An Allegory of Recall
KARP, DEBORAH B.
An Allegory of Recall The Waters of Kronos. By Conrad Richter. Knopf. 176 pp. $3.50. Reviewed by Deborah B. Karp Short story writer and critic Conrad Richter deserves the gratitude of his fellow...
...Homely details of daily life make his stories at once authentic for a particular locale and, because of their evident truth, representative of mankind everywhere...
...The Waters of Kronos, his latest work, is an excursion into personal nostalgia...
...He seeks also to exorcize, before it is too late, the remembered childhood fears, the recurrent nightmare, the resentment of his father and the doubt that he is truly his father's son—primitive terrors that have shaped the mind of the race and the individual...
...A later frontier, that of the Southwest, is the scene of The Lady and The Sea of Grass...
...They are anybody's family, Everyman's to be exact, and they have no faces...
...Although the town and all its surroundings are covered, as he well knows, by the waters of a gigantic Government-built dam, he succeeds in some measure in returning to his childhood...
...He appears there as an unknown oldster in the bosom of his numerous and strong-minded family, even seeing and speaking to himself as a child...
...The hero, John Donner, the "man who lived by the Western Sea," in his old age travels seven days to revisit the site of his birthplace, Union-ville, Pennsylvania...
...His upbringing among the "Dutch"' in the mining country of Pennsylvania is reflected in several novels...
...The technique of allegory defeats itself...
...It is a brief and sensitive work, not a perfect gem, but a small uncut diamond, with a message of compassion for the human race...
...His pages evoke admiration for the stuff of the pioneers and the hard-working, hard-thinking townsmen, individualists all, of our pioneer settlements...
...The sure hope of its final sentence is one that lifts the heart...
...Yet The Waters of Kronos, where the author's favorite themes and deepest convictions are crystallized, is less moving and effective than most of Richter's novels...
...He seeks to understand his place, to return to his roots and perhaps to find a place to rest, like the old horses who come in from the open range to die—even though for him, more than for some others, there is not even a father's house to return to...
...Richter's people are real, their virtues solid and regrettably lacking in their softer descendants, and their faults are unsparingly recounted...
...All Richter's books are marked by unashamed love for America, its soil and its people...
...Reviewed by Deborah B. Karp Short story writer and critic Conrad Richter deserves the gratitude of his fellow citizens for his superbly documented and skillfully written novels of American life...
...The allegorical intent of the story is clear, beginning with the Greek name given the river whose waters now cover the past—Kronos, or Time...
...The trilogy of The Trees, The Fields and The Town movingly portrays the rude stock that felled the forests and founded the towns of Ohio in the first half of the 19th century...
...After a short stop at the re-located cemetery, where the graves of his prominent family are laid out "all precise and impersonal," he finds a way back to the town of his youth...
...No one has more poignantly described the passage from youth to age, accompanied by movement of the frontier, violent change and rapid industrialization, that characterized 19th-century America...
...His sense for the sweep of time, his feeling for family relationships, his compassion for the sorrows and struggles of each man shine through his pages...
...Yet, The Water's of Kronos, not, we hope, a farewell piece, has much in it that is beautiful and grips the imagination...
...The author, furthermore, visualizing himself as a child, and calling to mind his aunts and uncles, his row of ministerial great-uncles, does not do enough to make the characters known to us...
...The old man, John Donner, is Everyman, and his character is never defined beyond that...
...No one has made us see our ancestors and ourselves, with all our imperfections and all our worth, better than has Conrad Richter...
...Nostalgia for an earlier day is saved from sentimentality by a good admixture of earthiness...
...With warmth, a keen ear and scholarly insight, he has brought to life much that should be remembered of our country's history since the Revolutionary War...
...And before it is too late, he does find relief and peace in the discovery that he is his father's son and that the figure that haunted his sleep was not that of the older man, the father, but that of the child's own doom to become old himself...
...At 70, Conrad Richter has turned from historical reminiscence to autobiographical recall...
...The framework of allegory is too baldly apparent...
...A theme must be particularized, embodied in living flesh, to affect us strongly and to remain long with us...
...For his subjects, Richter has drawn on his family background and his own experience, as well as on a first-rate collection of Americana...
...in Always Young and Fair, the town of Pine Mills echoes the author's birthplace and home, Pine Grove...
Vol. 43 • August 1960 • No. 31
