American Myth

RAINTREE COUNTY (1,066 pp.) -- Ross Lockridge Jr. -- Houghton Mifflin ($3.95).

This first book is the impressive result of a bold, if not wholly successful, effort to write the Great American Novel. It is also the latest and plainest sign that native American and recent European traditions of art and thought can flow together and that this cultural Mississippi, though full of snags and shallows, may be one of the brightest things moving in the world. Raintree County is a historical novel of Indiana by an Indiana boy; it is also a philosophical novel (a rare thing in U.S. fiction), and a studied work of art that is striking enough to court comparison, in method at least, with the Ulysses of James Joyce.

Shawnessy Hero. As in Ulysses, the formal setting of the novel is one community and the time one day. The community is the small town of Waycross, Indiana, and the date July 4, 1892. The hero, John Wickliff Shawnessy, is both family man and poet, combining the two archetypal characters that Joyce separated in Leopold Bloom and Stephen Dedalus. Mr. Shawnessy, 53, schoolteacher and county scholar, moves through the day as a leading citizen in the local celebrations. At intervals the day's events or reflections, like firecrackers, touch off flashbacks to the significant events of Mr. Shawnessy's life.

Mr. Shawnessy's life is presented on several planes. On one, the gentle and discreet Mr. Shawnessy is also the adventurous mr. shawnessy, a creature of the unconscious with its fantasies and desires. On another his life is the life of the Republic whose Independence Day festivities he attends. On still a third plane Mr. Shawnessy's life is the Life of Man, of the mythical hero remembering a lost Eden, seeking a Golden Bough.

Shawnessy's Eve. As little Johnny Shawnessy, born in 1839, he grew up in the cornland of central Indiana. In his teens he pored over Shakespeare and began writing a column signed "Will Westward" for a Raintree County weekly paper. He fell in love with a beautiful girl named Nell. Among his friends were Cassius P. ("Cash") Carney, a boy with business sense, and Garwood Jones, a robust, youthful politician with a shrewd eye for the girls and the main chance. Garwood Jones and Johnny Shawnessy were rivals for Nell, but Garwood would never have won out if Johnny had not been tempted away by a predatory beauty from Louisiana named Susanna Drake.

The most important events in Johnny Shawnessy's life are accompanied and paralleled by the events of the Civil War period. His marriage to Susanna takes place at the time of John Brown's execution. Their child is born on the night after the cannonade against Fort Sumter. Then Johnny learns Susanna's secret: she fears her mother was not the woman her father married, but his mistress, a handsome mulatto. During the days of Gettysburg, her mind finally gives way and she burns down the house, killing her child.

Meanwhile Johnny's true sweetheart, Nell, has remained unmarried. Now she promises to wait for Johnny and does so, during the months when he is with the Union Army from Chickamauga to Savannah. But when Johnny is wounded, the report gets back that he is dead. Nell marries Garwood and dies in childbirth.

The war is soon over, the Union is preserved, but though Johnny comes marching home, the report of his death, in a sense, is true. The world of aspiration that was America before the war is gone; the dream is dead, the new Republic belongs to Cassius Carney, industrial magnate, and to Garwood Jones, distinguished Republican Senator and candidate for President, speaker of the day in Waycross, Indiana, on July 4, 1892.

Great talent has been expended to give this story solidity of detail and to raise it to the level of universal literature. Author Lockridge, 33, began with valuable background, for his father is an authority on the history of Indiana and the writer was steeped from boyhood in local atmosphere and legend. At Indiana University ('35) he was a letter man in track and made the highest scholastic average recorded up to that time. He studied in France and at Harvard. From 1941 to 1946 he taught English at Boston's Simmons College and worked eight hours a day on his novel. His wife typed for him and took care of the growing family (they now have four children).

Assignment Completed. With all due allowance for Author Lockridge's deliberate use of 19th Century melodrama as a convention, the plot of the novel at some points is strained and arbitrary. The unvarying use of some techniques becomes faintly annoying, and the work as a whole has the quality of an assignment brilliantly completed rather than a vision that demanded this and no other form.

As an original, spacious and significant work of the second order, however, Raintree County is a success. It is elaborately ingenious and it is fun. It is clearly superior to any of the recent "giant" novels of U.S. history such as Gone With the Wind. It also already has the mark of financial success on it: Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer has given the author a Novel Award* of $150,000 ($25,000 more if he wins the Pulitzer Prize). If M-G-M does as well by the book in cinema adaptation as it has done by the author, Lockridge will have enriched Hollywood as well as himself.

*Latest $150,000 M-G-M prizewinner: Esther Forbes, Pulitzer Prize biographer of Paul Revere, for a yet unpublished novel about early Salem. Said she: "It's rather like the national debt; really much too big to conceive."

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