Conrad
Richter
by David R. Johnson
As he traveled in a triangle formed by the Southwest, Florida, and his hometown of Pine Grove, Pennsylvania, Richter carried with him his increasingly battered portable typewriter and the loose pages of whatever novel was in progress. Because his wife Harvena and he loved the high desert of New Mexico, they returned often to Albuquerque, where they had spent the hardest years of their marriage. They loved as well the richly varied seasons in the Pennsylvania hills surrounding their hometown of Pine Grove. Whether in Pennsylvania or New Mexico, no matter how engaged he might be in his writing, each day Richter took time for an afternoon ride onto the desert around Albuquerque or into the hills above Pine Grove. That time was Harvey's, whose recovery from tuberculosis left her a semi-invalid. Because winters in New Mexico and Pennsylvania were too cold for Harvena and California too far to travel by car, in Richter's last years Florida became, almost by default, their home for the coldest months each year. There they avoided the tourist attractions and crowded beaches, renting modest cottages in smaller, out-of-the-way towns.
During Florida winters Richter was less inclined to press himself on writing a novel, allowing himself more time to keep up a remarkable correspondence, answering every letter he received. Many of his correspondents were fellow writers, usually ones less well known than Richter. Having himself been helped by the kindnesses of other writers when he was struggling in Albuquerque, Richter deliberately attempted to return the favor. He was especially solicitous of writers close to home in Pine Grove, driving out to Richard Wheeler's cottage in Swope's Valley to make friends with the reclusive writer, introducing Julia Hikes, whose novels were published under her maiden name, Julia Truitt Yenni, to his agent and his publisher. When a young editor for American Heritage by the name of David McCullough came to interview him, Richter encouraged him to write his own books and then pressed his agent, Paul Reynolds, to take on McCullough as a client.
By 1951, the year he won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction, the appearance of a Richter novel would be a modest literary event. Each novel was reviewed in major newspapers nationwide, with news and literary magazines sending staff writers to interview him and photographers to capture his portrait for their pages. After his second novel, Richter never read the reviews of his books. Instead, he relied on his wife to read them and then select passages to read aloud to him. On one such occasion, Richter interrupted his wife after several glowing sentences of praise, saying he could not bear to hear more. Then he went out to water the lawn for several hours until the effect of those words had worn off.15
Although Richter belonged to P.E.N., the international writers' organization, and to the National Institute of Arts and Letters, both offering opportunities to meet and mingle with the nation's literati, he seldom could bring himself to attend the dinners and other public affairs of either, sending his daughter in his place. And just as often as not, when chance put him in the way of famous writers, Richter would avoid the meeting. When he could not, he afterwards taxed himself with being too slow, too fumbling in his conversation. When another writer complimented him in person, he could never quite believe that such praise was not extorted by the personal meeting, as if people believed that he expected such talk from them. Just after the National Book Award ceremony, Richter stepped from an elevator to be greeted by Bernard Malamud and a man who spoke about The Waters of Kronos in embarrassing superlatives. "I tell people about the book, " he exclaimed, declaring that too few readers knew of Richter's marvelous work. The speaker was Isaac Bashevis Singer, and only in time would Richter come to believe that the writer's praise was not fulsome. Over the next several years reports would come to Richter that Singer was publicly pronouncing him "a great talent, " America's best novelist. In the occasional correspondence between the two writers, Singer sometimes began his letters with the salutation "Dear Master."16
To those who were acquainted with Richter, this man of modest habits and unpretentious lifestyle seemed someone who had found his center, a writer who did not care for public adulation or the distractions of public appearances. His course seemed fixed on a constant star, one of his own choosing, and he navigated safely by that star despite changing currents and popular tastes. That is not to say that Conrad Richter was without his small indulgences. He bought his shirts and pajamas from Brooks Brothers, simple accommodations to luxury. In his later years he drove Cadillacs, though he always bought used ones- preferring their functional superiority and prestige but unwilling to pay full price to acquire them-and drove them long after his neighbors had traded in their Fords and Buicks for new models. But these were clearly exceptions. Like so many other Americans who had suffered through the Great Depression, Richter was close with his money. Once his nephew Bill took Richter to a discount appliance store to buy a new toaster. There Richter chose the cheapest model available, explaining to his nephew that "we only make toast at breakfast."17 But if Richter was known by his family and neighbors to be thrifty, that was a practice for which, in the Pennsylvania Dutch country of his childhood and later years, there was no reason for rebuke. Rather, it made him simply another townsperson. He might be famous, but to the residents of Pine Grove he was still Connie, just as he had been to his mother and Aunt Lizzie long ago, in the years before the turn of the century when Pine Grove streets were paved with brick and the shade trees hung in a canopy over the sidewalks.
In his last years, Richter placed a snapshot inside the front cover of a devotional notebook he carried in his old corduroy jacket. Although around Pine Grove Richter habitually wore the jacket until Harvey threw it away to keep him from wearing it any longer, he was even in old age more attentive to what his neighbors thought of him than any of them would have guessed. The photograph inside his notebook was one of himself from the depression days in Albuquerque, a picture he evidently had not prepared himself for. In it he stands bareheaded in the outdoors, hair cropped exceptionally close and high above his ears. His collar is open, his sleeves rolled up, his pants unpressed. One arm slightly behind him, he stands with his legs apart, a man uncomfortably aware that his picture is being taken and making no attempt to look happy about the experience. The picture is worn at its edges, as pictures carried about become, but the writing at the bottom is still legible. It is in Richter's cribbed handwriting, an admonition to himself, pointed advice from one Conrad Richter to the other: "Smile, damn you, smile."
15. watering lawn: J, May 1, 1950.
16. "I tell people about the book": J, March 16, 1961; salutation "Dear Master": I. B. Singer to CR, May 1, 1965; also March 6, 1968, in which Singer himself reports on his attempts to promote Richter's novels: "Wherever I go I keep on telling people that there lives a great talent amidst us."
17. "we only make toast": interview with William Richter, September 18, 1992.
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© 2001 The Penn State University