The Waters of Kronos by Conrad Richter

First published: 1960

Type of work: Novel

Type of plot: Symbolic fantasy

Time of work: 1960’s and the past

Locale: Unionville, a town lost beneath the waters of time

Principal Characters:

• John Donner, an old man
• Harry Donner, his father
• Great-Aunt Teresa
• Aunt Jess
• Richard Ryon, Aunt Jess’s husband
• Mrs. Bonawitz, a neighbor of the Donners

Analysis

Conrad Richter is a writer apparently haunted by a sense of the past. In his early novels he re-created with quiet and assured art some spacious landscapes of an older America, regions widely separated in geography and time: the American Southwest in THE SEA OF GRASS, TACEY CROMWELL, and THE LADY; the growth of a settlement on the Ohio-Pennsylvania frontier in the trilogy of THE TREES, THE FIELDS, and THE TOWN; the period of the American Revolution in THE FREE MAN; bucolic comedy in THE GRANDFATHERS; life in a small Pennsylvania city in the years following the Spanish-American War in ALWAYS YOUNG AND FAIR; and the romance of the pioneer wilderness in THE LIGHT IN THE FOREST and A COUNTRY OF STRANGERS. These books are fresh and authentic in their presentation of regional and historical themes. In THE WATERS OF KRONOS, he gives a picture of a different kind of past, the story of one man’s pilgrimage back to the lost times and landmarks of his youth. In the process, Richter deals expertly with two matters of great concern in modern fiction, the problem of time and the enigma of man’s identity.

These, after all, make up the modern subject: the search for self and the exploration of consciousness, which is man’s measurement of the nature and duration of time, as memory and history are its deposit. The crisis for personality is the challenge of the age, for in a world as fragmented and confused as the earth is, the private sensibility is no longer self-contained, and man’s search for identity and wholeness takes on the form of a despairing quest. Leopold Bloom and Stephen Dedalus wandering the streets of Dublin, Proust’s narrator confronting his unrecognized figure in the mirror, Eugene Gant’s search for the father, Camus’ Jean-Baptiste Clemence in the Amsterdam bar, Saul Bellow’s Henderson shouting his “I want, I want” toward the African sky—these are the images of alienated, divided man trying to define himself in space and time. In a special way, Richter presents a variation on this universal quest, which in THE WATERS OF KRONOS is a return to a lost and buried past.

The fantasy of time travel is not new; it was as useful to Mark Twain as it was to H. G. Wells. The works of these writers, however, were based on what is called the mathematics of a space-time continuum; Richter’s novel, on its metaphysics. There is no book quite like this anywhere in American literature. In fact, the only two works which suggest any comparison in either quality or kind are Thornton Wilder’s play OUR TOWN, and Robert Frost’s poem “Directive.” As in Wilder’s play, readers watch events unfolding with a knowledge of how much of the life presented will be wasted and sad, how much of the beautiful and good will go unrecognized until it is past all recall; and readers look on helplessly, not with anticipation, but with foreknowledge of what the future holds for the people involved. THE WATERS OF KRONOS suggests “Directive” also in that it conveys with quiet tenderness and sad wisdom a sense of the inevitability of things: the loneliness of being, the awkwardness of communication, the fact that life wears away to a death that is half-welcomed and half-feared, the knowledge that the waters of time wash over the years of childhood and in the end man goes back to the depths where he began. These matters are the substance of old myths that express the fundamental common experience of the race. They shaped the strange adventure of John Donner when he went back to the place of his origins.

To begin with, it was a useless pilgrimage, as he knew, for Unionville, the town where he was born, is now buried under the waters of a huge hydroelectric dam. Donner is an old man who has lived in the West for many years. He has been ill also, and during his sickness his desire for many things now vanished from his life prompted him to make the long trip back to the Pennsylvania countryside of his ancestors. On his arrival, he finds everything as he knew it would be. The town is gone, deep under the dark waters. Only the bodies of the dead have been saved from the flooding. In the new cemetery to which they have been removed, they are all that remains of the past. Donner is deeply affected. Then as memories of the lost town close in about him, a miracle occurs. A man driving a miner’s wagon comes down the remains of an old road and gives him a lift. Donner finds himself back in Unionville as he had known it when he was a boy.

Now, however, the situation is reversed. He is an old man walking the familiar streets, peering into the houses, meeting old friends and relatives all younger than he. The time is 1899, the day before his grandfather’s funeral. He talks to his father but cannot reveal himself. He goes to the home of Great-Aunt Teresa and Aunt Jess, his childhood favorites, but all his relatives are busy with preparations for the funeral, and he is turned away. Wandering through the town, he sees people whose future he already knows. When he comes to the Flail house, he remembers that the father, a butcher, would kill his wife, their four children, and himself a short time later; he frightens Mrs. Flail when he calls out to her to leave her husband. That night, he sleeps in a covered bridge. The next day, he attends his grandfather’s funeral. Unrecognized, he sees himself as a boy. He sees his mother, but she is surrounded by relatives. When he goes to his father’s house later on and asks to see her, he is again turned away. Only Great-Aunt Teresa notes a family resemblance; she thinks he is the dead grandfather buried that day.

That night, he is taken in by Mrs. Bonawitz, a neighbor of the Donners, after he has lost consciousness and fallen. During the night, he meets his own boyhood again when young John Donner comes bringing word that the mother for whom old John Donner has asked will come to see the stranger the next day. Later, awake, he finds the answers to the two questions that have haunted his life. He is his father’s true son, he realizes, and the face of the great frightener who had disturbed the dreams of his childhood was really himself, as old as he is now, the specter shape of man’s mortality in the moment of death.

This realization joins reality and dream, part of the scheme of things that gives man his deepest knowledge, but too late. For John Donner, at the end, is dying. Reconciled with his father, he looks forward to reunion with his mother. “He could scarcely wait. She had promised yesterday that he would see her ’tomorrow’ and she had never told him a falsehood yet.” This conclusion suggests that Richter has further disclosures to make from the deep wash of time’s waters, the fulfillment of continued life suggested by the promise of the mother.

Part of the effectiveness of THE WATERS OF KRONOS comes from the device of superimposing one image upon another, past and present, youth and age, life and death. This dualism extends even into the dialogue, in which Conrad Richter’s people say one thing but seem to suggest other meanings, thus setting up a resonance which readers are more likely to find in poetry than in fiction. The novel, imaginatively conceived and beautifully styled, is a work of quiet hints and gentle persuasions. Conrad Richter is a writer who knows his own powers and thus is able to suit them admirably to the uses which the moral occasion demands.

Bibliography

Barnes, Robert J. Conrad Richter. Austin, Tex.: Steck-Vaughn, 1968.

Carpenter, Frederic I. “Conrad Richter’s Pioneers: Reality and Myth.” College English 12 (1950): 77-84.

Cowan, William. “Delaware Vocabulary in the Works of Conrad Richter.” In Papers of the Twenty-ninth Algonquian Conference, edited by David H. Pentland. Winnipeg: University of Manitoba Press, 1998.

Edwards, Clifford D. Conrad Richter’s Ohio Trilogy. The Hague, Netherlands: Mouton, 1970.

Flanagan, John T. “Conrad Richter: Romancer of the Southwest.” Southwest Review 43 (1958): 189-196.

Gaston, Edwin W., Jr. Conrad Richter. Rev. ed. Boston: G. K. Hall, 1989.

Johnson, David R. Conrad Richter: A Writer’s Life. University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2001.

Kohler, Dayton. “Conrad Richter’s Early Americana.” College English 7 (1947): 221-228.