|
"JUNIOR" When Dad learned the British Edition of RAINTREE COUNTY would tear
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.
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.
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| Inscription Page--Ross Lockridge Sr.'s Copy of his son's novel |
|
| Ross Lockridge Sr.'s personal copy of RAINTREE COUNTY |
|
| "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]
|
| To my father's paternal aunt, Marie, and her husband Robert Peters M.D. |
"For Uncle
Bob and Aunt Marie" etc.
"POETS ARE BORN SO" (suicide note) Elsie Shockley Lockridge worshipped her father, John Wesley Shockley (pictured below),
schoolmaster of a tiny Indiana farming community, and poetaster with Delusions of Grandeur that one day he would compose America's
AENEID! He looked like a poet. In his daughter's eyes her father's tragedy,
and heroism, lay in never having consummated his Quest. For whatever reason--dreams too noble for mere words? a hideously
materialistic nineteenth-century unworthy of his Genius? laying waste his powers instructing generations of perspiring unwashed
rubes in a one-room shanty?--he left behind some scraps of derivative, escapist verse, but nary an Epic syllable. While my father was little more than
a tabula rasa his mother was already initiating him in the worship of this backwoods Demigod, whom my father later transmuted
into The Hero of Raintree County. You have to be carefully taught, and the sooner the start, the cleaner the result:
begriming a tabula rasa will always trump brainwashing's messy unpredictability. It's worth noting that in all probability Grandma beat Grandpa to the punch.
Susannah Duke (1844-77): Impregnated out of wedlock at fifteen by The
Hero of Raintree County, who married her, only to divorce her shortly thereafter, allowing his son to vanish from his life.
She became the "model" for the beautiful, mysterious, soiled, insane Susannah Drake of RAINTREE COUNTY. Chewing
the scenery like an old pro, Elizabeth Taylor played Susannah in the 1957 MGM melodrama, one of the lousiest movies ever to
besmirch the Silver Screen. THE HERO OF RAINTREE COUNTY
Summer, 1956, on location in Danville, Kentucky, where MGM was filming
the Indiana portions of RAINTREE COUNTY. The four children of Ross Lockridge, Jr., pose with a miserably hungover Montgomery
Clift. That's me in back. We also met Eva Marie Saint, and THE REAL LIZ TAYLOR.
Top: The real Elizabeth Taylor, with Jeanne and Ross Lockridge III. Bottom: Liz and Monty, along with fellow-Hoosiers Miss Sweden, and Nigel Patrick, a British
ham. In take after take the hungover Liz and Monty flubbed their unmemorable lines. The heavily-accented Miss Sweden,
one Myrna Hansen, had no lines.
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. To
underline and expand upon the Master, Kinsey's wing man and our close neighbor Dr. Wardell Baxter Pomeroy said, "In father-daughter
incest, the daughter's age makes all the difference in the world. The older she is, the likelier it is that the experience
will be a positive one. The best sort of incest of all, surprisingly enough, is that between a son and a mother who
is educating him sexually and then encourages him to go out with girls." 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 now know that these "two cases"--one (Rex King)a Middle-Western
rapist of some 800 young children; the other (Dr. Fritz von Balluseck) a Nazi serial rapist-murderer of children who began
corresponding with Kinsey from Hitler's Germany--pursued their prey while providing Kinsey with the "supplementary material"
detailing their activities. "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 constitutes a Chimaera: “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,” 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 Oedipal odyssey (blessedly unpublished)
from 1939-41, down in the dungeon coal cellar of Murmuring Maples , whilst upstairs, in friendly competition,
The Boss was churning out a stupendous oeuvre of his own, a “novel” (now 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! [Though
in his own eyes an admirer of the "Red Man" second to no one, Grandpa believed without question that "any truly
superior White Man was the superior of any Red Man," and, further, that no first-class Red Man could possibly even consider
disputing such an incontrovertible fact.] At the close of each writing day the companionable competitors, Dreamer and
Boss, would regale one another—and The Beautiful One, Teeter, Mom, plus a literarily insentient yrs. truly—with
one another’s output fresh from the Ovens of the Muse. Dad's "subtext" flew far below the radar
of The Boss (of Teeter, too, and Mom, and of course me), but (wink, wink) scored a bull's-eye on the receptors of The Beautiful
One. Sharing a secret Morse Code was among the few pleasures in a degrading pact wherein the son shielded his "noble,"
"valiant," "good" mother against defilement by assuming her position. To save a buck we had moved out of the little log cabin wherein I was conceived,
but despite the heady creative environment my mother loathed the indignities of a Murmuring Maples whereTeeter
and The Beautiful One treated her like a small child. Having
returned, or regressed, to his childhood home, Dad needed a "Flesh of Iron" as protective armor in that genteel
hellhole of denial and abuse. Any old father can be a "Huge Imago"(the phrase is Auden's) to the son. In an
autobiographical fragment Dad wrote not long before his death, he observes, "This father [Grandpa] was to the boy [Dad]
a creature of almost terrifying energy": thus Grandpa's "IMAGO" seems to have been "super-sized." Not unlike the Huge Imago of my father.
|
| Research Materials: LIFE&TIME Magazines |
Dad bats out "DREAM
OF THE FLESH OF IRON" in the Coal Celler of Murmuring Maples. His research materials consist of LIFE magazines.
GOODBYE, BLOOMINGTON 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 Skunk Works 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. From our yard I could watch 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!
NERVOUS BREAKDOWN ". . . 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
|
| My Mother's Handwriting |
"IN AGONY"
(Suicide Note)
"These pictures
were taken late summer 1947 when he was exhausted but before his breakdown on about Oct. 21 [1947]" Vernice Baker
Lockridge
SNAKE PITHerewith 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. For example, Grandma Lockridge was pushing on Dad an aggressive regimen of Mary Baker Eddy, whose notion
that the material world of space and time--the "real world" in which all human experience occurs--is merely a malovelent
illusion had long been a balm to Grandma. 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." 
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, appetite 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
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 resort 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
"THE THOUSAND-YARD STARE "
My father looks shell-shocked
"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."
SUICIDE NOTE,
March 6, 1948
HERE'S THE RUB: Dad had a long-cherished 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. Why not? 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 childhood sexual abuse is merely a wish-fulfillment fantasy of the "victim."
SUICIDE CLAUSE The Bloomington, Indiana coroner was swift to rule Dad's death a suicide, but life-insurance
adjusters wanted to nail it down in order to pay out nothing in death benefits. The issue had been muddied by "Teeter,"
Dad's prison-matron older sister, who trashcanned the Electrolux tube Dad taped to the Kaiser's tailpipe. My mother
withheld this truth from us for forty years. She did confide during my teens how Grandma and Teeter had dismissed her dire
warnings about Dad, and how vindicated she felt by the coroner's ruling. Whether
Mom considered the vindication adequate exchange for receiving nothing from Dad's insurance policies, purchased from her sister
Beulah's husband, I don't recall.
"TEETER," Dad's older sister, and my
"AUNT KIKI"
|
| "TEETER"--I REFERRED TO HER AS "AUNT KIKI," A NICKNAME SHE, HERSELF, SUGGESTED |
"CAN'T I BE YOUR GIRL?" When I was
fourteen, Aunt Lillian--the formidable "Teeter"--pressed her mouth to my ear and whispered, "Ernest, am I your
girl? Just because I'm your aunt, can't I also be your girl?" I brushed it off. The Hoosier Historical Institute expired
with Grandpa when I was twelve, but Grandma kept right on grooming me to devote MY life to her Father, (bless His holy name).
RAINTREE COUNTY, heftier than most BIBLES, was nonetheless insufficient. Heaven forbid that Great Grandfather Shockley's
one-gospel legacy remain outdone by Jesus Christ's four. My interest
in neither project was enthusiastic and not long before her death even Grandma ran out of steam. "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] The morning after Dad's suicide, while Mom was in our living room breaking
Dad album of a dozen Stephen Foster 78's, I came across and read this monstrosity on the desk in our downstairs guest room
where Dad passed his last months lyng on a single bed staring at the ceiling. The self-proclaimed Execution Decree is
a tissue of impersonal pronouncements "ex machina"--literally, "ex" the ROYAL that birthed RAINTREE COUNTY.
The handwritten correction of
"had" to "have" is the sole instance of human intervention, as though "the evil" self-condemned
had already ceased to exist
The
dysgraphia in the lower lefthand corner is yrs truly's ["I'm out at the car"], like 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 Electrolux 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." This sepia reproduction of Beatrice Cenci's death-house
portrait (1599,by Guido Reni) adorned our Boston apartment while my father was writing RAINTREE COUNTY. Beatrice paid
with her head for arranging the murder of her domineering, incestuous father who had been serially raping her since childhood.
Dad blackened the margins of Shelley's tragedy THE CENCI with his indecipherable shorthand.
Pope Clement VIII (Freud's precursor), determining that Beatrice was making it all up and even if
she wasn't, so what?! signed her Death Warrant. Her pitiable shade haunted our cramped Boston apartment during the years my
father was machinegunning "Raintree County" through the old Royal. I thought she was Grandma as a young woman
until my mother said, No, she wasn't, and Beatrice settled into a puzzling shadow on our living room wall, no blood relative
but merely some pitiable stranger who lived a terrible life and died a terrible death. After beheading Beatrice, her
headsman suffered the agonies of the damned. My father forestalled any such consequences by executing himself.
"A NOVEL WHICH . . . MIGHT REALLY MERIT THE TITLE OF 'THE GREAT
AMERICAN NOVEL'"
 Following Houghton-Mifflin's acceptance of his manuscript in
1946, my father wrote, for publicity purposes, a long single-spaced "Story" of how it came to be. "One day in
the spring of 1934," he begins, "a nineteen-year-old American boy sprang suddenly from his typewriter and began
to pace excitedly back and forth. This was the idea-genesis of RAINTREE COUNTY . . . . It was on that day [in Paris]
that Ross Lockridge, Jr., awakened to the fact that certain Nineteenth Century backgrounds in the life of his own family
could be transmuted into the content of a novel, which, if it fully realized the possibilities of its content, might really
merit the title of 'The Great American Novel.'" But this account fails to mention the feverish journal into which the "nineteen-year-old
American boy" in Paris then proceeded to pour his ideas, plans and ambitions for "The Great American Novel."
This
58-page aesthetic manifesto by the artist as a young man is crucial to an understanding of my father.
"WRITE THE GREATEST SINGLE PIECE
OF LITERATURE EVER COMPOSED"
Ross Lockridge,
Jr., Paris--1934
| Right: My Father's PARIS JOURNAL, Spring 1934 |
|
| Left: My attempt at "Transliteration" |
" Plan for Man &
Idea Novel conceived
in its more detailed outlines when I believed I had not long to live=scarcely even to write it.
Objects to be fulfilled Write the greatest single piece of literature ever composed. 2. Use as touch stones and sources of literary inspiration. Les Miserables Madame
Bovary
Proust
Joyce=Ulysses Plays=Shakespeare Israfel [Poe] Anthony
Adverse
The Bible=Life of Christ
Rabelais=for certain parts
Preparatory Studies Psychology=Psychoanalysis Philosophy=All the way back"
[Journal of Ross Lockridge Jr. (aged 19), Spring, 1934--Paris]
Thus page one of the 58-page
journal which Ross Jr., not yet out of his teens, flooded with ideas for the novel that became RAINTREE COUNTY. By page
50 he is writing that "the first object of my return [from Paris to Bloomington] shall be the complete mastery of the
English language . . . to the end that my. . . use of . . .the language be the most brilliant ever known." "The greatest single piece of literature ever composed"--? What about, e.g., The Iliad and Odyssey? Genesis? The Divine Comedy? Hamlet?
Paradise Lost? The Canterbury Tales? Ode to a Nightingale? War and Peace? Middlemarch? Madam Bovary? Great Expectations?
The Brothers K.? Ulysses? The Search for Lost Time? . . . This
grandiosity--the outward mask of defilement, deep grieving, and despair--fueled my father's life's work from beginning to
end and made his collapse all but inevitable. It is not possible to
exaggerate the extent to which my father derived his identity and self-worth from the writing of "the greatest single
piece of literature ever composed," so that when the process ended and he saw the product to be not "that good"
(and how could ANY work of literature be "that good"?), he had nothing left, having bet his life on the turn of
a single card. NOTA BENE: 1)I do not know why, at
19, my father thought that he "had not long to live." 2)Oddly, neither biography of my father demonstrates the slightest
knowledge of this pivotal 58-page document, 3) whose holograph, along with the bulk of my father's manuscript originals
not housed in Indiana University's Lily Library, now moulders--invisible to scholars--in the bowels of a moldy old firetrap
of a house in a dangerous neighborhood. So, I herewith make my copy of Dad's "1934 Paris Journal"
available for DOWNLOAD:
CLICK HERE to Download PARIS JOURNAL, Spring 1934, ROSS LOCKRIDGE, JR.
"THE MIRACLE OF BEING"
|
|
| SAFFRON ROBE, Acrylic on Canvas, 24x36--Ernest Lockridge |
CLICK HERE--Bearing Witness: "GRANDSON OF PALEFACE." "Pity me not, but lend thy serious hearing to what I shall unfold."
DOUBLE WHAMMYThroughout 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 a 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 three sons, 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. "Ernest," she
confided following Grandpa's death, "when your grandfather came courting, my father warned me, 'Elsie, your young man's
bright little eyes reflect a shallow little soul without the slightest trace of poetic feeling." 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.
GRANDIOSITY My
father took grandiosity to its extreme: his was to be “the greatest single work of literature ever composed"
in the “best writing” ever. His ambition had a foundation of sorts, a sandy one, in the unnumbered first-place
finishes of his youth, even including State Championships in typing and shorthand. Because Indiana University no longer
gives out A-Pluses, his grades remain the highest in its history. He receives the top grades in the Sorbonne’s
foreign-exchange program. His M.A. Thesis is the grandiosely titled “BYRON AND NAPOLEON."
Instead of a suicide note he writes an “Ultimate Philosophy”! He crucifies himself at 33.
My
1974 novel PRINCE ELMO'S FIRE shows the dynamics between my father and grandparents:
CLICK HERE to Download PRINCE ELMO'S FIRE
ELSIE SHOCKLEY
Wife of Ross Lockridge Sr., Mother of Ross Lockridge Jr., Disciple of Mary Baker Eddy who preached: "There is no life, truth, intelligence,
nor substance in Matter. Spirit is immortal Truth; Matter is mortal error."
| 1901--Grandma at 21, Before Her Marriage |
|
| I thought Beatrice Cenci was a picture of Grandma as a young woman, until my mother set me straight |
| NEWLYWEDS |
|
| UNCLE SHOCKLEY |
RAMPAGE The day after Grandma's 1961 death, Dad's surviving brother Shockley ripped his way quite literally through Grandma's
trunkful of memorabilia, devoting special attention to his father and mother: note, for instance, the drawing and quartering
of The Honeymooners, above. I seized an opportunity, while "Uncle Shock" was taking a break, to retrieve from the
trunk's damp bottom a couple of rotting packets, Dad's letters home from Paris (1932-3) and Boston (1940-1946), the bulk of
them written to his mother.
In 1919 soon after graduating from Fort Wayne High School, Dad's eldest brother Robert Bruce Lockridge had drowned himself
in St. Joseph's River. He was sixteen. March 7, 1948, the morning I learned my father was dead, my mother sent me off to Indianapolis to stay with Uncle
Shockley while funeral arrangements were underway. A couple of days later driving me back to Bloomington where my becoffined
father lay on display surrounded with gardenias in our living room, Uncle Shockley advised, "Ernest, you may not feel
sad, but by golly you had sure better ACT as though you do!" "THE COMPULSION OF . . . EXPERIENCE" (Suicide note)
In his coffin my father's
hand was cold and hard as dry ice. Food covered our kitchen table. I took a mouthful of pineapple pie, and it made me
sick. I loathe pineapple pie. The stench of gardenias nauseates me. Displaying the wisdom that typified them in all
matters of significance, the elder Lockridges determined it to be in my best interest not to attend my father's funeral.
I spent that day alone wandering the wooded acreage of Murmuring Maples and whittling saplings with a pearl-handled pen-knife
bearing the legend, "WIN THE WAR." Our local hospice provides volunteers with "The Four Tasks of Grief": "1.To accept
reality. 2.To express the pain of grief. 3) To adjust to environment. 4) To reinvest energy." I've done my best,
on my own mostly. But after 63 years I still do "feel sad."
Early spring, 1948, our side yard is thick with crabgrass. Ross Lockridge
Jr.'s widow and children scant weeks after he gassed himself to death. I'm behind my mother. By golly! acting
as if I were sad.
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 fortune by a revered and trusted publisher; returning home to Bloomington to find himself
shunned by the Indiana University English Department where he had achieved the highest undergraduate and graduate-student
grade average (which stands to this day) in the University's history; being bludgeoned with a review by that department's
new Professor of Creative Writing (hired by Dad's ex thesis advisor) second in pure fiendishness only to THE NEW YORKER'S;
bidding farewell to the grand project that had sustained him since his teens, then concluding that RAINTREE COUNTY was not
even very good; enduring the lethal ministrations of his dreadful parents: such stressors triggered the underlying pathology
that fractured my father's sanity, much as influenza had ruptured with fatal results the encapsulated childhood tubercule
that Thomas Wolfe (RAINTREE COUNTY'S chief literary influence) had contracted in his mother's boarding house for tuberculars.
Exhausted, beaten to a pulp, my father lost the strength to keep the monster in its cave. 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 hollowed out. Six decades later RAINTREE COUNTY still possesses
the hypnotic force to drive the 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 SKELETON IN THE CLOSET
 CLOCKWISE
ABOVE FROM TOP LEFT: 1 Family Patriarch Ross Franklin Lockridge Sr.; 2)Grandma and firstborn Bruce; 3)Bruce, ten days before
drowning [the snapshot, which came back from the developer after his death, bears the inscription in Grandma's hand, "Excelsior";
Shockley (L) and Bruce as little boys. Grandma would tell me how on the day before Bruce drowned he had challenged her to see who could hold their breath
longer. Bruce won by minutes, and Grandma told me, "I see my Bruce down there holding out till the last possible
moment!" her eyes widening with wonderment at the sheer coincidence of it all. Meanwhile, the Ectoplasm of Mrs.
Eddy must have been exploding with pride and joy! Grandma did surmise a "material-world," real-life connection between something Dad said on
the afternoon of March 6, 1948, and his suicide that night. "If I'd only known what he meant, I might have changed his
mind," she told me, never revealing what it was that he actually did say. I think it was something Dad said in reference to the Legendary Lockridge Double-Long
Electrolux hose (for asphyxiating the myriad moles of Murmuring Maples) which he was borrowing from the "Old Folks"
the afternoon of March 6--some dark, sardonic jest about why he was transporting it back to our house: "Mother, we find ourselves sharing
our South Stull property with a gigantic mole who's practically begging to be put out of his misery." Something like that. Revealing his last words to her would have meant spilling the
beans about the tangled object Teeter deep-sixed into the back-alley garbage can of Lockridge Family Secrets. Uncle Shockley matriculated into Indiana
University at 15, joined his father's college fraternity (later my father's, and then mine own), and proceeded to drown himself
in alcohol till he was 40 and climbed on the wagon, joined A.A. and maintained sobriety for the lengthy remainder of his life.
Whether it was my father's suicide that jolted him into sobriety I do not know.
Some further words regarding Mrs. Eddy, Grandma's bulwark against her miserable marriage.
If, as Mrs. Eddy teaches us with utter certitude, "there is no life, truth, intelligence, nor substance in Matter";
and if the so-called "real world" of "sin, sickness and death" is merely error and illusion and
therefore essentially "unreal" and non-existent; then it follows that the outrages perpetrated upon Grandma's sons
and their suffering and suicides and drunken self-destruction are mere Phantasm, the "mortal errors" of "Matter"
as opposed to the "immortal truth" of "Spirit." What mother need worry overly much about, or protect
her children against, non-existent horrors? At
Grandma's request, I read SCIENCE AND HEALTH to her on her deathbed. It was like reading a fairy tale to put a child
to sleep.
"LET NO ONE BLAME ANOTHER ONE" (Suicide Note) 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.
 “A PERSON APART” Thus Ross Lockridge Sr., my
grandfather, sums up the French explorer Sieur LaSalle who tramped through the American wilderness on a Quixotic mission to
claim the New World for the King of France. And thus, reflexively, Grandpa also sums
up his vision of himself: “He may be characterized as an impossible dreamer who accomplished no real results, who only
followed wild fancies that brought expense and trouble to others and suffering an tragedy to himself . .
. . ‘Such is the lot of those men whom a mixture of great faults and great virtues lifts
above the common sphere. Their passions betray them into errors . .
. ’ [quoting Charlevoix]. [But in] the softening light of time we begin to see the man
in his true light . . . . He seemed to feel convinced
. . . that he could not act otherwise than the way he did
. . . . [He] had a lofty vision based upon the highest patriotism
and the purest religious motives [and] . . . ,
in all his work he never wavered . . . ,
never relaxed his purpose . . . , never lost his
courage; and never abandoned his religious faith.” Grandpa saw himself to be a man of “dauntless
spirit.” “For the sake of the work that he felt to be his mission [he] was willing to make
any sacrifice. [His] mighty spirit . . .
towered high above all hardships. The utmost that extreme disaster could do was to delay him; it
could not defeat him or cause him to despair . . .
. He was to leave imprinted upon the pages of time the tragic but inspiring record of a glorious
hero attempting the impossible . . . , guided
on . . . by a gleam of hope like a Holy Grail.”
La Salle was assassinated by his tiny band of followers. Grandpa's Holy Grail was to resurrect the Great American Past, installing its Heroes in a
Pantheon within the collective American Psyche. Throughout my childhood Grandpa revealed this Gallery of Secular Saints
to be populated not only with La Salle, George Rogers Clark, Lincoln, Little Turtle, Tonti, Tecumseh--an eclectic panoply
of historic figures--but with fictional figures as well: Robinson Crusoe; Hawkeye (a.k.a. Natty Bumppo and the Deerslayer);
A.C. Doyle's The White Company; Grandpa's favorite of the Silver Screen, Randolph Scott; Black Snake, the hero of Grandpa's
unpublished novel BLACK SNAKE AND WHITE ROSE. To mention a select few. Grandma worshipped her dream-father, John Wesley Shockley, the Perfect
Man, and badgered my father into becoming his avatar. Grandpa worshipped an "impossible dreamer . . . whose great
virtues [lift] him above the common sphere," whose "passions" might "betray [him] into errors," but
who remains a "glorious hero attempting the impossible": i.e., Grandpa HIMSELF, "dauntless spirit" and
seeker of the "Holy Grail," Ross Franklin Lockridge Sr., who badgered my father to embody Him and to bear His noble
flame. Delusions
of grandeur, regressive fantasies, rape of body and mind: the mix-and-match pathologies of my father's dreadful parents corroded
his spirit and plunged him into the Abyss.
"GLORIOUS HERO"
ABOVE: A man "whom a mixture of great faults and great virtues [lifted]
above the common sphere." His "passions [betrayed] him into errors" [e.g., incestuous pedophilia against
his three sons]. "The utmost that extreme disaster [e.g., the suicides of two of his sons] could do was to delay
him; it could not defeat him or cause him to despair. . . . He was to leave imprinted upon the pages of time the tragic
[!] but inspiring record of a glorious hero attempting the impossible." [Ross Lockridge Sr., LA SALLE, World Book Company]
Oh ye who are so inclined, please, by all means, Be Inspired!
MOM
|
| JULY 10, 1937 |
It was sheer serendipity that a
door-to-door photographer photographed my mother in the back yard of her childhood home the day before she married my father
whom she worshipped and adored and who a decade later left her with four little children, but no last will and testament,
or even a note of farewell.
Mom, who typed and retyped the manuscript of RAINTREE COUNTY and consecrated its final page with her tears,
saw her husband dedicate the book to his “noble, etc.” mother for whom he had written it.
Following 16 years of chaste widowhood, Mom also lucked out in her re-marriage, to Dad’s former M.A. thesis-advisor,
whose diabetes he controlled by controlling my mother and who during their years together before his death never got around
to including her in his will.
The
Man Who Wasn't There Dad's friends and acquaintances, those I've
spoken with over the decades since his suicide, agree that he was the most charming, attractive, and utterly secretive person
they ever met. "I never really knew him," they say. Like Richard Cory, he was "a gentleman from
sole to crown, clean favored, and imperially slim . . . And he glittered when he walked. . . We thought he was everything
to make us wish that we were in his place . . . And Richard Cory . . . went home and put a bullet through his head." As Dad writes in his "Ultimate Philosophy,"
"Some lives . . . which seem fortunate become involved in agony." Which brings me back to RAINTREE COUNTY. The family dynamics that gutted the core of my father's identity gutted the core of his
novel. Johnny Shawnessy,"The Hero of Raintree County," takes over the role of "Dreamer or Soul of Humanity"
from his understudy, the nameless protagonist of DREAM OF THE FLESH OF IRON. But neither "Dreamer" becomes
even a marginally realized flesh-and-blood human being. Shawnessy remains an Entity, a compendium of thoughts, feelings,
and--above all--"Dreams," "floating like a vapor on the" novel's thousand-plus closely printed pages.
Action never defines him; nor does what he says or how he says it. He neither rises, nor falls, to the level of
everyone in, say, Dickens, Joyce, Hemingway, O'Connor, Faulkner . . . The more he strives to become the Everyman of
his creation, the more my father becomes The Man Who Wasn't There. This ever-expanding emptiness constitutes RAINTREE
COUNTY's central flaw, and it is fatal.
"THE PROMISE THAT MADE HUMAN LIFE POSSIBLE AND TOLERABLE"
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" (Suicide Note)
| 2nd grade, Wm. McKinley School, Boston--1945 |
|
[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.
Following our father'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 sorrowful, earth-bound South 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--prominent in the mix, an unchecked, stultifying, unilateral sibling rivalry
ginned up with a vicious Oedipal twist--has been poisonous. ["Puck"--a blood-transfusion reservoir for the legions of swollen ticks
Grandma and I often tore from her tormented flesh with needle-nose pliars--had replaced Dad's beloved dog "Skirt"
after she was struck dead by an automobile on High Street which skirted Murmuring Maples to the east.]
Click Here:GROWING UP LOCKRIDGE,Viewed from Outside the Fold
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 mysterious death has spawned a demented loopy little Church--solidly grounded in denial
and delusion--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 like fetishes, 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. A fantasy-world of make-believe is fine and dandy until their disregard of ordinary decency
and truth renders the inmates dangerous.
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. The cult mimics, in lower case, the ANCESTOR WORSHIP underlying all of RAINTREE COUNTY.
SIR
ISAAC NEWTON'S THIRD LAW OF MOTION
"Make way, make way for the Hero of Raintree County! His victory is not in consummations but in quests!" RAINTREE
COUNTY
"Descend with me. This is the dream I dreamed."
THE DREAM OF THE FLESH OF IRON Grandiosity such
as my father's does not arise from a heightened sense of self-worth but from its opposite, a profound sense of degradation
and worthlessness, the knowledge from childhood on that your life is unfit to be lived. "As for the miracle of being,"
Dad writes in his Ultimate Philosophy, "it is, of course, a miracle, but it is not necessarily a good miracle."
And, "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." Grandiosity offers an equal but
opposite reaction to the ongoing destruction of oneself: "If only I achieve the Greatest Goal I can imagine, the Greatest
Single Work Ever Written and in the Greatest Writing since the Human Race emerged from the muck , my Dream, my Holy Grail!--who
dare call me 'worthless'?" Any man or woman drowning in quicksand grasps for the muddy root. It helps to be attractive, brilliant, in good health, to have a mother who nurtures
and encourages you. In place of delivering you from evil, however, the Beautiful One ushers you into her most intimate
confidence and--spoonfeeding her Sacred Pablum--initiates you into a mystical, mythical Secret Society of Two, then furnishes
not merely the map to your Dream-Quest but the the very essence of the Grail to whose pursuit you must devote your life.
This lifeline stays your drowning until you achieve your Dream, or give it your last best try. But your strength gives out, your vision clears--or seems to--and reveals that you
are not only soiled, you are "Evil." Your Grail-Quest has nearly reached its end as you join the throngs of
the Damned, "those who lose their grasp on the stuff of life, who become unble to cope with this world." The root slips from your grasp. And descending forever into "the Dream [you] dreamed" you drown in the Holy Grail of Suicide. Rest in peace.
AN EXORCISM
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,
our veritable Skeleton in the Closet, who unwittingly palmed me the 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:
they could have fobbed me off onto some Freudian. I no longer blame my father for abandoning me to the wolves. Suicidal
depression is like the guy who survives a head-on collision to find the white-hot engine-block flaming in his lap, and he’s
begging the State Trooper to shoot him.
"LINK BY LINK HE IS BOUND TO THE GROWN MAN"
| Dad and Me, May 20, 1939, Murmuring Maples |
|
IF NOT NOW, WHEN?Neither the infirmaties of old age, nor public exposure,
nor the knowledge of other adult family-members of his past offenses, nothing can predictably arrest the pedophile in his
mania to molest children. The sole sign that he no longer poses a clear and present danger is his Death Certificate--assuming
it has not been faked. Which does not mean that we should not keep throwing roadblocks in his slimy path. Those of us who have exposed an adult sexual abuser of children know well the great rewards that befall our act.
Moreover, we have all experienced first-hand how these rewards multiply in direct proportion to our abuser's blood ties, how
our family falls all over itself with gratitude: "Oh, see how your brave act has spared your younger siblings, little
brothers, sisters, cousins, maybe even the children of neighbors and strangers! "Why, can
it be that you've protected and spared little precious US? Oh, Thank you! Do please tell us--how can we ever thank
you enough?" Uh huh. Younger siblings will claim "we were
not abused"; therefore, you are lying. Or delusional. And so on.
Child-molesters share
techniques for using a child suppreptitiously. Lifelong molesters practice sufficient discretion
and self-control to create a modicum of deniability, especially when past crimes are well-known to his wife and daughter:
one sexually abused child in the litter is maliciously "making up things," but two at once might prove more difficult
to dismiss. There's also the matter of individual taste. I think Grandpa, given a choice, preferred his catamites nearer
pre-adolescence than infancy--"less than ten," but not by all that much. I cannot,
however, emphasize this enough: if your younger siblings were indeed spared, it is because of YOUR COURAGE IN "COMING
FORWARD"! For even as children we know intuitively that by coming forward we risk tossing our future into a Nest
of Vipers.
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 one's own survival), marginalization, ridicule, slander, and outright treachery. Bottom-feeders
with no visible dog in the fight attack us. Sadistic thugs admonish us to "turn the other cheek." Those
once "near and dear" all too generously disseminate the lie that we are demented, or deceased. No matter who
we are or how impressive our accomplishments in life, we can expect to be grossly vilified: this is the universal tactic employed
to discredit all adult survivors of childhood sexual abuse. To hell with them! When challenged to swallow the contents of a spitoon and spit out something in your own defense, walk away! If at
all possible.
And remember: WE ARE NOT ALONE! Too often
it is we strangers who are one another's true sisters and brothers. And: THERE
IS NO NECESSITY FOR THE EVIL PERPETRATED UPON US TO UNDO US. To You Child-molesters: YOU WILL
BE EXPOSED. Maybe not until the world's been cleansed of your filthy presence, and in spite of your having outlived
your victims and parceled out your boasting to Facilitating Institutions with their false promise of a hermitically-sealed
vault for your exploits to rot and fester in the dark. The vaults will open, and your souls' stench will foul the nostrils
of humanity. 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 distressing 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 
"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 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). In 1971, Yale's seven
University-wide literary prizes (including the never-before-awarded prize for Satire) were won by his students, with work
written under his supervision. Lockridge 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. He delivered The OSU DEPARTMENT OF ENGLISH FIFTH ANNUAL
EMERITI LECTURE, April 8, 2010. 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. His 2009 painting "THE
FIRE THIS TIME" won FIRST PLACE in The High Road Gallery of Worthington's annual fall exhibit. On July 4, 2010,
his photograph "HOMELESS" won FIRST PLACE in the High Road exhibit, "Double Take, An Uncommon View of Common
Things." Past President of the WORTHINGTON AREA ART LEAGUE (WAAL), he is the proud father of three, stepfather of two,
grandfather of eight.
| HOMELESS, San Francisco, 2009 |
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| Ernest Lockridge, artist |
"Real, actual. Contrasting the ideal . . . with the truths of the
street. Honest photo." Exhibit Judge : Emeritus Professor Tom Hubbard, The Ohio State School of Journalism and
Communications, July 4, 2010
Click Here: CORRESPONDENCE regarding "SHADE OF THE RAINTREE, the Life and Death of ROSS LOCKRIDGE JR.., Author of RAINTREE
COUNTY"
CLICK HERE: PAINTINGS BY ERNEST LOCKRIDGE
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| TIDAL POOL, Acrylic on Canvas, 24x38--Ernest Lockridge |
GET THROUGH IT!
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