84 Charing Cross Road Read online

  Frank Doel & family. From left, wife Nora,

  daughters Mary and Sheila, then Frank.

  circa early 60’s

  Helene Hanff outdoors

  Helene in conversation

  Helene at the typewriter

  Helene circa 1990s

  Helene—sample letter 30 Sept 1974; text below:

  “Open House” will—with lotsa luck—be in the hands of the printers around Christmas (or Gene, my editor, and I, will both commit suicide) & will be out next September.

  Meanwhile, I’m suddenly dying to read Q.L. Rouse. Think I tried him once but it was a history book. Never knew he was a disciple of Q! Will dig him out of the library.

  Excuse haste & mess : I’m writing this at the hairdresser’s. How-doth-the-busy-bee.

  Cheers—

  HH

  Reply to a young fan, Angela M. Garry; Oct 17 1989. Text below:

  Well, my word, how lovely to hear from a baby-of-two-months who grew up to read not only “84” but all my other books, including “Underfoot” written ten years before you got here.

  I shall be in awe of you when you get your Maths degree. (I flunked geometry.) Life is treating me very well, thank you—and I have to tell you that my middle name is Marjorie and I gave up the M when I was just about your age!

  Thanks for the delightful letter.

  Yrs

  Helene Hanff

  P.S. Thanks for the photos of the plaque

  Epilogue

  84, Charing Cross Road

  Sadly we report that Marks and Co. ceased business in December 1970, as the site at 84, Charing Cross Road is to be redeveloped.

  The Publishers

  More recently:

  Public pressure, led by Michael Foot, British Labour party leader, orchestrated a preservation order on the Charing Cross Road site, so the planned redevelopment did not occur.

  The following photos show some of 84’s more recent history.

  Commemorative plaque at the left in each photo below

  Vacant with real estate agent’s sign in window, 1996

  City bar, All Bar One, late 1990s–2007

  Med kitchen, Mediterranean restaurant, 2008–

  Reviews

  84, Charing Cross Road is a charming record of bibliophilia, cultural difference, and imaginative sympathy. For 20 years, an outspoken New York writer and a rather more restrained London bookseller carried on an increasingly touching correspondence. In her first letter to Marks & Co., Helene Hanff encloses a wish list, but warns, “The phrase ‘antiquarian booksellers’ scares me somewhat, as I equate ‘antique’ with expensive.” Twenty days later, on October 25, 1949, a correspondent identified only as FPD let Hanff know that works by Hazlitt and Robert Louis Stevenson would be coming under separate cover. When they arrive, Hanff is ecstatic—but unsure she’ll ever conquer “bilingual arithmetic.” By early December 1949, Hanff is suddenly worried that the six-pound ham she’s sent off to augment British rations will arrive in a kosher office. But only when FPD turns out to have an actual name, Frank Doel, does the real fun begin.

  Two years later, Hanff is outraged that Marks & Co. has dared to send an abridged Pepys diary. “i enclose two limp singles, i will make do with this thing till you find me a real Pepys. THEN i will rip up this ersatz book, page by page, AND WRAP THINGS IN IT.” Nonetheless, her postscript asks whether they want fresh or powdered eggs for Christmas. Soon they’re sharing news of Frank’s family and Hanff’s career. No doubt their letters would have continued, but in 1969, the firm’s secretary informed her that Frank Doel had died. In the collection’s penultimate entry, Helene Hanff urges a tourist friend, “If you happen to pass by 84, Charing Cross Road, kiss it for me. I owe it so much.“

  —Amazon.com

  Helene Hanff will always be associated with what is, undoubtedly, her most endearing and enduring book, 84 Charing Cross Road (1971); yet this slim volume of correspondence between herself and Marks & Co., an antiquarian bookshop in London, was written at the lowest point in her career.

  For years, as she was later to describe in Underfoot in Show Business (1961), she had been writing plays that never got produced, while eking out a precarious existence reading scripts for Paramount Pictures, writing articles for encyclopaedias, television scripts, and children’s history books; until one evening she sat down to take stock of herself and her future. “I was a failed playwright. I was nowhere. I was nothing.”

  It was into this void that there came the news of the death of Frank Doel of Marks & Co. from whom for over 20 years she had been ordering books she could ill afford, but which had given her a link with England. “Coming when it did the news was devastating. It seemed to me that the last anchor in my life—my bookshop—was taken from me. I began to cry and I couldn’t stop.” It was then that she realised that she had to write the story of her relationship with the shop and, in particular, with Frank Doel.

  Published in 1971, the book became an overnight success and, even more surprisingly, a cult book. Once, in conversation with me, she referred to it as “my little nothing book; I thought I was writing a New Yorker story when I wrote it. I still think it is a nice little short story.”

  —James Rouse-Evans, The Independent

  First published in 1970, the epistolary work 84, Charing Cross Road chronicles her 20 years of correspondence with Frank Doel, the chief buyer for Marks & Co., a London bookshop, on which she depended for the obscure classics and British literature titles around which her passion for self-education revolved. She became intimately involved in the lives of the shop’s staff, sending them food parcels during Britain’s postwar shortages and sharing with them details of her life in Manhattan.

  Due to financial difficulties and an aversion to travel, she put off visiting her English friends until too late; Doel died in December 1968 from peritonitis from a burst appendix and the bookshop eventually closed. Hanff did finally visit Charing Cross Road and the empty but still standing shop in the summer of 1971, a trip recorded in her 1973 book The Duchess of Bloomsbury Street. In Duchess, Hanff describes her visits with friends and fans to various locations and places of literary and historical interest in London and Southern England. This trip was a highlight of her life—her modesty and sense of humor are evident as she talks about the friends, including Frank Doel’s wife, Nora, and daughter, Sheila, who were so devoted to her because of 84 Charing Cross Road, and her love of London.

  In the 1987 film adaptation, 84 Charing Cross Road, Hanff was played by Anne Bancroft, while Anthony Hopkins took the part of Frank Doel. Anne Jackson had earlier played Hanff and Frank Finlay Doel in a 1975 adaptation of the book for British television. Ellen Burstyn recreated the role on Broadway in 1982 at the Nederlander Theater in New York City. Elaine Stritch also played Helene Hanff in a television adaptation of 84, Charing Cross Road.

  Hanff never married. In the 1987 movie, a photo of a US serviceman is shown in her apartment during the period of World War II, a portrait at which she smiles fondly, suggesting to the viewer that Hanff remained unmarried due to this naval officer’s death. No such person is mentioned in her autobiographical Underfoot in Show Business and none of her writings suggests that she ever had any lasting, or even short-term, romantic relationship with any person. In Duchess she confides to her diary that she was irritated by “a lot of togetherness” with one of her male English fans who had taken her to Stratford-upon-Avon and Oxford on a two-day driving trip. This implies that Hanff preferred her own company and had no need of a life partner. Her relationship with Frank Doel, warm as it was, was entirely literary.

  —Wikipedia

  See also: New York Times Obituary

  Helene Hanff, Wry Epistler Of ‘84 Charing,’ Dies at 80

  Obituary—New York Times

  By MARGALIT FOX

  Published: April 11, 1997

  Helene Hanff, whose wittily acerbic 20-year correspondence with a London bookseller she never met won her a passionate following after it was p
ublished as the epistolary memoir 84, Charing Cross Road, died on Wednesday [9 April, 1997] at the De Witt Nursing Home in Manhattan. She was 80.

  Up to the book’s publication in 1970, Ms. Hanff was a relatively unheralded freelance writer whose work centered mainly on television screenplays and children’s books. But the letters she addressed to the antiquarian bookshop Marks & Co. from 1949 to 1969, with their shared confidences and affectionate needling along with orders for Jane Austen and Izaak Walton, brought her a small if unanticipated literary celebrity.

  Reviewing the book in The New York Times, Thomas Lask wrote: “Here is a charmer: a 19th-century book in a 20th-century world. It will beguile an hour of your time and put you in tune with mankind.”

  From the beginning of her correspondence, Ms. Hanff ignored the niceties of business letter writing. “WHAT KIND OF A PEPYS’ DIARY DO YOU CALL THIS?,” she bellowed in an eccentrically capitalized letter of Oct. 15, 1951, after receiving a Marks & Co. shipment. “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?”

  In his replies, Frank Doel, the shop’s chief buyer and Ms. Hanff’s principal correspondent, strove at first to maintain what she called his “proper British reserve.” But little by little, Ms. Hanff wore him down, as she did the other members of the shop’s staff. They sent her recipes for Yorkshire pudding. She sent them food parcels and nylon stockings in a one-woman crusade to ameliorate Britain’s postwar shortages. And Ms. Hanff often tempered her trans-Atlantic crankiness with rhapsodic soliloquies over the orders that Marks & Co. managed to get right.

  “The Newman arrived almost a week ago and I’m just beginning to recover,” she wrote in 1950 after buying a first edition of John Henry Newman’s “Idea of a University” (1852) for $6. “I feel vaguely guilty about owning it. All that gleaming leather and gold stamping and beautiful type belongs in the pine-paneled 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.”

  Despite her origins south of the Battery—she was a native of Philadelphia—Ms. Hanff was the Platonic New Yorker to her enchanted London correspondents. Her letters are a window on days spent picnicking in Central Park, rooting ardently for the Dodgers (and later the Mets) and wading into the fray of local politics (she was the first woman to serve as president of the Lenox Hill Democratic Club).

  A constant undercurrent in Ms. Hanff’s letters was the hand-to-mouth writing life she led, working at home in “moth-eaten sweaters” with an overflowing ashtray at her elbow and the gin bottle never far from reach. Despite repeated pleas from Marks & Co. staff members to visit them in England (by the 1950’s Frank Doel was offering her the use of his grown daughter’s bedroom), Ms. Hanff’s precarious finances never allowed her to make the trip until 1969, after Mr. Doel’s sudden death from peritonitis.

  Helene (pronounced heh-LAYNE) Hanff was born on April 15, 1916, in Philadelphia, the daughter of Arthur and Miriam Levy Hanff. She grew up in a theater-mad household (during the Depression, her father, a shirt salesman, took the family to the theater every week by slipping shirts to the box-office men in exchange for tickets), and all she ever wanted to be was a playwright.

  Her career began auspiciously in 1938, when she won a fellowship from the Bureau of New Plays as a result of a nationwide competition. Soon afterward, she moved to Manhattan, where she became a protegee of Theresa Helburn, a co-producer of the Theater Guild. But although Ms. Hanff wrote 20 plays through the 1940’s, none were ever produced. Her repeated attempts to succeed in New York theater are chronicled in her 1961 memoir, Underfoot in Show Business.

  “I wrote great dialogue, but I couldn’t invent a story to save my neck,” she told The New York Times in 1982. In the 1950’s, Ms. Hanff supported herself by writing screenplays for television programs including Playhouse 90, The Adventures of Ellery Queen and Hallmark Hall of Fame.

  A child of the Depression, Ms. Hanff could afford only a year of college, and throughout her life was an impassioned autodidact, educating herself by reading the great books, which she preferred to procure from London rather than dip into “Barnes & Noble’s grimy, marked-up schoolboy copies.” One wall of her studio apartment on East 72d Street in Manhattan was filled from floor to ceiling with her Marks & Co. treasures, with their rich leather bindings and gleaming gold stamping. In front of the bookshelves hung the Marks & Co. sign, stolen for her by a devoted 84 reader from the shop after it closed, not long after Mr. Doel’s death.

  When Ms. Hanff decided to publish her correspondence with the shop as a memorial to Mr. Doel, the result brought her undreamed-of attention. 84, Charing Cross Road was hugely popular in Britain, where it was adapted for the London stage by James Roose-Evans. (The play was less well-received on Broadway, where it ran in 1982 with Ellen Burstyn as Ms. Hanff and Joseph Maher as Mr. Doel.) In 1987 the book was made into a feature film starring Anne Bancroft and Anthony Hopkins.

  The book’s success finally gave Ms. Hanff the wherewithal to travel to England, where she visited the boarded-up bookshop and met Mr. Doel’s widow, Nora, a journey documented in The Duchess of Bloomsbury Street (1973). Ms. Hanff’s other books include Q’s Legacy (1986), Apple of My Eye (1977) and the children’s titles Movers and Shakers (1969) and Terrible Thomas (1964).

  “It’s unreal to me, what the last 10 years have been like,” Ms. Hanff said in 1982. “The fans—people all over the world who regard me as a friend! And in London there is a brass plaque on the wall with my name on it, to mark the spot where the bookshop once stood, because I wrote letters to it. In your own mind you’re still an uneducated writer who doesn’t have much talent, and yet here you are with a plaque on the wall in London! You don’t even dream about things like that.”

  But 84, Charing Cross Road could not provide its author with the economic stability she sought throughout her life. “The one drawback about being a writer is that you never know in any month where the rent is coming from six months from then,” Ms. Hanff told Publishers Weekly in 1985.

  In her last years she was “broke,” by her own account, living on royalties and Social Security and accepting a $5,000 grant from the Authors League Fund to help pay her hospital bills.

  No immediate family members survive.

  See also: Reviews