Conrad Richter by Edwin W. Gaston, Jr (review)

Reviews 141 His life was fever and his soul was fire: O burning fool, O restless fool at rest, No other knew how high you could aspire, No other knew how deep your soul could sink! is no doubt sincere, but is nevertheless unreal. Harriet Monroe once said of Neihardt’s earlier lyrics, . . the speaker is proclaiming his high vocation, not proving it with a few magic lines.” The magic lines came after Neihardt conceived and began, in 1912, the epic cycle of the West. Here, instead of a fruitless concentration upon the self of a striving young poet, there is an enlargement of consciousness to embrace the full size and glory of the West; instead of a kind of tortured introspection, a singing celebration. T h o m a s J. L y o n , Utah State University Conrad Richter. By Edwin W. Gaston, Jr. (New York: Twayne Publishers, Inc., 1965. 176 pages, $3.50.) Conrad Richter has had the good sense and the good luck to take an over-worked genre like historical fiction and a little-used form like the novella, combine the two, and make literature out of the combination. In a career of fifty years, he has produced twelve novels, two collections of short stories, more than fifty uncollected stories, three book-length essays, and “several articles.” He won the Pulitzer Prize for The Town in 1951 and the National Book Award for The Waters of Kronos in 1960. The essays we can largely ignore. They are, as Gaston says, early and failed attempts to provide a formal philosophical basis for the fiction. That fiction, on the other hand, we cannot ignore, for in its totality it represents the universe that Richter has been plotting out and building since he began to write. All this is evident in Gaston’s book, but not very. Gaston does a good job of summarizing the novels as he goes along, but for the most part, the reader has to dig out the sense of proliferation and progression in Richter’s world of fiction for himself. Gaston is never quite sure whether he wants to follow Richter’s themes through the novels— “westering,” for instance, or strength through adversity, or the search for and reconciliation with the father— or whether he should follow Richter through the development of the philosophy of such books as Human Vibration, Principles in Bio-Physics, and The Mountain on the Desert and the application of these books to Richter’s fiction; or whether, indeed, 142 Western American Literature he should stick to his stated theme, that Conrad Richter is perhaps the most autobiographical writer in American literature since Thomas Wolfe. In spite of such confusion, this eighty-first volume of the TUSAS series begins, as do others in the series, quite conventionally, with a chronology and with a biographical section which bears a strong family resemblance to the authorized biographies of the nineteenth century. In support of his Richter-Wolfe thesis, Gaston then traces several of Richter’s fictional characters through generations of Richter’s ancestry, both paternal and maternal, in a section of the book which threatens to become as monotonous as the Biblical begats. But Gaston gets sidetracked by Richter’s philosophy — a curious combination of Michael Faraday and Emile Coue. Every time he considers a new work, Gaston ties it up tightly with Richter’s philosophical ideas and with the half dozen themes which he dis­ cerns in Richter’s fiction; and every time he does that, he recapitulates the relationship of the philosophy and the themes to the stories and novels he has already considered. The plot summaries and the bibliography are useful, and the final chap­ ter, in which Gaston evaluates Conrad Richter’s total production, and does so justly and with surprising economy, is the best part of the book. J o hn D e W it t M c K e e , New Mexico Institute of Mining < L r Technology The Crying of Lot 49. By Thomas Pynchon. (Philadelphia: J. B. Lippincott, 1966. 183 pages, $3.95.) The West doesn’t end at the Sierra Madre. Beyond plains and prairies and last lettuce ranch, it falls— often quite literally— into the cool, complacent Pacific. Along the sea’s littoral, the dregs of the Westward Movement have deposited — like a town hiding its garbage in a ravine at its edge — a litter of paranoid suburbs, their ceaseless conspiratorial whisperings erupting only occasionally into the grating grunts of motorcycles and the nightmare shrieks of old men dreaming of losing money. This twilight zone is the West as much as the land of “High Noon,”— a gilded fringe dipped too often in gravy — and some time our novelists are going to have to come to terms with its senile sun-seekers, frantic-to-befashionable junior executives, atavistic hordes of juvenile delinquents. Some day we are going to learn how the land that sprawls from Palo Alto to Chula Vista has turned the old alchemist’s wistful dream into living nightmare by converting movie stars into public officials, peroxided tramps into cult god­ desses, subliterate outcasts from other states into authorities on education, morals, and art. ...