Ross Lockridge, Jr.

Ross Franklin Lockridge, Jr., (April 25, 1914 – March 6, 1948) was an American novelist of the mid-20th century. He is noted for Raintree County (1948), a widely praised novel which many readers and critics considered a contender for the "Great American Novel," and for his death by suicide just as it was reaching the top of the best-seller lists.

Youth and apprenticeship

Ross was born and raised in Bloomington, Indiana, the youngest of four children of Elsie Shockley Lockridge and the populist historian and lecturer Ross Lockridge Sr. Through his father, he was a double cousin of the future novelist Mary Jane Ward. He was by all accounts a handsome, amiable, and talented young man, known as "A-plus Lockridge" for his easy mastery of school assignments. "He was of medium size," wrote his biographer, the novelist John Leggett, "with curly, dark brown hair and a striking handsomeness, but the unusual thing about him was his energy. It glowed and crackled." Elsewhere, he was described as a "slight, dark-haired boy with blue-gray eyes that shone in joy."^[1] At the same time, like many high-performing youngsters, he seemed sensitive to criticism and troubled by the occasional setback, even when he lost a chess game.

He graduated from Indiana University in 1935 with the highest average in the history of the university, despite having earned an unaccustomed B during two semesters at the Sorbonne in Paris. The year abroad made a great impression on the young Hoosier, not least in setting his standard for future success: "Write the greatest single piece of literature ever composed," he instructed himself. And again: "the first object of my return [to the U.S.] shall be the complete mastery of the English language to the end that my use of the language be the most brilliant ever known."^[2]

Following his graduation, he was sidelined for nearly a year by "scarlet fever ... and possibly rheumatic fever."^[3] He returned to the university in 1936 as an English instructor and M.A. candidate, writing his thesis on "Byron and Napoleon." He later referred to this period of his life as "the lost years,"^[4] though they included his marriage to Vernice Baker, the birth of their first child, and a considerable body of apprentice writing, including what seems to have been an early stab at the themes that would eventually reach fruition in Raintree County.

In September 1940 the young family moved to Cambridge, Mass., so Ross could take up a fellowship at Harvard University, working toward a Ph.D in English and meanwhile writing what his second son would call an "unreadable 400-page poem."^[5] The Dream of the Flesh of Iron was rejected by the Boston publisher Houghton Mifflin in 1941, by which time Lockridge was teaching at Boston's Simmons College while ostensibly working on a dissertation about Walt Whitman. Instead, he wrote 2,000 pages of a novel with the working title American Lives, based on his mother's family, the Shockleys. He lived on Mountfort Street, in an apartment that was "pathetically bleak, books and clothing stored in makeshift boxes, piles of papers everywhere."^[6]

Genesis of the novel

In the summer of 1943, Lockridge turned those pages over and began to type on the other side. The new novel was similarly based, though moved back one generation and focusing on a single day—July 4, 1892—in what may have been an emulation of James Joyce's Ulysses. Instead of treating several Shockleys, it would have a single hero, John Wickliff Shawnessy, who bore the same initials as his maternal grandfather. The rest of the sprawling story would be told in flashbacks and in a long, concluding dream sequence. As before, it would be set in Indiana, in what any good Hoosier understood to be the heartland of the United States. The Civil War would be its defining event, as it had been for the country and for the poet Lockridge had selected for the subject of his abandoned Ph.D dissertation. He would, he said, "express the American myth—give shape to the lasting 'heroic' qualities of the American people." Indeed, he intended to do nothing less than "write the American republic," thus completing a trifecta of James Joyce, Walt Whitman—and Plato!^[7]

Though he was now the father of three, Lockridge was called for a pre-induction physical in February 1944. For the U.S. Army, this was a time of high manpower needs (the invasion of France was scheduled for the spring) and a much-depleted draft pool. He was classified 4-F—unfit for military service—when the doctors noticed an irregular heartbeat, probably resulting from his bout with scarlet fever.^[8] Meanwhile his fictional hero was fighting in the Civil War. "For my part," he later said with mingled regret and chagrin, "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.^[9]

"Lockridge was a Vesuvius," in the words of John Leggett. "When he was at work, twenty or thirty pages spewed from his typewriter each day, some on their way to the wastebasket, others to be revised, endlessly before they were satisfactory, but always expanding."^[10] Indeed, Ross claimed to type at up to 100 words per minute, an incredible feat on a manual typewriter. Toward the end, he worked in one room while Vernice typed the clean version in another room, with young Ernest carrying papers from one to the other. "[M]y father was Gatling-gunning Raintree County through the old Royal [typewriter]," Ernest later wrote.^[11]

Ross completed the 600,000-word typescript in April 1946. He put its five sections into as many binders, put the binders into a suitcase, and splurged on a taxi to carry himself and his 20-pound package to the Houghton Mifflin offices at Two Park Street. The first reader advised rejecting the novel, as the publisher had earlier done to The Dream of the Flesh of Iron, but fortunately for Houghton Mifflin and arguably for American literature, the final decision was favorable. When the telephone call came, offering him an advance against royalties of $3500—more than a year's salary at Simmons—Lockridge asked for and was granted a leave of absence from his teaching duties.^[12]

Back in Bloomington, Lockridge became "more and more nervous" about the process of turning his huge book into a commercial product. The editors wanted him to trim it by 100,000 words, including the dream sequence that he regarded as central to the book. (Among the material to be jettisoned was a fantasy auction of the hero, who in an echo of Lockridge's reaction to his draft status was advertised as "back from the wars without any hurts, after hiding behind a thousand skirts.") Ross and Vernice therefore spent the rest of the year as before, "ceaselessly typing from morning to night."^[13] The task took until January 1947, meaning that Raintree County would not be published on schedule in April.

Ross returned to Boston for what he thought would be the final push. He was given an office at Houghton Mifflin, from which he advised the staff on the book's illustrations, typography, cover design, and even the design of the dust jacket, showing green hills in the shape of his recumbent heroine. Because the company planned to publish another potential best-seller that autumn, it pushed Raintree County back to January 1948. Adding to the author's excitement and stress, Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer Studios) awarded him a $150,000 prize that with escalators had the potential of amounting to $350,000—the equivalent of more than $3.5 million today—but he would have to cut another 100,000 words from the book. In negotiations that went through the night, Lockridge and M-G-M compromised on a reduction of 50,000 words, which, as he said, "virtually killed me at the time and took all of the sweet out of the prize." To Houghton Mifflin, he confessed that "six and a half years of effort have played me out and I'm not quite up to it physically." Nevertheless he went to work, jettisoning one character and adding another.

The 450,000-word revision was finished in August, whereupon the Book of the Month Club offered to make it a main selection—but only if further cuts were made. Meanwhile Lockridge and Houghton Mifflin argued how the M-G-M award would be shared between them.^[14] At the same time, there were complicated negotiations about income-averaging to lower tax rates on income from the book.

Publication and death

In the end, the squeamishness of the Book of the Month Club caused there to be two versions of Raintree County. As the book developed, Lockridge had created an alter ego for his hero, in the person of the outrageous "Perfessor" Jerusalem Webster Styles. On page 152, the Perfessor delivers a blasphemous riff in praise of bastards, including three words ("Wasn't Jesus God's?") that the BMOC could not tolerate. They were duly removed, but only after 5,000 copies had already been printed. The first edition press run was an extraordinary 50,000 copies, bound in green cloth imprinted with a golden raintree. There were faux nineteenth-century wood engravings on the end papers, and a frontispiece locating the town of Waycross and the Shawmucky River, its meandering course spelling out the initials JWS. All of this (except for the three missing words) was according to the author's specifications, just as he had sketched the recumbent nude that could be seen on the dust jacket.

The fall of 1947 began the author's descent into madness. Life magazine published a ribald excerpt on September 18. "I walk past people," he confided to his wife, "and I wonder what they think." And, more ominously: "Whatever made me think I could get away with it?"^[15]

The book was released on January 4, 1948, and the entire press run was sold out by the official publication day, January 5.^[16] The reviews were as extravagant as the novel itself. The New York Times called Raintree County "a huge and extraordinary first novel ... an achievement of art and purpose, a cosmically brooding book full of significance and beauty."^[17] By contrast, The New Yorker was scathing, calling the book "the climax of all the swollen, pretentious human chronicles that also include a panorama of the Civil War, life in the corn-and-wheat belt, or whatnot ... just the sort of plump turkey that they bake to a turn in Hollywood...."^[18] (Compounding the pain to the author and the embarrassment to the magazine, the review referred to the book as "Raintree Country" and its author as "Lockwood.") Writing in Saturday Review, the distinguished critic Howard Mumford Jones struck an admiring middle ground: "Latest candidate for that mythical honor, the Great American Novel, 'Raintree County' displays unflagging industry, a jerky and sometimes magnificent vitality, a queer amalgam of pattern and formlessness, and an ingenuity of structure that is at once admirable and maddening...."^[19]

Suffering from severe depression, Lockridge committed suicide by carbon monoxide poisoning shortly after the novel's publication. His grave is in Rose Hill Cemetery in Bloomington.

In 1957, MGM released the motion picture version of "Raintree County" starring Elizabeth Taylor, Montgomery Clift and Eva Marie Saint. It received fair to good reviews and did moderately well at the box office, receiving four Academy Awards nominations, including one for Taylor.

2.Ernest Lockridge. Skeleton Key to the Suicide of My Father, Ross Lockridge, Jr.. Kindle edition, 2011, loc. 1725, 1748. The first and second quotes are confirmed by reproductions from his father's journal.

^[1]

Further reading

• Leggett, John (1974). Ross and Tom: Two American Tragedies. New York: Simon and Schuster. ISBN 0-671-21733-X. 
• Lockridge, Larry (1994). Shade of the Raintree: The Life and Death of Ross Lockridge, Jr. New York: Viking Penguin. ISBN 0-670-85440-9. 
• Lockridge, Ernest (2004). Travels with Ernest: Crossing the Literary/Sociological Divide. New York: Rowman & Littlefield. ISBN 0-7591-0596-0. 
• Lockridge, Ernest (2011). Skeleton Key to the Suicide of My Father, Ross Lockridge, Jr., Author of Raintree County. Charleston: Global Enterprises. ISBN 978-1-4609-0976-8. 

External links

• Raintree County.com
• Ross Lockridge, Jr. at Find a Grave
• RFL, Jr. 1934 Paris Journal
• Howard Mumford Jones, "Indiana Reflection of U. S, 1844-92"
• Behold! Raintree County is the Great American Novel!

1. ↑ SKELETON KEY TO THE SUICIDE OF MY FATHER, ROSS LOCKRIDGE, JR., 2011, loc. 1748