Raintree County: It's Not the Great American Novel, But...

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.

Ross Lockridge, Jr.

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?

Lockridge at a book signing soon after publication of Raintree County.

It seems the public loved it despite its dreaded stream-of-consciousness style.

* * *

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 Jiminy 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.”