By Denise Trull
Every autumn, when the leaves start falling and the wind rises, when old favorite chairs seem cozier and afghans form a tent of pleasant solitude about my head, I close my office door and reach for one, old, familiar paperback that has seen much loving wear about its curled edges and a shocking amount of underlined paragraphs throughout its ruffled pages. It is not a book that would win an award for its leather cover, jeweled illustrations, or first edition airs. But as soon as I turn the worn cover hanging on by yellowed tape at the binding, I know I have entered a kind of warm and whimsical world that reads like a fairy tale -- every single time. It is a tale that breathes out the beautiful cocooned warmth of November to me, as that is the lovely month in which I found it by chance on top of a pile at an unassuming little book fair. November will never be the same again.
It doesn’t seem the stuff of fairy tales at first glance. It is the story of an ordinary young woman named Helene who is born with an extraordinary passion to write, come what may. She was born in 1916 to a lively Jewish couple named Miriam and Arthur Hanff of Philadelphia. Arthur had at one time been a stage performer, but wisely decided to settle down at last to “sell shirts” at a clothing store to support his family. He passed on his theater bug to Helene, however and though the family was not rich, Arthur would sometimes swap his shirts out to customers for coveted theater tickets and the family would spend their Monday nights taking in the excitement near the footlights of a local theater.
Helene resolved after one or two Mondays had passed that she was destined to write plays. She would grow up, become a writer, and move to New York City. But the stars in her eyes did not match the money in her pocketbook, alas. Her family could in no way afford to send her to college, and although she was a good reader and had a passion to study literature, her high school grades did not reach high enough to grab that prestigious golden ring of a four year Ivy League school. She did manage to win a one year scholarship to Temple University, which unfortunately was not extended. At the end of that one year, she resigned herself to a college-less destiny. However, our spunky heroine did not despair. If she could not go to school, she would educate herself!
She returned home and set up a literary regimen to follow that summer, but she soon realized that she must work to help the family and to support herself. She landed a job in a bookstore, but was warned that there might be a lot of empty hours to fill as that was the slow time for business. Considering this a stroke of educational luck, she made her way to the public library a few days before starting the job, determined to get some reading material to fill the empty hours ticking away at the store.
In her practical, charming way, she found the section on English Literature and was determined to find textbooks. She started at “A” and made her way down the shelves. Nothing seemed to jump out. It all seemed dry and academic for something as wonderful as literature.
“What I wanted was the Best – written in a language I could understand. I hadn't defined "the Best " but I was discovering what it wasn't. Most of the textbooks confined themselves to nineteenth and twentieth century writers, omitting what I'd been taught were the greatest works of English literature: Shakespeare, Milton and the Bible. And all of them were written in learned academic language that was over my head.”
When she finally made her way to the “Q” section there was only one volume standing on the shelf. It had the simple, yet auspicious title: On the Art of Writing by a Cambridge professor of English named Sir Arthur Quiller-Couch, M.A. If angel choirs could be heard they might have been singing when she pulled down the book and opened its pages. She was sold immediately and reasoned that “If you wanted instruction in how to read and write English, Oxford-and-Cambridge was definitely the best!” She bought the book and began to read in earnest. She continued through several jobs over the next few years, saving money to buy four additional volumes of his lectures on English literature. She affectionately dubbed Professor Quiller-Couch of Cambridge simply as “Q” and later in life was to declare most emphatically, “Q was all by himself my college education.” She began to collect all the novels, poetry, and short stories mentioned in Q’s lectures.
Hanff eventually made her way to New York City and found many different odd jobs as a writer. She started part-time at home in her cheap hotel room, reading scripts of plays and novels which were submitted to the New York Story Department of Paramount Pictures. She typed up summaries and reviews of what she read. Over time, she wrote episodes for the mystery series Ellery Queen, play scripts, historical dramas for TV, articles for magazines, and several books.
Eventually she and her growing collection of books travel across town to a beat up old brownstone where she settled into a first floor apartment. She set up her bookshelves straight away and spent her days sitting at her typewriter, or reading voraciously. “Q” was never far from her reach on the table. She developed a penchant for gin and a good cigarette. She began to hone her sharp Jewish wit. In her own words she wore the same moth eaten sweaters and wool pants. She was never happier than when sitting on her lovely, dumpy furniture surrounded by the mounds of books at her feet.
As she made her faithful way through Q’s lectures, she began to discover that she could not always purchase the books he recommended from the New York publishers and bookstores in her area, which mostly offered only modern literature. She discovered an ad for a small used book shop in London with the dignified title Marks & Co. Helene decided to write and inquire about obtaining a book or two on “Q’s list. It is here she writes about how much Q had captivated her mind and heart:
“Q brought English literature into my life and my passion for London grew. Sam Pepys' London might be gone but Leigh Hunt's was still there. I wanted to take the walks he took at night. I wanted to stand on Westminster Bridge and look at the view, because Wordsworth said that Earth had not anything to show more fair. But it was all day-dreaming. Between my hand-to-mouth income and my fear of travel, I never really expected to see London. Staring at that ad, I thought it would be a lovely consolation prize to hold in my hands books that actually came from there…”
The year was 1949 and for the next twenty years to come she would order books and indeed hold them in her hands. Here begins the most wonderful correspondence with one Frank Doel, the soft-spoken, well-mannered English proprietor of said bookstore.
Helene slowly educates herself in the classics and Frank helpfully, and skillfully, searches out all the books on her growing list. Helene is soon initiated into a new world of bibliophilic beauty, for Frank’s books hail from old British colleges, manor sales, and English collectors. The romance that is leather embossed covers, golden edged pages with unique type face wrapped in plain brown paper begin to arrive at Helene’s door. She is enchanted. The more she orders, the more interested the other employees at Marks and Co become.
Frank begins to read her letters aloud over their quiet little teas at midday. They all help Frank to find the best for Helene over there in New York City. They become acquainted with her humor and her kind heart. Since England is still reeling at the end of World War II many things are tightly rationed and life is rather lean and poor. Helene begins sending eggs, groceries, nylons, and hams. She gets to know Frank's wife Nora and all the employees and they begin to greet her boxes with little, self possessed and mannerly cheers.
Through Frank’s letters she begins to envision the bookstore and longs to see it. In her own newsy, witty, and slightly acerbic letters, Frank begins to get a notion of the fast paced life of New York City so far “across the pond.” They write this way to each other for twenty years. Some of the letters are priceless gems, like this one from Helene to Frank thanking him for a book called Walton’s Lives.
"Oh my, 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 rough-cut 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.”
Since brown paper was scarce, the bookshop would use old, extra copies of books and tear out the pages to wrap the purchases. Helene expresses her outrage at this when she receives a copy of Cardinal Newman’s sermons in the mail:
"All I have to say to YOU, Frank Doel, is we live in depraved, destructive and degenerate times when a book shop - a BOOKSHOP - starts tearing up beautiful old books to use as wrapping paper. I said to John Henry when he stepped out of it: ‘Would you believe a thing like that, Your Eminence?’ and he said he wouldn't. You tore that book up in the middle of a major battle and I don't even know which war it was! I keep the Newman on the table with me all day, and every now and then I stop typing and reach over and touch it. Not because it's a first edition; I just never saw a book so beautiful."
Because of her fear of travel, her consistently meager savings account, and her ever present “dental calamities” she never manages to make it to England before she hears the news that Frank has died suddenly of complications from a burst appendix. They were never to meet in person, though they knew each other intimately through years of letters, their mutual love of books, and a shared humor:
“....you better watch out. All my scripts have artistic backgrounds - ballet, concert halls, 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?”
It is during a season of writers block, that Helene tries desperately to find an idea to pitch to her writing agent. The agent discovers that Helene and Frank have had this longtime correspondence over the years, and she is charmed by the letters. She convinces Helene to arrange them into a book, and thus 84 Charing Cross Road is conceived. To Helene’s surprise, the book is a great success and is even made into a movie.
Helene ends up writing about her whole journey with a loving nod to “Q” in a terrific book called Q’s Legacy. I laughed. I cried. I ruminated. This is the sort of woman whose thoughts send you on journeys down fabulous rabbit holes. I would count my life a complete success if I sent people down rabbit holes!
This is the best of fairytales, but in the end far better than a fairytale. For this is the unlikely tale of a cultured book seller, a fast talking New York writer determined to educate herself, and the staid Cambridge professor affectionately known as Q who unwittingly forged a lasting friendship between such oddly paired comrades, as he himself sat in his study writing lectures on literature. Reality is stranger than fiction! These individual lives coming so magically together simply through the romance of books.
I often think of Helene and Frank and Q when I walk through the quiet shelves at the library. I sometimes take a fancy and stop at the Q’s in the literature section. Any one of those books could hold a literary adventure such as the one Helene had. If you are a writer, that is a beautiful idea to hold onto. Books are living things. Words go where they will and they work their magic even if you never see it happen. You too might be the future catalyst for a beautiful friendship that blossoms as you unwittingly write by your own office window. And I ask you, what better reason to write than that? And what better reason to keep reading and educating yourself beyond high school or college. You never know who you will meet through the pages of a book. Enter the romance!
Here’s to Helene, to Frank, to all the employees at 84 Charing Cross Road, and to Q, who always makes my November afternoons a thing of magic. I raise my coffee cup to you as I pull my afghan close. To books! Huzzah.
Denise Trull is the editor in chief of Sostenuto, an online journal for writers and thinkers of every kind to share their work with each other. Her own writing is also featured regularly at Theology of Home, and has appeared in Dappled Things. She also can be found at her Substack, The Inscapist. Denise is the mother of seven grown, adventurous children and has acquired the illustrious title of grandmother. She lives with her husband Tony in St. Louis, Missouri.