Success and the American Novelist
A review of "Shade of the Raintree"
by novelist Richard Bausch
"Shade of the Raintree"
by Larry Lockridge
Viking/Penguin, $27.95h/$14.95p, 500p
Hardcover ISBN 0-670-85440-9
Paperback ISBN: 0140158715
In 1974, John
Leggett, then director of the University of Iowa Writers' Workshop,
published a dual biography called "Ross and Tom," about
the premature and self-inflicted deaths of two writers--Ross
Lockridge Jr. and Thomas Heggen--both of whom had enjoyed outlandish
success with first novels, and who, at the time they died within
a year of each other in the late '40s, were unable to write.
Leggett's book
provides a kind of cautionary examination of the pathology that
lurks inside the American success system where writers are concerned,
and of the two tragedies, Ross Lockridge Jr.'s was to me the
most disturbing, for he had been a family man--he left a wife
and four young children--and, unlike Thomas Heggen, had not lived
a dissolute or self-destructive life.
When, in March
of 1948, he went out to the garage of his house in Bloomington,
Ind., turned on the engine of his new car and died of carbon
monoxide poisoning, his capacious novel, "Raintree County"
was high on all the country's bestseller lists, and a Main Selection
of the Book-of-the-Month Club; it had won the $150,000 novel
prize from MGM, and been excerpted in Life magazine. At 33 years
old, he had reached heights most writers only dream about.
This, at least,
is what the story seemed on its surface.
Now Ross Lockridge
Jr.'s son Larry has written a wonderful biography, which aims
among other things to correct John Leggett's portrait of Ross--Leggett,
he says, depended too much on Freud--and in any case he means
to "overcome confusion and lay bare this desolate act--and,
more so, the life and work that proceeded it."
This, Larry
Lockridge proceeds to do with an unsparing yet loving hand, a
steady grace and humor that are nothing less than remarkable.
Ross Lockridge
Jr. was the youngest son of a popular historian of Indiana, Ross
Sr., and a woman, Elsie Shockley, who had once aspired to make
a name for herself as a writer of fiction. His parents brought
him up on an ideal of accomplishment, and apparently Elsie, like
a lot of parents of very bright children, tended to value him
more for his achievements than for himself: If ever there was
a dutiful son, Ross Lockridge Jr. was it. By age 15, he was traveling
with his father, helping him put on popular history shows. He
wrote copy, memorized speeches and took dictation; and as he
grew into maturity, his father depended on him in ways that might
have swamped a less gifted or energetic man.
And the thing
that becomes most clear about Ross Jr. is that he was possessed
of an astonishing amount of energy. Letters, assays for school,
verses, lines for his father's history pageants, all came storming
out of him, usually at much greater length and in much greater
detail than anyone expected--indeed some readers might wonder
how he could've done anything else but write. And he excelled
at almost everything he tried (while at the University of Indiana,
for instance, he achieved the highest grade-point average in
the school's history). He went on to study for a summer in France,
and then to Harvard on a graduate fellowship. For a time he taught
English at Simmons College, amazing his students with his powers
of retention and, again, with his boundless energy.
His marriage
to Lillian Vernice Baker was a happy one, and in fact he and
his wife worked together, typing and retyping the voluminous
pages of his writing. In the beginning, they worked on a prodigious
epic poem entitled "Dream of the Flesh of Iron," and
then, when that failed, and after Ross had turned to the first
incarnation of the big novel using his mother's side of the family,
which he'd first envisioned when he was in France in 1934, they
worked as a team producing the manuscript of "Raintree County."
It took eight years. The earlier version, "American Lives,"
Ross worked on almost in secret--it had reached 2,000 pages,
and "nobody, including Vernice, had read a page of it"--all
while maintaining a full teaching load, and going through the
arrival of new babies. When Ross decided the 2,000 pages of "American
Lives" weren't right, and discovered for himself the true
way to proceed, he simply turned the pages of the manuscript
over and began typing the newer, more concentrated version. Before
long, Vernice was helping with typing again: "After the
kids were tucked in... she would type in the living room, about
10 pages an evening.... If he heard her typewriter stop for an
. . . interval, he'd call in, 'No fair. Stop reading the manuscript,
honey.'" "Raintree County" also came in at 2,000
pages, and had to be delivered to Houghton Mifflin in a suitcase.
Larry Lockridge
portrays these young people, his mother and father, with an admirable
balance of compassion and humor; and when he comes to talk about
the novel itself, "Shade of the Raintree" becomes in
all respects an intelligent and thorough work of critical biography:
The son provides strong insight into the making of the novel
and into its artistry, for "Raintree County" is a book
filled with large pleasures and with life, and merits a strong,
intelligent critic's treatment. Larry Lockridge is a literary
scholar by profession, and his criticism is concise and judicious.
Given the circumstances, this alone is an accomplishment worthy
of the highest praise.
Moreover, the
story of "Raintree County's" publication is handled
with impressive restraint and skill. Ross Lockridge Jr.'s conflicts
with his publisher seem in a way indicative of something in his
makeup, and perhaps show an element of what may have contributed
to the destruction which followed; but they provide an even stronger
picture of what damages can be done by well-meaning people with
a measure of control over an artist's life. Just after the book
was accepted, the editors at Houghton-Mifflin were heaping praise
on the young author while saying different things to each other
about his book and what needed to be done to it. The author made
the understandable but dangerous mistake of believing the praise,
and when the editors began to address the problems they believed
they saw, they did so in ways that ended up doing more harm than
good to the poor writer.
Larry Lockridge
delivers the storms of publicity and confusion surrounding "Raintree
County's" progress toward print, and in the process, his
father is made all the more vivid, struggling to keep his vision
in the face of what is in several important instances an appalling
ignorance of what he had done, and of what he was doing as a
writer.
But beyond
all of this, "Shade of the Raintree" is an act of love,
and of forgiveness. If the mystery of another life can never
be fully understood, the enigma of a suicide is beyond any understanding
at all, and the more one tries to find the clues to it, the deeper
the puzzle becomes. Too often, our confusion makes us glib, and
the easiest, or the most obvious explanation becomes the story
we cling to. Larry Lockridge takes great care to refrain from
these pitfalls. In telling the difficult story of Ross Lockridge's
death, he provides a deeply moving portrayal of a good and gifted
young man in the grip of something terrible, that is perhaps
most terrible not a little because in that man's whole bright
short life, it happens also to be completely unprecedented.
"His was
an American life of great aspiration whose prodigious labors
ended in a sense of dead enormous failure even before the applause
began. Few driven spirits give way to darkness so irrevocably,
but I believe that in some ways Ross Lockridge's life is an allegory
of the American Writer."
Maybe so, but
I would read the last line of "Raintree County" as
a kind of mirror of this son's brave and unflinching attempt
to understand his father's pain, while restoring his father's
dream. In a very real sense, "Shade of the Raintree"
delineates "the legend of a life upon the earth . . . a
signature of father and preserver, of some young hero and endlessly
courageous dreamer."
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