I was fourteen when, in search of something to read in my grandmother’s house in Florence, South Carolina, I ran across a paperback copy of the 1948 novel Raintree County by Ross Lockridge, Jr. It was an abridged version, published by Dell in 1957 in connection with the mgm screen adaptation that was released that year. I had never seen the movie, but, lying on the guest-room bed in that summer of 1971, I quickly became lost in the book.

Raintree County tells the story, from boyhood to late middle age, of John Wickliff Shawnessy, a mid-nineteenth-century Hoosier who is his county’s “one true aesthete.” In his earnest, idealistic youth, he devours the great literature of the ages and dreams of becoming an immortal poet; he develops a rivalrous friendship with Garwood Jones, who has his own more worldly ambitions; he studies under the lecherous cynic Jerusalem Webster Stiles, also known as “the Perfessor”; and he falls in love with a sweet, lovely local girl, Nell Gaither, only to find himself driven by circumstances into marriage to an unstable New Orleans belle, Susanna Drake. In the wake of a personal catastrophe he marches off to war, fighting his way through Georgia under Sherman and sustaining a wound before returning home, where still more tragedy awaits him. The chapters recounting these events are intercalated with episodes chronicling his experiences on July 4, 1892, when, older, more sober, and married for a second time, he welcomes Garwood, now a senator, and the Perfessor, now a New York journalist, to the local Independence Day celebrations.

I adored Raintree County. To be sure, that same summer I was also entranced by Nevil Shute’s 1957 novel On the Beach and James Michener’s 1965 novel The Source. Michener’s hefty tome, which uses the items found on an Israeli archeological dig to tell, in flashback, the stories behind those items, gave me a spellbinding sense of the sweep of human history. And Shute’s book—an anti-nuke screed in which radioactive fallout has killed nearly everybody on earth and the last tiny remnant, in Melbourne, awaits the inevitable day when the toxic clouds will reach their latitudes and wipe them out, too—was a potent memento mori. But Raintree County stood apart even from these books. For one thing, I strongly identified with its protagonist. Like John Shawnessy, I was stirred by the idea of America (which he calls “the love-child of History”), saw the settings of my life as mythic (a couple of years later, taking my first train trip across the United States, I began writing an epic poem about the journey), and viewed pretty much everything through a romantic lens (in my case the product of a cultural diet of old Hollywood weepies and standard ballads).

When I first read Raintree County, I didn’t know anything about its author. Only recently did I become aware of the existence of Shade of the Raintree: The Life and Death of Ross Lockridge, Jr., a 1994 book by Lockridge’s son Larry—hereafter L. L.—that is part biography and part literary criticism. (L. L. proves to be excellent at both.) Born in 1914 and raised in Bloomington, the novelist was the son of Ross Lockridge, Sr., a populist historian, and the grandson of John Wesley Shockley, a polymathic schoolteacher and poet who ended up becoming the model for John Wickliff Shawnessy. To be sure, the author of Raintree County put much of himself into his protagonist, too. A stellar student, he spent a college year studying Western civilization in Paris (during which his French improved so swiftly that he was soon taken for a native speaker); returning to complete his degree at Indiana University, he graduated with the highest grade-point average ever recorded there. By that point he was fluent in Greek, Latin, German, French, Italian, and Old English.

A stellar student, he spent a college year studying Western civilization in Paris.

He was also extraordinarily well read in Western literature and had strong, if shifting, opinions about all of it. Attracted in his youth to such romantic authors as Victor Hugo, he saw himself during his student days as having moved beyond Romanticism—although he didn’t care for modernism, either. To quote L. L., he didn’t consider any contemporary American novelist “the equal of Tolstoy, Joyce, and Mann—or for that matter Hawthorne, Melville, and Mark Twain.” Writers like Ezra Pound and T. S. Eliot (in whom, he lamented, “the life-stream is exceedingly feeble”) had, he acknowledged, “learned maturity and subtlety from the French, but they must seek an expression that will rescue them from the pessimistic determination of Zola and the artistic cul-de-sac of decadent poetry.” He wrote his 1934 term essay not about Eliot, Pound, or even Yeats but about Stephen Vincent Benét, whose 1928 epic poem John Brown’s Body he saw as “a magnificent failure”; under its spell, he composed a four-hundred-page verse epic whose 1941 rejection by Houghton Mifflin led him to switch to fiction—although the novel he began sketching out soon assumed the contours of a prose epic. Set in the nineteenth century (when, as L. L. puts it, “there was still great promise and . . . humanity had not yet come into the desolation of reality”), it would encompass everything: war, slavery, the plight of the American Indian, the carpetbaggers and scalawags, the robber barons, even early feminism. The principal locale would be based on Henry County, where his mother had grown up, with the river running through it, the Eel, renamed the Shawmucky, and the county itself renamed for a mysterious tree that, according to a legend spun in the novel, grows somewhere in the county’s marshy heart.

Reviewers of Raintree County compared Lockridge to both Joyce and Thomas Wolfe, and indeed, in the years before he plunged into its composition, he read through both of these men’s oeuvres. Among his conclusions were that Wolfe couldn’t create characters, had a monotonously unvarying style, and possessed almost no sense of humor; that “the moral world [did] not really exist” for him; and that his “strange, pathological subjectivism and egotism” had a negative impact on his “artistry and his feeling for existence.” That said, Wolfe had “real poetic feeling and passion,” especially as regards the enigma of time, Lockridge’s own most urgent theme. And Joyce? If Wolfe lacked artistry, Joyce had an overabundance of it: Ulysses was too intellectual, too “analytical,” too “literary”; combine that with its lack of a “sense of humanity” and the result was, in Lockridge’s view, a “maimed and terrible greatness.”

Lockridge’s comments about Joyce and Wolfe helpfully illuminate his state of mind as he approached the creation of Raintree County. A celebration of America’s people, history, freedom, and landscape, it mixes bawdy humor and erotic dream sequences with high-minded speeches and scenes of Sophoclean tragedy and employs a multitude of forms and styles, drawing on everything from the King James Bible and Shakespeare to frontier journalism and folk tunes. Lockridge saw his book as being written in “a new form” that combined “drama, poetry, [and] novel”; L. L., who considers Raintree County “the most ambitious attempt” by any American at an “encyclopedic work” (such as Gravity’s Rainbow), adds to this list such genres as satire, parody, pastoral, lyric, tragedy, elegy, farce, prophecy, oratory, exegesis, and epistle. Like Joyce, from whom Lockridge took the idea of viewing life from the vantage point of a single day, he sought, in his own words, “to pervade all scenes and characters with mythos—with a sense of the symbolical character of human life, with the feeling of reiterated and perpetual mystery that informs all acts of human life.” Unlike Joyce, however, but like Walt Whitman—who, he had now decided, was America’s best poet—he would infuse every sentence of his work with a deep feeling for humanity, with “energy, force, and incantation,” and with a profound sense of the tragic nature of time and the vital importance of memory.

He did that and more. He put into Raintree County massive doses of his surpassing intelligence and good old-fashioned Midwestern decency; for all his distaste for Gilded Age wealth and other aspects of postbellum America, moreover, his novel exudes a powerful and authentic love of country that is virtually absent in the serious American literature of the past century. My fascination with this book as a teenager testifies to its appeal for the romantic adolescent mind, but I can vouch that it also speaks affectingly to older, more experienced readers who, while vividly recalling their own youthful hopes and ambitions, have come to learn that a life lived long enough involves dashed hopes, crushing disappointment, inconceivable loss, and an ever-intensifying consciousness of mortality. Yet for all its merits, Raintree County ended up (to borrow a phrase from a British novel that came out a year later) being dropped down the memory hole. A number-one best-seller and Book of the Month Club selection, Lockridge’s magnum opus lost the Pulitzer Prize to Guard of Honor by James Gould Cozzens; it eventually fell out of print. Meanwhile, two other debut novels from the same year, Norman Mailer’s The Naked and the Dead and Truman Capote’s Other Voices, Other Rooms, came to be viewed as classics. Why? Well, for one thing, after the advent of television, Mailer and Capote were constantly on the tube promoting themselves. For another, the heavily hyped movie of Raintree County, which starred a horribly miscast Montgomery Clift as John Shawnessy, Elizabeth Taylor as Susanna, and Eva Marie Saint as Nell, turned out to be a godawful botch job, perhaps the worst film adaptation of a first-rate novel in cinema history. Yet another reason was that in the decades after 1948, influential literary critics tended to dislike lushly poetic prose and patriotic protagonists who weren’t anti-heroes.

He put into Raintree County massive doses of his surpassing intelligence and good old-fashioned Midwestern decency

But none of this would matter to Lockridge, who even before his novel’s publication date began to suffer severe psychological problems. The change in his personality was dramatic: people who’d known him pre-Raintree had esteemed his brilliance, energy, and kindness. (One friend called him “une force de la nature”; the woman at Houghton Mifflin to whom he’d delivered the manuscript of Raintree County recognized in him “some special quality of goodness, integrity” and hoped that “the world wouldn’t hurt someone who looked and seemed like that.”) But now he was coming apart. What had happened? Was he experiencing a version of postpartum depression or ptsd? It was as if he’d poured all his vitality into the book and, when he was done with it, had nothing left. He himself said that “the strength that enabled me to write it seemed to desert me.” Despondent, he let his mother drag him into Christian Science—than which, L. L. writes, “there is no aggregate of beliefs more antithetical to the values of Raintree County”—and sent Houghton Mifflin a pathetically pietistic apologia for his novel that L. L. describes as “a Christian Science misreading” of it, “sad evidence of an author who has lost his nerve.” (Houghton later made this text public after a Jesuit professor at Fordham noisily proclaimed that the “devil had a lot to do . . . with the writing of this book.”)

L. L.’s own theory of his father’s collapse is that he “turned to Christian Science because of the shame and guilt he now felt about having exploited his mother in this erotic, blasphemous book. He had used her and her family for his own ends—he had written of their lusts, dark secrets, and failures. He now felt that instead of celebrating the family tree, he had betrayed his mother for his ambition and egoism.” Plaintively, Lockridge asked his wife, Vernice: “How did I ever think I could get away with writing such a book?” Standing up to his parents, who thought psychiatric treatment shameful, Vernice had him committed to a mental hospital, where he was diagnosed with “reactive depression” and given electroconvulsive therapy.

It made no difference. On March 6, 1948, two months and five days after his publication date, he committed suicide by carbon monoxide poisoning in the family garage. At his funeral, the president emeritus of Indiana University pronounced that Raintree County had been “written with a passion that burns up a man.” Indeed, Lockridge’s novel is a work of extraordinary passion—as well as of heartbreaking tenderness, high-mindedness of purpose, and sheer goodness of soul. The notion that he had betrayed his family, or anyone, by writing this book was utterly unfounded; on the contrary, particularly today—at a time when we are being told more aggressively than ever that we must hate our country, despise our forebears, and be ashamed of our history—the devotion to family, tradition, and the American idea that suffuses Raintree County is thoroughly admirable and almost unbearably moving. Granted, even though Lockridge (at the insistence of mgm and the Book of the Month Club) cut tens of thousands of words from his original typescript, the novel could still do with some pruning. (I must admit that on my recent re-reading, I found myself fondly recalling the condensed Dell edition; even L. L., who views his father’s book as a masterpiece, wishes it had undergone more blue-penciling.) Nonetheless, the fact remains: this is a truly sublime achievement—and if it’s not the Great American Novel, I can’t at the moment think of a book that comes closer, in the final analysis, to deserving that designation.

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This article originally appeared in The New Criterion, Volume 40 Number 6, on page 36
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