibliographic
triumph of art over puritanism that has passed entirely unnoticed,
and the other a touching tie between father and son that has
also passed unnoticed. In the former, a phrase that had appeared
in the first printing but was expurgated from subsequent printings
is restored in the new Viking edition. In the original on page
152, as Professor Stiles pontificates on nature and nature's
law, he states,
