Bibliopath #5: In which we bask in the love of a woman of letters
Dear reader,
This book is for Casey, and anyone else who loves sharing in a love of books. It's 84 Charing Cross Road by Helene Hanff, and before you ask, yes, it was made into a movie, no, I haven't seen it, and I don't have a real desire to, because this book is so complete in and of itself.
84 was recommended to me by Kathleen, who called it "gentle and acerbic and fond of good books and people".
It's short—you can read it in about 40 minutes, unless you want to slow down and savour the exchanges—and is made up of a series of real life letters between Helene, a New York TV writer, and a London bookseller, Frank Doel.
Which admittedly sounds like a terrible premise, but it's all borne along by the sheer buoyancy of HH's writing—her light-hearted needling of the very-English Doel, the unmitigated delight over the books that she delights in. One gets the sense that you would read anything that she wrote, just for the joy of journeying with her thoughts as she does so—she would have been a heck of a blogger.
The copy I got from the library includes The Duchess of Bloomsbury Street, which is her account of finally visiting England after 84 is released and becomes a success. It is all delightful, but I include this account of how she learned to write so that you can get a sense of her voice, but also so that I can point it at people who ask a) how do I learn to write, or b) whether learning to write is too difficult:
Q (Quiller-Couch) was all by himself my college education. I went down to the public library one day when I was seventeen looking for books on the art of writing, and found five books of lectures which Q had delivered to his students of writing at Cambridge.
‘Just what I need!’ I congratulated myself. I hurried home with the first volume and started reading and got to page 3 and hit a snag:
Q was lecturing to young men educated at Eton and Harrow. He therefore assumed that his students—including me—had read Paradise Lost as a matter of course and would understand his analysis of the ‘Invocation to Light’ in Book 9. So I said, ‘Wait here,’ and went down to the library and got Paradise Lost and took it home and started reading it and got to page 3, when I hit a snag:
Milton assumed I’d read the Christian version of Isaiah and the New Testament and had learned all about Lucifer and the War in Heaven, and since I’d been reared in Judaism I hadn’t. So I said, ‘Wait here,’ and borrowed a Christian Bible and read about Lucifer and so forth, and then went back to Milton and read Paradise Lost, and then finally got back to Q, page 3. On page 4 or 5, I discovered that the point of the sentence at the top of the page was in Latin and the long quotation at the bottom of the page was in Greek. So I advertised in the Saturday Review for somebody to teach me Latin and Greek, and went back to Q meanwhile, and discovered he assumed I not only knew all the plays of Shakespeare and Boswell’s Johnson, but also the Second Book of Esdras … in the Apocrypha, which is a set of books nobody had ever thought to tell me existed.
So what with one thing and another and an average of three ‘Wait here’s’ a week, it took me eleven years to get through Q’s five books of lectures.
(One can only wonder what Helene would have thought about her beloved books, including the Q lectures being now freely available online.)
I've been wandering in the writing wilderness for a while, wondering what I'm doing, and where I'm going next. And Helene has been a companion who has reminded me that the writing life is stranger, richer, and made of innumerable possibilities—especially when you get to share the books and writing that you love.
Towards generosity and possibility,
Guan