Raintree County and “The Next Indiana”

Larry Lockridge discusses his father’s book Raintree County in the following guest post for our Indiana Bicentennial Bookshelf series, which appears courtesy of the Indiana Humanities' Next Indiana Bookshelf. Ross Lockridge, Jr.’s novel was selected to be a part of the Next Indiana Bookshelf, which was created by the Indiana Center for the Book (at the Indiana State Library) and Indiana Humanities to encourage Hoosiers to think and talk about the present and future of Indiana during the upcoming state bicentennial in 2016. Each title has a strong connection to Indiana, whether it is set in the state or written by a Hoosier author, and includes poetry, nonfiction, and fiction books.

Other IUP books chosen for the Next Indiana Bookshelf were Earth Works: Selected Essays by Scott Russell Sanders, What This River Keeps by Greg Schwipps, and Sailing the Inland Sea: On Writing, Literature, and Land by Susan Neville.

By Larry Lockridge

In his 1948 novel Raintree County, my father Ross Lockridge, Jr. unabashedly attempted to write the Great American Novel, not just the Great Hoosier Novel, but the original setting is, for the most part, Henry County, Indiana. The protagonist, John Wickliff Shawnessy, is modeled on my paternal great-grandfather, John Wesley Shockley of Straughn, Indiana. He spends a modest life as a Hoosier schoolmaster who writes poetry on the side as an idealist who quietly nurses the highest literary aspirations. But he is too mired in this own tragic past to write his way toward a visionary future, to write the epic of America.

In Raintree County Lockridge attempted to write that future for him, as a literary prophet with a strong sense of nostalgia but with a mission also—to restore to American life its fading mythic sense of things, anchored in immediate and celebratory sensate experience. Finishing his novel just as World War II was coming to an end, Lockridge thought this mythic sense of things was greatly imperiled by commerce and industry, by the lack of what Matthew Arnold called “sweetness and light” and Northrop Frye “the myth of freedom.” As the bestselling novel in the early months of 1948, Raintree County seemed for a time to answer to a hunger in the populus for American meaning beyond the banalities of Main Street. Lockridge especially emphasized the values of the landscape and its mythic enhancements. How can we regain a sense of the miraculous and a reverence for the landscape when the ancient river gods are taking flight at the coming of the railroads? Shawnessy asks this kind of question again and again, and Raintree County has thus been called the “foremost American environmental novel.”

I feel that Raintree County mingles history with prophecy in a way full of implication for “The Next Indiana.” The “endlessly courageous dreamers” whom Ross Lockridge speaks of may not be found in our politicians—and politicians with the exception of Lincoln come off poorly in Raintree County. Rather, it is in the rank and file of ordinary Hoosiers where the extraordinary must be found as we take stock of our collective heritage, find the uses of the past, maintain our rivers and lakes, and work toward what Lockridge called “the gigantic labor by which the earth is rescued again and again from chaos and old night.”

I tell the story of my father in Shade of the Raintree: The Life and Death of Ross Lockridge, Jr., author of Raintree County, republished in 2014 by IU Press with a new preface.

Larry Lockridge is Professor of English at New York University and a Guggenheim Fellow. He is author of Coleridge the Moralist, The Ethics of Romanticism, and essays on biography and British Romantic literature. For Shade of the Raintree he received the MidAmerica Award, given by the Society for the Study of Midwestern Literature. For more information on Raintree County, visit the website maintained by Ross Lockridge III, www.raintreecounty.com.

Our Indiana Bicentennial Bookshelf series will continue every month as we count down to 200th anniversary of the state on December 11, 2016. IN Writing author Douglas A. Wissing will blog for us in March.