Critchfield Writes Family Album : Book Chronicles Dark, Light Sides of American Dream

Shortly before his biography of his Midwestern family, “Those Days: An American Album” (Anchor Press/Doubleday, $19.95), was published in February, author Richard Critchfield predicted that it would have an instant audience.

“Everybody wants to write a family history,” he said.

With only a hint of a smile, the 55-year-old Berkeley writer envisioned hordes of would-be family chroniclers descending on him for advice and to press their own stories on him. He predicted: “This book is going to ruin my life.”

‘Minor Celebrityhood’

Six months later, the book is selling at a brisk pace; paperback rights have been sold and feelers have been sent out about television possibilities, fulfilling the first part of Critchfield’s forecast. As for ruining his life, he is finding his “minor celebrityhood” an interesting change from his years as a respected but little-known journalist specializing in the effects of late-20th-Century life on Third World villages.

His story of three generations of white Anglo-Saxon Protestants living rather ordinary lives in Iowa and North Dakota between 1880 and 1940 has touched a nerve among American readers. “I’ve gotten a lot of emotional letters,” Critchfield said recently at his brother’s Berkeley town house, the closest thing the much-traveled bachelor has to a stable home. The story that Critchfield wove together from old family stories and his own investigative reporting is at once specific and universal while being profoundly American. He set out to write something like his acclaimed books tracing the effect of 20th-Century technology on rural life in developing countries, “Villages” (1981), “Shahhat: An Egyptian” (1978), “The Golden Bowl Be Broken: Peasant Life in Four Cultures” (1974) and his first book, “The Long Charade” (1968), which was drawn from a stint as a Washington Star reporter in Vietnam.

Critchfield wanted to write about America’s conversion from an agrarian society to a technological one using his family’s experience as a touchstone. Instead, the family story took over.

Tracing Family Roots

Using first-person narratives that are sometimes taken from recent interviews, sometimes extrapolated from newspaper accounts and letters, Critchfield traced the intertwining story of his father’s family, robust frontiersmen descended from an English convict, and his mother’s clan, hard-working, pious Quakers and Methodists who retained their New England values even on the rough Ohio frontier of the 19th Century.

“We were classic,” Critchfield said of his parents’ match. “The Midwest--and America at that time--was essentially made of up two strains. The Yankee-New Englanders who were always trying to legislate morality and the Mid-Atlantic Southerners, the frontiersmen who just wanted to be left alone.”

His mother, Anna Louise Williams, was a young schoolteacher raised in sedate Iowa parsonages who was anxious for adventure.

“Now people join the Peace Corps,” Critchfield said, “then you went to North Dakota.”

Jim Critchfield was handsome, athletic and known as a hell-raiser. He was also the son of a doctor who planned to become a doctor himself if he could ever make enough money from farming to finish medical school. He married Anne, as he called her, in 1913.

The young couple set up housekeeping on Jim Critchfield’s North Dakota farm, weathering sickness, crop failure and back-breaking work. High farm prices in World War I gave the Critchfields enough capital to send him back to medical school while also supporting their little family, daughter Betty and son Jimmy.

The smoothly written tale follows the family through the ‘20s when he became a country doctor, the sort of tough but sensitive character who has always been a staple in American literature. The doctor’s wife is a charming, unstuffy saint who runs a household, fills in as nurse and has three more children--Billy, Peggy and Pat (Richard Critchfield’s family nickname).

The dark side of this American Dream unfolds with Jim Critchfield’s increased drinking as he patched together one mangled farm laborer after another and watched all manner of sickness kill and maim his patients, the townspeople who were his friends and the rural people he loved. At 40 he fell into a disastrous affair with an 18-year-old woman who came to him with a botched abortion.

The Great Depression

The family moved to Fargo in 1932 to end the scandal and try to start over. But the Depression was in full force by then and it was too late for Jim Critchfield, who sank steadily into more drinking and was plagued by worse health. When he died in 1937, the family was left almost destitute.

While Critchfield calls his father’s experience typical of what happened to many men in the Depression, the book shows how magnificently his mother coped. The family, who laughingly referred to themselves as “The Five Little Peppers,” lived in a small house near the North Dakota State University campus.

One passage from the book seems to sum up the Critchfields’ buoyant approach to life: “One night we had no butter,” Anne Critchfield recalled of the lean Depression days. “There was no money to buy any. When I told the kids, we just sat there for a moment. Then they roared with laughter. They found the idea of being that poor howlingly funny.”

Critchfield, who was 7 when his father died and has only hazy memories of him, approached this story in the same single-minded, businesslike way he has written about the villages of Asia, Africa and South America.

“This is not autobiographical in any way,” he said. “This is a story of people who happen to be my family.”

He decided to write the book in 1981, 12 years after leaving his job as a foreign correspondent for the Washington Star in order to write about villages. Critchfield is one of a dying breed, the gypsy free-lance journalist who hikes off to faraway places to write about war, famine, breaking news or whatever interests him.

Villages interested Critchfield after covering the early days of the Vietnam War. Watching the first U.S. soldiers struggling and often failing to understand who were their allies and who were their enemies, Critchfield began to see that the Vietnamese communists were winning the war through their thorough understanding of Vietnamese life--which was most acted out in villages. He became convinced that this primary building block for all human society was the key to understanding how much of the world thinks, works and makes decisions.

The decision to focus his village reporting on the United States was immeasurably boosted by the news that he had been chosen for a MacArthur Fellowship. Critchfield, who proudly points out that he has scraped by on incomes of $8,000 and $10,000 a year while living for months at a time in remote areas of Egypt, Iran and India, used the $244,000 grant to support himself and finance two years of research.

Mounds of Research

Critchfield went back to North Dakota and Iowa and hired three researchers. Together they read through years of old newspapers, searched out almost everyone who had known his family and waded through any records Critchfield could get his hands on. At the core of his research was an 81-page manuscript of interviews that he had done with his mother and his oldest sister, Betty, in 1959 before going abroad to teach in India.

When the professional reporter turned his skills toward fleshing out these remembrances and anecdotes, the dark side of the story began to come out bit by bit. His father’s affair, it turned out, wasn’t a brief mid-life fling, but a liaison that lasted until his death. His father’s death from acute alcoholism was long and painful. But Critchfield never considered giving up the story.

His mother, fading fast in a Berkeley nursing home at age 95 (she died in 1982), had given him a charge: “Now that you know how to write,” she had said on one of her lucid days, “I’d like you to go back to North Dakota and Iowa.”

Critchfield’s two older brothers argued that what their mother really wanted was for him to write a Reader’s Digest version of their family’s history, preferably to be privately printed and circulated within the family.

“Mother changed as she got older,” he said of the woman who he admits was always concerned about “what will people think?” “In the end it was the truth that mattered to her.”

For his siblings, though, “Those Days” is still a little unsettling, despite rave reviews. His two brothers haven’t read it; Jimmy (now Jim) is a former Army officer and ex-CIA chief who lives near Washington, D.C., and Bill is a scientist specializing in tree genetics who has settled in Berkeley. Betty, the breezy sister who became the closest thing North Dakota had to flappers, died in 1980. Peggy, Critchfield’s youngest sister, was most involved with the book. She is divorced and lives in Berkeley.

Still, the Five Little Peppers rallied around for book parties in Washington and New York and the whole family gathered last spring in Fargo to see Richard and Jim receive honorary doctorates from North Dakota State University.

His Next Projects

Critchfield is in London this summer at Oxford University as a visiting fellow. He has several projects in mind and mentions a thriller-murder mystery based on the death of a Vietnamese politician he knew and a book about the revolution in U.S. agriculture, possibly written with his hero, Dr. Norman Borlaug, the scientist who fathered the Third World’s “Green Revolution” with his high-producing hybrid grains.

As for the village reporting, a school of journalism that he virtually created, Critchfield said it’s “too dangerous now and I’m too old. . . . Suddenly I’m 55 instead of 25--to my great surprise. You don’t expect to get old.” Still, he is irritated that the stories behind the front-page stories aren’t being written.

“One time in Vietnam,” he said, “I went to this village brothel to talk to the madam. In the course of our talk she pulled aside this red curtain, behind it was an altar to her dead little 6-year-old son who had been killed in street fighting. In the lives of everybody there is that red curtain--something decent, sweet and moving.”

Critchfield has spent his life searching for the red curtains in ordinary lives.