Helene Hanff and Frank Doel - a 20 year relationship

In my younger son’s last year at high school, he asked me one night if I could read a novel, review it and submit it for his English class the next day. The conversation went thus:

Me: are you insane?
Him: sorry mum but I am desperate.
Me: no, never, not on your life. It would be cheating.
Him: this doesn't count towards my final results, but I will never get into the university faculty of my choice if I don’t get each assignment in.
Me: too bad. When did you receive this assignment?
Him: three weeks ago. I didn’t do it because I don’t like reading crappy old novels. But you do!
Me (hurt): Sheesh. I got into the university because I did all my high school essays! Whether I liked the subject or not.
Him (sensing a weakness): ok, I will look after your computer for the rest of your life, if you do this one thing.
Me (giving up): alright. Give me the slimmest novel ever written in the entire English-speaking universe. Make sure it is a book I already know very well!

Thus I came to re-read 84 Charing Cross Road, written by Helene Hanff and published in 1970. 

Cover photograph

used for the book: 84, Charing Cross Road

This was the true story of American writer Helene Hanff (1916–97)’s 20 years of correspondence with Englishman Frank Doel (1908–68), chief buyer for the London bookshop, Marks and Co. Hanff didn’t have any money but she had a passion for out-of-print British classics which she could not find in New York. Doel read her impersonal first note (in response to a newspaper advertisement) in late 1949, and from then on, the two “strangers” became closer and closer.

The letters weren’t just about books, although Chaucer, Jane Austen, John Donne, Samuel Pepys and others were what this particular American yearned for. Hanff understood how difficult it was that bombed-out London was still suffering from food rationing which did not end until July 1954. She personally helped the shop's staff, sending them delicious and otherwise unobtainable food parcels. Soon Hanff was corresponding not only with Doel, but with his gentle, patient wife and with all the staff at Marks & Co.

Hanff died in 1997. Her obituaries, published in 1997, were full of new information.  Her letters to London evolved into accounts of life in New York and the Brooklyn Dodgers. In one letter, she described making her first Yorkshire pudding from a recipe sent by one of the staff. In return, the staff sent her first editions of her favourite poets and Irish linen tablecloths, embroidered by Frank Doel's neighbour.

Hanff lived a very modest life herself. Her one-roomed Manhatten flat started to fill up with precious second hand books that arrived from London. Of course the Anglophile American longed to travel abroad, to “see the England of English literature”. So why oh why didn’t she travel? The book does not give a definitive answer, but The Telegraph does. As the years passed, she could never afford to make the trip. Single and childless, she lived a hand-to-mouth exist­ence as a writer of children’s history books, television scripts and magazine articles, but regarded herself as a failed playwright. And perhaps she feared the idea of travelling thousands of kilometres from home, all alone.

Hanff had a very special relationship with Frank Doel, with the bookshop and with London, but it was a relationship based solely on paper. In January 1969 Marks & Co informed her that Doel had tragically died, before she had ever met him face to face. I wept when I read this part of the book. And of course the bookshop had to close.

Hanff did finally visit Charing Cross Road, to examine the now-empty shop two years after Doel had died. She was delighted to spend quality time with Frank Doel's widow and daughter, women who treated the American with as much affection as Frank himself would have done. Hanff also tried to see all the places of literary and historical interest that she could reach from London, knowing that she would never travel across the Atlantic again. It was blissful. 

I too am a passionate Anglophile and bibliophile, so I suppose I have to thank my son for getting out the Hanff book once again. But don’t try that stunt again, son!