While acknowledging the quaint Tennysonian
echoes, Lockridge loved this poem, especially the last three
lines.
I'd call it a species of Hoosier
Orientalism. John Shockley's poems are escapist, many of them
dream visions. They often find him choosing among an embarrassment
of riches. When twelve beautiful maidens descend in a basket,
our poet swiftly marries the youngest and best-looking. In "The
Two Girls" the poet spies on Katie and Mat swimming in the
nude, prefers Katie, and marries her. He tries his hand at the
short story: After cheating death in a Nashville hospital, Alfred
Kline becomes a New York bohemian poet, woos Jennie on Lake Tahoe
over the objections of her parents who would rather she perish
at the hands of Indians, rescues her from an inundated tree,
whereupon they drift out into the Pacific Ocean and live happily
ever after. There are some folksy coups de plume with more local
color, but John Shockley often deploys his imagination to get
the hell out of Indiana and away from his sober wife Emma.
I find no unfinished epic in his
surviving works to suggest a larger literary ambition. The closest
is "An Indian Idyll," which exists in three unfinished
drafts and concerns an ancient temple of twelve large slabs,
on which an epic legend has been etched in an Indian language
now lost. Another lengthy narrative poem, "A Summer Dream,"
mingles Spenser, Coleridge, and Keats, as my brother Ernest notes,
in an Edenic quest romance full of birthing monstrosities.
Adapting his grandfather to the
role of leading character, Lockridge asks, in effect, what if
we give him true epic ambition and what if we bolster somewhat
his literary pedigree? John Shockley was born on April 29th,
so he nudges the gestation back a few days and gets his hero
John Shawnessy born on Shakespeare's official birthday, April
23rd, improving on his own near miss of April 25th. (We know
for sure only that Shakespeare was baptized on April 26th.)
He also slips in an old family
legend that his great-grandfather William B. Shockley was a bastard
son of Thomas Carlyle. His fictional counterpart T. D. Shawnessy
strongly hints this in confessing his bastardy to his son. (There
are only two problems with this legend. One is the common opinion
that Carlyle died a virgin. The other is that Carlyle was born
in 1795 and W. B. Shockley in 1801, so even if the Victorian
Sage was unacknowledged stud to all the lasses of Ecclefechan,
it seems unlikely he got started by the age of six.)
Other tailorings of his grandfather
show that Lockridge was in effect asking, What if I make Shawnessy
more like me? Where John Shockley had been born eighth in a family
of fifteen children, Lockridge makes John Shawnessy the youngest
in a somewhat smaller family and, like himself, an accident.
Shawnessy like Lockridge decides on a career of writer at the
age of seven.
More telling are the many personality
parallels. Both Lockridge and Shawnessy are fascinated by words
and totally absorbed as readers, are students of classical literature
and myth, and ponder time, antiquities, and old photographs.
Both entertain a sense of special destiny as writers, in a clash
of native humility with egoism. Their keen interest in sex chafes
against an inner check. They have a capacity for friendship,
male and female, yet give the impression of holding something
in reserve. They are fast runners and competitive in a self-punishing
way. They are smiling, handsome, rather soft-spoken and shy,
heterosexual, attractive to women, and possessed of a vitality
and optimism sometimes seen by others as naive. They are idealist
in philosophy, non-literal in religion, liberal socialist in
politics, and are always trying to do the right thing. Except
on occasion, neither smokes or drinks or swears. Neither tells
his parents off.
Beneath this formidable miscellany
is a trait Lockridge lays out schematically early in his novel.
His hero is "plural"--on the one hand he is Mr. Shawnessy,
"a dutiful citizen of the Republic calling for his mail,"
and on the other he is mr. shawnessy, "a faunlike hero poised
on the verge of festive adventures." Mr. Shawnessy is the
public family man bounded by custom who lingers on thresholds
without crossing and acts as "a large comfortable mask"
for his twin.
"mr. shawnessy," in turn,
runs into naked women on stone slabs in post offices, crosses
all boundaries of time and space in an "eternal vagabondage,"
and feels his mythic participation in the history of the human
race from Genesis to Revelation. "His face peered furtively
from a frieze of the Parthenon, passed in mob scenes in the reign
of Justinian, crossed with crowds on Brooklyn Ferry ever so many
centuries hence. . . Mr. Shawnessy had made the turn north onto
the County Road. But the insouciant twin had kept the westward
bias."
They are of course one person,
the narrator concedes, but it is largely mr. shawnessy who hopes
to write the great epic of his people.
When Raintree County appeared,
some of Ross Lockridge's friends and acquaintances were surprised
by the novel's depth of feeling. They had known him as someone
with "a delightful sense of whimsy and of relaxed fun,"
who "carried a truly impressive fund of erudition as naturally
as breathing," as Don Smalley would write his wife Ruth.
"In contrast and in conflict there lived the other Ross
who felt driven to greatness, a Ross carefully hidden from friends
and colleagues, I would judge, certainly from me"--and this
Ross, Smalley thinks, must have been punishing to the other.
I agree.
Lockridge attempted half-seriously
to revise his persona when returning from Europe in 1934, to
make the smiling young man more consistent with the serious consciousness
within, if only to impress the girls. He was annoyed by his affable
public self, satirizing it as Mr. Shawnessy, and yielding his
pen to the lyrical, memory-haunted self within. Only in his novel
was this self permitted to speak.
Given these resemblances in personality
between author and main character, Lockridge transforms the circumstances
and happenings of his own life, as if to put himself by proxy
through a more severe testing.
What if, for example, he had like
Bruce confronted death by drowning? Johnny Shawnessy at seventeen
tries to follow the Shawmucky River down to Paradise Lake and
gets lost in the Great Swamp, where he drops neckdeep into ooze,
at the last moment grasping an exposed willow root. "He
clung to the willow, gasping with a fear he hadn't felt during
the struggle. Around him, impassive, secret, beautiful, the Great
Swamp shimmered and stank. With a brutal indifference, his own
earth had nearly killed him."
For a youth who has been reading
Shakespeare on the banks of his beloved river and dreaming of
noble fame, the experience is chastening. Nature, which had worn
a nurturing human face, must now be engaged without sentimentality.
And what if Lockridge had lost
Vernice Baker to a rival? Shawnessy watches as Nell Gaither makes
out with Garwood Jones backstage at a performance of his own
temperance play. In a privileged life, this would be a momentary
discomfort overcome by love and perseverance. But though Johnny
and Nell do love one another, he is at first hemmed in by the
thornhedge of his reluctance and then dogged by a series of mishaps--including
the bad luck that her aunt is still up when they try to sneak
into Nell's bedroom. Nell eventually marries Garwood, with disastrous
consequences for her and Johnny. Nell eventually marries Garwood
with disastrous consequences for her and Johnny.
And what if Lockridge had not been
declared 4-F for the draft and had got into the fuss, confronting
real enemy in combat? John Shockley's own military service was
as an assistant surgeon in the 134th Regiment of Indiana Volunteers.
He didn't enlist until late spring of 1864 and may have seen
no action. Once again Lockridge enhances the raw materials. Shawnessy
fights all the way from Chickamauga to Missionary Ridge to Atlanta
to the sea. He discovers that half of courage is fear, that battles
can be lost and depend largely on chance, that heroic ideals
are lost sight of on the battlefield, where men shyly hold their
own guts in their hands, and that even he, Shawnessy, can simplify
his concepts and learn to hate.
In his single most telling pronouncement
to his publisher, Lockridge made clear the autobiographical thrust
of his novel and laid the grounds for the reading I offer here.
"For my part," he told them, "while the Republic
was bleeding, I hid behind a thousand skirts and let J.W.S. bleed
for me all over the thousands of MS. pages of Raintree County."
And what if Lockridge hadn't recovered
from scarlet fever in 1935? What would have happened to the world
in the aftermath of this terrible loss? , Falsely reported dead,
John Shawnessy has a rare opportunity to gauge public reaction.
The man who discovers him still alive is disappointed because
he'd been named trustee of an educational fund in his name. Nell
Gaither recovered enough from the bad news to marry his rival,
Garwood Jones, almost in time to make use of the funeral baked
meats. Garwood's terrible poetic tribute ("Lo, where is
Seth, that erst did fill these glades / With laughter and rejoicing
blithe and brave?") appeared with typos on the back page
of the Clarion. And his mother has stopped wearing black.
Life goes on in Raintree County. "After all, what did the
dead expect? Did the dead have any rights?"
Such chastenings, contrasted with
the better luck of the author, could be extended: Shawnessy never
recovers his lost son, he doesn't win any elections.
And though he does win the great Fourth of July footrace in 1859--while
Lockridge was always eating dust--he pays for his victory tragically.
Most important, he never
finishes the great work. In his youth Shawnessy writes a conventional
temperance play and some derivative sentimental verse. While
living in New York City he attempts a play, Sphinx Recumbent,
but is unable to finish the fifth act. And now the great epic
of America languishes. Politely assuming lack of genius isn't
the problem, the Perfessor speaks like a modern-day historicist:
"All so-called great men are the result of human collaboration
before, during, and after the fact. With a little cooperation
from Fate, you might have been America's Shakespeare, John, but
you lacked the human context. A whole age worked to create the
Plays, which are not unwisely attributed to a dozen other men
besides the man who penned them." As we have moved from
the Age of Lincoln to the Age of Senator Garwood B. Jones, the
epic potential has withered.
The Perfessor's judgments, always
incisive, are never sufficient. Exactly why Shawnessy can't otherwise
get on with his epic isn't made explicit. In a passage Lockridge
deleted, perhaps for being too explicit, Shawnessy reflects that
Shakespeare didn't himself suffer the fates of Hamlet, Othello,
Macbeth, Lear, or Cleopatra, and enjoyed an enabling aesthetic
distance. Whereas, "I lived perhaps too deeply to give back
what I have lived."
This is the rub. Shawnessy is too
haunted by his own tragic past to make the conversion from life
to art, to be the artist-contriver who, with radiant pencil,
converts memory into "a legend of light and shadow, some
faces on the great Road of the Republic." Although another
kind of creative power will be ascribed to him, he is too steeped
in his own unfinished life to see it whole and write his way
out of it. Instead of the artist he is "the rememberer."
Lockridge is an innocent compared
with his proxy shawnessy, who suffers many irreparable losses--his
sweetheart Nell Gaither, his first wife, susanna, and their son,
James, his parents, and his army buddy Flash Perkins, "the
most affirmative being Johnny shawnessy had ever seen."
Because his suffering is more through
imaginative identification than literal mishap, Lockridge can
write, in a trial of his projected selves, the life that Shawnessy
only dreams of writing. Raintree County, as some critics
have pointed out, becomes that paradoxical creation, an epic
about the impossibility of writing an epic. It's the novel of
a life and a people that stands in for the epic poem its own
hero would have written, had he been able.
In the novel, Lockridge thus undercuts
his own sense of entitlement and special destiny. Shawnessy is
repeatedly chastened--by nature and circumstance, and by the
fact that there are other people in the world. Yet Lockridge's
own lucky exemption from literal tragedy is enabling for the
artist in him--he must "lift the soul," in Coleridge's
phrase, to create through empathy what he has not shared.
The novel's
most vivid character is not Shawnessy but Professor Jerusalem
Webster Stiles. He was initially the spawn of Shawnessy himself.
He made his first appearance, same name and same costume, in
one of Shawnessy's dreams in the abandoned novel, American
Lives. He and Shawnessy share the initials JWS. Lockridge
asks in effect, What if, in addition to the plurality of his
inner selves, I create for Shawnessy an alter ego who challenges
him every inch of the way?
As elsewhere, there is no single
real-life counterpart to the Perfessor. Lockridge had many cynic-skeptics
among his friends: scientist Malcolm Correll takes a dim view
of religious and metaphysical moonshine, sophisticated Cloise
Crane argues a dark determinism, international businessman and
adventurer Curtis Lamorey accepts no wooden nickels, Quaker pacifist
Larry Wylie is skeptical of religious dogma and militaristic
flag-waving, economist and poet Donald Blankertz has a world-weary
suspicion of claims to heroic motivation, and historian Steve
Tryon finds much about American history that gives us little
reason to cheer. Correll told me that in quirky mannerism and
physical bearing--a "huge vivid insect," tall, thin,
angular, black-haired, with a malacca cane substituted for a
baton--the Perfessor owes much to BHS orchestral conductor Fred
Sharp. Some other pedagogues may add a trait or two. Lockridge
told his wife that the Perfessor, like many of his other characters,
was a composite.
I think, though, that the Perfessor
is deep-seated in Lockridge's own personality. The satiric voice
developed from high school days on. In degree of virtuosity it
was dominant. With something like the division of labor one finds
in Byron--between the heroic quester Childe Harold and the satiric
narrator of Don Juan--Shawnessy and Stiles conduct a dialogue
throughout the novel and test contrarieties in the author who
created them both.
Similarly, the dialogue of Castorp
and Settembrini in The Magic Mountain impressed him greatly.
"It's like a symphony," he said to his wife after reading
Mann's novel in 1943. Despite its "time-tranced existence"
and portrait of European life in decay, it doesn't fall into
negation. "Living is dying, and smells like it too,"
Lockridge noted, paraphrasing Hans Castorp, "but life keeps
the form through change of substance. . . Life, its tremendous
hovering instability, and yet an inner principle always controlling
and generating form. A pullulation, something called flesh and
becoming form, beauty, a lofty image, and yet all the time the
essence of sensuality and desire." In the dialogue of Raintree
County, Lockridge tries to give Shawnessy the upper hand
over the Perfessor. His hero argues the continuance of life amid
instability and negation.
In unpublished notes growing out
of his earlier novel, Lockridge speaks of the Perfessor as a
philologist, a Pagan Easterner who transplants Classicism to
the Midwest in a quaintly "Latinized America." He's
a latter-day Hermes, messenger of the Gods to Pedee Academy,
Raintree County. The Perfessor speaks "the word Latin, sonorous,
reverberant, the word capable of becoming a thing in itself,
the word containing a kind of purple, stiff vitality, the word
a tool of inhibition and reflection." The spirited classicism
of Raintree County is Americanized, for though the novel
invokes all the great epics from Homer to Joyce, Lockridge is
attempting an American epic. In this largely Christian
culture, classical myth and literature have an anachronistic
gentility. But they have bearing on us still and the Perfessor
is their messenger.
In the flexible mythic overlay
of the novel, he takes on more sinister roles as well. He is
the Grand Inquisitor, the Mysterious Stranger, Mephistopheles.
When he departs on the night train "the glare from the furnace
showed a long, thin body in a soiled white suit, a face old and
cunning, black eyes shining through pince-nez glasses."
A master of outrageous utterance,
the Perfessor satirizes what Raintree County holds dear and does
so with such gusto that he thrives on the targeted fatuities.
He has neither a reformer's hope nor the animus of a severe moralist.
Some of his pronouncements--for instance, that "Religion's
a vast ritual of remorse for the unhappy discovery of pain and
death"--flummoxed the American clergy in 1948.
In religion he's an agnostic, in
politics a Marxist, in natural history a Darwinian, in psychology
a Hobbesian and pre-Freudian, in personal morals a sexual opportunist
(who, however, rarely gets any), in metaphysics a determinist,
in history a debunker--and, for all this, a loyal friend to Shawnessy,
his best student, whom he enormously likes.
Theirs is a relationship of mutual
need. When the Perfessor is about to be lynched for having absconded
with a juiceless preacher's succulent young wife, Shawnessy outruns
the mob to tip him off. And when Shawnessy is himself about to
be tarred, feathered, and falsely accused of adultery with a
local Waycross feminist, the Perfessor confronts the mob led
by a preacher. After helping unmask the Rev. Lloyd G. Jarvey,
who has indulged in some adultery of his own that day, he "rapped
the Preacher sharply on the head with his cane or jabbed him
in the seat of the trousers. So doing, he had appeared to ship
the whole struggling mass through the gates, which he promptly
slammed to."
Farce has its allegorical meaning
in Raintree County. The Perfessor, with his enlightened
skepticism, routs the myopic preacher, whose name echoes Lord
God Jehovah. The novel challenges Old Testament authoritarianism,
as well as New Testament literalism. As Lockridge writes of Henry
Adams, the Perfessor has the "tenacity of genius."
Yet like Adams's his vision is inadequate.
The Perfessor's limitation is grounded
in a personal tragedy, which Lockridge withholds until late in
the novel, confronting only there one of the most personally
troubling of the "what if's." Late in the day, Stiles
tells Shawnessy, "My father had died before I was old enough
to remember him. When I was only ten years old, my mother died.
In that death, Jerusalem Webster Stiles knew the secret of life--which
is death--and never after added to his wisdom though he added
to his words. And with that act, also, he left Raintree County
and went East, where he had roots. Now, as you know, he came
back to Raintree County when he was a young man, but he never
came back home. He learned early, with the bitterness of the
homeless child, that the earth cares nothing for our grief, and
that even our mother who cared for us in life cares nothing for
us in death. We care for her and keep her image alive in our
brief world of memory and grief, but she doesn't care for us
any longer. She has forgotten us. She doesn't remember our face.
. . This is the autobiography of Jerusalem Webster Stiles, which
may be said to have ended when he was ten years old."
Lockridge knew Freud's essay, "Mourning
and Melancholia" and in an unpublished note on the Perfessor's
psychology speaks of "the infantile and unadjusted grief
for the loss of one's mother." He knew that grief can turn
pathological and that one must work through it.
Shawnessy hopes to overcome the
terrible force of the perfessor's utterance "by a myth of
homecoming and a myth of resurrection. . . Grief is the most
beautiful garland given to love." But his memory shifts
back to the death of his own mother in 1877, which had left him
bereft, with only a half-written rejected manuscript, a guidebook
to the Centennial Exposition, some old photographs and crumpled
telegrams, and a "mothy personal legend" about the
raintree.
For both men the death of fathers
is barely registered, while the death of mothers is a personal
and metaphysical calamity. Lockridge's inspiration for his novel
going back to Paris days was deeply interwoven with his sense
of his mother's mortality. The novel is partly grounded in a
kind of anticipatory loss. Elsie Lockridge's confidence that
the dead are "living on" is not shared by her
son. But on another level I think Lockridge identifies with the
Perfessor. He may have carried with him from earliest childhood
the sense of already having lost his mother.
This "what if" is among
the most difficult of all for Lockridge to ask: what is left
after our mothers die, after we become dead to them?
That he asks this question enhances
the probability that the writing of his novel is itself a working
through of grief--of grief for all that has been and could be
lost. The Perfessor's unremittent grief is portrayed as pathological.
Thus, Lockridge attempts, through the catharsis and self-mastery
of writing, to overcome his own novel's pervasive atmosphere
of loss, to overcome the death nausea that befell him while visiting
Messick graveyard with his mother in the summer of 1941. The
novel is both an expression and an organizing of his emotional
life.
But there's an even more calamitous
loss for Shawnessy, if not for the Perfessor: the death of Nell.
Though occurring chronologically before the death of Shawnessy's
mother, Nell's death in childbirth--she is pregnant by Garwood--is
narrated only in the novel's final pages, as Shawnessy confronts
in memory his greatest loss.
Why it is greatest will take us
to the heart of the warmly expressed values of Raintree County,
which has been something other than a long day's journey into
night.
Lockridge's novel is a search for
sustaining values in the face of desolation and death. Without
embarrassment it asks large questions. The largest is, What survives
the ruins of time? It's a question both personal and metaphysical.
The Perfessor would seem to have the edge in the great debate,
scoring point after point. But Shawnessy gamely holds on in a
narrative where sexual vitality and mythic vision contend as
best they can with mortality and cultural decline.
* * *
Sex is an idol
in Raintree County. In the Day episodes the menfolk gather
around a pasture to watch a white bull named Jupiter mount a
heifer. At the same time the myopic Reverend Jarvey arrives at
Lorena Passifee's to administer one of those orgasmic "godshouts"
the local ladies are always lining up for, begging for multiple
conversions. Jarvey is Zeus (Jupiter) in pursuit of Io and Europa,
or Poseidon's bull mounting Pasiphaè. Their coupling,
enhanced by dandelion wine, will be observed through the window
by neighborhood children, just as the mating of bull and heifer
is furtively watched by feminist Evelina Brown from her tower
window.
There's a difference, though: what
is blind and indiscriminate in the white bull is comic hypocrisy
in the Preacher, who is finally undone by sex. Subjected to various
frocks and hoopskirts, sex is life in this novel, sex permeates
Raintree County from conception to the grave.
Growing up in pre-Kinsey-report
Bloomington, Lockridge felt both the fecundity of his natural
habitat and the puritan restraints of Hoosier culture. For all
her advanced notions in other respects, his mother was a Christian
Scientist for whom, as Mary Baker Eddy says, "no more sympathy
exists between the flesh and Spirit than between Belial and Christ."
He was greatly interested in sex,
curious to hear from his friends about their sexual initiations,
enjoying the humor of local folk--Jim Pennington's jokes, for
instance--and reading widely on the subject. At the same time,
he postponed his own sexual initiation probably until marriage,
was faithful to his wife, and was rarely far from the family
hearth. Earlier he had backed away when women seemed to be pressuring
him sexually, less I think from puritanism than from the weight
of meaning he placed on sex.
He was heterosexual but might now
agree there was a homoerotic component in those strong male friendships.
The ritual of male bonding in the bull-and-heifer scene--a nineteenth-century
equivalent to the stag film--is as close as his novel comes to
homoeroticism on an otherwise panoramic screen.
I think it was pretty audacious for a young Hoosier
from a studious, rather prudish household--a former member of
Epworth League, secretary of YPB, and President of a consortium
of Indiana Hi-Y's--to publish a novel that dwelt on the erotic
life, as some reviewers complained, more than any previous American
novel. He was not some objective sociologist of sex correcting
our pious misreadings of ourselves. Rather, he was a nervy writer
working up his materials to give a fuller sensation of life.
What is the meaning of sex in the
novel?
The title of Elsie Lockridge's
favorite childhood book, Barriers
Burned Away, becomes a metaphor of the erotic life. The
great sentimental wish of sex is to burn all barriers away
in total unmediated ecstasy. But "Raintree County was itself
the barrier of form imposed upon a stuff of longing, life-jet
of the river." The "random curve of water" contrasts
with the "rectilinear stone" of the Courthouse, and
would ideally be "the pathway of the hero of a legend, of
one who rose from the Great Swamp and rode a horse of godlike
appetite to the summit of Platonic forms."
But the imposition of barriers
is the only way a humanly erotic life is possible, whether as
incest taboos or rituals of courtship and marriage. These barriers
can be either restrictive or defining, as the various love affairs
in the novel show.
Not long after his dunking in the
swamp, Johnny Shawnessy is compensated by the river, out of which
a fabulous creature steps naked one day while he covertly watches.
"On the left of the deepfleshed hemispheres was a brown
mole, pennysized. Then as the creature half turned a moment and
stretched up its arms full length in the sunlight, he saw the
brightnippled breasts, the wide, smooth belly, and three gold
tufts of hair." Nell Gaither has ordinarily appeared in
highnecked bodice and petticoats, speaking the "evasive
language" of Raintree County. Suddenly she is Venus.
Johnny had earlier seen the Indiana
landscape in the image of his mother Ellen (near-anagram of Nell),
as a maternal earth with its riddle of origins reinscribing the
Oedipus myth. But now "it had taken for its image the Venus
Callipygos in exchange for Mother Eve in her figleaf."
The novel implies that this exchange
is a healthy one in the natural history of sex. It echoes Lockridge's
own comparative ease in marrying Vernice Baker and beginning
his own family. The Perfessor in his grief over his mother's
death has not resolved the Oedipal predicament.
Thus, Shawnessy's greater grief
is not for his mother but for Nell, the river goddess and local
girl who first awakened him to life as desire. This loss is tragic,
while the other is natural and necessary.
For Shawnessy and Lockridge, desire
enhances the sensation of life even because it attempts
always to transcend its own roots in vacancy and loss. The novel
conveyed both the vitality and poignancy of desire to a generation
of young readers who still remember elusive, doomed Nell rising
naked from the riverbank when they've forgotten everything else.
Desire draws its nourishment from
our connection with the biological landscape. The land is always
there, with its river of life and Great Swamp. Emblem of female
genitalia, the Swamp is the home of our nostalgia, as well as
our ultimate tomb. Geography recapitulates anatomy in Raintree
County, even down to the book jacket, where the living body of
Nell is seen in the lush contours of the county map. Though dead
and buried she survives in the landscape. The abandoned Danwebster
graveyard lying next to the river gives Shawnessy an overwhelming
sense of life, overrun as it is by grasshoppers, gravemyrtle,
wild carrot, blackberries and poison ivy.
Corruption of this sense of place
threatens our collective vitality. Called an "ecological
novel written before its time," Raintree County warned
of our loss of connection with this biological planet. There's
been plenty of evidence that Lockridge's environmental instincts
were right--that in "mining and stripping and gutting and
draining, and whoring and ravaging and rending the beautiful
earth of America," we would lay waste our powers.
I take some consolation in the
fact that he didn't survive to see the east pastures off High
Street give way to shopping malls, his old boy scout camp lose
out to the freeway, and the streams and gardens in and around
Bloomington polluted by Westinghouse's PCBs.
Lockridge finds meaning and value
in our fierce attachments, even when they retard, wound, or destroy
us. Resisting the Perfessor's maxim that "Narcissus was
your only honest lover," Shawnessy thinks our attachments
extend the self beyond itself. They also link us to desires,
fixations, and taboos rooted in our biological evolution, before
custom and the rectangular county lines imposed. And they have
human meaning. Tragedy, severing the objects of our love, ironically
reaffirms meaning and value in Raintree County.
Other relationships
in the novel portray the perseverance of sex and love amid calamity
and sorrow. And they portray how we must seek love beyond family
romance, beyond the powerful field of parental domination. The
attachments that make us human can also make us ill.
Some female characters have more
trouble with their fathers than Shawnessy ever had with his mother.
Lockridge wants multiple points of view, and except for Shawnessy
makes them all female, as if to shift the balance of sensibility
somewhat. We see some episodes through the eyes of Shawnessy's
daughter Eva, modeled on Elsie Shockley Lockridge as a young
girl. We see others through the eyes of his second wife Esther
Root, modeled on Emma Rhoton Shockley, and of Evelina Brown,
a feminist who is a take-off on those Minerva Society women at
New Harmony. With this profusion of "E" names and women
with green eyes, Lockridge suggests the ubiquity of Eve.
Eva idealizes her father and loathes
herself for it. She can never be worthy of him. Lockridge narrates
his mother's childhood jealousy, competitiveness, self-loathing,
aggression, and nightmares. He doesn't narrate her life beyond
the age of twelve--her sexual development is permanently arrested
by the novel's time frame--but he confronts the living grownup
Eva in his own mother, who half a century later still worships
that father, with implications, as we have seen, for her own
marriage and child-rearing. The novel is dedicated to his mother.
But Lockridge would later feel that in portraying her youthful
passions he had exploited and harmed her.
Hollywood deleted Eva, as well as Esther and Evelina,
and made its movie around the character of Susanna Drake, who
is haunted by her father's ghost in a different way. Lockridge
once again has both used and altered family sources. In 1861
John Shockley, then twenty-two, married Susannah Duke, just approaching
seventeen. A photograph of her shows
no particular resemblance to Elizabeth Taylor, alas. Her father,
originally from North Carolina, was a colorfully brutish Henry
County dirt farmer, thrice-married with fifteen children.
The Duke brothers hated know-it-all
John Shockley, and played nasty practical jokes on him. John
and Susannah lived together for only three months before they
separated, she pregnant by then. In divorce proceedings brought
in 1864, he complained that she refused to sleep or live with
him, and she complained of same, her lawyer adding that "he
was a disbeliever in a married life, that the vow taken in a
marriage ceremony is of no moral force and not binding on any
one . . . and that he belonged to the so called Progressive Society
which holds to all the isms and cisms of modern fanatics and
religion and morality." Susannah won custody and John promptly
enlisted in the army. She lived briefly in Mississippi with relatives
before returning to Henry County, possibly insane by this time,
and died in 1877 at the age of thirty-three. Their son James
lived until 1919, a Mississippi farmer.
Lockridge had to improve on all
this. What if the lowly Dukes get upscaled to Southern aristocracy
and Susanna Drake is made two years John Shawnessy's senior,
a beautiful olive-skinned nymphomaniac? She has arrived from
Louisiana, taken up residence in an elegant house in the county
seat Freehaven, and bestows the laurels on Johnny when he wins
the 1859 Fourth of July footrace against Flash Perkins. Later
that day, very drunk, he chases her into the swamp near Paradise
Lake where on a grassy mound they make love, the dust of yellow
flowers from a tree falling on his shoulders and her black hair.
Lockridge counterpoints sex this
time with journalistic accounts of a disastrous balloon ascension,
a perilous crossing of Niagara Falls on a tightrope, and a tourist
promo on the "balsamic odors and blue skies" beneath
the Mason-Dixon Line.
Promptly evicted from Eden, Johnny
is forced to marry Susanna and journeys with her to New Orleans--as
epic heroes have journeyed to Hades--where he sees slavery first-hand
and intervenes in the ax murder of a young black. He is otherwise
well-entertained, rather like Lord Byron in his Regency society
phase. Then back to Raintree County, where he watches helplessly
as Susanna sinks into psychosis and eventual suicide.
Although the causes differ, the
description of Susanna's psychosis and Shawnessy's sense of guilt
contain uncanny prophecies of Lockridge's fate. Probably on a
level beneath his own awareness, he did intuit his own vulnerability.
But I would otherwise call this foreshadowing a dramatic irony
that highlights how one can know about mental disorder, perhaps
anticipate it, yet be baffled when it is time to confront the
snakes oneself. The Snake Pit isn't the only family novel that
portrays mental illness.
In the days following his indiscretion
under the raintree, Shawnessy feels as if a thousand eyes are
watching him. He dreads the daily newspaper, expects it to publicize
his crime, feels only greater dread for every day's reprieve.
When he receives a letter from Susanna informing him, falsely,
of her pregnancy, "the words said what he had always feared,
what he had known would come to pass . . . Someone would come
in and find him leaning insanely against this wall and would
know that he was guilty of something." He feels helpless,
caught by fate as time brings to birth dark events seeded years
earlier--and he thinks of hopping a train to "California,
on the Golden Shore!"
Shame before his mother's eyes
brings on the catastrophe. She has received a letter from an
informer. He knows then that he will marry Susanna. The bitter
words they exchange are "merely the truncated mouthings
of the Oedipean agony." She could never understand "the
young man's pagan world of beauty and desire" and relents
in her censure only when she fears he's about to throw himself
under a train. He sees his fate--marrying Susanna instead of
Nell--as a "Great Betrayal," as bringing harm to those
he most loves. He hopes somehow to clear "his honor and
good name before the County." Nell sensibly berates him
for having too great a conscience in these matters, as Vernice
Lockridge will try to talk good sense into her husband.
With some detective work, in a
novel full of riddles, Shawnessy uncovers the origin of Susanna's
psychosis. Her father James had taken a mulatto mistress, Henrietta
Courtney, to the virtual exclusion of his wife, and Susanna is
probably the mulatto's daughter. As a racist she fears her blood
is tainted. In some unpublished notes on Susanna's psychology,
Lockridge makes it explicit that in her self-punishing nymphomania
she is identifying with Henrietta and other black mistresses
of her white father, compulsively asking that the sexual subjugation
be repeated. She is a "black Helen," an emblem of the
Old South, one race enslaved by the other. Slavery is "the
mental illness of America" as well as its original sin.
Susanna's decline is marked by
depression and paranoia. She spends hours alone in her bedroom.
She imagines conspiracies everywhere--"they" are all
plotting against her. She loses interest in sex, at least with
Shawnessy. Talking about her problems proves less than cathartic,
and Shawnessy, not handling things very well, would rather not
listen. "He couldn't imagine a greater indignity than to
go before Raintree County and confess that he was married to
a crazy woman." It seemed to him "that he was groping
helplessly outside his own world and trying to get back into
it. He must not give up. He must go on bearing the burden of
the whole implacably connected universe of himself." Susanna
is eventually a suicide, who diverts attention at one key moment
by falsely claiming that she is visiting her parents. Again,
these are uncanny prophecies of the author fate.
Shawnessy's second wife Esther
is ashamed in turn at the probability that she is part Miami
Indian. Esther like Susanna is dominated by her father. Gideon
Root's fierce love for her is close to incestuous and seems greater
than Shawnessy's own. In a scene the precise opposite of Joyce's
"Evelina," literal-minded and humorless Esther suddenly
acknowledges the hidden spring of her will, refuses to move out
west with her father after all, and runs impetuously to join
Mr. Shawnessy. Root's hands will always be on her, torn as she
is between two worlds, and she is in effect seeking out another
father figure.
But she still shows Lockridge's
affirmative reading of human freedom--more affirmative at least
than Joyce's in his short story. By dint of will and desire,
we can sometimes free ourselves of dark entrapments, burning
some of those barriers away and forming new structures for our
lives grounded in other human attachments. Where Susanna and
Shawnessy found themselves caught up in Aeschylean tragedy, Esther
and he take up residence in a domestic Victorian novel, complete
with gingerbread house, where marriage and family will survive.
Desire in Raintree County thus
takes some dark turns before finding a compensatory haven. To
reach Paradise Lake "one had to pass by the graveyard and
the vanished town of Danwebster." Yet for all his ordeal
Shawnessy isn't in paradise. Clearly there's been a chastening
of the impassioned young man dreaming of lush-loined Nell on
the Shawmucky River. Esther never even calls him by his first
name; he is always "Mr. Shawnessy." The fate of desire
is the institution of the family, brought forth in sorrow "for
the crime of lustful love." There's both loss and gain in
this, and Shawnessy by the novel's end has seen that boundaries
and barriers, not wholly burned away, have given form and meaning
to eros.
And the land is still there for
Shawnessy, a full presence as always--the river, swamp, and tree,
the rock at the limit of the land, and Raintree County itself,
which gives us life and will reclaim us in the end. The warmth
of our emotional life--the deepest element of a biological heritage
rooted in the land--doesn't necessarily diminish, even as it
takes forms other than erotic fever.
Lockridge was himself a family
man whose feeling for his mother was strong and whose authorial
freedom and identity were imposed on unwittingly by his father.
Through his reading of Freud and more so through personal experience,
he knew the threat of family romance. Writing is a therapy; the
various sexual relationships in the novel show him working through
Oedipean entrapment and still earlier torments. He had already
contended with them well enough in his personal life. At a rather
early age he found his living Nell Gaither--not having to settle
for an Esther--and set up a family of his own.
Thus he sacrificed the youthful
vagabondage of Paris days for domesticity, in a warmer marriage
than his father or Grandfather Shockley had experienced. Faithful
Husband, provider, and father of four, he found in domesticity
the structures that regulated the currents of a fearfully strong
emotional life--a life he continued to express through fiction.
And like Shawnessy he had a resource
beyond eros to sustain him. Mythic consciousness--grounded less
in feeling than in imagination--is another human power in Lockridge's
novel answering to the ruins of time.
* * *
As a young child,
Rossie was touring the old cemetery at Frankfurt, Kentucky with
his father and asked, "Are all the people buried here great
men?"
When father and son played their
homemade game of heroes "The Rossiteers," their list
included Ulysses, Hercules, Atlas, Helen of Troy, Theseus, Jason,
Mercury, Bellerophon, and many others, mythical and historical,
who crop up again in Raintree County.
The novel is an often comic testing
of criteria, as Shawnessy from boyhood on ponders who and what
is great. His purported grandfather Thomas Carlyle asks the same
questions in Of Heroes and Hero-Worship, with his own
list of heroes, including Shakespeare. Johnny Shawnessy hears
of many dubious candidates for Greatest Living American, from
James K. Polk to Henry Clay to Zachary Taylor. Lincoln comes
off as more likely. Raintree County is somewhere between
heroic and anti-heroic fiction, as Leonard Lutwak has noted.
It doesn't dismiss heroes altogether but redefining their nature
and mission in an era when the river gods have been chased away
by freight trains.
Some readers may find annoying
the dreams of glory entertained by an adolescent who silently
aspires to be Shakespeare: Johnny is a high-flyer like Bellerophon
and Icarus, who hungers for beauty and greatness. His hopes are
sometimes downright messianic, as he imagines himself a prophet
bringing a new religion into an America still weighed down with
Old Testament and other moribund deities. Grandiose vision coexists
with his unpushy good nature.
The narrator's language is often
a sympathetic echoing of these dreams in the earlier portions
of the novel. But irony is at work even there, and Shawnessy's early poetic effusions are meant to show
that the Shakespearean gift isn't in evidence just yet. some
are candidates for "Lockridge's Leaden Treasury." And
well before the novel's end, Shawnessy is humbled, no longer
thinking himself a new Shakespeare, let alone Jesus. After losing
a local election he feels he has "been rejected by his people
and called a false prophet."
He isn't broken, though. What he
salvages is a vision to challenge the Perfessor's cynicism--a
vision rather lovely and very fragile.
Lockridge calls on much of what
he most values in fashioning this vision for Shawnessy--words,
legends, maps, antiquities, dreams, philosophy. He puts to good
use the Illustrated Historical Atlas of Henry County that
he took from Emma Shockley's house, revising it somewhat as the
main prop in the Day episodes. Senator Garwood B. Jones has heard
that the engraver, about to lose his job, introduced pornographic
images into the Illustrated Historical Atlas of Raintree County.
Only a single copy was said to have been printed before detection,
with such images as a lady going into a dry goods store stark
naked except for a parasol, and a bull "showing prize-winning
form in an intimate domestic scene." Moreover, "John
J. Jubal's palatial home in Beardstown features an ithyphallic
Aztec god instead of a cast-iron triton. The sign reading Burke
House on Freehaven's leading hotel has been altered to something
more pungent. And Jesus Christ surrounded by the twelve Apostles
is getting ready to jump to Zion from the observation platform
of the house on page 61."
Shawnessy obliges the Senator and
manages early in the day to retrieve the copy, kept under lock
and key at the Historical Museum. Off and on throughout the day
they and others pour disappointedly over its pages, finding no
such variants. Only in the final minutes before the Perfessor's
departure does Shawnessy think of looking in the most obvious
place: the main entrance to the Court House on page five. In
amazement they find a naked Adam and Eve tasting the forbidden
fruit. "With what an exquisite feeling for paradox, an unknown
artist had substituted his symbolic statue of Edenic rebellion
for the stern yet necessary lady with the scales, whose upright
form had ruled the conscience of Raintree County from the beginning!"
The old myths still have the power
to subvert and give new life to our sober constructs, but the
myth-making power itself needs constant rejuvenation. "Americans
have rewritten the old epics and have added myths of their own.
From the Greeks, we've taken the plural gods, the rape of beauty,
the long war, the wandering and the return. From the Hebrew and
Christian myth, we've taken the lost garden and the divine man,"
says Shawnessy.
Raintree County is itself
a rewrite of that Atlas, with renditions of the subversive scenes
its own characters hoped to find. And it attempts to add some
myths of its own. A few years before the vogue of archetypal
criticism in America, Lockridge has his hero speak of America
as "a new Eden," whose people are "the new mythmakers."
Unknown artists like Shawnessy
add to our sustaining mythology by localizing and revising the
old myths. Tree worship is found in many ancient cultures, as
Frazer documents in The Golden Bough, and is prominent
in the Genesis myth. Shawnessy's raintree is a mutation of an
ancient archetype, combining trees of life and knowledge in the
sacred grove. It reflects the local culture's impulse to seek
its own origin, to explain its own name in a county where no
raintrees have yet been found. The legend claims some historical
grounding--perhaps Johnny Appleseed planted it--yet is anchored
in human imagination and our need for myths of miraculous origin.
Shawnessy won't look too closely
at his own myth, and the Perfessor reinforces this, saying that
if they made an excursion and actually found the raintree, "we'd
sit there and have a couple sandwiches and after an afternoon
of contemplating the tree, we'd go back home with sunburnt noses
and ants in our pantses, no wiser than before." The Perfessor
is a comparative mythologist who could write The Golden Bough
himself, as the narrator hints, but who sees through literal
claims and thinks the age of myth is drawing to a close. "I
wish I could believe in sacred places. . . But beauty and the
gods can't survive the era of Darwin and the Dynamo. All lovely
things are old things."
Shawnessy's reply draws on much
of Lockridge's own philosophy of language and literature, in
the making since high school days. It owes much also to Ross
Lockridge Senior, who could conduct a group of folks out into
some featureless cow pasture and convey a brooding sense of place
by evoking a legend that still haunts that ground. Language is
a direct linkage with our origins, our own etymology. As a boy,
Shawnessy felt he "had sprung into being from words in an
immense blackbordered book on the parlor table." He and
other poets are in search of "dawnwords" that would
return us to the primitive garden of the race, "back to
the parent Word." But most words are like palimpsests, layered
over deceptively and in need of the poet's delving. The language
of poets dissolves the distinction between words and things,
ideally giving us a more intimate sense of reality than our own
random experience with it and putting us in touch with our aboriginal
selves.
Shawnessy believes in miracles
in the sense that the raintree is "no more nor less miraculous
than any other tree--and all trees are miraculous. . . Every
county in America has its secret place and every American life
its Delphic cave." Being itself is miraculous--"the
world is a perpetual creation" in which all selves participate.
"Each Self is a Universe, and no universe is possible without
God."
In a sense the Perfessor has the
novel's last word because it is he who earlier dubs Shawnessy
an "endlessly courageous dreamer." Lockridge's conception
of the dreamer turns out to be something other than moonshiner.
The dreamer is the mythmaker, and in the social sphere the mythmaker
has legislative powers. In dreams begin responsibilities. Dreamer-novelist
Lockridge wants his book to be read by Americans because "it
will do them good--goddam them."
Shawnessy has been aware of the
mythic texture of his own life, interpreting it as he goes. In
beating Flash Perkins in the footrace, he lives out the myth
described by Frazer that one hero must usurp another, often killing
him. In making love to Susanna under the raintree and paying
for it mightily, he lives out the Genesis myth. In returning
from the war after having been reported dead, he lives out the
myth of Lazarus. In being rejected by his own people after a
period in the wilderness, he lives out the myth of Christ, almost
crucified again by indignant local townsfolk led by Jarvey. It's
up to the Perfessor to point out that Shawnessy has lived an
American myth, Hawthorne's Great Stone Face. In his stay-at-home
decency he has proved to be the hero of Raintree County.
Caught up in these myths that interpret
his life, does Shawnessy have any heroic power of his own? It's
clear the narrator doesn't grant this single person much direct
influence beyond the classroom. Rather, he's America's representative
dreamer, who has maintained his sanity while failing as an individual
writer. He sees himself as part of a larger collective enterprise,
the creative building of the Republic throughout the ages.
The Perfessor narrates at length
his amiable "History of Mankind": e.g., "The female
of the species was beginning to lose the hair around her vestigial
tail because the male of the species liked it better that way
and chased the ones with the bare behinds. This is called Natural
Selection."
Shawnessy replies with "The
Legend of Raintree County," a fable-like account of a child's
growth into mythic awareness. It lacks the Perfessorial punch,
but the moral of it, as interpreted by Shawnessy and also by
Lockridge in an unpublished note, is that the greatest human
institutions are grounded in fictions that have been made real
through collective human will. "From this premise all begins:
that science and all the world are unavoidably human. Everything
exists by the authority of that sturdy republican, the Self.
The world in which we live lives in us. To look outward at the
farthest star is to look inward into oneself. We are merely exploring
our immense cupboard," says Shawnessy.
Lockridge adds that "what
we call primeval nature, Eden, is already completely humanized.
. . The very conception of that which is primitive [is] a rather
poetic human notion. Even the so-called War of the Species is
not really a war, the combat for survival is not a real combat.
Darwin makes it so." Human institutions like the Republic,
History, and Science are all human projections rich in metaphor
that attempt to rescue us from chaos and old night.
Strictly speaking, these institutions
begin as illusions. The trick is to dream better, to purge the
world of the bad dreams of slavery, genocide, and environmental
rape--to dream the myth of freedom as prelude to investing it
literally in our institutions. This is a radical mythic humanism
or cultural idealism, not unlike what the modern critic Northrop
Frye would later elaborate. Shawnessy's hope is that our best
imaginings can become literal, worked out in history and culture.
For better or worse we think up our institutions; they are not
inevitable in the nature of things. The great human illusions
"were created by centuries of struggle."
In his own small schoolteacherly
way, but with the prophetic vision of the poet, Shawnessy contributes
to the dream of the Republic. The hero isn't precisely this single
person Shawnessy; it is the collective of people who help make
and sustain myth in an age of its dimming, and Shawnessy in this
novel is but their representative visionary. The age--Shawnessy's
and by implication our own--is in decline through a failure of
imagination.
The Perfessor calls this a "beautiful
and brave fable." Its vulnerability is everywhere registered
by him. In an era of disillusionment, where is any evidence the
dreamer is prevailing? Where's the executive will for all this?
Doesn't a mechanical universe reclaim the whole experiment in
the end? Lockridge was bringing his novel to a close just as
the world press was peering into the Nazi ovens. After this,
how entertain Olympian hopes for the human race?
Lockridge's hope for his own novel
is that in evoking the old names and singing the myth of the
Republic, he can move Americans to return to origins, to revere
the nourishing earth and democratic vistas. In a grander way
and speaking not only to Hoosiers, he hopes to fulfill the dreams
of his own father. Like Whitman, he writes with the conviction,
first enunciated in Longinus, that the end of art is not only
to teach and delight but to transport.
But Raintree County is after
all only a book, published for a season like other books, and
how much can one have riding on a book? When Shawnessy is branded
a false prophet, he picks up and goes on with his scribbling
and schoolteaching. Could Lockridge be as resilient as his own
hero?
* * *
What is this book? Lockridge made fun
of his father's literary sensibility, which he thought hadn't
advanced beyond a fondness James Fenimore Cooper. Yet Raintree
County shows just as much the imprint of father as of mother.
She had considerably more to do with the cast of characters,
ironically he with matters of vision and literary form. I'll
make some large claims for the novel that have no necessary connection
with value judgments--claims I think true even if the novel were
to be deemed at last a large-scale fiasco.
One reviewer complained that Lockridge
should never have been permitted by his editor to retell the
whole of Hawthorne's "Great Stone Face." It slipped
by her that the entire novel is based on this story. Lockridge
does his best to make things fairly obvious, by contrast at least
with much modernist fiction. Clearly he doesn't succeed with
all readers.
I'd call this an incorporative
more than an allusive novel, and contrast it with Ulysses.
As any teacher of the great novel knows, Joyce relies on his
reader's familiarity with everything in western culture from
Agenbite of Inwit to modern Irish street slang. Even before
the semester's first bomb scare, it's clear in any American undergraduate
class that his confidence is misplaced--happily for the teacher,
who now has something to talk about. Much discussion of modernist
texts must be taken up with footnoting allusions. Joyce would
have alluded once or twice to Hawthorne's tale and left it to
us to spot it, then grasp its significance.
But the lament out of which Raintree
County emerges is precisely that the wealth of western myth,
history, and literature is growing dim to modern memory. It must
be invoked and recited. Our hope is in memory.
Recited. This is where Ross Lockridge
Senior begins to leave his mark. When Shawnessy meets
a naked woman on a slab in the post office, the narrator makes
clear the incorporation of the Oedipus story: "She lay on
her stomach, chin propped on hands. . . . Her eyes were a great
cat's," and she asks Shawnessy, "What creature is it
that in the morning of its life--." If we are trained to
take pleasure in spotting allusions, we'll say, "Oh my god,
this is too obvious!" But Lockridge means it to be obvious.
A reader on another park bench may never have heard of the Riddle
of the Sphinx.
Ross Lockridge Senior would tell
his children, grandchildren, and Hoosier audiences all the old
stories from scratch, as if everyone were hearing them for the
first time. When his son invokes the Golden Apples of the Hesperides,
he creates a context in which the story of Atlas and Hercules
can be briefly told. Not counting on his reader's intimate knowledge
of Frazer, he has the Perfessor tell the story of the Golden
Bough and the woodland lake at Nemi. And when Reverend Jarvey
is telling "The Oldest Story in the World," Lockridge
has him recite substantial passages from the Book of Genesis.
This incorporative method extends
to the texts of American history and well beyond. Shawnessy's
great work for the July Fourth festivities is his organization
of the Grand Patriotic Program, the whole flyer for which is
printed in the novel. General Jackson reads the Declaration of
Independence, portions of which are quoted. Many years earlier,
Shawnessy first read the Gettysburg Address in a newspaper while
he was visiting a Chattanooga whorehouse with Flash Perkins and
the Perfessor. Lockridge prints most of the Address in counterpoint
to Flash Perkins's singing: "If you got a gal that's a mite
tew fat, You kin melt her down with a dance like that!"
Flash dances a jig with whores while the Perfessor recites obscenely
revised classical texts.
If this isn't quite what Ross Senior
has in mind for these masterpieces of eloquence, his son makes
up for it. After all, Shawnessy takes schoolchildren on historical
tours. He was "on the spot" where history was made,
from the burning of Atlanta to the assassination of Lincoln to
the great railroad strike of 1877. When Senator Jones calls Lincoln
a "clownish country lawyer" whom Booth made great,
Shawnessy intones that there are few hard facts of history but
"there are some words in the right context. Perhaps the
office of the historian is to rebuild an accurate context around
the few great words that survive."
Lockridge builds imaginary contexts
around great words that have survived--from history, literature,
philosophy, and religion to journalism, folklore, and folksong.
Like his father, he hopes to reanimate them with words of his
own.
He gourmandizes other texts with
the same gusto he brought to Madame Pernot's dinner table. There
are so many sources, "running the gamut of the so-called
Great Books ancient and modern," that he thinks the question
of comparative influence "pretty well adds out." But
he does single out The Republic, the Bible, the
Homeric epics, the Greek tragedies, Shakespeare's plays, Hugo,
Flaubert, Tolstoi, Emerson, Whitman, Wolfe, Hemingway, Dos Passos,
Joyce, and Mann. He should have added Frazer and Freud. Somewhat
more off-beat titles leave their imprint--Uncle Tom's Cabin,
John Brown's Body, Barriers Burned Away, the Elsie
series, Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, Before the
Footlights & Behind the Scenes, Ten Nights in a Barroom,
Through the Dark Continent, The Life of Jesus,
The Education of Henry Adams, Gone with the Wind,
and especially his father's rejected novel of the Old Northwest,
Black Snake and White Rose.
Raintree County devours
a plurality of such authors and titles, of literary and non-literary
genres, without being particularly bookish. Again, what is
it?
Lockridge himself thought the genre
problematic. Early into its composition he reflected on its style,
thinking it more an epic than a novel. But he goes on to surmise
that it's "a new form, an art form mingling the characteristics
of many previous genres, drama, poetry, novel, short story, legend,
dream, logomyth."
Many other genres and subgenres
that criss-cross his book could be added: satire, parody, romance,
pastoral, lyric, tragedy, elegy, comedy, farce, gothic fiction,
sentimental fiction, Bildungsroman, historical fiction,
agrarian fiction, realistic fiction, detective fiction, the dime
cowboy novel, the fairy tale, the folk tale, folk dialect, song,
prophecy, oratory, scientific and pseudo-scientific treatise,
natural history, memoir, autobiography, confession, travel literature,
philosophical dialogue, exegesis, epistle, anthropological and
sociological discourse, aphorism, essay, journalism, cinema,
the photo album, the county atlas, pornography, blasphemy, cartography,
the outline, the testimonial, the riddle, the variant. (In this
biography I've tried to imitate his method somewhat.)
Some critics, spotting the hand
of other writers and the imprint of one or another literary form,
have called the novel "derivative." Lockridge wants
it to be obvious that his novel is derived--from
a multitude of sources. He wants the reader to recognize them.
This is his method. Joyce and Wolfe will be most frequently mentioned
by reviewers, more so than Whitman. He feels he's incorporated
these authors among many others and gone his own way. Where in
the House of Literature, he will ask, do you find anything quite
like my book?
It's not only the formal variety--it's
the scope of the thing and what he hopes to embody. He tells
the Houghton Mifflin publicity people that, among other impossibilities,
he wishes to "express the American Myth" in an American
version of The Republic, to dramatize "the vast dualism
between materialism and idealism," to make a study "of
the synoptic character of human personality," to embody
the "social, anthropological, and sexual characteristics
of 19th-century American life," to "provide a living
document of the religious and political 'rites' of the American
people" and thus incorporate American culture into one novel
to an unprecedented extent.
To this end he deliberately uses
many American archetypes--the New Eden, the Frontier, the Republic,
the Fall from Innocence, the Fear of Miscegenation, the character
types such as the Innocent American Hero, the Dark Lady and the
Light, the Capitalist, the Frontiersman, the Evangelical, the
Feminist, the Statesman, the Perfessor. He revises these archetypes
to make some ironic point or to individualize them. Nell Gaither
may be offspring of the Good Good Girl, but she's also erotic,
her pale skin has a blemish, she fools around with someone other
than our hero, and makes a practical compromise in her marriage.
All of this in a novel he hopes
will be widely read for its story values--a page turner. Enough!
or Too Much!
There's now a term for this kind
of thing, not yet to my knowledge applied to Raintree County.
In 1957 Northrop Frye coined the term "encyclopedic form."
Simply put, he means works that attempt to embody the entire
life cycle and culture of a people, written by one or more scribes
who presume to reach beyond the merely personal to a vision of
the whole. In canonical literature, Frye alludes to the Bible,
the eddas, the Mahabharata, the classical epics, the Divine
Comedy, Canterbury Tales, The Fairie Queene,
Don Quixote, Paradise Lost, Pilgrim's Progress,
Prometheus Unbound, Don Juan, Moby Dick,
The Cantos, Ulysses, Finnegan's Wake, A
la Recherche du Temps Perdu. There is often a mélange
of genres in encyclopedic works--a totality of form as well as
of represented reality.
In modern American fiction the
encyclopedic work most discussed has been Thomas Pynchon's Gravity's
Rainbow with its internationalist perspectives and a cast
of some three hundred. Others have included John Barth's The
Sot-Weed Factor, William Gaddis's The Recognitions,
and Joseph McElroy's Women and Men.
I'll avoid value judgments, yet
make another kind of large claim that will sound inflated coming
from a son of the author. It seems to me that Raintree County
is the most ambitious attempt at encyclopedic form in American
literature.
Any such attempt must necessarily
fail in completeness. (Aesthetic failure in greater or lesser
degree is equally assured.) Where are the gays, Chicanos, and
Mormons in Lockridge's novel? Where do we find a character evil
enough to hint at the horrors of Dachau? Some will say the genius
of American fiction is gothic, and that this novel is insufficiently
gothic. And so on. The Perfessor's constant undercutting of Shawnessy's
epic ambition, and Shawnessy's failure ever to complete his epic,
are the narrator's own acknowledgment that such projects must
always fall short.
Still, Lockridge aspires to what
his novel itself implies is an impossibility. He will write the
grand work his own hero fails to write. The encyclopedic impulse
has always been basic in him as in his father, who wrote a seven-volume
local history for all of Indiana, not just a few corners
of it. When MGM asks him to cut the City section, he will refuse;
his novel is more than a pastoral. He'll incorporate--in addition
to the Midwest--the East, the South, and the myth of the Western
Frontier. And sex is part of life, and so are dreams, and so
is disillusionment and religious doubt. He feels it all belongs
in his novel.
Some readers will say he has used
the novel as a dumping ground for all he knew. But he himself
criticized Benét for trying to pack too much into John
Brown's Body and felt he was instead portraying that fraction
of American life that represented the whole.
Frye makes an observation telling
in its implications for Ross Lockridge, Jr. Writers of encyclopedic
works usually write only one such work in a lifetime. I think
it follows that for the writer of encyclopedic ambition, the
problem of "What next?" must be in large measure stressful.
It may feel, for a time at least, as if there's nothing more
to say. Might be wise to postpone such a project till the gout
is setting in.
Besides encyclopedic
form, there's another metaphor of modern criticism that's helpful
here: Mikhail Bakhtin's "carnival." In early drafts
Lockridge called a central portion of his novel "The Marketplace,"
and much of this Russian critic's study of Rabelais is a matter
of what one finds in that part of town. In folk culture--with
its pageantry, fairs, banquets, farces, parodies, curses, bodily
grotesqueries, obscenities, blasphemies, vital laughter--we find
the vernacular languages that challenge official language. Rabelais's
great book is a vernacular rout of Ciceronian Latin. Bakhtin
finds the genre of novel the great arena for representing "dialogic"
struggle among various languages or discourses, all linked to
their own power bases, professions, and social classes. These
languages jostle one against the other and assault the official
language of a particular culture.
I'll make another claim for Raintree
County: it's among the most carnivalesque of American novels.
Only one critic, Darshan Maini, has so far noted this aspect
of Lockridge's novel. Early on, though, Mary Jane Ward, trying
to cheer her cousin up, praised the "change of style according
to the mood, setting, characters etc., and it seems to me that
few of the reviews I've seen have made enough of this ability
to create whole vocabularies suitable to each situation."
It's the use to which this polyphony
of styles and voices is put that makes the novel carnivalesque.
A lively subversive quality is
found throughout and accounts for much of the fuss the novel
caused in 1948. Fat belching Grampa Peters sits on "his
big dumb behind" while a woman is screaming upstairs in
labor: "Well, Jeeeeeeeeeesus God in Heaven, Dear Lord! git
rid of it, sister!" At graduation exercises Johnny Shawnessy
gets the usual dose of sentimental tributes, but Garwood Jones
writes, "Tew hoom it may consurn: The owner of this book
is wun of my closest pursonal ennumies. I hev no reluctuntz in
recommending him fer enny kind of ordeenary household work inclooding
ginneral carpentry (his fabreekations are noomerous and unsurpassed),
but vurgins over fiftee wood dew well to keep him out of there
drawers. Signed, Rube Shucks."
As soon as the Perfessor steps
off the train, he asks for the privy ("the Boylston Chair
of Oratory and Rhetoric") and talks philosophy with Shawnessy
while taking a crap. Public ceremonies are subverted by firecrackers
under hooped skirts, weddings are hazed with a violence well
beyond rude fun, county fairs are rife with quacks and fakirs.
The Perfessor is an emanation from
that culture: his title was applied "to all the glib, fraudulent
creatures who appeared at carnivals and festive anniversaries
to sell hair tonic, quick success, and brand-new sexual potency
to the common folk. . . It was a title of respect for an itinerant
wizard who robbed the people by sheer power of language."
The dream sequences are more carnivalesque
than Freudian, and more grotesque than celebratory. In one, the
Philadelphia Centennial Exposition of 1876 (inspired in part
by the trip Lockridge took with Malcolm Correll to the 1933 World's
Fair) is transformed into a Roman Holiday, where bodies are torn
and trampled by chariots. Shawnessy then finds himself in "an
Egyptian temple where stone idols to lascivious gods stood between
brownstone columns. Priestesses naked except for belts of the
brown tobacco leaf scattered gold coins at the base of an idol
of pure gold, which, changing slowly, became Mr. Cassius P. Carney,
the high priest of the temple, in ceremonial robes stained with
tobacco juice."
In the dozens of different types
of language--from Hoosier dialect to sentimental effusion to
reportage to philosophical dialogue--Lockridge implies that much
of the vitality of American life is its linguistic variety. It's
a democracy of language--and the language of hicks is as expressive
in its sphere as Shawnessy's is in his.
There's a threat, though, in Senator
Garwood Jones's official utterance (when he talks to his buddies
he reverts to his lively "profane" style). Shawnessy
feels almost swept away by Jones's hypocritical pomposities on
the podium and begins to doubt his own speech. And the older
Cash Carney's and the General's speech is dry, stumbling, and
empty. The linguistic vitality of Raintree County folk can turn
fake, it can be drained, it can become official.
Language also gets Lockridge in
trouble with his reader, especially in the earlier chapters,
where Shawnessy's boyhood is narrated in childlike syntax, and
where Shawnessy's adolescence is narrated in linguistic purple.
Some readers have assumed this language must be laid directly
on its author's doorstep, not honoring--as in Joyce's Portrait
of the Artist--the sometimes distant ironies. Shawnessy never
shakes those adolescent yearnings altogether. But there are many
languages in the novel, not just Shawnessy's in his various incarnations.
Shawnessy's great poem would be
a return to "dawnwords" with their hint of "Edenic
rebellion." So dreaming, he would be the poet of the people,
and his own poem would tell of their "vast and vulgar laughters,
festive days, their competitions, races, lusty games. Of strong
men running to a distant string. Of their rights and their reforms,
religions and revivals. Of their shrine to justice, the court
house in the middle of the square. Of their plantings, buildings,
minings, makings, ravagings, explorings"--indeed the carnivalesque
work that Lockridge has written for him.
Lockridge liked the people of Indiana,
and this affection is expressed in the largely affirmative folk
portraits of the novel. Yet he sees their vitality under siege,
just as America itself has an uncertain future in an era dominated
by the flesh of iron.
In a novel both
encyclopedic and carnivalesque, one might expect chaos and sprawl.
More than any other word, Lockridge would hate "sprawling"--an
epithet fixed to his novel by reviewers, nosing out "obscene"
and "blasphemous." He rather liked sprawl in Hugo,
but was convinced his own novel had intricate, discernible, meaningful
form. Anybody in whatever walk of life can have such and such
a vision, and espouse values others find exemplary or disgusting.
But artistic form is the special province of the artist, and
to have it impugned is the unkindest cut of all.
There are problems with the novel,
but I don't think formlessness is one of them. It has a large-scale
symmetry. More to the point here, each of its five phases finds
a parallel in the life of its author, though not planned with
that in mind.
Early morning of July 4th, 1892,
Mr. Shawnessy visits the Historical Museum and recalls his life
to age nineteen--from 1839 to 1859. This is the period of beginnings,
the opening of the quest of the hero, and dreams of love and
literary fame. The principal woman is Nell Gaither, the visitor
is Senator Garwood Jones, and the principal myths are the Garden
of Eden and Actaeon's spying on Diana at the river's edge. The
historical period extends from Native Americans and early settlers
to the conquest of the West. This is not a conventional historical
novel where history is a backdrop or frame for the hero. Lockridge's
linkage is more intimate: Shawnessy's life is a repetition through
analogy of the nation's history. So during the period of hopeful
westward expansion, Shawnessy comes into self-awareness, learns
to love the land and heroic myth, and overhears a woman giving
birth.
We find a parallel in Lockridge's
own life in his Fort Wayne and early Bloomington days, his own
trip out west, his own "legends in a class-day album,"
his courtship of Vernice Baker, and his desire to become a great
writer.
In the late morning, Mr. Shawnessy
receives his next visitor, the infidel Perfessor, and recalls
his loss of innocence in marrying Susanna, who supplants Nell
as principal woman. He leaves Raintree County, journeying South
into a mythic equivalent of Hades, confronts injustice and insanity,
and becomes a father. His sense of identity grows through suffering.
Historically, this is the period, 1859-1863, from John Brown's
raid on Harper's Ferry to the Battle of Gettysburg and a House
Divided. Shawnessy's wedding to Susanna is simultaneous with
the execution of John Brown, and she gives birth when the firing
begins on Fort Sumter.
In Lockridge's own life this second
phase roughly parallels the years 1933-1940, when he left Indiana
for ancient parapets abroad, suffered a life-threatening illness
that entailed his own fall from innocence, married, became a
father, and wrote an epic poem of sickness, nightmare, and the
coming of the Second World War. But his fate was preferable to
his hero's: Europe in 1933-1934 proved to a richly laden festal
board instead of a Hades, and he married his Nell.
In the early afternoon Mr. Shawnessy
orchestrates the Grand Patriotic Program, honoring his next visitor,
General Jacob J. Jackson. Shawnessy remembers his years as a
soldier, 1863-1865, from the Battle of Chickamauga through Sherman's
march to the sea to the end of the Civil War. The mythic subtexts
include the Trojan War and the wanderings of Odysseus.
The biographical equivalent of
this third phase is Lockridge's composition of his novel itself,
his own Grand Patriotic Program, during the years 1941-1946,
when he "hid behind a thousand skirts and let J.W.S. bleed
for me all over the thousands of MS. pages of Raintree County."
In the late afternoon Mr. Shawnessy
welcomes the final visitor, financier Cash Carney, and remembers
his sober post-War years, 1865 through 1877, including the period
in the City of New York when he courted the actress Laura Golden.
Mysterious, empty, and tarnished, she is the principal woman
of the City Section. Shawnessy is himself tarnished during this
Gilded Age of American history, with its greed, exploited labor,
and uninspired post-Lincoln presidencies. He almost loses touch
with his own aspirations and the great human riddles. Myths include
the Sphinx and Golden Calf.
Biographical parallels to this
fourth phase are both direct and prophetic. In 1947, Lockridge
will go to New York City for what proves to be the most calamitous
moment in his career. In response he will revise the City Section,
darkening its tone. Thereafter he will feel himself an exploited
laborer and have a falling-out with his publisher over how to
divvy up the spoils.
The novel's fifth and final phase
is the homecoming, as Mr. Shawnessy attends the evening meeting
of the Waycross Literary Society, where the subject of discussion
is the myth of the Golden Bough, the fate of heroes. Mr. Shawnessy
is targeted as scapegoat by a tar-and-feather mob led by Reverend
Jarvey. Thanks to the deft Perfessor's malacca cane, he escapes
the fate of Christ, the sacrificial god-hero. Postponed until
now are the pivotal moments of Shawnessy's life. It is a homecoming
of memory in this time-drenched novel as he recalls the great
footrace, his loss of virginity to Susanna, the death of his
son, his homecoming after being reported dead, his discovery
of Nell's tombstone, and his homecoming from New York City upon
the death of his mother. The memory of love and grief is restorative,
as trauma has converted to personal strength through the mercies
of time. In his present domesticity--with his children and Esther,
a new Eve with Native American blood--he sees the perpetuity
of human aspiration through tragedy and across generations. Still
the courageous dreamer, he bids farewell to the Perfessor, whose
leavetaking is the mirror image of his own emotional homecoming
amid complex recognitions of loss and gain.
Here the parallel to Lockridge's
own life is a blatant and terrible irony, for in early 1948 he
too will come home to Indiana, feeling rather like someone soon
to be tarred and feathered. As the Perfessor prophesied, it will
be a homecoming of death.
Wishing his
novel never to come to a full stop, Lockridge creates verbal
linkages among all sections, often undercutting lyrical crescendos.
The train bore him steadily on, stopped briefly
at Three Mile Junction, and then continued--beyond the point,
he thought, where he had been accustomed to notice the cupola
of the Court House.
BUT THE TIME COULD NOT BE LONG NOW,
COULD NOT BE LONG UNTIL
THE
[new section]
AWAKENING, the Perfessor snorted. He looked
bewildered, clutched at his face, and then, touching his pince-nez,
seemed instantly to recover his composure.
--God! he said. Garwood should
bottle and sell that stuff. I haven't had such a good snooze
in weeks. Well, program's over, I see.
