He had come a very long distance indeed.
The most fascinating thing about the Lindbergh story is not the Paris flight, not the planes he flew or the fanfare he ignited, but Lindbergh himself. “As our civilization advances,” he said in a speech in Minnesota in 1972, “if our follies permit it to advance, I feel sure we will realize that progress can be measured only by the quality of life—all life, not human life alone.”
What he saw then, at the close of his life, was the imperative need for balance between man and nature. This was his long-distance vision.
Beryl Markham, who spent her last years in Kenya, died in 1986. Anne Morrow Lindbergh, a widow since 1974, lives in Connecticut in the small house she and her husband built after their children were grown. The last of the pioneer pilots, she is still writing.
IV
FIGURES IN A LANDSCAPE
CHAPTER TEN
Cross the Blue Mountain
THE FICTION of Conrad Richter stands alone. His frontier stories, set East and West, have an authenticity, an unerring ring of truth that is extraordinary, and many, like The Sea of Grass, are still in print after more than a generation. Others include The Lady, The Light in the Forest, and A Country of Strangers. His great Ohio trilogy—The Trees, The Fields, and The Town—is an American masterpiece, as vivid and as moving an account as we have of pioneer life. The central character, Sayward Luckett, an illiterate Pennsylvania girl who crosses with her family into the Ohio wilderness after the Revolution and there makes her life, is among the memorable figures in American fiction. The portrayal of the primordial forest of the time is unforgettable.
But Conrad Richter was my friend, and this is a personal reminiscence, not a review or literary appraisal. It is one man’s homage to an authentic and exceedingly modest American artist about whom too little has been said.
We met for the first time in July 1963, at his home in Pine Grove, an old crossroads and market town on Swatara Creek in eastern Pennsylvania. At seventy-two, he was then working on what was to be his last published novel, The Aristocrat. I had come because I wanted to do an article about him. The article never materialized, but the friendship did, despite the considerable difference in our ages and much else.
“No doubt you will be driving over on Route 22,” he had written in advance. “If so, after you pass the junction to Route 183 and a little later the Midway Diner, you will see ahead an overpass before which there is a turnoff to Route 501 on which you cross the Blue Mountain. In town after crossing the railroad, turn right, then left, and our house will be on your right. One o’clock will be fine, a little before or after.”
The house, a white stucco on Maple Street, was the largest I had seen while driving into the town. There was a neat front walk, a small front porch with columns, a larger screened porch over to one side. Everything—house, walk, me—was bathed in cool green light under the shade trees. “The perfect house for the town doctor” was my thought, and then, when he greeted me at the door, he could have been the doctor himself.
He seemed older than in his photographs, and more impressive-looking, a straight, spare, clean-shaven man with thin white hair and fine features and marvelous crystal-blue eyes. He was about my own height, five feet eleven, and he was in his shirt sleeves, but he wore a necktie and the white shirt was spotless. Later, when we were in the dining room—his work area—I saw that he had tiny squares of adhesive tape, each very clean and clinical-looking, fixed to the tips of the fingers of his left hand. He would bite his nails otherwise, he explained. Children in town often asked about it, he said. He told them he was a bank robber.
We covered a good deal of ground before evening, and though years have passed and he is dead and buried there in Pine Grove, the memory of all he said is very clear, even without the notes I kept. The next spring I returned, and then again with my wife the year following. A correspondence began that lasted until his death.
He told me about his boyhood before the turn of the century. We went to see the brick house in Pine Grove where he was born. He spoke of his father, a Lutheran preacher who began as a storekeeper and whose life story is the subject of A Simple Honorable Man. He talked of the growing season on that side of the mountain, of the Amish and the Pennsylvania Dutch, of going to work when he was fifteen, of a job in the mines, of driving a team, of working as a timberman, farm hand, bank teller, of his first newspaper job on the old Johnstown Journal and of the hard-boiled city editor who had told him without a trace of rancor, “Boy, you’ll go far!”
When he smiled I was often struck by how much he resembled General Eisenhower, who was exactly the same age—only a day’s difference—and whose people all came from Elizabethville, only about twenty-five miles from Pine Grove.
He described the farm he had bought in a high valley in central Pennsylvania soon after he and Mrs. Richter—Harvena Achenbach of Pine Grove—were married, and he talked of their sudden, desperate move to New Mexico in 1928 when the doctors said she had tuberculosis and would not last the year. The care and attention he gave her—year in, year out—I learned of from her and from their daughter. He mentioned only the struggle to survive on his writing and, with a light in his eye, talked of the very different, raw sort of place Albuquerque had been in those days. In 1950 they had returned to Pine Grove, she still bedridden much of every day.
He had no heroes, he said, at least not historical heroes. He had been to Monticello once and was disturbed by what he saw. “He didn’t think Jefferson’s democratic principles quite matched his aristocratic way of life,” I read now in my notes. “He mentioned the long distance his slaves had to carry the food to the master’s table and the place where he chose to be buried, enclosed in a spiked iron fence, removed from the rest of mankind.”
I once asked him whose fiction he admired. He thought a moment, then said, “Turgenev.” And that seemed to be that.
Often and with great passion in his voice, he talked of the despoiling of the American land, the despoiling of the American Indian, and on one or two occasions he talked, though guardedly, of his lifelong interest in the occult, an interest he believed most writers shared. “But you have to be so careful about what you say,” he would add, meaning he might be taken for a crackpot. Once, when I went to get a drink of water from the kitchen tap, he stopped me short, warning that the water came through copper pipes. Copper poisons the water, he insisted, which at the time impressed me as extremely silly. The remark led to further talk of his belief in natural foods, his enthusiasm for organic gardening. I learned of his friendship with Louis Bromfield and his long interest in the theories and publishing enterprise of J. I. Rodale, a name I had not heard before.
One evening he put on his hat and we walked uptown to visit an aged cousin who had spent most of her life abroad and whom the townspeople called the aristocrat. His novel then in progress was her story and he was exceptionally fond of her, a painfully frail person of amazing spirit living in dim Victorian splendor on Tulpehocken Street. Her comments on life and the passing scene pleased him no end—comments such as these, from his manuscript, which, on another occasion when my wife was with me, he read aloud:
These days you’re not supposed to get mad. They say it’s murder on your blood vessels. I don’t only get mad but I kick the swinging door as I go through. It’s such a handy place to take it out on.
I hear that townspeople say I’m common. They don’t use the word like we do. They mean I don’t care what old clothes I go around in and like Mother, I speak to everybody.
Princess Vershaliv said to me, “Yes, I knew Alfred Noyes on the Isle of Wight. In fact I lived with him for three years. I suppose that isn’t exactly a nice thing to say.” “No,” I told her. “It’s a perfectly terrible thing to say. But how interesting.”
During the Depression years in New Mexico, continually in debt, he survived on short fiction—stories for The Saturday Evening Post in the main—but writing, as one critic has noted, “with typical care and integrity.” Th
e first of the novels—and his first financial success—was The Sea of Grass, which did not appear until 1937, when he was approaching fifty. Being a late bloomer, as he said, weighed on him and had much to do, I believe, with his remarkable productivity. His writing was “slow and painful, something to be avoided.” Still, there were days “when the typewriter keys are pure velvet.” He worked every day, beginning in the early morning. Altogether, in thirty-odd years he wrote fifteen published novels, a collection of short stories, and a novel for children, in addition to keeping a daily journal (unpublished) and compiling a shelf of notes on early rural life and speech, of which more in a moment.
His shyness could be monumental. I don’t think I ever knew a more private man or one half so modest—by nature, not by design. He had no public side, no act. The man known by his comparatively few friends was the man. Beyond his small family, those who knew him best and longest were Alfred A. Knopf, his publisher, and Paul R. Reynolds, his literarv agent. A writer living in Pine Grove, Richard Wheeler, was somebody he saw often. So were a Pine Grove banker and his wife, Mr. and Mrs. Charles Hikes, who lived in a beautiful old stone farmhouse outside of town.
No one was allowed to make a fuss over him. When The Town, the concluding volume of the Ohio trilogy, won the Pulitzer Prize in 1951 and Mrs. Hikes and others in Pine Grove wanted to celebrate with a dinner in his honor, he would have none of it. In New York to receive the prize, he stayed in an out-of-the-way hotel and registered under an assumed name. He made no television appearances to promote his books. He made virtually no public appearances of any kind: he didn’t like it; he wouldn’t do it. In 1961, when he won the National Book Award for The Waters of Kronos, he refused to mount the platform at the ceremonies, refused to make a speech, something no author had done in the history of the awards. His brief acceptance was given instead in writing, and was read aloud by Alfred Knopf.
Yet for all that he liked to work, he could only work, he said, with life stirring about him—hence the desk in the dining room, in full view of the street and anyone coming up the front walk, with double doors open to the front hall and an intolerable (to me) German cuckoo clock declaring every hour.
Troubled by restlessness, he would pack the current work in a suitcase, lock the house, and drive with his wife to the west coast of Florida, if it was winter, or, in summer, to Pawcatuck, Connecticut, or Mount Desert Island, Maine, where they would take a small house for several weeks. But if while away he saw a car with Pennsylvania plates on the street, he would at once strike up a conversation with the driver, enjoying himself as though he had discovered one of the world’s most interesting people. On the highway in his big cream-colored, secondhand Cadillac, he drove fast and extremely well. His vision was phenomenal. He would pick out a caterpillar crossing the road up ahead, then swerve just enough to miss it.
The problems of his craft, he said, were chiefly “problems of compression.” He labored for clarity and order and for power through simplicity. I don’t think anyone ever worked harder to make it all seem so effortless, as if the story were being told in the only way it could be told, easy, natural, not a word more or less. Some of the later work (I think in particular of A Country of Strangers, a brief, haunting account of a white girl raised by Indians) has an almost mythic simplicity, as if generations of telling have worn away everything extraneous, leaving only pure story.
The hard work ought never to show, he felt, never intrude. Nor should the research. Historical details—those descriptions of period costume, furniture, social customs and the like that lesser writers play on so heavily for “color”—were used but sparingly. Recognizable historical figures or events are seldom mentioned in his books. In truth, I don’t believe he much cared for history in the conventional sense. As some people are born with perfect pitch, he had a perfect sense of time past. Isaac Bashevis Singer remarked that it was as if he had actually been there and came back—a transmigrated soul—to tell his stories.
His love was for the great mainstream of early life in America, for “obscure, unremarkable men,” for “men and women whose names never figured in the history books but whose influence on their land and times was that of the people itself.” You could say, I suppose, that he was a patriot, in the largest, best meaning of the word.
There is great tenderness in his stories, much that is raw and earthy, much that is funny, and not a little cold-blooded violence. The land is never merely the setting; it is elemental to the story, vast and full of power and mystery. His characters do not merely move across a landscape; it is part of them and they are part of it. In the New Mexican books, of which The Lady is my favorite, it is the immense open grassland, “the land running on and on.” In the trilogy it is the ancient trees, “a race of giants,” that shut out the light.
There they stood [Sayward Luckett reflects] with their feet deep in the guts of the old earth and their heads in the sky, never even looking at you or letting on you were there. This was their country. Here they had lived and died since back in heathen times. Even the Lord, it seemed, couldn’t do much with them. For every one He blew down, a hundred tried to grow up in its place.
The first intimations of the Ohio story came to him in the 1930s while living in a log cabin among the big pines, up seven thousand feet in the Sandia Mountains east of Albuquerque. Years of careful research followed in various parts of the country. He was never happier, I once heard him say, than when he was working in a good library, with a table spread with old books and rare old maps and personal journals. His search was for the “endless small authenticities, without which life would not be life.”
The spoken language of the frontier was particularly important to him and he took great pains to track it down, combing through court records, letters, interviewing old-timers in New Mexico, in rural Pennsylvania and Ohio, not just for their yarns but for their vocabulary. He compiled his own thesaurus, a collection unlike any I have ever seen, to get as close as he could to what he called “the great mother tongue of early America,” which, as he appreciated, was a very different kind of speech from the formal written language of the time. The words and expressions filled a heavy looseleaf notebook—dominie (for preacher), plunder (meaning one’s earthly possessions), on tenterhooks (uneasy), painter (panther), By the tarnal! (which was about equivalent to “Well, I’ll be damned!”), chimly for chimney, crick for creek, middle for stomach, bury hole for grave. The Great Lakes were the English seas; the devil, Old Harry.
The names for his characters were also drawn, in part or whole, from original sources—Sayward, Achsa, Solie (for Ursula), Jake Tench, Judah MacWhirter, Azariah Penny, Mathias Cottle, Buckman Tull, Will Beagle.
Interestingly, his favorite character, or at least the one he took the most obvious pleasure in, was not one of his homespun figures, but a young Massachusetts lawyer, Portius Wheeler, a very misplaced soul in Ohio by all appearances. All but useless with a rifle, “a slight, almost delicate figure,” Portius has fled from civilization because of some youthful misdeed that is never explained. It is he who marries Sayward Luckett and who becomes a leading figure, a judge ultimately, in the new civilization in Ohio—in New England transplanted. Conrad Richter in his youth had wanted repeatedly to escape from civilization. He was a “free thinker,” as is Portius. Much about Sayward, he told me, was patterned after his wife, Harvey, as he called her. So it would be easy enough to leap to a number of conclusions, which I will not, except to say that the sense of humor Portius brings to the story and that of Conrad Richter are one and the same:
“I want to ask you a very personal question, Mathias,” he said, and his face was grave as a gravestone. “Is it true you had ancestors?”
“It’s a lie!” Mathias called out, bristling. “I never did, nor my boy either. His head’s clean as yourn.”
“Well, they say that you slumber in your sleep,” Portius plagued him.
“It’s false as a gypsy!” Mathias shouted. “I never once did! Not since I was little, anyway
.”
—The Fields
The underlying values expressed in the trilogy, in all the novels, are the old-fashioned primary values—courage, respect for one’s fellow man, selfreliance, courtesy, devotion to the truth, a loathing of hypocrisy, the power in simple goodness. He called them “the old verities” and he was sure they were vanishing from American life. He had no patience with such expressions as “the Puritan ethic.” He thought most of those who used that expression never bothered to understand what the Puritans were about.
His work was widely praised. In 1966, when the trilogy was reissued by Knopf as one volume under the title The Awakening Land, a critic in The New York Times hailed him as a “modest giant” among American writers. His following was an impassioned one; readers had—have—a devotion to his books of a kind rarely known. The Trees went through fourteen editions in hardcover, as well as sixty translations in some twenty languages. Yet none of his books was ever a best seller; there was no overnight fortune, no fortune anywhere along the line. He was never fashionable.
He went his own way, hard as it was, heedless of literary trends, seldom reading reviews of his own work, for example, and everything he wrote is in essence a celebration of a proud, stubborn individualistic spirit. He believed in gain from hardship, as is also implicit in his stories, what Shakespeare called “benefit of ill,” an expression he liked to quote. Human energies—love, art, perseverance, wisdom—are born of difficulty, he would say in his quiet manner, his eyes never straying from your own.
David McCullough Library E-book Box Set Page 65