The Return to Raintree County
By David D. Anderson
"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
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,
. . .Besides, Nature puts no premium on chastity. My God, where would
the human race be if it weren't for the bastards? Wasn't Jesus
God's?
Pass the perfectos, John.
Completely stunned, Johnny passed the cigars.
Perhaps in
an effort to placate some of the clerical criticism directed
at the book, the phrase "Wasn't Jesus God's? was deleted
from further printings, leaving the readers to wonder at Johnny's
simplistic response to an otherwise inoffensive phrase. Now the
phrase is restored, the text is pure, and Johnny's response is
in character.
The other footnote
is both personal and touching. Larry Lockridge has been Professor
Laurence Lockridge for many years. In the course of his research,
however, he learned that his father insisted that his name was
not Laurence but Larry. It is Larry Lockridge whose name appears
on the title page of "Shade of the Raintree".
I can think of no more suitable tribute by the son to the father
as well as the writer and the man defined so compellingly in
these pages.
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Page last updated: 25 January 1998