Every year or so I search the internet to see if any new publications have come up on 'my' authors. Which is how I discovered this biography.
Helen Hoover (1910 - 1984) was born in Greenfield, Ohio. After a pampered childhood her life changed abruptly after her father died, leaving her and her mother with no money. Together they move to Chicago where Helen finds a job. She meets Adrian Hover on a double date. It is Adrian who comes up with the idea of "'living in the woods for a while'. They marry in 1937. This is when Helen starts writing, selling her first piece to a newspaper. Slowly their life improves, they can afford a car, a camera and take holidays. By the summer of 1939 they are at last ready to begin their search for the idyllic cabin in the forest. But after Japan's attack on Pearl Harbour it becomes clear that Adrian will be called up, while Helen sees more opportunities opening for women.
It will take them until the late 1940's to discover their ideal spot at Gunflint Lake. They buy a derelict cabin, and later purchase a second one on a neighbouring plot, and in 1954 they leave their jobs to live there permanently. Moving in in the autumn makes it extra hard: most neighbours who could help them have left by now, and they are not really prepared for the severely cold winter. While getting supplies in from town they have a car accident, leaving them carless and jobless (Adrian was to have met a contact for a lucrative job).
What will they live on? Slowly, Helen begins to sell stories to magazines, while Adrian designs and sells notepaper. They still struggle to make ends meet. Apart from food for themselves they also buy food for the animals they feed in winter, at considerable expense. During the winter their diet is so poorly balanced that Helen develops scurvy and anemia. For the whole story see this post.
By the late 1950's Helen's writing is bringing in more money and she is contemplating writing a book.
While the books are succesful they also cause a stream of visitors, interrupting their paradise and longing for peace and quiet. In the end they decide to leave. They spend time in Florida and New Mexico (where they get into trouble with the authorities for feeding and thus attracting stray cats), before ending up in Wyoming. There, their growing cat colony again becomes a problem.
The Years of the Forest, Helen's second book on her life in the forest, is published in 1973.
Read my post on this book here.
Helen and Adrian valued their privacy greatly. Once they move to their final house in Laramie they rarely left home.
Helen died in 1984, Adrian in 1986.
While I was glad to discover more about Helen Hoover I found this a disappointing biography. Although in the acknowledgements David Hakensen mentions talking to people around Gunflint Lake there is little evidence of this in the book. In her letters HH complained about being obstructed by locals. Was this true or just her imagination? I wish David H would have given us some more quotes from people who lived at Gunflint Lake at the time.
It would at least have made the book more lively, as now it reads more like a report of everything David H. found in HH's lettters. This means we learn, in extreme detail, about her correspondence with her agents and publishers. While David H. tells us what HH wrote in her letters, he rarely quotes from them. I wish he had, because I love HH's writing in her books and would be very interested to read her letters (I wonder if anyone has thought of publishing them?).
The other thing I find odd about this book is that David H. seems to pay more attention to Helen's relationship with her agent and publishers than to her relationship with her husband or his work as an artist.
The book left me feeling sad for Helen, who according to David H. struggled with her mental and physical health, searching for the ideal place to live but somehow never finding it, or only for a short time.
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