A Pilgrim’s Digression

I can’t remember when I first became fascinated by the story of the American author Ross Lockridge, Jr. Perhaps a professor told me about him, long ago; or perhaps I read about him in the biography of another writer. My problem is that many of the titles and authors of books I read years ago are slipping away from me as I age.

At first, as I sat here preparing to write a little about this man whose life and suicide has always haunted me, I thought that perhaps I had read about him in a book titled The Thirsty Muse: Alcohol and the American Writer, yet it occurs to me that this is probably not the case, since Lockridge himself was famously abstemious.

Who knows, at this point. I write at length about my own faulty recall only to point out the fragility of human memory. There have been times over the years since Lockridge’s death when even the memory of him has been on the verge of dying, except amongst his close family members. His one novel was out of print for many years, and if it was recalled at all as an artifact of American culture, it was remembered not as a novel but as a rather rotten film starring the young Elizabeth Taylor and Monty Clift.

Rather ironically, I have not yet read Lockridge’s novel, Raintree County. I may never read it, since it is a bit lengthy for my much-shortened attention span. But I have read quite a bit about Lockridge. Most recently Lockridge was recalled to mind when a writer at work mentioned that I might like to read a book by John Leggett, Ross and Tom: Two American Tragedies, a rather novelistic biography of two American writers, Ross Lockridge, Jr., and Tom Heggen. I checked the book out of the library and began reading it; so far, I am still on the Ross Lockridge portion of the book, but I am already looking ahead to the next book.

Because of a certain dissatisfaction with Leggett’s writing, I am planning on reading a biography of Lockridge by the writer’s youngest son, Larry Lockridge, Shades of the Raintree. Larry Lockridge is an English professor at NYU, and he apparently inherited his father’s taste for the Romantic poets; and from what I have read of the biography, he uses many previously undiscovered primary sources for his book, including his father’s suicide note (which he did not even know existed until he began researching his book in the late ’80’s). It should make up for the deficiencies of Leggett’s biography, deficiencies which admittedly could have been caused by lack of access to correspondence and other primary source material (Ross and Tom was published in 1975; Shades of the Raintree was published in 1996).

I am almost loathe to admit it, but I have a morbid fascination with suicides. It is the promise of details about the suicide that attracts me to the younger Lockridge’s biography. I want to know not only why Lockridge committed suicide, but how. I want all the details and am hoping for a lengthy chapter in the biography on the day of the suicide alone. If I could read the autopsy report, I would eagerly do so. These details fascinate me, much as when I read Carlos Baker’s biography of Hemingway I was unable to restrain myself from skipping to the end in order to read about what the shotgun blast did to the man’s head.

There is nothing so lurid about Lockridge’s death. In fact, it is the homely details of his dying that fascinate me. He went out to his garage, telling his wife he was going for a drive, but instead hooking a vacuum cleaner hose to his exhaust pipe and running it into the window of the vehicle. He sat down in the back seat and quietly asphyxiated.

All the accounts of his suicide mention that the car he died in was a brand new Kaiser sedan. Why the detail that it was “new” fascinates, I don’t know, except that the whole story of Lockridge’s death is one of how a man who had achieved the pinnacle of literary triumph took his own life. Another detail that tingles in the mind: his novel had reached the top of the New York Times bestseller list just a few days prior to Lockridge taking his life.

And then there is the detail of the vacuum cleaner hose. Almost hygienic, isn’t it? Yet how else would a faithful family man, who often would sing while washing the dishes, kill himself? Unlike Hemingway, there would be no bits of brain, flesh, and teeth for his wife to clean off the walls.

Besides the “how,” though, I did mention that I am interested in the “why.” Larry Lockridge’s biography promises at least the beginning of an answer there, too. Lockridge takes the conventional nostrum of the writer tainted by success with a grain of salt, and instead applies a more synthetic approach, tying in modern theory on the causes of depression to external factors such as his father’s upbringing and genetic inheritance.

The Lockridge family maintains a web page dedicated to their father and his work, Raintree County. It’s a fabulous resource for anyone interested in the life and work of the man. I don’t mean to overemphasize his death, simply because I have a morbid personality. His novel really is worthy of remembrance through reading, and one of these days I do hope to get around to reading it, rather than simply reading about the author.