A row of hard-bound books on a bookshelf at the “ranch,” a property in Napa county owned by my Grandfather and subsequently by my father with his siblings. They must have been mid-level novels of the 1950s of the Louis Auchincloss variety, though probably by writers now even more obscure. “Serious literary fiction” of no particular renown. (My Grandmother would not have kept her Proust or Henry James, or even her Auchincloss, at the ranch.) I remember looking at them when I was 12, or perhaps older, leafing through a few. It is as though they were printed with blank pages: they could make no impression on me, and of course my memory of this event is even blanker than the original experience. The property was sold years ago and I have no idea what could have happened to these books.

What makes writing last? These writers must have been cultivated, literate people with stories to tell. I don’t mean to condescend, but an episode of “I Love Lucy” from the same period holds much greater interest. “Popular entertainment” is usually superior to “middle-brow” culture.