Heap o' writin'

A SIMPLE, HONORABLE MAN (309 pp.) --Conrad Richter-- Knopf ($4.50).

The names in this novel seem to have come from unpretentious rural tomb stones, the thin sandstone kind that a man could carry under one arm : Lizzie Yoh, Theodosia Garrison, Phrany Luck-enbill, Lutie Markle, Jake Loy. Palmyra Scarlett, Seranus Mast. They live in towns like Jacob's and Unionville in Pennsylvania's Vale of Union, or up in the mining patches at Mahanoy near the Tulpehocken Trail. The prose is as homely as a bag of snitz. Some people get their dutch up, others are as meek as Moses. They eat victuals, marry helpmeets, and get around on shanks' mare. They don't like high muckety mucks. The little folks in grammar school are called scholars.

Everybody fears Gut in Himmel. The old blacksmith says, "Dang your old liver pin." The props are out of the 1900 Sears, Roebuck catalogue -- horsehair chairs, heaters with isinglass panes, Brussels car pets, claw-footed mahogany sideboards, a crokinole board. There's a rock-'n'-rye jug full of booze, rock candy, rusty nails, and rusty hinges.

Back to Beginnings. It takes a heap o' writin' to use that sort of material in this day and age on anything more pretentious than a TV show, but 71 -year-old Conrad Richter has been making quiet, honest novels out of it for 25 years. The Town, part of his trilogy on frontier life in the Ohio territory (The Trees, The Fields, The Town), won a Pulitzer Prize in 1951.

Two years ago, The Waters of Kronos.

an autobiographical fantasy about an old writer named John Donner who returns to his home town in Pennsylvania, won the National Book Award, defeating such competition as John Updike's Rabbit, Run, John Hersey's The Child Buyer, and Harper Lee's To Kill a Mockingbird. The present novel is a sequel to Kronos. The fantasy is gone. It is a straightforward account of the life of John Donner's fa ther, a country preacher.

Little Corn. Presumably this is Richter's own clergyman father. Religion can be a heavy garment for the young. If the preacher's son can be taken for Rich ter himself, he found the religious atmosphere oppressive -- "his ear assailed by the peculiarly dry and sterile vulgate of the church, his young life faced by the stern presence of rituals and sacraments, of vows and austerities, of obligations and constraints, all under the overhanging shadow of the cross." But the acerbic tone shows only occasionally; in the end, after following the parson on his rounds from one parishioner to another in a splendid gallery of sketches spanning sev eral decades, the novel comes down to the simplest of statements of simple faith. "I think my belief in God personal ly supports me.'' says Father-Preacher Donner, putting his lifetime into a sentence, ''and that His presence and angels go with me. gives me grace to do what I'm called on to do, and peace of mind while I'm doing it.'' The book bears a sweet, refreshing smell of hay. and -- considering the risk involved -- surprisingly little corn. The hero, at least, has a golden heart, not a golden arm. The book is a faithful portrait of a man in awe of heaven who finally goes there, leaving an estate worth $1.38.

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