How quickly life can change from one moment to the next, with world events overrunning our thoughts and our peaceful day-to-day. Yet our Literature Club has soldiered on through many historic events (i.e., the last few years alone!) and we find solace and community and humanity in our coming together, marveling at the wonder of great literature and its power to salve and inspire.
Please let me know that you received this email to ensure everyone has the latest info on time and place. Joanna will be handing out our booklets on Wednesday. Hopefully there will be fewer changes to our schedule going forward.
I look forward to being with you on Wednesday. x Jacquie
On to presenter Jacquie Weitzman, whose overall 1964/5 topic was “Letters in Literature” and her specific subject, Helene Hanff. If ever there were an example of Anglo-American bonhomie, entente, generosity, it was surely found in the correspondence between American author, Helene Hanff, and the staff of the London antiquarian bookstore, Marks & Co, which is the heart of Jacquie’s presentation, letting Helene speak for herself and enchanting us as we read the letters, all of them, aloud.
Philadelphia-born Helene, a child of the depression, born April 15, 1916, grew up in a theater loving family, where her father, a shirt salesman, traded shirts at the box office for theater tickets for the Hanffs. She’s said to aways have wanted to be a playwright and wrote 20 plays in the 1940’s—none ever produced. She did write screenplays for TV, including “Playhouse 90”, “The Adventures of Ellery Queen” and “Hallmark Hall of Fame,” her main sources of income—often precarious.
With only one year of college, all she could afford, Helene was an enthusiastic, self-taught student in love with books. Both the physical books and their often esoteric contents were things she rhapsodizes about, which brings us back to 84 Charing Cross Rd. As an upper east side New Yorker, Helene wrote letters spanning the years 1949 to 1969. Her choice of dealing with a London bookshop reflected disdain for the Barnes and Noble’s “grimy, marked-up schoolboy copies.”
In both the letter salutations and content, we see a gradual thawing on both sides of the ocean. Her introductory letter of inquiry, October 5, 1949, is addressed “Gentlemen” signed “Very truly yours, Helene Hanff (Miss)” and the reply, “Yours faithfully, FPD for Marks and Co.” And an irate11/18 letter has no salutation—just “WHAT KIND OF A BLACK PROTESTANT BIBLE IS THIS?” On receiving a copy she disliked: “Kindly inform the Church of England they have loused up the most beautiful prose ever written, whoever told them to tinker with the Vulgate Latin?” By December 8, the letter is addressed to “Sir” (“It seems a witless token writing Gentlemen” when the same solitary soul is taking care of everything for me) and signed “Helene Hanff.” It also details a first gift—a small Christmas present to Marks & Co., referring to the food rationing and scarcity in post-war England: “I’m sending it c/o of you, FPD, whoever you are.” In a follow-up note—the package had included a ham—“FPD? Crisis” she mentions the names on the invoice—“B. Marks, M. Cohen. Props.” And asks, “ARE THEY KOSHER? I could rush a tongue over.” The note of thanks is addressed to “Dear Miss Hanff ” and signed “Yours Faithfully, Frank Doel for MARKS & CO.” It’s “Dear Frank” when she’s been offered “an Oxford Book of English Verse, printed on India paper, original blue cloth binding and a first edition of Newman’s Idea of a University.” On its receipt, she answered, October 15, 1950, “I never saw a book so beautiful. I feel vaguely guilty about owning it. All that gleaming leather and gold stamping and beautiful type.”
While Frank is her main Marks correspondent, Helene also writes to and hears from other staff members. Cecily shares a requested Yorkshire pudding recipe. Megan sends thanks for Easter “parcels.” And Frank arranges for a beautiful, hand embroidered linen cloth sent by the staff to Helene, made by an 80-year-old neighbor of his. The intimacy, the humor, grow and glow. Even Frank’s wife and daughters become part of the picture, holiday fare sent and prized, and rare nylons brought to them through Helene’s visiting friend. By February 14, 1952, it’s “Dear Helene “and “With best wishes from us all, Frank Doel.” And May 11, 1952, she writes “Dear Frank, Meant to write you the day The Angler arrived, just to thank you, the woodcuts alone are worth 10 times the price of the book. What a weird world we live in when so beautiful a thing can be owned for life—for the price of a ticket to a Broadway movie palace, or 1/50 the cost of a having one tooth capped.”
In May 1953, she writes triumphantly about a successful TV script, a life of a famous person. “Frankie, you’ll DIE when I tell you... And whaddya think I dramatized? JOHN DONNE ELOPING WITH THE BOSS’S DAUGHTER out of Walton’s Lives. ... So that’s how John Donne made the Hallmark Hall of Fame and paid for all the books you ever sent me and five teeth.... Cheers, hh”. Walton’s Lives was a book she’d ordered from Marks & Co. that had included that “story.”
While Helene hoped to get to London to meet all at Marks & Co, and the staff members were equally eager, it didn’t happen till after the sad death of Frank from a ruptured appendix in December, 1968. At that time, his widow, Nora, wrote to thank Helene for her “kind letter. I only wished you had met Frank and known him personally, he was the most well-adjusted person with a marvelous sense of humor. ... At times I don’t mind telling you I was very jealous of you, as Frank so enjoyed your letters...” With the financial rewards of her published correspondence, Helene finally did get to visit London and the now closed and boarded up bookstore and met Nora when she finally got there.
Helene published the correspondence, 84 Charing Cross Road, in a memorial to Frank Doel. The book was a great success in Britain, adapted for the London stage by James Roose-Evans, although less successful in its 1982 Broadway run with Ellen Burstyn and Joseph Maher. It was made into a movie in 1987, starring Anne Bancroft and Anthony Hopkins. (Mel Brooks had bought the rights to the film as an anniversary gift to Anne. Anne Jackson had starred in the 1975 BBC TV adaptation and she and Helene became friends.)
In addition to her TV scripts, Helene also wrote other books including: The Duchess of Bloomsbury Street (1973), Q’s Legacy (1986), Apple of My Eye (1977) and the children's books Movers and Shakers (1969) and Terrible Thomas (1964). She marveled at the many fans worldwide who thought of her as a friend. She died at age 80, living on royalties and social security, and financial help from the Authors League Fund. “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,” she told Publishers’ Weekly.
Respectfully submitted,
Carla Potash (Interim Secy.)
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