Starting on Raintree County, Part 1 1-16-2021

 I first read Ross Lockridge, Jr's Raintree County while a teenager. I think I was around 15 or 16. My mother had a copy on the bookshelves and I had nothing to read except that or War and Peace. Not for the first time I took a pass on Tolstoy. I know I had already read James Joyce's The Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (a copy sent by my mother's sister after my cousin Paul had finished with it at his prep school) as I recognized Lockridge's use of a dash instead of quotation marks as emulating Joyce. I thought it was great. I thought its complexity was what the novel should be. When I quit thinking of being a writer, I forgot about this novel. Now that I have started writing again, I decided to re-read Raintree County. Not without trepidation, mind you. For I wondered if it would stand up to my memory or prove I have no sense about good writing.

Reading the novel again I saw here where I first met Freud and Marx and Lincoln's Second Inaugural and the mysticism of the American Union. Here I first read how Reconstruction betrayed the freedman; a view I thought came from my later reading of W.E.B. Dubois's The Souls of Black Folk. Now, I wish I read the novel 30 years ago. I might have understood more. I might have been less intimidated in taking up fiction. Maybe the protagonist's, John W. Shawnessy's, optimism might have rubbed off on my pragmatism.

I find myself using an idea in my "Chasing Ashes" that might be traced back to Raintree County. That is Indiana as an abstraction. 

Not that I have Ross Lockridge's style. Indulge me in this quote as example of his style and content:

He saw the fabric of his life a moment spread out like a map of interwoven lines. Across this map trailed a single curving line, passing through its many curving intersections. Source and sink, spring and lake existed all at once. One had to pass by the three mounds and the Indian battleground to arrive at the the great south bend. One had to pass b y the graveyard and the vanished town of Danwebster to reach the lake. And one had  been hunting the source all one's life. The forgotten and perhaps mythical tree still shed its golden petals by the lake.

 Beyond this map, the earth dissolved into into a whole republic of such linear nets all beaded with human lives. Then all these lines dissolved, and there - without north, south, east or west - was the casual republic of the Great Swamp, a nation of flowers black and white, brown and red and yellow.

 Raintree County (Houghton, Mifflin, 1948)

To be continued

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