SKELETON KEY toThe SUICIDE of My Father ROSS LOCKRIDGE JR., Author of "RAINTREE COUNTY"

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                                ERNEST LOCKRIDGE, PH.D. (Yale University)
                  Professor Emeritus of English, The Ohio State University

This site  The Web 

Pity me not, but lend thy serious hearing to what I shall unfold. [Ghost of Hamlet's Father] Shakespeare

If I am not for myself, who will be?  If I am only for myself, who am I?  If not now, when? Rabbi Hillel

Listen with the trust you accord the batterer, the rapist, the assassin, to any mere mortal who admonishes you to "turn the other cheek." Pere Nabri 

                                  " AS FOR THE EVIL,

                      as for those who lose their grasp

                       on the stuff of life,

                        who become unable to cope

                        with their world,

                         are they to blame

                         or are they not also

                         the victims of long circumstance?

                  SUICIDE NOTE

                    Ross Lockridge Jr., March 6, 1948

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                               "AS FOR THE MIRACLE OF BEING--

                         IT IS OF COURSE A MIRACLE,

                                       BUT

                             IT IS NOT NECESSARILY A GOOD MIRACLE."

                                   SUICIDE NOTE

                                            ROSS LOCKRIDGE JR.

                                                 MARCH 6, 1948

 

 

                                WHY

did my brilliant father Ross Lockridge Jr. execute himself at 33, March 6, 1948, with RAINTREE COUNTY Number One on The New York Times Bestseller List? This waste of a precious life and incalculable loss to literature body forth a murder-mystery that for six decades has extruded a slow crawl of brain-dead platitudes: Dad was "worn out"; was unable to immediately begin a second novel and therefore believed himself to be "written out"; was destroyed by "the bitch-goddess Success"; was "mangled to morsels" by an unfeeling publisher, book club, Hollywood (pick one, or all the above); was unloved by his mother; was burdened with "patricidal guilt" for besting his father in the "Fame-Game."  Ad nauseam.  The two biographies of Dad--1) an envy-driven hatchet-job with kid gloves, and 2) a tedious shaggy-dog story--proffer "solutions" that make Doctor Watson and Colonel Hastings sound like Einstein.  The Freudian quackery of both biographies is quintessential Sid Caesar.

To counter six decades of banality, ignorance, denial, suppression and mendacity regarding my father's suicide, I offer here the Skeleton Key that unlocks The Riddle of Raintree County.  I do this less from choice than an obligation to truth.

"Murder will out!" (Chaucer et al.)

Bear with me.

                                                            Ernest Lockridge

 


 

 

            "NO ONE BLAMES THE CHILD OF LESS THAN TEN

         FOR THE ERRORS OF HIS PERSONALITY,

         BUT LINK BY LINK HE IS BOUND

         TO THE GROWN MAN."

                          SUICIDE NOTE, ROSS LOCKRIDGE JR., MARCH 6, 1948

 

          "My heart leaps up when I behold

          A rainbow in the sky:

          So was it when my life began;

          So is it now I am a man;

          So be it when I shall grow old,

                 Or let me die!

          The Child is father of the Man;

          And I could wish my days to be

          Bound each to each by natural piety."

                    William Wordsworth, March 26, 1802

 

                    
 
                      
 
                           "THERE ARE GOOD PEOPLE"

Vernice Lockridge and Ross Lockridge Jr.
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Studio photos, Manistee, Michigan, late summer 1947.  Mom hoped having their portraits taken might "make him feel better."  She dates his "breakdown" as occurring "on or about Oct. 21, 1947."

 

 

                           "THE COMPULSION OF THEIR EXPERIENCE"

The "Old Folks" visit us in Manistee, staying at a separate lakeside bungalow down the street, August, 1946.  Dad shot the photograph. 

1946:Grandpa,Grandma,Mom(Ross III),me,Jeanne,Larry
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Grandpa,Dad (around 9)

                                    TYRO AND TYRANT

              "The universe is neither good nor bad. 

         It does not care about the individual human being. 

         It is he who learns care and who is taught good and bad from infancy. 

         There is nothing that we are that is not taught us by our bodies,

          By events, by other men."  Ross Lockridge Jr., SUICIDE NOTE

 

                  "The glory that moves all things penetrates the universe,

                and shines in one part more and in another less."  Dante, PARADISO

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Vernice Baker and Ross Lockridge Jr.--Bloomington High School

                                "Just as poets are born so,

                           the brave are born so,

                           and the cowardly are born so. 

                            That is, they are born to their fate."

                                     SUICIDE NOTE, March 6., 1948

 

                             "There's a divinity that shapes our ends,

                             Rough-hew them how we will--"

                                      HAMLET

 

 

"Murmuring Maples," Dad's home 1924-37
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                                                                         CUCKOO'S NEST
 
"Murmuring Maples" bears an unnerving resemblance to the Bates Home in PSYCHO.  "The Sun Room," which Dad shared with Grandpa, lies to the dwelling's rear.

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Elsie Shockley Lockridge and Ross Lockridge Sr. after Dad's death. The book is not RAINTREE COUNTY

 

 

                   YOU HAVE TO BE CAREFULLY TAUGHT

       "IT IS [THE INDIVIDUAL HUMAN BEING] . . .

     WHO IS TAUGHT GOOD AND BAD FROM INFANCY.

     THERE IS NOTHING THAT WE ARE

      THAT IS NOT TAUGHT US . . ." 

                 SUICIDE NOTE, Ross Lockridge Jr.,

                                   March 6, 1948"

 

           "Destiny has more resources than the most imaginative composer of fiction."

                            Frank Moore

 

Dad's Inscription to MY Grandmother
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                           "1/29/48

       For Mother--

         One of the noble, one of the valiant,

                          one of the good.

        With love and admiration

                                      Ross, Jr"

        

                THOSE WHO LEARN NOTHING FROM THE PAST CONDEMN OTHERS TO REPEAT IT
 
My mother idolized Ross Lockridge Sr. After I exposed his behavior, Grandma Lockridge remained the one loving presence of my childhood. She had loved my father when she seduced him into a pact that was anything but "noble," "valiant," or "good."  Old habits die hard, and following Dad's suicide I was "next up."

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Ross Lockridge Sr.'s personal copy of RAINTREE COUNTY

                                         THE DOG DID NOT BARK IN THE NIGHT
 
Ross Jr. was generous to a fault with inscribed presentation copies of RAINTREE COUNTY to aunts, uncles, in-laws and the like, but he inscribed nothing of the sort to his own father.

Enter main content here

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"Tommy and Clona"=my mother's brother-in-law and older sister

       "For Tommy and Clona

             With admiration and affection

                                Ross Lockridge, Jr.

                                       and

                               Vernice" [her signature]

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To my father's paternal aunt, Marie, and her husband Robert Peters M.D.

                             "POETS ARE BORN SO"

THE IDEAL MAN--Grandma's father John W. Shockley
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Dad and Grandma, Dad's IU Graduation, 1935

                          "LET NO ONE BLAME ANOTHER ONE.

                     A man is an accumulation of many men,

                    of all mankind

                    quartered in a now, inescapable,. unasked for,

                    absolute,

                    ultimate . . .

                           There are good people,

                     though whether they are good

                      for reasons other than the compulsion 

                       of their experience or not,

                        remains unanswerable."

                                                          Ross Lockridge Jr.

                                                   SUICIDE NOTE, March 6, 1948

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                                   DUAL FAME: THE PAW PAW FAMILY REUNION OF 1947

"Pie was the prize for these Hoosier literary cousins, Mary Jane Ward, author of 'The Snake Pit,' and Ross Lockridge Jr. (right), author of 'Raintree County,' at the reunion of the Lockridge family [in the Paw Paw Methodist Church] near Peru, Ind., yesterday.  They are receiving their awards from Lockridge's father, Ross Lockridge Sr., head of the Hoosier Historical Institute." THE INDIANAPOLIS STAR, September 21, 1947, one month to the day before Dad's "breakdown."  Grandpa used the occasion to pressure Dad to exert his new-found fame to publicize the Hoosier Historical Institute, which may explain its mention in the news story.  One doubts that Grandpa exerted similar pressure on Mary Jane, whose fame was tainted by her ties to mental illness. 

 

 

                                   UNLIKELY PAIR OF BLOOMINGTON AUTHORS

                                             MAKE HEAP BIG SPLASH

In 1948 Professor Alfred J. Kinsey, Bloomingtonian and founder of Indiana University's Kinsey Institute, came out with SEXUAL BEHAVIOR OF THE HUMAN MALE, which topped the best-seller list for nonfiction simultaneously with RAINTREE COUNTY'S topping the list for fiction.  The Kinsey Institute during the years that Kinsey himself was in charge has become infamous for: junk science; sexual predation and staff orgies in the name of "research"; heavy reliance on the testimony of convicts, rapists, and sexual psychopaths; willful disregard of sampling techniques and statistical methodology; proselytizing a Religion of Polymorphous Perversity--to name a few of the Institute's less egregious shortcomings.  Kinsey, himself a closeted homosexual and self-mutilating masochist, would have granted Ross Sr. high standing among pedophiles; Kinsey considered them "intrepid Adventurers who, in the face of great personal risk even to the point of mortal danger, yet maintain a noble courage and, indeed, an elan vital and the sheer masculine nerve to plumb those extreme boundaries and depths of human sexual behavior which for the ordinary man forever languishe [sic] in the realm of mere imaginings, unacted upon and therefore unfulfilled."  (We know the Unenlightened to employ a somewhat less sychophantic terminology, and not unlike the pitchfork and torch-bearing villagers in Frankenstein to howl for the rack and the screw.)  Inclusion in Kinsey's Pantheon of Pedophiles would have heartened Grandpa, whose literary preference ran to little bands of men-without-women, societies unto themselves slogging in close-knit company through the Uncharted Wilderness.  Grandpa wrote a couple of such adventure stories--a book for boys extolling Sieur LaSalle, and one extolling George Rogers Clark .   Kinsey, unlike Freud, did not deny that incestuous child sexual abuse existed, merely that it caused anyone any lasting harm.

[Here, if you can stand it, is a bit more Kinsey, whose callous moral relativism, by virtue of Kinseyism's extension into the universe of concrete reality, far surpasses the Marquis de Sade's: "A number of persons have turned in sexual calendars and diaries showing their day to day activities over some period of time . . .  They ADMIRABlY {emphasis added} supplement the information routinely obtained on the standard histories. . . In each of two cases there are over a thousand pages of such supplementary material."  We know, now, that these "two cases"--one a Nazi murderer of children--were pedophiles actively pursuing children during their collaboration with Kinsey; between them they recounted thousands of child-rapes.  "Persons who have kept records or who are willing to begin keeping day by day calendars showing the frequencies and the sources of their sexual outlet, are urged to place the accumulated data at our disposal," urged Kinsey. There can exist no reasonable doubt that had a Gacy, Bundy, or Dahmer provided Kinsey with such "supplementary material," he would have welcomed it with gratitude and dispensed ongoing advice to transform the novice "information provider" into a "trained observer."]

 

 

 

 

                                EPIC PRECURSOR

                  TO “RAINTREE COUNTY”

 

To wit, Dad's 399-page Poetic Epic, THE DREAM OF THE FLESH OF IRON, the bulk of which consists of that most contemporary of American verse forms the Spenserian Stanza.  The poem is an odd amalgam: “The Waste Land” and “John Brown’s Body” meet “The Faerie Queene.”  Its “Argument”?  Here followeth Dad’s version of THE ETERNAL TRIANGLE  refracted through the Prism of Herr Freud.  1)”The Dreamer,” 2)”The Beautiful One ,” versus  3)”The Boss” who “becomes the objectified symbol of antagonism to the Beautiful One and thus also to the Dreamer or the soul of humanity.  [‘The Boss’] is, variously, lust, tyranny, [and] evil . . . “   For “The Dreamer or the soul of humanity,” read Ross Jr.  For “The Beautiful One,” read Grandma.  And, for “the objectified symbol of antagonism . . . [of] lust, tyranny [and] evil” “The Boss,” read Ross Sr.  Here’s a taste:

                                The Boss was with her, stood, and smiled at her.

                                He glowed with confidence, removed his coat,

                                The great soft coat of wool, expensive weave.

                                His little pigeyes were red with lechergloat.

                                He wiped his glistening forehead with his sleeve.

                                I heard the ugly words he said to her. . .

                                The Boss bent over and grabbed her slender waist.

                                She fought.  He crushed her body to the wall.

                                His heavy muscles bulged.  His face was tense.

                                He panted hard.  His body seemed immense

                                Against her beauty and her slenderness.

Get it? The Dreamer churned out his Epic  (blessedly unpublished)  from 1939-41, down in the dungeon-like coal cellar of Murmuring Maples , whilst upstairs, in friendly competition, The Boss was churning out a stupendous oeuvre of his own,  a “novel” (now, one prays, gone with the wind) concerning a pair of Native American lovers (one a male, the other a distinctly masculine female) who blissfully learn in the end that they were kidnapped at birth by the "Redskins" who raised them, and are in fact, uh, WHITE!  At the close of each writing day the companionable competitors, Dreamer and Boss, would regale one another—along with The Beautiful One, Teeter, Mom, plus a literarily insentient yrs. truly—with one another’s output fresh from the Ovens of the Muse.  Despite the heady creative environment my mother loathed cohabiting with Dad’s family.  (To save money we had moved out of the little log cabin wherein I was conceived.)  Mom found Teeter’s large presence to be especially baneful.  Both Teeter and The Beautiful One treated her like a small child.  My father must also have felt like a child, an especially vulnerable one, having returned, or regressed, home to good old "Murmuring Maples."

A couple of observations:

1) Any old father is (in Auden's phrase) a "HUGE IMAGO" to the son.
 
2) Dad dreamed of wearing a "Flesh of Iron" for protective armor, to survive that hellhole of denial and abuse.

 

Dad Extruding DREAM OF THE FLESH OF IRON c.1941
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Coal Bin Research Materials: LIFE and TIME Magazines

 

                                   OPPORTUNITIES LOST

During the late 1940’s and early ‘50’s when I was a kid in Bloomington, Indiana, Kinsey’s right-hand man Wardell Pomeroy Ph.D. resided across the road from us in a miniature one-story limestone cottage where I hobnobbed with his three kids.  I nearly grew accustomed to Dr. Pomeroy parading around naked.  We little playmates enjoyed a jolly old time,though I'd scram back home whenever one of the little Pomeroys piped up,"Hey Ern! Mom and Dad are having sexual intercourse--wanna watch?” A simpering backward prude at heart, I declined perusal of the explicit materials Dr. Pomeroy ferried home from the Kinsey Institute to indoctrinate us children—e.g., playing cards, 52 positions, plus a pair of wild Jokers.I evaded Dr. Pomeroy’s persistent badgering that he “take [my] sexual History.” His monomaniacal focus on sex was comical and creepy. I was in no way going to be sequestered with this man while he probed my little life. Could Wardell Pomeroy Ph.D., Clyde Martin B.A., or The Great Kinsey Himself have taken Grandpa’s “History.” Dad’s? I doubt it profoundly: both men were too hermetically guarded.  Meanwhile,stuffed with junk,our cramped single-car garage wherein Dad had gassed himself loomed by our back alley like the Valley of the Shadow of Death. Big Kinsey and all the little kinseys—Institute Staff from bottom to top--regularly congregated at one another’s abodes for what I later learned were orgies to which Kinsey required attendance, to raise staff awareness, destroy inhibitions, and deepen research-sensitivity.  Standing in my side yard I observed Kinsey’s extended family funneling inside the tiny limestone Pomeroy cottage.Light-years ahead of staid mid-century Middle-Western couture,Clyde Martin’s wife would show up in “Hot Pants,” her spectacularly long and shapely legs untrammeled--sixty years later indelibly etched in my mind’s eye.  Ah, Bloomington!

 

 

                    ". . . THIS SOUL HATH BEEN

              ALONE ON A WIDE WIDE SEA:

               SO LONELY 'TWAS, THAT GOD HIMSELF

               SCARCE SEEMED THERE TO BE."  S.T.Coleridge 

             

               "GOD IS MAN'S DESIRE THAT GOOD

                HAVE AN ABSOLUTE GUARANTEE. 

                ONCE MAN BECAME AWARE OF DEATH,

                LEARNED ANTICIPATION, ACQUIRED KNOWLEDGE,

                GOD BECAME NECESSARY AS THE GUARANTOR OF GOOD,

                 AS THE PROMISE THAT MADE HUMAN LIFE POSSIBLE

                 AND TOLERABLE"  R.F.Lockridge Jr., SUICIDE NOTE

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My Mother's Handwriting

                                      "IN AGONY"

       "These pictures were taken late summer 1947 when he was exhausted but before his breakdown on about Oct. 21 [1947]"

                                                                                                                                            

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                           SNAKE PIT

Herewith the lion's share of Dad's medical records of his brief stint at Methodist Hospital of Indianapolis, 12/23/47-1/4/48.  "Referring Doctor" is "Robt. Peters" (his signature), prominent Indianapolis physician and husband of Dad's Aunt Marie, his father's sister.  (Cf. RAINTREE COUNTY inscription, above.)  "Doctor Bob" thought so highly of Dad's character and intellectual ability that he once offered to pay his way through medical school if Dad would join his wealthy practice.  Dr. Bob was thoroughly distressed by Dad's condition, and the inability of my mother and other Bloomington relatives to cope effectively.  (Grandma Lockridge was pushing an aggressive regimen of Mary Baker Eddy, whose notion that the "real world" is an illusion had long been a balm to Grandma, for reasons that will become obvious.)  Dr. Peters realized Dad's condition was life-threatening and followed the "progress" of his in-hospital stay, indicated by his presence at the three Electro Shock treatments administered by Dr. DeArmond ("EST & grand mal"--from "Nurses Clinical Record," 12-27-47, 12-30-47 and 1-1-48 [Happy New Year!], "Dr. Peters here"). No record exists of psychotherapy. Having registered under a pseudonym ("Charles E. Duncan") to avoid scandal, he guards his false identity with his life, revealing zilch about his true self beyond his spiritual "agony." DeArmond, who knows nothing of RAINTREE COUNTY, learns nothing of Dad's real life. Thus, an iron curtain of secrecy makes "talk therapy"  not merely ineffective but impossible."Treatment" is limited to insulin, "Seconal etc.", plus Electro Shock Therapy "& grand mal."  The "Nurse's Clinical Record" for 1-3-48 reads, "Cheerful and responsive.  Wants to go home."  In fact, having been traumatically shocked as a child while changing a light bulb at Murmuring Maples, Dad had a profound electrocution phobia; according to Mom the unsedated Shock Treatments were agony for him.  Dad told her he never fully lost consciousness during the grand mal seizures, that it was like being tortured in Hell for his sins.  It was THE SNAKE PIT of his double-second-cousin Mary Jane Ward's best-selling novel, only infinitely worse.  So he cranked up the charm, and as with all his endeavors he met with stellar success: after less than two weeks in the hospital, three shocks treatments "to grand mal," a bunch of barbiturates, and no talk-therapy, he is discharged as "Recovered."

 

                            RICHARD COREY

Dad's friends and acquaintances, those I've questioned over the years, agree that he was the most secretive person they have ever encountered.  They would say, "I never really knew him at all."

"Some lives are fortunate, and some which seem fortunate become involved in agony . . ."  Ross Lockridge Jr., March 6, 1948

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                       NOSTALGIA OF EMPTINESS
 
RAINTREE COUNTY is the crie de coeur of a mortally wounded spirit.
 
Months of non-stop revising to meet impossible demands by the Book-of-the-Month Club and M.G.M.; being swindled out of a small fortune by a revered and trusted publisher; completing the grand project that had sustained him since his teens; concluding that RAINTREE COUNTY was not all that good: these stressors triggered the underlying pathology that fractured my father's sanity, much as influenza ruptured, with fatal results, the encapsulated childhood tubercule that Thomas Wolfe (the chief literary influence upon RAINTREE COUNTY) had contracted in his mother's boarding house for tuberculars. 
 
A nostalgia of emptiness pervades my father's novel, a phantasmagoric homesickness or longing for a non-existent past that enervates the soul leaving both reader and author completely hollowed-out.  After six decades RAINTREE COUNTY still possesses the hypnotic force to drive a susceptible reader hysterical with nostalgia.
 
Attention must be paid to the fact that my father's life was one long Peine Forte Et Dure, and that in the end  it required the adding-on of a not inconsiderable tonnage to crush his brave heart.
 
The poor son-of-a-bitch.

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 12-23-47           2pm

Is unwilling to submit to a history and physical untill [sic] he consults Dr. DeArmond.

                                                 R.M.Seibel

In September 1947 the patient had a "let down" in which he was aware of a change in his feeling.  He says it seemed as if he had lost contact with the world although this does not appear to be a process of depersonalization.  There has been a tendency to avoid social contacts and he fears and dreads to face the ordinary daily problems.  He has lost some weight, appetitie has been below par, sleep poor and disturbed by harrassing dreams.

        Past illnesses have been insignificant.

        [Physical Examination] reveals a well-developed, well nourished male who has no complaints except he doesn't know what has happened to him.  Neurological examination--normal.  Heart normal.  [Blood Pressure] 120/74.

        Psychiatric examination shows good insight--no evidence of hallucinations or delusions.  He is fearful, depressed, has lost confidence and feels helpless to straighten himself out.

                                                     Impression: Reactive depression.

                                                                  M.DeArmond

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 12-23-47

[Patient] states he is here because of "nervousness."  He has been under care of Dr. DeArmond and states he preferred to wait and make one recital of his troubles.  He admits to insomnia but says he has been eating fairly well.  He looks sad and unhappy.

                                                                                                         Schuster

Jan 4, 1948

    Insulin sedation was started on admission because of sleep difficulty and it was advisable to observe him for a short time.  He was profoundly depressed, showed no interest other than the agony of his own lack of initiative.  His intellectual analysis and insight are good but his affect is flat.

    Very soon it seemed advisable to resport to Shock Therapy and this was started on 12/28.  His improvement was prompt and after three treatments it seemed to justify a trial in his social activity.  He was released on Jan. 4, 1948

                                                                             DeArmond

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"The Thousand-Yard Stare"

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                                                     SUICIDE CLAUSE
 
The Bloomington, Indiana coroner was swift to rule Dad's death a suicide, but life-insurance adjusters wanted to nail it down so as to pay out nothing in death benefits. The issue had been muddied at the outset when Teeter, Dad's prison-matron older sister, tossed the Electrolux hose--Dad fastened it to our brand-new Kaiser's tailpipe the better to asphyxiate himself--into our alleyway garbage can before police and ambulance arrived on the scene, a fact my mother kept secret from us for forty years.  When I was in my teens she did tell me how Grandma and Teeter had dismissed as naive her dire warnings about Dad, and how she felt vindicated by the coroner's ruling.  Whether Mom considered this vindication an adequate and just exchange for receiving not one penny from Dad's many life-insurance policies I don't recall. 

                                                           "CAN'T I BE YOUR GIRL?"

When I was around 12, my fetching Aunt Lillian, or as I called her, "Aunt Kiki"--the formidable "Teeter"--turned to me intimately with a look I will not attempt to describe and said, "Ernest, am I your girl?  Just because I'm your aunt, can't I also be your girl?"  In a chaos of utter existential confusion resulting in a total lack of chivalry I somehow (!) managed to brush the "offer" off.  This instance of unrequited romance occurred in a docked touring boat in the Wisconsin Dells, which Grandma and Grandpa had not yet boarded.  I maintained a guarded truce with Grandpa, whom my ingratitude (having ratted him out) so disappointed that I was no longer under consideration for future Director of The Hoosier Historical Institute.  Grandma, however, still had me pegged as the future Torch-Bearer for her Demi-God father, my great grandfather John Wesley Shockley.  A single 1000-page tome deifying the guy was downright insufficient: did not Jesus Christ have FOUR entire Gospels devoted unto HIM?

 

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"Teeter" whom I called "Aunt Kiki," the nickname she suggested for herself

                                        DEATH WARRANT

DAD'S SUICIDE "NOTE"
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                                                          "ULTIMATE PHILOSOPHY

"Let no one blame another one.  A man is an accumulation of many men, of all mankind quartered in a now, inescapable, unasked for, absolute, ultimate.  Good and bad are human discoveries.  The universe is neither good nor bad.  It does not care about the individual human being.  It is he who learns care and who is taught good and bad from infancy.  There is nothing that we are that is not taught us by our bodies, by events, by other men.  God is man's desire that good have an absolute guarantee.  Once man became aware of death, learned anticipation, acquired knowledge, God became necessary as the guarantor of good, as the promise that made human life possible and tolerable.  And thus there are good people, though whether they are good for reasons other than the compulsions of their experience or not, remains unanswerable.  As for the evil, as for those who lose their grasp on the stuff of life, who become unable to cope with their world, are they to blame or are they not also the victims of long circumstance?

    "As for the miracle of being--it is of course a miracle, but it is not necessarily a good miracle.  Some lives are fortunate, and some which seem fortunate become involved in agony, and who shall say whether this is through their own fault or not?  Just as poets are born so, the brave are born so, and the cowardly are born so.  That is, they are born to their fate.  No one blames the child of less than ten for the errors of his personality, but link by link he is bound to the grown man."  Ross Lockridge Jr., March 6, 1948

I discovered this chilling abrogation of all responsibility the morning of March 7, 1948, atop a neat stack of paper on the desk in the guest room downstairs,Dad's room in the months after we returned to Bloomington from Manistee.  The dysgraphia in the lower lefthand corner is mine ["I'm out at the car"], as are the blazing sixguns.  "The car" refers to Uncle Shockley's Buick: Dad's older brother was spiriting me off to Indianapolis until the funeral, which I was not allowed to attend.  Did Dad leave behind a second statement, one that was concrete, personal, signed--and unambigulously a suicide note?  And did Teeter bury it with the Elextrolux hose in our alley trashcan? The implications of Dad's "Ultimate Philosophy" are horrendous.  Plenty of suicides far less philosophically grounded in Nihilism than my father have spared the wife and kids the meaninglessness of further existence.  So, I feel most fortunate that my father allowed me the privilege of soldiering on, continuing to experience that "not necessarily good miracle""of being," to go on living as a human person with a future that keeps on expanding. 

F.Scott Fitzgerald put forward his melodramatic notion that "there are no Second Acts in American Lives," and my father did indeed bring down the curtain after the first act, dashing backstage and leaping into the trashbin, when he might have waited it out and come through, still alive now at 95,having written even better novels, entertaining his great-grandkids, watching his garden grow.

Second acts are possible in American Lives.  Second and third lives, too.  Nine lives, even.  Why not? 

Be on guard and "unwilling to submit." 

 

 

                                             "THE MIRACLE OF BEING"

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SAFFRON ROBE, Acrylic on Canvas, 24x36--Ernest Lockridge

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                                                                          HERE'S THE RUB: 

Dad had long kept an acolyte's faith that Sigmund Freud held the Open-Sesame to the human psyche.  Why then in the throes of his agony did Dad settle for a plain-vanilla therapist like Dr. DeArmond, in a primitive snake pit of seconal and grand mal seizures?  Why no Freudian Analysis? Or Freudian Anything? He'd undergone Electro Shock Therapy, numerous seances with a Christian Science Practitioner to please his mother, tolerated his father's vigorous ministrations--but there exists no evidence that he considered even one consult with a Freudian Analyst.  Well, Folks, like Virginia Woolf who refused Freudian ministrations when her own sanity was on the line, Dad was fully aware of Freud's ultimate conclusion that child sexual abuse is merely a wish-fulfillment fantasy of the "victim."

                                                   

                                           THE PHANTOM OF 46 MOUNTFORT STREET

                                                                             Or:

                                                              MY FATHER'S MUSE

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                                      NOT MY GRANDMA LOCKRIDGE AT 22
 
Pope Clement VIII--precursor of the great Freud--determined that Beatrice Cenci was making up the fact that her late father was her rapist, so it was off with her head!  Her pitiable shade haunted our cramped Boston apartment in which my father was machinegunning "Raintree County" through the old Royal, and at first I believed Beatrice to be Grandma Lockridge as a young woman.  After my father disabused me of this notion, Beatrice settled into a disturbing and puzzling shadow on our living room wall, no blood relative but merely some pitiable stranger who lived a tragic life and suffered a tragic death.  For their unspeakable deed, Beatrice's executioners suffered the agonies of the damned.  My father forestalled any such consequences by executing himself.

CLICK HERE--Bearing Witness: "GRANDSON OF PALEFACE." "Pity me not, but lend thy serious hearing to what I shall unfold."

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                                                          DOUBLE WHAMMY

Throughout his life my father struggled to forge an identity separate from the man whose name he bore and whose mission was to obliterate him. Senior bullied Junior into acting as his amanuensis, ghost-writer, office boy, Boy Friday, and far worse.  Grandpa relentlessly dogged Dad to take on an array of "projects," as though Dad were a gifted vassal, an exotic parrot or trained monkey. When Dad emerged from the asylum with all his defenses gone, Grandpa came to the rescue.  He put Dad on display in Rotary-Club-type venues where his inanition disappointed the micro-audiences.  Hoping to "revive" my father, Grandpa challenged him to memorization contest after "EST & grand mal" had disabled his phenomenal memory.  He resumed badgering Dad to assume co-directorship of The Hoosier Historical Institute.  

If Grandpa could not save Dad, neither could the enormous success of RAINTREE COUNTY, a work inspired by his mother and written "for" her.  Dad had rebelled against his father only to deliver himself into his mother's strait-jacket.  Trapped in a nightmare marriage to an incestuous homosexual pedophile (talk about hitting the trifecta!) and his repellent victimizing of their children, Elsie Shockley Lockridge co-opted her brilliant youngest son to transform the sow's ear of her degraded existence into the silk purse of "The Great American Novel."  In the Civil War between his parents, Dad took on the role of his mother's Savior, sacrificing himself to make her the victor. 

March 6, 1948: Ripped apart and cannibalized upon the family hearth, my father finished off what little remained.

 After his loss Grandpa proceeded to train me in public speaking--or, in the knack of projecting my voice from the barn to the rear of the house, reciting passages he had me memorize: e.g., "How They Brought the Good News from Ghent to Aix," "Concord Bridge," "The Gettysburg Address," "The Boy Stood on the Burning Deck," "Charge of the Light Brigade," etc.  My words had to be clear and audible from a distance of at least 100 feet, and though I could never hope to equal the oratorical acumen of Tecumseh's brother "The One-eyed Prophet," whose voice carried a country mile, Grandpa declared me "promising."  He was indoctrinating me in the lore, minutia, and "manly virtues" necessary to someone who might one day qualify to direct The Hoosier Historical Institute when I ungratefully put a stop to it.  Meanwhile, Grandma was extolling the extraordinary virtues of her father, far more sensitive and romantic than her husband. Great Grandfather Shockley had been "reborn" in my father, and she sensed that it was I who now embodied both of these dead souls, "heroic dreamers" whose greatness lay not in what they accomplished (John Wesley Shockley was a "mute inglorious Milton,") but quite literally in what they "dreamed."

Not unlike most victims of intolerable childhood abuse Dad went somewhere inside his head for escape, and it became a way of life.

 

  My 1974 novel PRINCE ELMO'S FIRE shows the dynamics between my father and grandparents:

CLICK HERE to Download PRINCE ELMO'S FIRE

                                                       NOT BEATRICE CENCI

1901--Grandma at 21, Before Her Marriage
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I thought Beatrice Cenci was a picture of Grandma as a young woman, until my father set me straight

In ornate calligraphy on the backside:

"Elsie Lillian Shockley

          The

Only Daughter

          of

JW and Emma Shockley

         who

was born January 26, 1880

         Near

   Messick, Indiana

          and

united in the holy bonds of

         Matrimony

             to

Ross Franklin Lockridge

             on

     July 23, 1902"

In Dad's hand at the bottom: "Mother, Summer of 1901

    

 

             "LET NO ONE BLAME ANOTHER ONE"

Each year when spring rolled 'round, Stella Hull—a woman Grandma’s age, quiet and unassuming, well-spoken, genteel to a fault, wearing a clean, threadbare dress, bringing her belongings in a single carpetbag--would visit Murmuring Maples for two weeks, sewing, darning, sweeping, cleaning, cooking, doing laundry, ironing, scrubbing floors, making the old homestead spick and span, "an' earn her board an' keep.”  Born into “a distinguished Southern family,” Grandma said, Stella Hull ran off with a “handsome no-good” who drank himself to death, leaving his destitute young widow to survive as an itinerant "houseguest" and drudge—and yearly reminder of the fate of wives of Grandma’s generation who, lacking their own resources, became husbandless.

                    "THE PROMISE THAT MADE HUMAN LIFE POSSIBLE AND TOLERABLE"

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              February 1, 1947

Dear Ernest,

   Daddy has been very busy, and that's why you haven't had a letter from me lately.

   I thought you might want to know what's happening along Mountfort Street.  The other day I was walking to our building, when suddenly a small boy shot out of an alley running with all his might and two larger boys after him.  On looking closely at this boy, I saw that it was none other than our old friend Henry Miller.  I said, "Hello, Henry," and Henry immediately began to talk under my arm, while the two bigger kids slunk off, muttering things under their breath.  "How is the William McKinley School these days, Henry?" I said.  "It stinks," Henry said.  "Who's your teacher now, Henry?" I asked.  "Bucktoothed Murphy," Henry said.  "She stinks."  "Is she hard on you, Henry?" I asked.  "She pulls your hair and hits your knuckles with a ruler," Henry said.

   Just then we saw a small blocky kid walking along the street loaded with war equipment and having a surly smile on his face.  It was Lee Oliver, who hasn't grown much since you saw him last probably because he drinks coffee.  After Lee had passed, I said, "Henry, does Lee still beat the boys up?"  "Not so much now," Henry said.  "The other kids can run faster now."

   It wasn't many days after that, that I came out of our apartment building and saw a small boy stirring with a stick in a puddle of dirty slush right in front of the mailbox in the gutter.  It was Errol, who is bigger now but no better looking.  "What are you doing, Errol?" I asked.  "Fixing it so that cars will get stuck in this mud," Errol said.

   Same old Errol.

   All the kids want to be remembered to you, Ernest, and Sandra Kelley promises me that she has some old comic books that you may have.  Don't get your hopes too high, though, as I still don't have these comic books.

   You can see that life on Mountfort Street is much as it always was except that little Ernest Lockridge is no longer dodging around corners there to get away from other kids.  Some relics and reminders of little Ernest Lockridge are still there, however, as every now and then I see a terribly battered old gun or something that looks like one you used to have.

   Henry Miller says he knows where I can get caps, and I'm going to try to get you some.

   I hope you are getting along fine in that good school that Grandma has started you at.  You know that Daddy expects you to be a good boy in school and at Grandma's.  Thanks ever so much for that good letter about the basketball game, and write me again soon.

                            Love, 

                            Daddy

 

                        "BORN TO THEIR FATE"

2nd grade, Wm. McKinley School, Boston--1945
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[LEE OLIVER, top row, 2nd from left.  HENRY MILLER, top row, 2nd from right.  SANDRA KELLEY, middle row, far right.  ERNEST LOCKRIDGE, seated, center.  ERROL NEWTON (not pictured and unschooled) was the younger son of our apartment building's alcoholic janitor "Old Man" Newton, who mercilessly beat his kids.  Dad and I saw him kicking his eldest, Bucky, in the stomach, on the basement's concrete floor..]
 
 
                                                             GUARDIAN ANGEL
 
Tough little LEE OLIVER whose father had been shot dead by the Nazis led a small gang of fellow toughs who took to picking on me going to and from school for 3 years K through 2 at Boston's Wm. McKinley School. I came to enjoy fighting. Lee Oliver made me an offer to join the gang if I'd help beat up my best friend Henry Miller, but I refused. The fighting toughened me, so when the time came to fight off Grandpa my "training" came through.

Larry, Ernest, Jeanne, Puck--1946
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                                            LORD OF THE FLIES
 
Following Dad's suicide the role of de facto Father to my three younger siblings--five, four and two years old--fell unto me.  Over them like a vapor floated our flawless Father Who Art In Heaven, whilst down on Bloomington's grim Stull Avenue resided an all-too-solid and (at nine) inadequate little surrogate, who nonetheless towered above his littermates like the Colossus.  The resulting cocktail--a stultifying, unilateral sibling rivalry ginned up with a vicious Oedipal chaser--has been poisonous.
 
[Oh--the dog in the photograph is not "Skirt," who had been struck dead by an automobile several years before, on High Street which skirted Murmuring Maples to the east.  In actuality, the dog is the late Skirt's replacement, "Puck," a blood-transfusion reservoir for the legions of swollen ticks that Grandma and I would periodically tear loose with needle-nose pliars.]

 

 

                                  RAINTREE COUNTY:THE RELIGION

With mythic ambitions writ large, in a florid and “mystical” language, my father’s novel positions itself as both National Epic (his ambition was to write “The Great American Novel”) and Holy Writ.  RAINTREE COUNTY coupled with its author’s inexplicable death have spawned a demented little Church complete with 1) Bible (The Novel), 2)Hero (Johnny Shawnessy), 3) Martyr (Dad), 4) Paradise (“Raintree County which [has] no boundaries in time or space”),  5) True Believers, 6) Vatican wherein the Holy Holographs are stored and guarded, 7) Hagiography, 8) Apostates, 9) Unbelievers, and 10) Defilers.  Not unlike religious fanatics throughout history, Raintree County’s “[have] no boundaries” when it comes to Defending a "Faith" that is only a trance, a spiritual Dead Zone whose devotees see the universe from the bottom of a deep dry well.

 Lockridges under various surnames are particularly vulnerable to THE FAMILY CULT, inclusion in which confers a faux sense of entitlement, plus additional life-impeding toxins such as the obsession with seeing RAINTREE COUNTY declared--in The Cult's fantasy of a Perfect World--"The Official Great American Novel." A Perfect World would have an inoculation against brainwashing.

                                   

 

                                                     PERSONAL NOTE

And my “Legacy” ?  Initially: overwhelming  grief,  Survivor’s Guilt, anger, defiance, the ineluctable belief that I counted for nothing in a universe that suddenly made no sense at all.  Plus which, who should come to the rescue but Grandpa?

It took awhile to realize he was one of those all-too-well-disguised blessings—Grandpa, who unwittingly palmed along to me the skeleton key to the suicide of his youngest child.  With understanding comes reordering, chaos resolves into sense, which helps.  I mean, it does.  Really.   Good thing my childhood “therapy” was emphatically of the self-help variety.  It could have been worse.  They might have fobbed me off onto some Freudian.

I no longer blame my father for abandoning me to the wolves.  You’ve heard about the guy who survives a head-on collision only to find the white-hot engine-block flaming in his lap, and he’s begging the State Trooper to shoot him?   Suicidal depression is like that, only worse.

      

 

 

                                 "LINK BY LINK

                   HE IS BOUND TO THE GROWN MAN"

Dad and Me, May 20, 1939, Murmuring Maples
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                                                                     IF NOT NOW, WHEN?

Those of you who have exposed a child sex abuser know well the great rewards that befall your act.  Moreover, you have experienced first-hand how these rewards multiply in direct proportion to your abuser's blood ties, how your family falls all over itself with gratitude: "Oh, see how your brave act has spared your brothers, sisters, cousins, even the children of neighbors and strangers! Why, can it be that you've protected little precious US!"

Uh huh.

Being branded "liar," "evil," and "insane" represents only a small portion of a reward that includes withdrawal of parental love and support, alienation from one's closest relatives (often a necessity for your own survival), marginalization, ridicule, slander, and outright treachery.  Bottom-feeders with no visible dog in the fight will attack you.  Sadistic thugs admonish you to "turn the other cheek."  Those once "near and dear" all too generously disseminate the lie that you are demented, or deceased.  It never quite ends.

But remember:

WE ARE NOT ALONE!  Indeed, it is we strangers who are one another's true sisters and brothers.

And:

THERE IS NO NECESSITY FOR THIS EVIL TO UNDO US!

 At twice my father's age at his death plus five I want to set the record straight, in the hope that wide knowledge and understanding of this profound American tragedy might help prevent the waste of even one life.

"BE NOT OVERCOME WITH EVIL, BUT OVERCOME EVIL WITH GOOD." St. Paul

 

Ernest Lockridge

November 28,2009

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                               "SOME LIVES ARE FORTUNATE"

ERNEST LOCKRIDGE graduated Phi Beta Kappa with Honors from Indiana University in 1960. A Rhodes Scholarship finalist he was Woodrow Wilson and Lewis-Farmington Fellow at Yale University where he earned "Honors" in all his graduate classes, was awarded an inaugural Woodrow Wilson Dissertation Fellowship (1962-3) and completed his M.A. and Ph.D in English within three years (1960-3).  He was hired by Yale's Department of English (1963-71) and taught at Yale during the Golden Age when its English Department was internationally rated as Number One.  While a member of the Yale faculty Lockridge was selected Fellow at The Center for Advanced Study, University of Illinois at Champaign-Urbana (1969-70).  He is author of three published novels, one of which, PRINCE ELMO'S FIRE, was a Book-of-the-Month Club selection.  His TWENTIETH-CENTURY INTERPRETATIONS OF THE GREAT GATSBY (Prentice-Hall) went through twenty printings, remained in print for a quarter-century and continues to sell briskly over the Internet. All but one of his essays in literary criticism have been included in anthologies, and singled out for special praise. From 1971-91 Lockridge taught English at The Ohio State University where in 1976 he was promoted to Full Professor and in 1985 was awarded the university's premier award for teaching excellence The O.S.U. ALUMNI AWARD FOR DISTINGUISHED TEACHING.  TRAVELS WITH ERNEST (Rowman & Littlefield Publishers), co-authored with his famous wife, sociologist and poet Laurel Richardson, appeared in 2004.  Emeritus Professor of English at O.S.U., Ernest Lockridge is a jazz musician and painter of award-winning paintings that have appeared in numerous solo exhibits and galleries.  This year his painting "THE FIRE THIS TIME" won FIRST PLACE in The High Road Gallery of Worthington's annual fall exhibit.   He serves as President of the WORTHINGTON AREA ART LEAGUE (WAAL), and is the proud father of three, stepfather of two, grandfather of eight.

THE FIRE THIS TIME, Acrylic on Canvas, 24x36
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CLICK HERE: PAINTINGS BY ERNEST LOCKRIDGE

     

 

                                "THE BRAVE ARE BORN SO"

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LOST IN ICELAND, Acrylic on Canvas, 28x39--Ernest Lockridge
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                                                December 17, 2009

In my el supremo position as President of the Worthington [Ohio] Area Art League I'm awarding WAAL's inaugural President's Award to my mentor and dear friend Bill Westerman (left), gifted artist and teacher.

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TIDAL POOL, Acrylic on Canvas, 24x38--Ernest Lockridge

                                                        GET THROUGH IT!

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Inscription Page--Ross Lockridge Sr.'s Copy of his son's novel

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Dedicated to "Teeter," my father's older sister Lillian, Matron at the Indiana Women's Reformatory

                            "2/12/48

"For Lillian

    Or as she was first called by the

author of this book "Teeter"

     With affection and admiration

                              Ross"

 

 

  "For Uncle Bob and Aunt Marie

          With the affection and admiration

              of the author and gratitude

               for many kindnesses rendered

               down the years. 

                                Ross, Jr."

     

When Dad learned the British Edition of RAINTREE COUNTY would subtract the "Jr." (a term of ridicule in Britain) from his name, he was, my mother told me, "beside himself" that anyone might think his novel was written by his father.

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