posted on 20 Oct 2020

The Waters of Kronos by Conrad Richter

This comparatively short novel, which was published in 1960, won the National Book Award for Fiction in the States the following year. It’s a slow, contemplative and melancholic meditation on aging, memory and regret which is built on the laying down of sedimentary detail that has an almost dreamlike quality to it.

I suspect that, as we age, a good many of us fantasize over the possibility of our elderly selves somehow being able to return to our childhood homes to witness the people and places of our past. We would relish the chance to discover what happened in those years to shape the people we have become. As the years of life approach their end we are filled with a mixture of positive and negative emotions – unfulfilled aspirations to ‘know’ or to understand what was really going on around us when we were too immature to really grasp the complexity of our family and our communities.

This central conceit is the heart of Conrad Richter’s novel. I was put onto this book in the first place by a paper on the Penn State University website which has an admirable summation of the book’s central plot and themes:

 "this is the story of John Donner, an aging writer who has driven from the West Coast back to Unionville, Pennsylvania, where he grew up. He discovers that the town he once knew has been submerged under the Kronos River because of a dam created to supply power for a hydroelectric plant. After viewing where the residents of the town cemeteries have been relocated, Donner finds himself on a road that went through Unionville to coal mines, where he improbably sees a wagon carrying coal and seemingly rides this wagon into the past. Once there, he finds it is the night before his grandfather's funeral, and although he knows the town and its inhabitants, they do not know him."

As you may be able to deduce from this summary, Richter uses a fantasy/magic realist device to carry the elderly John Donner back into his past, to a time when he was only a young boy. However, he returns as what he is now – an old man – and his dream to engage with the people and places of his past meet with puzzlement and hostility. He discovers that he cannot in fact get inside the lives and actions of his family or his neighbours and they in turn can only look at him as an outsider – an eccentric old man, a stranger, claiming to be part of their lives.

When he is eventually called to ride the train back to ‘reality’ he leaves as a disappointed man whose excursion into his past not only fails to bring him pleasure or enlightenment but actually causes him distress rather than comfort. The past is indeed a foreign country whose languages and traditions are closed to us.

When the book was published in 1960 it was assumed that there was a big dollop of autobiography in the content. PSU Press note in their promotional puff for the book:

“From the time of its first publication in 1960, Conrad Richter's The Waters of Kronos sparked lively debate about the extent to which its story of a belated return to childhood scenes mirrored key events of Richter's own life.”

But, quite honestly, the extent of the autobiographical material is ultimately by the by. The book very quickly moves beyond the personal or individual and becomes more of a meditation on the very nature of our relationship to the past. It’s an exploration of just how the young person we were relates to the person we have become. Is it ever possible to know how the past influences the present - whether what we remember of our childhood and the key events in our lives is the ‘truth’ or a construction of the truth that we have created to make sense of our existence?

The book seems to be back in print but copies are not cheap – you might be better looking for a copy on the second hand market where you should be able to pick something up for under a tenner.

 

Terry Potter

October 2020