Monday, May. 01, 1950
The Taming of Ohio
THE TOWN (433 pp.)--Conrad Richter --Knopf ($3.50).
Even in the hands of a second-rater, few stories can grip the American imagination so much as that of the pioneer, his hardships, his courage, his eccentricities. Once in a while, a really good writer retells it and then the pioneer's story seems as fresh as the land he settled. Such a writer is Conrad Richter, a 59-year-old Pennsylvanian who also spends part of his time in New Mexico. Though his novels lack the color of A. B. Guthrie Jr.'s The Way West (TIME, Oct. 17), they have an impressive honesty and an authentic flavor of their own.
The Town is the third volume in Richter's trilogy of Ohio from post-Revolutionary War times to the Civil War (the first two: The Trees, The Fields), and starts after the War of 1812. Richter picks up his story at the point where pioneer Ohio, its woods cleared and safe, is becoming a town society. Sayward Wheeler, a hardworking, sweet-souled "woodsy," and her lawyer-husband, Portius, could now relax and enjoy life. With loping, casually connected episodes, Richter tells how the nine Wheeler children grow up, how Sayward reluctantly agrees to leave her cabin for a fancy house in Americus (new, high-sounding name for Moonshine Church), and how Portius gets to be a judge.
Sayward is one of those magnetic women who holds her family in an unbreakable hoop of love. She forgives Portius' drinking and wenching because she is awed by his education and believes in his essential goodness; she closes her eyes to the fact that little Rosa Tench is Portius' child, and she expands with pride when Portius makes a fine speech. Portius is a stout character himself. He survives the cholera, though his only medicine is red pepper and asafetida pills, because he is too "preserved in alcohol to die." When he becomes a judge, agnostic and prankster that he is, he secretly replaces the court Bible with Arabian Nights, by which everyone swears as devoutly as before.
Most of Sayward's brood are a lusty, hard-working lot. The oldest son marries well and eventually becomes governor of Ohio; one daughter takes a fancy to a red-haired furnaceman, and runs naked in the night to the house of her chosen; another daughter becomes a school teacher. Sayward's son Chancey is the family disappointment; he turns out a priggish reformer and a Copperhead, but he shows up at his mother's deathbed, impressed in spite of himself by her hardy pioneer virtues.
The Town is written in pioneer idiom; sometimes it gets to be a strain watching Richter strain for colorful expressions. But when he succeeds, they're good, e.g., "You wouldn't reckon to look at her she could read a lick, but she'd turn the old page and suck out the meaning of the new like a bird pulling out a worm."
Even in its drier passages The Town is always readable, full of a sweet nostalgia that only occasionally spills over into sentimentality. Its publisher announces it as part of "a great American epic," which is overstating the case. The Town is something more modest but almost as enjoyable, a good bit of fictional Americana.
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