"Q's Legacy" by Helene Hanff

This month marks the fortieth anniversary of the publication of the last book written by Helene Hanff (1916 - 1997). A delightful volume comprising the talks she used to give on the BBC 'Woman's Hour' programme appeared posthumously, but this was the last one she published during her lifetime. Like all her others it is short, very personal and utterly entrancing. It is a memoir in which she explains how a struggling New York playwright, publisher's reader, children's writer and author of magazine articles who just about managed to keep her head above water for decades, became pretty well overnight in her mid-fifties a much loved and celebrated author of bestselling books.

I am sure that Hanff, with her natural writing ability, could had she wanted to written some excellent novels. She was happy to write fiction in the form of plays and television serials after all and scratched a living from doing so too. But she had very strong principles and prejudices that got in the way:

I don't like novels. I subscribe to Randall Jarrell's definition of a novel as 'a prose narrative that has something wrong with it'.

Essays, diaries, letters, travel literature and memoirs formed her own preferred reading material and it was these that she turned to when other types of writing assignment started drying up. For decades she had been getting hold of the out-of-print books she wanted from a second hand / antiquarian bookstore in London called Marks & Co, and had kept up a lengthy and playful correspondence with a bookseller there called Frank Doel who would send her the books to her address in New York City. For much of this time rationing was still very much part of life in the UK, so she would send food parcels to Frank and his colleagues at the shop. They, as well as Frank's wife Nora, also started corresponding with her and she kept all of their letters. When she was informed, in 1969, that Frank had died, she was distraught and dug them all out to read. This correspondence then became '84 Charing Cross Road' which is one of my absolute favourite books (and films, and TV series, and plays), as is of course also the case for countless bookworms - particularly in Britain because it was English literature that Helene Hanff loved most of all.

This little book is mostly an account of how she came to write '84 Charing Cross Road' and the transformative effect it had on her life. She became a literary celebrity, got to travel to the UK on several occasions and built a devoted phalanx of fans who, thanks to knowing her address from the book, wrote to her directly and later started telephoning her too. But she also traces the origin of '84 Charing Cross Road' top being a bit of a failure at school when she was young. Being unable to master science and maths, finding secretarial college appallingly dull and being somewhat socially awkward, she headed off one day to the Philadelphia Public Library where she found a copy of 'On the Art of Writing' by Sir Arthur Quiller Couch, the first Professor of English at Cambridge University. This was one of seven books containing his lectures that she subsequently also read and which fuelled her love of literature and writing. He was always known as 'Q' and his books became the major influence on her professional life, being the reason she needed to buy books by mail from London and hence the source of all her later success:

"It was an awesome legacy for a Cambridge don to have conferred on a lowly pupil he never knew existed three thousand miles away."

One of Helene Hanff's great virtues as a memoirist was her personal modesty. She combined self-deprecating humour with terrific affection for everyone she meets. Her writing bursts with positivity, which is of course the source of its extraordinary charm. But her letters to Marks and Co were rather different, being spiky, very opinionated and unpredictable. It was the contrast of her informal and familiar writing style, with Frank Doel's sweet-natured, professional and much more proper replies that makes '84 Charing Cross Road' such a towering pleasure to read. They are representatives of American and British archetypes - so different but writing with huge affection - and it is this characteristic that means it can be enjoyed by anyone even if they have no interest in books whatsoever.

I have always been in the unashamed superfan category when it comes to Helene Hanff, and it is always with sadness that I walk down Charing Cross Road (as I very often do) towards Cambridge Circus and pause where the shop stood to read the commemorative plaque. It is attached to the side of much more modern shopfront behind which a huge, busy Macdonald's restaurant now operates. Much more exciting was the time I dragged my long-suffering wife to look at the exteriors of the two apartment blocks Helene Hanff lived in upper east side of Manhattan. The first one, at 14 East 95th Street she evidently found to be unsatisfactory. But it is wonderfully located just by Fifth Avenue across from Central Park. Not a bad place to live at all. Interestingly (at least to me) it is also located immediately opposite the black where another great hero of mine, Alistair Cooke (the writer and broadcaster not the accomplished cricketer), lived at the same time in a far more elegant apartment overlooking the park.