Nancy Hale’s Heaven and Hardpan Farm, a novel consisting of six connected short stories published in The New Yorker in the 1950s, is far from her best work. These feather-light stories sketch the lives of a small group of neurotic ladies at a fancy sanatorium, Hardpan Farm. These women do not have much wrong with them: the psychiatrist divides them into extraverts [sic] and introverts who either follow the latest health fads or lie in bed sulking and snapping at one another. The extraverts find the introverts tedious, and vice versa. But all are obsessed with the health of The Doctor, their elderly psychiatrist. They think he works too hard.
Christmas is a strange time at Hardpan Farm. Miss Hughes wonders if she made a mistake by turning down her brother Bernard’s invitation to spend Christmas with him at the rectory. Others, too, have doubts about their plans. But the focus of this particular day in the Christmas season is the suspense of waiting for The Doctor to return from the city in a blizzard.
The following passage illustrates a blizzardy, cozy sense of fun.
The blizzard had raged since morning of the day before. Only in the early afternoon had it begun petering down from a still-leaden sky to light upon huge drifts. Hardpan Farm lay under its counterpane of white looking like the most ideal greeting card, but underneath its roof was pent an atmosphere highly charged with doubt, suspicion, and anxiety. Although the ladies within were busying themselves with preparations for Christmas, just over a week away, and making it a point to waft holiday thoughts toward their loved ones at home, their minds were uncontrollably taken up with a present, momentous concern. The Doctor had a cold.
This out-of-print light novel is uncharacteristic of Nancy Hale’s excellence and complexity. I recommend her Selected Stories and her 1942 novel, The Prodigal Women, which have been reissued by Library of America. The simplicity and silliness of Heaven and Hardpan Farm is slightly awkward. She is not naturally a silly writer.
Yet this book is a cozy read, as the extraverts battle the introverts and vice versa.