In The Shade of Father's Tree
By Darshan Singh Maini
"Raintree County"
by Ross Lockridge Jr.
Viking/Penguin, $18.95, 1050p
Paper ISBN: 014023666X
"Shade of the Raintree"
by Larry Lockridge
Viking/Penguin, $27.95h/$14.95p, 500p
Hardcover ISBN 0-670-85440-9
Paperback ISBN: 0140158715
Of all the
books a reviewer has to contend with, there is perhaps no volume
more daunting in some respects than the biography of a literary
star that for some obscure and tantalizing reasons burnt himself
out at the peak of his powers, achieving a fiery nirvana of sorts.
And those drawn to that flame remain there to rake up the ashes
for the clues to such a tragic fate. Or, to change the metaphor,
the imagination of scrutiny and resurrection takes upon itself
to explore the catacombs of documents, letters, diaries, abandoned
manuscripts and stray papers to come to terms with such a singular
phenomenon. A number of different directions that the engaged
muses may take begin to offer tentative constructions -- from
the familial, cultural and sociological to the Freudian, Jungian
and mythic, and the imagination in labour cannot but be inveigled
into some fanciful options.
It is in the
light of such thoughts that the reader response acquires a certain
kind of readiness to close with the fabulous volume called "Shade
of the Raintree" written by Larry Lockridge in anguish,
nostalgia and celebration. At any time and in any context, it
cannot but be a harrowing experience for a writer caught thus
in the web of memories, rumours and surmises. But when the subject
of the biography happens to be a genius (to some, a genius manqué)
imperious and arrant in action, and exulting to the top of his
bent in the service of a great dream, even a reviewer cannot
but be drawn into a Byzantium of thought and word, let alone
the author, such being, then, the raison d'etre of this biography.
It is appropriate
to recall Larry Lockridge's preamble in this regard. "My
book," he writes, "is a quest, four decades later,
to overcome confusion and lay bare the desolate act.......I'll
tell this story of my father's life, from dawn to darkness, for
the intensities of will and creative intellect we might find
there." Somewhere, I think, H.G. Wells said this of the
difficult genre of biography: "A man's biography should
be written by a conscientious enemy." Well, the author of
"Raintree County", I guess, must have created quite
a few foes en route, such being the fate of literary celebrities,
but none perhaps survived, or thought of doing it on any large
scale.
It was left
then to a conscientious son and scholar, and an eminent critic
and teacher at New York University to do the job through the
energies of the empathetic imagination. The result is a deeply
pondered book, rich in all kinds of aesthetic epiphanies and
observations. The precarious balance between love and commitment,
and between the torment and the truth has been beautifully maintained.
It is a fascinating dialectic which a troubled son has hoisted
to achieve the aesthetic of authenticity about which Lionel Trilling
talked so eloquently in his Harvard lectures, "Sincerity
and Authenticity", around the time the author graduated
from that great university. It is, indeed, such an exercise which
preserves the aroma of scholarly thought.
Quite clearly,
the biography, conceived in pain and perplexity, and nurtured
in the arbours of his spirit was ready for consummation only
when Larry Lockridge had acquired the necessary amount of nervous
energy and intellectual wherewithal to face such an "ordeal
of consciousness". Thus we find here a great life, a great
novel and a great tragedy memorialized in a classic vein. What
has been maturing silently in the cellars of the mind was brought
to a vintage condition by a brooding intelligence. Undoubtedly,
the costs for the author-son were heavy, an "expense of
spirit", though not in a "waste" of words. The
Shakespearian phrase, as we shall see, holds good in more than
one sense. The Shakespearian motif in "Raintree County"
and Shakespearian dimensions here and there do lend that novel
a metaphoric structure much in the manner of the bard's late
romances.
This pitiless
probe, then, into his father's vanities, pretenses and posturing
on the one hand, and into the processes of his mind and imagination
which went into the making of "Raintree County" over
a period of seven years or so on the other, constitute the great
appeal of this biography. It is a harrowing tale of a great talent,
and an insightful evocation of a great novel in all its linguistic
richness, episodic fecundity, poetic fantasies, cultural and
historical context, etc.
The son also
seems to have experienced something of the agony and ecstasy
that the father once felt in such great measure. It is a filial
bonding at the level of literary emotion also. One may even go
on to aver that like the Jameses, the Lockridges -- a historian
grandfather, a novelist father and a critic son -- also constitute
"a family of minds". No wonder, one is tempted to call
it oedipal biography, for even otherwise there is a distinctive
echo of "the family romance" in it.
Since this
biography is an intersection story of a writer and a book, no
one who has not read this "mega novel" is likely to
get completely to the nuclear heart of the problem, or to its
pitch and promise. It is, therefore, necessary that we have a
measure of the complicated strains that go to make the fabulous
tapestry of this American odyssey. It is such a crowded and over-wrought
work as to become almost a drag at times, but even its extravagances
and its prodigalities, in the end, fall into a pattern. What
is more, they are also laced with an operative irony, thus mitigating
the effects of excess or inflation.
The "story"
of the story as told by Larry Lockridge in a series of dispersed
chapters is artfully managed. The jolly romp of the hero, John
Shawnessy, (modelled on the writer's maternal grandfather) through
the Indiana countryside, and through American history, romance,
mythology, culture and a dozen other territories of the imagination
is one fascination sprawl from end to end. Scores of characters
flit through its pages, characters that a Hogarth or a Bruegel
might have assembled on canvas, characters that suggest both
Whitmanian energies and Dickensian drolleries, and characters
that have a fey poetic charm. It is indeed, a whole little microcosm
of God's creatures settled in the promised land. The sheer sparkle
and dazzle of things holds and compels.
Again, Larry
Lockridge has taken care to isolate for comment and evocation
some of the glorious sun-lit scenes of love, tenderness and intimacy.
Also, some scenes of great tragedy and the triumph of the spirit.
The novelist, it appears, was, after a few false starts, able
to chip away effortlessly at the rock reality of life and bring
out the figures lurking in the marble.
But, I trust,
eventually the great appeal of the book lies in its visionary
prose, in its architectonics, and in its narratology. It is not
surprising to see the language acquire wings and take off as
though possessed, wanting to reach out to the extremities of
human thought and experience. There are, en route, explosions,
epiphanies and intimations of all manner.
In a bid to
take the human reality by the scruff of the neck, as it were,
Lockridge's language begins, at times to pant for breath in that
assault; it seems to be straining beyond the limit of endurance.
Obviously, the writer believed in the holiness of the word, not
in any theological sense, but in the sense of its dynamics. The
energies of language are the energies of life. He believed passionately
in its human riches.
As Larry Lockridge
puts it, "Instead of an arbitrary sign, a word is potentially
the incarnation of thought, and capable of taking us to the interior
of its represented world. The word is a living thing. This is
a poet's faith, and it was Ross Lockridge's......" In this
aspect, he was close to such writers as Melville, Whitman, Joyce,
Wolfe and Faulkner, for whom also the human language had explosive
and expansive possibilities quite beyond the putative aspect.
Similarly,
Ross Lockridge in his magnum opus, as his son tells us, wanted
to write "The Great American Novel" which the novelist
believed was waiting for "The Master". In his letters
and other comments, he tried to repudiate his debt to Melville,
Joyce and Wolfe, above all but there is no doubt all these earlier
novelists were fuming in his blood and bones, and it was perhaps
"the anxiety of influence" which he had sought to dissipate,
to use Harold Bloom's idea in an extended context. For the poetic
novel (which is what that genre tends towards continually, whatever
its vestures) seems to obey the same rules as poetry per se.
Thus the elaborate schema of "Raintree County" which
subsumes the use of myth, symbol, layering, overlay, shifts and
echoes, among other devices, was, in fact, painfully evolved
though it does begin to creak here and there under its own monstrous
weight.
Again, different
characters, by turns, become "the novel's center of consciousness",
and it is through a "polyphony of styles and voices"
that Ross Lockridge achieves what Northrop Frye styled as "encyclopaedic
form". That is perhaps in some ways the opposite of the
Jamesian novel of form annealed under dramatic pressure, and
assuming diamond-like cut and finish. A chiselled artefact, in
short. The "encyclopaedic" novel, or, if you like,
the Whitmanian, on the other hand, is almost always bursting
at the seams, and chafing under the pressure of constraints.
Each, of course, has its own true rationale, and its aesthetic
dialectic.
There is, in
addition, as Larry Lockridge is quick to realise, a "carnivalesque"
side to "Raintree County". And if Bakhtin's concept
of this form and the idea of "grotesque realism", is
extended, we begin to understand the mixed strains that weave
the thought and the events into a loose pattern. It may be added,
in passing, that "the carnivalesque" genre is essentially
parodic, subversive and anti-canonic. No wonder, some of Ross
Lockridge's daring forays into the constitutive hypocrisies of
the establishment in regard to sex and religion in particular
made some of the contemporary readers view "Raintree County"
as "a dirty book". There are, besides, some stinging
broadsides against the brigand-type of capitalism which reduced
the human beings to commodity and thing. And "the perfessor"
(sic) seems to be the voice of Ross's other self in the book,
questioning all sorts of orthodoxies in his inimitable ironic
idiom.
This is but
one side of the passage of "Raintree County"-- through
the rapids of theme and thought, of form and technique. There
is still that other side -- the story of its stormy passage to
publication, the awe and anxiety it evoked at the publisher's
end, the endless quarrels over the jettisoning of some parts,
the MGM award of $150000 (which in today's terms comes to $1,050,000)
the Hollywood film with Liz Taylor and Montgomery Clift, and
several such hassles and fracas which were enough to break anyone's
nerves. All these troublesome details are given by the son in
an unsparing manner. His father's pettinesses and even "meannesses"
are not overlooked, or sought to be explained away. There is
a transparent honesty in the proceedings.
And then came
the catastrophic end with the rapidity and unexpectedness of
a tornado. The novelist suffering from illusions, and delusions,
and edging towards the brink, took his own life, locking himself
in his car and inhaling the poisonous fumes of the emission.
It was a disaster at a time when a whole new career of literary
fame and fortune lay before him! And as Larry Lockridge says:
"Thus we grew up with a novel instead of a father".
In other words, the bereaved and desolated family had from that
time onwards to live under the shade of that surrogate father
"Raintree County". Clearly, the book had assumed "spiritual"
dimensions for those close to him, and they have had to live
with it, each in his or her own way, and on own terms.
In the end,
I may add a few words on Larry Lockridge's own prose and style.
He eschews his father's lushnesses and magnanimities of prose,
and is content to hone into shape a style that is muscular, efficient
and brisk though imbued with a sense of poetry and nervous beauty.
Criticism and biography would naturally demand a different order
of expression. It is not plenitude but economy which governs
their argument. But, surely, the son manages to catch "the
murmur of the spirit" to use the Indian editor, R. Raghunatha
Aiyer's eloquent words in relation to great prose.
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