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1. Click Here: SKELETON KEY to THE SUICIDE of my FATHER ROSS LOCKRIDGE Jr.AUTHOR of RAINTREE COUNTY
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 rated number one in the world. 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 selected by Book-of-the-Month Club. His TWENTIETH-CENTURY INTERPRETATIONS OF THE GREAT GATSBY went through twenty printings, remained in print for a quarter-century and continues to sell briskly over the Internet. 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 The Ohio State University, Ernest Lockridge is a jazz musician and painter of award-winning paintings. He is past President of the WORTHINGTON AREA ART LEAGUE (WAAL).
"ALL TRUTH PASSES THROUGH THREE STAGES. FIRST,
IT IS RIDICULED. SECOND, IT IS VIOLENTLY OPPOSED. THIRD, IT IS ACCEPTED AS BEING SELF-EVIDENT." (Schopenhauer)
Assistant Professor of English, Yale University, July 14, 1966 "One last thing . . . I probably should have put it into my last letter to you, but it felt like pissing into a wind, and I was tired, sick and tired of the whole subject. But, anyway, (briefly) here goes, mainly because it's still in my head and I want to get rid of it. "I think your ms. lays out the central pattern of the relationship between RFL Jr. and Sr., but without . . . sufficient weight or emphasis . . . [which] lies in the struggle that perisisted throughout Dad's life to create . . . an identity separate from the man whose name he bore and who . . . tried from childhood on to obliterate him--making him his amanuensis, his ghost-writer, all-round employee, Junior, the person slated . . . to take over and thus be ultimately subsumed by Senior's life. RFL Sr. relentlessly 'dogged' Dad . . . to subordinate himself to those endless 'projects,' etc. Dad objected strenuously . . . to the British edition of [RAINTREE COUNTY's] appearing without the 'Jr.' . . . RFL Sr. . . . felt and acted as though he OWNED his namesake, and Dad had this to struggle against. It's in your narrative, but buried, or off to one side, in the shadows. At times it seems that you exert your greatest ingenuity in order to dismiss any serious dark side to this father-son dance of wills (to de-Leggett the story? to douse in advance any possible ember of what you know I think?). However ineffectual and diminished the father may be as [an actual] person, he remains in some living part of the son's mind a giant. It requires no sexual dimension to help understand how, in the end, giving himself over to the 'smotherer' might contribute to the feelings of entrapment, powerlesness, worthlessness, and loss of self that lie at the base of Dad's suicidal depression." Ernest Lockridge (November 13, 1992) GROWING UP LOCKRIDGE IN BLOOMINGTON Why did my brilliant father Ross Lockridge Jr. murder himself at 33, with RAINTREE COUNTY number one on The New York Times bestseller list? This incalculable loss to literature bodies forth a unique murder-mystery that for decades has extruded a slow crawl of bromides and brainless cliches: Dad was "worn out," "couldn't begin a second novel," was destroyed by "the bitch-goddess Success," was mangled to morsels by his greedy publisher, was insufficiently loved by his mother. The two biographies of Dad--an envy-driven hatchet-job with kid gloves, and a tedious and mean-spirited shaggy-dog story--proffer "answers" worthy of Doctor Watson and Colonel Hastings; the Freudian quackery of both biographies is quintessential Sid Caesar. Here and now, however, "Grandson of Paleface"--my act of Witness--provides the skeleton key that unlocks the Riddle of Raintree County.
4. Click Here: DARTMOUTH PROFESSOR JAMES M. COX's Letter re. TRAVELS WITH ERNEST 5. Click Here: TRAVELS WITH ERNEST
7. CLICK HERE: ABRIDGED VERSION, "AN OPTICAL ILLUSION CALLED THE GREAT GATSBY" This essay demonstrates in concrete, precise detail
what Fitzgerald meant when he wrote that GATSBY, which "nobody understood" at the time, "IS A NEW THINKING-OUT
OF THE IDEA OF ILLUSION." Fitzgerald, himself, prefigures GATSBY's magicianship in THE BEAUTIFUL
AND DAMNED (1922), when a character fabulates an previous embodiment of irony gone awry: "the failure
of . . . some sceptics [who] said to one another: 'Let's . . . make a great book that will last forever to mock the credulity
of man. Let's persuade our more erotic poets to write about the delights of the flesh, and induce some of our robust
journalists to contribute stories of famous amours. We'll include all the most preposterous old wives' tales now current.
We'll choose the keenest satirist alive to compile a deity from all the deities worshipped by mankind, a deity who will be
more magnificent than any of them, and yet so weakly human that he'll become a byword for laughter the world over . . . so
that the people will read our book and . . . there'll be no more nonsense . . . Finally, let us take care that the book
possesses all the virtues of style, so that it may last forever as a witness to our profound scepticism and our universal
irony . . .' But the book lived always, so beautifully had it been written . . . They had neglected to give it
a name, but after they were dead it became known as the Bible." The Ohio State University Distinguished University
Research Professor James Phelan calls my GATSBY essay "a wonderful . . . tour de force."
"The glory that moves everything penetrates the universe
in one part more and in another less." Paradiso
8. Click Here: PAINTINGS BY ERNEST LOCKRIDGE 9. Click Here: "Liz James ArtScene" review of Ernest Lockridge's solo exhibit, "Winter Dreams" 10. Click Here: "'PRIMITIVE EMOTIONS':A Tragedy of Revenge Called THE SUN ALSO RISES" "In this incendiary selection, Ernest Lockridge blasts
both Jake and Brett as manipulative connivers who deserve to be punished. Lockridge argues that other critics who claim
that Jake's 'selling' of Romero to Brett as an act of love have missed the point. It is Jake's hatred for Robert Cohn--for
being a Jew--that is responsible. Jake is acting out of revenge, even at his own expense. This is illustrated
by the contempt he shows for Cohn; Jake considers Brett's other conquests just loveblind victims like himself. Ernest
Lockridge is professor emeritus of Ohio State University and the author and editor of numerous essays and novels, including
HARTSPRING BLOWS HIS MIND and PRINCE ELMO'S FIRE." Introduction to "The Primitive Emotion that Drives Jake
Barnes," reprint of my essay in the Literary Companion Series, essays on THE SUN ALSO RISES (Greenhaven Press, 2002),
p. 79.
11. Click Here: "OTHELLO as a Key to Hemingway," THE HEMINGWAY REVIEW, 18 (Fall 1998): 68-77. "With OTHELLO, a presence in Hemingway's writing throughout his career, Hemingway provides a key to unlock the subtexts of THE SUN ALSO RISES, A FAREWELL TO ARMS, and GREEN HILLS OF AFRICA, allowing us to view the seven-eighths of the iceberg lying beneath the surface omissions and obfuscations of his narrators. The anti-Semitic narrator of THE SUN ALSO RISES is the Hemingway version of 'honest Iago.' The narrator of A FAREWELL TO ARMS lives out Othello's fond desire to linger in a fool's paradise, sleeping the 'sweet sleep' of not knowing that he has been betrayed. The perverse braggert who narrates GREEN HILLS OF AFRICA is an Othello who deliberately pursues the horns of the cuckold." "Abstracts," THE HEMINGWAY REVIEW (Fall 1998)
In A MOVEABLE FEAST Hemingway
writes, "Well, now I have them so they do not understand them. There cannot be much doubt about that . . .
But they will understand the same way that they always do in painting. It only takes time and it only needs confidence."
13. Click Here: from HARTSPRING BLOWS HIS MIND, New American Library and Signet Books, 1968. "Nothing quite so outrageous has before come out of an
academic community to my knowledge. It's daring and funny, and sometimes, way down, sad." Mark Schorer "I made the book jolly, and like many jolly books it was written in an agony of suffering." Paul
Theroux
"G.P Putnam's Sons Jimmy Miller" 14. Click Here: Jimmy Miller's letter to Ernest Lockridge
15. Click Here: from PRINCE ELMO'S FIRE, Stein & Day, Cardinal Books, Book-of-the-Month Club, 1974. "I won't be able to make much sense right now--and why?
I feel all beaten up, crawling out of one of Prince Elmo's brawls, picking broken teeth and bones and whatnot out of myself.
For the time being I can't even speak the language: I was trying to say something perfectly pleasant about dinner tonight
and out fell this horrible toad of a cliche--as you now have made me aware--something as harmless as, "Dear, these
plums are really succulent!" See what I mean?
"I'm certain that many people are going to think, as I do, that this is an extraordinary novel. I'll have to write you later in a more composed way, but for the time being I can only tell you that no piece of fiction has had me reading with such constant attention for years, if ever. Your inventiveness is inexhaustible. "Maybe it's a great book. Or maybe you've just so undone me by it that I'd like to think that I was in on the making of a great book. Anyway, I'm undone." Mark Schorer, letter to the author, July 12, 1971 16. Click Here: MARK SCHORER'S LETTER to Ernest Lockridge
17. Click Here:FLYING ELBOWS, Stein & Day (New York), 1975.
"The book seems artless, so skillfully is it crafted . . . The picaresque plot burns with Lockrige's brilliant language and break-neck pacing. Crazy scenes as real as newspaper stories tumble together so fast that the book seems life distilled into laughter . . . Since this is a family newspaper, we will not quote, but recommend you read FLYING ELBOWS for yourself." Pittsburgh Press, Sept. 28, 1975 18. Click Here: James Joyce, ULYSSES, and "The Mustard Gas of Theory"
19. Click Here: "GRAVITY'S RAINBOW" a HOAX 20. Click Here: ERNEST GOES TO YALE "The Yale Department of English, back when I was there,
judged Faulkner to be little more than a dumb uncultured rube. You can imagine what they thought of poor old Scott Fitzgerald,
if he was even on the radar! And that 'simpleton' Hemingway? Not to mention Dad, notoriously well-known Bloomington
Indiana novelist and suicide, universally familiar around the environs of Indiana University whilst I was a student during
the late fifties, but nowhere--a cipher--not a morsel of his big fat book anywhere upon the immaculate landscape of Yale."
I knocked off "A Vision of the Sentimental Absurd: Sterne and Camus" (SEWANEE REVIEW 72 [1964], pp. 652-667) in April, 1962, for "Studies in Eighteenth-Century English Literature," a Yale graduate seminar taught by the sublimely great Professor of English Martin Price, who "marked" my paper thus: "Brilliant." Back in the day, things didn't get any better than that; maybe they never do. So I mailed it off to THE SEWANEE REVIEW, my Holy Grail for lit-crit. Andrew Lytle's acceptance letter (q.v.) arrived mere days after Martin's seminar ended. Writing the paper had actually gobbled up the lion's share of an entire afternoon, minus a recess I took around 3 to donate a pint to the Red Cross, following which--returning from Harkness to my dingy 3rd-floor Chapel Street apartment directly opposite the YMCA --I interspersed writing-bouts with dangling my head over the bedside till my child's brain felt sufficiently replenished with blood (and Great Notions) to soldier on to the end. TRISTRAM SHANDY'S been bumped from the latest 100-Greatest-Novels-List--to make way for the likes of . . . scan the list and weep. 22. Click Here: ANDREW LYTLE, letter to Ernest Lockridge, May 21, 1962 On October 10, 1967, Robert Mony, one of my terrific Prentice-Hall
editors, wrote, "Please don't touch a word of your splendid introduction," which I'd knocked out when
absolutely no literary critic---especially me--"had even the slightest idea what THE GREAT GATSBY was all about."
This was Fitzgerald's complaint in 1925, and it was just as true in 1967. Although my book contains not a single word
of basic Truth by anyone besides Fitzgerald, himself, it has sold many more copies than GATSBY ever sold during Fitzgerald's
lifetime. This sort of thing is, of course--and ever shall be--Commonplace. On the bright side,
my "Introduction" afforded the simply marvelous opportunity to show off some recent reading, though
as I was all of 27, all of my reading was "recent" --and raw, and undigested. Fitzgerald did not write
to be understood by children, and all of the critical essays in my volume seem to have been written by children.
Professor Maynard Mack of Yale--to my mind one of the most brilliant and generous human beings ever to grace
Earth--gave me my chance to edit this volume in the TWENTIETH-CENTURY INTERPRETATIONS SERIES he was inaugurating
with Prentice-Hall. And did I, then, truly appreciate his Act of Grace? No.
24. Click Here: Letter, LIFE MAGAZINE, Feb. 9, 1959: "Idealists" Castro and Robbespierre 25. Click Here: A VISION OF ART: HENRY JAMES'S THE TRAGIC MUSE |
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