A Simple Honorable Man by Conrad Richter

First published: 1962

Type of work: Novel

Type of plot: Personal narrative

Time of work: Early twentieth century

Locale: Pennsylvania

Principal Characters:

• Harry Donner, a storekeeper who becomes a Lutheran minister
• Valeria Donner, his wife
• John, ,
• Gene, and
• Tim, their sons
• The Reverend Elijah Morgan, Harry Donner’s father-in-law
• Mike Barrett, a dying Irish miner
• Sally, his wife
• Isaac Gottschall, a crippled miner
• Emma Severn, a girl who marries unwisely
• Phillip Rodey, Harry Donner’s friend and parishioner
• Jenny, his wife
• Mrs. McPhail, a woman grieving for her murdered son
• Jake Schnecke, a murderer

Analysis

In THE WATERS OF KRONOS, Conrad Richter told the imaginatively conceived and poetically textured story of one man’s journey back to the lost times and landmarks of his youth, to remembrances recalled but now beyond his physical reach. For Unionville, the Pennsylvania community of his boyhood had been buried under the waters of a great hydroelectric dam, just as the years of his early life have been covered by the deep wash of time. What John Donner discovered at the end of that quietly told but deeply moving novel is the secret of his own mortality, the realization of how much in life is wasted and sad, how much that is beautiful and good is never recognized until it is past recall. In the end, man’s death, half-welcomed and half-feared, is joined to his beginning, far back in the years of childhood and the place of his origins.

Although separate and complete in itself, THE WATERS OF KRONOS hinted at further disclosures in the Donner family, particularly of the father to whom John Donner, dying, becomes reconciled, and of the mother with whom a reunion has been promised. A SIMPLE HONORABLE MAN does extend the story of the Donners but on a different level of action and presentation. The earlier novel relied for much of its effect on time fantasy and suggestions from ancient myths. In this novel, however, the treatment is straightforward in chronology and structure.

The epigraph, taken from a letter by James Joyce, sets forth Richter’s intentions to present a man of simplicity and honor. In THE WATERS OF KRONOS, there are hints that the younger John Donner never really understood his father and that there had been some kind of friction between them. A lack of understanding also appears in the relationship of father and son in this novel, but only because the boy cannot share his father’s firm and joyous belief in the everlasting goodness of God. In the end, the father’s example overwhelms, even if it never quite succeeds in erasing, his son’s belief that the church maintains its authority by the “dark, theocratic gloom” of such phrases as “holiness,” “original sin,” “the blood of the lamb,” and “eternal damnation.” Words like these had chilled John Donner when he was a boy. To Harry Donner, however, church is a citadel of strength, and he lives the life of a clergyman with all the devotion of his passionate mind and heart. In his dealings with his fellows and with God he is, as his son eventually sees him, a simple, unselfish, honorable man.

Harry Donner’s way of grace is not easy. He is almost forty, married, and the father of three sons when, about the turn of the century, he feels an irresistible call to the ministry. His father-in-law, the austere old clergyman whom John Donner calls Pap-pa, tries to dissuade him. Harry Donner is too old for such a step; he is a family man; he can never hope to obtain a charge in one of the better churches; he has his general store in Unionville and ought to be satisfied with the life he has. In the face of these arguments, however, he remains stubborn in his resolve. With a small legacy left to his wife and money from the sale of his store—the business had never been a success because he was unable to deny credit to the miners of the region—he goes off to West Shore College and from there to the seminary to prepare for the Lutheran ministry. In the next thirty-three years, he fills three parishes. The first is Mahanoy, about ten miles from Unionville. There he has his first experience in pastoral duties, not all of them pleasant. Perhaps he expects too much of his congregation, he decides. If the people of Mahanoy do not want to accept all that he is prepared to offer, the miners and poor people in the mining patch at Lost Run need him. There he visits the sick, comforts the dying, performs marriages, preaches funeral sermons, and in the end, builds at Lost Run the church of which he had dreamed. From Mahanoy, the Donners go to Wetherill, where the minister finds himself caught between opposing factions quarreling over building a new church or keeping the old one. While there, Harry Donner is offered the assistant pastorship of a large church in Brooklyn, but he refuses the call; he cannot believe that the people there really need him. So he goes off to a bleak parish at Paint Creek in Cambria County. There his sons grow up and leave home, and there his wife (the mother of THE WATERS OF KRONOS) dies, reliving in memory her early life with family and friends in Unionville. Harry Donner serves the Paint Creek parish until his retirement. When he dies his bank balance is one dollar and thirty-eight cents.

Harry Donner is the book. Other characters enter into his story briefly but memorably, figures like Mike Barrett, the tough old Irishman, who was baptized while he was dying of miner’s asthma; Harry Gottschall, who had lost both arms in mine accidents; Mrs. McPhail, whose son had murdered his wife and child; beautiful young Emma Severn, who married a worthless fellow and paid the minister for the wedding with a bag of snitz; Dan Singer and Dolly, his common-law wife, who refused to get married, with Dan quoting the Bible to prove his point; Phillip Rodey, who was accused of stealing a pig, and his wife Jenny; the three Piatt brothers, who wanted all things their way; Jake Schnecke, who shot his best friend and then turned his gun on himself. Only in retrospect does the reader realize what a large and varied picture of experience Richter has distilled into his novel.

Tribulation, hardship, and strength of purpose fill Harry Donner’s world, but humor is there as well. On one occasion, he mentioned David and Bathsheba in a sermon, only to be rebuked and threatened the next day by a backwoodsman named Dave Mace, who accused the minister of slandering him and his woman. As Dave explains it, he and Sheba are not living in sin; they merely have not yet got around to getting married. Harry Donner pays for the license, marries them, and baptizes their three children. Before long, he has performed four marriages in the community and has run out of baptismal certificates.

Richter makes the story of Harry Donner the record of a dedicated, proud, upright life, one rich in sustaining values. To his wife and sons, as to members of his congregations, he is at once a source of trial and a tower of strength. A man motivated by his strong yet unostentatious love for the meek and the lowly as much as by his religious zeal, he lives the life of a shepherd according to his own simple, unyielding belief and powers. He belongs to a time when right and wrong, good and bad, were still terms of meaning, before they were blunted by Freudian psychology and sociological cant. Harry Donner bases his life and his ministry on three simple premises. First, God forgives all sins if the sinner is repentant. Second, salvation is possible for everyone through God’s grace. Third, all these things are wonderfully and meaningfully true.

Even though John Donner did not always understand his father, through his eyes that humble, earnest, dedicated man is brought warmly and movingly to life in this novel.

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.