Prince Elmo's fire - Hardcover

Lockridge, Ernest

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0812816404 ISBN 13: 9780812816402

Publisher: Stein and Day, 1974

Synopsis

BOOK-OF-THE-MONTH CLUB NEWS-- June, 1974"Prince Elmo Hatcher comes from an ordinary family--ordinary, that is, for the backwoods of Indiana.  Daddy is shiftless, older brother steals to put bread on the table, older sister follows in mamma's footsteps by becoming a whore, and grandpa is a very dirty old man.  Brother and sister leave for a life of vice in the big city.  Grandpa, in a fit of more than usual cantankerousness, shoots a honor student from the local high school and then gets killed trying to bust out of jail.  Mamma is arrested for doing daddy in.  And Prince Elmo, the youngest of this colorful backwoods clan, is left alone.  But not friendless.  Prince Elmo has been drawing pictures for as long as he can remember.  And, thanks to a local art collector (who was one of his sister's customers), he studies art at the university and becomes an overnight sensation, the darling of the art crowd--until his local draft board catches up with him.  He is sent to Vietnam, where he barely escapes the far-from-tender clutches of a fearsome female Vietcong guerilla leader, moves on to Paris for a bittersweet sojourn with the girl who might have been, and finally returns home again to Indiana a wealthy and perhaps wiser man." ******************************************************"A fulminating exposition of the shriving of contemporary man -- from the cave to today's cultular carnage . . . . It all begins with the childhood acre of Prince Elmo, product of a family of neanderthals . . . . There's Grandpa and his memories of French whores, loony Grandma, Daddy Dick who runs out and down, brother Duke headed for this world's goods, sister Cissie, hot as steamed squash, and mother Helen, impregnated by Prince Elmo . . . . Elmo is sent to a foster family of decadent intellectuals and is on his way to fame in the art world via his pulsating nudes. From then on it's a montage of corpses -- at home and abroad in Vietnam -- and Elmo, at the close a billionaire recluse, has his final cleansing vision." Kirkus Service**************************************************** "A big book, rich in themes, rich in diversity, rich in fidelity to the thoroughly American grain from which it was hewn.  The people in it speak an earthy tongue. . . . At their best they are a tribute to Ernest Lockridge's ability to capture them in the act of talking, in the fullest sense, naturally.  This is the story of Prince Elmo Hatcher, backwoods baby, student, stud, sculptor and soldier. Hungry for life, he first has it shoved at him, begins to shove back and finds out that one man alone can't shove enough.  He strikes out on an adventurous and gutsy search for something which, unluckily for him, always seems to elude definition..  He begins by reaching out, but ends by overreaching, unconscious of the function of boundaries to protect as well as restrain.  His success is laced with disappointment.  That disappointment is shared by other people, such as his foster mother: 'Sometimes I wish I could beak loose from some of the old hidebound patterns that make me feel so cramped, and take off into a clear blue sky.' His epic fornications recall his freewheeling hill-country roots.  He becomes a commercially successful artist, goes to war in Vietnam, becomes a hero, then turns into a wealthy eccentric. Lockridge assigns him the problem of getting in touch with the uncivilized and authentic roots of life, of learning to bevel satisfaction and achievement.  But the book's subject isn't really the picaresque adventures of Prince Elmo Hatcher.  The subject is the contemporary line between the ludicrous, which is funny, and the surreal, which is frightening. A good book."  Michael Edgerton, SUN TIMES SHOWCASE

About this title

From the Author:

"As Elmo tramps through the miasma of uncertain direction and undecided parentage the reader is dragged with him through the gore and squalor of an often vulgar existence where ignorance and innocence are twins.  [Elmo] runs the gamut of experiences in love, becoming a famous artist, being a soldier and inheriting, and dissipating, immense material wealth.  And that's only the surface of things and changes.  One feels an unsettling sense of catharsis welling just below the type. Lockridge's vivid imagination gives the story energy while his finely paced, blunt style makes it compelling reading.  One would cry for a sequel, but then what more could possibly happen that wouldn't be a step backward?  It's good reading, but not for the tender reader." Cecil Richmond, Indianapolis Star                                    ..................................................       I want to catch up with the animals that filled the Pickwick basement. Their coats were light gray and softer than goosedown; a darker stripe covered their spine to the tail's tip. Our slightest breath could part the fur, baring the gray hide. Adult chinchillas grew to the size of squirrels or medium large rats. They remained wild in their cages, and hostile. When one of us filled their feedbox with pellets-processed from fruits,seeds, herbs, and moss-they scurried with amazing rapidity around the wire. Agile as giant spiders, they whirled three hundred sixty degrees up the side, across the top, until we finally slammed the gate shut. These rodents, royal chinchillas,were native to the foothills of Chile and Peru. Inca gourmets once prized their meat. Each pair occupied a separate cage as more or less permanent mates. Interbreeding damaged the stock, and the Breeders'Association required that careful pedigrees be kept. But occasionally things went haywire. Three afternoons a week, Mr.Pickwick, Billy and I descended together into the basement to clean cages. "Valedictorian of my college class!" Mr. Pickwick chortled. "Now look at me!" Cages would stand open while we scooped out soggy, reeking newspaper and straw and stuffed it into cardboard banana boxes to haul outside and burn in the backyard incinerator.  We thrust arms amidst. the whirling chaos of small animals, and over the months received painful bites from incisors like those of a small beaver. Once, as if by diabolic plan, six animals suddenly whirred through the door, then rebounding off our bodies scurried lightly into the basement. They whizzed over the ceiling as if it were floor, snicked our fingers when we lunged and jumped. After a couple of hours, we finally captured them in nervous, bleeding hands. And hastily caged together two males, two females. and a female with a male not her former mate. The paired males became lovers-though at first we thought they were male and female breeding. The paired females squeaked and spat at each other, then settled to glowering from separate corners of the cage, a temporary lovers' quarrel, we said. We did not discover the error until the female chewed her interloping male almost to death, a thousand-dollar pelt half ground into raw meat. We tried, nevertheless, to save him for breeding stock, and during several weeks caged with his true mate, he seemed to recover, even thrive. Then for no reason we knew,he fell dead. To make sure each rodent stayed where it belonged, Mr.Pickwick bought a pliers-like device which punched serial numbers into the delicate ear; this caused no problem, since ears were amputated from pelts before they were stitched into wraps.But we had further difficulties. The mated pairs sometimes ate their newborn young. There was no predicting when they might crave such a meal. Once a male killed his mate; by the time we found out, he had already eaten her top half. Mrs. Pickwick refused to help feed or clean up, and soon refused even to enter the basement. "They're repulsive! I can't stand to look at them!" But I could. And sometimes, alone, at night when I couldn't sleep, I'd walk down, snap on the light, wake them, and peacefully brood upon the silent spinning chaos of fur.It was here one midnight while the Pickwicks slept that I noticed, sticking through the newsprint inside one cage, a crumpled wad of typing paper. I fished it out and straightened it.Stained with urine and dung, it appeared to be two ripped-apart, unrelated fragments of Mr. Pickwick's manuscript.  I read:    . . . knelt and rested my forehead against the pew in front.From the center of her rose-window above the altar, the Virgin smiled sadly down upon me. My brain throbbed . . .   I tore loose the brassiere and pushed my face between her huge, firm breasts. With wild, animal impulse, she grabbed a fistful of my hair and bored a hard, hungry thumb of nipple against my tongue. "Loverman!" she cried. "Ram me with your big, hot cock!"After more than a year passed and the rodents had multiplied and, along with them, problems, Mr, Pickwick complained while we cleaned cages, "I don't understand these beasts. I can't control them."           from Prnce Elmo's Fire*************************************************                            from COSMOPOLITAN MAGAZINE:"Literary merit aside, PRINCE ELMO'S FIRE, by Ernest Lockridge, is sure to cause a stir: the writer's father was Ross Lockridge, Jr., author of the marvelous RAINTREE COUNTY who killed himself at the very moment of success, leaving a wife and four children, the oldest of whom, Ernest, was nine.  Apprehension: will son unconsciously imitate father, will his work be any good?  Well, though both have mined the same territory--their native rural Indiana--Ernest's mid-century vision is so dramatically different from his father's golden turn-of-the-century dream that similarity simply doesn't exist . . . until the end.  What's more, this new novel by Lockridge fils standson its own literary merit.  A rednecked black comedy, ELMO wakes up screaming, on its feet, in a startling first chapter of backwoods mayhem.  From there, the author hurtles his "incestuous, glandular, ignorant, depraved" hero, a painter, on a randy, picaresque rise from tobacco-road origins to jet-set fame unlike any I've seen in current fiction.  Indeed, the book would be a wonder if the obligatory violence--murders, suicide, mutilation, torture--did not get so disagreeably out of hand.  Of his talent, the painter notes, 'It scurried out like a wild rat which had been hiding all along in some dark corner of its cage.'  Just so, there seems a wild beast loose in Lockridge county, one badly in need of caging.  How this finally happens makes for a beautiful closing sequence that links the hero to his heritage and, in a curious fashion, the author to his."  Mary Ellin Barrett, "COSMO Reads the Books," March 1974.  (The Reviewer is the daughter of IRVING BERLIN)

From the Inside Flap:

In this giant of a novel, Ernest Lockridge has created one of the most unforgettable characters in modern fiction: Prince Elmo Hatcher Prince Elmo is the youngest member of a tough backwoods clan; coarse-talking, uncouth, uncivilized.  When the fat Welfare Woman opens the door of the one-room shack that houses the Hatcher family, she is red with outrage.  But in the backwoods of Indiana things just seem to happen naturally, and Prince Elmo doesn't realize that his relationships with his mother--and his sister--are anything out of the ordinary.  When his father is called up for the war, Prince Elmo and his brother shoplift to keep from starving; his mother turns to the breadman for consolation; and the lovely young Cerulia sells the only thing she has to offer.   Into Elmo's childhood bursts a whirlwind of events that sends his mother to prison, his grandfather to his death, his brother and sister to a life of vice far away.  Prince Elmo finds himself alone, with nothing to count on  but the crazy pictures he has been drawing since childhood.  His primitive talent takes him into the university, then to his first exhibit in Boston and unwanted fame; from the neon glare of New York to the jungles of Southeast Asia; from Paris, and the woman who might have shared his life, home again to his backwoods shack to face the shadows of the people he has loved. Passionate, touching, earthy, funny, the story of Prince Elmo Hatcher is destined for a place among the most memorable American novels.

About this edition

• Publisher: Stein and Day
• Publication date: 1974
• ISBN 10: 0812816404
• ISBN 13: 9780812816402
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 346