You might want to skip this one. I admit its existence is to collect my notes for a possible essay on Raintree County.
The Riddle of Raintree County: How a Young Indiana Author Gave His Life for the Great American Novel
"There was a kind of nervy ambition in him," says Larry Lockridge of his father, and it manifested itself throughout his short life in scholarship and competition. Born in Bloomington in 1914, he spent his earliest childhood years in Fort Wayne, where his brother Bruce drowned when Ross was five--a "founding catastrophe in the family," as Larry Lockridge calls it. His father was a historical orator who was involved with the Indiana Federal Writers‘ Project, his mother a woman of thwarted intellectual ambition. The Lockridges moved back to Bloomington when Ross was nine; by then he had already decided that he wanted to be a writer. And he wrote, thousands upon thousands of pages in the next 24 years. He aided his father in his historical projects and excelled at all of his academic pursuits; at Indiana University, he was known as "A+ Lockridge," and he graduated with a 4.33 GPA, the highest ever awarded. (IU later abolished A+s.) In 1934 he spent some time studying abroad in Europe, where he first had the vision of writing a novel that would draw upon the would-be literary heritage of his maternal grandfather, a schoolteacher and poet who had lived in Indiana‘s Henry County. Returning to the United States, he eventually married his adolescent sweetheart, Vernice Baker; by all accounts the marriage was a deeply loving and supportive one. They had four children, and Lockridge taught a heavy load at Harvard in the early 1940s as he began work on the book that would become Raintree County, his wife typing the manuscript from his edited drafts (which Lockridge typed himself-he was an exceptionally fast typist).
###
Ross Lockridge Jr. wrote the bulk of what would eventually be published as Raintree County in a two-year period. The trajectory of his labor, success, and devastating ending is remarkably short by the standards of a normal life. He delivered, unsolicited, a 2000-page manuscript to Boston publisher Houghton Mifflin in 1946. They accepted it, beginning a year-and-a-half-long cycle of revisions and editorial and financial conflicts that would contribute greatly to Lockridge‘s demise. He was strongly advised to cut the 356-page "dream section" which ended the novel, and finally did. (Today that section is retained at the Lilly Library in Bloomington.) In 1947 he and his publishers entered the novel-in-waiting into an MGM contest that resulted in the award of a $150,000 prize--nearly 1.5 million dollars by today‘s standards. However, the award was contingent upon Lockridge‘s agreeing to cut 50,000 more words from his book. After an agonizing debate he agreed to do this as well. Then the Book-of-the-Month Club made Raintree County a main selection--that is, if Lockridge was willing to make some more cuts.
All of these compromises ate at the author‘s considerable vitality. He revised and rewrote in a feverish state as the book‘s publication date was pushed back to January 1948. Letters he wrote to his publisher during this period veer between grandiosity and anguish. A bitter dispute in the autumn of 1947 over how to divide a portion of MGM‘s prize money appears to have been a breaking point, one from which Lockridge never recovered. He felt that he‘d been cheated, but there were other anxieties plaguing him as publication approached. He was worried about what his family would think of the book. He was beginning to worry that the book wasn‘t as good as he‘d thought it to be. In the midst of rising praise and accolades, on the apparent verge of the kind of triumph that every writer dreams about, he suddenly found himself in a nightmarish state of mind. Eating, sleeping, talking, and other normal aspects of everyday life became difficult, sometimes impossible. He was entering into what we would now know as a severe depression, but doing so in age with no Prozac, no highly-developed or humane ways of treatment, and little or no understanding and sympathy for such a state--especially in the case of someone just about to make his first prominent appearance on the public stage.
###
Raintree County was perhaps only the second-most significant book by a Bloomingtonian that came out on January 5, 1948; that was the same day that Lockridge‘s neighbor Alfred Kinsey published Sexual Behavior in the Human Male, prompting Lockridge to remark, "It seems Mr. Kinsey and I have succeeded in making Bloomington the sex center of the universe." Such wit was rapidly becoming atypical of Ross Lockridge Jr., who spent most of his days lying down, enervated, avoiding publicity and the press as much as possible. He did several book signings and tried to respond to the attacks that clergy and cultural conservatives were now launching at him and his novel, with his wife regularly intercepting hate mail. The erotic themes of the book and its irreverent musings on Christianity also outraged some Book-of-the-Month club members. In general the novel received very positive reviews in the nation‘s papers and magazines, but several high-profile journals drubbed it, including the New Yorker, which printed a piece erroneously referring to the author as "Ross Lockwood Jr." and describing his work of six years as the "sort of plump turkey that they bake to a turn in Hollywood."
Most of this I knew before now. I knew from the novel's dust jacket that he had attended the Sorbonne, There is an erudition to the novel that had to come from an education and intelligence.
I finally have an answer to one of my big questions: what was the reaction from the Book of the Month crowd?
If the quote from The New Yorker is accurate of the whole, then it was real miss on the magazine's part.
That was 2007; this is 2014:
The World Of A Novel: Ross Lockridge Jr.'s Raintree County
In 1994 Larry Lockridge, a professor of English at New York University and one of Ross Lockridge Jr.'s four children, published a biography of his father, Shade of the Raintree, and ushered Raintree County back into availability again as well. Lockridge organized and notated the 75,000-item collection of his father's writings, books, family archives, and other materials that the Lockridge children donated to the Lilly in 2011, and from which the exhibition is drawn.
Lilly Library Manuscripts Curator Cherry Williams says that the exhibition is a narrative in itself, aided by the Lockridge family's extensive annotation and highlighting of the materials donated. It contains more than 300 items, including Ross Lockridge Jr.'s original sketch for what became the novel's cover, excerpts from many of his unpublished writings, memorabilia from the movie adaptation, and 19th-century Lockridge family documents and possessions that served as some of the inspiration for Raintree County.
"It's in a sense a spinoff of the novel, and his ambition to write the Great American Novel, whatever that is," says Lockridge. "He did wish to incorporate the history and culture of the American peoplea big job."
###
Larry Lockridge says pulling together all of the correspondence, manuscripts, and other materials that enabled him to write his biography and put together the archival donation to the Lilly Library was a quest for him to try to understand what happened to his father. He also notes that Raintree County's place in the canon of American literature remains an open-ended question.
"When the book reappeared in 1994, some critics stuck out their necks to say, 'This is indeed the Great American Novel, it's been sitting there all along,'" says Lockridge. "I don't try to make value judgements of it, but I can't help but hope that they are correct."
The Ross Lockridge, Jr. archive : a descriptive bibliography
Which leads to a 448-page document.
Interview with Larry Lockridge - Ross wanted to make Ulysses accessible to the common reader.
An Extended Synopsis on Ross Lockridge, Jr. (2016):
Not unlike Shawnessy himself but no longer obscure, Lockridge returned to his hometown Bloomington, Indiana with his family in time for the much-heralded publication of Raintree County on January 5, 1948, the same day fellow Bloomingtonian Alfred Kinsey published Sexual Behavior in the Human Male. The novel had already been excerpted as "The Great Footrace," in the September 8, 1947 issue of Life magazine (108-27). It was the main selection of Book-of-the-Month Club, had secured a very lucrative movie contract with MGM, and had sold out a pre-publication edition of 50,000 copies. On March 6, 1948, just as his novel reached the top of the New York Times best-seller list, Lockridge took his own life by carbon monoxide poisoning in the family garage. He was thirty-three years old.
The initial popularity of the novel owed much to the post-war letdown and a widely felt need throughout America for renewal of its cultural mission in a world that had witnessed the Holocaust and Hiroshima and was then settling into the Cold War. Many early reviews of Raintree County emphasized its idealism, vitality, anchorage in American history, and affirmation of American values. But the novel was also deemed controversial for its eroticism and blasphemy. In the prepublication run, Jerusalem Webster Stiles, a Mephistophelean character, remarks, "Nature puts no premium on chastity. My God, where would the human race be if it weren't for the bastards? Wasn't Jesus God's? Pass the perfectos, John" (152, 1994 edition). In the remaining first edition run, the Book-of-the-Month Club edition, and all subsequent printings until 1994, "Wasn't Jesus God's?" was deleted. Prominently condemned by a Jesuit professor at Fordham, the novel was seized in late March, 1948 by the Philadelphia vice squad in bookstores throughout the city. Houghton Mifflin won an injunction against further seizures and eventually prevailed in United States District Court (Houghton Library, Ross Lockridge, Jr. Correspondence and Documents).
The title Raintree County is familiar to Americans more for the movie version MGM released in 1957 than for the novel itself. Frequently shown on television, the movie-directed by Edward Dmytryk, with a screenplay by Millard Kaufman, and starring Elizabeth Taylor, Montgomery Clift, and Eva Marie Saint-bears slight resemblance to the novel, whose length has limited any potential for college course adoption. Though it has occasioned a fair number of critical essays and one monograph, Raintree County has had to date few serious readers in academe and has been on the fringe of the American canon.
Lockridge's ambition was encyclopedic, and the resulting novel might best be termed "encyclopedic" in Northrop Frye's sense of a work that attempts to embody the life cycle and culture of a people. It explicitly incorporates a large number of well-known works, from the Bible, Oedipus Rex, and The Republic to Uncle Tom's Cabin, the Gettysburg Address, Leaves of Grass, and The Golden Bough. The plot is based on Hawthorne's short story, "The Great Stone Face." Its single-day framework comes from Joyce's Ulysses-though unlike Joyce's novel the flashbacks are fully narrated episodes. Lockridge felt that Joyce's novel, which he deeply admired in other respects, was inaccessible to the common reader. "The emotions are there, but not for the reader, who is too busy deciphering." (This comment, as well as all comments below on Midwestern writers, is taken from Lockridge's unpublished notes made on his reading, ca. 1939-1943.) Lockridge attempted a polyphony of voices, prose styles, and subgenres, but early critics heard mostly Thomas Wolfe. Having read the southern novelist, Lockridge disliked this comparison because of what he took to be Wolfe's egotism and formlessness. He thought of his novel as epic, even cosmic, and was dismayed when Hamilton Basso in The New Yorker treated it as the raw produce of a Hoosier hick, mistakenly calling him "Lockwood" throughout.
Lockridge did pay his respects to Midwestern writers, taking notes on his reading of them as he geared up to write American Lives, an earlier 2,000-page manuscript he began in 1941. He abruptly turned it over one summer evening in 1943 and started writing Raintree County on the other side. American Lives, of which some two hundred pages survive on versos of the fragmentary Raintree County manuscript, was set in twentieth-century instead of nineteenth-century Henry County. It was more single-mindedly agrarian and small-town than Raintree County, which has portions set in New York City, Philadelphia, Washington, D.C., Indianapolis, New Orleans, and many Southern sites associated with the Civil War.
For American Lives he opportunistically read The Story of a County Town (1883), by EDGAR WATSON HOWE (1853-1937), calling that work, "A punk book, without even the historical importance generally ascribed to it." He wrote ten pages of non-judgmental notes on A Son of the Middle Border (1917) by (HANNIBAL) HAMLIN GARLAND (1860-1940) and plot summaries of the stories in WINESBURG, OHIO (1919) by SHERWOOD ANDERSON (1876-1941). Of (HARRY) SINCLAIR LEWIS's (1885-1951) MAIN STREET (1920) he commented: "An American version of Madame Bovary, but lacking the intensity and classic effect of Flaubert's masterpiece."
Responses to other Midwestern writers suggest that Lockridge rarely felt they lived up to the ambitions he had set for himself. He thought An American Tragedy (1925) by (HERMAN) THEODORE DREISER (1871-1945) "very impressive, though the reader is nearly drugged to sleep in the first few hundred pages. Style and artistic presentation as bad as ever . . . A very depressing book." Of The Bridge of San Luis Rey (1927), by THORNTON (NIVEN) WILDER (1897-1975) he wrote, "Certainly a second-rate book and scarcely worth the popularity it has attained." Of Oil! (1927) by UPTON (BEALL) SINCLAIR (1878-1968). He wrote, "The usual strong socialist doctrine. Artistically weak . . . but a noble book, and of course on the right side."
Lockridge had a higher estimate of U.S.A. (collected 1938) by JOHN (RODERIGO) DOS PASSOS (1896-1970), writing a lengthy impassioned defense of the novel when he ran into trouble at Simmons College for assigning portions to female undergraduates. Among Midwestern works, U.S.A. had the single greatest influence on Raintree County, more for its journalistic and cinematic techniques than for its literary sensibility. Not much taken by Faulkner, Lockridge read most of ERNEST (MILLER) HEMINGWAY (1899-1961) up through For Whom the Bell Tolls (1940), admiring the "tough, honest writing" and dialogue. He envied Hemingway for his war experience. Declared 4-F for the draft, Lockridge wrote to his publisher that "while the Republic was bleeding, I hid behind a thousand skirts and let J. W. S. bleed for me all over the thousands of MS. pages of Raintree County." He fought World War II from his writing desk.
Apart from growing up in it, Lockridge's greatest debt to Midwestern culture came by way of his parents. Ross Sr. (1877-1952) was known throughout the state as "Mr. Indiana," a state historian who wrote middle-school biographies of George Rogers Clark, ABRAHAM LINCOLN (1809-1865), and the standard textbook of Indiana history. He was better known for his "Historic Site Recitals," in which he told stories of the famous dead and orated their words on the very spot where great events had taken place. As a boy and high school student, Ross Jr. participated in these recitals and other historical pageants arranged by his father. But he began to chafe at the tasks his father set for him and, in time, developed a more critical view of American history.
He had small interest in the Lockridge side of the family and found his main character Shawnessy in his maternal grandfather, John Wesley Shockley (1839-1907), a Hoosier schoolmaster who wrote belletristic poetry and dreamt of a larger life. Lockridge dedicated his novel to his mother, Elsie Shockley (1880-1961), who told him many stories of her Henry County childhood and of her revered father, who had died seven years before Ross Jr. was born.
It warms my vanity that Lockridge and I share the opinion about the Thomas Wolfe comparisons.
The novel's dominant themes of homecoming, attachment to the land, eros, time and mortality, memorials, racism, FEMINISM, politics, war, religion, and the power of myth are large and perennial at the same time that they are anchored in nineteenth-century Midwestern culture. Asked by his publisher for promotional material, he wrote in July 1947 that, among other large aims, he wished to "embody in fiction a profound analysis of the social, anthropological, and sexual characteristics of Nineteenth Century American life" and to "provide a living document of the religious and political 'rites' of the American People" (Houghton Library, Ross Lockridge, Jr. Correspondence and Documents). Raintree County is an album of Midwestern county fairs, grand patriotic programs, revival meetings, county atlases, courthouse and marketplace culture, footraces, saloons, picnics, buggy rides, rough country weddings, temperance dramas, and outdoor sex. Lockridge spent untold hours in the journalistic archives of the Boston Public Library, reading old newspapers of Henry County and environs to get a better sense of the immediacy of events, both local and national. He revisited the old family sites in Henry and Miami counties with a historian's passion for repossession of the past. He read the manuscripts of his grandfather Shockley's poetry and pondered the Illustrated Historical Atlas of Henry County (1875).
Yes, all the same themes I noticed.
Subsequent writers have rarely acknowledged a Raintree County influence. Pablo Neruda (1904-1973) mentions Lockridge in a 1948 poem, "Que despierte el leñador." Lynne Doyle's The Riddle of Genesis County (1958) is an explicit brief adaptation. Paradise Falls (1968) by DON ROBERTSON (1929-1999) parallels Raintree County in some respects and was initially publicized with references to the novel. John (Hoyer) Updike (1932-2009) has on occasion referred to it, as in In the Beauty of the Lilies (1996). Thomas Mallon (b. 1951) makes Lockridge's suicide a leitmotiv in Dewey Defeats Truman (1997), but his narrator is critical of Raintree County itself. Tears of the Mountain (2010) by John Addiego (b. 1951) is a direct homage, utilizing a single day, July 4, 1876, with flashbacks beginning in 1831, and set in Sonoma County, California; it makes use also of the technique of one chapter leading linguistically into the next. Some important novelists and poets have indicated to this writer a felt, if indirect, influence: for instance, Herman Wouk (b. 1915), Marguerite (Vivian) Young (1908-1995), Thomas (Michael) Keneally (b. 1935), Philip D. Appleman (b. 1926), and Joseph (Prince) McElroy (b. 1930). Edna Rydzik Buchanan (b. 1939), a Pulitzer Prize winning novelist-journalist, has said that Raintree County is her all-time favorite novel, but her own genre is crime fiction.
####
The first book-length study of Lockridge's novel is Fred Waage's Raintree County: The Foremost American Environmental Novel: uncovering the Deep Message of an Undervalued Text (2011). This volume was published with a foreword by Barbara Stedman by the Edwin Mellen Press in 2011. Other extended discussions include Larry Lockridge's "The Author in the Epic," chapter 8 of Shade of the Raintree: The Life and Death of Ross Lockridge, Jr. (1994), 271-309. DAVID D(ANIEL) ANDERSON (1924-2011) has edited two collections of critical essays: Myth, Memory, and the American Earth: The Durability of Raintree County (1998), with essays by Ray Lewis White, Gerald D. Nemanic, Joel M. Jones, Park Dixon Goist, Dean Rehberger, Douglas A. Noverr, David D. Anderson, and Larry Lockridge; and Midwestern Miscellany 26 (Spring 1998), with new essays by some of these critics as well as essays by Patricia Ward Julius and Theodore R. Kennedy. See also Twentieth-Century Literary Criticism 109 (2001), 316-74. Raintreecounty.com, maintained by Ross Lockridge, III, contains many manuscript materials, photographs, and links to other sites. The small portion of the original Raintree County manuscript that Lockridge did not burn is in the Lilly Library, Indiana University. In late 2011 the four Lockridge heirs-Ernest, Larry, Jeanne, and Ross, III-donated forty-seven organized cartons of Ross Lockridge, Jr.'s papers and related materials to the Lilly Library. Containing 75,000 items, the archive is inventoried in a two-volume 457-page descriptive bibliography, compiled by Larry Lockridge, available in the reference room at the Lilly Library, which has also made it available online. An inventory can be found on the Lilly Library website: www.indiana.edu/~liblilly/, see Lockridge mss. III. This archive and other Ross Lockridge, Jr. papers are available without restriction to scholars and critics. An exhibition, "Raintree County: A Celebration of the Life and Work of Ross Lockridge, Jr," containing about 300 items from the Ross Lockridge, Jr. Collection, occupied the Main Gallery of the Lilly Library, January 21 through May 19, 2014, marking the centennial of the author's birth. In conjunction with this exhibition, Indiana University Press reissued Larry Lockridge's Shade of the Raintree, with a new preface by the author. For a fuller bibliographical survey, consult The Dictionary of Midwestern Literature l (2001): 328-29.
From the Dictionary of Midwestern Literature 2001
FURTHER READING: Book-length studies include Larry Lockridge's full-scale critical biography, Shade of the Raintree: The Life and Death of Ross Lockridge, Jr. (1994), and John Leggett's Ross and Tom: Two American Tragedies (1974), which narrates Lockridge's life as well as that of Thomas Heggen, author of Mister Roberts. A notable doctoral dissertation is Delia Clark Temes's "The American Epic Tradition and Raintree County" (University of Syracuse, 1973).
Early journalistic reviews and review essays include James Baldwin's negative "The American Myth" in New Leader (10 Apr 1948), 10, 14; Howard Mumford Jones's "Indiana Reflection of U.S. 1844-92" in Saturday Review 31 (3 Jan 48), 9-10, which observed that the novel had ended a long slump in American fiction; Nanette Kutner's "Ross Lockridge, Jr.: Escape from Main Street" in Saturday Review 31 (12 June 1948), 6-7, 31, which includes a portrait of Lockridge's final days; Charles Lee's "Encompassing the American Spirit" from the New York Times Book Review (4 Jan 1948), 5, 21, the review Lockridge himself liked best; and William York Tindall's "Many-leveled Fiction: Virginia Woolf to Ross Lockridge" in 10 (Nov, 1948), 65-71.
Journalistic reviews and review essays on the occasion of the novel's republication in 1994, simultaneous with publication of Shade of the Raintree, include Richard Bausch's "Success and the American Novelist" in the Los Angeles Times Book Review (15 May 1994), 2; Bruce Cook's "Raintree Revisited" in the Chicago Tribune Books (29 May 1994), 3; Scott Donaldson's "Nowhere to Go but Down" in the Washington Post Book World (10 Apr 1994), 11; Christopher Lehmann-Haupt's "Novelist's Work and Death" in the New York Times (2 May 1994), C13; Tim Page's "In Search of Raintree County" in Newsday (17 Nov 1994), 1, 4-5, 7 (pt 2); and Charles Trueheart's "The Great American Studies Novel" in Atlantic Monthly (Sept, 1994), 105-11. Of the score of major 1994 reviews, only Trueheart's is, on balance, negative; several critics reconfirm Lockridge's early high estimate of his own novel, which remains, however, in problematic relationship to the American canon.
Notable critical essays include Daniel Aaron's "On Ross Lockridge's Raintree County" in Classics of Civil War Fiction, ed. David Madden and Peggy Bach (1991), 204-14; Joseph Blotner's"Raintree County Revisited" in Western Humanities Review 10 (Winter, 1956), 57-64, and his Introduction to Raintree County (1984), xiii-xvii; Fred Erisman's "Raintree County and the Power of Place" in Markham Review 8 (Winter, 1979), 36-40, which makes a case for the novel as ecological fiction; Park Dixon Goist's "Habits of the Heart in Raintree County" in MidAmerica XIII (1986), 94-106; Donald Greiner's deeply considered "Ross Lockridge and the Tragedy of Raintree County" in Critique: Studies in Modern Fiction 20 (1978), 51-63; Joel Jones's "The Presence of the Past in the Heartland: Raintree County Revisited" in MidAmerica IV (1977), 112-21; Leonard Lutwak's "Raintree County and the Epicising Poet in American Fiction" in Ball State University Forum 13 (Winter, 1972), 14-28, which contains a close structural analysis; Darshan Singh Maini's "An Ode to America: A Reconsideration of Raintree County" in Essays in American Studies, ed. Isaac Sequeira (India, 1992), 142-49; and Gerald Nemanic's "Ross Lockridge, Raintree County, and the Epic of Irony" in MidAmerica II (1975), 35-46. David D. Anderson has edited a collection of critical essays, Myth, Memory, and the American Earth: The Durability of Raintree County (1998).
I'll tell a bit of the story behind the raintree and Henry County. In the summer of 1943 at the age of 29 in a refurbished barn on Cape Ann, Massachusetts, my father had already drafted a 2,000-page novel he intended to call American Lives, set in the early twentieth century and based on his mother Elsie Shockley Lockridge's Henry County relatives. He wasn't at all happy with his efforts so far. These pages seemed without energy and focus, and it was only when his maternal grandfather John Wesley Shockley, a Henry County native, made an occasional appearance as an old man that the novel perked up. One evening in late summer of '43 he had a eureka moment and decided to move the entire action back to nineteenth-century Henry County, with John Shockley, now John Wickliff Shawnessy, playing the central role. To save paper he didn't throw the 2,000 pages away; he turned them over and began writing Raintree County on the other side.
The following summer of 1944, again on Cape Ann, he had another sudden inspiration. He was, in his own words, "juggling words and trying out proper names by a process of sound-resemblance and free association." He stumbled onto the word "raintree" by its slight phonetic resemblance to "Henry," and the central motif of the Raintree, as he put it, "instantly fused with the already existing pattern of the book. Almost as if by magic the whole landscape of Raintree County . . . sprang into being." It felt to him less a creation than a discovery. He seized a pencil and in a few minutes sketched the first map of Raintree County, clearly based on Henry County. The entire novel Raintree County was written in white heat over the next few months, fully drafted by April, 1946, including a 400-page coda, the "Dream Section," that his publisher insist he cut.
Therein another question is answered - why go back to the 19th century.
THE ROSS LOCKRIDGE, JR. ARCHIVE
Proust and Mann were read by Lockridge
Shorthand comments written in Proust’s Remembrance of Things Past;
Veblen’s Theory of the Leisure Class; Joyce’s Ulysses; Wolfe’s The Web
and the Rock and You Can’t Go Home Again; Whitman’s Leaves of Grass;
Tolstoy’s War and Peace; and The Sherwood Anderson Reader
###
better self—her idealism, simplicity, youthful mind, hopeful outlook.
Rather than material, practical, selfish qualities on which Hamilton
based his policy.” “To a certain extent the older meaning of democracy
was terror, atheism, and free love.” (On verso, crossed out outline of
Grand Patriotic Program from perspective of Elsie=Eva.). 1 p.
“Notes and ideas from reading Thomas Mann’s contribution to a book
entitled THE TEN COMMANDMENTS,” observations made use of in The
White Bull section, Raintree County, 2 pp.
“THE DREAM.” RLJ’s copy of his summary of the Dream Section, written
after initial submission of novel, 6 pp. In RLJ’s hand, “Save to put in
M.S. Vol. V of the original Dream Section.”
“Some titles and brief dates and facts,” 1 p. Twenty-four book titles
related to American history and culture.
“Remarks on the M.M. (Magic Mountain) in process of reading it,” 4 pp.
Strong engagement with Mann’s novel argues for considerable influence
on Raintree County, especially with respect to biology, disease, and time.
“Notes on American Journalism, a History of Newspapers in the U.S.
Through 250 Years,” Frank Luther Mott, Macmillan, 1941, 8 pp.
“Ideas from Mumford suitable for my novel,” ruminations based on The
Origins of the American Mind. 6 pp.
“1892 News events through Fourth of July,” 5 pp.
“Phrases from the story Old Stone Phiz,” 1 p. Hawthorne’s story provides
the basic plot of the Day episodes of Raintree County.
“The matter of songs, and traditional motifs,” 1 p.
“More ideas for book,” 1 p. E.g. “Give the National Road as well as the
Railroad a strong play. Both symbolical like the corn, the church, the
school, the family, the little town, and the river.”
“For Book, added episodes,” 1 p., focusing on the home library.
“A clear and brief statement of the religion of the typical American of
1845”; “The relationship of the sentimental novel to all this,” 2 pp. The
latter reinforces the former: on hoopskirted sex, Old Testament
vindictiveness; the relationship of religion and democracy. This is an
important statement with regard to Raintree County.
Pencil sketch of the house in Strawland (=Straughn= Waycross). An
accurate sketch of the Shockley house still standing in Straughn. On
verso is a sketch, very preliminary, “Map of Raintree County.” 2 pp.
“Notes on Xmas Books, etc.,” 3 pp.
“19th century textbooks,” matters of grammar, population, fashion, etc.
“Some American 19th century histories,” 2 pp. Goodrich, Murray.
“The Great Stone Face: Quotations,” 3 pp. In RLJ’s hand, “To be broken
down”: some passages bracketed as most likely to be used in the novel.
“Some notes from Harper’s Weeklies and other Magazines, 1859-1865,” 5
pp.
“A Tribute of Flowers to the Memory of Mother, or Thoughts on Mother’s
Love, Mother’s Death, Mother’s Grave, and Mother’s Home Beyond,”
compiled by John McCoy, 1886.
Folder:
“1892 New Events through Fourth of July,” TD, 6 pp., with either RC or
American Lives text on versos.
44
So was Crane:
“Thomas Mann, Some Notes, on reading,” 2 pp., limited to Death in
Venice, trans. Lowe-Porter, introduction by Ludwig Lewisohn.
“Men, Women, and Boats by Stephen Crane, edited by Vincent Starrett,
Boni and Liveright, New York, 1921,” 3 pp.
“The Red Badge of Courage, Stephen Crane, Published 1895, written
while Crane was 22, and before he had ever seen any war firsthand,” 2
pp.
“Winesburg, Ohio, 1918, Sherwood Anderson,” 3 pp.
“The Monster, The Blue Hotel, and His New Mittens, by Stephen Crane.
1899. Harper and Brothers, New York and London,” 1 p.
THE PRESENCE OF THE PAST IN THE HEARTLAND: RAINTREE COUNTY REVISITED by JOEL M. JONES
Yeah, so not so original,e ither in seeing The War and Peace parallel.Those works of historical fiction of which Howells approved, particularly War and Peace, succeed, he says, because "a whole epoch lives again morally, politically, and socially, with such entirety and large inclusion that the reader himself becomes of it." It is by re-creating for us the "motives and feelings" of people in time pastóand, therefore, of time presentóit is not by "taking us out of ourselves, but by taking us into ourselves" that a work of art proves its worth. Acting on the belief of philosophical pragmatism in personal experience as the ultimate source of reality and truth, Howells contends that a novel "convinces us by entering into our experiences and making its events part of that."6
In one of his many flashbacks, the protagonist of Ross Lockridge's Raintree County (considered by some an American War and Peace), John Wickliff Shawnessy, recalls how, while listening to a Centennial Day speech on July 4, 1876, he had "tried to reconstruct the scene of the Founding Fathers founding and fathering the Republic. But it wouldn't come clear and have any meaning. Penetrating into the reality of the Past was an impossible undertaking," he reflects. Then Lockridge proffers the recognition which echoes Howells' prescription for successful historical fiction: "There was . . . only one realityóthe reality of someone's experience. What people dealt with when they spoke of the Past was a world of convenient abstractions" (802) .7 These convenient abstractions are the "conventional acceptations by which men live on easy terms with themselves" and which Howells would have the historical novelist disperse. Lockridge, like Howells, tries to go behind those convenient abstractions and conventional acceptations, those illusions of the past, to see the past in terms of that one meaningful realityóthe reality of someone's experience.
... Lockridge chooses for his historical subject matter both the way of life in a small Indiana town in 1892 and the manners and milieu of a larger county and much larger nation from 1839 to 1892. Raintree County has been described as the most singular of all American historical novels. One should qualify this description by noting that in its singularity Raintree County is not simply a historical novel, as I have described that literary phenomenon. A strong case could be made for this work as an example of each one of Northrop Frye's five modesófrom the mythical to the ironic. Frye says, for example, the myth "deals with gods," the romance "deals with heroes," and the novel "deals with men."8 Raintree County deals with all three, though significantly, one rarely loses sight of the "men." I think it can be shown that finally the low mimetic mode of literary realism is the controlling one and though Howells would find it a long trip from Leatherwood Valley to Raintree County, he would find Lockridge's landscape and legends familiar territory. Lockridge's ultimate concern is with all human illusions, and his efforts are directed specifically both to an examination of the illusions of nineteenth-century Americaóthe illusions it had of itself (of its past, present and future) and the illusions the present may have of itóand to a Howellsian revelation of the realities underlying those illusions.
Joseph L. Blotner, writing of Raintree County a decade after its appearance, feels this work to be possibly "one of the five or six most important novels of this era," and points out, as did most of the contemporary reviewers, that in both narrative technique and structure "the influence of James Joyce's Ulysses is unmistakable."9 Like Joyce, Lockridge needed a method by which to control his materials at all levels; and as William York Tindall remarks, "Lockridge learned many tricks from Joyce.''l0 Less esoteric than Joyce, but, considering his intended audience, just as effective, Lockridge's use of the stream-of-consciousness technique dramatically portrays the specious present of a man in the pastóand as that individual is a reflector of the social forces and attitudes endemic to his region and nation, his personal experience offers insights into the confluence of complexities and contradictions of the specious present of that historical period in general.
###
Lockridge achieves, finally, what Charles Lee calls "a critical biography of America from the period of its agrarian innocence through the Civil War and into the era of . . . industrial expansion.''l2 Shawnessy's biography becomes the region's and the nation's. His is the heart of the heartland. As Lee, Blotner, and Tindall have all pointed out, perhaps Lockridge's most impressive aesthetic achievement is the extensive temporal and structural parallels he establishes between the personal experiences of Shawnessy and public events in the national experience. For example, a long series of important events dealing with the outbreak of the Civil War parallel exactly, in terms of time, the disruptive occurrences in Shawnessy's first marriage. And most significantly, the parallel events on both levels always have the same causal and consequential relationships to preceding and following events. Blotner notes that this constitutes an artistic fusion of private and public levels of meaning accomplished with similar skill by very few historical novelists (or novelists), American or otherwise.l3 The characters and events of Raintree County are invested with multiple meanings, and finally function on many levels: the personal and national, the narrative and symbolic, the mundane and mythical, the particular and universal, and the historical and ahistorical.l4
###
One might even contend that many of the strengths and weaknesses of the novel result from its typically American natureóit is extensively eclectic and markedly experimental. Lockridge, at one time or another, borrows techniques or themes directly from Hawthorne, Tolstoy, Whitman, Twain, Joyce, Dos Passos, Wolfe, and Faulkner. For example, the germ of the novel, if a single one can be identified, must have been Hawthorne's short story "The Great Stone Face"; and Lockridge impressively integrates this motif, as the society he depicts discloses its priorities and value system by hailing the politician, the businessman, and the military leader as its respective heroesónever, significantly, recognizing the poet and hometown philosopher, John Wickliff Shawnessy. His emulation of the Wolfean sprawl and echoing of several Wolfean themes, on the other hand, contributes very little. It is his adaptation of the Joycean stylistic and structural device of the stream of consciousness, of course, which finally enables him to succeed in his multifaceted endeavor. Also in a typically American fashion, he manages to use this traditionally esoteric literary technique in a manner which does not alienate the general reader. Tindall believes that Lockridge "succeeded in narrowing, if not entirely closing, the space that has separated the general reader from the many leveled novel," doing so "without the loss of value that might be supposed." "Value," says Tindall, "depends not so much upon the amount of reality in a book as the amount of reality under control, and control is a matter of method.''l8 Lockridge manages to gain control over a large amount of the historical reality of his region and the nationóand I feel he succeeds in narrowing, if not entirely closing, the space that often separates the general reader from the multileveled reality of the American past.
Such chastenings, contrasted with the better luck of the author, could be extended: Shawnessy never recovers his lost son, he doesn't win any elections. And though he does win the great Fourth of July footrace in 1859--while Lockridge was always eating dust--he pays for his victory tragically.
Most important, he never finishes the great work. In his youth Shawnessy writes a conventional temperance play and some derivative sentimental verse. While living in New York City he attempts a play, Sphinx Recumbent, but is unable to finish the fifth act. And now the great epic of America languishes. Politely assuming lack of genius isn't the problem, the Perfessor speaks like a modern-day historicist: "All so-called great men are the result of human collaboration before, during, and after the fact. With a little cooperation from Fate, you might have been America's Shakespeare, John, but you lacked the human context. A whole age worked to create the Plays, which are not unwisely attributed to a dozen other men besides the man who penned them." As we have moved from the Age of Lincoln to the Age of Senator Garwood B. Jones, the epic potential has withered.
The Perfessor's judgments, always incisive, are never sufficient. Exactly why Shawnessy can't otherwise get on with his epic isn't made explicit. In a passage Lockridge deleted, perhaps for being too explicit, Shawnessy reflects that Shakespeare didn't himself suffer the fates of Hamlet, Othello, Macbeth, Lear, or Cleopatra, and enjoyed an enabling aesthetic distance. Whereas, "I lived perhaps too deeply to give back what I have lived."
###
Lockridge's novel is a search for sustaining values in the face of desolation and death. Without embarrassment it asks large questions. The largest is, What survives the ruins of time? It's a question both personal and metaphysical. The Perfessor would seem to have the edge in the great debate, scoring point after point. But Shawnessy gamely holds on in a narrative where sexual vitality and mythic vision contend as best they can with mortality and cultural decline.
###
For Shawnessy and Lockridge, desire enhances the sensation of life even because it attempts always to transcend its own roots in vacancy and loss. The novel conveyed both the vitality and poignancy of desire to a generation of young readers who still remember elusive, doomed Nell rising naked from the riverbank when they've forgotten everything else.
Desire draws its nourishment from our connection with the biological landscape. The land is always there, with its river of life and Great Swamp. Emblem of female genitalia, the Swamp is the home of our nostalgia, as well as our ultimate tomb. Geography recapitulates anatomy in Raintree County, even down to the book jacket, where the living body of Nell is seen in the lush contours of the county map. Though dead and buried she survives in the landscape. The abandoned Danwebster graveyard lying next to the river gives Shawnessy an overwhelming sense of life, overrun as it is by grasshoppers, gravemyrtle, wild carrot, blackberries and poison ivy.
Corruption of this sense of place threatens our collective vitality. Called an "ecological novel written before its time," Raintree County warned of our loss of connection with this biological planet. There's been plenty of evidence that Lockridge's environmental instincts were right--that in "mining and stripping and gutting and draining, and whoring and ravaging and rending the beautiful earth of America," we would lay waste our powers.
###
The novel is an often comic testing of criteria, as Shawnessy from boyhood on ponders who and what is great. His purported grandfather Thomas Carlyle asks the same questions in Of Heroes and Hero-Worship, with his own list of heroes, including Shakespeare. Johnny Shawnessy hears of many dubious candidates for Greatest Living American, from James K. Polk to Henry Clay to Zachary Taylor. Lincoln comes off as more likely. Raintree County is somewhere between heroic and anti-heroic fiction, as Leonard Lutwak has noted. It doesn't dismiss heroes altogether but redefining their nature and mission in an era when the river gods have been chased away by freight trains.
###
Lockridge builds imaginary contexts around great words that have survived--from history, literature, philosophy, and religion to journalism, folklore, and folksong. Like his father, he hopes to reanimate them with words of his own.
He gourmandizes other texts with the same gusto he brought to Madame Pernot's dinner table. There are so many sources, "running the gamut of the so-called Great Books ancient and modern," that he thinks the question of comparative influence "pretty well adds out." But he does single out The Republic, the Bible, the Homeric epics, the Greek tragedies, Shakespeare's plays, Hugo, Flaubert, Tolstoi, Emerson, Whitman, Wolfe, Hemingway, Dos Passos, Joyce, and Mann. He should have added Frazer and Freud. Somewhat more off-beat titles leave their imprint--Uncle Tom's Cabin, John Brown's Body, Barriers Burned Away, the Elsie series, Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, Before the Footlights & Behind the Scenes, Ten Nights in a Barroom, Through the Dark Continent, The Life of Jesus, The Education of Henry Adams, Gone with the Wind, and especially his father's rejected novel of the Old Northwest, Black Snake and White Rose.
Raintree County devours a plurality of such authors and titles, of literary and non-literary genres, without being particularly bookish. Again, what is it?
Lockridge himself thought the genre problematic. Early into its composition he reflected on its style, thinking it more an epic than a novel. But he goes on to surmise that it's "a new form, an art form mingling the characteristics of many previous genres, drama, poetry, novel, short story, legend, dream, logomyth."
Many other genres and subgenres that criss-cross his book could be added: satire, parody, romance, pastoral, lyric, tragedy, elegy, comedy, farce, gothic fiction, sentimental fiction, Bildungsroman, historical fiction, agrarian fiction, realistic fiction, detective fiction, the dime cowboy novel, the fairy tale, the folk tale, folk dialect, song, prophecy, oratory, scientific and pseudo-scientific treatise, natural history, memoir, autobiography, confession, travel literature, philosophical dialogue, exegesis, epistle, anthropological and sociological discourse, aphorism, essay, journalism, cinema, the photo album, the county atlas, pornography, blasphemy, cartography, the outline, the testimonial, the riddle, the variant. (In this biography I've tried to imitate his method somewhat.)
Some critics, spotting the hand of other writers and the imprint of one or another literary form, have called the novel "derivative." Lockridge wants it to be obvious that his novel is derived--from a multitude of sources. He wants the reader to recognize them. This is his method. Joyce and Wolfe will be most frequently mentioned by reviewers, more so than Whitman. He feels he's incorporated these authors among many others and gone his own way. Where in the House of Literature, he will ask, do you find anything quite like my book?
It's not only the formal variety--it's the scope of the thing and what he hopes to embody. He tells the Houghton Mifflin publicity people that, among other impossibilities, he wishes to "express the American Myth" in an American version of The Republic, to dramatize "the vast dualism between materialism and idealism," to make a study "of the synoptic character of human personality," to embody the "social, anthropological, and sexual characteristics of 19th-century American life," to "provide a living document of the religious and political 'rites' of the American people" and thus incorporate American culture into one novel to an unprecedented extent.
Pynchon referred to:
There's now a term for this kind of thing, not yet to my knowledge applied to Raintree County. In 1957 Northrop Frye coined the term "encyclopedic form." Simply put, he means works that attempt to embody the entire life cycle and culture of a people, written by one or more scribes who presume to reach beyond the merely personal to a vision of the whole. In canonical literature, Frye alludes to the Bible, the eddas, the Mahabharata, the classical epics, the Divine Comedy, Canterbury Tales, The Fairie Queene, Don Quixote, Paradise Lost, Pilgrim's Progress, Prometheus Unbound, Don Juan, Moby Dick, The Cantos, Ulysses, Finnegan's Wake, A la Recherche du Temps Perdu. There is often a mélange of genres in encyclopedic works--a totality of form as well as of represented reality.
In modern American fiction the encyclopedic work most discussed has been Thomas Pynchon's Gravity's Rainbow with its internationalist perspectives and a cast of some three hundred. Others have included John Barth's The Sot-Weed Factor, William Gaddis's The Recognitions, and Joseph McElroy's Women and Men.
I'll avoid value judgments, yet make another kind of large claim that will sound inflated coming from a son of the author. It seems to me that Raintree County is the most ambitious attempt at encyclopedic form in American literature.
RAINTREE COUNTY AND THE EPICISING POET IN AMERICAN FICTION
Perhaps Raintree County may appear a little more from behind the critical cloud that covers it if instead of being placed for adverse comparison beside Joyce's Ulysses it is considered among those American novels which present an epicising poet who fails to become another Homer and yet whose story in itself presumes to be an epic. Frank Norris's The Octopus is such a novel, and John Barth's The Sot-Weed Factor is another, which takes as a subject the centuries-old American ambition to produce a native epic poem. The first of these is a serious attempt at epic, the latter a mock-epic, and Raintree County lies somewhere between the two extremes.1 The poet in Raintree County, John Wickliff Shawnessy, takes his place alongside of Norris's Presley, who hopes to capture the story of the west in thundering hexameters, and Ebenezer Cooke, who plans to write a Marylandiad honoring Lord Calvert's colony, "an epic to out-epic epics." The three epic poetasters fall far short of their ambition: Presley produces a short social protest poem, "The Toilers"; Shawnessy writes a trivial play "on the theme of love"; and Eben has nothing to show for his effort but a Hudibrastic poem satirizing colonial manners. But while they have failed to rival Homer, their creators go on to write novels that fulfill the requirements of the epic genre. The Octopus, Raintree County, and The Sot-Weed Factor are, so to speak, accidental prose paraphrases of the epic poems their poet-heroes wanted to write and could not. The anomalous result is that the American ambition to produce and epic poem is rejected in the very works that present themselves as epics. Of the three novels Raintree County is the most ambitiously epic since it attempts to weave together the history of the United States from 1842 to 1892, the life of Shawnessy, and an eventful day in the life of Shawnessy. To express this undertaking in terms of literary derivations, Lockridge tries to take one giant step beyond Virgil by adding the materials of Ulysses to those of the Iliad and the Odyssey.
So, not the only one to see the mock-heroic.
Ross Lockridge, Jr. on John Dos Passos--
The variety and richness of material in U.S.A. make that work a good one for illustrating the techniques and purposes of modern writers. Here are some of the more important objectives which I wish to reach in a class discussion of the novel:
1. I illustrate from the book the preponderant interest which modern writers take in the lives of the disinherited of the earth, the emphasis on the common, the everyday, as subject-matter for writing.
2. I point out the manner in which the book reproduces in a way impossible for the historian and sociologist the living, plastic stream of life in the American past. I point out--although it is unnecessary for the girls whom I teach--that this is not intended to represent the whole of American life.
3. I illustrate the extent to which the modern novel has been attempting, with varying degrees of success, to take over some of the functions of the sociologist, the economic theorist, and the historian.4. I illustrate how the novel can be used for propaganda purposes.
5. I illustrate how the book contains important reflections, direct and indirect, of such events within the past forty years as World War I, the Roaring Twenties, the Stock Market Crash, and the beginning of the Great Depression.
6. I emphasize a device regularly employed throughout the book--namely, the introduction of real personages in sketches which at one time personify a man and a period in American life. Much of the reading assigned is devoted to those justly famed pen-portraits of William Jenning Bryan, Woodrow Wilson, Henry Ford, Rudolph Valentino, and other representative figures.
7. I show how the writer is careful to give us the authentic décor of the period and the milieu portrayed. In this respect, the work is a work of scholarship--really an over-elaborate piece of documentation.
8. I illustrate the variety of new techniques which Dos Passos employs as a writer, how the attempt is made at times to perform in prose the traditional functions of poetry, how much of the novel is experimental in technique, how much of it is at the same time simple, straightforward, unadorned.
9. More specifically, I show how the example of the motion picture has influenced the art of fiction--the visual character of much of the writing, the use of flashbacks, odd camera angles, the effort to perform in writing the office of the News Reel.
10. I show the influence of newspaper writing on fiction and explain the use of selected newspaper headlines, which give the flavor of a bygone day just as it passed before the eyes of the people.
11. I illustrate from the book how modern writers are experimenting with words--compounding words, seeking new words, taking words from technology. I hope thereby to teach the students an important fact about language which few of them understand--namely, that it is changing all the time, that we are continually creating it.
12. I hope incidentally to cultivate in the minds of our students (who are often very uncharitable toward those in harder straits than themselves) an attitude of sympathy toward the underprivileged, an indignation at the evils of society on some levels, a determination someday to do something about it all when they are helping to erect the new world on the ruins of the old.
Ross Lockridge, Jr. Notes Thomas Wolfe and . among the dozens of other novelists Ross Lockridge, Jr. was reading . . . Wolfe and Joyce were the two . . .
HE SOUTHERN MYTH IN ROSS LOCKRIDGE, Jr's RAINTREE COUNTY
sch 12/17/22
Hoosier prodigy by Bruce Bawer (2022) covers some of the same ground as the other essays, but some points catching my eye:
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.
###
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.
###
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.
sch 12/18
No comments:
Post a Comment
Please feel free to comment