Yours Ever (13 page)

The most famous postal friendship of modern times may be the twenty-year exchange begun in 1949 by Miss Helene Hanff of New York City and the employees of Marks & Co., London booksellers at 84 Charing Cross Road. The first letter from Miss Hanff—as her principal correspondent, Frank Doel, will call her for quite some time—is a response to the firm’s ad in the
Saturday Review:
“The phrase ‘antiquarian booksellers’ scares me somewhat, as I equate
‘antique’ with expensive. I am a poor writer with an antiquarian taste in books and all the things I want are impossible to get over here except in very expensive rare editions, or in Barnes & Noble’s grimy, marked-up schoolboy copies.” Hanff encloses a list of her “most pressing problems,” two of which are soon alleviated by the delivery of essay collections by Hazlitt and Robert Louis Stevenson.

After a bit of coaxing, Frank Doel emerges from the initials he’s been concealing himself with, and he is soon learning more than he would ever himself ask about his new customer and correspondent. Miss Hanff, in her early thirties, works out of an underheated brownstone in the East Nineties, reading scripts and also writing them, for the new black-and-white television
Adventures of Ellery Queen
. Thanks to her comma-spliced wisecracks and his clerkly fastidiousness, the Hanff-Doel letters become a winning vaudeville of American sass and British reserve. Her mock scoldings about the slow pace of Marks & Co.’s commerce (“Dear Speed—You dizzy me, rushing Leigh Hunt and the Vulgate over here whizbang like that … it’s hardly more than two years since I ordered them”), or against the shop’s disgraceful use of old book pages for wrapping paper, are always met with his muted forbearance: “please don’t worry about us using old books such as Clarendon’s Rebellion for wrapping. In this particular case they were just two odd volumes with the covers detached and nobody in their right senses would have given us a shilling for them.” After eight years have passed, one can hear Doel finally acquiring a bit of Hanff’s mischief, when he tells her about a crush of American tourists who’ve been visiting the shop, “including hundreds of lawyers who march around with a large card pinned to their clothes stating their home town and name.”

Hanff’s own liveliness extends to a penchant for personifying whatever books make the trip across the ocean: “
SAM PEPYS
… says to tell you he’s over
JOYED
to be here, he was previously owned by a slob who never even bothered to cut the pages.” Not having the money to finish college, Hanff had derived her literary tastes from reading the criticism of Sir Arthur Quiller-Couch, “whom I fell over in a library when I was 17.” She prefers old books to new; antique
prose to the revised-standard sort; frankness to expurgation; and nonfiction to novels. She would rather read Chaucer’s diary, if he’d written one, than
The Canterbury Tales
. Only Jane Austen makes a temporary dent in her bias toward reality: “went out of my mind over
Pride & Prejudice
which I can’t bring myself to take back to the library till you find me a copy of my own.”

The letters between New York and London lack nothing in the way of plot. Their referential weave—replies alluding to letters just received, or to ones far back in the exchange—makes for a natural storytelling that most novelists, vexing themselves with the creation of a narrative arc, can only envy. Once Hanff begins sending food parcels to the still-rationed Londoners who work in the shop, there are questions to be settled (next time, fresh eggs or powdered?) and an expanding cast of characters wanting to get in on the epistolary act. Cecily Farr (“I do hope you don’t mind my writing. Please don’t mention it when you write to Frank”) says she’s decided that Miss Hanff must be “young and very sophisticated and smart-looking,” a series of inferences Miss Hanff quickly corrects: “I’m about as smart-looking as a Broadway panhandler. I live in moth-eaten sweaters and wool slacks.”

Within a couple of years, even Frank’s wife is writing.

The underlying drama is, of course, whether Helene and Frank will ever lay eyes on each other. By 1952, she has an open invitation to come to England, and she gives it careful thought, confiding both her desire and reluctance to a friend: “I write them the most outrageous letters from a safe 3,000 miles away. I’ll probably walk in there one day and walk right out again without telling them who I am.” The possibility of going over for the queen’s coronation is soon dashed by dental bills: “Elizabeth will have to ascend the throne without me,” she tells Frank; “teeth are all I’m going to see crowned for the next couple of years.” In 1956, the owners of her brownstone are making renovations and evicting the tenants, and she needs to put what savings she has toward a new apartment.

The years pass, references to Churchill giving way to mention of the Beatles, whom Frank “rather” likes, if only “the fans just wouldn’t scream so.” In September 1968, Hanff opens a letter with:

“Still alive, are we?” and the two of them appear ready to settle into a new phase of gentle complaints about growing older but no richer. As it turns out, within three months of the joking salutation, Frank Doel is suddenly dead, from peritonitis that follows a ruptured appendix. Hanff receives word from the shop secretary—somebody new, one feels sure—who closes by asking: “Do you still wish us to try and obtain the Austens for you?”

By the time she at last travels to England, the shop itself has closed for good. Its sign will find a new home in Helene Hanff’s apartment, once it’s filched for her by a fan of the letters that she published, in 1970, as
84, Charing Cross Road
.

EPISTOLARY COUNSEL
operates with a number of advantages over the face-to-face variety. Its written form betokens a certain effort—and hence, perhaps, sincerity—that oral persuasion may lack. If spoken advice is one’s “two cents,” the inked kind now costs at least forty-four. Paper permits no interruption and preserves advice for purposes of reinforcement, unless of course the recipient chooses to rip it up, a gesture that can be as satisfying as stabbing Polonius behind the arras.

In letters, as in person, advice is often offered with its own prefatory suggestion—advice about the advice—that the recipient should “feel free to take it or leave it.” The admonition relieves the advisee of pressure and the advisor of potential embarrassment: if the advice is rejected, no matter; its extension was never a matter of consequence. How awful, by contrast, to have been in the position of the Archbishop François de Salignac de la Mothe Fénelon, a tutor to young seventeenth-century noblemen who wrote letters to his star charge as if the fate of all France lay in the balance.

The author
of Télémaque
(1699), an instructive romance on politics and world affairs, Fénelon gradually fell into the role of epistolary advisor to any number of wellborn scions: “Fulfill your vocation—” he writes the duc de Chaulnes in 1713; “mine is to
torment you!” Indeed, his letters to the young and the noble are exacting little syllabi of good sense. The Vidame d’Amiens, something of a wastrel, gets lectures against ambition; in favor of piety; against flattery; for charity. He is told to “eschew melancholy, folly, and false modesty; be neither proud nor pliant,” and advised, dispiritingly enough, to put aside pleasure until such time as “the passion is gone out of it.”

Fénelon’s highest and most tricky responsibility is the duc de Bourgogne, grandson of the aging Louis XIV and second in line to the throne. The duke is told, repeatedly, to model himself on Saint Louis, who before canonization had been the merely royal Louis IX: “Before you inherit his crown see to it that you inherit his virtues.” Less remotely, Fénelon points to the current pretender to the English throne, the would-be James III, as a fit, if unexciting, subject for emulation: “He is very self-possessed, good-tempered, and with no quirks of character, does not possess a great deal of imagination and acts at all times by the light of reason.”

When need be, Fénelon’s mentoring can move from the pious to the politic. In 1708, he tells the duke to remain at the head of the armies around Lille, even if French forces fighting the War of the Spanish Succession can’t lift the siege of the city; sticking it out will give him political credit he can draw on later. The pupil, when requesting counsel, can get equally specific: “I would take this opportunity of asking you whether you think it is right that I should have my headquarters in a convent as is the case at present.”

Fénelon is a bit besieged himself. Out of favor at court—thanks to
Télémaque
and for promoting heresy—he is forbidden to speak with the duc de Bourgogne without a third person there to hear the conversation. He must send his letters of advice through another tutor, the duc de Beauvilliers, and take care not to put the duc de Bourgogne’s name on the envelope. Grateful for the royal heir’s loyalty, Fénelon calls him “our dear Prince” in letters to the go-between, who becomes one more recipient of Fénelon’s counsel. “Take care of your health,” the archbishop writes Beauvilliers; “no medicines but a rest occasionally, freedom and high spirits.” He adds advice on how to advise: “Concern yourself with the inner
rather than with the outer life of Monsieur le Duc de Bourgogne.” So compulsively, in fact, does Fénelon counsel change and correction and proactivity that it becomes difficult for a reader of the letters to remember that the heresy with which the author had been associated was the passive, soul-surrendering doctrine of “quietism.”

His theology can’t stop him from fretting over his protégé, or from worrying about himself. In 1712, the duke—not yet thirty and by now the dauphin—suddenly dies. The seventy-three-year-old Sun King, having outlived his son and grandson, remains on the throne, and Fénelon must now nervously write to the duc de Chevreuse about what he long ago transmitted in those unmarked envelopes:

One usually finds this level of anxiety operating in the retrieval of love letters, not packets of mail that so often, along with so many other suggestions, counseled the avoidance of love’s snares.

ON OCCASION
one side of a published correspondence will make for better reading than two. After all, in replying to a letter, the writer will often make verbatim reference to some of its contents, trying to remind the first sender of what he wrote some time ago. But these are the same words that a latter-day reader, if both sides of the exchange have been published, will have read just half a page and a minute ago.

One-sidedness also offers the pleasures of inference, the intellectual labor it takes to surmise what the other party said and was like. After James Agee’s premature death in 1955, his letters to Father James Harold Flye were published by themselves, without his
lifelong advisor’s half of their thirty-year correspondence. The teacher had outlived his pupil, and whatever counsel the Episcopal priest gave to Agee—from the time the boy left St. Andrew’s School in Tennessee, all through his attempts to balance serious work and slick journalism, and beyond the success of
A Death in the Family
—was to remain mute, the unheard half of a conversation on which we’re now trying to eavesdrop. What we get is all Agee, and the general effect is that of a long, hesitant recessional. As he grows up and older, the author’s handwriting shrinks; he switches from definite ink to impermanent pencil; flares to a brief fulfillment and then keeps backing away from his oldest friend and his own better self.

From Exeter in the late 1920s, Agee reports that the Dreiser he is reading is “horribly obvious, and has no humor,” though the novelist’s “dullness is a relief from the heady brilliance of Dos Passos or Lewis.” (Agee is also reading Anita Loos, on Flye’s surprisingly hip recommendation.) The boy’s own writing shows the exuberant strain of someone realizing he’s got what it takes. A girl he’s met has an “unobstreperous intelligence, tinged with a charming limeadish sarcasm”—a description self-conscious enough to make the young Agee follow it with an amiable retraction: “Well, I’ll cease to make a jackass of myself.” He’s performing for Flye and delighted by his own showing off.

It’s a wonder to see how fast he becomes genuinely good: “‘Through pull’ with an Irish Politician, I got to see the [Boston] Morgue and the Jail, neither of which were what I’d expected, but rather worse, in a clammy, metallic way. I had a taste in my mouth as if I’d been licking an old sardine can.” By the time he’s ready to go off to Harvard, he’s the one recommending writers to Flye, though as soon as he’s done so (“Don’t you think [Housman’s] beautiful stuff?”), he remembers his manners and who’s supposed to be mentoring whom: “Probably you know it—even have the books in the house.”

Precocity doomed him. His letters resemble no one’s so much as those of Rupert Brooke, who also, in style and psychology, became at a very early age not just all he would ever be but all he could ever have become, however long he lived. At twenty-eight, a dozen
years after leaving home, Agee is a paunchy, anguished Peter Pan, unable to stop singing in an adolescent tremolo: “The world (and my self) seem to me this morning, in light of recent context, evil, exhausting and hopeless, not to mention nauseating and infuriating and incurable, yet I am thoroughly glad I am in it and alive.” He never sheds the self-importance of youth. One sees it mutating, as he embarks upon
Let Us Now Praise Famous Men
, into a kind of grandiose humility: “If I could make it what it ought to be made I would not be human.” Once the book is done and Flye has praised it, Agee’s mea culpa is more megalomaniacal than self-critical: “What you write of the book needless to say is good to hear to the point of shaming me—for it is a sinful book at least in all degrees of ‘falling short of the mark’ and I think in more corrupt ways as well.” In 1940, he continues to fly a teenager’s banner (“I never in all my life want to feel respect for a half-good”), and ten years after that he’s still taking birthdays hard.