topics: |  fiction | autobiography | books |

An old love

I returned to this book as to an old love. No desire, just a pleasurable memory.

Many years back I had read this book in one quick gulp and it left a powerful tingling in the back of my mind. Despite the fact that I avoid going to Britain due to the stiff visa regime and the generally unfriendly attitude towards Indians, there remains a strong fondness for visiting the legendary bookshops that still remain on Charing Cross Road.

I didn't have a copy - may never have owned one. So when I ran into this book the other day on a used bookshop at Daryaganj, I snapped it up immediately, and closeted myself until I had sated myself on it.

The letters seem too fictionesque to be true. It seems to defy logic that Helene could be writing such spritzers to a man who tries so hard to maintain a prim preserve. But Frank Doel has to give in eventually in the face of a barrage of tinned meat and other gifts, not to mention the acerbic humour in lines like:

	What do you do with yourself all day, sit in the back 
	of the store and read? Why don't you try selling a 
	book to somebody?

	MISS Hanff to you.
	(I'm Helene only to my FRIENDS)  [Feb 52]

Under this diatribe, Frank's language also adopts a Hanff-like tone,
segue-ing from

	Dear Madam...  

	Yours faithfully, 
				FPD for MARKS & CO.  [in 1949]

to

	Dear Helene,

	I quite agree it is time we dropped the "Miss" when writing to you.
	I am not really so stand-offish as you may have been led to
	believe...

(from Feb, 1952 -- his reply to the above letter by HH).  and then: 

	Dear Helene,

	Prepare yourself for a shock. ALL THREE of the books you requested in
	your last letter are on the way to you ...
						  [1957]

The correspondence goes on for twenty years, during which entire period,
Helene is unable to make the trip to London to see all the places she has
been reading about.  From the letters we learn how Frank's kids are growing
up and take up jobs and Nora is on the verge of becoming a grandmother.
how Helene moves from a house in the 95th to one on the presumably more
posh 72nd.

Most of the letters however, are from the first two years - the first 55
pages of the 95 page book cover till 1952.  After that the years flip more
quickly. 

Despite the image of being made-up stories, it seems that most of the book
is true - the characters and their names and the events are real, though I
presume some of the language may have been spruced up and some private
addresses etc. may have been changed.

A Bibliophile's book

But most of all, this is a book overflowing with a love affair with books -
one can hear the gilted pages turn after their transatlantic journey into a
dusty attic of New York, one smells the leather covers and the glue in the
old bindings.

The book-lover in me can relate completely with the exuberant yet
introverted life of the reading-obsessed Helene Hanff, quite a foil to the
the prim business-like Frank, whom Helene seduces slowly and steadily to
"Frankie".

The pleasures (and sorrows) of making of long lists for one's favourite
bookseller is something that I have some experience in, but alas it is a
phase that has died with the advent of the second-hand cornucopia on the
internet.  The pleasure of browsing second-hand stores remains, however,
especially in India, where one still encounters books by the heap, as in
some parts of Daryaganj...

Quite early on, Helene discovers that they have rationing in post-war
England, and she sends Frank a parcel with some tins of meat - for everyone
in the bookshop.

Bit by bit, everyone in the shop becomes her friend and starts writing to
her. Frank's family often writes thanking her for the gifts and
exchanging news and wishing her well on her various predicaments, from having
to shift from her cozy brownstone flat, to expensive mishaps with her
teeth... 

Most of all, they keep inviting her to visit England, but due to some
reason or the other, she isn't able to do so.  In the end Frank dies in
1968, which is where the book ends, without sentimental elaborations.  The
last letter is from his daughter, giving her permission to reprint the
letters in her book.

It is in 1971, after the book is published, that she finally visits London
and meets up with Nora Doel and her family and also visits the
bookstore, much depleted by the deaths of Frank and also both of its
founders.   The volume also includes The Duchess of Bloomsbury, a diary
from Hanff's visit to London two years after the last letter in the book.

Today 84 Charing Cross Road is a winery, it seems. 

A love affair with books

It is Helene's personality and her exuberant language that keeps the book
going.   On the one hand, she has read all of Shakespeare (as we found out
in the second book, when someone takes her to a bar that Shakespeare actually
used to visit.  On the other, she is a fan of the Dodgers:

	    I shall be obliged if you will send Nora and the girls to church
	every Sunday for the next month to pray for the continued health and
	strength of the messrs. Gilliam, Reese, Snider, Campanella, Robinson,
	Hodges, Furillo, Podres, Newcombe And Labine, collectively known as
	The Brooklyn Dodgers. If they lose this World Series I shall Do
	Myself In and then where will you be?  [Sept 55, p.59]

But mostly, one cannot but gush over her intimate raptures on new
acquisitions:  

	the Stevenson is so fine it embarrasses my orange-crate bookshelves,
	I'm almost afraid to handle such soft vellum and heavy cream-colored
	pages. Being used to the dead-white paper and stiff cardboardy covers
	of American books, I never knew a book could be such a joy to the
	touch. [after her first order, Nov 1949, p.3]

	The Newman arrived almost a week ago and I'm just beginning to
	recover. I keep it on the table with me all day, every now and then I
	stop typing and reach over and touch it. ... I just never saw a book
	so beautiful. I feel vaguely guilty about owning it. All that
	gleaming leather and gold stamping and beautiful type belongs in 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 secondhand
	studio couch in a one-room hovel in a broken-down brownstone front.
	[Oct 1950]

	    this is not pepys' diary, this is some busybody editor's miserable
	collection of EXCERPTS from pepys' diary may he rot. 
	    i could just spit. 
	where is jan. 12, 1668, where his wife chased him out of bed and
	round the bedroom with a red-hot poker?  [oct 1951, p.31]

	The Book-Lovers' Anthology stepped out of its wrappings, all
	gold-embossed leather and gold-tipped pages, easily the most
	beautiful book I own including the Newman first edition. 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've 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!) [Dec 1952]

Excerpts

The day Hazlitt came he opened to “I hate to read new books,” and I hollered
“Comrade!” to whoever owned it before me.  [p.7, 1949]

---
March 25, 1950

What are you DOING over there, you are not doing ANYTHING, you are just
sitting AROUND.

Where is Leigh Hunt? Where is the Oxford Verse? Where is the Vulgate and dear
goofy John Henry, I thought they'd be such nice uplifting reading for Lent
and NOTHING do you send me.

you leave me sitting here writing long margin notes in library books that
don't belong to me, some day they'll find out I did it and take my library
card away.

I have made arrangements with the Easter bunny to bring you an Egg, he will
get over there and find you have died of inertia.

I require a book of love poems with spring coming on. No Keats or Shelley,
send me poets who can make love without slobbering. Wyatt or Jonson or
somebody, use your own judgment. Just a nice book preferably small enough to
stick in a slacks pocket and take to Central Park.

Well, don't just sit there! Go find it! I swear I don't know how that shop
keeps going.
				[p.10]

--- 

Thank you for the beautiful book. I've never owned a book before with pages
edged all round in gold. Would you believe it arrived on my birthday? I wish
you hadn't been so over-courteous about putting the inscription on a card
instead of on the flyleaf. It's the bookseller coming out in you all, you
were afraid you'd decrease its value. You would have increased it for the
present owner. 27

	    this is not pepys' diary, this is some busybody editor's miserable
	collection of EXCERPTS from pepys' diary may he rot. 
	    i could just spit. 
	where is jan. 12, 1668, where his wife chased him out of bed and
	round the bedroom with a red-hot poker?  [oct 1951, p.31]

---

November 2,1951

Dear Speed,

    You dizzy me, rushing Leigh Hunt and the Vulgate over here whizbang like
that. You probably don't realize it, but it's hardly more than two years
since I ordered them. You keep going at this rate you're gonna give yourself
a heart attack. 

    that's mean. You go to so much trouble for me and I never even thank
you, I just needle you, it's mean. I really am grateful for all the pains
you take for me.  
			[p.34]

---

[HH doesn't like fiction].  
	I never can get interested in things that
	didn't happen to people who never lived.  [Feb 1952, 43]
[But later we fine her liking Jane Austen, Wind in the Willows, etc.]

---

	Dear Helene,

	I quite agree it is time we dropped the "Miss" when writing to you.
	I am not really so stand-offish as you may have been led to
	believe, but as copies of letters I have written to you go into the
	office files the formal address seemed more appropriate.  
							[Feb 1952, 44]

---

I do bless you for that Walton's Lives. It's incredible that a book
published in 1840 can be in such perfect condition more than a hundred
years later. Such beautiful, mellow roughcut pages they are, I do feel for
poor William T. Gordon who wrote his name in it in 1841, what a 
crummy lot of descendants he must have-to sell it to you casually for
nothing. Boy, I'd like to have run barefoot through THEIR library before they
sold it.

[...] didn't I tell you I write arty murders for Ellery Queen on
television?  All my scripts have artistic backgrounds - ballet, concert
hall, opera -- and all the suspects and corpses are cultured, maybe I'll do
one about the rare book business in your honor, you want to be the murderer
or the corpse?  45

Friends visit Marks and Co.

POSTCARD MAILED FROM STRATFORD-UPON-AVON (p.66)
May 6, 1957

You might have warned us! We walked into your bookstore and said we were
friends of yours and were nearly mobbed. Your Frank wanted to take us home
for the weekend. Mr. Marks came out from the back of the store just to shake
hands" with friends..of Miss Hanff, everybody in the place wanted to wine and
dine us, we barely got out alive. 

Thought you'd like to see the house where your Sweet William was born. 

On to Paris, then Copenhagen, home on the 23rd. 

Love,
Ginny and Ed
			
---

Dear Helene,
     I don't know how to break the bad news, but two days after offering
you the Shorter Oxford Dictionary for your friend, a man came in and
bought it when my back was turned.  
						[1959, p.70]


	[AM: On a personal note, The Shorter Oxford Dictionary is a book I
	have lusted for over many years.  It comes as a boxed two-volume set,
	with pages squish-printed onto each quarter, and it has a drawer on
	top where it keeps a magnifying glass so you can read it!!  My ardour
	for it diminished after I picked up the three-volume websters Third
	New International - though it's a very poor transatlantic cousin...
	Today thanks to an institutional access to the online OED, I feel
	little need for it.  But maybe I could still pick up the sOED some
	day, if only to smell it's pages and handle that hefty sherlockian
	magnifying glass.

	But first I need some more bookshelves, inshallah!]

---
M. De Tocqueville's compliments and he begs to announce his safe arrival in
America. He sits around looking smug because everything he said was true,
especially about lawyers running the country. I belong to a Democratic club,
there were fourteen men over there the other night, eleven of them
lawyers. 
				[May 1960, p.77]

---

Out-Hanffing Helene - a line from the movie: 
	I don't want Isaiah's personal copy of the Old Testament.