A Son Revisits the Tragedy of "Raintree County"
Author
A review of "Shade of the Raintree"
by novelist Donald Newlove
"Shade of the Raintree"
by Larry Lockridge
Viking/Penguin, $27.95h/$14.95p, 500p
Hardcover ISBN 0-670-85440-9
Paperback ISBN: 0140158715
Ross Lockridge,
Jr., the briefly celebrated author of the 1948 best-selling novel
Raintree County, is today famed as an American literary suicide.
With Thomas
Heggen--author of the celebrated novel and play Mister Roberts
and another suicide--Lockridge shared billing in John Legget's
dual biography, Ross and Tom, Published in 1977.
In Shade of
the Raintree, Lockridge's son, Larry, a professor of English
at New York University, takes an immense burden upon himself
in facing his father's death in 1948 at age 33 and its misrepresentation
in the press, and in laying bare the roots of his father's clinical
depression.
He must also
bear the reader's prejudice against the soapy, three-hour film
nullity shaped out of his father's novelistic riches, featuring
the costumed striving of Montgomery Clift and Elizabeth Taylor.
And he does
it!
In a writerly
achievement of great magnitude, he lights up every dark corner
in his father's soul and convinces the reader that an even greater
tragedy has taken place than the self-destruction of a writer.
Raintree County,
a work that should rank with thomas Wolfe's Look Homeward, Angel
as a landmark in American fiction, lies a victim, along with
its dead author and his reputation.
Shade of the
Raintree, at 528 pages a massive picture of one writer's depression,
of the familial tensions that fed it, and of the societal materialism
that finally crushed him, is a book whose stirring power and
complexity would daunt any reviewer. These are depths you simply
must swim down into rather than be told about.
It also helps
to have read the 1,066-page Raintree County first, though Larry
Lockridge takes for granted that you haven't, since the novel
has been out of print for many years. (Viking Penguin, however,
. . . [has issued] a paperback reprint to accompany this biography.)
I read it the summer that Lockridge died and thought it the only
American novel ever to combine the lively possibilities of simultaneity
in film editing with the fragmented storytelling of James Joyce's
Ulysses. I also found its lyric voice endearing, its romantic
characters attractive, its darker quirks of personality and philosophic
questionings unusual for a novel but not too difficult to take
in--and it has a hypnotically erotic, racy cover, devised by
the author himself, of the hills and rivers of Raintree County
as a naked woman embedded in the landscape. I was 20 and I loved
it.
In Raintree
County, the hero, John Wickliff Shawnessy, looks back on his
Indiana manhood from the hilltop of July 4, 1892. He has failed
to write the great poem of his time. Ross Lockridge, Jr., however,
will do his hero one better and write the great American encyclopedic
novel, one that absorbs all the modern literary devices of his
day and breathes them forth refashioned on a wind from Walt Whitman.
But just as
Shawnessy has been pestered throughout life by a cynical alter
ego, Jerusalem Webster Stiles, called the Perfessor, who ensures
that Shawnessy will fall short of his ambition, so also will
Ross Lockridge Jr. be undermined by a spirit of competitiveness
that ensures that his ever-expanding literary ambition must in
some degree fall short.
The tragedy
is that we can't know just how short Lockridge fell.
Lockridge originally
had ended his novel with a surreal 300-page dream section that
he felt was the natural flowering of his story and its manner
of storytelling. His manuscript had won a $150,000 novel prize
from MGM studios that included the studio's right to film the
novel.
But MGM, the
Book-of-the-Month Club and Lockridge's publisher, Houghton Mifflin,
all knew that the 19th-century behemoth he'd handed in at twice
the length of Gone With the Wind, would never be a bestseller.
Cuts had to be made to assure sales. Zip went the dream section
and much else. Again and again, relentlessly, Lockridge cut and
finished, cut and finished, cut. Writes Larry Lockridge: "He
felt like a prisoner at the typewriter trying to write his way
out from under his own enormous book, and bled himself white....
The false finishes made him doubt the integrity of the beloved
novel--the more he revised, the more imperfect it seemed....
So now he read his own life as a shameful tale of 'ambition,
narcissism, vanity' as he put it...." When Lockridge finally
read the first bound copy of Raintree County, he found it a nice
pastoral novel but a small win beside the triumph that he's envisioned
during six years of research, writing and revision. He couldn't
bare to see his wife, Vernice, reading the book, and told her
to put it away. He began a second novel, even bigger, more cosmological
than what he already feared was his masterwork.
His spirit
also had been eroded by more mundane concerns. Houghton Mifflin
wanted a percentage of all the prize money he's won, not only
from the MGM novel award but even from the Pulitzer, should he
win that (he didn't). MGM reneged on a promise to spread his
prize money over a long period and insisted on paying it all
at once, incurring for Lockridge a huge, truly hurtful tax bite.
These concerns
fed into clusters of fears triggered by his depression, his sudden
helplessness and lack of will. He was admitted to a hospital
for what was then called "reactive depression" but
which, Larry Lockridge writes, would now be described as a "'major
depressive episode with psychotic features,' whose dire symptoms
lead to inability to feel pleasure, insomnia, psychomotor retardation,
fatigue, recurrent thoughts of death, and inappropriate delusional
guilt--not to mention constipation and impotence (and the belief)
that great and terrible misfortunes will befall the patient....
The patient's thinking is dominated by the themes of failure,
guilt, self-blame and condemnation, hopelessness, and sin....'"
On top of an
avalanche of hate mail that came when the book appeared--it was
called blasphemous and sacrilegious because it contained sex
scenes and religious satire--came Hamilton Basso's devastating
review in the New Yorker, calling Lockridge "Ross Lockwood
Jr." while trashing his novel--clearly without having read
it. These sad tidings darkened even deeper familial currents,
washing away any self-esteem that he may have had. He killed
himself with car exhaust fumes.
Larry Lockridge
redresses the picture of Ross Lockridge Jr. in Leggett's Ross
and Tom and shows his father not as a compulsively fast-talking
egomaniac but as an amazing American hero.
Competitive
to a fault, Ross was known as "A-Plus Lockridge" for
his scholarly achievements at Harvard and the Sorbonne, his mastery
of many languages, speed at shorthand and typing prowess (Indiana
state champion at more than 100 words a minute), his photographic
memory and letter-winning athleticism. He married a great beauty,
gaining both a helpmate and an intellectual equal. Larry Lockridge's
portrait of him seems in no way too wonderful to be true. You
really believe that here was a hero who flew too high and found
himself shot down by earthbound moneymen in the movies, book
clubs and publishing.
Aside from
its other merits, this is as well a major work on clinical depression
that gathers you into the illness' grip link by link until death
seems the only release.
If it were
up to me, I'd give this book all the awards and literary rosettes
that Raintree County should have received but which went to far
less inventive works back in the dim old days of 1948.
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Page last updated: 25 January 1998