3. 84, Charing Cross Road

By Helene Hanff

I do love second-hand books that open to the page some previous owner read oftenest. The day Hazlitt came he opened to “I hate to read new books,” and I hollered “Comrade!” to whoever owned it before me. 

I wanted to start off with this lovely review that perfectly captured my feelings of 84, Charing Cross Road (though I dispute the "aging" bit as Hanff was only 33 when she began her correspondence with Frank Doel in 1949!):

Epistolary fiction had always captured my fancies, but I never knew non-fiction of a similar kind could possess far more power to entwine the reader in its vast web of human intricacies ranging from the art of letter-writing, to the art of conversation and how human compassion can traverse miles and miles of oceans to make a mark on people one has never met, seen, or even heard about. The potency of words is such that seemingly polarized people are woven together in a relationship that transcends the barriers of friendship and love and all other abstract notions mankind has come to acknowledge and define.

 

Such is the relationship between an aging scriptwriter hailing from New York, the vivacious Helene Hanff and a certain Frank Doel of Marks & Co., booksellers located in London at the eponymous 84, Charing Cross Road. Ms. Hanff has an unquenchable thirst for English literature and in search for now obscure classics does she begin her acerbic albeit sidesplitting correspondence with the booksellers situated miles away from her shabby apartment. Ms. Hanff stumbles upon the book dealers through an ad placement made in the Saturday Review of Literature. From here onwards starts a warm and compassionate relationship between her and Mr. Doel on whom the responsibility of delivering her books falls on. This relationship is penned down in form of letters spanning almost twenty years.

 

I loved loved LOVED this book!  It was SUCH A DELIGHT.  Charming, witty, cozy and yet brimming with intelligence and affection.  And this unlikely friendship between a brazen NYC writer and reserved English bookseller, which spanned decades and the vast expanse of the Atlantic ocean, was real. I think I read it within 24 hours as the breezy, epistolary format made it very easy. And I didn't want it to end. It had to though, as Frank Doel unexpectedly passed away from illness in 1968.  This was not a surprise for me as I had already the watched the film adaptation back in May 2024. 

Apparently, 84, Charing Cross Road was one of Anne Bancroft's faves and her husband Mel Brooks bought the rights to the book for her birthday, which was how we ended up with the wonderful film starring Bancroft and Anthony Hopkins (with a young Dame Judi Dench as Mrs Noel). I was so fond of the adaptation that I put the book on my list. When I'm not in a rush to read something, I prefer ordering secondhand books from the USA as there is much more range and choice. Sure enough, I found this paperback Penguin edition for only $4.75 USD ($5.23 total with tax!) in great condition.

 

I had ordered the book to be delivered to my MIL's address when we were there during Xmas but I left it somewhat late and the book arrived shortly AFTER we had already returned home. It languished at my mother in law's for several months. I never told anyone to look for it until my SIL found it, still in its unopened envelope, during a summer visit after the Patch-Addario family had left. Hubs was finally able to bring it back in September!  By then I had lost my momentum. Some more months passed before I finally remembered I wanted to read 84 Charing Cross Road, and here we are.

 

I learned later that Hanff was an Anglophile and autodidact. Unable to afford a college education during the Great Depression, she undertook a comprehensive, self-taught English literature course that lasted over a decade. She was then in her early thirties, scraping a living as a freelance scriptwriter and magazine journalist. Her unconventional education was structured around the writings of Sir Arthur Quiller-Couch ("Q"), specifically his lectures at Cambridge University. Hanff discovered On the Art of Writing by "Q" in a library and used his recommendations as her syllabus, covering authors and texts he admired.  Under ‘Q’s gentle, ghostly tutelage’, the self-study process took approximately 11 years because she would stop her study to investigate unfamiliar references and texts, as the scholar had assumed the reader would be already familiar with these books.  

So I started reading Q. Who assumes I’ve read The Fairie Queene and Paradise Lost. So I read Paradise Lost and find I need to have read the New Testament. So I read the New Testament and find I need to read the Latin Vulgate. And my Latin reader says the rules governing the ablative are the same as in English. A-ha. Thanks a LOT!

Hanff didn't want to bother with the library because she wanted to have her reference books within easy grasp.  When she inquired at local booksellers, she discovered that the American editions of the English books she wanted were of lesser quality and/or over-priced. When Hanff spotted the Marks & Co ad, she wrote to them and the rest was history.  

Gentlemen: Your ad in the Saturday Review of Literature says that you specialize in out-of-print books. The phrase ‘antiquarian book-sellers’ scares me somewhat, as I equate ‘antique’ with expensive. I am a poor writer with an antiquarian taste in books . . .

It's a niche genre, I guess, but I love reading about under the radar autodidacts, like The Elegance of the Hedgehog.

Another fact I learned was that Gene, Hanff's editor, was mentioned in her letters as being Chinese.  It was well-known that editor Genevieve Young was instrumental in getting 84, Charing Cross Road published. Young also had a fascinating legacy and bio of her own, entering the publishing business in the early 1950s, when there were few female editors and even fewer Asians.

It was bittersweet how Hanff finally made the journey to London well after Frank Doel had passed on and Marks & Co had long been shuttered. Even though Hanff made enough money to support herself relatively comfortably and was setting aside money for her trip, minor emergencies kept eating away at her savings. I think air travel was still prohibitively expensive for the average person during the 50s and 60s and ocean travel took longer.  Ironically, it wasn't until after 84, Charing Cross Road was published in 1970 that Hanff would afford to finally travel to London!  She wrote about her experience in her 1973 book The Duchess of Bloomsbury Street, which is now on my list.

 

There are so many wonderful online reviews of 84, Charing Cross Road.

From A Literary Love Affair:

By the time she wrote to Marks & Co., Hanff ’s pursuits had become, frankly, arcane. Her first few letters include requests for a very particular edition of Landor’s Imaginary Conversations, the Sir Roger de Coverley Papers, de Tocqueville’s Journey to America and Jowett’s translation of Plato’s Four Socratic Dialogues.

But Helene Hanff is no dry old blue-stocking. She reads with the seasons, ordering ‘Dear goofy JH’s’ (John Henry Newman’s) The Idea of a University for Lent, and Pepys’s Diary for long winter evenings. On 25 March 1950, she writes to say that, with spring coming, she requires a book of love poems:

 No Keats or Shelley, send me poets who can make love without slobbering . . . Just a nice book preferably small enough to stick in a slacks pocket and take to Central Park.

Had she ever been in love? Rumours after her death suggested that her heart had been broken by some high-ranking American whose identity she kept under wraps for the sake of his wife and family. Was she lonely? We cannot tell. All that is clear from her letters is that for this single woman in her ‘moth-eaten sweaters and slacks’ books are friends and companions, and antiquarian books especially so. She loves ‘inscriptions on flyleaves and notes in margins’; she rejoices in the way that the books sent by Marks & Co. ‘open to the page some previous owner read oftenest. The day Hazlitt came he opened to “hate to read new books”, and I hollered “Comrade!”’

In response to these wild, wise-cracking, passionate outpourings, ‘FPD’ of 84, Charing Cross Road is, at first, stiff: ‘Dear Madam’, his letters begin, and they are cautious almost to the point of curtness. Undaunted, Helene Hanff works at puncturing his reserve. ‘I hope “madam” doesn’t mean over there what it does here’, she writes, and on the rare occasions that she does not like the books he sends her, she makes no bones about it...

And that is how providence seems to operate, blocking the paths we think we want to take and then introducing unexpected openings in the form of opportunities and delights more wonderful than anything we could have dreamed up for ourselves. This was Helene Hanff ’s experience and, since meeting her through the pages of this book, it has been mine too. Nowadays if I find myself on Charing Cross Road it is with a sense of gratitude and wonder; and the knowledge that the best things come unbidden.

From A Life in Books:
 

The funny thing about Helene as an author is that she could not write fiction. She never made it as a playwright, though Lord knows she tried, and studied her art. She wrote scripts for TV shows, and reviewed books for film companies to advise on how well they might be adapted as films. The Lord of the Rings was one of her great ordeals, because she absolutely hated it, and charged her employers ten times her usual fee as recompense for the mental torture of trying to summarise the plot. (This explains clearly to me why she was not able to write fiction.)

I realized that there were many, many authors, and books, in the long history of English as a literature, that she just had to read. But the New York libraries couldn’t supply what she needed (she had a passion for eighteenth- and nineteenth-century essayists), and she began to order books from Marks & Co, who had advertised their services as an antiquarian book-finding service in the New York Times Saturday Review of Books.

If you like the sound of 84 Charing Cross Road, but want to find out more about her, try Underfoot in Show Business, and Q’s Legacy. There is also a what-I-did-in-London book, called The Duchess of Bloomsbury Street, about when Helene finally gets to visit London, to see the BBC filming her book, and there’s also a book of New York reminiscences, Apple of My Eye. I’ve also found, to my great delight, that there’s a biography of Helene’s life, by Stephen Pastore, which I now have to read after a lifetime of vague guesses.