Conrad Richter Long Fiction Analysis
Conrad Richter’s qualities as a writer are partly described by the title of one of his late novels, A Simple Honorable Man. Although the book is about his father, the same terms might be used to characterize Richter’s fiction, which is simple, concise, and concerned with basic virtues. Thus, it is something of a paradox that Richter’s novels and stories are underpinned by a rather complex theory of human life and history, and that these philosophical, quasi-scientific ideas provide a conceptual framework over which the characters, plots, and settings of his fiction are stretched like a covering fabric. Another major tendency of Richter’s fiction is that it is intensely autobiographical, deriving from family traditions and experience. In his youth, Richter heard stories of frontier experiences from relatives who had been pioneers themselves. It was his fascination with the way things had been and his conviction that he could inspire his readers to cope with modern problems by showing how ordinary people in the past had overcome the adversities of their frontier that prompted him to become a historical novelist.
Equally important to Richter’s development as a novelist, however, were the quasi-scientific philosophical principles that he developed long before his first novel was published. Thus, Richter is unlike most writers in that his fiction does not represent the developing and unfolding of a philosophy, but rather the extension of a belief system that was essentially static after being established. This being the case, it is important to grasp some of the rudiments of Richter’s philosophy before discussing his longer fiction, for his themes as a novelist grow out of his philosophical notions.
It must be pointed out that despite their would-be scientific titles and vocabulary (Human Vibration and Principles in Bio-Physics), Richter’s book-length essays lack the rigor of scientific methodology. At first glance, his theory of life seems to be based on an odd merging of materialism and idealism. His first premise is that humans function in response to bodily cellular vibrations, or vibes, that are regulated by reserves of psychical or physical energy. If energy abounds, people are in harmony with life. The ultimate expression of human harmony is compassion for fellow humans. Other signs are charity, fortitude, and the confidence to prevail against hardship, a sense of unity with nature, a tendency toward betterment in history, and a quest for freedom. On the other hand, if energy sources are low, there is a lack of harmony in life. Conflict with nature, with other people, and with oneself all signify a deficiency of energy; other such manifestations are restless wandering, fruitless searching for intangibles, and historic change for the worse. Thus, as Richter explains it, human life and history are governed by mechanical laws.
Richter’s second premise is based on what can best be described as quasi-scientific ideas. He holds that people respond in mind and body with “cellular energy” to outside stimuli. Activity causes the cells in one’s body to overflow, revitalizing the weak cells. The process is like that of an electrical circuit in which there is a constant reenergizing while the operation continues. Therefore, constant use ensures a steady power source, whereas disuse can cause the source to decline and lose power. In human terms, mental and physical exertion stimulates the release of energy and speeds up energy transfer through the cell structure.
Like many American autodidacts, Richter combined Yankee know-how and practicality with the visions of the crank philosopher. His biophysics serves as a point of departure for accurate historical fiction about the actualities of pioneer life. By Richter’s own admission, much of...
(This entire section contains 3790 words.)
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what he produced before he moved to New Mexico in 1928 was hack writing for the pulp magazines, but while there he was led to new literary subjects. He launched his career as a serious author with a series of stories and novels. Inspired by the grand surroundings of his Western residence and informed by extensive research and the philosophical themes that would run through his subsequent fiction, he produced his first novel,The Sea of Grass.
The Sea of Grass
The Sea of Grass was well received on publication and remains highly regarded by readers and critics. The similarities between Richter’s story of a strong-willed southwestern pioneer woman and Cather’s A Lost Lady (1923) were quickly noted. The central idea of The Sea of Grass was sounded in a short story titled “Smoke over the Prairie,” published two years earlier in The Saturday Evening Post. The novel is set in New Mexico during the last decades of the nineteenth century. It revolves around a feud between cattle ranchers (led by Colonel James Brewton) who use the open grasslands for grazing and growing numbers of farmers, called “nesters” by the cattlemen, who are supported by Brice Chamberlain, a federal judge. A subplot concerns a love triangle between Brewton, his wife, Lutie, and Chamberlain, which ends with the tragic death of the son of Brewton and Lutie, whose paternity is uncertain, since it is implied that Chamberlain might well have been the boy’s father.
The major theme is the decline of the grasslands, a historic change for the worse. The story is narrated as a reminiscence by Hal Brewton, a nephew of Colonel Brewton. He tells the story of an era that has already passed and thus conveys an aura of nostalgia that Richter himself apparently felt for these bygone days. In fact, Hal Brewton is actually a persona for the author and reflects his attitudes toward events. For this reason, Hal remains a one-dimensional character, yet his role as narrator serves to create an objective view of the material. Hal is involved in the events he describes but not so closely as to have his judgment obscured. He is a boy when the story starts and is the town doctor when the story ends twenty-five years later. The first part of the book is devoted to Lutie, a lively and lovely belle from St. Louis, who comes to Salt Fork, New Mexico, to marry the cattle baron Jim Brewton. The Colonel, as he is called, has a battle going on with the nesters because he believes that the dry lands are doomed to be blown away if they are plowed. The marriage results in three children, but Lutie grows tired of her life as a rancher’s wife and simply walks out, staying away for fifteen years. She had left thinking that her lover, Chamberlain, would come with her, but he remains to support the cause of the farmers.
The title of the book implies that it is a story about the land, and it is indeed, for the basic conflict of the novel arises from how the land will be used. The Sea of Grass also introduces the typical Richter hero and heroine in Colonel and Lutie Brewton. The Colonel embodies the best combination of idealism and pragmatism, but he is not complex. He reflects the virtues Richter admires—integrity and courage—and he exercises his control over his world with sure authority. Lutie, in contrast, is the first in a line of female characters in Richter’s fiction who are not in harmony with their existence, and who achieve maturity only through hardship and suffering. When she returns to the Southwest, she has finally learned that she needs the sense of fulfillment that comes from the exertion required to survive on the sea of grass. The Sea of Grass is ultimately a novel in which the triumph belongs to the earth, for it is the land itself that finally, through a drought, defeats the persistent nesters and subdues Lutie’s willful romanticism when her son is destroyed by the violence of the Southwest. Although The Sea of Grass is a lasting achievement, it has some of Richter’s characteristic flaws as well. There is a thinness to the writing that gives the impression of a screenplay or an extended short story rather than a fully realized novel, a charge leveled with even more justification against Richter’s next novel, Tacey Cromwell.
Tacey Cromwell
Tacey Cromwell was generally not as well received as The Sea of Grass, perhaps because the heroine is a prostitute and the hero a gambler. Recalling his Idaho experience, Richter sets the plot of Tacey Cromwell in a mining town called Bisbee; his treatment of this setting reflects extensive research concerning life in early Western mining towns. He shows the ethnic diversity of the miners and the pretensions of the leading townsmen, who have risen from humble origins to positions of wealth and power. The plot of the novel is built around the conflict between the rough-and-ready immigrants and the new rich ruling class in town. The narrator is again a small boy, Wickers Covington, who is both an observer and a partial participant in the action, about which he reminisces as he tells the story after the fact.
The book begins with the runaway boy Wickers escaping from an uncle in Kansas who has mistreated him. Changing his name to Nugget Oldaker, he heads to Socarro, New Mexico, where his half brother, Gaye Oldaker, is living. He finds his kinsman in a house of tolerance called the White Palace, which is ironically named, for it is a place of prostitution. His brother’s mistress is a prostitute named Tacey Cromwell. Fearing that an upbringing in a bordello would prejudice the lad’s morals, the couple moves away to give Nugget a decent home. They relocate in a mining town in Arizona, where they settle down and start the climb to success. Tacey and Gaye never marry, but they remain something of a team. She shows incredible altruism toward her former lover, even after he leaves her and marries the richest woman in town. Tacey’s conversion to respectability is hastened by the adoption of two children of a neighbor killed in a mine accident. The good women of the town, however, take umbrage at the children being reared by even a reformed prostitute, and they bring legal action against Tacey, which results in her losing the children.
Undaunted by disappointment in love, community treachery, and sickness, Tacey starts a business as a dressmaker. At first she is boycotted by the priggish ladies, but one of her creations is worn at an annual ball by a lady who did not know or care about Tacey’s reputation. The dress is a sensation, and her future as a dressmaker and designer is made overnight. Meanwhile, Gaye has been appointed territorial treasurer, a position he sought after being encouraged by Tacey. His wife, the haughty and puritanical Rudith Watrons, is drenched in a rainstorm that leads to a long illness and finally to her death. Nugget, who has grown up and become a mining engineer, returns to Bisbee, and one of the foster children taken from Tacey is restored to her. Thus, the novel ends with things returned to their original condition, but with the new harmony that hardship always hands to those who accept it in Richter’s fictional worlds.
The novel also illustrates the concept of “westering,” the process of evolution in which a region goes from frontier to community. Such a process, in Richter’s conception, involves more than historic change. On the physiological and psychological levels, Tacey Cromwell depicts Richter’s theory of altruism. Tacey’s selfless assumption of guilt, both hers and her gambler-lover’s, so that Gaye and his children might prosper, is close to the formula plot of the prostitute with a heart of gold used by Bret Harte in his Western fiction. Richter, however, has Tacey’s sacrifice pay off, and she finally rises to respectability and eventual reunion with her lover and loved ones.
The Lady
The Lady, Richter’s ninth novel and his third with a southwestern setting, was published fifteen years later in 1957. The Lady was better received by the critics and evidences Richter’s increased competence as a writer. It is a stronger novel because the central character, Doña Ellen Sessions, is more fully developed than Tacey Cromwell. The plot is partly based on an actual case, an unsolved New Mexico mystery of the frontier period, that involved the disappearance and probable murder of a judge and his young son. The conflict in this book centers on the struggle between Spanish American sheepherders and Anglo-American cattle ranchers.
The story is told by a narrator named Jud, who tells of events that happened sixty years before, when he was ten years old. He, like the juvenile narrators of The Sea of Grass and Tacey Cromwell, is both a participant and a witness. Jud is taken in by his cousin, the territorial judge Albert Sessions, after his own father has abandoned him. The judge’s wife is the charming and arrogant Doña Lady Ellen, as she is styled because of her noble Spanish and English bloodlines. She is the owner of a giant sheep spread, inherited from her parents. In addition to breeding and wealth, she has acquired skills as a horseback rider and markswoman. The villain of the piece is her brother-in-law, a mercenary and unethical lawyer, Snell Beasley. The violent feud that is the focus of the book is begun when Beasley drives a cattle herd through Doña Ellen’s ranch. A shoot-out results in the death of some of the cattlemen.
The chain of events that leads to the disappearance of Judge Sessions and his young son, Wily, is set in motion. Thinking Doña Ellen is now vulnerable, Snell Beasley sets out to destroy her completely. Doña Ellen is forced to sell her once great ranch, and it seems that her humiliation is complete, yet in the final scene of the novel, poetic justice is served. A buggy race between Doña Ellen and Snell ends with an accident, and her adversary is killed; thus, the heroine gets her revenge in a somewhat melodramatic ending. Her victory underscores Richter’s central themes of endurance in the process of westering and the mystic bond between people and landscape. It is fitting that Richter’s last book about his adopted Southwest should be concluded with a glorification of the land that had inspired him to write the type of fiction that would be his forte—historical romances.
The Trees
While working on his southwestern novels, Richter began in the early 1940’s his trilogy, The Awakening Land, about the Pennsylvania-Ohio frontier, which was conceived from the first as a whole. The first novel of the trilogy, The Trees, is set in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. The novel unfolds the story of a typical pioneer family, the Luckett clan, whose frequent migrations through the great sea of woods that covers the Ohio Valley and the Allegheny Mountains is the basis of the plot. In this novel, Richter vividly depicts the darkness of the forest floor as well as the moral darkness in the heart of people. Theprotagonist of The Trees is a woodswoman named Sayward Luckett, a larger-than-life figure who is the focal character of the entire trilogy. She is married to Portius Wheeler, who, for reasons never explained, has abandoned his native New England, where he was educated as a lawyer, and has become a loutish and drunken backwoodsman. Although nearly all traces of culture and civilization have been erased from him by the time he is married to Sayward, she nevertheless prevents him from further decline, and he honors her by making a reformation.
In addition, The Trees tells how Sayward as a girl had wandered with her nomadic family, breaking away from that way of life to marry Portius and settle down. Richter intended that Sayward’s experiences should reflect the whole pioneer experience of movement, settlement, and domestication. Using the span of one woman’s life, the novel reflects the process of historical change in the Ohio Valley from hunters to farmers to town dwellers. Thus, like Richter’s southwestern novels, The Trees traces social evolution; it also resembles his southwestern novels in being episodic, in having a strong heroine, and in its themes of hardship and endurance, ending in ultimate triumph. It differs most from the earlier books in that there is no boy narrator. Richter’s point of view is omniscient in the trilogy, and he uses more dialect in the dialogue. Furthermore, in an effort to make his depiction of pioneer life more convincing, he uses folktales and superstitions to reflect the primitive way of life on the frontier.
The Fields
The final two volumes of the trilogy, The Fields and The Town, continue the portrait of Sayward and depict the conquering of the land through the process of civilization. The Fields tells of Sayward’s ten children and her husband’s affair with the local schoolteacher. The affair leads to an illegitimate daughter. Sayward is devastated by Portius’s unfaithfulness, yet she recovers from this crushing experience when she hitches a pair of oxen to a plow and begins to till the fields. She sees in the great brutes’ tolerance and strength and in the permanence of the earth a prescription for her own survival.
The Town
The Town, though not any more successful artistically than the first two parts of the trilogy, was awarded the Pulitzer Prize in 1951, more for the entire series than for its concluding volume. The Town, which is set in pre-Civil War Ohio, deals mostly with the romance between Sayward’s youngest son, Chancey, and her husband’s illegitimate daughter, Rosa Tench. The love between the half brother and sister is marked by tragedy; she commits suicide following a balloon accident. The rest of the book completes Sayward’s story. The conflict that fills out the plot is between mother and son: Sayward tries to make a pioneering man out of Chancey, but he refuses to accept her value system and goes off to edit a liberal newspaper in Cincinnati. The newspaper, which is supported by an unknown patron, publishes Chancey’s socialist views, which are an affront to his mother. Just before her death, he learns that she was the secret benefactor who had supported his career over the years. Chancey has to reexamine his philosophy in the light of this revelation. He concludes that his mother’s doctrine of hard work and self-reliance is a better one than his own. Thus, Sayward dies at the age of eighty, having won her last victory, rescuing her son from the heresy of socialism; the puritan faith in work of the older generation remains superior to modern liberal social theory.
Thus, in his trilogy, Richter brings full circle the westering process in which wilderness gives way to farms and farms become towns—historic change for the better; that is the essence of the American experience. Yet as civilization eradicates the wilderness, something is lost as well as gained. The frontier’s hardships had tested people and honed their character. Modern Americans lack hardiness, vigor, and self-reliance, those qualities of mind and spirit that their ancestors had in abundance, as the heroine of Richter’s Ohio trilogy so amply shows.
Richter produced some half dozen minor novels on various historical subjects and themes, but the major achievements of his later career are The Waters of Kronos and its sequel, A Simple Honorable Man, the first two volumes of a projected trilogy that he did not live to complete. The former is regarded as one of Richter’s highest artistic successes and won wide critical acclaim, earning a National Book Award in 1960. The book is one of Richter’s most autobiographical.
Richter’s main character, a man named John Donner, resembles Richter himself; the character’s parents are very much like his family as well. The Waters of Kronos is an almost mystical story in which Donner, an ill and aged man, returns from the West to his Pennsylvania hometown, which is covered by a human-made lake, to visit the graves of his ancestors. At the cemetery, he meets an old man, who takes Donner down a steep hill where, to his incredulous eyes, he finds his town just as it looked sixty years ago. The remainder of the plot is a reexamination of the scenes of his childhood and a reunion with friends and relatives. The journey into the past enables him to learn that what he has always feared is not true—that the gap between his faith and that of his father is not as wide as he once thought. He discovers that he is his father’s spiritual son. His final realization from his return to the past is that they have both worshiped the same god in different ways. Having come to terms with his father’s god in his novel, Richter’s next book shows how he gains further understanding of his parents as a person.
A Simple Honorable Man
A Simple Honorable Man describes the life of Donner’s father, Harry, who at age forty gives up a career in business for a lifetime of service to the Lutheran Church. Like The Waters of Kronos, this book is clearly autobiographical, but it is more than a nostalgic family history, for in this novel as in the previous one, Richter tries to come to grips with a number of philosophical problems. The novel emphasizes that the most important things in life are not social status or power of office or money but altruistic service to others. Harry Donner’s greatest satisfaction is not in putting money in the bank but in helping those who are in need.
The third volume of the trilogy, on which Richter was at work when he died, was intended to show, as the first two books had done, his reconciliation with his actual father and his final reconciliation with his spiritual father. The two volumes that he did complete are a fitting capstone to Richter’s career as a writer. His personal struggles, reflected through those of the Donners, show him to be a man of spiritual and intellectual integrity. The order and lucidity of thenarrative reveal his artistry; the restrained realism that characterizes his fiction mutes the sentimentality inherent in such materials, and even though dealing with personal subject of a moral nature, he never lapses into overt didacticism.
Except for The Sea of Grass, Richter’s reputation will rest most firmly on the books written in the last stages of his career, especially The Waters of Kronos; nevertheless, he will probably continue to attract readers who admire exciting, concise, sometimes lyrical stories and novels about the early history of the United States and the common people who experienced it.