84, Charing Cross Road by Helene Hanff

84, Charing Cross Road

Helene Hanff

Toronto: Penguin, 1990.

Originally published in 1970 by Grossman.

If Susan Hill is the inspiration for my curtailing my spending on books, Helene Hanff is the author whose book persuaded me that a cheap paperback would not honour the excellence of the story told within its flimsy covers.  This is a work that deserves to be read in a book that will sit comfortably in the hand, whose pages are a heavy stock and whose type appears crisp and properly centred on the page. 

The edition I read could boast none of these things, but the book does awaken in me all kinds of strong emotion.  I adore this book.  I’m gushing, I know, and I have said that I hate gushing, but this is a book that affirms all of my book-loving perspectives of the world.  I have read it three times now, and I still laugh out loud and weep fat, hot tears and marvel at how skillfully told the story is.

84, Charing Cross Road is a collection of letters exchanged over twenty years between the author, Helene Hanff, a part-time script-writer and full-time book-lover in New York, and Frank Doel, who is the chief book buyer for Marks and Co, booksellers at 84, Charing Cross Road, London.  Frustrated with the quality of the books to be had in America, Helene writes to the gentlemen at Marks and Co. in October of 1949, and sends a list of her “most pressing problems.”  So begins the correspondence between Helene and Frank.

When Nick Bantock created the Griffin and Sabine series, he had absolutely the right idea with the form of the book: put the characters’ letters into actual envelopes for the reader to open.  It’s exciting to open a letter, especially one that is eagerly anticipated, and these letters have excitement, humour, and great characters in spades.

The characterization is remarkably done.  Helene gets more and more “outrageous,” and it’s a persona she admits to being able to adopt from “a safe 3000 miles away.”  Her first letter, addressed to the “Gentlemen” at Marks and Co., includes a list, on which is a request for a Latin Bible: “If you have clean secondhand copies of any of the books on the list, for no more than $5.00 each, will you consider this a purchase order and send them to me?”  So far, so formal.

Six weeks later she has rather relaxed her tone.  She writes a letter upon receipt of said Bible, sans salutation, which begins, “WHAT KIND OF BLACK PROTESTANT BIBLE IS THIS?  Kindly inform the Church of England that they have loused up the most beautiful prose ever written, whoever told them to tinker with the Vulgate Latin?  They’ll burn for it, you mark my words.  It’s nothing to me, I’m Jewish myself. …  Well, the hell with it.  I’ve been using my Latin teacher’s Vulgate, what I imagine I’ll do is just not give it back till you find me one of my own.” 

If Helene’s change of tone is precipitous, Frank’s is glacial.  Very, very slowly his English reserve melts away, and three years into their correspondence he finally drops the “Miss” from his salutation.  (I worry that even telling you this might be a plot spoiler….  I know I kept waiting for it to happen.)  He relaxes into a very sly, very dry humour.  After Helene has a similar outburst about a poor translation of Catullus, he writes, “I am sorry to have been so long in writing, but until today we have had nothing to send you and I thought it best to wait a decent interval after the Catullus incident before writing.”[1]

As Helene begins to include letters from other members of the staff, her friends, and Frank’s wife and children, the cast of characters expands and the world of the bookstore opens. 

Several times, Helene sends them parcels of food that are still rationed in post-war England, and they send her books in gratitude.  Here is her response to one of those gifts: “The Book-Lovers’ Anthology stepped out of its wrappings, all gold-embossed leather and gold-tipped pages, easily the most beautiful book I own….  It looks too new and pristine ever to have been read by anyone else, but it has been; it keeps falling open at the most delightful places as the ghost of its former owner points me to things I have never read before.  Like Tristram Shandy’s description of his father’s remarkable library which ‘contained every book and treatise which had ever been wrote upon the subject of great noses.’  (Frank!  Go find me Tristram Shandy!)”[2]

Who knew that the epistolary form could work so well as non-fiction?  Of course, there are Ranier Maria Rilke’s Letters to a Young Poet, and Fay Weldon’s Letters to Alice on First Reading Jane Austen, but in both cases, there is only one voice, and it is rather didactic.  One of the things I love most about Helene’s persona is how self-deprecating she is.  She’s the perfect brash Yank foil to Frank’s English reserve. 

Closer to home, and also didactic, there are Yann Martel’s letters to Stephen Harper, collected in What is Stephen Harper Reading? but the correspondence is, let’s face it, a bit one-sided.  (He sends Harper a book every two weeks with a cover letter about its cultural value in response to the diminishing funding for the arts in Canada.)  As entertaining as Martel’s idea is, the man can only speak into a vacuum for so long.  If you want bedtime reading to put you to sleep, try reading the handful of bland responses Martel gets from the PM’s office.  Yawn.  (You can send your books to me, Yann.  I don’t know if you’ve heard, but I’m not buying any books for myself this year.)

Please suggest other gems of epistolary nonfiction or memoir. 

In the mean time, I am going to read everything by Hanff that I can get my hands on.[3] 

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[1] The book has been adapted for the stage and the big and small screens.  The movie starred Anne Bancroft, Anthony Hopkins and Judi Dench as Frank’s wife.  I happened to stumble upon it on t.v. over the Christmas holidays and caught the last three minutes.  Of course, since then, I see the actors when I read the book.  Will I ever read Pride and Prejudice  without seeing Colin Firth?  Still undecided about whether this is a good or a bad thing….

[2] Ted!  Go find me The Book-Lover’s Anthology! 

[3] The observant reader may be wondering how I can manage to quote from a book that I did not buy.  The logical answer is that I got it out of the library, and, indeed I did check out The Helene Hanff Omnibus  today, a book too heavy to truly enjoy curling up with.  Alas, I quote from the flimsy paperback, which I broke down and bought last Fall when I wanted another fix of the book.  So, all three readings have been from the flimsy paperback.  I hold out hope for a future reading from an edition that fills all my requirements for tactile and visual pleasure.