The usual selection of fall images.....
but thoughts of longer evenings and more reading... Nicola Beauman of Persephone Books suggested I read Heat Lightning by Helen Hull. Helen who? Never heard of her. The book, published in 1932, is utterly out of print.
It arrives smelling of musty old bookshop, and, lo and behold, a delight with an entire family painted boldly: the grandma who controls it all, the young wife on the outs with her husband, the feckless young cousin who beds the maid...a whole panoply of greed, love, jealousy, disappointment --the usual family stuff. Post 1929 you feel the approach of hard times.
So the question is: why do some excellent writers vanish without trace and others become classic and staples of reading lists ?
I came to American books rather late, but feel they are wonderful at depicting the fluctuations of fortune --as in Dreiser's Jennie Gerhardt and Booth Tarkington's The Magnificent Ambersons. (Better known as a film than a book, I think).
But I don't come to books to prove theories, just to discover people I might care about and enter their lives for a moment.
So horray for Helen Hull.
