Conrad Richter’s America 9783111370705, 9783111013756

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S T U D I E S IN A M E R I C A N L I T E R A T U R E Volume XXIX

CONRAD RICHTER'S AMERICA

h

MARVIN J. LAHOOD Salem State College

1975 MOUTON T H E H A G U E • PARIS

© Copyright 1975 in The Netherlands Mouton & Co. N.V., Publishers, The Hague No part of this book may be translated or reproduced in any form by print, photoprint, microfilm, or any other means, without written permission from the publishers

LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOG CARD NUMBER: 74-79523

Printed in The Netherlands, by Mouton, The Hague

For My Wife Marjorie color her gold

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Many people have helped me, and therefore this book, during the years since I began working on it, and before. These are a few: at Boston College, Michael P. Walsh, S.J.; at The University of Notre Dame, Paul E. Beichner, C.S.C., and John Edward Hardy; at Niagara University, Joseph M. Cahill, C.M.; at State University College at Buffalo, Fraser B. Drew, Paul V. Hale, and Howard G. Sengbusch; also Aleksis Rubulis. Several people at each of these libraries: Grosvenor in Buffalo, the University of Notre Dame Library, Lockwood Memorial Library at the State University of New York at Buffalo, Firestone Memorial Library at Princeton University, the Library at the State University College at Buffalo, and Canisius College Library. The Research Foundation of the State University of New York whose Faculty Research Fellowships for the summers of 1967 and 1968 enabled me to work on this book. My Mother, Anna LaHood, my wife's parents, Francis and Margaret Braun, and our families. Most particularly, the late Mr. and Mrs. Conrad Richter.

CONTENTS

Acknowledgments

7

Introduction

11

1. Stories: 1913-1936

14

2. Three Novels of the Southwest The Sea of Grass Tacey Cromwell The Lady

1937 1942 1957

37 44 51

Ohio Trilogy Trees Fields Town

1940 1946 1950

59 67 71

4. Four Pennsylvania Novels The Free M a n Always Young and Fair The Grandfathers The Aristocrat

1943 1947 1964 1968

81 84 90 92

5. The Indian Novels The Light in the Forest A Country of Strangers

1953 1966

94 105

6. The Pennsylvania Trilogy The Waters of Kronos A Simple Honorable Man

1960 1962

107 113

3. The The The The

10

CONTENTS

7. Literary Affiliations

116

Appendix: Richter's Richter

130

Bibliography

137

Index

140

INTRODUCTION

Conrad Richter's life (13 October 1890 to 30 October 1968) spanned an era of overwhelming change in American life. In his youth he heard stories of frontier conditions from authentic pioneers, when he died N.A.S.A. was preparing to put a man on the moon. Richter was a productive writer all of his life: during his last decade he published novels in 1960, 1962, 1964, 1966, and 1968. He won the Pulitzer Prize at 60 and the National Book Award at 70. I saw him for the last time shortly before he died at 78 and he was as bright and vigorous as ever. Conrad Richter was a humane, gentle, warm intellectual, a good person, and a dedicated artist. By thinking out in his work how the pioneers developed into a breed of heroically proportioned men and women, he hoped to devise a life style for modern man to make him strong and selfless. Like his favorite author, Willa Cather, he mourned the passing of the frontier precisely because he, like her, saw it as a challenge that produced a race of giants. Neither ever found a new frontier to similarly invigorate and ennoble modern man. It is hard to tell what makes a man dedicate a lifetime to writing. I n Richter's case it was clearly not fame; he shied away from the acclaim that came to him during his career. He "earned a living" writing, but did not desire to become rich doing so. I began to write to him in 1961 and saw him for the first time in 1963. The impressions I had of him through his writing began to broaden and deepen. He was, I think, bemused by my years of interest in his work. He always implied that it wasn't worth that kind of dedicated study. And yet, as I remember him, no other reaction would have been right for him. He always acted as if his forty-five years of dedication to the craft of fiction and to the careful research and

12

INTRODUCTION

presentation of the American pioneer were somehow unworthy of any great concern. Fame and fortune were obviously not his motivation. He lived in relative obscurity in the nineteen-sixties, summering in his native village of Pine Grove, Pennsylvania, and wintering in Bradenton, Florida. He worked tirelessly, however, writing two of his most ambitious novels, The Waters of Kronos (1960) and A Simple Honorable Man (1962), and his poignant sequel to The Light in the Forest (1953), A Country of Strangers (1966). He wanted very much to tell clearly how it had been; he also hoped, I believe, that his readers would take heart in their struggle with more complex modern problems by seeing how ordinary men and women had overcome the seemingly insurmountable obstacles of the frontier. Conrad Richter's America has all but vanished. Even the virtues it preached and sometimes adhered to are disappearing from the language. Thrift, hard work, perseverance, manliness, courage, honesty, and even integrity, are concepts only the loving historian of our past is likely to come across. We have lived to see a new world, chaotic and uncertain, in which the concepts of virtue and vice have no currency because there can be no agreement on their definition. Conrad Richter suffered from no such paralysis of judgment. I n his philosophy a man grew in proportion to the hardships he faced, and how he faced them. That philosophy, he believed, had made this nation great. What he would have predicted about our destiny when that creed fell into disrepute can only be guessed at. What may be our country's middle-aged muddle must be depicted by others. Conrad Richter's work shines with the glory of a nation in its vigorous youth. In the following study of Richter's work I have begun where he began, with a quarter of a century of short stories. I have included those that eventually were collected in two volumes, and a few other important ones. Picking up Richter's basic themes from these stories I have followed these themes through all of his novels in five categories, progressing chronologically through each category. I have not treated his non-fiction (a few essays and The Mountain on

INTRODUCTION

13

The Desert, 1955) because I can see little real connection between its theories and his fiction. Chapter seven (7) is an attempt to show Richter's relationship to other Twentieth Century American authors whose style and content are similar to his.

1. S T O R I E S : 1913-1936

In 1924 Hinds, Hayden and Eldridge published a book of short stories by Conrad Richter. According to the "Foreword by the Publishers", Brothers of No Kin and Other Stories is a collection of "the most noteworthy of Conrad Richter's work in standard magazines". 1 It contained twelve of Richter's stories written between 1914 and 1922. Two of the stories were written to entertain readers of the popular magazines in which they appeared, two deal with the problem of appearance and reality, two feature a heroine who will develop into the great Richter heroine of the novels, and one is a crucial story in establishing the Richter canon: it is about people who don't appreciate their good life because it came to them too easily. The remaining four stories are the core of the book, for they incorporate a theme that is always present in the novels: hard work and pioneer-like steadfastness invariably result in success. Three of the short stories had appeared earlier in periodicals under different titles. I n a letter Richter said of the early stories that "some of these, indeed a great many of them, were written to support my small family, sometimes in desperate situations, and for what possible markets existed". 2 The four central stories of this collection, while merely " p o p u l a r " stories, contain a doctrine Richter developed throughout his writing career. It is not carefully worked out here, but is part of the world view that is evident in all his writing. Three of these stories were published in 1920 along with one on the same theme that was 1 2

Conrad Richter, Brothers of No Kin and Other Stories ( N e w York, 1924), p. vii. Conrad Richter to Marvin LaHood, J u l y 5, 1961.

S T O R I E S : 1913-1936

15

not collected and that will be treated here; the fifth story was published in February of 1921. T h e first to be published was "Tempered Copper", which appeared in People's Magazine in February of 1920. Rife Copperwait is untempered "copper" as the story begins. His temper makes him unemployable in his uncle's lumber company. Rife secures a j o b in Crowfoot Valley with a logging firm and after just three months of hard work he becomes a man, finds a heroine, and is given a high position in his uncle's lumber company. I n the next four stories the circumstances that lead the hero to rugged country and hard work, as well as the people he helps, change, but the theme remains the same. It is the theme with which he ends his major novel, The Town, published in 1950, and for which he won the Pulitzer Prize. T h e second story, the uncollected one, appeared in Everybody's Magazine in March of 1920. "Cabbages and Shoes" tells the story of Robert Murray, the son of a perfectionist farmer who is going blind. H e too, after quitting an easy j o b and tackling the more arduous task of putting his father's farm in order, is rewarded with a new strength of character and business success. In April of 1920, the third story on this theme was published in American Magazine. " T h e Making of Val Pierce" (it was called "Forest M o u l d " in the collection), according to the caption under the title in the magazine, is " a story of the bitter experience of a rich man's son". It opens with playboy Val holding down an easy job in his father's table company. Val Pierce is the first of the Richter characters who do not appreciate or enjoy what they have because they haven't worked for it. By the end of the story Val has matured, through hardship, and is ready to live like a man. The fourth story, " T h e M a n W h o Hid Himself", titled "Suicide" in the collection, first appeared in the July, 1920, issue of American Magazine. Like the previous stories it has a hero who finds his easy life changed to a difficult one. Again the hero, Newton, through his encounter with adversity, changes from a careless playboy into a solid citizen, and ends u p with a fine position and a suitable heroine. T h e fifth story appeared in American Magazine in February, 1921, as "You're Too Contwisted Satisfied-Jim T e d ! " It is titled "Bad Luck is Good Luck" in the collection. Once again the hero,

16

STORIES: 1913-1936

J i m Benton, changes from a complacent, easy-going boy to a hardworking m a n through a successful encounter with a difficult situation. T h e philosophy behind the five stories is given in "Bad Luck is Good Luck": There are few greater stimuli to action than agony. Agony accomplishes either miracles or murder, rolls away mountains or commits suicide. It is the divine rheostat at which the mortal battery is charged with storage power to feed the divine spark to the human cylinders. 3

I n the terms of Richter's metaphor, the "agony" of hard work has rolled away mountains and charged the mortal battery of these five heroes. Richter really believed that only through agony could come ecstasy. Within six years after these stories appeared he completed three works on the subject of "bio-energics", as he called it. I n 1955 he published a long book, The Mountain on the Desert, in the foreword of which he declares that it contains a theory of life energy he has held and developed throughout his life, and which underlies his fiction. T h e five stories are obviously the beginning of a combination of philosophy and fiction that culminated in Richter's impressive trilogy of the Ohio frontier. T h e collection included a story closely related in theme to these five. " O v e r the Hill to the Rich House" first appeared in Outlook for September 6, 1922. George Martin, owner of Martin and Company, jobbers in paper and twine, was brought up on a farm and is a very wealthy citizen of Pennver (the name of the city in many of these early stories - probably in north-western Pennsylvania). He lives with his bored wife, Elizabeth Traylor Martin, and their bored son, George, Jr., in an elegant home filled with servants. When he suggests that they spend a few days at a friend's farm, both mother and son respond with their usual lack of enthusiasm. Frustrated, George Martin arranges things so that his wife and son think he has gone bankrupt. Everything is sold and they move to a third-floor apartment in a small town. George, Jr., finds a part-time job and Elizabeth Traylor Martin pinches pennies as her husband brings home a small weekly pay. After some time 3

Richter, Brothers, p. 264.

S T O R I E S : 1913-1936

17

George, Sr., makes the offer of a few days at the farm again, and of course they j u m p at the chance. They have begun to enjoy life. This theme of enjoying most what we work hardest for is a major one of Richter's and very closely related to the efficacy-of-work theme he had explored two years earlier. It is, like the other, a theme found throughout his later writing. The title story of the 1924 collection appeared in Forum for April, 1914, a n d w a s c h o s e n b y E d w a r d O ' B r i e n of t h e Boston

Transcript

in his annual review as the best short story published in any magazine during the year. The story netted Richter twenty-five dollars. He wrote in 1924: I had just been married, had sober obligations, and told myself stubbornly that if this is what one got for the "best" story of the year, I had better stick to business and write in my spare time only the type of story that would fetch a fair price, which I did. 4

"Brothers of No K i n " is the story of a good man who assumes the guilt of a dying bad man. In it Richter is able to create and sustain an aura of the mysterious, and to record, with care, the manners and mores of a Bedford county congregation. Its realistic portrayal of the Straint household, gaunt, spare, and despotic, helps to make this short story one of the finest Richter ever wrote. The two stories in the collection that are "merely" entertaining are "Old Debt" and "Swanson's Home Sweet Home". Neither story has any germ in it that Richter developed later. "Old Debt" a p p e a r e d i n Woman's Stories i n N o v e m b e r , 1914. I t is a n a c c o u n t of

a vagrant son who comes home after six years of work in the big city to take his mother on a spree. "Swanson's Home Sweet Home", though containing no theme that can be traced through Richter's work, is a thoroughly enjoyable story. It is a sensitive and well-written account of the courtship of a shy, lonely girl by a gruff engineer who plays the title song on his train whistle each time he passes through her town. It is written with a restraint and whimsicality evidenced in Richter's later work. It first appeared in the August, 1919, issue of Everybody's. Two stories in the collection deal with the problem of appearance 4

Conrad Richter, "Autobiographical Sketch", Twentieth Century Authors, ed. Stanley Kunitz and Howard Haycraft (New York, 1942), p. 1171.

18

S T O R I E S : 1913-1936

and reality. T h e theme of "Sure Thing", which appeared in 1917 in the Saturday Evening Post, is "all that glitters is not gold". "Smokehouse", the second story on this theme, first appeared in the Country Gentleman in 1920. The central symbols in this story are two trees in an apple grove, a gnarled, old tree, and a tall straight one. T h e heroine, who can't distinguish between appearance and reality, likes the tall, straight tree. At the end of the story the heroine's favorite tree produces small, inedible apples, while the bent old favorite of the hero gives forth delicious Smokehouse apples. This symbolic dichotomy is further realized in the story in the contrast between city and country, a glittering investment and a humble one. T h e heroine learns the wisdom of her lover and the possibility of the noble in homely things through the failure of the tall tree, the city, and the glittering investment. This story is well-written and treats a theme related to the two major themes developing in Richter's work. T h e three themes are closely connected but distinguishable strands in the fictional fabric Richter wove throughout his literary career. The two stories of the collection left until last concern the Richter heroine. "Wings of a Swallow" appeared in 1920 in the December issue of People's Magazine. Theodora Pilgrim has the name of a heroine but the complicated story about her finally learning to "fly" is not very convincing. W h a t she shares with later Richter heroines is strength of character, honesty, perseverance and an ability to face each situation in her life squarely. A better story, and the initial appearance of the true Richter heroine is " T h e Laughter of Leen". This story appeared in Outlook for February 23, 1916, and has a remarkable heroine named Thaleen Juste, who though born in Belgium, lives in America because the Germans have killed her parents. She is able, however, to understand the nationalism that leads to war, and to forigve its transgressions. I a m Belgian. But I could not help - there I was born. I might French have been, or Hungarian. Everybody is same as I. But they are not away, heart cooler in another land. Oh, no matter what I a m born, I a m a woman, and all peoples w h o have been good I love. 5 5

Richter, Brothers, pp. 31-32.

STORIES: 1913-1936

19

Thaleen Juste is a true Richter heroine of fortitude, perseverance, and womanly love. Sayward Luckett Wheeler, in her long life on the Pennsylvania-Ohio frontier, will find it in her heart to love and care for "all peoples who have been good". The "Foreword by the Publishers" to Brothers of No Kin and Other Stories says: In these twelve stories by Conrad Richter may be found both human interest and literary distinction. They may be read both by the general reader seeking a good story and the general reader seeking technique. 6

There is both human interest and literary distinction in this collection. If it were not for Richter's later work, however, these stories would probably be almost completely forgotten. As it is, they serve as a logical beginning of any complete study of his work. A careful reading of them is rewarding because they contain the germs of some of the major aspects of his writing. In Brothers of No Kin Richter uses the oral tradition of the Pennsylvania of his ancestors handed down to him by his mother and his aunt, and carefully recorded by him. Later, he supplemented this knowledge with a thorough and painstaking study of documents, and further conversations with elder members of Pennsylvania communities. He uses this information to great advantage in his novels of the Pennsylvania-Ohio frontier, and he uses the method successfully in his study and writing of the early Southwest. I n these stories begin three inter-related themes that continue throughout Richter's fiction: (1) hard work is good for a man and leads to maturity and success, (2) people enjoy most what they work hardest for, and (3) the humble and the homely are usually more productive than the flashy and conspicuous. They also contain a preview of the Richter heroine. Theodora Pilgrim and Thaleen Juste are limited characters, but each gives a hint of what Richter's later heroines will be like. The collection also furnishes us with one more preview of things to come. In these stories Richter gives evidence of the restraint and understatement that distinguish his later fiction. The characteristics of this collection seem to be leading Richter 6

R i c h t e r , Brothers, p . vii.

20

S T O R I E S : 1913-1936

in one definite direction. Only in frontier America could he find characters whose lives would be examples of his theories about the efficacy of hard work, and the enjoyment of things that come hard. And while his ealyr heroines could not develop logically into the typical woman of modern America, it was an easy transition from them to the great pioneer women of the stature of Willa Cather's Antonia. Besides the stories collected in Brothers of No Kin, Richter published other stories between 1913 and 1934. The first story that Richter published appeared in Cavalier, a Munsey publication, for September 6, 1913. " H o w Tuck Went H o m e " is a sentimental tale of altruism among rough lead miners in Bitter Roots, Idaho, in the tradition of Bret Harte's " T h e Luck of Roaring C a m p " . O n e of the last stories that Richter published before his stories of the Southwest began to appear was " T h e King Was in the Kitchen", which appeared in the May, 1923, issue of The Woman's Home Companion. I n it, Foster Whitman, an advertising manager for six years, is dropped by his employer, Packed Products, Incorporated. Through his wife's encouragement he finds a new career and happiness as a chef. Of the remaining short stories that were published before 1934, three that are thematically related to Richter's later work are "Rich Relations" (1924), "Derickson's Gagoo" (1925), and " T h e M a n W h o Retired" (1926). All three appeared in American Magazine. "Rich Relations", published in March of 1924, is related to "Sure T h i n g " and "Smokehouse". Like them it is a story of appearance and reality. Harry Cameron, chairman of the board of the Cameron Company in Penn City, appears to have everything, while his childhood friend T o m Dutter, a carpenter in Dicktown, seems to have very little. It turns out that the truth is just the reverse. It is a simple story, well told, and strengthens the impression that Richter believed that the wholesome goodness of a simple life far surpassed what the complex civilization of the city had to offer. The contrast between Penn City and Dicktown appears again in Richter's work. "Derickson's Gagoo", which appeared in M a y of 1925, is a story

S T O R I E S : 1913-1936

21

about two people who have a "gagoo" they must learn to live without. Little Betty's "gagoo" is an afghan of Germantown wool, her father Will Derickson's is a "safe" job in the French Creek Table Works. Mary Derickson is trying her best to make both daughter and husband grow out of their "gagoo" stage. O n a trip during which Mary accidentally forgets Betty's "gagoo", Will finally decides to quit working for someone else and to strike out on his own business venture, while the baby falls asleep without her afghan. Although this is one of Richter's early popular magazine stories it contains a concept close to his thinking up to then. The third story appeared in April of 1926. "The Man Who Retired" is a new way of treating an old theme. Henry Hartman, a successful farmer, retires at fifty-six, and moves to the city with his childless wife Althea. After a year in Wilsonville they are bored and unhappy. Althea takes a trip and Henry hikes into the country. He comes upon a twelve-year-old boy plowing a field and helps the youth complete the job. Upon entering the farmhouse he discovers that the father is an invalid and Dannie, the boy, is the only son with five sisters, a mother, and a grandmother. Henry stays on and helps the family to prepare the farm for sale. Having enjoyed the farm work a great deal more than city loafing he buys the farm himself, and keeps Dannie on to help him. Richter has again observed the formula for popular success, but he has also written a story that incorporates a philosophy he believed in. The contrast between Wilsonville and the farmland surrounding it serves as a background to show that a Richter hero or heroine is never happy when idle, or when separated from the land. When Sayward Luckett Wheeler grows old and useless in The Town and is unhappy, she brings a symbol of the joy of her early life close to her by planting a tree beside her large house in town. It was the struggle with and triumph over the soil and nature that gave the pioneer his agony and his ecstasy, and that also gave him a vitality Richter believed most Americans no longer have. Richter's stories up to 1934 contain a city-country contrast that always shows farm life as idyllic. These early stories are a far cry from the bitter experiences of farmers portrayed in books like Hamlin Garland's Main Travelled Roads (1891). Richter knew Garland but

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was obviously not much influenced by his view of farming. When Richter presents a more realistic picture of farm life, it is clear that it was mostly personal experience and not literary influence that caused this shift. Here he expresses his early love of the soil, and his admiration for the "honest" hard work of getting a living from it. In some of these stories Richter used an easily translateable set of symbols: an apple tree, a baby's "gagoo", and a swallow's wings. He uses symbols in his later work with greater frequency and greater subtlety, until, in the Waters of Kronos, the symbolic becomes a major strand in the texture of the narrative. While a few of his early stories were written primarily to sell, many of the others that were also "popular" do contain a set of ideas Richter heartily believed in. He is almost always serious about these things; he is seldom satiric, and when he does try humor, it is the humor of a modified tall-tale. Richter, from these early stories of 1913 to 1934, never changed direction on his way to the mature art of his Ohio trilogy (The Trees, The Fields, The Town). His experience in the Southwest, from 1928 on, deepened and matured his art. The later novels are a result of a steady building on the old thematic foundations, and on the stylistic foundation of lucidity, restraint, and understatement. In 1928 Richter moved, with his wife and daughter, from the Pennsylvania of his youth and young manhood to Albuquerque, New Mexico. By late 1933 he had assembled enough data to begin writing about this area, and he decided that he would no longer write popular stories, but would try to write stories of real literary merit. The combination of the lore of the frontier Southwest and his new attitude toward his art produced nine stories of genuine worth. They were collected in 1936 in Early Americana and Other Stories published on August 3 by Alfred A. Knopf. The "Foreword" to this second collection of Richter's short stories was undoubtedly written by Richter, for it is a biography written in such a way that only the shy author himself could have composed it.

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Since early boyhood the writer of these stories has been almost painfully interested in early Americana, both Eastern a n d Western. For the past eight years he has lived in New Mexico and bordering states, digging into the old West by those slender veins of golden metal that still remain: the yellowed files of newspapers printed on paper hauled across the great plains on ox trains, and the rare books, manuscripts, and personal records left by the early adventurers and settlers of both sexes. But most of his material, which fills a shelf of heavy notebooks, has come from first sources still alive when he talked to t h e m : men a n d women who lived through the seventies a n d sixties, a few through the fifties, a n d who spent hours on end patiently bringing to light details and authenticities he wished to know, not ol history, but of early life. And in telling these stories he has tried to set them down on a n underlying pattern of these endless, small authenticities, without which life would not be either then or today, and in a style suggestive of those times that are gone but not dead, he hopes, in this year of our Lord nineteen hundred a n d thirty-six. 7 T h e first of these stories to appear was "Early Marriage". It was published b y the Saturday Evening Post o n April 7, 1934. Five of the nine stories appeared in the Post; the other four were first printed in the Ladies' Home Journal. "Early M a r r i a g e " is as fine a story as a n y in the collection. A t its e n d N a n c y Belle is standing before a preacher w i t h S t e p h e n D e w e e . Then he [the preacher] coughed a n d began the ceremony. H e h a d a deep voice, but Nancy Belle didn't hear all of the service. Her mind kept going back to a tall, grave m a n in a lonely adobe post on the wide, Santa Ana plain. And after she had said: " I d o " , her lips moved, but she was not praying for Stephen, her husband. 8 N a n c y Belle is praying for her father, A s a P u t m a n , t w o h u n d r e d miles a w a y , t e n d i n g his trading-post, w i t h only Ignacita his m a i d keeping h i m from being alone o n the vast, sandy Santa A n a plain. H e gives her his blessing, but he cannot leave his post to a c c o m p a n y her to her w e d d i n g . Instead h e must send his

fifteen-year-old

son

Rife w i t h her. But he has given her m u c h m o r e than a blessing; he has given her the inner steadfastness a n d fortitude necessary to face w i t h e q u a n i m i t y all o f the terrifying possibilities of life i n the early Southwest. T h r o u g h carefully but unobtrusively p l a c e d statements 7 8

Conrad Richter, Early Americana and Other Stories (New York, 1936), pp. v-vi. Richter, Early Americana, p. 322.

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we learn that Asa's wife has died sometime in the past, and that she was an Easterner whose family resented his taking her into the loneliness and peril of the boundless Southwest. What isn't stated, but is evident from the rest of Richter's fiction, is that she did not draw from her husband the stolidness and inner strength that her children drew from him. Without these qualities she perished on the frontier. Rife and Nancy Belle take five days for their trip. They face the monumental hazards of the trail with a stern, unyielding fortitude; Indians, wild beasts, runaway horses, and a flood threaten them, but do not stop them. We are mildly surprised at the end, at Nancy Belle's prayer, putting Asa Putman in such a prominent place, until we realize that the story of the triumph of Rife and Nancy Belle over the great obstacles of the vast, merciless, inscrutable Southwest is his story. So Asa Putman becomes the first hero in Richter's new brand of fiction. A laconic, stoical man, he has faced the hardships of the frontier and survived. Though sketchily drawn, his outline is enough to indicate that he is a fictional forerunner of the intrepid heroine who will face the hardships of the Pennsylvania-Ohio wilderness in The Trees. No mere documentary or geographical study could account for the giant step Richter's art had taken with these stories of Early Americana. Nor could it be accounted for by his own determination to write better; something had happened to the man himself. Somewhere in his reflection on his own experience a new depth of sensitivity and understanding had been sounded. Perhaps it was his marriage and fatherhood that worked this change, or the Southwest itself, or some deep agony and grief. Whatever the cause, the result was that from 1934 on, almost without exception, Richter wrote very well. There is another story in this collection in which an absent father is remembered by his daughter in the last passage of the story. "Long Engagement" appeared in the June 16, 1934, issue of the Saturday Evening Post, and was collected as "Long Drouth". Joanna Davis is like Nancy Belle Putman in age, fortitude and her approaching marriage. She is living in the Valle Grande as the story begins in 1889. Like Nancy Belle she has derived her strength

STORIES: 1913-1936

25

from her father, Sylvester Davis. Joanna is courted by Yancey McQuaid. The drought not only postpones their intended marriage, but by the third rainless year it also forces Yancey to join the other settlers leaving for South Dakota, where the grass is reported to be growing abundantly. 'Syl' Davis, however, will not leave the land he has labored over. After two more years of drouth, and with her father away on the range, Joanna rides for a doctor to deliver her mother of a child. With the birth of the new Davis comes news that the father has died of a broken neck after being thrown by his horse. A few weeks later, as Joanna is riding on the Davis land, she sees a rider coming towards her. As Yancey and Joanna meet, the clouds that have been gathering for a week finally burst and begin to water the parched land. Emotion swept up in Joanna as she remembered her father's prophetic words: "When troubles come thick, they soon get their worst. Then they start to mend." With streaming eyes she looked wildly about, hoping somehow her father might be there near them to hear how truly he had spoken. All she could see was the gray rain driving endlessly over the thirsty land.»

As important as Sylvester and Joanna are, this is a story about the land. Richter recreates with a restrained realism, and an eye for the smallest details, the life and death of the earth and its dependents during five rainless years. The story opens with this passage: This was the open range of the Valle Grande, fenceless, roadless, a rolling bonanza of grass. June 1889 went by without rain, but the past winter's heavy snowfall still bubbled in summer springs from the hidden ground. Crossed only by long reefs of redtop in the sloughs, the inland sea of bunch grass tossed under the territorial sky for a hundred miles. Cattle swam in it. The hoofs of loping horses beat against it like a muffled drum. 10

After two years without rain this is the scene: She [Joanna] was seeing blue sky, once the most uplifting thing she knew, turn hideous in front of her eyes. Even the warm sun had become a malevolent, staring eye, watching without compassion the slow death of every living thing. 11 9 10

11

R i c h t e r , Early Americana, p . 147. Richter, Early Americana, p. 119.

Richter, Early Americana, pp. 127-128.

26

S T O R I E S : 1913-1936

After five years without rain Sylvester rides the range, but spares his family the details of the ravages of drouth. He said scarcely a word of the depressing things he had seen or heard - of skies black with crows, of the few remaining water-holes reeking with dead cattle, of his mares eating misletoe from the junipers and losing their colts from the ergot, of wells and springs going dry through the Panhandle and Arizona territory, and settlers forced to move. 12

I n this excellent short story the land is transfigured before our eyes. We begin to feel intensely the necessity of rain; when it comes, we rejoice with Joanna and the land. Richter treats the calamity of drouth with a characteristic restraint and understatement that serve to give the scene the touch of reality felt first hand. Also, an important thing is happening in these two stories: a taciturn, intrepid father is bequeathing, not to a son but to a daughter, the pioneer qualities necessary for survival against any hardship. A year later, in his first novel, The Sea of Grass, it is difficult to determine who is dominant, Lutie Cameron or Colonel J i m Brewton. In The Trees (1940) there is no doubt as to which gender Richter has picked to exemplify the pioneer qualities he so esteemed. There is no man in the Ohio trilogy, or thereafter in Richter's fiction, to rival the greatness of Sayward Luckett Wheeler. In "Smoke Over the Prairie" Frank Gant appears, the second strongest hero in Richter's fiction. The strongest is Colonel J i m Brewton, for whom Gant is the early draft. This story, which appeared in the July 1, 1937, issue of the Saturday Evening Post, is important for three reasons. While Frank Gant is the prototype of Jim Brewton, he still has an existence of his own as the epitome of a powerful, wilful and brash breed of men that has vanished. This story is the skeleton from which The Sea of Grass developed. And finally, it is the first story of Richter's in which there is a conflict between men of the old way and men of the new. Here the men of change are railroaders, in The Sea of Grass they are homesteaders. In both cases the man who tries to stave off "progress" is a powerful cattle baron, opposed in the short story by Vance Rutherford; in the novel by Brice Chamberlain. Both are well educated, in contrast 12

Richter, Early Americana, p. 140.

STORIES: 1913-1936

27

to the self-taught men they oppose; both love a woman connected with the hero (in the story a daughter, in the novel a wife) and both women married to the men of steel are cosmopolitan in background and sympathy. The Sea of Grass contains a more mature recognition, on the part of the hero, of the inevitability of change, and a very strong heroine in Lutie Cameron. Even though only a short novel, it is much more complex than the story. The story ends melodramatically in a race between Frank Gant and the railroad train that is making its first run to Capitan. At the moment that Gant's rig, pulled by his favorite horses Prince and Custer, establishes its supremacy over the railroad, it is hit at a crossing in front of a large group of horrified spectators. Gant is killed, but his son Johnnie, the narrator, who was riding with him, is thrown clear. " W h e r e ' s m y f a t h e r ? " I asked them. T h e y all just stood there looking a t m e . . . W h e n I closed m y eyes I could still see m y father sitting in the buggy beside me, aloof, powerful, absolute, his black b e a r d turned stubbornly in the wind, the reins in his thew-like fingers. All these m e n f r o m the train looked white a n d soft in comparison... I w a n t e d m y father. O n e b a r k f r o m his bearded lips, a n d most of this crowd would scurry like prairie dogs. " W h e r e ' d he g o ? " I cried, a n d struggled to sit u p . . . T h e crowd fell back slightly. All I could see between tailored trousers and gayly flounced dresses were the iron bands of the railroad r u n n i n g t r i u m p h a n t l y westward a n d glinting like mottled silver in the sun. 1 3

John Gant is the first Richter narrator, and is very much like his many successors. He is close to the action as a small boy (although nobody pays much attention to him), and he retells the story from memory, many years later. The opening passage is memorable in its depiction of the vast grandeur of a huge empire. It closely resembles the opening scene of The Sea of Grass. I t is ground into dust now like Mobeetie a n d Tascosa, swallowed u p b y t h e grass a n d desert along with split ox-shoes, shaggy buffalo trails, a n d the crude cap-and-ball rifle. A n d how can I say it so that you w h o were not there m a y see it as I did, rolling, surging, fermenting u n d e r t h e b r a z e n territorial sun, t h a t vanished r u d e empire of which my father was a baron, a l a n d as feudal as old E n g l a n d , larger t h a n the British Isles, with lords a n d freemen, savages a n d Peons, most of t h e m on horseback, all here in 13

Richter, Early Americana, pp. 82-83.

28

STORIES: 1913-1936

America a little more than half a century ago, and yet in another world and another age that was just then - although we didn't know it - drawing to a violent close? I remember, as a small boy, climbing up our roof ladder in the shadowy blot after sunset and telling myself that five days' journey west across the territory the sun was still shining on flocks of my father's hundred thousand sheep. And I can remember the cavelike darkness of some early-morning waking between blankets tossed over tanned buffalo hides on my huge bed and thinking that a thousand miles east on one of my father's mule or bull trains the sun was already shining. 1 4

J o h n Gant's father had to be big to master an empire whose size almost defies belief. Richter was moving toward an environment that would be a proper challenge to the kind of character he wished to depict. T h e vast cattle lands of the Southwest were a stimulant to his imagination that never failed to impress him, even years later. Frank Gant is more than a match for anything on the frontier; he is defeated by something else. I was only a boy, but I could tell, as I rode thoughtfully homeward, that in this thing m y mother called civilization there was no quarter, no compromise, no pity. It was not like your grazing pony that, after tiring you for an hour, would let you catch it, or like a wagon train that welcomed you with a blanket, food, and the red warmth of a campfire. This was something of another kidney. Of another and newer age. 1 5

Frank Gant resembles Richter's 1960 hero, Harry Donner, the father of the narrator in The Waters of Kronos. The resemblance is interesting because The Waters of Kronos is autobiographical. Frank Gant, H a r r y Donner, and J o h n Richter all were storekeepers, and all prayed fervently in an almost unintelligible agony. From "Early Marriage" to The Waters of Kronos to The Aristocrat, Richter wrote about what he knew and felt most deeply, and his relationship with his father was an important one. One of the strongest heroines of all of Richter's short stories u p to 1936 is Lalla Porterfield of "Frontier W o m a n " . This tale of the early Southwest appeared in the Ladies'' Home Journal for December, 1934. As the story begins Lalla and her mother are starting out from the ruins of their Southern plantation, destroyed in the Civil 14 15

Richter, Early Americana, pp. 38-39. Richter, Early Americana, pp. 66-67.

S T O R I E S : 1913-1936

29

War. They are bound for New Mexico, where Mr. Porterfield has gone to start a new life for the three. With three old Negroes, former servants, they make the long and arduous journey. Lalla, already toughened by the horror and privation of the war, takes over, as the old Negroes fearfully desert them, and her fragile mother fails to adapt to the changing environment. She is courted on the trail by Craig Wetherill, young owner of the C Bar ranch. By the end of the story Lalla has seen examples of the violence, crudity, grandeur, and loneliness of this land. She has come a long way from the gentility of her plantation youth. Craig proposes in these terms: "The C bar lays out on the cap rock", he went on, his voice almost grim. "Some people call it the Staked Plains. No better location to sell cattle to the military. Some day it will be a big ranch in a great country. But it's wild and lonesome now. Hardly any of it's been surveyed. Your nearest woman neighbor would be Mrs. Bugbee, eighty miles off. The only people you'd see would be cowboys and Indians, maybe a few buffalo hunters." 1 6

He is honest in his presentation of what he has to offer. Another woman with Lalla's background probably would have refused. Lalla accepts. And now in a kind of mirage she saw herself out on the desolate cap rock, far from mother, father, and new friends, the only white woman for eighty miles, giving birth to Craig Wetherill's children, herself their teacher in a rambling adobe ranch house, nursing them without hope of a doctor, keeping lonely vigils, helping in times of attack to load the guns for the men, trying to teach indifferent hands some of the delicate recipes of the South, inevitably homesick, never entirely forgiving the harsh land of her husband - a frontier woman. 1 7

This is the heroine of Richter's mature art. She doesn't have illusions about her life, yet she isn't cynical about it either; she meets life face to face and never flinches. "As ifin answer to these pictures, a steady welling rose in her. She was glad to feel it, to know... that it was still there to lean upon, a kind of flowing armor in the blood." 1 8 16 17 18

Richter, Early Americana, pp. 181-182. Richter, Early Americana, p. 182. Richter, Early Americana, pp. 182-183.

30

S T O R I E S : 1913-1936

I n The Light in the Forest (1953) and A Country of Strangers (1966) Richter treats in detail the problem of a white child captured and raised by Indians and then released to its white family. In The Town a very poignant chapter describes Sayward's journey to see her sister Sulie who was captured several years earlier as a child by Indian warriors. I n each case the white person has a very difficult time deciding to which race allegiance is owed. "As It Was in the Beginning" is Richter's first treatment of this theme. It appeared in the Saturday Evening Post on Spetember 14, 1935. In this long story Richter draws an accurate and convincing picture of Chief Shaved Head and his Comanche followers. T h e hero, Foard Hudspeth, a strong twenty-four year old trader between Bent's Fort and Santa Fe, desires a wife. He fondly remembers the Ohio of his youth, and decides to trade for an Eastern girl held captive by Shaved Head, instead of marrying a Spanish or Indian woman from New Mexico. The ensuing bargaining brings out the cunning of the Comanches, but Foard, with a touch of Yankee craftiness, beats them at their own game. As in every treatment of Indians by Richter, he neither idealizes them nor slanders them. His treatment of the Delaware Indians in The Light in the Forest has been highly praised by ethnohistorians as historically accurate. His picture of the Comanche Indians of New Mexico is a result of the same kind of careful study and objectivity of presentation. There is a bit of humor at the end, for the beautiful Ursula Ross, ransomed by Foard, is not willing to be regarded as a piece of property and forced into marriage. Finally, when Foard tells her that she is not obligated to him and may return to the East, she accepts his offer of marriage as a free woman. Ursula, unlike her counterparts in The Light in the Forest and The Town, is not torn between two loyalties. She is glad to return to the white civilization of her childhood by marrying Foard. " T h e Square Piano", which appeared in the March, 1935, issue of the Ladies' Home Journal, is a combination of gun play and romance. It is a story told in retrospect by the younger sister of the heroine. Cynthia Wingate is Richter's only female narrator, which may explain why this story is, along with "Buckskin Vacation", the most romantic in the collection. T h e scene of the unveiling of the

S T O R I E S : 1913-1936

31

square piano, in which two feuding ranches come to violence, is tense, but the sentimental ending of the story keeps the achievement below the level of the others in the collection. "Buckskin Vacation" is another love story placed against the background of some of the violence and uncertainty of frontier life. T h e lovers triumph, however, and do so in such a way that the story does not achieve the balance between hardship and joy that is evident in some of the other stories of the collection. "Buckskin Vacation" first appeared in the Ladies' Home Journal of May, 1935. "New H o m e " was first published in the Ladies' Home Journal of October, 1934. It is a remarkable account of young Sabina Clark's three-week vigil on the lonely Texas plain. Her husband Pleas leaves Sabina and their new baby to ride to the land office and file their claim. O n the last night of his absence a war party of Kiowa Indians attacks many of the scattered settlers in the area. Sabina herds all the animals into her new one-room house and waits all night with a shotgun. Two Indians arrive before dawn, but she wounds one and drives them away. She is a heroine lovingly drawn by Richter. Her seventeen-year-old face, framed by the bolster, was of a type not often seen today - the cheek bones strong and resolute, the eyes warm and dark, the mouth firm, stoical, yet good-humored, and the shining black hair plaited in thewlike braids. 19

Mrs. Hurd, Sabina's closest neighbor who lives several miles away, does not accept her fate as Sabina does. "You got a good man," she said with feeling. "So have I. But nobody except the Lord understands 'em draggin' their women and children off from friends and relations and meetin' houses in the settlements 'way out here in the wilderness where it's got only wild beasts and red savage devils and murderin' cowboys that darsen't go back where they come from." 2 0

Richter's unromantic treatment of the cowboy is another example of his attempt at historical accuracy. A careful attention to authenticities underlies all of his fiction; it is evident in this description of the Clark's new home: 19 20

Richter, Early Americana, p. 84. Richter, Early Americana, pp. 89-90.

32

S T O R I E S : 1913-1936

It was all one large r o o m of log walls chinked with m u d . A straightened wagon tire spanned the m o u t h of the fireplace for the hanging pots. Shelves of split, hewn, a n d planed chinking boards were laid on long wooden pine, in lieu of nails. T h e door, of the same h a n d m a d e boards, was h u n g on wooden pegs. Light canvas, sewn with a buffalo sinew over a pole frame, covered the window. A n d the bed was a single high, carved leg with horizontal poles angling into a n d along the two adjoining walls a n d woven with rawhide w h a n g for springs T h e first night in the new house engraved on Sabina's mind a picture she could not soon forget. C e d a r a n d oak b u r n e d on the hearth, sending tongues of w a r m light into the farthermost corners. A pair of black twogallon pots p u r r e d over the fire. O n the shelves, brightly scrubbed tin plates a n d cups a n d steel knives a n d forks reflected the red gleam. Below t h e m stood native fat gourds of every size u p to half a gallon, holding salt sorghum molasses, lard, pinto beans, biscuits, a n d victuals left f r o m supper. Grapes a n d plums were in small tin buckets closed with sealing wax. T h e red cloth her m o t h e r h a d given her covered the chinking-board table, and on it were her Bible, the almanac, a n d her pile of sewing. 2 1

This is fiction evocative of a way of life not so far distant in time as in spirit. By re-creating in a painstaking but artful way the life of an age in this country's past, Richter says much about modern times by comparison. Lalla Porterfield and Sabina Clark certainly seem to be women of a generation long past. Catherine Lydia Minor of "Early Americana", the title story of the collection, which appeared in the January 25, 1936, issue of the Saturday Evening Post, is another of that generation. This story, although it appeared last in print, was well-chosen as the title story. All of the collection, as well as most of Richter's work, deals with early Americana, and this story contains the major elements of that way of life. It is specific in that it is about buffalo hunters in the Carnuel area, but it stands for every frontier experience in its portrayal of hardship, danger, and death. It has slipped almost out of reality now, into the golden haze t h a t covers Adobe Walls a n d the Alamo, so t h a t today, behind speeding headlights or in the carpeted p u l l m a n , it seems as if it might never have really been. But if you are ever on the back of a horse at night far out on the windswept loneliness of the Staked Plains, with no light b u t the ancient horns of the C o m a n c h e moon a n d t h a t milky b a n d of star dust stirred u p by the passing of some celestial herd, a cloud m a y darken the face of the u n t a m e d 21

Richter, Early Americana, pp. 94-95.

S T O R I E S : 1913-1936

33

earth, the w i n d in your face will suddenly bring y o u the smell of cattle, and there beyond you for a moment on the dim, unfenced, roadless prairie you can make out a fabulous dark herd rolling, stretching, reaching majestically farther than the eye can see, grazing on the wild, unplanted mats of the buffalo grass. 22

It is against this background that the tragedy of Jack Shelby and Nellie Hedd takes place. An uprising of the Kiowa Indians, determined to drive all white hunters out of the buffalo area, results in their death on the day before their intended marriage in Carnuel. Throughout that night Laban Oldham, Catherine Minor, and four other whites wait for the approach of the Kiowas. After recovering Nellie Hedd's mutilated body, each of the three men chooses a card which decides which of the three women he must kill in the event of an attack, to spare them being brutally murdered by the Indians. Laban draws Catherine's card, and as the long vigil begins he becomes attracted to the girl. She stays through the night with him. At dawn a large group of people coming to the wedding arrive, and the Indian threat is over. Laban, just turned eighteen, and about to become a buffalo hunter on his own, suggests to Catherine that they take the place of the murdered couple. Carnuel has its wedding after all, but only with the sad memory of the mutilated first bride in everyone's mind. As the marriage ceremony is completed "a huge shaggy hunter" rides into the post and bellows for Dan Seery to unlock the saloon. A n d w h e n he saw the silent couple and the black book of the circuit rider, he stood in his stirrups and roared, shaking his long, gray m a n e and the blood-stained, weather-beaten fringe of his buck-skins till he looked like an old buffalo bull coming out of the wallow: "I left m y old wife in the country of T y r o m I'll never go back till they take m e in irons While I live, let m e ride where the buffalo graze W h e n I die, set a bottle to the head of m y g r a v e . " 2 3

The old Southwest lives again in the careful prose of Conrad Richter. It was a rude, violent land, captured forever in these nine stories that grew out of Richter's loving study of the settling of his adopted territory. 22 23

Richter, Early Americana, pp. 3-4. Richter, Early Americana, p. 37.

34

S T O R I E S : 1913-1936

"THAT EARLY AMERICAN QUALITY" R i c h t e r ' s e a r l y s t o r i e s , p a r t i c u l a r l y t h o s e c o l l e c t e d i n Early

Ameri-

cana and Other Stories, g i v e a n i n d i c a t i o n of t h e k i n d o f p e r s o n h e e s t e e m e d . I n t h e y e a r s t h a t f o l l o w e d , h e p o r t r a y e d a v a r i e t y of h e r o e s a n d h e r o i n e s i n his fiction, all of w h o m h a d a p i o n e e r vigor t h a t h e defined in a n article, " T h a t Early A m e r i c a n Q u a l i t y " . a p p e a r e d i n t h e S e p t e m b e r , 1 9 5 0 , i s s u e o f t h e Atlantic

It

Monthly.

O u r f a u l t h a s n o t been so m u c h t h e b e t r a y a l of o u r forefathers as t h e shortsighted a b a n d o n m e n t of a vital t h i n g t h a t m i g h t h a v e kept us on t h e track. S o m e of t h e bounties of those early A m e r i c a n s w e try to k e e p alive t o d a y - f r e e speech, trial b y j u r y , s e p a r a t i o n of c h u r c h a n d state. But t h e most precious thing, t h e t e m p e r of t h e m e n w h o p r o d u c e d a n d established these b o u n t i e s a n d privileges, has b e e n i g n o r e d . 2 4 R i c h t e r ' s p a s s i o n f o r e a r l y A m e r i c a n life a n d p e o p l e l e d h i m t o a r e a l i z a t i o n t h a t e a r l y A m e r i c a n s w e r e d i f f e r e n t f r o m t h e p e o p l e of modern America. T h e r e w e r e still a b u n d a n t in m y y o u t h certain types of A m e r i c a n s t h a t t o d a y in their t u r n h a v e almost d i s a p p e a r e d f r o m o u r scene. T h e s e types, n o w t h a t I look b a c k on t h e m , a p p e a r e d to h a v e h a d o n e t h i n g in c o m m o n . It w a s a kind of h a r d i h o o d a n d vigor beside w h i c h most A m e r i c a n s seem soft a n d squeamish t o d a y . 2 5 T h i s h a r d i h o o d a n d v i g o r w a s t h e r e s u l t o f t h e k i n d of l i f e t h e y led. T h e r e w a s a type of A m e r i c a n in m y y o u t h w h o I t h i n k held u p t h e p e c u l i a r early A m e r i c a n trait of vigor a n d t e m p e r m o r e t h a n a n y o t h e r N o single w o r d ever completely describes a m a n , b u t there is one t h a t gives us a good idea. T h e w o r d has d i s a p p e a r e d f r o m t h e c u r r e n t scene almost as generally as t h e m a n it typifies. T h a t w o r d is manliness. I d o n o t m e a n p h y s i q u e . S o m e of those I k n e w w e r e small m e n , b u t y o u instantly felt t h e q u a l i t y I m e a n , a sort of i n d e p e n d e n t , sometimes c r a b b e d h a r d i h o o d t h a t stood u p for its rights a n d took y o u o n a t a n y odds. It was a q u a l i t y of m i n d a n d spirit r a t h e r t h a n of b o d y , still m o r e of creed a n d belief. 2 6

24

Conrad Richter, "That Early American Quality", Atlantic Monthly, 186 (September, 1950), p. 26. 25 Richter, "That Early American Quality", p. 27. 2« Richter, "That Early American Quality", p. 27.

S T O R I E S : 1913-1936

35

Richter admired this lost breed of men, and he has immortalized it in his fiction. What these early Americans had that so many of us today do not have are a sense of sovereignty, a rank vitality, and a deep unswerving belief in the dignity of man, beginning with themselves When they spoke, it was with strong, often rude conviction. They didn't believe in flattery. Their loyalty was great, but they had a greater respect for discipline and training.... I have seldom seen them frightened, cowed, bewildered, beaten down by life, running with the sheep. 27 Our forefathers held the belief, often stated, that the virtues of their character, such as they had, were the result of their conflict with the wilderness, with hardship and privation It seems that discipline and privation are conditions that must be established by Providence and are not readily self-imposed by ease-loving Americans. 28 Richter goes on to a discussion of what made the pioneer strong. There were other strengthening influences than privation and hardship in our ancestor's day. One of these undoubtedly was their robust religion A less-considered source of strength among our earlier citizenry was the custom that I may call oratorical enlargement. By this I mean the hearty and profound vigor of thought and phrase in olden times Many of our forefathers actually saw and felt things in this deep-energy manner.... It took a robust man to look on the world in such a fashion. His powerful thought and expression produced in turn strong currents of energy that further stirred and supported him. 29 Richter feels that living in close association with animals was another source of manliness. The horse has always had, I suspect, its effect on men.... When I was a boy there were always horses on the street, some of them spirited and unpredictable, and I can promise you the street was a more exciting place then Tension and spirit were in the air, made life richer and pulses a little faster. Even a team of slow, powerful, and well-matched draft horses stirred physical admiration and a certain setup in the energies of the beholder.... Today we have traded the companionship of the braver animal that uplifts for the companionship of the mechanical and inanimate that dull. 30 27 28 29 30

Richter, Richter, Richter, Richter,

"That "That "That "That

Early Early Early Early

American American American American

Quality", Quality", Quality", Quality",

p. 28. pp. 28-29. p. 29. p. 29.

36

S T O R I E S : 1913-1936

Another nourishment for early American character was the rude educational freedom. The strong schoolmasters, and the heterogeneity of the product, tended to give a vigorous hybrid mixture to the mind of the citizenry. A final influence was continence. The early form of our society had a number of strong restraints that are not in effect today. Richter concludes the article with this statement: If I were to try to sum up a few words the most fundamental and far-reaching change from our forefathers' character to ours, I should say it was the tendency, the method, of the modern world to relieve It is a process of lowering the evolutionary and manly standard that our ancestors so laboriously built up.... The old-fashioned method was... subborn and audacious. Its effort was to overcome. Endure, bear, fight the good fight! Win if you can. If you can't, try again. The possibility of breaking was not unrecognized by our forefathers.... The sustained summoning of effort and energies built up in some mysterious way the spiritual and physical reservoirs of men and women. It produced that breed whose record so dwarfs us spiritually and physically today. 3 1

In this research into the life of the pioneer, Richter found that a close connection existed between hardship and the growth of the individual. His own phrase for this process is "hardship into gain"It is impossible to analyze Richter's novels without realizing his lifelong commitment to this theory.

31

Richter, "That Early American Quality", p. 30.

2. T H R E E NOVELS O F T H E S O U T H W E S T

THE SEA OF

GRASS

Conrad Richter has written four books with a Southwestern setting: Early Americana and Other Stories (1936), The Sea of Grass (1937), Tacey Cromwell (1942), and The Lady (1957). John T. Flanagan wrote about them: Richter's fiction about the Southwest is atmospheric, dramatic, and episodic. His four books about his adopted environment are as authentic and vivid as his studies of Pennsylvania and Ohio life, yet they are different in tone and technique. 1

As noted in chapter one, The Sea of Grass had a forerunner in the story "Smoke Over the Prairie". Both have narrators who tell the story as reminiscence, both have powerful cattle-baron heroes, and both are stories about the conflict of the old way with the new, in the Southwest of the late Nineteenth century. Dayton Kohler stated, in the September, 1946, issue of the English Journal, that Richter's use of a narrator in his Southwestern stories had a twofold advantage. The story of reminiscence takes in both past and present, and it is a form particularly suited to the literature of a late frontier like the Southwest. 2

Hal Brewton, the narrator of The Sea of Grass, is a nephew of Colonel Jim Brewton, the cattle-baron hero of the story. Hal tells the story from the vantage point of time, and with Richter's own nostalgia for an era gone forever. 1

2

John T. Flanagan, "Conrad Richter: Romancer of the Southwest", Southwest Review, XLIII (Summer, 1958), 189-190. Dayton Kohler, "Conrad Richter: Early Americana", The English Journal, X X X V (September, 1946), 365.

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That lusty pioneer blood is tamed now, broken and gelded like the wild horse and the frontier settlement. And I think that I shall never see it flowing through human veins again as it did in my Uncle Jim Brewton riding a lathered horse across his shaggy range or standing in his massive ranch house, bare of furniture as a garret, and holding together his empire of grass and cattle by the fire in his eyes. His rude empire is dead and quartered today like a steer on the meatblock, but I still lie in bed at night and see it tossing, pitching, leaping in the golden sunlight of more that fifty years ago, sweeping up to his very door, stretching a hundred and twenty miles north and south along the river, and rolling as far into the sunset as stock could roam - a ranch larger than Massachusetts with Connecticut thrown in, his fabulous herds of Texas cattle sprinkled like grains of cinnamon across the horizons, his name a legend even then, his brand familiar as the A B C's in every packinghouse, and his word the law. 3 T h e use of a m a t u r e n a r r a t o r gave R i c h t e r the perspective he needed to view the material he h a d collected a b o u t the Southwestern frontier. H a l Brewton views the action of the story at a b o u t the same time-distance t h a t R i c h t e r himself viewed the era of the cattleb a r o n . H a l never really exists as a three-dimensional character in the story; h e is simply a persona for Richter himself, a n d as such tells us a good deal a b o u t Richter's a t t i t u d e t o w a r d his material. While not always objective, H a l tells his story with little m o r a l comm e n t ; we are allowed to j u d g e the characters a n d the action for ourselves. T h i s objectivity is partly d u e to Hal's relationship to the m a i n action of the story: he is close e n o u g h a relative to the central figures to be quite interested in their actions, b u t not so close as to blur his vision. This is also true of the n a r r a t o r s in Tacey Cromwell, a n d The Lady. W h a t e v e r " m o r a l " these stories have, Richter is content to let his readers decide for themselves. T h e use of a n a r r a t o r served a n o t h e r p u r p o s e for R i c h t e r : it helped to m u t e the violence a n d sordidness of the frontier. A shy, retiring m a n by n a t u r e , Richter, nevertheless, almost always includes in his stories whatever details are necessary to give a t r u e account of how it was. T h e use of the n a r r a t i v e of reminiscence allows h i m to m a i n t a i n his integrity as a historical novelist w i t h o u t offending his own sensibility. 3

Conrad Richter, The Sea of Grass (New York, 1937), pp. 3-4.

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39

In his article on Conrad Richter in the Winter, 1945, issue of the New Mexico Quarterly Review, Bruce Sutherland wrote this about The Sea of

Grass:

For a writer of carefully constructed, almost condensed stories the planning of a novel must have presented some formidable problems. There were patterns to follow, but the long, padded epic so typical of American historical fiction did not appeal to him. Faced with highly theatrical material which verged on the melodramatic, he was brief and restrained almost to the point of taciturnity in his treatment of it. The result is a completely successful short novel which meets even the most exacting literary standards. 4

H a l is a boy as the action begins, and the town physician as it ends. His character never changes, he doesn't learn anything as a result of the action as such personae as Marlow, Burden, and Carraway do. H e is a clear and uncomplicated prism through which we see the three important characters act out a quarter century of their lives. T h e book is divided into three parts, the titles of which, " L u t i e " , " T h e Colonel", and "Brock", are a n accurate breakdown of the action. Lutie, a lively and beautiful St. Louis belle, comes to Salt Fork to m a r r y the rich cattle owner Colonel J i m Brewton. T h e Colonel has already begun his battle against nesters on the grounds that the land is too dry for successful farming, and good only for grazing. T h e nesters are championed by a young, brash, Eastern lawyer, Brice Chamberlain. T h e Brewtons have three children, Sarah Beth, J i m m y , and Brock (the blond, blue-eyed child of an affair between Lutie and Brice). Lutie, tired of the harshness of the frontier, leaves for fifteen years, returning only when Brock is hunted and killed as an outlaw. Brice Chamberlain, who was supposed to follow Lutie from Salt Fork, never does. I n the end a long drouth practically destroys the nesters, a n d Lutie returns to the Colonel who has had carved on Brock's tombstone, "Brock Brewton, son of J a m e s B. a n d Lutie C. Brewton". Lutie is one of a long line of Richter women from the East who find it almost impossible to adjust to the rigors of the frontier. She 4

Bruce Sutherland, "Conrad Richter's Americana", The New Mexico Quarterly Review, 15 (Winter 1945), 418-419.

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has two columns of trees planted, supposedly for shade, b u t which really serve to separate her f r o m the range. Accustomed to the gaiety a n d color of fashionable St. Louis, she is tireless in her efforts to enliven the Brewton r a n c h house. She is not a "frontier w o m a n " , b u t she is lovingly d r a w n by R i c h t e r as a person of flame-like intensity. With her first baby in the cradle, I felt that out of respect I should call her Aunt Lutie, but she turned on me quickly. "Don't you dare call me that, Hal!" she said and her eyes were black and flashing. "I shall never be old enough to be Auntie to anyone." 5 W h e n she finally decides t h a t she can n o longer cope with the b a r r e n life of the frontier a n d the unyielding position of her husb a n d t o w a r d the nesters, she leaves. "I'm not dying and being stuffed into a coffin. I'm going where there's life, Hal. I'm going to balls and theatres and shaded streets and up-to-date stores and where everyday people drive in the parks." 6 I t is never quite clear w h a t Brice C h a m b e r l a i n ' s intentions are. T h e Colonel hates him, not so m u c h , it seems, for being Lutie's r e p u t e d lover, as for deserting her, a n d not following her f r o m Salt Fork. C h a m b e r l a i n is not d r a w n well e n o u g h for a r e a d e r to be able to decide if this desertion is characteristic or not. His a p p e a l to L u t i e is m a d e plausible by the fact t h a t he is Eastern in education a n d dress. H e is refined, a n d m u c h more her social equal t h a n the Colonel. I n a story t h a t covers twenty-five years in one h u n d r e d a n d fifty pages, a n d in which the l a n d itself is as i m p o r t a n t as the characters, it is not too surprising t h a t some character would not b e well d r a w n . Lutie Brewton is a r o m a n t i c heroine. W h a t she is really like is best expressed by Richter, not in w h a t she does, b u t in w h a t her old Salt Fork friends conjecture as to her fate after leaving the Colonel a n d her children. Several thought they knew where she was. Young Mrs. Bob Kingman said she had seen Lutie Brewton's face, as young and beautiful as ever, in a nun's wimple on the streets of New Orleans. The gentlemanly wagon boss 5 Richter, Sea, p. 35. 6 Richter, Sea, pp. 41-42.

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of the Bar 44, who had won a prize with her as his partner at whist, had seen someone he believed was Mrs. Brewton in a stunning black lace gown and diamonds gambling for high stakes in Tombstone. She was painted and powdered like a dance-hall woman, but he had absolutely remembered the feverish gestures with which she played. And John McCandless, agent for the Mescalero Apaches, had gone to Washington on Indian bureau business and seen a lady he knew but couldn't place, in an open carriage on Pennsylvania Avenue, by the side of a foreign ambassador or someone with ribbons on his coat.... But the story I clung to was told by Superintendent Bedford of the railroad, who had been at the famous Silver Ball given with full orchestra and waxed floor under a waterproof canopy at the bottom of a Colorado silver mine. During the evening a fall of rock in a near-by stope had frightened the dancers off the floor, all but a guest with another name, who was the image of Mrs. Brewton. For several minutes while the rocks continued to fall, she had kept on gayly dancing with her partner, encouraging the orchestra and laughing to her partner as if nothing had happened, until most of the guests were over their scare and back on the floor. Somehow I felt that had been the real Lutie Brewton. 7 These rumors about Lutie are an indication of the essentially romantic attitude of the narrator and the author toward her. In contrast to the femininely delicate character of Lutie (Hal always associates her with the faint odor of violets), is the Colonel's rock-like presence. H e enters the story with his entrance into the Salt Fork courtroom. Then I saw by her veiled eyes that she glimpsed something and, turning my head, I saw it, too, moving erect and towering down the crowded aisle along the wall, a familiar, proud, almost insolent figure in a long gray broadcloth coat with tails and bulging on the side toward us with what I knew was a holster capped with ivory handles, his coal-black eyebrows and mustache white with alkali dust, and in the abrupt quiet of the room the fall of his boot-heels like the shots of a pistol. 8 Colonel Brewton is Richter's greatest hero; he has all of the virtues that Richter admires, particularly integrity and courage, but he is the last and fullest portrait of this brash, fearless breed of men in Richter's work. It isn't because Richter wrote about another era in another locale that the central character is a woman in his next novel and 7 8

Richter, Sea, pp. 97-98. Richter, Sea, p. 17.

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thereafter. His two other novels about the Southwest feature heroines : Tacey Cromwell is dominant in her story, as is Dona Ellen in The Lady. Colonel Brewton is not, after all, very complex, Sayward Wheeler a n d her counterparts have a subtlety that J i m Brewton couldn't fathom. I want to suggest that the change from male to female protagonist represented a deepening, a maturing, of Richter's vision of reality. W h a t the father knew was no longer enough to cope with the complexities that this forty-seven-year-old author now saw in the world. Whether consciously or not, he switched to the mother-symbol who could bring to bear on the problems of living, not just rational knowledge, b u t intuition. T o be sure, some of Richter's heroines are not much more complex t h a n the Colonel, but his best, Sayward Wheeler, has an intuitive understanding of the life around her that no Richter hero could ever equal. T h e master of the Branch-B cattle empire has a firm control on his world as Lutie Cameron debarks at Salt Fork; in the ensuing twenty-five years he sees his grip weaken. He never acquiesces, b u t the nesters, and Lutie's betrayal and desertion of him, take their toll. And Brock, symbol of both forces, dies a n outlaw, calling himself, finally, Brock Chamberlain, thereby aggravating both previous wrongs. T h e Colonel rides home from Brock's burial a hurt, but not defeated, man. H e finds the returned Lutie there, and accepts her without question. He, for one, has never revealed in any way that he considered her unfaithful. "Have you noticed how young she still looks, Hal?" he asked, filling his chair again with that iron dignity and pride I remembered as a boy. "It was a hard thing for a lady to go through. But she's one in a thousand, Hal. N o one else will ever be like her." 9

Brock Chamberlain is a significant character in Richter's fiction; he is the first tragic figure drawn by Richter. T h e most important character of this kind is Rosa T e n c h of The Town. Both Brock a n d Rosa are the children of illicit love affairs, both suffer greatly, as if in expiation of the sin of their parents, and both die tragic deaths in their late teens, before they have a chance to find out for themselves what the meaning of life, a n d their lives, really is. 9

Richter, Sea, pp. 148-149.

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Brock has his mother's vibrant character, her love of gaiety, and her winning ways, but he lacks restraint. He is the darling of Salt Fork's dance-hall girls, and is spoiled by them and the town sycophants. He is, like Rosa, strange and willful, and seems fated from his birth for a violent end. Richter is very good at creating characters like this and they serve an important function in the novels, giving them a touch of the tragic. Brock's life and death give The Sea of Grass a feeling of reality that strengthens the novel. His destruction is symbolic of the violence of the old Southwest. O n another level it serves as a startling chastisement for Lutie, as sinner. When Brock, at the beginning of his short, violent path to death, shoots Dutch Charlie, Brice Chamberlain gains his release. For a headlong, incredible moment it was as if I had seen the long arm and white hand of Brice Chamberlain... reaching across all Salt Fork county in front of the town ladies, the rancher's wives and the dance-hall women, to pin a final ugly red brand on the gay, slender figure of Lutie Brewton.10

Lutie is not as memorable a character as Hester Prynne, but the theme of sin and guilt is part of her story. She learns of Brock's death as she attends Mass. She has two things to be sorry for: his conception, and his childhood and young manhood without her guidance. She pays heavily for both. His death as an outlaw is painful for her, and her return to Salt Fork, and the Colonel, is a great mortification. When we leave her living happily with the Colonel at the end of the story, we are aware that this last measure of peace has been dearly won by both. The title of the book suggests that it is a story of the land. Land is the force that underlies the basic conflicts in the story: rancher against nester, Brewton against Chamberlain, and the Eastern temperament (St. Louis as East), against the Western. The vast sea of grass is the backdrop against which a quarter of a century of conflict is depicted. And it is the land itself that triumphs over the nesters, when a powerful man could not. Only a long drouth finally proves to them what Brewton always maintained: that this land could support only ranching, never farming. When Lutie comes i" Richter, Sea, p. 117.

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back it is a triumph for the land, for she has learned that the colorful East is not enough to give a woman the fulfillment she needs. It is a ranch surrounded by a vast sea of grass that she finally calls home. Richter's stories are always stories of the earth. Whether the frontier is in the Southwest or in the Pennsylvania-Ohio region, the earth is of paramount importance. It is the mother without whom nothing can live, who gives up her treasures grudgingly, but rewards hard work. It is this closeness to the land that gives Richter's fiction solidity and strength. The story of J i m Brewton and Lutie Cameron is carefully framed by the vast and violent land of the early Southwest.

TACET

CROMWELL

In this first three novels Richter treated three distinct aspects of the early America he loved. In The Sea of Grass he depicted the Texas cattle land between 1885 and 1910. In The Trees (1940), which is treated later in a study of the Ohio Trilogy as a whole, he portrayed the Pennsylvania-Ohio wilderness at the end of the eighteenth century. In Tacey Cromwell he wrote his only story of another American frontier myth, the western mining town. Bret Harte and Mark Twain brought to eastern readers a glimpse of the violence, color, and romance of the booming mining town. The hero and heroine of Richter's novel are a gambler and a prostitute, as are John Oakhurst and Mother Shipton of Harte's "The Outcasts of Poker Flat". However, the Bisbee of Richter's novel is a much more complex and sophisticated mining town than Harte's Poker Flat or Roaring Camp. This novel is the result of painstaking research on Richter's part into the social and economic make-up of the early American mining town. He treats the wide nationality mixture of the town, as well as the humble origins of most of its leading citizens. The Bisbee of Tacey Cromwell is in its second generation of mine operation, and so the wealth of the mines has produced a rich ruling class in the town. But the rough, semi-illiterate emigrants are there

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too, and this contrast forms part of the background for the major action. The plot of this novel is simple enough. A small boy of eight, Wickers Covington, the narrator of the story, is mistreated by his uncle of the same name who takes care of him because his mother died giving birth to him, and his father was soon after crippled in an accident. He calls himself Nugget Oldaker and runs away from his home in Cat Creek, eastern Kansas. His destination is Socorro, New Mexico, where his half-brother (same mother), Gaye Oldaker, is living. He finds his brother in a combination bawdy house-saloon called the White Palace. His brother's mistress is the prostitute, Tacey Cromwell. In order to give Nugget a decent home they move four hundred miles to Bisbee, Arizona, where they settle among the miners on O.K. Street in Brewery Gulch (Youngblood Hill). Gaye, a two-dimensional figure throughout, does not marry Tacey. She, however, with almost unbelievable altruism, helps him up the ladder of success. His climb is climaxed by his marriage to the wealthy Rudith Watrous, and his selection as territorial treasurer. Tacey, meanwhile, has taken the two children of a neighbor killed in the mines, and has kept them for two years. The genteel ladies of the town, one of whom is Rudith Watrous, bring legal action against Tacey and take Nugget and the children, Seely and Timmy Dowden, away from her. In the end Nugget, a mining engineer trained in Butte, Montana, comes back to Bisbee to find Rudith dead, and Tacey and the willful and disgraced Seely together. Gaye, the territorial treasurer, is also in Bisbee, and so the novel ends with the four together again. Tacey Cromwell is another novel of reminiscence. Nugget Oldaker tells the story, we suppose, from the vantage point of time, but there is a curious blurring of narrative focus in this story. On page eighty-three Nugget, after hearing Gaye and Seely sing, says, "... if I had my chance now I would like to see and hear them again." In other places he says that he now understands things that he didn't understand when they occurred. The ending of the novel suggests, however, that Nugget is telling the story only from the time of the ending:

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We went slowly back to the house. As we opened the iron gate it seemed strange to have the thought come to me, but up on Youngblood Hill it had been Tacey and Seely and Gaye and I. Nowhere were the four of us again. 11

It isn't clear whether Richter meant his narrator to have progressed temporally only as far as the story had, or not. The ending suggests that the narrator doesn't know what the future of these characters holds. Other narrative comments suggest that the action is long past. This is a distracting problem because Nugget is a more important narrator than Hal Brewton in The Sea of Grass. He is much closer emotionally to the action and he has a close relationship with each of the three major characters: Tacey, Seely, and Gaye. His initial running away from his uncle is the action that causes Gaye and Tacey to leave the White Palace, and Socorro. Nugget, like Hal, goes away to school later in the story, and this is a favorite technique of Richter's. The narrator who is away from the scene of the action can gather only the highlights of the story. This enables the author to cover long periods of time with little difficulty, but it is sometimes distracting. Nugget Oldaker is an interesting narrator; he is sensitive and objective. He is impressed with the unyielding quality of Tacey's nature, and she turns out to be a more complex character than the usual reformed, good-hearted harlot. In fact she never quite seems the harlot at all, even in the White Palace. This may be part of Richter's plan in using a boy narrator, for Nugget is quite innocent of the implications of most of the events he describes. The advantage of having an innocent narrator is twofold: Richter could avoid a detailed account of the low-life involved, and he could also leave out moral comment. The disadvantages, however, are grave ones. Tacey's past is not real enough to be the influence it should be in her life, and Gaye is not three-dimensional, his relationship with Tacey is never believeable. He becomes, unfortunately, merely a narrative device, resembling Brice Chamberlain in this respect. Richter is consistent in always showing the action through the narrator's eyes. For instance, Nugget never calls Rudith Watrous Mrs. Oldaker, he always calls her Miss Rudith. It is his way of 11

Conrad Richter, Tacey Cromwell (New York, 1942), p. 208.

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showing his disappointment that Gaye didn't marry Tacey, although he never knows why his brother acts this way. Gaye never seems Nugget's brother, just as he never seems Tacey's lover. It isn't enough that we are told that he has a poker face, and never shows emotion. If there is a crucial fault in the novel it is this failure of Gaye to seem real. It weakens Tacey's story, because her tragedy of not being accepted by Bisbee society stems from his selfish refusal to marry her. Why he refuses is not at all clear. Tacey is a genuine Richter heroine, intelligent and persevering. The thwarting of her deep desire for a husband and a family almost crushes her, but she recovers and survives. Rudith Watrous, the soft, rich girl with Eastern ancestors, dies young, and without a struggle. She is almost a stock character in Richter's fiction. She is Tacey's opposite in social and economic background, and the contrast brings out Tacey's steadfastness and durability. As a Richter heroine, Tacey is intuitive, efficient, and altruistic. When Nugget reaches Socorro, it is Tacey who decides that they must move to Bisbee for the boy's sake. In Bisbee, even when she realizes that Gaye isn't going to marry her, it is her direction that helps him rise from gambler to territorial treasurer. She also helps him in his courtship of Rudith Watrous. She takes the baby Timmy and his sister Seely when Mr.Dowden, her neighbor, is killed in the mine. Seely is one of Richter's willful, unbridled, tragic youths like Brock Brewton and Rosa Tench. Tacey is extremely fond of her, partly because she sees in Seely her own lost childhood. Tacey is often too efficient and some of her manipulations make her seem god-like. She resembles, in such instances, the father or father-substitute who manipulates the destiny of a developing son in Richter's earliest stories. The idea behind the story is satisfactory. After Richter decided to write a book about the western mining town as it had been during the last century, his next problem was to find a central character. Of the large variety of characters in a town like Bisbee, Richter chose one that would need the strength of his pioneer heroines. The theme of the woman with a past trying to rise to respectability offered the kind of challenge his heroines often face.

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She was slight, her face almost pale She looked very proper a n d genteel except for her yellow, almost orange-colored hair, which appeared to h a v e been stained or bleached with acid. Staring at that artificial and licentious shade a n d then at the circumspect rest of her gave you the feeling that here was a being of strange, conflicting forces.... Even today w h e n I think of her as she was then, perhaps a little c r u d e a n d make-believe, yet young, ambitous, a n d intense, it brings back the very feel of t h a t whisky, tobacco, a n d scent-ridden room. 1 2

As a heroine of romance her origin is uncertain.'" She comes from some little old ranch down in Texas or the Nations!'" 1 3 She has no relatives, and only one friend, Bee, another White Palace girl. It is through Bee that the crisis of Tacey's relationship with Gaye occurs. About two years after the move to Bisbee Tacey receives a letter from Bee, who is to be married. Tacey has the wedding in her house on O.K. Street. As the day approaches Tacey becomes more excited, thinking perhaps that Gaye will make it a double wedding. I think that, whatever it was t h a t Tacey thought or hoped for, she d i d n ' t give u p until the m o m e n t the vicar began speaking. T h e n a change came. She seemed to listen, b u t when you looked close, her green eyes were faintly gray a n d far away. After t h a t she d i d n ' t glance at Gaye any more. But once while the vicar droned, she t u r n e d her face peculiarly t o w a r d Bee beside her, a n d her eyes examined her in quiet detail as if searching for some m a r k of distinction or good fortune she h a d not perceived there before. 1 4

A month later the three children are taken from her, and Gaye moves out. He returns by night, up to one week before his marriage to Rudith Watrous, to receive instructions from Tacey on how to make his way in the world. If he were not so two-dimensional, he would stand out as one of the most calloused villains in all of literature. Unfortunately he never seems more than a device to show how clever and altruistic Tacey is. Nugget goes to live with the Herfords, who are childless. M r . H e r f o r d was a powerful, medium-sized m a n with a silent j a w a n d truculent eye... Mrs. Herford was soft as he was h a r d . It seemed perfectly 12 13 14

Richter, Tacey, pp. 16-17. Richter, Tacey, p. 17. Richter, Tacey, pp. 90-91.

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natural that they had no children. They were two entirely different species. 15

After Gaye's marriage and Tacey's subsequent illness, Tacey opens a dressmaking shop on Main Street. Not patronized by the ladies of the town, she has very little business. Finally a new woman in town has Tacey make her a dress for the annual ball. It is the outstanding dress at the affair, and Tacey's fortune is made. Before the story ends she is faced with one disaster and one triumph. The victory is Gaye's appointment to territorial treasurer, a position she told him he could win. The disaster is the story of Seely Dowden. Seely is a vibrant, violent character closely resembling the tragic characters Brock Brewton and Rosa Tench. She is about nine years old when Tacey, Gaye, and Nugget move next to the Dowdens on O.K. Street. Mrs. Dowden has committed suicide, leaving the boisterous, brawling miner with Seely and the baby Timmy. Seely's temper and vocabulary are about the same as her father's. When he is killed in a mine explosion, Tacey takes the two children in. One of the best pieces of writing in the book describes Seely's and Nugget's trip home from their first day of school. The town gang, charged with initiating new students, begins to molest Nugget. The volatile and violent Seely comes to his defense, and soon the attackers are scattered. This memorable scene ends with Seely taking the pants from the lone unescaped attacker, and making him climb a tree for Nugget's cap, after which she throws his pants up for the bare-bottomed, terrified boy to recover. As she does so, she calls triumphantly: "Here, then!" she told him. "Here are your dirty old pants." And she threw them savagely up on the tree where they hung. "Now you can climb up again, you naked baboon!" 1 6

When Nugget is taken in by the Herfords, Seely goes to the Watrous mansion. It is nine years from this time until the end of the story. At first Seely shows signs of becoming gentle under the care and supervision of the soft Miss Rudith. When Nugget finishes high school and goes to Butte, Montana, to study mining, Seely goes to 15 Richter, Tacey, p. 113. 16 Richter, Tacey, p. 75.

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an exclusive girl's school in California from which she is expelled. It is the first indication that the Watrous veneer has not been thick enough. Eighteen months later Nugget returns to Bisbee at Christmas, and Seely talks Nugget into taking her to Mexico for a bullfight, where she sneaks away from him and elopes with Tom Ferrebee, a loafer from Bisbee. The Watrouses have the marriage annulled, but a short time later Nugget hears that she has run off with a barber, Max Houras. Seely has a baby that is born dead. When Nugget returns to Bisbee, a fire destroys the main section of town in a memorable scene. Just after the fire Tacey and an aging Miss Rudith meet. Rudith Watrous tells Tacey that Seely has lost her child; Tacey has already heard. She answers: "You're her mother, but you w a n t m e to suffer. I won't suffer. I'm not responsible. Nine years ago you took her away. I wasn't fit - I wasn't decent to h a v e a child around me. Y o u brought her up your own w a y . Fine things and a fine mansion and never a look at m e ! W e l l , I hope you're satisfied. M a y b e it works with saints and decent people. But I w a n t to tell you there are kids w h o h a v e the devil and all hell to fight in themselves. Oh, it's easier on you to pet and spoil them and believe all they say and let them go their own w a y . It saves a lot of hard talk and nasty watching and uglier thinking. But I w a n t to tell you that if there is a Christ, it's one w h o knows w h a t sinners are and how they'll go straight to hell if He doesn't watch out and hold them up at every danger. M a y b e such a kid likes you when you let him do anything he wants to. But later if he goes bad, I tell you he'll hate and curse you - " "Please stop!" Miss R u d i t h begged h e r . 1 7

Shortly after this Miss Rudith is caught in a violent rain storm that causes her a lengthy illness and death. By this time Seely has returned to Bisbee and is living with Tacey. Nugget returns too, and the novel ends with his already quoted statement that the four are together in Bisbee again, as they had been a decade earlier on Youngblood Hill. John T. Flanagan in his article about Conrad Richter in the Southwest Review writes of Tacey Cromwell: Richter was less successful here than in The Sea of Grass in fusing atmosphere and characters. T h e scenes are too often the finely outlined but metallic plates of an album, accurate, colorful, but remote.... Tacey is... 1' Richter, Tacey, pp. 192-193.

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the scarlet woman with the heart of gold whose reform is perhaps genuine but is not made convincing. 18

This story of the Southwest is uneven in quality. Some of the scenes are well done, Bisbee is an authentic Western mining town, and Seely Dowden is one of Richter's most memorable characters. But the novel has faults, one of which is, as Mr. Flanagan points out, a lack of complete fusion of atmosphere and characters. This stems from a fault in the characterization of Tacey, the central figure. It is hard to picture her as a fallen woman, even in Socorro. She treats Gaye, throughout, more as a younger brother than as a lover, and his passionless character reinforces this brother-sister nature of the relationship. If we don't believe in Tacey as a fallen woman, it makes her fight for respectability less poignant. The whole problem of Tacey's characterization is a result of using a boy as narrator. Nugget is never aware of what goes on in the White Palace, nor is he aware of what his brother's relationship with Tacey is. Perhaps Richter believed that by using a boy narrator this lack of passion in the relations of Gaye and Tacey would seem natural. What really happened, however, was that the most important part of Tacey's character was never drawn in.

THE LADY

Fifteen years elapsed before Richter published another book about the Southwest. The Lady (1957) is in some respects his finest portrayal of that vast and lonely land. In this novel, which Richter completed in his sixty-seventh year, there is little wasted motion. The story of Dona Ellen, English-Spanish heroine of the Johnson y Campo dynasty, is presented with concision and brevity. This novel is one of Richter's fine technical achievements; the style is clean and the structure unencumbered. The narrator, Jud, tells the story after many years have passed. Each of the narrators in these three novels of the Southwest tells a story that happened when he was a boy growing into manhood. 18

John T. Flanagan, "Conrad Richter: Romancer of the Southwest", Southwest Review, XLIII (Summer, 1958), 192.

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Each is a sensitive observer, related to the main character closely enough to be interested in the action, but not so close as to be too involved emotionally. Hal Brewton is Colonel Brewton's nephew, Nugget Oldaker is Gaye Oldaker's half-brother, and J u d is the nephew of Albert Sessions, Dona Ellen's husband. Of the three, Nugget is the most emotionally involved in the action. J u d , like Hal, is an interested observer, almost completely objective. Richter, obviously nostalgic about his own boyhood, uses a boy as the recording instrument of his three stories of the land he came to at thirtyeight. Perhaps he felt that only with the enthusiasm and imagination of youth could an observer fully appreciate that land. J u d is never given a family name, but his origins are briefly sketched. Out of remorse for not having come West for his wife's health, after her death Jud's father comes to Moro where his wife's cousin, Albert Sessions, is a judge married to the wealthy and vivacious Dona Ellen. The Sessions have a son, Willy, who is about nine as the story begins. The narrative opens just after Jud's father has disappeared with over six thousand dollars of his employer's money that he was taking on a trip to buy sheep. J u d doesn't believe the current gossip that his father ran off with his paramour Mrs. Consuelo Blount, who has also disappeared. He defends his father vigorously. I said many things to his credit, and not a word of the two bad things I knew he had really done, one of them being with another woman while my mother lay in her last illness back in Missouri, and the other, his unwillingness to bring her West when they found she had lung fever. 19

Jud's English ancestry "colors" his judgment about the heroine. Her vitality and charm result from a combination of two nationality strains. And while her Spanish volatility leads to many of the novel's disasters, it is the spark that fires her nature. Albert Sessions, her English husband, is staid and quiet by comparison. Richter, the product of a commingling of many cultures, is obviously saying what has often been said before: that much of the vitality of the American is due to this mixed racial background. J u d is English enough to be a somewhat dispassionate narrator. 19 Conrad Richter, The Lady (New York, 1957), p. 4.

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Like Hal Brewton, he does not seem to develop through knowledge gained by observing the tragedy of Ellen Sessions. Unlike Hal and Nugget he does not go away to school. The only time-gap in the narrative occurs near the end, a necessary one to produce the final effect that Richter desired. J u d is an almost prefectly clear prism through which we view the narrative. His greatest emotion is a transference to Ellen of some of the properties of mother. The two main characters, the heroine and the villain, are memorably portrayed. Dona Ellen is a strong Richter heroine, and although she exhibits a close resemblance to her literary forebears, she is highly individualistic. The villain, Snell Beasley, Ellen's borther-in-law, is Richter's fiercest satanic character. He becomes so symbolic of evil, however, that his individuality suffers. J u d is greeted by Dona Ellen soon after his father disappears. She asks him to climb into her fancy buggy for a ride home. To my surprise, her accent was English rather than Spanish. The stylish slant of her sailor straw and the genteel softness of her driving gloves were certainly non-Mexican, her hair, a golden Anglo color against her blue eyes. But never would I get in beside her at that moment. There flashed through my mind the tale they told of her Spanish temper and her wild English love for horses. They said she was a girl away at convent school when a mozo had put a spade bit on her favorite riding horse and after long and cruel training taught him to bow low. When the girl came home from school, he had proudly showed her horse off to her, but one look at the maimed and bleeding mouth, and she had struck the mozo down with the heavy end of her crop. The story was that she killed him. 20

This early association of violence with Ellen is a prophecy of things to come, and the hint of violence in her nature is part of her racial heritage. It is closely related to her love of horses. Her relationship with Critter, her oscura colored horse, is interesting. She refers to him as her son, but there are sexual undertones involved. At the end he is the " m a n " that delivers her from her adversary. That as a girl she would kill a mozo for hurting her favorite horse is only a hint as to what she would do to defend the companion of her womanhood. This unusual connection of Ellen with horses is brought up early in a passage in which Jud is thinking about her hands. 2° Richter, The Lady, p. 15.

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Once... I heard her say amusedly that her hands didn't match the rest of her, that they were too large, that driving and especially holding back fast horses from her youth had developed them abnormally.21 Besides being an excellent horsewoman Ellen is also an excellent shot. She is as successful in getting her rifle to do her biding as she is in getting Critter to do it. Both rifle and horse are instruments of violence and death in her hands. When her vindictive brother-inlaw, Snell Beasley, has his cattleman JefTcoat drive through a pass on the Johnson y Campo sheep ranch that Ellen has warned him he must not use, JefTcoat is shot, at long range, through the forehead. Charlie, Ellen's only brother, turns himself in as the murderer, but Charlie isn't good with a gun. This act sets in motion a chain of events in the novel that result in seven more violent deaths, including those of Albert Sessions and his son Willy. Albert and Willy are never killed in the story, they just disappear, but it is highly probable that the cattlemen who have lost three men in this feud are responsible for the death of the Judge and his son. Ellen never seems to be remorseful for having begun this tragic chain of events. Her curious strain of joy and melancholy is an indication from the beginning that she is fated to be involved in much misery and death. She seems aware of this fate. For one brief interlude before Charlie's murder she tries to be charitable to her arch-enemy Snell Beasley. But once her brother is killed she reverts to the primitive passions that rule her being. On the other side of her nature Ellen is a sophisticated, socially adept, graceful woman. Otherwise the title of the book would be inappropriate. A descendant of a rich and powerful English ranch owner and a Spanish mother, she has been reared in an atmosphere of graciousness. Her manners are faultless, and she knows how to act with millionaire and peon alike. She resembles Lutie Brewton very closely in her feverish activity. "Evenings were lively with late dinners, wine, and cards, the days with horses, hunting, and game." 2 2 For Lutie, Tacey, and Ellen (as indeed for every Richter heroine), activity is more blessed than rest. In the three heroines we have treated this vitality has, in each case, been the cause of 21 Richter, The Lady, p. 24. 2 2 Richter, The Lady, p. 57.

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some grave evil. Each pays for her impetuous encounter with reality: Lutie loses her son Brock, and suffers the humiliation of having to return to the Colonel; Tacey is deprived of husband and children, and Ellen loses a brother, husband, and son. But reality never intimidates them; their wills are indomitable. They are able to draw on some inner spiritual source that enables them to endure any adversity, and finally to prevail. Judge Albert Sessions is less a full-blooded character than Colonel Brewton, but not as wooden as Gaye Oldaker. Although quietnatured, he is also a man of integrity. Like the Colonel he never admits that his wife has performed an evil action. He champions her and her cause in court, and it is this loyalty that costs him his life on the three-day trip to the Baca county courthouse. He and Willy disappear, never to be found. The book ends with this reminiscence of Jud's. I wish it were possible to a d d that Willy a n d Cousin Albert c a m e b a c k . . . b u t they never did. Their bodies were never found. Only the whispering wind knows where they lie, for those unknown men involved it in must be d e a d today. Now, looking back over sixty years, I feel this m a y be the reason why the unsolved mystery remains to m a n y of us the most haunting of earlier happenings in the annals of New M e x i c o . 2 3

Willy, the Sessions' only child, is a true son of the father; he has inherited none of Ellen's passion, and his sensitive nature is pained by violence of any kind. When his mother takes the two boys antelope-hunting and kills one of the animals with an excellent rifle shot, the scene depresses him instead of elating him. His pale, almost unreal presence, is a mute chastisement of Ellen and her unbridled life. Richter expertly characterizes three minor characters in the novel with short but deft strokes. Ezequiel, the wily owner of L a Casa Nunoz, is a memorable portrayal of a Spaniard. Mama Grande, Dona Ellen's mother, although appearing rarely in the novel, is well characterized. She shares with Hemingway's Pilar some of the solidity and earthiness of a certain kind of Spanish woman. Dona's father, although dead, and but briefly mentioned, 23

Richter, The Lady, p. 191.

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is memorable too. J u d sees a picture of a large, fair-complexioned, one-armed man standing with a gun over his trophies of the hunt. In this brief glimpse of the man we are aware of his strength and vitality. Throughout Richter's work the strong father bequeaths nothing of his strength to the son, and almost all of it to the daughter. Charlie is Dona Ellen's match in nothing. The villain, Snell Beasley, is one of the most stirring characters in Richter's fiction. A short, powerfully built man, he has married Dona's sister Ana, a two-dimensional figure, operating only as the link between Ellen and Snell. He is a lawyer who champions the cattlemen in any controversy with the sheep owners. His enmity towards Ellen began when Ellen's father died and the family wouldn't let him take over the ranch. He is avaricious and unscrupulous ; his most striking characteristic is his eyes. His face wasn't lifted. It was only the eyes that peered up, almost squinted... the fierce large eye and the smaller drooping one... I don't know which one frightened me most. 2 4

Later J u d remarks that, "His little eye twinkled like a dark star." 2 5 Near the end of the novel appears this sentence: " 'They say he has the evil eye', an old man said." 26 If the imagery isn't specific enough there is this reflection of Jud's: " H e was a devil, the very devil himself, I thought." 2 7 After the Judge and Willy disappear, and it is apparent that they can't be found, Beasley is still not satisfied, he must destroy Ellen completely. The only things she has left are Critter and the ranch. A long drouth and President Cleveland's sheep laws bring financial ruin to the ranch, and Ellen is forced to sell it at auction. Beasley buys it for a fraction of its worth. He also tries to buy Critter, but Ellen won't sell him so Beasley buys a Texas racing horse with which he hopes to humiliate Ellen by defeating her and Critter in a race. In the novel's last scene Ellen and J u d go to the great Johnson y Campo ranch to remove the few personal things that Beasley will 24 26 26 27

Richter, Richter, Richter, Richter,

The Lady, The Lady, The Lady, The Lady,

p. p. p. p.

150. 153. 172. 155.

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allow Ellen to take. After saying goodbye to the faithful employees, Ellen guides Critter down the road to Moro. Ellen's defeat at Beasley's hands is almost complete. If he can beat her in a race and establish his horse's superiority over Critter, his triumph will be perfect. Shortly after leaving the ranch Ellen and J u d hear hoof beats behind them. I n a moment the race is on. Critter, who would never let another horse pass him, is just a little too old for this race. As Snell's Texas racer begins to pass him, Critter lunges towards horse and driver, causing both buggies to be wrecked. J u d breaks his arm, and Ellen is badly bruised: J . Snell Beasley is killed. Richter's lady is rescued by her last valorous defender, her faithful horse. T h e ending is melodramatic, but the novel, as a whole, is saved by other factors. O n e of the most important of these is Richter's magnificent, and last description of the land he lived in for over two decades. A land capable of concealing a person as important as a district judge is certainly a formidable and inscrutable being. Silent and watching, it becomes an ancient and primeval background that dwarfs the h u m a n characters acting out their small tragedies. At Charlie's funeral on the ranch J u d has this feeling. A desert graveyard is to me one of the loneliest sights in the world, an expression of man's transience and unimportance on earth To me our little group of humans standing there by the open grave looked helpless and insignificant, mere grains of dust against the vast spaces beyond. 28

This is highly reminiscent of the passage in The Sea of Grass describing Dr. Reid's burial. " W e buried him... in one of those inexpressibly lonely and barren Southwestern graveyards." When Jud and Willy go riding on the huge Johnson y Campo range they see another face of the land. Riding out, we were prisoners suddenly escaped to the unfettered world of land and sky. Before, behind, and beneath us swept the open range, fenceless, seemingly without border or end. This was the older, more joyous world where the Creator and the mark of his hand were still to be seen and felt We watered our horses in ponds unnamed and unknown except by the tule, wild waterfowl, and the wandering herder.... Often we loitered in some distant spot so we could ride home through it without talking... our minds... open only to the delicious awareness of a... pagan and primitive existence. 29 28 Richter, The Lady, p. 81. 2 9 Richter, The Lady, pp. 91-92.

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T h i s strange a n d beautiful land, J u d later muses, is the last thing W i l l y sees before h e dies. W h e n the sheriff stops searching for Albert a n d Willy, Ellen begins a search of her o w n . J u d , w i t h her, is a g a i n impressed b y the strangeness of the land. ...here there was more than h u m a n graves abandoned to the barren waste. Something else could be felt, a wildness far back in time a n d the h u m a n heart. 3 0 T h e y search for a l o n g time, b u t w i t h o u t success. More than once I grew tired and rode m y pony off into the rugged country, hoping to find a clue to the missing travelers in some hidden d r a w or rincon, yet fearing to catch a glimpse of a Jeffcoat rider watching like a n Indian from one of the ridges. But I saw no one and nothing, only the immense dry broken earth, the endless sand and the black landmark of malpai which made it impossible for m e to get lost. Beyond lay a wilderness of arroyos, buttes, and mesas. 3 1 Finally they give u p the search. This was the first time, I think, that she ever admitted to herself the possibility that the enigma, like m a n y others she knew, would never be solved, Cousin Albert a n d Willy never found, their fate swallowed u p . . . in the well-kept secrets of this aloof and silent land. 3 2

3° Richter, The Lady, p. 127. 31 Richter, The Lady, p. 129. 32 Richter, The Lady, p. 130.

3. T H E O H I O T R I L O G Y

THE TREES

Conrad Richter never wrote a novel that did not have as one of its themes the American pioneer's struggle and resultant strength; three novels in which this theme is his central and abiding concern comprise his Ohio trilogy. His main purpose in writing the triolgy was to portray faithfully the history of the Ohio valley from its early settlement in the late eighteenth century until the advent of the Civil War. Richter always maintained that his interest in the past was to portray the everyday life of the ordinary pioneer, not the lives of those whose names appear in history books. What emerges in the trilogy, however, is not just the story of one family of pioneer settlers but an epic of Western settlement. On one level the trilogy is a realistic account of the settlement of the Ohio valley. Everything from household utensils to manners of speech has been conscientiously recorded by Richter. On another level the story is one more chapter in man's endless struggle with the forces of nature. The Luckett family - Worth, Jary, and their five children - travel from western Pennsylvania to Ohio at the beginning of The Trees (1940). On their journey they are confronted by many perils, from Indians to the darkness of the forest itself. Their journey stands for the journeys of innumerable pioneer families who, for one reason or another, left the security of a friendly settlement and trekked westward to the unknown and unfamiliar. In order to use the material he had collected about the Pennsylvania-Ohio frontier, Richter chose the story of a pioneer family, hunters first, and farmers later. If he had made the central figure Worth, the hunter and father of the Luckett clan, the scene of the triology would have had to move west, out of Ohio and the North-

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west Territory. Since Richter wanted to keep the scene in Ohio, instead of telling Worth's story he tells Sayward's. In her lifetime he is able to show the shift from hunter to farmer to town-dweller that actually took place in eastern Ohio from the late eighteenth to the middle of the nineteenth century. The Trees itself has less story than the Southwestern novels, but the interplay of people and land is better. Now, finally, the people and the land are perfectly fused. This novel, like Richter's others, is episodic, but here the episodes are closely connected because the psychic center of the three novels remains the same. A human being upon whom nothing is lost, Sayward Wheeler is Richter's finest character portrayal. Besides being episodic, The Trees resembles Richter's other work in having a strong heroine, a villain, and a woman of Eastern background who cannot cope with frontier conditions. The story is told in the language of the pioneer, and it includes several folk tales and superstitions. Richter's manner could probably be called realistic in the trilogy, although the subject is the romance of the frontier. The January 1, 1938, issue of The Saturday Evening Post included a Richter short story titled "Rawhide Knot". The "knot" is the marriage bond, and the people knotted are Portius Wheeler and Sayward Hewett. This story, appearing two years before The Trees, resembles the novel very closely in several passages, containing many of the same characters and incidents of the novel. The story covers about one hundred and twenty-five years. It begins with Sayward's deathbed reminiscence of her life on the Ohio frontier, and particularly her forced marriage to Portius. It ends with a news dispatch from the Albuquerque Enterprise dated September 1, 1937, describing a party at which Sayward's granddaughter Beriah danced a square dance. From Beriah's description it is evident that she is an early draft of Sayward. While "Rawhide Knot" contains some hints of what was to come in The Fields and The Town, most of its details are the facts Richter used in The Trees. A comparison of the two is informative. Sayward does not have a large, hearty, pioneer-type granddaughter in the trilogy but she does have an aunt of the same description in The

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Trees. The woman in the short story and the one in the novel resemble each other very closely and their name, in each case, is Beriah. Each is said to be very much like Sayward. In the story, which covers over a century, it was convenient to make her a granddaughter; in the novel, which covers less than a decade, she appears only in reminiscence as an aunt on her mother's side whom Sayward closely resembles. In each case Beriah is said to be the kind of woman men foolishly do not marry. I believe that Beriah is patterned after an ancestor of Richter's that he either knew or had heard a great deal about. One of the few weaknesses in The Trees is the portrayal of Portius Wheeler, the Bay State lawyer forced by a drunken band of settlers to marry the willing Sayward. He is the only two-dimensional character in the book. He doesn't live as Worth and Sulie and Louie Scurrah do. And yet he is very important, not so much in The Trees as in the second and third volumes of the trilogy. He is, like Gaye Oldaker and Albert Sessions, a taciturn man. The three are patterned after Richter's father who, he tells us, was friendly to people he knew, but reserved towards his sons. They are related to the father in The Waters of Kronos whom the narrator cannot communicate with. Richter was almost forced by the bent of his mind to make his main male characters like his father. Never able to fully fathom his father in real life, it was difficult for him to portray him effectively in fiction. The story includes many of the characters of the novel: Ascha, Genny, Sulie, and Wyitt (called Michael). Violent and savage Jake Tench is included, as is the trader George Roebuck. Worth Luckett appears as Thomas Hewett, and Granny MacWhirter, of the novel, as Granny Wildermuth. In the story, as in the novel, Jake Tench is Portius's first client. The story gives some information that the novel does not. Throughout the novel Portius waits for a letter from the East that never comes. Sayward thinks that it is probably from a woman he once loved, but the novel offers this only as conjecture. In the story, when Sayward says she will take the hermit Portius for her husband, this appears: " ' T h e r e was a high-toned Boston woman he wanted to marry once,' Jake told her brutally. 'He don't want the likes of

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y o u . ' " Leaving this matter unsolved in the novel is artistically better, because the contrast between Sayward and an adversary she is not quite certain about leaves more to her, and to our, imagination. Portius is unfaithful to Sayward in The Fields and one must decide what it is that Sayward lacks, that perhaps the Boston lady had, that makes Portius restless. This adultery is the beginning of the tragedy of Rosa Tench. The story reveals that Richter had great plans for Portius Wheeler. At the end of The Trees he has just begun his carrer and is talking to his first client, but in the story Sayward is called "the widow of the great Portius Wheeler whom Henry Clay had called the wheel horse of the nation". Wheeler does achieve greatness in The Town. The short story shows that Richter had details of The Town in mind a decade before he wrote it. All of the Lucketts are well drawn and memorable characters. As they cross from Pennsylvania to Ohio, this family of father, mother, four daughters and a son, struggles against the perils that surround it, symbolized by the dark forest. We know why this family moves west. The father is part Shawanee, and an inveterate hunter. He follows the game, and as settlements develop game grows scarce, so on he must go. Jary, his wife, loves the friendly and familiar life near other settlers. His decision to follow the trace west into Ohio is the beginning of the end for her. As the novel begins she is sickly; she is buried before it is a quarter of the way through, but she lives on in the memory of her children. She is the genius loci of the Luckett's log cabin in Ohio; the classic example in Richter of the Eastern woman unsuited to pioneer life. It is her daughter Sayward who has the strength and spirit to survive in this harsh environment. Jary's life and death are very poignantly drawn by Richter. Her hatred of the big trees that block out the sun, and her desire for neighbors that are not to be had, point up the loneliness and privation that the early pioneers had to face. She is prepared for burial ritualistically and buried with her feet toward the east and the rising sun. Of the many types that went west, from traders to farmers, all 1

Conrad Richter, "Rawhide Knot", The Saturday Evening Post, 210 (January 1, 1938), 57.

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scholars agree that the first was the hunter-trapper. Daniel Boone was not a figure without a counterpart. The hunter led the way, and when he felt civilization closing in on him he moved again. He was independent and crafty, knew the woods as well as the Indians, and learned and used many of the Indian's tricks for survival. In Richter's epic triology of the settling of the Ohio valley it is not surprising that so much of the first novel is about the hunter. Worth Luckett is one of Richter's finest character portrayals. A "woodsy" with a distinct distaste for civilization, he is never happy unless he is roaming the forest with his gun. While Richter is careful to point out the hardships of the pioneer who wanted to cut down the trees and sustain himself from the land, his treatment of the hunter is essentially romantic. During Sayward's first proposal of marriage, when her father seems over-anxious, she realizes that he would be free again if she was married and able to care for the other children. Sayward thinks: He could off and forget to come and they would be all right He would be free as a bird to wander. He could see those far places they told about where the deer had strange black tails. He could skin the striped tiger cat and the queen mountain ram that some called the big-horn. Even could he cross that far river they said was a river of flowing mud and see those Indians with blue eyes and hair yellow as a panther's. And when he tired, he could rest in the Spanish Settlements of the Illinois and listen to the women whose talk, they said, was like singing.2

This is the romance of the hunter, but Richter was also aware of the other side of his life. Chapter seventeen, "The Ever Hunter", includes the wonderful episode of Wyitt's first kill, and the rite of his becoming a hunter. As Sayward cleans the dried blood from the bruises inflicted on her brother by the large deer he shot, and wounded, she sees him in the future following the life of his father. That shock of sandy hair would be farther down over his shoulders then and his young face that had hardly fuzz on it as yet would be covered thick with a sandy beard. His buckskins would be bloody where he wiped his hands, and his hair would be full of nits. Not often would he wash, least of all his itchy feet. Where those feet would take him, a sister had no means of knowing and no business if she had She better wash him 2

Conrad Richter, The Trees (New York, 1940), p. 79.

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whilst she had the chance. Later she'd think of this many a time when he had gone off yonder with none perhaps but an Indian woman to tend him and a gray moose cow for milk. 3

Worth and Wyitt both follow the woods. In his portrayal of them Richter writes with a knowledge of the woods, and a sensitivity toward the life of the forest and its creatures. Only in The Light in the Forest (1953) and A Country of Stangers (1966) does he again treat this aspect of frontier life. In The Trees he has painted an unforgetable portrait of a very important pioneer type. Sayward Luckett, the heroine of the trilogy, is not as satisfying in this novel as are some of the other characters. She has all of the Richter virtues, and perhaps this is the problem. She is like Tacey Cromwell in her efficiency, and like Tacey she knows what she wants and usually gets it. Both push their wooden men to high positions in the government. Sayward is in many ways superior to Tacey; she is more sensitive, and she suffers more. Her story has no really happy ending. Even though her marriage to Portius occurs near the end of The Trees her joy is very sober; Sulie has been lost, Genny deserted for her sister by Louie, and Worth has fled beyond the Mississippi. She and Portius must work extremely hard to clear their land of the big trees. Sayward is expecting a child at the novel's end, but the reader is aware of the many hardships of the world that the child will be born into, even though it is brightened a bit by Portius getting his first client. Sayward embodies much of what Richter loved and esteemed. Although she cannot read or write she has the artist's sensitivity and an intuition enabling her to say or do the humane thing when needed. She is the vein of iron that is the backbone of the trilogy, and the recording instrument without which many events would pale to insignificance. While her portrait in this volume is weaker than in the following two, she is firmly established as the psychic center and unifying force of the trilogy. Three aspects of the book that help to make it a fine work are its language approximating that used by the pioneers, the many folk tales, and some highly artistic, ritualistic scenes. s Richter, The Trees, pp. 237-238.

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I n his acknowledgments Richter includes this paragraph: And finally to Mrs. George P. Riggs, a native of the Ohio Valley, and to those neighbors of pioneer stock the author knew intimately as boy and man in the mountains of Northern and Central Pennsylvania, whose great uncles, several times removed, carried the early pioneer language along with the early Pennsylvania rifle down into Kentucky and other Southern states, where the former long lingered, and later into Ohio where it soon all but vanished; whose mode of speech and thought so nearly approximated the store of early living speech compiled by the author from books, letters and personal records of colonial days that he felt he could do no better than to tell this story in their own words.4 This language of the pioneers, in Richter's hands, is an excellent medium for the trilogy. Any other language would have sounded strange for the uneducated Lucketts. When Portius speaks, that is a different matter. And when, in the later novels, the Wheelers become educated, their language reflects their learning. In using this wide range of language Richter is able to portray faithfully the dialect changes that took place over the eighty years of Sayward's life. In order to make the story more authentic Richter goes one step further than the use of dialect. He includes several folk tales and superstitions that were prevalent at the time of the action: if a person sees a corpse candle someone will die, and if you look closely you will see the face of the doomed one in the candle. Women are dull in the dark of the moon, but bold and free when the moon is full. I f a single girl puts salt on her tongue before going to bed, she will find out who she will marry because the man who offers her a drink in her dream will be that person. An Indian woman will never give her white lover up, but after seven years will come back to face him carrying his child. A witch can put a sign on a gun that will make the hunter lucky or unlucky. These superstitions are effective in keeping the reader aware of the primitive way of life the pioneers followed. As the trilogy progresses, and the society becomes more complex and sophisticated, these folk tales and superstitions become less prevalent. For this reason The Trees contains more than the other two novels. T h e 4

Richter, The Trees, "Acknowledgments".

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changing dialect and the disappearing superstitions help Richter to portray the changes that took place in the Ohio Valley over almost a century of development. The presence of many ritualistic scenes is as much a literary touch as an historical one on Richter's part. There are four scenes in The Trees that are particularly well done. The first is the ritual of preparing the mother, Jary, for burial, and the burial itself. Richter is able to show effectively the poignancy of her death by the way each member of the family tries to help in the proper burial of the mother. It is a lonely and memorable scene in the dark, silent woods. Chapter seven, "Maidenhead", ends with another ritual. Sayward has grown u p ; she has filled out both physically and emotionally. She goes to the river, and removing her short gown plunges into the moving water to bathe. She is aware, at this moment, alone in the wilderness, that she has finally become a woman, and she rejoices. Chapter seventeen, "Ever Hunter", is one of the finest chapters in the book. It is the story of Wyitt, a boy of eleven, and his first day alone in the woods with a gun. He wounds a deer with his last shot and while trying to cut the buck's throat from the rear is lifted on its back and carried violently through the forest. The buck finally tires and is killed by Wyitt, but not before the boy is torn and cut and scarred for life. This is his initiation into the life of the hunter, and although he is hurt, he is elated as he brings his first kill home to his eldest sister. The final ritualistic scene in the book is the one most closely related to the title of the novel. The last chapter, "Black Land", describes the newly married Sayward and Portius in their battle to clear the giant trees from their land. They work extremely hard and finally, with the all-out help of their neighbors, they are able to make a small clearing in the dense and almost impenetrable forest. Thus the book ends with man's partial triumph over the trees, and the beginning of a new way of life for the pioneer of the Ohio valley in his fields. This novel depicts the most elemental stage of the frontier. The forest is the antagonist that Sayward, as a woman who desires a

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home and stability, must fight against. At the end she has her clearing, her man, and is expecting a child, but the trees have taken their toll. Jary is dead, Sulie lost, and Worth gone, and the forest is partially responsible for all three of these events. Wyitt desires to follow his father, and Louie Scurrah, a hunter and therefore identified with the forest, has deserted one sister to run off with another. The Trees is a deeply satisfying novel of man's never-ending struggle with the forces of nature.

THE FIELDS

The Fields is not as successful a novel as The Trees. Worth, Sayward's colorful father, and symbol of the hunter, is gone. Wyitt, a hunter too, leaves before The Fields is a third over. There is no one to replace these memorable figures, nor the other members of the Luckett family, Jary, Sulie, and Achsa. The novel covers about two decades, and serves as a connecting link between the fine first and third novels of the trilogy. Sayward gives birth to eight children during this period, and each child has a distinct personality. But the children, and Portius, cannot make up for the vigor of both character and scene in the earlier novel. Sayward grows in stature, and is better portrayed than in the earlier novel. The elements of language, folk tale, and ritual that enhanced the first novel are present here, but altered. Instead of using the idiom of the pioneer unobtrusively as he did in The Trees, Richter distractingly puts quotation marks around certain dialect pronunciations such as "yaller" and "cam". There are fewer folk tales and superstitions, but this is understandable since the people are moving from the primitive, lonely existence of the woods to the more complex existence of the small town. The hunter has been replaced by the farmer, the woods, at least partially, by the fields. Sayward is a repository of all the old ways, and it is in her that the past blends with the present. But Sayward's children are citizens of a world already far different from the one she knew as a child. An article on the Ohio trilogy, "Folklore in the Novels of Conrad Richter", by John T. Flanagan, appeared in the Spring, 1952,

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issue of Midwest Folklore. It is a study that points out the folklore elements of language, folk tale, and superstition that appear in the three novels, but particularly in the first two. It ends with this statement: [Sayward's] excellence rests squarely on Richter's depiction of her as a woman strongly if often unconsciously influenced by racial and folk tradition. Her cultural legacy makes her what she is and demonstrates the tremendous importance of folk survivals in the frontier period. 5

The Fields is more episodic than The Trees because it covers a longer period of time; each episode treats an aspect of the life of the pioneers. Sayward's first daughter, Sulie, is burned to death in a memorable chapter that shows the terror of fire. It appeared in the May, 1945, issue of the Atlantic Monthly as "The Face at the Winder". It is to Resolve, the oldest Wheeler child, that a dark face with short hair appears in the greased paper window of the cabin when Sayward is pregnant with Sulie. Sayward tells him he is imagining things, but she is frightened, and considers it all ill omen. One of her most difficult trials comes when the young Sulie, a bright, active child, catches fire while playing in the ashes of a fire used in making soap. By the time Sayward gets to her she is a screaming ball of fire. The child dies, and Resolve, at her grave, tells Sayward that the face he saw at the window was the charred face of the burned Sulie. "The Nettle Patch", chapter thirteen of The Fields, appeared in the January, 1946, issue of the Atlantic Monthly. It is about Guerdon, Sayward's second son, in a scene depicting another pioneer problem, snake bite. Guerdon cuts off the tip of his bitten finger in an heroic action that saves his life. The Fields is essentially the story of the pioneer's battle with, and final triumph over, the trees. There are two chapters that treat this central theme very well. Chapter six, "His Own Man", is Wyitt's final appearance in the trilogy. It describes a rather brutal slaying of all the forest animals by a large group of settlers who systematically march on the animals until they are forced into an open field. Surrounded, the animals panic and are killed in large numbers. John T. Flanagan, "Folklore in the Novels of Conrad Richter", Midwest Folklore, II (Spring, 1952), 5-14.

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This marks the end of the hunter's day in this part of the Northwest Territory. No longer will the settlers be bothered by the wild animals who lived in the dark forest when they arrived. The farmer, protecting his crops, has destroyed this last vestige of wild life. The hunter must move on. Wyitt, Sayward's only brother, cannot adapt himself to the life of a farmer. He hears the call of the wild as his father did. When the giant massacre is over he goes west, with only his gun and a friend, to find a new life for himself. Chapter seventeen, "Red Bird", completes the cycle of change from forest to field. It is fitting that Billy Harbison, an old hunter, is the central figure here. He has not adapted himself to the regimen of farming and so, game being scarce, he and his family are poor. He has caught a red bird that he has caged and is going to sell to one of the settlers. The appearance of small birds and field mice signals the end of the forest's dominion. These animals survive only where land has been cultivated; they are symbolic of the settler's success over the trees. But Sayward realizes that progress is not all good for with the gain of the fields she has lost a father and a brother who are ever-hunters. Old Billy Harbison reminds her of her father and the old days. Sayward muses: Yes, those days Worth Luckett and Billy Harbison with their rifles and hounds counted for something around here. But the country had changed and passed Billy by.... His work was following the woods. N o one was better at it that he, but that's all he could do. Now the times had left him behind, for he couldn't fit himself to the new. 6

Billy Harbison stands for many hunters on the American frontier who could not fit themselves to the new. He is the last of that race of fierce individualists in the Ohio valley. An important aspect of this novel is Sayward's desire to have Portius found a school on their property. Although illiterate she has the wisdom to realize the value of education. The school is built, and Resolve is portrayed as a dedicated and idealistic student. He helps his mother as she practices writing her name on a slate. One day when he returns from school she is ready to show him the result of her hard work. She hands him the slate. "Can you read it, Resolve?" she asked him anxiously. 8

Conrad Richter, The Fields (New York, 1946), pp. 253-254.

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"Oh, I can read it good," he told her, pleased, trying to talk like his teacher. "What does it say?" " I t says your name, Sayward Wheeler." "You knowed!" she protested. "Could your pappy read it, do you think?" "Anybody could," Resolve told her. His mam's face grew almost cruel with hidden feeling. She held the slate straight out in her hand and gazed unwinkingly at the letters. "That writing stands for me!" she said. " I can't get over it." There was a power of pride and wonder in her voice.7 Richter's portrait of his great heroine taken as a whole is his highest artistic achievement. H e r portrait is highly successful because she is a w o m a n he loves intensely, a n d because he has been able to get enough psychic distance to render her artistically satisfying. The Fields, though less successful than the other two volumes of the trilogy, is successful in developing Sayward's figure until she approaches the stature of the Great Mother. T h e book begins with a letter from Wheelers' lawyer asking vital questions about Portius a n d Sayward. She candidly admits to George Roebuck, who reads her the letter, that she is a "woods girl" and illiterate, and also that Portius was forced to m a r r y her by J a k e Tench and his drunken friends. T h e last question asks if she is keeping her husband from returning home. She answers: "Me and Portius came out here in the woods and here's whar we aim to make our stake. You kin say I said so. You kin say I'm wilful, too, and set in my ways." 8 H e r origin in the woods and her instinctive perseverance to survive in the way she feels is best are part of her portrait as Great Mother. She is slow to act, but once she does it is with deliberate a n d unflinching movement. W h e n the pressure on her to move to the new town of Tateville is greatest, she reverts to an ancient ritual to solve her dilemma. Realizing that she alone, of all her family, is the one who is keeping them from the easier life of the town, she walks completely around her land. From field to forest to river to swamp to cabin she circumscribes the earth that is her legacy from her ancestors. From the earth she gains strength, a n d the conviction ' Richter, The Fields, p. 170. 8 Richter, The Fields, p . 10.

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that she and her family will remain on the land, no matter how hard the work necessary for survival. Everyone in the settlement knows that Miss Bartram is pregnant with Portius's child except Sayward. Her sister Genny finally has to tell her. It hurts her deeply; she returns to her cabin crushed in spirit. As a primitive being she instinctively seeks the land and brute animals to let off "the black bile" she feels for Portius. She harnesses the two oxen, gelded by her own hand, and doggedly begins to plow her field. The children, sensing her depression, beg her to lie down, but she rebukes them. Her oxen, Buck and Bright, are slow witted, but they have tolerance, patience and strength. She learns from them, and from the dark earth, the formula for survival. Having brought us to the threshold of the more complex world of The Town, The Fields ends with a scene depicting a large gathering celebrating the launching of the first boat built on the Ohio river. It has served its purpose as a connecting link between the primitive and almost primeval world of The Trees, and the complex and almost modern world of The Town.

THE TOWN

The Town, the last volume in the trilogy, is Richter's biggest book in every way. It deepens the concepts presented in the first two books, and it introduces new themes. The portrait of the great pioneer heroine Sayward is completed, but here she shares the protagonist's role with her youngest son, Chancey: he is the spokesman for "modern" social thinking, she for pioneer's views. This contrast between two ways of life, one soft and the other hard, forms the core of the novel, and gives Richter a chance to state clearly his views on both ways. Sayward's life is an eloquent testimonial to the wisdom of the pioneer way and she deserves to be included among the great fictional characters of American literature. In this novel Portius reaches his full stature as a shrewd and joke-playing Yankee. He is at his best when someone is trying to take advantage of him. Zephron Brown, a villainous and miserly

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man, sells Portius a load of hay when Portius is drunk. Zephron, to the delight of his cronies, remains on the load and so is included in the weight Portius is charged for. Portius proposes that they finish the transaction with a drink. As Zephron begins to leave the tavern, Portius informs him that he is no longer a free man, but belongs to him because he just paid for him. Zephron is first surprised, but then terrified. T h e tavern is in an uproar. In order to buy himself free Zephron must pay Portius the entire price of the load. So the Yankee gets his hay free, and buys a round for the house. No one ever gets the best of him. When the inhabitants of Moonshine Church are debating whether they should give the town a new name or not he takes both sides. He writes a poem rebuking the people who want to change the name, and then, when the council votes for a change, he suggests the name that is finally used. He calls his son " N o a h " for a long time after the unfortunate youth is washed down the river on a raft during a flood. When asked to help certain virtuous people who are in need he replies: "I never help that kind of person. There's a hundred other people that will. I help only the devil's poor. When you're taking up a collection for somebody drunken and worthless that nobody else will give a hand to, come around and I'll contribute." 9

Sayward muses after he is dead: Oh, sometimes he had been hard to put up with, and yet that was the very part of him she would have parted with last. His feeling for rogues, she always thought, came from his being part of one himself. He liked to take sly digs at folks, and none was so honest or sacred as to be spared. 10

If there is ever a time when he is outwitted he has a ready answer: " I was just a thinking, and if I hadn't been a thinking, I wouldn't have thunk that w a y . " 1 1 During a cholera epidemic in Americus, when several inhabitants die from the disease, Portius suffers from it but survives. The doctor explains that Portius is "too pickled and preserved by alcohol to die". Portius is closely related to the Yankee portrayed in Constance Rourke's excellent book, American Humor. Rosa Tench is Richter's most tragic character. T h e child of an 9

Conrad Richter, The Town (New York, 1950), p. 248. l" Richter, The Town, p. 397. ii Richter, The Town, p. 398.

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affair between Portius Wheeler and the young Philadelphia school teacher, Miss Bartram, she is destined for a dark life and even darker death. We first see her in the slovenly Tench household: The door of the house stood open and amid the dim disorder inside Chancey glimpsed a girl Her face looked white and delicately perfect in this untidy and disorderly place A grimy child clung to one hand but the girl herself looked miraculously clean and spotless as if no dirt could soil her. 12

This is an irony, in a sense, because the opprobrium of her origin rests so heavily on her that she finally tries to remove the guilt by cutting herself to pieces with an eelspear. Throughout her short life she seems too good for this world. In death her young blood drips on the neurotic mother who failed her in every way. Her love for Chancey never seems wrong to her because she never realizes that he is her half-brother. That she could remain unaware of this when everyone else, including Chancey, knows, is another indication of her ethereal nature. She tries for a marriage of heaven and earth with Chancey but fails. At first it seems that nothing can prevent their union. "They understood the very thoughts of each other. Things spoke to them with the same words." 1 3 But Chancey is told by his father that he must never see Rosa again, and why. Despite this warning the two pass through an idyllic summer when they are in their late teens. It all ends at a fair when Rosa jumps into the basket suspended beneath a balloon that is taking people for rides above the city. Chancey, already in, and afraid of the crowd's reaction, ignores her. She, seeing her chance to escape this petty world of gossip and meanness, cuts the rope and they are free. But Chancey, a weakling in many ways, pulls the cord and Rosa's balloon deflates once and for all. One of the characters talking about her death says: "Dr. Keller said she was all cut up. He didn't see how a body could cut their own self that way. He said it looked exactly like she thought she had something wrong inside of her and was trying to cut it out." 14

Rosa lives in a dream world she is unable to sustain. When the 12 13 14

Richter, The Town, p. 146. Richter, The Town, p. 156. Richter, The Town, p. 357.

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other inhabitant of that world betrays her, she does the only thing such a being can do when faced with reality, she flees it. Rosa's mother, after her marriage to the vile and violent Jake Tench, retreats into a dim world of unreality. It is a marriage supposedly arranged by Portius to protect himself, and to soothe his conscience concerning the woman and the child she was expecting. He never speaks to either mother or daughter again, and as he rises in prestige and affluence, they decline further into squalor and poverty. Rosa's mother retreats into the world of fiction through books loaned to her by the wealthy Mrs. Phillips. She sits in her chair, never going out, never combing her hair or washing, year after year, like a character from a Gothic novel, faintly reminiscent of Dickens' Miss Havisham. And when the world outside her impinges on her consciousness she regards it as an intrusion. While they talked, Rosa's mother sat there hardly listening. All the peculiar yellow light from the novel had gone out of her eyes, as if what she looked at and listened to now wasn't real life or true. No, the real world was in the book she still held in her hand, keeping the place open, waiting to return to it as soon as this make-believe scene from a story was over. 15

This confusion of the real world with an unreal one exists in a third mind in the novel. Chancey Wheeler, the youngest child of Sayward and Portius, is the only weakling in the family. He resents, all his life, the robust health and the fearlessness of his parents and siblings. As a child he quickly decides that this is not his real family, that he is a foster child. He calls himself Henry Ormsbee, and runs away. He doesn't get very far, but this symbolic alienation continues throughout the book. He retreats from the physical world into the world of the mind where his dreams are more real to him than reality. His fancifulness puzzles his mother; the unsubstantiality of his world is contrasted throughout the novel with the solid substance of hers. Chancey is a searcher. After Rosa's wretched burial among the children of Cain in a cemetery called the "Devil's Acre" he tries to find some consolation for her death. The first person to try to reach Chancey is Dr. Shotwell, the family minister. Chancey waits for 15 Richter, The Town, p. 218.

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some charitable word of hope concerning Rosa, "But nothing rose to the good doctor's lips save piety and justice and the uncompromising word of God". 1 6 Father Murtrie, the Catholic priest in Americus, also fails, although Chancey finds some peace in the dark interior of St. Martin's Church. His agnostic father's solution does not appeal to Chancey either. " ' . . . I and you and all whom we know in Americus today will some day be only unthinking and unfeeling clods whirling on this dead planet.'" 1 7 Finally he meets Johnny Appleseed, whose gospel of immortality out of Swedenborg's Heaven and Hell cures him of some of the "disease" he has suffered over Rosa's death. Chancey is a poet, with the poet's eye and the poet's sensitivity. He advocates the reduction of hardship in the universe, and is captivated by the social thinking of Robert Owen. In Sayward's words Richter rebukes these theories of socialism: Such schemes never worked in this world and never will but there's always cracked people getting born who try to get something for nothing There always was work and there always will be. Some folks just never want to do any. 1 8

Chancey moves out of the Wheeler mansion as soon as possible to work for the Americus Centinel. He later becomes editor of the New Palladium, a liberal Cincinnati newspaper. Because of the views expressed in it, the Mew Palladium is a financial failure, but is supported by an unknown benefactor. In it Chancey attacks his mother and everything she stands for. When he comes home to her bedside, where she lies unconscious just before death, his eldest brother Resolve tells him that she is the benefactor who has supported him all these years. Chancey stood there thunderstruck. He couldn't, he wouldn't, believe such a thing - that his cherished patron, his philanthropic and ardent reader, who had supported not only his paper but his own courage and spirit, was nobody save his own mother. 19

He realizes immediately that now he must re-evaluate his " Richter, The Town, p. 362. i? Richter, The Town, p. 365. « Richter, The Town, p. 310. 1 9 Richter, The Town, p. 429.

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mother's world, the world of the pioneer, that he has sneered at all his life. He must determine if her philosophy of hard work and selfsufficiency isn't, after all, a better one in this world of challenge and hardships than his. He wishes to ask her some questions. But it is too late. There was no quiver of the eyelids. His mother only lay there, silent and oblivious as in the majesty of death. He knew now that she would never answer him again, that from this time on he would have to ponder his own questions and travel his own way alone. 20

Sayward is Richter's greatest fictional character. In her life and in her words she preaches the gospel of hard work that has appeared in his works from his earliest short stories to this, his Pulitzer Prize novel. Take away all the hardship from the world, and man wouldn't amount to much, she opined. He'd just lay back and grow fat and feeble as a pug on a lap. 21

As the mother of ten children, and the psychic center that connects three generations, she is superb. Richter's insight into the mother is excellent. Thinking about Chancey's feeling that he is a foster child, Sayward muses: Did a young one, Sayward wondered, ever know how its mother felt for it? Likely not. Perhaps some dark night long after its mammy was dead and gone, such a one now grown up might recollect the glimmer of light around it when it was little. But hardly could it guess how tender its mother had held it in her mind, how loving, how anxious for blessings on it, how constant and everlasting, year in and year out, even when it was a grown man going about his business.22

Portius is not close to the children. From these two portraits in the trilogy, and the picture given of J o h n Donner's relationship to his mother and father in The Waters of Kronos and A Simple Honorable Man, it is quite evident that Richter drew upon his own relationship with his parents in writing these novels. I n his non-fiction he mentions that his father was friendly and jovial with most people, but quite reserved when dealing with his sons. T h e same thing is 20

Richter, The Town, p. 433. 1 Richter, The Town, p. 373. 22 Richter, The Town, p. 21. 2

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said of the father in The Waters of Kronos. Of course Sayward and Portius are fictional characters, but Richter is very interested in himself in relation to his ancestors. He is also quite straightforwardly honest. I feel that biographical criticism is not dangerous in this matter, and I think that it offers us the beginning of an explanation for the insight into Sayward's character as mother that is evidenced in the trilogy. She is the eternal female. Her ritual washing in the stream in The Trees, when she reaches puberty and inspects the signs of her budding womanhood, is mirrored in a scene in The Town. Now the cycle of mothering is over. She is alone in her cabin and about to take her bath; she examines herself as she did long before in the stream. Now why, she wondered, did a woman's hams have to get heavy just when she needed them supple and light the most? Could those hams spell out that no more child would rise up between them? And why did her breasts... hang down now Were they a telling her now they didn't have to stand up and feed greedy mouths any more? Was that it? Was that the change that had come on her, that never could she give flesh, blood and breath to a squalling young one again? 23

She is the female in other ways too. She is a daughter and sister of great warmth. It is in these two capacities that she suffers the ending of two actions that began in The Trees. Worth, her hunterfather whom she hasn't seen in thirty-five years, returns to Americus a ragged but willful old man. He won't stay in her large house nor accept new clothes, but insists on living in a shack by the river. Once an impressive and successful pioneer hunter, he is now only a shell of a man. She is very kind to him, but it hurts her to see in him so little of the man she remembered so well. As he dies he reveals to Genny and Sayward that their lost sister Sulie is alive in Indiana. Sayward writes to her but receives no answer. So Sayward, Genny, Chancey, and Massey go to Vinita, Indiana, to see the long lost Sulie. They find her in an old cabin on the outskirts of town with an Indian husband and Indian children. She refuses to recognize them as her sisters even after Genny sings a song of their 23

Richter, The Town, pp. 5-6.

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childhood to help her remember. She does remember, however, and asks that the two white children be left alone with her. They tell Sayward and Genny that Sulie stroked their hands and cried. But she is adamant until the end, never admitting that she was once Sulie Luckett. Sayward knows why. Sulie is ashamed of her life before the obvious affluence of her sisters with white husbands and white children. She is an Indian, and must always live as one. Richter states here and in The Light in the Forest that a white person captured young by the Indians generally resented being given back much later to his white relatives. Sulie had passed the point of no return. Sayward is saddened by this meeting with her youngest sister Sulie, but she meets this unexpected event with wisdom. That was the way to look at it, Sayward told herself. Sulie might have had a hard life, but it was better than if she had died that time in the woods and been put under ground. She had grown up and tasted life. She knew what it meant to give birth to young ones, to nurse and watch them a growing. She had a cabin, a man and family of her own. It mightn't look like much of a life to white folks, but you had to take life as it was and not as you wished you had it. 24

Sayward meets life as Richter believes it should be met. Relying on some inward strength she always faces up to reality, never flinches. Richter states the source of this strength through a minor character's speech: "What gave our generation enterprise and a keen mind was the deprivation we had in the woods, the hard work we enjoyed and the freedom from deadly refinement and ease." 25

If the hardships almost overcome you, as they sometimes do, then follow the advice of an early saying: "Spit on your hands and take a fresh holt." This concept of the necessity and desirability of hardship and hard work is the central theme in Richter's writing. This dominant theme of Richter's is clearly related to what has come to be known as the "Protestant ethic". Perry Miller writes in an anthology titled The American Puritans: 2" Richter, The Town, p. 270. 25 Richter, The Town, p. 386.

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Actually, it [the Protestant ethic] is a logical consequence of Puritan theology: man is put into this world, not to spend his life in profitless singing of hymns or in unfruitful monastic contemplation, but to do what the world requires, according to its terms. 26 T h e Puritan called it "loving the world with 'weaned affections'". H e worked because it was his particular vocation, and it gave honor to God. H e tried to keep detached from the material possessions resulting from his industry. It was a razor's edge and it is not surprising that so many fell to one side or the other. Miller says that "Franklin... transported the Puritcan ethic of Christian industry into a secular context." 2 7 M a n y followed Franklin, and the further this doctrine of work got from the original Puritan ideas of "vocation" the more materialistic it became. Ralph Gabriel gives a fine treatment of this problem in The Course of American Democratic Thought. In chapter thirteen, "The Gospel of Wealth of the Gilded Age", he writes: To be diligent in one's earthly calling was, then, a moral duty, a precept of that fundamental law basic to the theories of Calvinism and later of the democratic faith. To produce with energy but to consume sparingly and to the glory of God was the seventeenth-century Puritan doctrine sanctifying work and thrift. 28 H e continues: Such was the Christian form of the late nineteenth-century gospel of wealth. Its secular counterpart differed from it only in the dropping of the supernaturalistic trappings. This vision received its most cogent expression in the writings of Andrew Carnegie... who said to the socialist: "Civilization took its start from the day when the capable, industrious workman said to his incompetent and lazy fellow, 'If thou dost not sow, thou shalt not reap.' and thus ended primitive communism by separating the drones from the bees." 29 It would seem that Sayward practices the secular form of the "Puritan ethic" combined with an acknowledgment of the 26 27 28

29

Perry Miller, ed. The American Puritans (Garden City, 1956), p. 171. Miller, The American Puritans, p. 172. Ralph Henry Gabriel, The Course of American Democratic Thought (New York, 1956), p. 156. Gabriel, The Course, p. 159.

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existence of God. Since her husband, Portius, is an avowed Agnostic, his position is clear: he works for profit on this earth. She goes to church and has the children baptized, but she is suspicious of complex religious doctrine. There is nowhere the hint that she regards work as a "vocation" giving honor to God. Rather, she believes that the condition of man is such that work is the only sensible solution to his problems. Richter's belief in the efficacy of work seems to me, finally, merely a faith in work as the most practical way of doing things rather than as a means of salvation. Sayward's industry results in her becoming the wealthiest person in Americus. The trilogy is at its best when the characters are allowed to live and speak for themselves. Sayward is a memorable character, and one of the great mothers in American literature. She is the pioneer heroine who must stand for the many who braved the rigors of the frontier, and who thereby helped to form this vigorous and great nation. Richter writes in his "Acknowledgments" at the beginning of The Town: Finally the author wants again to set down his obligation to those men and women of pioneer stock among whom he lived in East and West, whose lives and whose tales of older days gave him a passionate love for the early American way of thought and speech, and a great respect for many whose names never figured in the history books but whose influence on their own times and country was incalculable. If this novel has had any other purpose than to tell some of their story, it has been to try to impart to the reader the feeling of having lived for a little while in those earlier days and of having come in contact, not with the sound and fury of dramatic historical events that is the fortune of the relative, and often uninteresting, few, but with the broader stuff of reality that was the lot of the great majority of men and women who, if they did not experience the certain incidences related in these pages, lived through comparable events and emotions, for life is endlessly resourceful and inexhaustible. It's only the author who is limited and mortal. 30

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Richter, The Town.

4. F O U R PENNSYLVANIA NOVELS

THE FREE MAN

The Free Man and Tacey Cromwell are Richter's two least successful novels. They were published in 1942 and 1943 between The Trees and The Fields. The Free Man was published during World War II, and it is very obviously a "patriotic" novel. Since it contains only one hundred and forty-seven pages it is less a novel than a long short story, and it incorporates many of the "popular" devices of Richter's earlier short stories. It is a propagandistic work in two ways: it was meant to make the American enthusiastic about his current fight for freedom by picturing romantically his original fight in that cause, and it paints a very glorious picture of the part played by the Pennsylvania Dutch in the fight lor American freedom in the Revolution. The purpose here was to allay any fear that Americans had concerning the loyalty of German-Americans during the struggle with Hitler's Germany. This novel was Richter's first attempt to portray both his ancestors and his home state in fiction. Henner Dellicker, the free man of the title, came over to Philadelphia from his home along the Neckar River in the Palatinate. Dellicker's ancestor, Barbara Wenz, who was burned publicly in Holland with her tongue screwed fast in her mouth, is also Richter's ancestor according to the "Foreword". As in the trilogy Richter tried to use the language of the time and place. He writes in the "Foreword": The sound of the Pennsylvania dialect, not a corruption of German as some suppose but a more ancient, earthy and less serious-hearted tongue, has been familiar in his [the author's] ears since childhood. 1 1

Conrad Richter, The Free Man (New York, 1943), p. vii.

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Richter used almost this same form of speech in his short story about the Amish of Pennsylvania, "The Last Man Alive", which appeared in 1948. It is especially evident in the use of "once" in such expressions as "listen once" or "wait once". One critic writing about the novel regarded it as a great disappointment. He felt that because Richter had written a good novel about his adopted Southwest in The Sea of Grass, and had followed it with his fine novel about late eighteenth century Ohio in The Trees, he would naturally write very well about his own ancestors in his home state. The Free Man did not live up to this critic's expectations. It contains evidence of the same kind of painstaking research into early manners and mores that the earlier novels do, but the plot is too melodramatic: Henry Free rises from bound boy to rich merchant, then marries the snobbish English woman who is cruel to him when he is her servant. As one critic wrote: "This is one of those tales that starts extremely well and ends up as a Hollywood costume piece." 2 At the beginning of the story Henry Free is an old man presiding over his highly successful trading establishment. His nephew Yorrick and a newspaperman from Reading, "lawyer" Hartranft, ask him about his long life. This sets the stage for the free man's reminiscence that is primarily concerned with his early manhood. As the criticism just quoted points out, the tale does start well. Richter researched the travel conditions to which immigrants were subjected just before the Revolution. The picture he paints of the St. Andrew, and her villainous Captain Grigg, is frightening. The four hundred Swiss and Palatines aboard suffer greatly, and Henner loses both of his parents at sea due to the rigor of the trip. Besides the indignities of the trip, the immigrants suffer a further injustice. Instead of being free upon arrival in Philadelphia they find that they are all indentured servants. In a white slave market scene families are separated mercilessly. Henner is taken by the Bayleys. He is a wilful youth and it is evident that he will not remain a servant very long. His escape into the Pennsylvania Dutch country west of Reading is interesting, as is his marshaling of the 2

Bess J o n e s , Saturday Review of Literature, 26 (September 11, 1943), 10.

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inhabitants into a fighting unit when news of Concord and Lexington reaches them over the Blue Mountains. This is historical fiction written at a competent literary level. If the frame constructed in chapter one and the epilogue were left out, the novel would stand as an interesting account of a Pennsylvania Dutchman's fight both for his own freedom and the freedom of his adopted country. It is written in a competent, clean prose. What brings the novel down to the level at which the New Torker reviewer could call it "mediocre" is the "Hollywood ending" presented through the first chapter and the epilogue. The New York Times critic who reviewed the book was more charitable than this, but even he found it a disappointing book. Mr. Richter has sometimes let his wealth of research obscure his characters. Some of his pages read like notes for a brilliant but unorganized history of an era. The book is too fragmentary to give more than a vignette of the country, and the people. 3

Richter published one other piece of fiction in 1943. "The Good Neighbors" is an interesting story because it again pursues the theme of the bortherhood of man that underlies much of his fiction. It appeared in the October 30 issue of The Saturday Evening Post. Peter Noll, a small boy who lives in Pine Mills, Pennsylvania, is a good neighbor all his life. As a youth he journeys into the Canaltown section of Pine Mills and finds a friend in Harry Owen. Later, when he is working for a newspaper, he falls in love with Aleksandra Aksakoff. At twenty he enlists to fight in World War II, and is wounded in China. As the story ends he is in the Orient, still making friends. I suppose the theme of this story is that the heart is not subject to considerations of economics, nationality, or geography. Richter is good to our allies. Aleksandra is a Russian and the Chinese in the story are very friendly toward Americans. In 1943 Richter was repeating during World War II a theme he had treated in 1916 during World War I. Peter Noll, as well as Thaleen Juste ("The Laughter of Leen"), could say, "all peoples who have been good I love". 3

William DuBois, New York Times (August 8, 1943), p. 6.

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Richter was quite explicit about this theme in his foreword to The Free

Man.

Perhaps in an understanding of the Pennsylvania Dutch, their loyalty to democracy and their love of peace may be found the secret of a peaceful Europe in the years to come. 4

Whatever the literary failings of his effort, his purpose was commendable.

ALWAYS

rOUNG

AMD FAIR

Always Young and Fair (1947), while appearing to be an historical novel of southeastern Pennsylvania at the turn of the century, is really Richter's finest attempt at writing a psychological novel. To be sure the Pine Mills of the story is so carefully placed geographically that it must be the Pine Grove of Richter's birth. It is recreated as it was during the Spanish-American war when Richter was a small boy. But here the characters in the tragedy dominate their environment, not so much as Sayward does by triumphing over it, as by being so intensely involved with each other that only the background is left for the historical setting. Lucy Markle, the lovely young daughter of Asa Markle, a wealthy mine owner, is courted by two cousins, Tom and Will Grail, as the story begins. Tom is the less fortunate economically of the two, and when the cousins leave to fight in the SpanishAmerican war Lucy chooses Private Tom rather than Captain Will as her betrothed. Tom is killed in the Philippines. Lucy immediately goes into mourning and continues her devotion to her dead lover despite the pleas of her parents and the returned Will Grail. Finally she agrees to marry Will at a quiet ceremony. Instead of following her wishes her parents arrange a large wedding. When the day arrives and Lucy sees the crowd, she stubbornly locks herself in her room and refuses to join Will at the altar. Will remains faithful to her but she goes back to her devotion to Tom and the pictures of him she has placed all over the house. Finally 4

Richter, The Free Man, p. vii.

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Will goes to fight in World War I. He returns five years later a tired man desirous now only of peace and quiet. Then the Pine Mills American Legion dedicates its new post to Tom Grail. At the ceremony the main speaker's comparison of the youthful Tom of the picture that Lucy has loaned to the post for the occasion, to the aging Lucy, awakens her with a tremendous shock that she has not remained young with her lover, but has aged. She begins to despise Tom because she feels that he has caused her to deceive herself. She tries to recapture what she had with Will, but he is no longer interested. She finally gets him to agree to marry her. Coming very late to the ceremony Will gets his revenge on her for her earlier humiliation of him. They go to Maine for their honeymoon but instead of returning to Pine Mills they go to Europe and remain there for five years. When they return their delay is explained, for Lucy has aged considerably and Will is a helpless cripple. Both are bitter. Only Tom has remained young and fair. Rose Feld, in her review of the novel, wrote the following: T h e story is told a minor key that holds the dark quality of tragedy. But psychologically it is never wholly convincing. O n e is left wondering w h y Lucy's feeling for T o m should have turned to hatred, w h y her indifference to Will should have turned to love. If madness is the explanation, w h y should Will, w h o was wholly sane, have submitted to a marriage he hated? T h e facts are there and the truth probably lies in them, but for fictional purposes they need deeper probing of the h u m a n heart and mind. 5

When reading Always Young and Fair it helps to realize that Lucy and Will are not new characters in Richter's fiction; only what happens to them is new. Lucy, in several passages, walks and talks like Lutie Brewton and Tacey Cromwell. The most important thing that she shares with them (and with the two other protagonists of Richter's earlier novels, Sayward Luckett and Henner Dellicker) is her strong will. Her antagonist, Will Grail, is, by name and action, strong-willed too. They are the only major characters in Richter's fiction who end in tragedy because of their wilfulness. Richter is very careful to show how strong-willed Lucy and Will are precisely so that their actions will not seem, as Miss Feld 5 Rose Feld, New York Herald Tribune Book Review Section (March 30, 1947), p. 10.

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maintains, "never wholly convincing". And he is equally aware that Lucy's hatred of Tom must be substantiated. He does this in the powerful scene describing the dedication of the Tom Grail Post. When Lucy realizes that time has not stood still as she had imagined, but has ruthlessly marched on, she suffers the greatest trauma of her life. She feels that her lover has deceived her in the basest possible way. What further reason could we ask for her subsequent hatred of her youthful lover? Nor do I find her desire to marry Will unconvincing. She finally realizes that her wilful devotion to a dead man has caused her to ruin two lives. She asks Will after her rude awakening, "What have we two done to each other?" While he is reluctant we cannot assume that he "hates" this marriage. Even if belated, her wanting him is a triumph for him. And he has his moment of complete revenge by making her wait at the altar, thereby showing the town that now she is courting him. But the marriage is too late; he suffers a stroke soon after and both find the dregs at the bottom of their lives very bitter. Their stubborness, first hers and then his, has resulted in the tragedy of two very promising lives being completely wasted. It is apparent that time is an important factor in Always Young and Fair. Lucy, like Gatsby, tries to stop the clock. In Fitzgerald's story Gatsby nervously juggles Nick's mantle clock. Here Johnny, the narrator, describes the Markels' grandfather clock: There it stood unusually tall, shrouded in shadow and silence, aloof, withdrawn from this world and life as if dead to the present and living only in the past. 6

Lucy maintains this sense of the past around her by not changing to electricity when it becomes available, and by falling behind in women's fashions by keeping her dresses the same. Her seeming triumph over time is also manifested in her manner of telling stories about her love for Tom. There was in the way she told them, a delicate yet significant relationship between her and her hero. T o m had been just a youth, and so was she, for she was still younger than he, his betrothed and companion. 7

Such an illusion is difficult to maintain. The American Legion 6 7

Conrad Richter, Always Young and Fair (New York, 1957), p. 103. Richter, Always, p. 84.

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speaker's remarks mark the beginning of its destruction. Lucy rushes home, and in a fit of passion looks in the mirror and then at her dead lover's picture. I n a moment of illusion-shattering lucidity she realizes that time has tricked her into thinking that she could enjoy two decades of grace. Tom alone has found the secret of eternal youth. This is an unusual novel for Richter who had erected his fictional world on a substructure of nostalgia. Here we see that there can be a destructive kind of nostalgia. One critic, aware of Richter's usual position, says this about the novel: "A beautifully nostalgic story of smalltown life in Pennsylvania." This is an obvious mis-reading. Lucy's life turns out to be a horror of misspent emotion. The tone that seems to pervade the novel is best exemplified by this passge in which Johnny, weighed down by the age and mustiness of the old Markle house, muses: ...for the first time it came over me what a wholesome thing it was that God in His wisdom decreed that man and woman must sometime die and slough away from all these rotten old birth wrappings, must sever themselves from hoary carpets and massive beds, from antique chairs and antiquated bureaus, from mouldering furnishings and endless stuff in cluttered attic and stable, leaving all cleanly behind to disposal and eventual destruction.8

This sentiment isn't very different from Richter's deploring of the way possessions enslave their possessors in The Light in the Forest. Here the tone of the passage reinforces the theme of the novel. Tom has avoided the many aspects of age - one of which is the accumulation of material possessions. Its puts the Pine Mills (Pine Grove) of Richter's youth in a peculiar light. For once in Richter's art the past is not exalted without qualification. The book, while obviously different from Richter's other work, is in some respects very similar. In its use of a narrator who idolizes the heroine and is related to her, it is very much like the three novels of the Southwest. The first page of the novel establishes her as a close relation of Lutie, Tacey, and Dona Ellen. We have no such pure gossamer handiwork of our Creator today.... I 8

Richter, Always, p. 104.

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thought when she played tennis that her feet scarcely touched the ground, and I can still see her white dress floating over the uneven, root-bulged sidewalks of Pine Mills light as the vapor in Stephen Foster's song. 9

All four heroines are thin and lively. Their being is described as a pure flame of activity. Lucy is quite different from them, however, in the way her story ends. Johnny, seeing her when she returns to Pine Mills with her crippled husband, is struck by her changed appearance. He feels that age has been unkind to her. But the sharpest insult, almost sacrilege, was something I had seen only on old women before, a kind of sagging protuberance at the bottom of either cheek, as if the muscles there had enlarged and hardened from too frequent setting of the jaw until it gave the face a look of ancient and bitter disappointment. 1 0

Lucy Markle is the only Richter heroine who ends so miserably. Johnny, the narrator, closely resembles the narrators in the three Southwestern novels. He is a small boy as the story begins, a second cousin of Lucy's; later he goes away to prep school and college, then he returns to Pine Mills as a colliery engineer. (In this synopsis he bears a remarkable resemblance to Nugget Oldaker of Tacey Cromwell.) But Johnny has a distinguishing mark. His name is John and he lives in Pine Mills. He will appear twice more as John in Richter's novels: in The Light in the Forest he is John Butler (True Son) in search of his father; in the Pennsylvania trilogy he is John Donner, again seeking the answers to the riddle of his existence. Pine Mills is obviously Pine Grove; Richter's description of the roads leading into it, on page forty-three, is conclusive. Richter gives Johnny two other personal attributes: he shares with his author a boyhood love of the Frank Nelson books, and he also shares, I believe, Richter's mother. Lucy calls her "cousin Matty", and throughout she possesses what Johnny calls "gentle dignity". It is this woman that John Donner waits for at the end of The Waters of Kronos. Of all of Richter's works this most nearly fits into the genre of the psychological novel. It also has a curious strain of determinism in it. There is, throughout, the suggestion that Lucy and Will are 9

Richter, Always, p. 3. Richter, Always, p. 171.

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" f a t e d " to live the life they do. It is most explicit in the following passage: After a while I saw Will lift her back in her saddle, and again they moved slowly down the road... there was something that day in the dim scene, in the primeval hemlocks standing in their daytime gloom, in the faint sun trickling though the heavy branches of dark green needles like the veriest twilight, and the two figures riding slowly down the deserted woods road that made me feel it wasn't flesh and blood that I had seen at all, but a passage I had read of strange doomed lovers riding through the lone Scottish wood of a Waverley novel. 11

I call it a "curious" strain of determinism because there is a blending in the novel of the two causes of disaster: wilfulness and fate. This same kind of shadowy premonition of disaster also appears in the Ohio trilogy. There it assumes the character of superstition; here, occurring in a more enlightened age, it can be called fatalism. This novel, published between The Fields (1946) and The Town (1950), shares with the latter, a sense of tragedy. Unlike The Town it is not didactic, nor are its tragic elements in any way relieved. It is a very short novel, and that may in some way account for its being vaguely dissatisfying. It is not a failure because, as Miss Feld has stated, the characters' actions are not properly motivated. Rather, it does not attain the stature it might have because, unlike great tragedy, it is depressing; one feels no elation at the end. T h e two sufferers have learned only to envy and despise Tom, the fortunate third party who has escaped by real death the living death of their unhappiness. Tragedy gives a new nobility to life. Always Young and. Fair manages only to make its protagnists envious of a n early death. T h e short story "Sinister J o u r n e y " is Richter's only attempt to portray the Utopian police state of the future. It appeared in the September 26, 1953, issue of The Saturday Evening Post. I have included it here because it is, at least in one sense, a story that makes an unusual use of time. It is closely related to The Mountain on the 11

Richter, Always, pp. 46-47.

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Desert (1955), and " T h a t Early American Quality" (1950). It is one of the most overt embodiments in Richter's fiction of the theories presented in these two works of non-fiction. The narrator Michael (another link with The Mountain on the Desert) comes to New Mexico to search for his friend, Douglas Creel, who has disappeared. Creel is a famous American composer and pianist who champions liberal ideas. Michael, unable to fall asleep in Creel's bed, starts out for the bathroom and a glass of water. He finds himself in a long, dark corridor that opens out into the underground of a future state where everyone is free from want. But the inhabitants have become smaller in every way. Lack of obstacles to overcome has produced a race of physical and intellectual pigmies. (Conversely, Richter's pioneers, faced with every conceivable hardship, became a race of giants.) Richter is not very subtle about presenting his favorite theme here. The police state of the future is bad precisely because man needs obstacles to make him grow; he must have agony so that he can appreciate ecstasy. It is the same point he made three years earlier near the end of The Town. Chancey, at his dying mother's bedside, thinks: Was there something deeper and more mysterious in his mother's philosophy than he and his generation who knew so much had suspected; something not simple but complex; something which held not only that hardship built happiness but which somehow implied that hate built love; evil, goodness? 12

Michael escapes from Millennia, certain that a world without hardship, hate, and evil can never be a world of happiness, love, and goodness.

THE

GRANDFATHERSi»

The Grandfathers (1964) is a charming novel of rural America in the early part of this century. Chariter, the heroine, is a member of the 12 13

Richter, The Town, p. 432. Although set in Maryland this novel is included among "The Pennsylvania Novels" because Mr. Richter confided in me that he changed the setting from Pennsylvania to Maryland to avoid upsetting his neighbors.

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Murdock clan of Western Maryland. The two or three years covered by the story take the Murdocks and some of their friends and neighbors through a series of episodes ranging from comic to tragic. They are drawn with Richter's undying love for people who are down to earth, vibrant, mostly honest, and true to themselves. Their speech and manners are evocative of a time and place in American life that seem attractively simple. Chariter is in the tradition of the great Richter heroine. Like Sayward and the others she is made of metal that rings true. When the going gets tough she rises to the occasion. Close to the earth she draws from it the common sense and intuitiveness she needs for survival. She is named Chariter, sometimes called Charity, and like others whose names reveal their character she is charitable in the widest sense: always trying to understand others by putting herself in their place. She reacts compassionately to people of all ages, relatives and strangers alike. Much of her steadfastness is inherited from her grandmother, of whom she thinks, "Why, no matter the high water, Granmam had always been the rock that stood in the middle of the crick." Every great Richter heroine has these qualities. Chariter is fifteen when the novel begins and still trying to determine who her father is; it is part of her trying to determine who she is. Her mother will not tell, and her two half-brothers and half-sister don't know either. She is named Murdock, and she is proud to be a member of the clan. Yet her lack of a father and the anxiety that goes with it disturbs her greatly. Once when her younger brother Babe asks if she ever imagines what her father looks like, she answers: " I don't ever give him a face, I just hide him behind a bush in my mind." 1 4 Gossip provides her with candidates and she carefully tries to determine the true one. She is never certain but by the novel's end she has been able to settle the problem satisfactorily. There are many colorful characters in the novel: Fulliam Jones, Chariter's suitor; Nicodemus, the bootlegger; Squire Goddem and his sister, Miss Bell; but the most delightful of all is Granpap Culy Murdock. A wilful old man who loses his only tooth during the 14

Conrad Richter, The Grandfathers (New York, 1964), p. 90.

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course of the story, he lives with a vibrancy that only a loving and sympathetic author could have re-created him with. It is rascals such as him that Richter feels made everyday life once so exciting. The uniform man that Richter thought our society produces is much tamer and much duller than Culy Murdock. This novel shares with Richter's others a careful attention to the way people spoke in the time and place depicted. The speech is authentic, the stories, customs, habits, and superstitions carefully researched and artfully woven into the fabric of the novel. The Grandfathers is a delightful low comic contribution to our literary record of American rural mores.

THE ARISTOCRAT

The Aristocrat (1968) was Richter's last novel. Set in the Pine Grove of his birth it sketches charmingly the last few years of an aristocratic lady, Miss Alexandria Morley. Miss Morley is patterned after an actual inhabitant of Pine Grove whose integrity, candour, strength, courage, and wit Richter obviously admired. She is, in all of these traits, a memorable addition to his other heroines. Her story is told by the fifteen year old son of her "major-domo". Young Tommy takes up residence in the Morley mansion as the book begins because Miss Alexandria wants a man in the house. Seen through his eyes she appears bigger than life, a match for any adversary, even death. Into her mansion comes a succession of delightful characters: a brash young doctor, a garrulous old cousin as well as a neurotically envious one, the charming, young granddaughter of her unmarried sister, a couple of clergymen, members of the town council, and her maid Fanny. She civilizes the doctor (Clay Howell), trades quips with the talkative cousin and barbs with the jealous one, loses one battle with the clergymen but wins another, fights the town council to a draw, and uses Fanny to "protect" her from her adversaries. Clearly, the center of the book is Miss Alexandria herself, "frail but indomitable", in her eighties, symbolizing with the Morley mansion a time long past, a time when strong men and women

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dominated society rather than be dominated by it. She has the pioneer intrepidity that helped make this nation great. An index of what has befallen us is the awareness on everyone's part that this kind of individualism is an anachronism. She suffers no illusions; she knows (as does Richter) that she is the last of her breed. What a dull place Unionville (Pine Grove) will be without her. Writing about his Pine Grove, Richter is able to evoke the memory of a rural America that is delightfully recalled and whimsically yearned for. The Morley mansion clearly dominates it, but its new apartment house, neglected park, noxious dump, busy collieries, and impressive mountains all live with the life that only first-hand experience can be transmitted into. Although Miss Morley's last few years are sketchily drawn (135 pages), the book is given greater substance by forty pages of her deliverances on such topics as her parents, relations, friends, maids, and modern times. Most are delightful, a few give Richter a chance to have his say too. " O n Modern Times" includes this: T h e powers that be are trying to turn us into sheep. We must tell the government what we earn and how much we save. We must stop when the traffic signal says stop and go when it says go. We must break off interesting radio or television programs until the commercials are rammed down out throats. It's one way of making people meek and submissive for what's coming. But it doesn't me. I say, to the devil with you, and turn off my set. 15

As an indication of the background of power and prestige against which she is drawn is this: I don't know what it costs to join the Country Club. We never had to join. We founded it and decided who we wanted in and who we wanted kept out. Even so some of those people got in. 1 6

Yet she wears her wealth and her influence gracefully. Always a lady, but never afraid, always the aristocrat.

15 16

Conrad Richter, The Aristocrat (New York, 1968), p. 170. Richter, Aristocrat, p. 172.

5. T H E INDIAN NOVELS

THE LIGHT IN THE FOREST

The Light in the Forest (1953) is now Conrad Richter's best-selling novel, surpassing his Pulitzer Prize winning The Town (1950), and the National Book Award winner, The Waters of Kronos (1960). That it should sell so well is not surprising. Writing it after long and painstaking research into Indian-white relations in Pennsylvania and Ohio during the middle of the eighteenth century, Richter skillfully recreated an era in a short novel that is both good fiction and good history. Conrad Richter's abiding interest in early Americana has produced outstanding results. His Ohio trilogy is a classic treatment of the subjugation and settlement of the Ohio forests by pioneers whose plucky, intrepid foray into the wilderness awed him. These pioneers whom he admired and loved are made of the stuff of greatness: that "early American quality" of courageous hardiness that helped tame a continent and create a nation. But Richter is a fair, objective, and high-minded researcher and author. Although some of the hardships encountered by these pioneer whites stemmed from the Indians' natural reluctance to give up their land, he always tried to see the Indians' side too, something that has not been done very often in American writing. The result of this double vision is the picture of the Indian that emerges from the pages of The Light in the Forest. Richter's Delaware (Leni Lenape) is neither the over-idealized noble savage of some authors nor the equally distorted treacherous pagan of so many others. He is an objective rendering in fiction of the Delaware Indian that Richter found in all of the sources, both oral and written, that were available to

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him. The Leni Lenape live again in these pages, as undistorted as in historical writing at its best, but with the vividness that only a great novel can give. The author's stated aim was "not to write historical novels but give an authentic sensation of life in early America''. 1 All those who have read The Light in the Forest know how admirably he succeeded in accomplishing this aim. A fact Richter considered remarkable moved him to write this novel. I n the "Acknowledgments" he writes: " I n records of the Eastern border, the author was struck by the numbers of returned white captives who tried desperately to run away from their fleshand-blood families and return to their Indian foster homes and the Indian way of life." To anyone who had read the conventional accounts of the Indian mode of life this would seem surprising. Richter felt that it was a facet of early America worth exploring. His research led him to two works in particular: the Reverend John Heckewelder's Indian Nations, and David Zeisberger's History of North American Indians. Another valuable source of information was the "Narrative of John Brickell's Captivity Among the Delawares", which appeared in the American Pioneer in 1842. From these and many other sources Richter garnered the information needed to transform the accounts of many unhappy returned white captives into a single story. It also gave him an opportunity to deal with some of the problems of the settlers of his native state, Pennsylvania, during the years immediately preceding their fight for independence. More than careful research is needed to make a good novel, however, a believable, engaging story is essential. True Son's search for identity is just such a story. The boy's final statement, "Then who is my father?" 2 is the central question of the novel. J o h n Butler-True Son is a boy growing to manhood with divided loyalties. Born a white and raised by white parents until four, he is then stolen by Indians with whom he lives until he is 15. His white father is replaced by Cuyloga, an honorable and heroic Delaware leader. But two fathers means two allegiances, even though the boy feels allegiance only to the Indian 1 2

Conrad Richter, The Light in the Forest (New York, 1958), "Acknowledgments". Richter, Light, p. 116.

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throughout most of the novel. A faint, vague stirring in his blood, a vestigal remnant of his white heritage, causes him in the end to alienate irrevocably his Indian father. It is this tension created by the two distinct claims to the boy's loyalty and affection that makes the story exciting. These claims are the basis for the exploration of the Indian and white cultures that claim him, and keep the description of the two ways of life at the very center of the novel. The danger is a prejudiced view for or against either of these cultures. Richter assiduously avoids this pitfall. The two basic ingredients of careful research and a nearly perfect story in which to flesh out the facts left only one remaining factor: the author's style. By the early fifties when Richter began to compose the novel, he had already published seven novels and two collections of short stories. He had been writing for nearly 40 years and his style was consistent: spare, lucid, to-the-point, and yet poetic when necessary. It was a fitting instrument for telling True Son's story; there would be no embellishment, no over-statement, no purple passages to mar a tale that was essentially a simple one. Out of this combination of ingredients came the novel, now in its twenty-fifth printing, softbound, and eleventh printing in cloth. As the story opens, True Son, about 15 years old, has just heard that all white captives held by the Delaware tribe of which he is a part are to be returned to their white homes. It is the fall of 1764 according to a date given later, and it was at this time that Colonel Henry Boquet did in fact march into Ohio with 1,500 men to demand from the Indians their white captives. The Indians, astonished that such a large force could have made its way to them at the forks of the Muskingum and Tuscarawas rivers in east-central Ohio, were very reluctant to part with whites who were now beloved members of family and tribe. But Boquet was a determined soldier, and when he convinced the Indians that he intended to stay until they gave up all their white captives, they reluctantly capitulated. Boquet returned to Fort Pitt on 9 November 1764 with 206 released whites. According to Francis Parkman's The Conspiracy of Pontiac, most remained "sullen and scowling, angry that they were forced to abandon the wild license of the forest for the irksome restraints of society".

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O n e of the most sullen, scowling, a n d angry of these is T r u e Son. Raised for eleven years as a n adopted son by Cuyloga, the village sachem or chief, he considers himself a true Indian. H e loves his parents and two sisters dearly, and they love him. But because the Indians are afraid of Boquet a n d his army, a n d want them to depart, even Cuyloga is forced to give u p his son. Richter depicts poignantly the feeling of the boy when he finally realizes that this nightmare is real. H e is assigned a guard, Del H a r d y , against whom he struggles to no avail. I n the early chapters, the gradually unfolding white world is seen alternately through the eyes of T r u e Son and Del Hardy. A very effective narrative device, it shows that sights strange and forbidding to the boy's eyes are welcome signs of a return to white civilization for his guard. It points u p the dual vision necessary for understanding the world of the novel, the vision Richter maintained throughout in writing it. Del H a r d y is a familiar frontier figure. A big, strong outdoorsman, brought u p with Indians, he knows their ways and their language. H e acts as an interpreter for the boy and even sympathizes with him. But he is loyal to the whites, and although he is much closer to the Indian in his ability to survive in the wilderness than any white person in the novel, he believes wholeheartedly in the superiority of white civilization over the Indian's. Inevitably he has been compared with Leatherstocking, but Richter was not a great reader nor an admirer of Cooper's fiction, and Leatherstocking is more anarchic and less civilized than Hardy. T h e y do share many traits, however, and are two in a long series of frontiersmen of this typeT r u e Son and his guard proceed eastward with the rest of Boquet's large assemblage toward Fort Pitt. Initially the boy is so bitter that he plans suicide, but after being joined by his friend, Half Arrow, and another Indian, Little Crane, he cheers up. T h e y have been given permission to accompany T r u e Son and Little Crane's white wife to the Ohio River. T h e three Indians sometimes walk together, and to divert themselves discuss white ways. Richter is indebted to his sources for m a n y of these reflections. Little Crane voices a strongly held Delaware notion that they were an "original people". Heckewelder says this meant to them " a race of h u m a n

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beings who are the same that they were in the beginning, unchanged and unmixed". Little Crane remarks that every Indian's hair and complexion are the same, unlike the whites whose hair and skin color vary over a wide range. He concludes that whites are a "mixed people", and this accounts for their vagaries. He notes that they need a "Good Book", while the Indian knows good and evil without one. They are amused at the white traits of talking loudly and often all at once. They can't understand white camping habits: making camp in low, damp places, building fires so the smoke blows in their faces, burning wood that makes dangerous sparks, and often camping under a dead branch that may fall on them in the night. They also discuss something that the Indian found particularly incomprehensible: the white man's accumulation and concern for goods, evidenced by their many barns and fences. The Indians believed that God would provide for them, so they hunted and fished only what they could immediately consume. Even when game or fish became scarce they considered it part of God's plan to make them better appreciate these things. They cherished their freedom; they could not understand why a man would want possessions that required so much care. Locks and keys disturbed then; being very honest they never had to secure or guard anything against theft. What little they had was safe. One of the major themes of the novel is the contrast in freedom between Indian and white. The Indian was unencumbered, he sought little beyond sustenance, and he was usually very happy. The whites he encountered seemed burdened by their possessions; it was as if the possessions possessed them. Even in the frontier town of Paxton, on the Susquehanna, True Son sees the whites shackled on all sides. An old Negro in Paxton tells True Son: " I ' m never free from white folks, and neither are you Every day they drop another fine strap around you Finally you own a house and a piece of land and pays taxes. You hoe all day in the cornfield and toil and sweat a diggin' up stumps. Piece by piece you get broke in to livin' in a stall by night, and by day pullin' burdens that mean nothin' to the soul inside of you". 3 3

Richter, Light, p. 50.

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Richter isn't suggesting that everyone live by a Walden Pond, only that the Indian had reasons for thinking the white's way of life unattractive. One of True Son's first discomforts when he begins living in Paxton is sleeping indoors. " H e felt sealed up as in the grave. He knew now why the English looked so pale. They shut themselves off from the living air." 4 Another problem arises over his Indian clothes. His family, particularly his Aunt Kate, insists that he put on conventional white dress, but he finds it constraining. They finally take and hide his Indian clothes while he is asleep. As the Negro had warned him, the fine straps are dropped on him. When spring comes he is asked to hoe a field. He does so remembering that once while helping squaws hoe in his Indian village Cuyloga had sternly reproved him. As an Indian manchild he "should never dishonor himself with the labor of squaws". 5 He finds it very difficult to adjust himself to his new life, mainly because of the contrast between his Indian and white parents. When he first sees his white father, Harry Butler, he thinks: "Surely he had nothing in common with this insignificant man with black boots, a face colorless as clay and a silly hat on his head." 6 He contrasts him with Cuyloga: "How differently he would have looked and acted. With what dignity and restraint.... This weak and pale-skinned man was nothing beside him." 7 A few months later he still finds the discrepancy between his two fathers overwhelming. Harry Butler is a small, bookish man "whose fondest place was at his desk, his bald head bulging like a storehouse with useless figures of land, crops and money". 8 He is ruled by his sickly wife Myra, who spends most of the time in her room. He thinks her "a sleek white rat.... Beside her, the memory of his Indian mother was like a spreading sugar maple providing them all with food and warmth". 9 This inability to find anything attractive in his white parents prevents his acceptance of his white identity. The only 4 5 8 7 8 9

Richter, Richter, Richter, Richter, Richter, Richter,

Light, Light, Light, Light, Light, Light,

p. 37. p. 72. p. 26. pp. 26-27. p. 73. p. 73.

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white with whom he has any rapport at all is his little brother Gordie. At their first meeting " a look of mutual respect and understanding passed between the two brothers". 10 It is this frail link with the white world that causes True Son's defection and final exclusion from the Indian world he loves so well. His next most important white relative is his mother's brother, Wilse Owens. A strong, stocky man who intensely dislikes Indians, he doesn't trust True Son, and their first meeting is explosive. Uncle Wilse shows so much antagonism towards Indians that he finally elicits a response from his nephew who is trying to practice stoic restraint. True Son defends the Indian by denouncing the white. He knows that his uncle was a member of the "Paxton Boys", a group that existed in fact as well as in fiction. In 1763, during "Pontiac's Indian uprising", Indians made many attacks on white settlers in Pennsylvania. Colonel Boquet was one of the main combatants, defeating the Delawares at Bushy R u n in August of 1763, and shortly thereafter relieving the besieged garrison at Fort Pitt. In December the "Paxton Boys" decided to do something on their own. Like many frontiersmen in central and western Pennsylvania, they resented the lenient attitude toward the Indians shown by the more influential people in the eastern part of the state. In a speech reflecting this resentment, True Son's other uncle, George Owens, says: "If a white man kills an Indian, he's called a murderer.... But if an Indian kills a white man, he's just a poor pagan who doesn't know any better." 1 1 This pent-up feeling against both eastern settler and Indian was vented in the "Paxton Boys" murder of 20 peaceful Conestogo Indians who had converted to Christianity and lived in the area. They were mostly old men, women, and children. True Son had heard an account of this in his Delaware village. Wilse Owens is the living embodiment of the attitude that led to these atrocities, that the only good Indian was a dead one. The "Paxton Boys" represent the extreme attitude toward Indians found in frontier settlements. During the same stormy session with his relatives, True Son feels obligated to defend one of the treasures of the Delawares: 11

Richter, Light, p. 36. Richter, Light, p. 45.

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their language. Like the belief that they were an original people and the patriarchal stem from which all other Algonquian and nonAlgonquian tribes had sprung, their language was a great source of pride to them. Del Hardy, acting as an interpreter between True Son and the whites, states: " H e says when Indians of different tribes meet, they talk to each other in Delaware. It's the master language of the Indians, and that's true. Most all tribes learn some of it so they can get along with other tribes." 1 2 It was also a much more varied language than most whites believed, as Richter points out. While many thought, for instance, that Indian languages could not express spiritual concepts very well, there were over 20 ways to say God in Delaware. Richter cites three: Eliwaleck, He that's above everything; Eluwitschanessik, the strongest and most powerful one; and Eluwilissit, the one greatest in goodness. There are about 180 Delaware expressions in the novel, a device that helps to reveal how they thought and felt. Their names for the months indicate their vital concerns: fishing, farming, and hunting. They called June, "The Month When the Deer Turns Red", and August, "the Month When Corn is in the Milk". Richter found many of these Delaware words and expressions in Heckewelder and Zeisberger, and was also indebted to Brinton and Anthony's A Lenape-English Dictionary for them. Their inclusion enhances the novel unobtrusively and effectively. Many other aspects of Delaware life are included in the novel. To put these in perspective it must be remembered that the Delawares at the forks of the Muskingum and Tuscarawas rivers had very little contact with the whites; they were therefore still "true" Indians. Most white accounts were based on Indians who had a great deal of contact with whites. Joaquin Miller, writing about his life among the Indians ( M y Own Story) states: " I do protest against taking these Indians - renegades - who affiliate, mix and strike hands with the whites, as representative Indians.... The true Indian retires before the white man's face to the forest and to the mountain tops." One of the Delaware traits Richter seems particularly impressed with is their stoicism in both triumph and defeat. 12

R i c h t e r , Light, p . 4 2 .

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Of the many references to it in the novel the most memorable is a story Richter based on a incident recorded in Heckewelder. Half Arrow tells True Son about Cuyloga striking a wounded bear across the nose because it was whimpering and telling it: "Listen, bear. You are a coward and not the warrior you pretend to be... you sit and whimper like an old woman. You disgrace your tribe with your behavior." 1 3 Cuyloga practices what he preaches, particularly in his dramatic rescue of True Son from almost certain death toward the end of the novel. The Delaware was also stoical in moments of triumph. True Son and Half Arrow, upon arriving in their Indian village after their long trip from Paxton, do not respond to the cheers and greetings of the squaws and children but walk straight to their homes looking neither right nor left. The Delawares showed a marked respect for the wisdom of the aged. Grandparents were listened to with more solemnity than parents. In their village organization a sachem or chief ruled loosely. Cuyloga probably holds this office in True Son's village. However, if a brave could gather support for a fight outside of the village, he, not the sachem, would lead the war party. This occurs in the novel when Thitpan decides to avenge his brother Little Crane's death. Revenge was a sacred honor and duty among Indians, a concept whites found most "savage". But the white man was the Indian's mortal enemy: he had taken his land, killed his game, and pushed him farther and farther west. It was a fight for survival, and the Indian lost. While it lasted, every white man was the Indian's natural enemy. But among the Indians there was a wide range of behavior in this regard. True Son maintains in Paxton that he never saw a white child's scalp in his Indian village. This is probably true, considering Cuyloga's beliefs. When Thitpan and his friends are avenging Little Crane's murder and return to camp with the scalp of a white child, True Son's belief in the nobility of the Indian is shaken. It seems that Thitpan is as extreme in his hatred of whites as Wilse Owens is in his hatred of Indians. Fortunately, they are balanced by others of both races like Cuyloga and Del Hardy, men who at least try to understand their adversary's point of view. 13

Richter, Light,

p. 22.

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103

A striking trait of the Delawares, and indeed of all Indians, is their natural affinity for the land they live on. In Land of the Spotted Eagle Chief Standing Bear writes " T h e American Indian is of the soil, whether it be the region of forests, plains, pueblos, or mesas. H e fits into the landscape, for the hand that fashioned the continent also fashioned the man for his surroundings. He once grew as naturally as the wild sunflowers; he belongs just as the buffalo belonged." This is most evident in the brief holiday of T r u e Son and Half Arrow near the close of the story. W h e n Half Arrow and Little Crane come to visit True Son in Paxton, Little Crane is shot by Wilse Owens. T r u e Son then escapes with Half Arrow after attempting to scalp the murderer. Once they reach Indian territory west of Fort Pitt, they decide to stop and live for a time in the wilderness. Richter's love and reverence for nature is evident in the beautifully described scenes of hunting, fishing, and camping. " T h e y passed their days in a kind of primitive deliciousness. The past was buried. There was only the present and tomorrow. By day they lived as happy animals. Moonlight nights in the forest they saw what the deer saw. Swimming under water with open eyes, they knew now what the otter k n e w . " 1 4 This communion is all the more poignant, because it is the peaceful lull between the shooting of Little Crane and the subsequent murder of innocent whites by the revenging Thitpan and his followers. Finally the boys decide to go home. "Even though they wished it, they couldn't stay forever.... The foliage of the great forest wall had turned from light green to dark. It was time to leave." 1 5 Cuyloga and his family and friends rejoice over T r u e Son's return. He sleeps once more in his accustomed place and is happy again. But soon Thitpan demands revenge. Cuyloga and the father of Half Arrow realize that they and their sons must join the war party. The boys are glad to go. T o test True Son's loyalty, he is dressed like a white and ordered to ambush a group of whites coming downstream on a large boat. When they approach him to pick him up, he sees a young boy on board about Gordie's age. Without reflection he 14 15

Richter, Light, p. 45. Richter, Light, p. 97.

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yells: " T a k e him back! It's an a m b u s h ! " 1 6 Later, trying to explain his action to himself, he realizes that he doesn't understand what happened. But the action is irrevocable. T h e Indians, incensed at the loss of such easy prey, vote to b u r n him. Cuyloga, in a last heroic gesture, frees T r u e Son a n d sends him back to the whites. I n his parting speech he says: " T r u e Son.... W h e n you were very small I took you in. I taught you to speak with a straight tongue. I showed you right and wrong. I bound you to my heart with strong new vines. T h e old rotten vines have new life. They have sprouted again to pull you back to the white people." 1 7 At a fork in the road Cuyloga goes back to the Indians, T r u e Son to the whites. He is speechless; overwhelmed by his fate he trudges eastward. "Ahead of him ran the rutted road of the whites. It led, he knew, to where men of their own volition constrained themselves with heavy clothing like harness, where men chose to be slaves to their own or another's property and followed empty a n d desolate lives far from the wild beloved freedom of the I n d i a n . " 1 8 The Light in the Forest is a finely wrought novel of a boy's tragic predicament. T r u e Son is accidentally caught between two worlds; losing the one of his choice, he is forced back to the other. There will be no fond welcome for him in Paxton where his partially scalped uncle and rejected parents wait. After living so long in a n Indian culture he learned to cherish, he will never be able to adjust fully to the white culture of Paxton. W h e n he is shackled, as the old Negro predicted, he will know it - the worst thing that can happen to a man. Even Richter's restraint and understatement have not dulled the attractiveness of the Indian way of life. This slim volume stands as a corrective to the Indian distorted beyond recognition in hundreds of novels, motion pictures, television plays, and articles. Its honest picture of Delaware life restores to the Indian some of the dignity and integrity stolen from him by his detractors. In language and m a n n e r the Delaware emerges as a m a n of faith and honor. And yet the novel does not give the impression that every Indian acted like every other. There is a wide range of behavior, from the pri16 Richter, Light, p. 109. 17 Richter, Light, p. 114. 18 Richter, Light, p. 117.

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mitively violent T h i t p a n to the wise and courageous Cuyloga. T r u e Son, at least, h a d found a Shangri-La with them. O n e wonders at the end if he will ever find it again.

A COUNTRY

OF

STRANGERS

A Country of Strangers (1966) is a fine companion novel to The Light in the Forest. Like the earlier novel it is a scrupulously researched historical treatment of late 18th century Indian-white relations in Ohio, Pennsylvania and New York. It is also the story of a white child captured a n d raised by the Indians and then returned to the white family. Stone Girl, the heroine, is, like T r u e Son, a person torn between two worlds. She explains the horror of such a situation to the only white relative who is ever willing to try to believe her true identity: her grandmother. In an Indian legend she describes herself as like the blue squirrel whom the squirrels rejected because he was the wrong color. H e is advised to join the bluebirds in the forest but since he can't fly they reject him too. " A n d now he was neither Tshimalus, the bluebird, or Shipahep, the squirrel, b u t an outcast like Shaak, the skunk, and must live by himself, for nobody will live with h i m . " 1 9 M a r y Stanton - Stone Girl's search for identity is one of the most poignant stories Richter ever wrote. As a wanderer lost between two worlds, her story becomes a n epic of everyman's search for a home in a world that for all is a country of strangers. T h e challenges she faces a n d endures mark her as a great Richter heroine. She is only twenty as the novel ends, but has faced courageously the ordeals of a lifetime. M a r y Stanton begins life as the daughter of a wealthy Pennsylvania land owner along the broad Susquehanna. Captured at five by a party of Delaware Indians, she is adopted by Feast Maker, n a m e d Stone Girl, married to Espan, a n d has a son, Little Otter, in the beautiful Ohio country at the forks of the Muskingum and Tuscarawas Rivers. She is "fifteen, perhaps older", as the novel opens and is threatened with repatriation by an Army of white 19

Conrad Richter, A Country of Strangers (New York, 1966), p. 112.

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soldiers. Thus begins her tragic odyssey. In order to avoid repatriation, she and Little Otter travel to other Indian villages, then north to the French settlement of Fort Detroit. After several months there as "Claire", and after news of Espan's death, she travels across the Great Lakes to upstate New York, and finally back to Captain Stanton's estate. Here she is rebuked and mistreated; an imposter has successfully claimed to be the real Mary Stanton. Finally Little Otter is murdered by a furious brave whom Stone Girl then kills, and she begins the long trek back to Indian country with another who shares her plight: True Son of The Light in the Forest. Her story affords Richter another chance to describe the driving off of the Indian from his land that he believes has never been atoned for. It shows the Delaware (Leni Lenape) again as an upright race and honorable, but sometimes vicious because so severely threatened. He depicts their language, their skills, and their affinity for the land with a compassion and understanding seldom afforded them in white literature. As in The Light in the Forest they again seem freer and truer than the whites they are contrasted with. The white man's feeling of superiority over all the colored races seems absurd and unjustifiable. Stone Girl is a suitable successor to Sayward. A faithful wife, loving mother, and sensitive human being, she even risks her life to save her wretched younger sister's life near the novel's end. Her search for peace and love is sadly tragic. The Indians she loves are killed and the whites who should love her reject her. With the touch of true greatness, trials make her stronger, adversity more perseverent. Most important of all, no disaster diminishes her magnanimity. Like Antonia, Dilsey, Ma Joad, and Sayward she accepts life and loves life. These two novels are Richter's contribution to our Nation's Indian history. More important, they voice his concern for man's essential loneliness, inarticulateness, and desire to be loved. By creating two characters torn between white and Indian worlds, faced with problems of understanding compounded by every kind of prejudice, and finally finding themselves alone together, he has etched immemorably in his reader's minds two poignant searches for identity.

6. T H E PENNSYLVANIA T R I L O G Y

THE WATERS OF KRONOS

The first two volumes of Conrad Richter's second trilogy are a remarkable achievement. Seldom has a man written more candidly of himself and his relatives than has Richter in The Waters of Kronos (1960) and A Simple Honorable Man (1962). Richter was working on the third book, about his own life as an artist, when he died. In this second trilogy Richter honestly attempted to portray his struggles with life's most teasing intellectual and spiritual problems : man's existence before and after this life, the tenets of organized religion, the differences in character from person to person, the father-son relationship, and the old problem of fate versus free will. He also exhibited in these two novels a great pride in various ancestors from whom he received what he considered a priceless legacy. The Waters of Kronos and A Simple Honorable Man, published after Richter reached seventy, offer an invaluable insight into the mind and works of one of America's ablest authors. The writing of The Waters of Kronos was a labor of love. In it the protagonist, John Donner, is very much like Richter himself, and Unionville, the scene of the novel, is Richter's beloved birthplace and long-time home, Pine Grove, Pennsylvania. The novel opens as John Donner, a noted writer, now seventy, comes back to the place of his birth to visit his ancestors' graves. The town itself is now covered by the dammed-up waters of the Kronos River. At dusk John Donner walks to the old Unionville road bordering the cemetery where an old man on a wagon pulled by three horses agrees to take him to Unionville. Incredulous, J o h n Donner goes down the steep hill with his guide and finds the town as it was sixty years earlier. He spends the rest of the novel re-examining the scenes of

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his childhood a n d his several relatives as they were a t the t u r n of t h e century. H e meets everyone of i m p o r t a n c e in his childhood except his m o t h e r ; a t novel's end he waits for her in the house next door to hers. H e anticipated the novel with a short story published ten years earlier: " D o c t o r H a n r a y ' s Second C h a n c e " , which a p p e a r e d in the Saturday Evening Post on 10 J u n e 1950. I n it D r . Peter H a n r a y , a r e n o w n e d scientist, comes back to Stone C h u r c h , his birthplace, to visit the graves of his relatives. T h e town is being used as a n A r m y reservation; its inhabitants are gone. After visiting the cemetery he miraculously meets himself as he was as a child. T h e boy, Peter, takes h i m t h r o u g h the town as it was a n d t h e n to his own home. Unrecognized, D r . H a n r a y eats with his father, mother, a n d the boy Peter. At the end he leaves w i t h his parents' assurance t h a t they will p r a y for him. I n b o t h versions Richter's persona is famous b u t unwell. I n the short story his problems are not solved, b u t he does find some peace in his parents' promise of prayer a n d in his brief r a p p o r t with the young Peter. I t is evident t h a t as early as 1950 R i c h t e r was grappling with a crucial p r o b l e m of his boyhood, a n d a l t h o u g h he couldn't come fully to grips with it in the short story, he was exploring the solution t h a t the novel would present a decade later. The Waters of Kronos has a m u c h greater i m p a c t w h e n its autobiographical implications are understood, yet few of its reviewers suggested t h a t it m i g h t be essentially factual. N a t u r a l l y they were puzzled by J o h n D o n n e r ' s j o u r n e y back t h r o u g h t i m e ; a n d they are correct in feeling t h a t w h a t he learns doesn't seem to be i m p o r t a n t enough to justify the suspense generated t h r o u g h o u t the novel. W h e n the novel is r e a d in connection with Richter's life a n d his other works, however, its m e a n i n g becomes clear. The Waters of Kronos ends with a n attack on the O e d i p u s c o m p l e x : Now, why should the knowledge that he was after all his father's son give him... relief and freedom? Was it his earlier discovery that the son-fatherhate legend was fiction, after which it had no more power over him; that he and not his father was the monster? 1 1

Conrad Richter, The Waters of Kronos (New York, I960), p. 169.

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109

In The Mountain on the Desert (1955), his only long non-fiction work, Richter attacks Freud and his followers at length. What is also significant is that throughout his fiction the mother is the heroine, the father neither clearly drawn nor clearly understood. At seventy, Richter was able to look back on his relationship with his father, who had been dead twenty years, and see more clearly what both he and his father were like. Both biographical and autobiographical accounts of Conrad Richter's life have been published over the years. The details given in The Waters of Kronos describing Unionville, John Donner, and his relatives fit many of these facts. The Kronos River and Kronos Street in Unionville are Swatara Creek and Tulpehocken Street in Pine Grove. He had, in his previous novel about Pine Grove, Always Young and Fair (1947), used the name Swatara for the main street. In that novel appeared the Markle Mansion on Methodist Church hill. It appears on the same hill in The Waters of Kronos. Conrad Richter is disguished only by name. Donner, like Richter, is a writer who published his first novel when he was in Albuquerque, New Mexico. His father, Harry, was first a storekeeper and then a minister. He likes bird-watching and walking, Richter's two hobbies. His uncle, great-uncles, grandfather, and great-grandfather are ministers, as were Richter's. He has an Aunt Jess who told him stories and encouraged him as a writer. His great-grandfather, Squire Morgan, fits exactly Richter's description of his great-grandfather Squire Conrad. Both Richter and Donner have a maternal grandmother who dies at an early age from injuries sustained in a fall at a picnic. Identifying Conrad Richter with John Donner makes it possible to examine the main problems of the novel in connection with Richter the writer, and with his works. Richter, it seems to me, intended this identification to be made. The novel opens: For seven days the man who lived by the Western Sea had driven eastward toward the place where he was born, and every day he asked himself the same question. Why had he come? 2

He comes because he has an illness he has never been able to 2

Richter, Waters, p. 3.

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name or cure. This illness is due to an unresolved fear he has suffered from childhood. H e carries a photograph showing his parents and his two younger brothers in "the old sitting room". Behind them are two doors, one to the stairs and one to the kitchen. White light streams from under the door to the kitchen; all through his mature years he has had a desire to open that door. He was a fairly able man who had reached honors envied by some other men, but never was he able again to get through that closed door. This, he suspected, was part of the source of the pain that sometimes came to his head. 3 W h y must this successful author get back to the world of his youth? What unsolved problem of his childhood has worried him all his life? His father, he felt, had always sung at home in riddles, saying in music what he could never bring himself to reveal in speech. As a boy he had thought these particular words a warning to him to give up his youthful, dissenting ways, his shying from church and people, and enter into his father's hearty way of life and religion. 4 The shy and diffident John Donner found it hard to communicate with his father. His sentiments are very close to those of Chancey Wheeler in The Town, who, like Donner, thinks he is a foster child. Only he, Johnny, his oldest son, was uncomfortable with him. As a child he couldn't easily fathom it except that his father was not his real but a foster father. 5 This feeling helped make writers out of both John Donner and Chancey Wheeler. Sometimes he wondered if, whatever it was, it hadn't been the origin of his interest in books and nature, not born of commendable thirst for knowledge, but from a shying away from his father's world of enthusiastic sociability with people, which had given him as a boy only difficulty and suffering so that he found relief in freedom and solitude in fields, the forest and the printed page, like an unreasoning moth released from the hand and soaring in the air it had never taken cognizance of before. 6

» Richter, 4 Richter, 5 Richter, 6 Richter,

Waters, Waters, Waters, Waters,

p. p. p. p.

28. 45. 45. 46.

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111

In 1960 Richter was able to go back to his childhood in the Pine Grove of 1900, now covered forever by the waters of time. He doesn't find out immediately what it is that has haunted him all his life, and for which his father seems the symbol. He gets even further away from the solution at first by following the Oedipus complex one more step. Trying desperately to determine the source of his lifelong gloom he wonders: Could it possibly have been something not in him but in his mother's experience; something she had passionately wanted and never got, a wound which before birth or in their close symphathetic relationship afterward had been transmitted from mother to son? 7

But this hypothesis simply isn't true; Donner must find another answer. At his grandfather's funeral he sees his family at the church. His father sits on the aisle, "vigorous and alert as if to protect them from the contagion of death and all its malignancies". 8 It is this concept of death as contagious and malignant that is the first clear clue we are given concerning the horror which has dogged John Donner throughout his life. Near the novel's end he faints in front of a neighbor's home and she takes him in and gives him a bed. His family's home is next door. He asks for his mother, and the boy Johhny comes to tell him that Mrs. Donner will come the next day to see him. This is a chance the old man must take advantage of: he asks the boy if his mother still keeps his light lit for him at night. The boy reluctantly answers "yes". Then he asks him about his nightmares - the boy is surprised that he knows. Then the old man asks the crucial question: " ' . . . d i d you ever hear voices - after you're awake? I mean - that remind you of something, perhaps somebody in your nightmare?' " 9 The boy answers "yes", but he will not, perhaps cannot, tell the old John Donner whose voice it is that terrorizes him. Then John Donner calls the neighbor. She doesn't answer, and he realizes with horror that the voice he has just heard is the voice he has feared all his life. He looks in the mirror and sees a decaying 7 8 9

Richter, Waters, p. 91. Richter, Waters, p. 116. Richter, Waters, p. 152.

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old man. Now he knows why J o h n n y didn't answer him when he asked whose voice it was that frightened him. So that was why he wouldn't reply! It was the great deception practiced by m a n on himself and his fellows, the legend of hate against the father so the son need not face the real and ultimate abomination, might conceal the actual nature of the monster w h o haunted the shadows of childhood, whose n a m e only the soul knew and w h o never revealed himself before the end when it was found that all those disturbing things seen and felt in the father, which as a boy had given him an uncomprehending sense of dread and hostility, were only intimations of his older self to come, a self marked with the inescapable dissolution and decay of his youth. 1 0

The death of the body can be a terrifying thing. Richter is not as certain of immortality as his preacher-father was, and these doubts are what make death terrible. If Portius Wheeler is correct when he tells his son Chancey that there is no life after death, then death is indeed a formidable foe. But Chancey doesn't believe Portius the agnostic, and I don't think that Richter does either, finally. W h a t gives him hope and joy at the end of The Waters of Kronos is not just that he no longer identifies his fear with his father, but also that he can now draw strength from a source hitherto unavailable to him. He realizes that he is, despite his old age, "still the real and true son of his powerful, ever-living father, the participant of his parent's blood and patrimony". 1 1 He realizes now that his father is "ever-living" in his son, with the immortality that breed insures. He also realizes the meaning of his father's favorite song, a song also sung in "New H o m e " (1934): I'm a pilgrim A n d I'm a stranger. I can tarry, I can tarry But a night. 1 2

His father had known all along that he was immortal, that this earth was not his permanent home but only a place of trial. And with this realization Richter becomes aware of why his father prayed, prayers that as a boy he found painful and embarrassing. His father was fighting, with prayer, the forces of evil and death. 10 II

i2

Richter, Waters, p. 161. Richter, Waters, p. 169. Richter, Waters, p. 173.

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Now he could see that the cloud came from elsewhere, from uncontrollable sources, that his father had fought that cloud all his life with what forces at his command, and they were more powerful forces than the boy had realized, born of the strong fiber and convictions of his time. 13 W i t h this realization of the truth about his father a n d their relationship, Richter was ready to write his father's fictional biography, A Simple Honorable Man.

A SIMPLE HONORABLE

MAM

Although at seventy he was able to re-evaluate his relationship with his father in a more favorable light, there were still unresolved differences between them. I n this beautiful tribute to his father, A Simple Honorable Man, the crucial remaining difference is one of faith. T h e old resentments reappear, particularly the father's seemingly greater interest in others t h a n in his three sons, a n d his insensitivity to the family's hardships in following his belated vocation. But the major difference between father and son is that H a r r y Donner can live the way he does because of an unswerving belief in the desirability of living to the exact specifications prescribed by his L u t h e r a n faith, while J o h n worships a God he feels is greater but less interested in the sometimes small, rather exacting laws of organized religion. T h e novel opens as H a r r y Donner, nearing forty, decides to give u p running a village store in Unionville, a n d study for the L u t h e r a n ministry. Seen through his oldest son J o h n ' s eyes, the action is incomprehensible. It seems just a little less incomprehensible to H a r r y Donner's wife's father, the stern and m u c h respected minister of St. J o h n ' s in Unionville. Finally the old m a n relents a n d gives his son-in-law his blessing. H a r r y Donner follows the often trying life of seminarian a n d minister with great good cheer and saintly devotion. After m a n y trials and joys he dies a poor but successful h u m a n being. Like The Waters of Kronos this novel is clearly autobiographical, 13

Richter, Waters, p. 175.

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including m a n y of the same persons a n d places as the first. Instead of using the aged n a r r a t o r again, R i c h t e r tries the omniscient a u t h o r technique with limited points of view. This works very well because H a r r y D o n n e r ' s life seen variously t h r o u g h his own eyes, a n d those of his wife a n d their eldest son, gives the r e a d e r a b a l a n c e d view otherwise difficult to obtain. A Simple Honorable Man includes the most m i n u t e a n d detailed autobiographical reminiscences. Richter's nostalgia for the American past, so obvious in his carefully researched novels, b r o u g h t h i m a t seventy to a n exact r e n d e r i n g of his relatives as he r e m e m b e r e d t h e m . I t is a n u n d e r t a k i n g with few equals in A m e r i c a n literature. But it is m o r e t h a n just a nostalgic family history, for in the two novels R i c h t e r wrestled with his own metaphysical problems. By carefully examining his father's life of faith he gained invaluable insights into his own attitudes towards his minister father a n d his father's God. This is clear f r o m a careful analysis of the e n d i n g of the novel: Johnny sat on a choir chair bathed in a stream of sound. He looked through the open door to the green truck and greener world outside. He thought, all this improvidence of praise for God and good will toward men, lavished, wasted, on an obscure log church in an obscure mountain valley, poured out through the open door on stony fields, worn rail fences and a poor yellow dirt road that led to the small weathered barns and smaller unpainted houses of obscure unremarkable men. 14 Is this last p a r a g r a p h of the novel to be taken as ironical, a n d the father's ministry seen as meaningful a n d t r i u m p h a n t ? O r does Richter intend its almost cynical cast as his father's e p i t a p h ? T h e a m biguity arises f r o m the fusion of two points of view: immediately after his father's d e a t h R i c h t e r resented the waste of such a talented a n d altruistic m a n on such h u m b l e parishes as he chose to work in. But after twenty or so years his vision h a d mellowed to the point w h e r e he realized t h a t his father h a d followed his h e a r t to the situations w h e r e he could d o the most good, h u m b l e as they were. T h e novel re-creates with fidelity the A m e r i c a n w a y of life d u r i n g the first third of this century in the small mining towns of Pennsyl1 4 C o n r a d Richter, A Simple Honorable Man (New York, 1962), p. 310.

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vania. Everything rings true: the names, the characters, the Christians who do not love one another, and the altruistic Harry Donner in his simple but beloved humanity. The jet set and rock-and-roll seem like science fiction beside it. Yet tragedy is not absent, nor any of the evils man is heir to. Nevertheless, it is a refreshing glimpse of a time that seems long past. The psychic center of the book is Harry Donner. Pursuing a belated vocation, he enters the seminary, is ordained, and brings the word of God to a succession of parishes, which, because of his humble nature, are always less affluent than those that others might aspire to. He suffers every privation gladly, is altruistic to a fault, and brings joy and comfort to all who will receive him with an open heart. Throughout these labors Richter has woven his father's phrases, songs, jokes, likes and dislikes, triumphs and failures to such an extent that Harry Donner lives with a great intensity. Conrad Richter never completed the third novel of this projected trilogy. Instead, he wrote two of his lesser novels, The Grandfathers (1966) and The Aristocrat (1968). He was writing the autobiographical third novel when he died. He found it difficult to work on and in his usual humble way was certain that it would not sell. But at least he completed the first two books, and in them gave his readers a memorably accurate look at his well-remembered relatives, and an America long past. Read as personal experience and recollection the two novels help illuminate Richter's other writings. He emerges as a man of sensitivity, nostalgia, and remarkable memory, and his candid portrayal of his own spiritual struggles marks him as a man of great honesty and integrity.

7. LITERARY AFFILIATIONS

While Conrad Richter was somewhat willing to discuss the intent and purpose of his fiction, he showed little tendency to divulge the names of those authors who influenced him and his work. Richter used epigraphs in only two books: The Mountain on the Desert and The Town. In both they appear at the beginning of each chapter. The authors of the epigraphs in The Mountain on the Desert are not very revealing because they range from Thoreau to Isaiah; Blake, Tolstoi and Shakespeare are also represented. However, there is one epigraph from the writings of Willa Cather. Anyone familiar with her writing and Richter's is immediately struck with certain outstanding similarities. In a letter Richter wrote: "I was a reader and admirer of Willa Cather." 1 In The Town the chapter epigraphs are more specifically revealing of Richter's literary heritage. Whenever Richter uses an epigraph it is usually well integrated in theme with the contents of the chapter. Only two novels are represented more than once in the epigraphs of The Town-. Elizabeth Madox Roberts' The Time of Man is quoted three times, and Caroline Miller's Lamb in His Bosom is used twice. Elizabeth Madox Roberts, Caroline Miller, and Willa Cather are the authors whose work Conrad Richter's is most closely related to. Diony Hall, Ellen Chesser, Tillitha Cean Carver, Alexandra Bergson, Antonia Shimerda, and Sayward Luckett Wheeler all live lives that are a positive affirmation of life. In his 1952 book, In My Opinion, Orvill Prescott considered Conrad Richter and A. B. Guthrie, Jr., two of the finest writers of historical fiction in America at that time. He writes:

1

Conrad Richter to Marvin LaHood, August 19, 1961.

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Although the American frontier has been one of the dominant forces which shaped our society and although it has been written about in books past all counting, there have been surprisingly few genuinely distinguished novels about it. Among those few I would include Legrand Cannon's Look to the Mountain, Elizabeth Madox Roberts' The Great Meadow, Willa Cather's My Antonia, Conrad Richter's Ohio trilogy and the novels of A. B. Guthrie, J r . 2

Mr. Prescott could easily have included Caroline Miller's Lamb in His Bosom. All of these novels are tributes to the intrepidity and inner-steadfastness of the pioneer. Cannon and Guthrie were contemporaries of Richter, and while there are some similarities between their work and his, there are not nearly as many between the work of Cather, Miller, Roberts, and his. One of the most important things Richter learned from Elizabeth Madox Roberts' work was the value of writing his Ohio trilogy in the language of the people he portrayed. Miss Roberts had great success with the idiom of the people of the land in The Time of Man (1926), and in The Great Meadow (1930). Richter was aware of the similarities in speech between her settlers of Kentucky and his own pioneers of the Ohio valley. In the "Acknowledgments" to The Trees he wrote: The author acknowledges his debt to... those neighbors of pioneer stock the author knew intimately as boy and man in the mountains of Northern and central Pennsylvania, whose great uncles, several times removed, carried the early pioneer language along with the early Pennsylvania rifle down into Kentucky and other Southern states, where the former long lingered, and later into Ohio where it soon all but vanished. 3

Another aspect of Miss Roberts' work that Richter used to advantage in his trilogy was the inclusion of folk tales and folk superstitions. Besides learning something about the handling of folk speech and folk material from Miss Roberts, Richter was undoubtedly impressed with the feminine strength and positive affirmation of life of Ellen Chesser and Diony Hall. Two of the epigraphs he used in The Town come from the same passage in The Time of Man.

2 3

Orville Prescott, In My Opinion (New York, 1952), p. 137. Conrad Richter, "Acknowledgments", The Trees (New York, 1940).

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In quoting from this crucial section of the novel Richter is making explicit a bond that already exists between Ellen Chesser and Sayward Luckett. Ellen is alone on a hillside. ... the afternoon seemed very still back of the dove calls and the cries of the plovers, back of a faint dying phrase, "in the time of man." The wind lapped through the sky, swirling lightly now, and again dashing straight down from the sun. She was leaning over the clods to gather a stone, her shadow making an arched shape on the ground. All at once she lifted her body and flung up her head to the great sky that reached over the hills and shouted: "Here I am!" She waited listening. " I ' m Ellen Chesser! I'm here!"4

Ellen affirms to the universe, "here I am". She is alive, and with her woman's strength, bred of the land, she is ready for life and everything it holds. For her, as for Sayward, life is something positive, something to be desired. Sayward muses in The Town: ...for in all mortal creatures, she reckoned, was a great hankering to live or never would they have come into this living world.5

T h e single work most closely related to the trilogy is Caroline Miller's Pulitzer Prize winning novel, Lamb in His Bosom (1933). There is only one major difference between Miss Miller's novel and the trilogy, and that is in the matter of religion. The God of Lamb in His Bosom is very much the God of the psalmist David, an Old Testament God. He is an ever present force in the lives of the characters. He answers their prayers and he punishes their sins, and is in every way immediately concerned with them. They seem somehow to have gotten back to a direct relationship with Yahweh by almost completely disregarding two thousand years of theology. In the following passage Seen, the matriarch of the clan, thinks: [She] would throw that promise back into God's eternal face in the weak song of her lips. He had promised, and repromised to bear her like a lamb in His bosom, never, no, never, no, never to forsake her.6

The faith of Richter's characters is something quite different

* Elizabeth Madox Roberts, The Time of Man (New York, 1927), p. 81. 5 Conrad Richter, The Town (New York, 1950), p. 22. 6 Caroline Miller, Lamb in His Bosom (New York, 1933), p. 208.

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from this. It is no more sophisticated, but it is certainly less fervent. The number of similarities between the Ohio trilogy and Miss Miller's novel is striking. In Lamb in His Bosom, the dialect, folk tales, and superstitions closely resemble the same elements in Richter's The Trees, published seven years later. It was through reading Miss Roberts and Miss Miller that Richter realized that the language he was beginning to record in his notebooks was a suitable medium to use in his story about the early settlers of the Ohio valley. In Lamb in His Bosom as in The Time of Man and The Great Meadow there is an exceptionally strong woman. Tillitha Cean Carver is, in some respects, the strongest heroine of all. She resembles many of Richter's heroines in that her strength comes from her father. Her mother, like Sayward's, sorely misses her girlhood home in Carolina with its several available neighbors. Like Jary Luckett, Seen Carver resents her husband Vince for bringing her to the frontier wilderness of the Georgia interior. The episodic structure of the novel very closely resembles the structure of the trilogy. The prose is somewhat similar too, lucid and faintly lyrical. Richter's gospel of hard work is here, as is his admiration for the closeness of family ties on the frontier. Jake, Cean's younger brother, seems a faint prototype of Chancey Wheeler. Like Chancey he has a complexion which makes his blue veins quite prominent, and like Chancey he feels alienated from the rest of his family. One of the tragic episodes of the novel revolves around the death of Cean's young daughter Caty and her niece Fairby. Both are burned, like Sayward's daughter Sulie, while playing in the fire Cean has used to make soap. Two of the finest aspects of the trilogy, Richter's wonderful portrayal of motherhood and his belief in the cleansing action of the land, are found here too. ...a mother's heart stretched just as her body did when she was carrying a child As the babies grew... there must be more stretching until the heart was fit to burst sometimes with its load. For never did a mother's heart lose one jot nor tittle of its load: if a child died, still its Ma carried it about with her always, a dead weight; if a grown man got into trouble, his

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mother added that to her load, trying to bear it for him as she had borne his weight within her, safe from cold and sun and grief, long ago. 7

When Sayward finds out about Portius' disloyalty, she plows her fields to relieve the bitterness in her heart. When Margot Carver, Cean's sister-in-law, becomes aware that her husband has been unfaithful, she observes the same ritual. There was something in this field that came into her and purged her clean, as boneset tea purges disease from fevered flesh. There was no hot distemper in her heart now; there was hurting, but it was healing pain that must come to every wound that does not rot.8

One of the crucial episodes of the trilogy is Portius' adultery. Sayward believes that it is her punishment for refusing to have children for a period of time. Cean also practices birth control for two years. Later when she has twins born dead, she realizes that this is her punishment for trying to outwit God. Here, for once, the religion of the trilogy resembles that of Lamb in His Bosom. Anyone who has read the trilogy and Miss Miller's book will wonder at the great similarity. Richter was very impressed with this Pulitzer Prize novel of 1933. It is not surprising that he should have acknowledged his admiration by twice quoting it in his own Pulitzer Prize novel of 1950. Some of the finest aspects of Conrad Richter's work are the result of his life-long admiration for Willa Cather's haunting and memorable novels. Her portrayals of Alexandra Bergson and Antonia Shimerda served as models for Richter's greatest heroine, Sayward Luckett, the protagonist of his Ohio trilogy, The Trees (1940), The Fields (1946), and The Town (1950), for which he won the 1951 Pulitzer Prize. Alfred Kazin, in On Native Grounds, made this observation about Willa Cather: Her love for the West grew from a simple affection for her own kind into a reverence for the qualities they represented; from a patriotism of things and place-names into a patriotism of ideas. What she loved in the pioneer tradition was human qualities rather than institutions... but as those qualities seemed to disappear from the national life she began to think of them as 7 8

Miller, Lamb, p. 111. Miller, Lamb, p. 125

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something more than personal traits; they became the principles which she was to oppose to contemporary dissolution. Willa Cather's traditionalism was... a candid and philosophical nostalgia, a conviction and a standard possible only to a writer whose remembrance of the world of her childhood and the people in it was so overwhelming that everything after it seemed drab and a little cheap But the very intensity of her nostalgia had from the first led her beyond nostalgia; it had given her the conviction that the values of the world she had lost were the primary values, and everything else merely their degradation. 9 This is also true of Conrad Richter. Both writers mourned the passing of the frontier because it seemed to mark the end of the pioneer spirit too. They were both fervent admirers of the men a n d women of strength and character they found on the frontier. T h e y did differ in that he never wrote a novel whose central concern was the degradation of values in the modern world. Miss Cather tried to come to grips with this new world in One of Ours (1922) a n d The Professor's House (1925), and then retreated back into the more appealing past of old New Mexico a n d even older Quebec. H e seldom ventured into the world of "contemporary dissolution". T h e epigraph to My Antonia, Virgil's " O p t i m a dies... prima fugit", was a sentiment that they shared. Besides differing from Richter in her willingness to try to paint the new order (an order she felt shabby when compared with the strength and quality of the pioneer spirit), Miss Cather also differed from him in her abiding interest in the artistic spirit and temperament. She felt that the true successor to the pioneer was the artist. Both face formidable obstacles, and both realize in their final triumph that they have preserved their individuality by their single-minded struggle. T h e r e is no T h e a Kronborg in Richter's work. T h e closest he comes to seeing the artist as the true successor of the pioneer is in his own life. H e undoubtedly felt that through his dedication to a career of writing he had remained faithful to the spirit of his pioneer forefathers. Conrad Richter, as well as Miss Cather, found that living close to the land and the seasons helped to give meaningful order to life. T h e y mourned the separation from nature that modern u r b a n cul9

Alfred Kazin, On Native Grounds (New York, 1942), pp. 250-251.

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t u r e b r o u g h t a b o u t . This separation f r o m the order of n a t u r e is clearly one of the reasons w h y m o d e r n m a n feels vaguely alien in the world t h a t was once his home. I n The Modern Novel in America: 1900-1950, Frederick J . H o f f m a n included this observation a b o u t Willa C a t h e r : She is less a conscious artist than a conscientious recorder of the simple lives and faith of primitive peoples. For her these people have retained what the modern world has thrown out. 10 H e wrote l a t e r : She found in the plains states a kind of meaningful order - a life in which acts were closely associated with moral and emotional sanctions.11 It is the same kind of " m e a n i n g f u l o r d e r " t h a t R i c h t e r f o u n d in the frontier of the O h i o Valley a n d in the early Southwest. A n o t h e r point at which Willa Cather's frontier novels differ f r o m Richter's is in her choice of the i m m i g r a n t as pioneer. T h e Lucketts of Richter's trilogy are at some remove f r o m their i m m i g r a n t forefathers. Both writers used material t h a t they were familiar with, particularly material a c c u m u l a t e d b y observation a n d story in their childhood. Miss C a t h e r ' s neighbors d u r i n g her Nebraska girlhood were E u r o p e a n i m m i g r a n t s f r o m Scandinavia, Bohemia, Russia, Czechoslovakia, a n d France. She was fascinated by them, a n d they, in t u r n , regaled her w i t h stories she r e m e m b e r e d all her life. Richter, on the other h a n d , was two a n d three generations removed f r o m his ancestors w h o first c a m e to this country. Some of these ancestors he observed as a child, the others his m o t h e r a n d a u n t told h i m a b o u t in story. I t isn't surprising t h a t the two writers, b o t h of w h o m b e g a n their m a j o r work in their late thirties, (her first novel, Alexander's Bridge, was published w h e n she was thirty-nine, his, The Sea of Grass, was published w h e n he was forty-seven), a n d b o t h of w h o m looked on their own pasts with deep nostalgia, should have chosen for their heroes a n d heroines the kinds of people they k n e w in their youth. T h e i r greatest pioneer heroines, A l e x a n d r a Bergson, A n t o n i a Shimerda, a n d Sayward Luckett are not so far a p a r t in 10

11

Frederick J. Hoffman, The Modem Novel in America: 1900-1950 1951), p. 61. Hoffman, Modern Novel, p. 64.

(Chicago,

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nationality, geography, or time, as they are close in determination, perseverence, and indomitable strength. Connected with this is Miss Cather's interest in the artist. It is in this regard that the European qualities of her chosen people are most important. This artistic feeling is something that Richter's pioneers do not have. In one way the European Mr. Shimerda is quite different from the "woodsy" Worth Luckett. He has brought some of the culture of the Old World to the Nebraska plain where it cannot sustain itself. Only those, like Antonia, who can adapt to the demands of the land can survive. But Worth Luckett is as much a casualty of the pioneer way of life as Mr. Shimerda. His art, hunting, although different from Mr. Shimerda's violin playing, is equally out of harmony with an agrarian society. Miss Cather's interest in the artist leads her to an indictment of the frontier that Richter does not have to make. In this one thing, the antagonism of the pioneer community to the needs of the artist, Miss Cather finds the frontier deficient. Richter, antithetically, indicts Sayward's son Chancey's way of life (the only life in the Ohio trilogy approaching that of the artist) when he sets it against the life of his pioneer mother in The Town. This major difference between Miss Cather and Richter is brought out well in these two passages from 0 Pioneers! Alexandra muses: Yes, she told herself, it had been worthwhile; both Emil and the country had become what she had hoped. O u t of her father's children there was one w h o was fit to cope with the world, w h o had not been tied to the plow, and w h o had a personality apart from the soil. 1 2

Earlier she had said to Carl Lindstrum: If the world were no wider than m y cornfields, if there was not something beside this, I wouldn't feel that it was m u c h worthwhile to work. 1 3

This double standard is one of the real ambiguities in Miss Cather's work. She does not share Richter's whole-hearted acceptance of frontier values. Her return to the frontier as her subject matter left her with two ideals which she could put together but 12 13

Willa Cather, 0 Pioneers! (Boston and New York, 1913), p. 213. Cather, 0 Pioneers!, p. 124.

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never reconcile. The resulting tension gives her work much of its dynamism and strength. In her essay, "The Novel Démeublé", Miss Cather quotes from Merimee's essay on Gogol. This passage is an accurate index of her feelings. "The art of choosing among the innumerable traits which nature offers us is, after all, much more difficult than that of observing them with attention and describing with exactitude." 14

Richter, too, has tried to present the important aspects of the world he chose to depict, rather than tell all. A shy, retiring man, he was incapable of pouring out his art in the riot of emotion with which his contemporaries could sometimes write. Miss Cather's writing reflects the same kind of temperament. Along with the spare "furniture" of their novels is a lucid, concise prose. In their avoidance of some of the obvious excesses of naturalism they treat sex with a never quite Puritanical reserve. Miss Cather is better at it than Richter. The love between Emil Bergson and Marie Shabata is a beautiful and memorable one. In Richter's work only the tragic romance of Chancey Wheeler and Rosa Tench in The Town approaches it. Alexandra Bergson of 0 Pioneers! (1913) is Miss Cather's first pioneer heroine; she fits well the Whitman mould. All the past we leave behind, W e debouch upon a newer mightier world, varied world, Fresh and strong the world we seize, world of labor and the march, Pioneers! O Pioneers! 15

Her father, John Bergson, because he cannot leave the past completely behind, does not survive. His strong, imaginative daughter takes over, and through hard work and intelligence makes a success of the Bergson's Nebraska farm. Richter's Sayward Luckett is closely related to Alexandra Bergson. What Alfred Kazin says about Alexandra in On Native Grounds is also true of Sayward. The tenacious ownership of the land, the endless search of its possibilities, 1" Cather, "The Novel Démeublé", Willa Cather on Writing (New York, 1949), p. 37. 1 5 Walt Whitman, Leaves of Grass (New York, 1954), p. 197.

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became a very poetry of her character; the need to assert oneself proudly had become a triumphant acceptance of life. 1 6

Alexandra's mother, like Sayward's, regrets having left the friendly community of her youth for the harshness of the frontier. And while neither has the true pioneer strength and vision of her daughter, both are able to maintain a sense of order in the home. Marie Shabata and Rosa Tench are romantic dreamers who depart early from the realistic world of the frontier. Richter describes Rosa in a manner reminiscent of this passage in 0 Pioneers! Marie stole slowly, flutteringly, along the path, like a white night-moth out of the fields. The years seemed to stretch before her like the land; spring, summer, autumn, winter, spring... Marie walked on, her face lifted toward the remote, inaccessible evening star. 1 7

Both wish passionately for a year bounded on either end by spring but neither finds it. Their lives end in a violence they would never admit existed. Some critics consider Antonia Shimerda Miss Cather's most memorable character portrayal, and My Antonia (1918) her finest novel. The story is understandably nostalgic, for it is told by Antonia's lifelong admirer and friend, J i m Burden. Richter uses a similar male narrator-admirer to tell the story of a heroine in his three novels of the Southwest, in Always Young and Fair, and in The Aristocrat. In these five narrated novels of Richter's as in My Antonia, the tone is more nostalgic than in the Ohio trilogy or 0 Pioneers!, both using the omniscent author technique. Antonia was formed from the same heroic mold as Alexandra and Sayward. In Creating the Modern American Novel, Harlan Hatcher wrote: Without satire or bitterness, and with only a little sentimentalism, Willa Cather pictured a strong character developing under severe difficulties which would crush a less heroic soul, surviving the most primitive hardships in a sod hut, toiling like an ox in the field with the men, enduring want, cut off from ordinary pleasures, withstanding betrayal and the cheap life as a hired girl in a village, and emerging at last from such desperate 16 17

Alfred Kazin, On Native Grounds (New York, 1942), p. 252. Cather, 0 Pioneers.', p. 248.

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conditions to a triumphant serenity as mother to a healthy group of shy, awkward but happy and laughing boys who are content with their life on the farm. 1 8

Like Alexandra and Sayward, Antonia gains strength from the land, and finally becomes identified with it. Sayward, though uneducated, has a great respect for education. Antonia shows this same feeling when J i m Burden comes to ask her if she can go to school. She answers: "I ain't got time to learn. I can work like mans now School is all right for little boys. I help make this land one good farm." She clucked to her team and started for the barn. I walked beside her, feeling vexed. Was she going to grow up boastful like her mother, I wondered? Before we reached the stable, I felt something tense in her silence, and glancing up I saw she was crying. She turned her face from me and looked off at the red streak of dying light, over the dark prairie. 19

This moving passage is reflected in Richter's description of Sayward's emotion upon learning to write her name. Both episodes exemplify the two authors' deep and enduring love for education. They depict the rather strange combination in the American mind of an enduring love for practicality and a wistfulness for formal education. Alexandra, Antonia, and Sayward believe that through their tireless efforts to subdue the land some future generation will have advantages they didn't have. Their authors imply that this newer race will never appreciate the really valuable things in life as these three great pioneer women did. For Willa Gather and Conrad Richter the frontier experience was important precisely because it helped to develop, at least for one brief moment in our history, human beings of great substance, strength, and fortitude. Willa Gather's A Lost Lady (1923) and Conrad Richter's The Sea of Grass (1937) have many similarities. The protagonists, Marian Forrester and Lutie Brewton are thin, pale, and highly energized. They are happier in Denver and St. Louis drawing rooms than at home with their husbands, Captain Forrester and Colonel Brewton, who are both much older than their young, vivacious wives. The is Harlan Hatcher, Creating the Modern American Novel (New York, 1935), p. 66. 1 9 Willa Cather, My Antonia (New York, 1926), p. 141.

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women, restless, and afraid of being "buried" in the quiet of their husbands' lives, have affairs with younger men. While Lutie comes back to the Colonel in the end, Mrs. Forrester, once she is cut off from the solidity of the Captain, becomes a drifter in society and dies in Buenos Aires after being married to a rich Englishman. The two men are the last of a breed of pioneer giants. Men of courage and honor, they are crippled by an advancing society made up of small, unscrupulous, "modern" men. Their women are impressive only when seen in connection with them. Miss Cather sees the disintegration of Mrs. Forrester as symptomatic of the weakness of the generation that came after the pioneers. Her fall is inevitable once the strength of the Captain is no longer available to her. In Richter's story we are not aware of Lutie's vagaries as a "fall". At the end of The Sea of Grass the Colonel, older and less impressive after being thwarted by circumstance, is, nevertheless, undefeated. Both authors were attracted to the Southwest. Miss Cather set the stage for her masterpiece about this land, Death Comes for the Archbishop (1927) with the beautiful "Tom Outland's Story", in The Professor's House (1925). I n Willa Cather: A Critical

Introduction,

David Daiches writes: Professor St. Peter in The Professor's House has a kind of heroism which modern society neither recognizes nor appreciates... The professor finds his compensation in identifying himself in a sense with Tom Outland, for whom, as for the professor, the romance of history takes the place of contemporary heroism. Beauty, order, and heroic action - three ideals which haunted the professor, and which he was unable to find in modern life - are to be found in the old Catholic Southwest. 20

In "Tom Outland's Story", Willa Cather first captured the qualities she had found in the Southwest. The remains of an older pueblo civilization which Tom and Roddy Blake find, give evidence of a people who lived in perfect harmony with nature. The beauty and order of this city constructed by a vanished race of Indians mesmerizes Tom. He is rudely awakened by the petty materialism of the city of Washington, and Blake's well meaning cupidity. How20

David Daiches, Willa Cather: A Critical Introduction (Ithaca, New York, 1951), p. 104.

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ever, his disappointment doesn't prevent him from spending one last summer alone in the serenity of the ancient city he so loved. It is the great experience of his life, for he found in this lovely mesa of New Mexico a symbol for the things he cherished most. I n this fragile and fabulous tale Miss Cather conveys a feeling for the land which she continued two years later in Death Comes for the Archbishop. In this novel Miss Cather picked the ideal story to communicate in art all that she had personally found in the Southwest. T h e quietly heroic lives of J e a n Latour and Joseph Vaillant reflect perfectly the deep feeling Miss Cather had for the land. In Richter the land is sometimes described in a manner reminiscent of Miss Cather's. The Lady contains some of his best efforts at depicting this lonely, mysterious, and inscrutable country. It seemed impossible for any place to be so empty of life, so devoid of human traces. Suddenly, I would see a small cloud of dust moving toward me from far away. T h e feeling that a rider, a human being on a horse, was at last peopling the solitude and coming toward m e rose uncontrollably in my breast. Then the small cloud of dust would veer and I could see it was only the wind.... 2 1

This is something like the scene that greets J e a n Latour as he journeys toward his new post at the opening of Death Comes for the Archbishop. One afternoon in the autumn of 1851 a solitary horseman, followed by a pack-mule, was pushing through an arid stretch of country somewhere in central N e w Mexico. H e had lost his way, and was trying to get back to the trail, with only his compass and his sense of direction for guides. 22

A land where a m a n could really be alone, face to face once more with elemental forces, appealed greatly to the imaginations of these two authors for whom the crowded city was always less desirable than the quiet surroundings of Red Cloud, Nebraska, and Pine Grove, Pennsylvania. I n the Southwest they found the beauty and order of unspoiled nature in a land that seemed to reflect the grandeur of an age long past. These were the same qualities they found in the virgin forests of Ohio and the vast plains of Nebraska, but 21 Conrad Richter, The Lady (New York, 1957), p. 129. 22 Willa Cather, Death Comes for the Archbishop (Boston, 1938), p. 19.

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which progress had blotted out. They were happy to find them again. Among Richter's contemporaties only A. B. Guthrie, J r . invites comparison. His two fine frontier novels, The Big Sky (1947) and The Way West (1949), are memorable portraits of two phases of the Westward movement. They are related to Richter's work in their portrayal of strong pioneer types. However, they are not concerned with the agrarian themes of 0 Pioneers!, My Antonia, or the Ohio trilogy, nor are they written in a similar style. Mr. Guthrie's sensibility is not so delicate as either Gather's or Richter's; he is often coarsely realistic, both in the actions he depicts, and in the language he uses. He does, however, share Richter's belief that the frontier was a developer of strong character. In The Way West the transition of Lije Evans from an easygoing, mild-mannered man into the masterful leader of a group of pioneers on the difficult journey west to Oregon is memorably written. It is as fine a treatment of the response of an individual to the challenge of the frontier as can be found in American literature. Both Richter and Guthrie owe at least one debt to James Fenimore Cooper: Richter's Del H a r d y ( The Light in the Forest) and Guthrie's Dick Summers are characters in the Leather-Stocking tradition. Both authors have also tried to show that there was a time in American history when things were very difficult, and they have portrayed a breed of men and women who, by triumphing over these difficulties, rose to heroic stature. T h a t two of their novels, The Way West and The Town, won the Pulitzer Prize in successive years is evidence that modern Americans have an abiding interest in the reality and myth of the frontier. Conrad Richter learned many important lessons from three great American frontier novelists: Willa Cather, Caroline Miller, and Elizabeth Madox Roberts. A picture of Willa Cather hung in a prominent place in his Pine Grove home, and he was pleased that Elizabeth Madox Roberts had read and liked The Sea of Grass. Of course, his own treatment of the American frontier is distinctly his own, for it was his personal vision of a nation young and vigorous, where men and women of great courage were tested and not found wanting. This authentic and memorable frontier is Conrad Richter's America.

APPENDIX RICHTER'S

RICHTER

Conrad Michael Richter was born in Pine Grove, Pennsylvania o n October 13, 1890, the son of J o h n Absalom and Charlotte Esther (Henry) Richter. Richter's great-grandfather, Squire Henry Conrad, settled in Pine Grove (seventy miles northwest of Philadelphia) after the war of 1812, in which he had been a major. T h e squire built a hotel in which he also kept a general store, and where he presided as a magistrate. Partly because of Squire Conrad, Pine Grove was pretty well behaved; he was particularly tough on sinners w h o said "damn" on Sunday, an offense that carried a fine. Richter always loved Pine Grove and was residing at 11 M a p l e Street in the town where he was born at the time of his death o n October 30, 1968. I was born here before the moving picture and the automobile changed the country, and I wanted to set down my feelings for a vanished way of life. I mean the time when my grandfather's high silk hat looked perfectly natural, when everybody was an individualist refreshingly different from his neighbors, and when a couple score of town characters kept it in perpetual entertainment and good humor. Summer people came here from Philadelphia in search of peace and beauty, and found it; nerves were practically unknown. I think sometimes that if our small town might have been fenced off and preserved exactly as it was, with its characters still alive and doing their stuff, it would be known today from coast to coast. Now most of its beautiful trees have been cut down to make way for progress. What peace it has is daily broken by the roar of coal from the mines to the north. Its charming covered bridges have been torn down for common concrete ones, its once unsurpassed drinking water is no longer the town's pride, and Swatara Creek, in which I swam as a boy, is black as the hinges of hell. 1

1 Conrad Richter, "This Once Ideal Village", Saturday Evening Post, 219 (October 12, 1946), 4.

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Richter was named after his two grandmothers, Sarah Conrad and Susannah Michael. 1 w a s b o r n in Pine Grove, Pennsylvania, of m i x e d S o u t h G e r m a n , F r e n c h , English, a n d Scotch-Irish blood. M y f a t h e r , g r a n d f a t h e r , uncle, a n d g r e a t uncles w e r e preachers. T h e i r fathers, however, h a d been t r a d e s m e n , soldiers, c o u n t r y squires, blacksmiths, a n d farmers, a n d I think t h a t in m y passion for early A m e r i c a n life a n d people I a m a t h r o w - b a c k to these. 2

One of his forebears fought under Washington in the Revolutionary war; another was a Hessian mercenary in the opposing British Army. After Richter's father became a Lutheran minister, the youth grew up in a score of different villages and mountain settlements in the northern and central sections of Pennsylvania, where he was brought into contact with many families who were descended from the pioneers. He listened eagerly to their tales of bygone days, and in his own home throughout his boyhood he heard stories of early life, both Eastern and Western. Richter attended Susquehanna Preparatory School, in Selins Grove, Pennsylvania, during 1904-1905, and completed his education at Tremont (Pa.) High School. A t fifteen I finished h i g h school a n d w a s obliged to go to w o r k . I n t h e n e x t few years I d r o v e teams, clerked, p i t c h e d h a y , w a s a b a n k teller [ F a r m e r s a n d Citizens N a t i o n a l Bank, M o n t g o m e r y , P a . ] , c o u n t r y c o r r e s p o n d e n t , t i m b e r m a n , a n d subscription salesman. A series of articles in t h e Bookman [ M a r c h - D e c e m b e r 1904] a b o u t n e w s p a p e r m e n m a d e m e k n o w w h a t perm a n e n t w o r k I w a n t e d to do. I got m y first j o b r e p o r t i n g on t h e J o h n s t o w n , P a . , Journal [1909], a n d a t n i n e t e e n edited t h e weekly Courier a t P a t t o n , P a . L a t e r I r e p o r t e d o n t h e P i t t s b u r g Despatch a n d t h e J o h n s t o w n Leader [1911-1912], a n d t h e n b e c a m e a p r i v a t e secretary in Cleveland [19121913], w h e r e m y first fiction story was sold. 3

Richter's first published story was "How Tuck Went Home", in Cavalier, a Munsey publication, September 6, 1913, bought by Robert H. Davis. In 1914 "Brothers of No Kin" appeared in the April issue of Forum. It was subsequently picked by Edward J. 2

3

Conrad Richter, "Autobiographical Sketch", Twentieth Century Authors, ed. Stanley Kunitz and Howard Haycraft (New York, 1942), p. 1171. Richter, "Autobiographical Sketch", p. 1172.

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O ' B r i e n , in his a n n u a l survey for t h e Boston Transcript, as t h e best

short story of 1914-. Also in Cleveland I wrote "Brothers of N o K i n " . . . . It was reprinted in a number of papers, and editors at once wrote asking for m y stories. It was the sort of opportunity no youth today would fail to grasp, but I was too young, and callow and too stubborn. T h e Forum had said nothing about money, and when I got up courage to call on Mitchell Kennerley he wrote m e out a check for $25. I had just been married, had sober obligations, and told myself stubbornly that if this is what one got for the "best" story of the year, I had better stick to business and write in m y spare time only the type of story that would fetch a fair price, w h i c h I did. 4

Richter was married in Reading, Pa., M a r c h 24, 1915, to H a r vena Maria Achenbach, daughter of Georgry Achenbach of Pine Grove, a justice of the peace. T h e y had one daughter, Harvena. After a brief sojourn in the West, where he investigated a silverlead mine in the Coeur d'Alene region of Idaho, Richter began w r i t i n g children's stories for John Martin's Book, t u r n i n g o u t t h e

first serial that magazine ever printed. Later he became a small publisher a n d l a u n c h e d his o w n children's periodical, Junior Maga-

zine Book. Using a dozen pseudonyms, he wrote each issue in its entirety, including the verse a n d advertisements. T h e magazine was discontinued at the time of World W a r I. Richter continued in the publishing business until 1928, first in Reading, and later in Harrisburg. It is not surprising that he published his ov/n children's magazine, for as a youth he received a great deal of enjoyment from books written for boys. At an early age I read and reread m a n y of the Frank Nelson and Boy Trapper books. T h e free, open life on the prairies they portrayed gripped m e strongly, and m y cousin, two years m y elder, and I resolved to run away to the Great Plains and live our o w n lives hunting the buffalo and causing redskins to bite the dust. 5

T h e planned excursion never got under way b u t both men later went West: the cousin to M o n t a n a and Richter to New Mexico. During the period between 1915 a n d 1928, when Richter was publishing a n d writing short stories, he began to work out his 4 5

Richter, "Autobiographical Sketch", p. 1172. Conrad Richter, "A Few Personal Notes", Saturday Evening Post, 208 (July 13, 1935) p. 30.

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theory of psycho-energics. This interest resulted in three works, Human Vibration (1925), Principles in Bio Physics (1927), a n d a private-

ly printed manuscript "Life Energy". These three contained the basis of the theory he finally published as The Mountain on the Desert

(1955). In 1928 Richter, with his wife and small daughter, moved to the Southwest. In 1935 he wrote: For a long time I have read everything authentic of the early days that I have been able to get my hands on. A collector of rare old Western books has loaned m e armfuls from his library. Another Albuquerquean has generously done the same with bound volumes of his father's newspaper, printed in the territory on paper hauled across the plains by ox trains. But the backlog of my material has come from first sources, fine old-time men and women, chiefly from New Mexico and Arizona, Texas and Indian Territory, who lived through m a n y of the early days.... I had been born just in time to see a bit of their age before it was closed by electricity and the automobile; the age in which my grandfather still wore his stovepipe h a t ; when nearly everybody had horses, and my father would take m e along in his buggy or three-horse store team to the mountains; when the public could still be damned and everybody be his natural, individualistic self, so refreshingly different from his neighbor; and when motion pictures were unmissed because every town was hourly entertained by its own cast of characters, more varied and real than m a y be seen today in a whole year's cinema going. Only the close of this age my own eyes h a d seen, but with most of its duration I was, fortunately, familiar. M y father h a d told m e a great deal, a n d m y mother a n d aunt, who were born story-tellers, had, from the time I was a small boy, filled my ears with all the usual family tradition, memories and observations: Of the humorous incidents that had happened to my grandfather, who had ridden with his service book in his saddle bags to his first charge, where he preached some forty years and died; of what h a d gone on in my great-grandfather's store a n d tavern, the Mansion House, where colonial celebrities stayed when passing on the old Indian trail; and of the gallant gentleman who wooed my grandmother a n d lost her to the backwoodspreacher; my young grandmother, who... called her young children into the room where she lay, fatally injured by a fall at a picnic, to show them how to die. All these things, I found, to my surprise, h a d happened in the West as well as in Pennsylvania, and I found a great m a n y more, a few of which I hope to set down in future stories. 8 6

Richter, "A Few Personal Notes", p. 30.

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By the time this autobiographical sketch was published R i c h t e r h a d written seven of the nine stories collected in Early Americana and Other Stories (1936). I n 1937 he published The Sea of Grass, his first novel, a n d in 1940 The Trees, the first v o l u m e of his O h i o trilogy. I n 1942 a n d 1943 h e published Tacey Cromwell a n d The Free Man. H e t h e n r e t u r n e d to the O h i o trilogy, publishing The Fields in 1946 a n d The Town in 1950. H e was a w a r d e d The Pulitzer Prize for The Town in 1951. It is p r o b a b l e t h a t it was a w a r d e d to him for the entire trilogy. H e r e t u r n e d to Pine Grove, Pennsylvania, the place of his birth, in 1950. After 1950 he r e m a i n e d there except for trips to the Southwest, a n d winters in Bradenton, Florida. H e neither sought nor enjoyed the literary limelight. His acceptance speech for the 1960 N a t i o n a l Book A w a r d ( The Waters of Kronos) was given for h i m b y his friend of m a n y years, Alfred A. K n o p f . (Richter's short t r i b u t e to his publisher, " T h e M a n in the Green Shirt", a p p e a r e d in Portrait of a Publisher, 1915-1965, published in 1965 b y Alfred A. Knopf.) After r e t u r n i n g to Pine Grove in 1950 he wrote one m o r e novel a b o u t the Southwest, The Lady (1957). I n 1953 a n d 1966, p e r h a p s stirred by the b e a u t y of the land s u r r o u n d i n g his birthplace, with its I n d i a n memories, he completed The Light in the Forest a n d A Country of Strangers. The Light in the Forest is his best seller; it is in its 25th soft-bound edition a n d its 11th in cloth. H e r e he also wrote the first two volumes of the Pennsylvania trilogy, The Waters of Kronos, set in Pine Grove, a n d his beautiful tribute to his father, A Simple Honorable Man. H e was at work on the third volume w h e n he died. His closest associates in the publishing business were Alfred A. K n o p f w h o published Early Americana and Other Stories, a n d all of Richter's books after t h a t , a n d P a u l R . Reynolds, Sr., a n d J r . M r . Reynolds, Sr., wrote to R i c h t e r in 1915 asking for permission for someone w h o w a n t e d to r e p r i n t "Brothers of N o K i n " . Since R i c h t e r received m o r e f r o m the reprint t h a n the $ 25 he was paid for the original, he b e g a n sending stories to M r . Reynolds whose son was also Richter's agent. His work is substantive a n d d u r a b l e . I t has been translated into

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twenty-six languages in seventy-six editions. T h e distribution is interesting; ten I n d i a n dialects are represented: Bengali, Halayalan, Hindi, Marathi, Ongujareti, Oriya, Pak-Bengali, Punjabi, Tanid, a n d U r d u . Five of his novels have been serialized: The Sea of Grass,1 The Free Man, Always Young and Fair, The Light in the Forest, a n d The Lady. Richter received letters from readers almost every day. M a n y came from young people, which pleased him very much. Sometimes readers had insights into his work that startled him by their depth and accuracy. T h e letters indicate that there is a large and varied group of readers for whom Richter's work is important a n d meaningful. Richter, like his father, was a simple honorable m a n . His work suggests an author of discerning sensitivity and broad humanity. T h e m a n himself radiated the qualities that he admired in others: perseverance, charity, humility, and love of knowledge. After first meeting him I felt strongly that he was superior to his finest protagonists. His sense of honor and his beautiful simplicity were doubly attractive because they are virtues no longer held in high esteem nor practiced by many. I n an age when materialism and self-satisfaction are the obvious modes of operation of our society, it was refreshing to meet a m a n who was spiritually oriented and believed in self-denial and self-abnegation. It was not easy for him to see the kinds of novels that appeared on the best-seller lists year after year, nor the way our age seeks comfort and ease. O n e index of our return to sanity will be the public acclaim of fiction like Richter's. Conrad Richter lived a life of quiet thoughtfulness in the rural beauty of Pine Grove. T h e ideals he believed in and dedicated his life to portraying in fiction are the ideals that made this country great. Steadfastness, a sense of honor, honesty, charity, hard work, dedication, and love of country are a few. Perhaps through the medium of his well-modulated a n d poetic voice these ideals will again be cherished throughout this great land.

7

The Sea of Grass is Richter's second best selling book, having been published in several different editions.

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Conrad Richter received the following awards and honors: 1942 The Gold Medal for literary achievement from the Society for the Libraries of New York University. 1944 An honorary Doctor of Literature degree from Susquehanna University. 1946 The Award of Merit from the Pennsylvania German Society. 1947 The Ohioana Library Medal. 1951 The Pulitzer Prize for Fiction for The Town. 1958 An honorary Doctor of Literature degree from the University of New Mexico. 1960 The National Book Award for The Waters of Kronos. 1966 An honorary Doctor of Philosophy degree from Temple University. 1966 An honorary Doctor of Literature degree from Lafayette College. 1966 An honorary Doctor of Humane Letters from Lebanon Valley College.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

P R I M A R Y S O U R C E S (each category arranged chronologically)

A. Short Story Collections Brothers of No Kin and Other Stories (New York: Hinds, Hayden and Eldridge, 1924). Early Americana and Other Stories (New York : Knopf, 1936).

B. Novels (All published by Alfred A. Knopf, New York location of manuscripts in parenthesis.) The Sea of Grass, 1936. Serialized, Saturday Evening Post, October 31, November 7, 14, 1936. The Trees, 1940. Tacey Cromwell, 1942. (University of California at Los Angeles) TheFreeMan, 1943. Serialized, Saturday Evening Post, M a y 15, 22,29, J u n e 5, 1943. The Fields, 1946. (Princeton University) Always Toung and Fair, 1947. Condensed. Saturday Evening Post, October 12, 1946. The Town, 1950. (Princeton University) The Light in the Forest, 1953. Serialized, Saturday Evening Post, M a r c h 24, April 4, 11, 18, 1953. (The National Institute of Arts and Letters) The Lady, 1957. Serialized, Saturday Evening Post, M a r c h 30, April 6, 13, 20, 1957. (University of Wyoming) The Waters of Kronos, 1960. A Simple Honorable Man, 1962. (Boston University) The Grandfathers, 1964. (The Pennsylvania State University) A Country of Strangers, 1966. The Aristocrat, 1968.

C. Selected Uncollected Short Stories " H o w Tuck Went H o m e " , Cavalier (September 6, 1913), pp. 744-751.

138

BIBLIOGRAPHY

" T h e Wall of the House of R y l a n d " , Illustrated Sunday Magazine (November 21, 1915). " T h e Girl T h a t Got Colly", Ladies Home Journal, 34 (May, 1917), 13. "Pippin of Pike County", Every Week (March 16, 1918). "Nothing Else Matters", Every Week ( J a n u a r y 12, 1919). "Cabbages and Shoes", Everybody's, 42 (March, 1920), 61-63. " T h e Cheerful L i a r " , Munsey (January, 1922). " R i c h Relations", American Magazine, 97 (March, 1924), 54-57. " T e d d y Saves the D a y " , American Magazine, 97 (April, 1924), 28-30. " F a t h e r H a d No T a c t " , The Elks Magazine (March, 1925). "Derickson's Gagoo", American Magazine, 99 (May, 1925), 20-23. " T h e M a n W h o Loved a H o u n d " , The Elks Magazine (December, 1925). " T h e M a n W h o Retired", American Magazine, 101 (April, 1926), 20-23. " T h e Exaggerator", American Magazine, 101 (June, 1926), 28-30. "Rose of Decker Valley", The Farm Journal (January, 1930). " S t a m p e d e " , The Country Home (July, 1931). " T h e High Places", Liberty ( J a n u a r y 2, 1932). " T h e Blood of a Horseman", Liberty ( J a n u a r y 16, 1932). " T h e Substitute D a d d y " , The Home Magazine (January, 1932). " T h e King Was in the Kitchen", Woman's Home Companion, 59 (May, 1932), 25-26. "Mason Climbs the M o u n t a i n " , Short Stories (June, 1932). " T w o of a K i n d " , The Country Home (June, 1932). "Hutcheson's H e a d " , Liberty (September 30, 1933). " R a w h i d e K n o t " , Saturday Evening Post, 210 (January 1, 1938), 18-19. "Life Was Simple T h e n " , Saturday Evening Post, 212 (March 2, 1940), 9-11. "Good Neighbors", Saturday Evening Post, 216 (October 30, 1943), 12-13. " T h e Flood", Saturday Evening Post, 217 ( J a n u a r y 6, 1945), 12-13. " T h e Last M a n Alive", Saturday Evening Post, 221 (August 14, 1948), 26-27. "Doctor Hanray's Second Chance", Saturday Evening Post, 222 ( J u n e 10, 1950), 22-23. " T h e Marriage T h a t Can't Succeed", Saturday Evening Post, 224 (June 21, 1952), 34-35. "Sinister J o u r n e y " , Saturday Evening Post, 226 (September 26, 1953), 36-37. " T h e Iron L a d y " , Saturday Evening Post, 230 (July 13, 1957), 20-21.

D. Non-fiction Human Vibration (New York: Dodd, M e a d and Company, 1926). Principles in Bio-Physics (Harrisburg: Good Books Corporation, 1927). The Mountain on the Desert (New York: Knopf, 1955). (Boston University)

E. Essays " A Few Personal Notes", Saturday Evening Post, 208 (July 13, 1935), 30. " T h a t Early American Quality", Atlantic Monthly, 186 (September, 1950), 26-30. " T h r e e Towns I Love", Holiday, 14 (December, 1953), 54-59. "Pennsylvania", Holiday, 18 (October, 1955), 98-112.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

139

" F a r Away and Long Ago", Broadcast Music, Inc., 1956. (A radio book review script on W. H . Hudson's Far Away and Long Ago.) " N e w Mexico Was O u r Fate", New Mexico Magazine (March, 1957), pp. 20-21, 45. "Acceptance Speech", National Book Committee Quarterly, 5 (Spring-Summer, 1961), 6. "Valley of the Past", Country Beautiful, X I (April, 1963), 8-14.

SECONDARY SOURCES Barnard, Kenneth J . , "Presentation of the West in Conrad Richter's Trilogy", Northwest Ohio Quarterly, X X I X (Autumn, 1957), 224-234. Barnes, Robert J . , Conrad Richter (SWS 14) (Austin ,Texas: Steck-Vaughn, 1968). Carpenter, Frederick I., " C o n r a d Richter's Pioneers: Reality and M y t h " , College English, 12 (November, 1950), 77-82. Edwards, Clifford Duane, Conrad Richter's Ohio Trilogy: Its Ideas, Themes, and Relationship to Literary Tradition (The H a g u e : Mouton, 1970). Flanagan, J o h n T., " C o n r a d Richter: Romancer of the Southwest", Southwest Review, X L I I I (Summer, 1958), 189-196. , "Folklore I n the Novels of Conrad Richter", Midwest Folklore, II (Spring, 1952), 5-14. Gaston, Edwin W., J r . , Conrad Richter (New York: Twayne, 1965). Kohler, Dayton, " C o n r a d Richter: Early Americana", English Journal, 35 (September, 1946, 363-369. Reprinted in College English, 8 (February, 1947), 221-227. LaHood, Marvin J . , " A Study of the M a j o r Themes in the Work of Conrad Richter, and His Place in the Tradition of the American Frontier Novel", U n p u b lished doctoral dissertation, University of Notre Dame, 1962. , " C o n r a d Richter and Willa Cather: Some Similarities", Xavier University Studies, I X (Spring, 1970), 33-44. , "Richter's Early America", University Review, X X (June, 1964), 311-316. , "Richter's Pennsylvania Trilogy", Susquehanna University Studies, V I I (June, 1968), 5-13. , " T h e Light in the Forest: History as Fiction", English Journal, 55 (March, 1966), 298-304. Pearce, T . M., " C o n r a d Richter", New Mexico Quarterly, X X (Autumn, 1950), 371-373. Ruff, G. Elson, " A n Honest Novel of the Parsonage", The Lutheran, X L I V (May 30, 1962), 14-20. Schmaier, Maurice D., " C o n r a d Richter's The Light in the Forest: An Ethnohistorical Approach to Fiction", Ethnohistory, 7 (Fall, 1960), 327-398. Sutherland, Bruce, " C o n r a d Richter's Americana", New Mexico Quarterly Review, X V (Winter, 1945), 413-422. Young, David Lee, " T h e Art of Conrad Richter", Unpublished doctoral dissertation, the Ohio State University, 1965.

INDEX

N O T E : Fictitious characters (other than Richter's whose are listed under heading 'Characters') are asterisked. Achenbach, Gregory, 132 Achenbach, H a r v e n a Maria, 132 Albuquerque, New Mexico, 22, 109 Alexander's Bridge, 122 Algonquian Indians, 100 Always Young and Fair, 84-89, 109, 125, 135 American Humor, 72 American Magazine, 15, 20 American Pioneer, 95 The American Puritans, 78 The Aristocrat, 28, 92-93, 115, 125 Arizona, 133 "As It Was in the Beginning", 30 Atlantic Monthly, 34, 68 " B a d Luck is Good Luck", 15 Belgium, 18 •Bergson, Alexandra, 116, 120, 122126 The Big Sky, 129 Bioenergics, 16 Bisbee, Arizona, 44, 45 Bookman, 131 Boone, Daniel, 63 Boston, 61 Boston Transcript, 17, 132 Boquet, Colonel Henry, 96, 97, 100 Boy T r a p p e r Books, 133 Bradenton, Florida, 12, 134 Brickell, J o h n , 95 British Army, 131 "Brothers o f N o K i n " , 17,131,132,134 Brothers of No Kin and Other Stories, 1420

"Buckskin Vacation", 30, 31 Buenos Aires, 127 Buffalo Hunter, 32, 33 •Burden, J i m , 125, 126 Butte, Montana, 45, 49 "Cabbages a n d Shoes", 15 California, 50 Calvinism, 79 Cannon, Legrand, 116 Carnegie, Andrew, 79 •Carver, Tillitha Cean, 116, 119 Cather, Willa, 11, 20, 116, 117, 120129 Cavalier, 20, 131 Characters in Conrad Richter's Novels: (The multi-paged reference is to the full discussion of the novel (s) in which a major character appears.) Babe, 91 Bartram, Miss, 71, 73 Beasley, Ana, 56 Beasley, J . Snell, 51-58 Bee, 48 Bell, Miss, 91 Beriah, 61 Blount, Consuelo, 52 Brewton, Brock, 37-44, 49 Brewton, Colonel J i m , 26, 37-44, 52, 55, 126, 127 Brewton, Hal, 37-44, 52, 53 Brewton, J i m m y , 39 Brewton, Lutie Cameron, 26, 27, 37-44, 5 4 , 8 5 , 8 7 , 126 Brewton, Sarah Beth, 39

INDEX Brown, Z e p h r o n , 71, 72 Butler, Gordie, 100, 103 Butler, H a r r y , 99 Butler, J o h n ( T r u e Son), 88, 94-105 Butler, M y r a , 99 C h a m b e r l a i n , Brice, 26, 37-44 Covington, Wickers (Nugget O l d aker, 44-51, 52, 5 3 , 8 8 Cromwell, T a c e y , 42, 44-51, 54, 64, 85, 87 Cuyloga, 94-105 Dellicker, H e n n e r ( H e n r y Free), 8184, 85 D o n n e r , H a r r y , 28, 107-115 D o n n e r , J o h n , 76, 88, 107-115 D o n n e r , Mrs., 111 D o w d e n , M r . , 44 D o w d e n , Seeley, 44-51 D o w d e n , T i m m y , 44-51 D u t c h Charlie, 43 Espan, 105-106 Ezequiel, 55 Feast M a k e r , 105 Ferrebee, T o m , 50 Göddern, Squire, 91 Grail, T o m , 84-89 Grail, Will, 84-89 Grigg, C a p t a i n , 82 J e f f c o a t , 54 J o h n n y , 86 J o n e s , Fulliam, 91 J u d , 51-58 H a l f Arrow, 97, 102, 103 H a r b i s o n , Billy, 69 H a r d y , Del, 94-105, 129 H a r t r a n f t , L a w y e r , 82 H e r f o r d , M r . , 48 H e r f o r d , Mrs., 48 H o u r a s , M a x , 50 Howell, Clay, 92 K a t e , A u n t , 99 Little C r a n e , 97, 98, 102, 103 Little O t t e r , 105-106 Luckett, Genny, 59-67, 71, 77 L u c k e t t , J a r y , 59-67, 119 Luckett, S a y w a r d , 19, 21, 26, 30, 42, 59-80, 84, 85, 91, 106, 116, 118, 119, 120, 122-126 Luckett, Sulie, 30, 59-67, 77, 78

141

Luckett, W o r t h , 59-67, 123 Luckett, Wyitt, 59-67 M a c W h i r t e r , G r a n n y , 61 M a m a G r a n d e , 55 M a r k l e , Asa, 84 M a r k l e , Lucy, 84-89 Morley, Alexandria, 92-93 M u r d o c k , Chariter, 90-92 M u r d o c k , Culy, 9 1 , 9 2 M u r t r i e , F a t h e r , 75 Nicodemus, 91 O l d a k e r , Gaye, 44-51, 52, 55, 61 Owens, George, 100 Owens, Wilse, 100, 103 Phillips, Mrs., 74 R o e b u c k , George, 61, 70 R u t h e r f o r d , V a n c e , 26, 37-44 S c u r r a h , Louie, 59-67 Sessions, Albert, 51-58, 61 Sessions, D o n n a Ellen, 42, 51-58, 87 Sessions, Willy, 51-58 Shotwell, Dr., 74 S t a n t o n , C a p t a i n , 106 S t a n t o n , M a r y (Stone Girl), 105-106 T e n c h , J a k e , 59-67, 74 T e n c h , Rosa, 42, 43, 49, 62, 71-80, 124, 125 T h i t p a n , 102, 103 T o m m y , 92 T r u e Son, 105-106 W a t r o u s , R u d i t h , 44-51 W h e e l e r , Chancey, 71-80, 90, 110, 112, 119, 123,124 Wheeler, G u e r d o n , 68 Wheeler, Portius, 59-80, 112, 120 Wheeler, Resolve, 67-71 Wheeler, S a y w a r d Luckett, see u n der Luckett, S a y w a r d Wheeler, Sulie, 68, 119 Yorrick, 82 •Chesser, Ellen, 116, 117 C h i n a , 53 Cincinnati, 75 T h e Civil W a r , 28, 29, 59 Clay, H e n r y , 62 Cleveland, 132 Cleveland, President Grover, 56 C o m a n c h e Indians, 30 Conestogo Indians, 100

142

INDEX

" C o n r a d R i c h t e r : Early A m e r i c a n a " , 37^ " C o n r a d R i c h t e r : R o m a n c e r of the Southwest", 37 N , 50, 5 1 s C o n r a d , S a r a h , 31 C o n r a d , Squire H e n r y , 109, 130 The Conspiracy of Pontiac, 96 Cooper, J a m e s Fenimore, 97, 129 Country Gentleman, 18 A Country of Strangers, 12, 30, 64, 105106, 134 The Course of American Democratic Thought, 79 Creating the Modern American Novel, 125 Daiches, David, 127 Davis, R o b e r t H . , 131 Death Comes for the Archbishop, 127, 128, D e l a w a r e I n d i a n s (Leni L e n a p e ) , 30 94-106 Denver, 126 "Derickson's G a g o o " , 20 Detroit, Fort, 106 Dickens, Charles, 74 •Dilsey, 106 " D o c t o r H a n r a y ' s Second C h a n c e " , 108 DuBois, William, 83 N " E a r l y A m e r i c a n a " , 32 Early Americana and Other Stories, 22-33, 3 4 , 3 7 , 134 " E a r l y M a r r i a g e " , 23, 28 The English Journal, 37 E u r o p e , 85 • E v a n s , Lije, 129 Everybody's Magazine, 15,17 " F a c e a t t h e W i n d e r " , 68 F a r m e r s a n d Citizens N a t i o n a l Bank, M o n t g o m e r y , Pa., 131 Feld, Rose, 85 " A Few Personal Notes", 132 N , 133 s The Fields, 60, 67-71, 81, 89, 120, 134 Fitzgerald, F. Scott, 86 F l a n a g a n , J o h n T . , 37, 50, 51, 5 IN, 67 "Folklore in t h e Novels of C o n r a d R i c h t e r " , 67 "Forest M o u l d " , 15

»Forrester, C a p t a i n , 126, 127 •Forrester, M a r i a n , 126, 127 Forum, 17, 131, 132 Foster, Stephen, 88 Franklin, B e n j a m i n , 79 F r a n k Nelson Books, 133 The Free Man, 81-84, 134, 135 F r e u d , 109 Gabriel, R a l p h , 79 G a r l a n d , H a m l i n , 21 *Gatsby, J a y , 86 Georgia, 119 G e r m a n s , 18 Gogol, 124 " T h e G o o d N e i g h b o r s " , 83 Gothic Novel, 74 The Grandfathers, 90-92, 115 G r e a t Lakes, 106 The Great Meadow, 117,119 G u t h r i e , A. B., J r . , 116, 129 *Hall, Diony, 116, 117 H a r r i s b u r g , Pa., 133 H a r t e , Bret, 20, 44 H a t c h e r , H a r l a n , 125 • H a v i s h a m , Miss, 74 H a y c r a f t , H o w a r d , 17 N , 131 N Heaven and Hell, 75 Heckewelder, Rev., J o h n , 95, 97, 101, 102 H e m i n g w a y , Ernest, 55 Hessian M e r c e n a r y , 131 H i n d s , H a y d e n , a n d Eldridge, 14 History of North American Indians, 95 H o f f m a n , Frederick, J . , 122 " H o w T u c k W e n t H o m e " , 20, 131 Human Vibration, 133 Indian Nations, 95 In My Opinion, 116 *Joad, M a , 106 John Martin's Book, 132 J o h n n y Appleseed, 75 J o h n s t o w n , Pa., Journal, 131 J o h n s t o w n , Pa., Leader, 131 Jones, Bess, 82 N Junior Magazine Book, 132

INDEX

Kansas, 45 Kazin, Alfred, 120, 124 Kennerley, Mitchell, 132 Kentucky, 65, 117 " T h e King Was in the Kitchen", 20 Kiowa Indians, 31, 33 Knopf, Alfred A., 22, 134 Kohler, Dayton, 37 • K r o n b o r g , Thea, 121 Kunitz, Stanley, 17*, 131N Ladies' Home Journal, 23, 28, 30, 31 The Lady, 37, 38, 51-58, 125, 128, 134, 135 Lafayette College, 136 Lamb in His Bosom, 116-120 Land of the Spotted Eagle, 103 " T h e Last m a n Alive", 82 • L a t o u r , J e a n , 128 " T h e Laughter of Leen", 18 •Leather-Stocking (Natty Bumppo), 97, 129 Leaves of Grass, 124 Lebanon Valley College, 136 A Lenape — English Dictionary, 101 "Life Energy", 133 The Light in the Forest, 12, 30, 64, 78, 87, 88, 94-105, 106, 129, 134, 135 " L o n g D r o u g h t " , 24 " L o n g Engagement", 24 Look to the Mountain, 116 A Lost Lady, 126 " T h e Luck of Roaring C a m p " , 20 Lutheran, 113 Main Travelled Roads, 21 " T h e Making of V a l Pierce", 15 " T h e M a n in the Green Shirt", 134 " T h e M a n W h o H i d Himself", 15 " T h e M a n W h o Retired", 20, 21 Maryland, 91 Merimee, 124 Midwest Folklore, 68 Miller, Caroline, 116-120, 129 Miller, J o a q u i m , 101 Miller, Perry, 78 The Modern Novel in America, 122 M o n t a n a , 133 The Mountain on the Desert, 13, 16, 89,

143

109, 116, 133 Muskingum River, 96, 101, 105 My Antonia, 117, 121, 125, 126, 129 My Own Story, 101 "Narrative o f j o h n Brickell's Captivity Among the Delawares", 95 National Book Award, 11, 94, 134, 136 Nebraska, 122-124, 128 Nelson, Frank, 88 "New H o m e " , 31, 112 New Mexico, 23, 30, 55, 90, 121, 127, 133, 134 New Mexico Quarterly Review, 39 New York, 105, 106 New Torker, 83 New York Herald Tribune, 85 N New York Times, 83 New York University, 136 Northwest Territory, 59 " T h e Novel Démeublé", 124 •Oakhurst, J o h n , 44 O'Brien, Edward J . , 17, 131, 132 Oedipus Complex, 108, 111 Ohio, 19, 94, 96, 105, 117, 128 Ohioana Library Medal, 136 Ohio River, 97 T h e Ohio Trilogy, 16, 22, 26, 44, 59, 89, 94, 116, 118, 120, 125, 129, 134 Ohio Valley, 65, 69, 117, 122 " O l d D e b t " , 17 One of Ours, 121 On Native Grounds, 120, 124 0 Pioneers!, 123-126, 129 " T h e Outcasts of Poker Flat", 44 • O u t l a n d , T o m , 27 Outlook, 16, 18 " O v e r the Hill to the Rich House", 16 Owen, Robert, 75 Parkman, Francis, 96 Patton, Pa., Courier, 131 T h e " P a x t o n Boys", 100 Pennsylvania, 16, 19, 65, 84, 87, 94, 100, 105, 114, 115, 117 Pennsylvania Dutch, 81-83 Pennsylvania German Society, 136 People's Magazine, 15, 18

144

INDEX

Philadelphia, 84 Phillipines, 84 • P i l a r , 55 P i n e Grove, Pa., 12, 84, 87, 88, 92, 93, 107,109, 111, 128, 129, 130-135 Pitt, Fort, 96, 97 Pittsburg Dispatch, 131 " P o n t i a c ' s I n d i a n U p r i s i n g " , 100 Portrait of a Publisher, 134 Prescott, Orville, 116 Principles in Bio-Physics, 133 The Professor's House, 121, 127 " P r o t e s t a n t E t h i c " , 78, 79 * P r y n n e , Hester, 43 Pulitzer Prize, 1 1 , 9 4 , 120, 129, 134, 136 P u r i t a n , 79 Q u e b e c , 121 " R a w h i d e K n o t " , 60 R e a d i n g , Pa., 82, 132, 133 R e d Cloud, Nebraska, 128 T h e R e v o l u t i o n a r y W a r , 82, 131 Reynolds, P a u l R . , J r . , 134 Reynolds, P a u l R . , Sr., 134 " R i c h R e l a t i o n s " , 20 R i c h t e r , C h a r l o t t e Ester, 130 R i c h t e r , H a r v e n a , 132 Richter, J o h n Absalom, 28, 130 Richter, S u s a n n a h Michael, 130 Riggs, M r s . George P., 65 Roberts, Elizabeth M a d o x , 116, 117, 129 R o u r k e , Constance, 72 St. Louis, 39, 40, 126 *St. Peter, Professor, 127 Saturday Evening Post, 18, 23, 24, 26, 30, 3 2 , 6 0 , 8 3 , 8 9 , 108, 130 N , 133* Saturday Review of Literature, 83 N The Sea of Grass, 26, 37-44, 50, 57, 82, 122, 125-127, 129, 134, 135 Selins Grove, Pa., 131 • S h a b a t a , M a r i e , 124, 125 Shangri-La, 105 S h a w a n e e I n d i a n , 62 • S h i m e r d a , A n t o n i a , 20, 106, 116, 120, 123, 125, 126

• S h i m e r d a , M r . , 123 * Ship ton, M o t h e r , 44 A Simple Honorable Man, 12, 76, 107, 113-115, 134 "Sinister J o u r n e y " , 89 " S m o k e h o u s e " , 18, 20 " S m o k e O v e r t h e P r a i r i e " , 26, 37 Socorro, N e w Mexico, 45 South D a k o t a , 25 Southwest Review, 37 N , 50, 51 N T h e Spanish A m e r i c a n W a r , 84 " T h e S q u a r e P i a n o " , 30 S t a n d i n g Bear, Chief, 103 " S u i c i d e " , 15 • S u m m e r s , Dick, 129 "Sure Thing", 18,20 S u s q u e h a n n a P r e p a r a t o r y School, 131 S u s q u e h a n n a River, 98, 105 S u s q u e h a n n a University, 136 S u t h e r l a n d , Bruce, 39 " S w a n s o n ' s H o m e Sweet H o m e " , 17 Swedenborg, 75 Tacey Cromwell, 37, 38, 44-51, 81, 88, 125, 134 " T e m p e r e d C o p p e r " , 15 T e m p l e University, 136 Texas, 44, 48 " T h a t E a r l y A m e r i c a n Q u a l i t y " , 3436, 90 T h e m e s , Richter's Use O f : A g o n y yields ecstacy, 16, 21 A p p e a r a n c e vs. reality, 18, 19 City vs. country, 21 Cowboy, 31 Eastern w o m a n unsuited to pioneer life, 62, 119 E n j o y i n g most w h a t is worked hardest for, 17, 19, 20, 76 F a t h e r , R i c h t e r ' s relationship with, 2 8 , 6 1 , 7 8 , 109, 111-115 Folk tales a n d superstitions, 65, 67, 68, 117, 118 H a r d s h i p into gain, 3 6 , 9 0 I n d i a n - w h i t e contrast a n d relationship, 30, 77, 78,94-106 Life energy theory, 16 Manliness, 34 N a r r a t o r , use of, 27, 30, 38, 45, 46,

INDEX

51-53, 88,97, 125 Old way vs. new, 37 Pioneer struggle yields strength, 59, 90, 121, 126, 129 Possessions, 98 Rancher vs. nester, 43 Richter hero, 41,42 Richter herione, 18, 19, 29, 31, 42, 47, 53, 54, 70, 76, 77, 80, 85, 87, 88,91,92, 105, 106, 118, 119 The Southwest, 19, 20, 22, 23, 28, 37, 43, 44, 51, 59, 87, 122, 128, 134 Strength from the land, 44 Western mining town, 44,47, 51 "This Once Ideal Village", 130N The Time of Man, 116-119 "Tom Outland's Story", 127 The Town, 21, 30, 60, 62, 71-80, 89, 90, 94, 110, 116, 117, 120, 123, 124, 129, 134 The Trees, 24, 26, 44, 59-68, 71, 77, 81, 82, 117, 120, 134 Tremont, Pa., High School, 131 Tuscarawas River, 96, 101, 105 Twain, Mark, 44

145

Twentieth Century Authors, 17N, 131N University of New Mexico, 136 »Vaillant, Joseph, 128 Virgil, 121 Walden Pond, 99 Washington, D.C., 127 Washington, George, 131 The Waters o/Kronos, 12, 22, 28, 76, 77, 88,94, 107-113, 134 The Way West, 129 Whitman, Walt, 124 Willa Cather: A Critical Introduction, 127 Willa Gather on Writing, 124N "Wings of a Swallow", 18 The Woman's Home Companion, 20 Woman's Stories, 17 World War I, 133 World War II, 83 "You're Too Contwisted Satisfied Jim Ted!", 15 Zeisberger, David, 95, 101