Starting Raintree County Part 4 1-16-2021

 I think impressive now is what I see as Mr. Lockridge's subsuming of influences. I knew of the James Joyce influence as a teenager. I may have even written Lockridge as an merely an American imitator - although I think as I thought more of him as an American challenger.  Having finally read Ulysses, I must abandon any thought of him as an imitator of Joyce except in his use of the dash as a substitute for the quotation mark, of having an interest in history (although Joyce wants free of Irish history and Lockridge does not want American history forgotten), of having a writer as a protagonist, and their erudition.  Now with Lockridge, there are more obvious influences because he calls them out: Shakespeare and Walt  Whitman and Thomas Carlyle.  Raintree County's scope - from the run up to the Civil War to 1892 - makes me think of Tolstoy's War and Peace.  Reading the December 27 New York Times Book Review I wonder if Virginia Woolf's Mrs. Dalloway [a novel I have not read and I cannot recall what specifically led me to this conclusion.] The character of the Perfesser, a cynical interlocutor, recalls Ambrose Bierce or Mark Twain without the theatrical dress. I believe there are two references to Booth Tarkington's The Gentleman from Indiana - and no book from Indiana could be so far removed from Booth Tarkington as Raintree County.  Lockridge provides his own answer to the issue raised by Thomas Wolfe about being able to go home again and adds to that problem the returnee being dead.  Yet I cannot, will not, say Raintree County or Ross Lockridge, Jr. imitate any other novel or writer. What their influences they are subsumed into the story.

I suppose like John Dos Passos' USA Trilogy, Raintree County was too long, too complicated, [too unfashionable politically] for teaching in college courses which might have kept attention on the novel. (And there is a [possible] Dos Passos connection in how Lockridge intersperses his novel with imaginary news reports as a counter-voice to his narrative. I cannot imagine anyone following in his footsteps. After all, The Great American Novel has died out as a genre. Gore Vidal covered some of the same territory in Lincoln and 1876.in a style more mainstream than that of Lockridge. For what appears to be a historical novel only two historical figures - Lincoln and Ulysses S. Grant are given speaking parts - and then only in what amounts to cameos. 

Yet for its obscurity, it is an achievement that ought not be forgotten

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