‘Please write and tell me about London. I live for the day when I step off the boat train and feel its dirty sidewalks under my feet. I want to walk up Berkeley Square and down Wimpole Street and stand in St Paul’s where John Donne preached and sit on the steps Elizabeth sat on when she refused to enter the Tower, and things like that. A newspaper man I know, who was stationed in England during the war, says tourists go to England with preconceived notions, so they always find what they go looking for. I told him I’d go looking for the England of English Literature, and he said, ‘Then it’s all there.’ I want to see London the way old people want to see home before they die. And Oxford, I have to see Trinity College where John Donne, John Henry Newman, and Arthur Quiller–Couch all lived in their various long-gone eras. Whatever I know about English, those three men taught me, and before I die I want to stand in their freshmen’s rooms and call their names blessed!”

Helene was born on April 15th 1916 in Philadelphia and died on April 9th 1997 in New York. She grew up in a theatre mad household: during the Depression her father, a shirt salesman, took his family (Helene was the only girl) to the theatre every week by slipping shirts to the box office staff in exchange for tickets. From the start Helene’s only ambition was to be a playwright and in 1935 began to study English at Philadelphia University but, after only a year, her family could no longer afford the fees, and so she had to find work. Her career as a writer began auspiciously in 1938 when she won a 1500 dollar fellowship to study play-writing for two years from the prestigious Theatre Guild’s Bureau of New Plays, a nationwide contest which, in the previous year, had been won by Tennessee Williams. From this moment on she was to live in Manhattan. But although she went on to write some twenty plays none of them ever got staged, as she later recorded in her highly entertaining and autobiographical Underfoot in Show Business.

In 1948 she got a job as a reader for a film studio. This necessitated her collecting a novel or a screen play at 4 pm each day, taking it home to read, writing a synopsis, and returning it at 4 pm the following day. For this she was paid a meagre six dollars a synopsis. She never forgot her horror when on day she was asked to write a synopsis of Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings. She read the opening sentence of the first novel and then ‘phoned several friends to say goodbye, ‘because suicide seemed so obviously preferable to 500 more pages of the same’. When she handed in her invoice the next day for reading the three volumes, she added an extra 40 dollars for ‘mental torture’!

It was in the following year that she began ordering books from 84 Charing Cross Road and so beginning the correspondence that was to bring her fame. It was not until 1952, however, that she was given slightly more rewarding work when she was invited to write for the television series The Adventures of Ellery Queen, a job she only took because she had to have major dental work carried out which cost 2000 dollars. The Adventures of Ellery Queen paid for her teeth but did not extend to finance a trip to London to visit her beloved bookshop.

In 1953 she was contributing to another television series, The Hallmark of Fame, devoted to ‘great characters of history’; but by the late 1950’s most TV companies had left New York for Hollywood. Helene, unable to drive, and unwilling to leave New York, was once again unemployed. By 1960, however, she was concentrating on writing for magazines such as Harper’s Bazaar and The New Yorker. This resulted in her being asked to write her autobiography, Underfoot in Show Business, and was followed by The Q Legacy, her tribute to Sir Arthur Quiller Couch whose books had taught her most about the English language. Then, in 1971, she published 84 Charing Cross Road of which The New York Times 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’. After its English publication it was followed by its sequel, The Duchess of Bloomsbury Street, well as her idiosyncratic book about New York, The Apple of My Eye. From 1978 – 1985 she became a regular and much loved contributor to the BBC’s Woman’s Hour with her Letter from New York.

In 1989 she was diagnosed with diabetes but continued to smoke and drink even though both were prohibited by her doctor. When invited by James Roose-Evans to lunch at the Garrick to meet the actors Rosemary Leach and David Swift, she chain-smoked all through the meal, taking a mouthful of food, then picking up her cigarette for a puff, and so on. When the headwaiter came to whisper discreetly to James Roose-Evans that smoking was not permitted until 2.30, he replied, “Yes, I know, but you try telling Miss Hanff that!”

“If I had a million pounds and my life all over again,” she once said, “I’d have a flat in Marylebone and spend my days walking round London looking for Noël Coward’s Mayfair, Samuel Pepys’s Fleet Street, and Isaac Walton’s meandering river.

James Roose-Evans
Copyright 2003