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Richter
by David R. Johnson
It was the other Conrad Richter, however, whom Richter chose to portray first in his story of his life. This was the young man who would worry for days before an interview with one of the people to whom he had written so confidently, taking out his growing irritability on his family. This was the man who, after such an interview, would go home to write paragraphs in his personal notebooks assessing his performance, emphasizing his mistakes in what he said or should have said, ending with advice to "contain" himself, which meant bridling his inclination to what he called the three C's, confiding, confessing, and criticizing others.6 His extreme dread of such experiences did not lessen after he gained prominence as a novelist. Once when Richter was visiting his brother Fred's family in Syracuse, New York, a newspaper reporter found out he was in town and called Fred to ask for an interview. Discovering that his brother had agreed, Richter flew into a rage that frightened Fred's two sons, and he fretted irritably until the newspaperman actually arrived. Then Richter submitted to the interview with warmth, humor, and what appeared to Fred's sons, young Fred and Eduard, to be utterly unselfconscious ease. It thoroughly puzzled them.7
Richter saw such behavior as the inheritance from his ancestors in the Black Forest. He was simply a peasant, unfit for celebrity or any public occupation, he occasionally reminded himself in his journal. On the publication of his second collection of short stories, Early Americana, Richter was surprised and pleased with the first reviews his stories received, but uneasy, too. When he heard that the review in the New York Herald Tribune was accompanied by a photograph of him, he commented to himself wryly, "I am a little overwhelmed with my importance, " then continued his journal entry with a cautionary reminder: "I am not meant for greatness. I am a shepherd's grandson and am at peace and ease only alone with animals and nature as a shepherd. . . . Perhaps if I remember I am a kind of solitary shepherd, a quiet gentle amused shepherd even with people, I shall manage to get along. But if I ever get the notion I am clever, companionable, interesting, a conversationalist, I am hopelessly lost. It is beyond me."8
Less than two months later Richter found himself in a decidedly unpastoral Hollywood, a screenwriter for Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer. A photograph taken that fall, or perhaps the following fall when he was again putting in a four-month assignment screenwriting, displays the public Richter. In it he walks along a Los Angeles street, striding confidently toward the camera. Wearing a well-fitting suit of medium gray and a natty snap-brim hat, he could be a movie producer or director, or one of Hollywood's moguls. He has confidence, his appearance announces; it shows in his stride, his well-trimmed mustache, in the jaunty angle of his hat. This is a man who is going somewhere important. And in truth he was: at forty-six he had finally achieved something like the success he had been so eager to accomplish as a young man, selling a number of his stories to the Saturday Evening Post, which during the depression found its way into more American homes than any other magazine. That fall his first serial story, The Sea of Grass, appeared in the Post; it was later published as a novel by the prestigious publishing house of Alfred A. Knopf. And before either appeared, MGM would buy the motion picture rights to Richter's The Sea of Grass for $15, 000-more than triple what Richter had earned in any year of his life-as a film property for its premiere stars, Spencer Tracy and Katharine Hepburn.
During Richter's first stint at screenwriting, Alfred Knopf had written to his half brother at MGM, the man in charge of the studio's 125 writers, to say that Richter had "the guts and integrity" not to be "carried away" by Hollywood.9 This was strong-and shrewd-testimony and Edwin Knopf's own experience was to bear out his brother's estimation. In Richter's first week at MGM, Knopf had pressed him to sign a contract with a series of four options, each with a substantial increase to a final salary of $1, 200 a week. When Richter declined, Edwin Knopf had walked about his office in such agitation that Richter would later ask his Hollywood agent, Gerald Adams, if he had made Knopf angry. "No, he was just amazed with you, " was the agent's laughing reply. Then Adams explained to the novice Richter that he had turned down what for screenwriters was "the most sought after thing in pictures."10
At the time, Edwin Knopf knew comparatively little about his new writer. He may well have been even further perplexed at Richter's refusal if he had known more of the real story of Richter's writing career, a story that Richter, ever inclined to be secretive about his personal life, preferred to keep to himself. That fall Richter did offer a highly selective version of his past to Alfred Knopf, who had learned that Richter had already published three books-a collection of short stories and two nonfiction books on his theories about the evolution of human consciousness. When Knopf asked to read all three, Richter at first put his publisher off, and when Knopf pressed for copies, Richter dismissed his early writing career with characteristic understatement. He had tried writing the best stories he could and found they paid him almost no money. Thereafter he wrote stories of the ordinary commercial variety, like most in Brothers of No Kin, his first story collection. When his daughter as a senior in high school brought home great works of literature, he too read them, and this reading rekindled his ambition to write better stories than the pulp westerns and popular magazine stories that supported his family through the dark years of the depression. The result was that he began to write "the best fiction that was in me that would sell."11
Sorting out from his life a story for his publisher, Richter created a simple fable about a writer who turned from a modest livelihood to attempt a larger ambition and succeeded, a fable that he would regularly repeat in later years. Although Richter's explanation is not precisely a misrepresentation, it is a story most notable in what it leaves out. The final sentence in Richter's explanation to Knopf, a sentence seemingly itself the stuff of Hollywood, contains as much candor as any sentence in the letter: "The first better story I did in 1934 was 'Early Marriage, ' and the popular short story I was doing at the time the other sold is still unfinished and put away against such a time when this sort of work may again become necessary."12 There was indeed a pulp western Richter had put away while he sold "better" stories to George Horace Lorimer at the Curtis Publishing Company. But the story was only put away; it was not discarded. He was keeping it "against such a time when this sort of work may again become necessary." For all his sense of purposeful direction, his air of a man going places, the man striding so confidently in the photograph was not then-and would not ever be-as sure of the future as he preferred others to believe.
In a 1955 letter to a fellow writer, Frank Gruber, Richter tried out another version of his story, equally fable-like: "When people ask me the secret of writing successful stories, I say, lose all your money in the stock market, go deep into debt trying to save the stock so you can't pay the interest, have a sick wife who needs doctors and care and a kid who must go to school and be decently dressed, and have all this happen during a depression like 1929, 1930 when you can't get a job to save your soul-then by the great god Pan if you have anything in you, it'll come out. This, I suspect, is the plan of this world."13 Again the last sentence is the most telling, an admission slipped into what otherwise seems almost bluster. In it Richter opens just a crack the window into his personal beliefs about the meaning of life. The "plan of this world" to Richter is that humans must struggle; it is only by undergoing such times as Richter's own desperate experiences in the depression, only by such acts of will as Richter's efforts to bring into submission his own nervous disposition, that people evolve into higher levels of consciousness. His first two nonfiction books were about just this idea; so too was his later book, better received but still misunderstood, The Mountain on the Desert.
At the end of his first four-month assignment at MGM, Richter confided in Edwin Knopf another piece of the story he had left out in his sketch to the movie executive's brother, an admission that made Richter's refusal of the contract all the more puzzling. Richter had arrived in Hollywood more than $8, 500 in debt, debt that began with the stock market crash in 1929 when he lost in a single day his life's savings of $15, 000. As wary of Hollywood as a shepherd's grandson would be, he agreed to work for MGM because he had no other way to clear himself and his family of so much debt. But he had no illusions; Hollywood might well turn out to be as much of a trial as the stock market crash had been-another opportunity for Richter to play his part in the plan of the world. As he remarked in his journal at the beginning of his contract, "I told Adams earlier that I should be willing to go through hell to get my debts paid and I must not be surprised if fate takes me up on it."14
Richter left Hollywood in late February 1937, just after The Sea of Grass was published by Alfred Knopf. He returned for one more contract the following year, and then he was done with Hollywood forever. From the perspective of admiring readers and fellow writers, Conrad Richter's career thereafter was a model of a certain kind of artistic behavior. His novels came out regularly, about two years apart, for the rest of his life. None would be faddish or sensational. None would treat sex or violence graphically. But each would be greeted by loyal readers-and critics-anticipating the next Conrad Richter novel. Virtually all sold at least modestly well, and several very well indeed, and all would be translated into a long list of foreign languages.
6. three C's: Health file, undated sheet entitled "MY FAILURE CONTACTS WITH PEOPLE"; also repeatedly in J.
7. Richter meets a reporter: interview with Frederick D. Richter and Eduard C. Richter, September 21, 1991.
8. "I am a little overwhelmed": J, August 1, 1936.
9. "the guts and integrity": J, September 23, 1936.
10. just amazed with you": J, September 23, 1936; "the most sought after": CR to PRR, December 7, 1936.
11. "the best fiction": CR to AK, October 14, 1936.
12. fable of writing career; "The first better story": CR to AK, October 14, 1936.
13. "When people ask me": CR to Frank Gruber, November 12, 1955.
14. "I told Adams": J, September 7, 1936.
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