LETTERS
Timeless masterpiece
VATSALA VEDANTAM
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A 20th century classic remembered.
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HELENE HANFF is a New York-based freelance writer who unintentionally produced a 20th century classic with the spontaneous letters she wrote to an unknown friend in London for 20 long years. The first of these, dated October 5, 1949, is the beginning
of a warm and endearing relationship with a stranger who also happens to be a bookseller working for Marks and Company, a bookstore in Charing Cross Road. It is a second hand bookstore which specialises in out-of-print-books.
The common love of literature which these two people share makes up for the cultural and geographical differences between them. Although Helen Hanff and Frank Doel never meet, their friendship goes beyond the musty books and letters they wrote for over two decades. This correspondence and others — 80 in all — exchanged between the author and his colleagues at Mark and Co., go to make the book 84, Charing Cross Road, a timeless masterpiece in its own way.
Delightfully eccentric
Hanff is delightfully eccentric about her reading. She calls herself an “unstudious” person, who never went to college and who has a peculiar taste in books “thanks to a Cambridge professor named Quiller-Couch whom I fell over in a library when I was 17”. Her passion for reading leads her to collect rare books, which would “embarrass” her orange-crate book shelves. She approaches these books with reverence.
When Marks and Co. send her a first edition of Newman’s Discourses on Education, for example, she keeps it on a table near her typewriter to lean over and touch it every now and then, making sure she does not spill cigarette ash all over it. Not because it’s a first edition, but because I never saw a book so beautiful.
The essence of her personality is portrayed vividly in her description of this one book. All that gleaming leather and gold stamping and beautiful type belongs to the pine panelled library of an English country home; it wants to be read
by the fire in a gentleman’s leather easy chair — not on a second hand studio couch in a one-room hovel in a broken-down brown-stone front…………..
Helene and Frank become good friends. He is the archetypal Englishman, taciturn and formal, who believes in old-world courtesies. She is the typical down-to-earth American, casual about everything except her love affair with English literature. Their letters, stiff and formal in the beginning, gradually assume a warmth and friendliness that extends to all those working with him in that quaint used bookstore in Charing Cross Road.
It is post-war England when food is rationed and luxuries scarce. Hanff, a 40-dollar-a-week scriptwriter, starts sending delectable parcels of food and gifts to all the members of the Marks and Co. family, in return for the books they send her.
Throughout their correspondence, Frank and the friends she made in England through books and letters, invite her to visit that country. When she finally decides to make the long and almost impossible journey with the money she made writing history books for children, it is too late. A letter dated January 8, 1969 from the secretary of the book firm, in reply to her request to Frank Doel for a complete set of Jane Austen for a young friend, states: It is with great regret that I have to
tell you…
Three months later, sitting and smoking on her rug surrounded by books in every direction, Helene writes: Maybe it’s just as well I never got there. I dreamed about it for so many years. I used to go to English movies just to look
at the streets of London. Years ago I had said I’d go to England looking for the England of English Literature. Looking around this rug, one thing is for sure. It is here.
She adds: The blessed man who sold me all these books died. Mr. Marks, who owned that bookshop, died. But, Marks and Co. is still there. If you happen to pass by, kiss it for me. I owe it so much…
In 1970, Helene Hanff published her correspondence with Frank Doel titled 84, Charing Cross Road. It became a best seller. The New York Times called it “a winsome friendship based on a common love of books”. It is a balm
for all book lovers.
Looking for the store
When I read it, I told myself that I must go to Charing Cross Road on my next visit to London and see for myself that bookstore which she has immortalised. And, I did go at the first opportunity.
After getting off Charing Cross station one day, I walked across the Strand and turned into Charing Cross Road. This was it, I told myself. But, I walked on and on, past old art galleries and several used book shops, without running into the one I came looking for.
Then, after going right up to Oxford Street, I turned back exhausted to find myself staring at a doorway marked No. 84. I touched it as homage to this little classic. But, it was all locked and barred with a notice hanging outside bearing two cryptic words: ‘NO ENTRY’. Alas, Frank Doel’s beloved store was under litigation.
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