Raintree County (6) (Rediscovered Classics)

It’s possible this actually isn’t Ross Lockridge Jr’s fault.That’s a pretty equivocal statement, especially when one considers the herculean effort Lockridge put into the writing of Raintree County. His original MS was 600,000 words, but pressure from Houghton Mifflin, M-G-M, and the Book of the Month Club obliged him to cut it by a third. Now 400,000 words, it still weighs in at a hefty one thousand plus pages. The effort to tame the work, probably compounded by severe depression, cost Lockridge his life. He committed suicide at age 33, soon after the novel’s publication in 1948.But Raintree County, despite all that editing, remains a bit of a mess. It is at once indulgent, narcissistic, and even shallow, while still being a great read and a valuable polemic on the nature of government, the treatment of women, and the horror of war.So much of it is so good and so promising. Lockridge has a true, unerring, solid gold gift for narrative. The sections of the novel that are straight depictions of events following other events are delicious. The anticipation of what will happen in the next narrative section sustains the reader through the far less successful forays into fantasy and dreamscape. There is a palpable sense of relief whenever Lockridge returns to the thread of the story.I wonder, does that say more about Lockridge or about the reader? The 21st Century Human sees the grammar of life as a sequence of more or less coherent scenes in a personal motion picture. The screenwriter’s creed of “show, it, don’t say it” absolutely rules the way we currently experience reality. As a result, if indeed we ever had it, we have all certainly lost the ability to leisurely bathe in prose that doesn’t necessarily push the story along. And there is plenty of pointless verbiage in Raintree County to splash around in.* * *Raintree County is the story of local Indiana golden boy John Wickliff Shawnessy. He has all the necessary gifts to be the adored one—humble upbringing, nimble mind, gentle outlook on life, rock-solid faith in the vigorous young country around him (Shawnessey is born in 1839), and a mystical bond to his native Indiana soil. Told on successive (and eventually regressive) Independence Days, the novel tells the story of Shawnessey’s idyllic youth, falling in love with the local Venus, being educated by a traveling, boozing Socrates, and competing in the annual July 4th footrace. Shawnessey is seduced by a beautiful but damaged Southern belle, maneuvered into a hasty marriage and subsequent honeymoon in her beloved deep south. Eventually her mental illness claims her just as the sin of slavery claims the nation. Shawnessy fights for union in the Civil War (critically regarded as one of the best fictional accounts of Sherman’s March to the Sea ever written), is grievously wounded, and finds his way back to Raintree County to spend the remainder of his days teaching young minds.Ross Lockridge, Jr. was also a golden boy. Unusually gifted in language, he excelled in schoolwork, and had grandiose ambitions for his book. He intended nothing less than to crystallize the American Myth into story form, to create a hero who embodied the Republic, a recognizable sprout from the Tree of American Knowledge.* * *Following publication there was much heavy breathing and hushed academic discussion of whether the ordinary reading public could even follow Lockridge’s construction methods—surely the work would be opaque to all but the hippest of readers, those discerning few who recognized Joyce in the replacement of quotation marks with hyphens and the seeming dislocation of time. Instead, readers actually enjoyed the scattershot construction of the story, which is really a single long Fourth of July in 1892 interrupted by earlier Independence Days and other stretches of time that fill in the blanks. It was an immediate bestseller, and readers evidently had little problem negotiating the decades-long jumps in the timeline. But the story chugs away at its happiest when the narrative is straight ahead: —Fall in boys! the General barked. A little sheepishly, the veterans formed in a column four abreast…Mr. Shawnessey stepped unobtrusively into the last row with other men in civilian garb. The General strode strongly to the head of the column, took a stance twenty paces behind the band, and drawing his sword shouted, —Ready, boys! Column, Harch! The cracked brass of the command set off a series of explosions from the horns, unsynchronized at first, then acquiring a noisy pattern that Mr. Shawnessey recognized as the ‘Battle Hymn of the Republic’ He walked briskly with a shortened stride, walking as he never walked in ordinary life and as he seldom had in the Army. His arms swung stiffly. His chin jerked. A group of small boys marched much more smartly alongside. One of them tossed a lit firecracker into the middle of the veterans’ column. A half-dozen men broke ranks, and the whole column lost step and alignment at the explosion. —Hey Grandpa! a boy yelled. Playin’ sojer again?* * *Unfortunately Shawnessey's self-absorption, his constant gazing at himself in the waters of the Shawmucky leaves the reader vaguely disturbed and unsatisfied. Where Joyce in Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man is content to catalog the events that shape Stephen Daedalus, Lockridge allows Shawnessey to engage in page after page of sterile self-examination. And things that should concern the boy hero don’t: Shawnessey seems to harbor little concern over the fate of his own son with the tragically damaged Suzannah—the boy simply drops out of the story.Ultimately Lockridge’s labored attempt a building a heroic version of himself rings false, with one notable exception. The paper trail of the novel suggests that Jerusalem Webster Stiles was a late addition, a remarkably good attempt to save the work by relieving the tedium of wondering what Golden Johnny will do next. Stiles really deserves a book to himself. Womanizing, drunk more or less constantly, by turns university professor, would-be adulterer, and war correspondent, Stiles fills the double role of Greek Chorus for the reader and Jimmy Cricket for Shawnessey’s Pinocchio: —So this is where the Bard of Raintree County has elected to spend his declining years. Really John, isn’t it a bit bucolic for a man of your talents? —I have a good pure life here. —Unavoidably! said the Perfesser…By the way, do you read it [Stiles’ column]? The truth, the real truth, sounds so preposterously false to the average citizen of the Republic that he thinks I’m kidding. So they let me go my lonely way as the New York Dial’s Special Reporter on Life, the only man in America who reports the news as it really is. —Some time, Perfesser, I want you to publish a newspaper of your own and call it the Cosmic Enquirer. —Right now I’m cosmically thirsty, the Perfesser said. Where’s the local hell?Despite the flaws Raintree County is a rollicking good read (the movie, um, not so much). There are several scenes that will shock even the most jaded modern reader, and as mentioned above, Lockridge was way ahead of his time in his treatment of women and the environment. Just skim through the imagined stage plays (complete with script formatting) and wooly-headed philosophy, and you will enjoy the real core of the work. And by all means Google Raintree County Book Cover. The Sphinx Recumbent adorning the dust jacket was drawn by Lockridge himself and caused a bit of a stir on publication. It seems Lockridge actually accomplished the task he set out for his hero: “to sketch forbidden beauty into a puritan landscape.”

The "great American novel" is something that is often spoken of but rarely seen. Critics use that sobriquet far too often for books that don't merit more than a passing glance. But occasionally, a novel appears that is a good candidate for that phrase. And it has just been republished in a new edition!Raintree County, "which had no boundaries in time and space, where lurked musical and strange names and mythical and lost peoples, and which was itself only a name musical and strange,"? by Ross Lockridge Jr., was published in 1948 to critical and popular acclaim. This 1,066-page novel attempted to translate the American experience to paper through the eyes and experiences of a seemingly banal character, John Wickliff Shawnessy, "pagan and Pilgrim, poet and poem, idealist and idea"? (Charles Lee, writing in the New York Times in January, 1948). Over a period of 24 hours, as Waycross, Indiana, celebrates the Fourth of July, 1892, Shawnessy looks back on his life since 1844, through a series of flashbacks, interspersed with narrative of the celebratory day. He sees his youth, his first experience of pure feminine beauty, his first loves, then the great American tragedy: the Civil War. As the book goes on, we follow this Leopold Bloom of the Midwest through his peregrinations, until the past rejoins the present and the day ends.It's hard to sum up such a book. It's the story of a quest; a quest for the sacred tree of life, the raintree. A quest for origins; for the origins of life and of one man's life. It's a story of a man accepting the fate of death, "But if we could only resign ourselves to death, complete death, how much happier we'd be!" It's a story of a man and his family, his loves, his losses, the war (the Civil War) and how it forms his character.Anyone reading this book will find that their life has a new milestone: a before- and after-Raintree Country. More than just the characters and narrative, what remains in the reader's memory is the juxtaposition of the simple, idyllic life in Waycross, Indiana, the proverbial "Anytown, USA" and the chaos of the Civil War or the pandemonium of New York City. Lockridge was seeking simplicity, and showed how it did exist, somewhere in the world, in a place not on any map. It's both a modernist and traditional novel - modernist in the way the book is structured, with flashbacks melding into present-day narrative, which, in turn, melds back into the past. But traditional in the way it is deeply human, the way its main subject is the life of a man. It has much of the Victorian novel, and is also a very Joycean novel. It belays influences as broad as Thomas Wolfe, William Faulkner and Charles Dickens. Yet it is uniquely itself.

Lovely old copy, unabridged and a nice addition to my library

Some memories of the film based on this novel drew me to look it up. I am so glad I did. It is one of the most intriguing novels I have read, a 1060 page saga of the life of one man, told in flashbacks from a celebratory day in his late middle age. It is elegiac, poetic at times and conveys an amazing sense of relationship between place and mind. The coming of age section, with occasional hints of a whimsical eroticism, and the Civil War coverage are the most gripping but the novel holds the attention at all times. It is truly a stunning achievement and should be regarded as one of the great English language novels of the 20th century. Read it!