Friendship in the Margins: Used Books and the Ties that Bind in 84 Charing Cross Road
Through the letters they exchanged and their shared love for used books, Helene Hanff and Frank Dole developed a lifelong friendship from an ocean apart.
By Asher Gelzer-Govatos
After a childhood spent watching PBS on an antennae set, in middle school my family acquired satellite TV. As part of the introductory package, we gained access to all sorts of obscure, niche channels playing genre movies on endless loop. Thus I first encountered 84 Charing Cross Road, the 1987 adaptation of Helene Hanff’s memoir, in the most inappropriate framing possible: on a channel named “Romance Stories” or “Stories of the Heart” or some such ilk. Watching, enraptured, I knew instinctively that this was far from a love story, Anthony Hopkins’ wistful stare notwithstanding. Instead, it was a story about that most delicate thing, friendship—an intellectual friendship between a man and a woman, no less.
Looking back, it’s no surprise that the film, a passion project for star Anne Bancroft, chose to subtly hint at romance along the edges of its frames, nor that it was sold as a love story in its afterlife on cable. Because who in their right mind would sit down and watch a feature length movie about two people, one a nebbish New York writer, the other a reserved British bookseller, who never actually meet, and whose communications primarily consist of questions about and requests for rare old books? An atypical plot, a narrative driven by voiceover—that bane of film snobs everywhere—and no hope of resolution: box office poison. Indeed, the film barely limped over the million-dollar revenue mark in the U.S., a paltry sum even in 1987.
It’s an open question whether the middle school version of myself was in his right mind, but for one reason or another, the film sank its hooks into me. Eventually I stumbled across the book itself, no less addicting for trading the nuanced performances of Bancroft, Hopkins, and Judi Dench for even more of Hanff’s big apple bravado and her correspondent Frank Doel’s dry wit. What I found invigorating in the book, and still do, is its witness to the idea that people might begin and sustain friendships through a shared external love, yet experience that friendship spill over its boundaries to become something more.
Hanff’s book charts the twenty-year course of her friendship with Doel, a bookseller for the London firm Marks & Co. Hanff began writing to the company just after World War II, on the hunt for rare (but inexpensive) antiquarian British books. After a time she noticed that all her letters got answered by a single employee, Doel, and a cautiously playful back and forth began between them. Though at first confined to book talk, the letters gradually reveal a deepening friendship, as Hanff sends over a series of food packages to an England undergoing strict post-war rationing. Indeed, Doel gradually loosens his reserve and introduces Hanff (on the page) to his family and co-workers. For a memoir, the book makes plenty of odd moves: large, sometimes multi-year gaps exist in the narrative, and the banter gets interrupted by missing or otherwise excluded letters. Despite these absences, the book packs a hefty emotional punch into less than a hundred pages, such that by the time Helene learns of Frank’s death secondhand, we as readers feel the loss keenly.
Aristotle famously delineated three types of friendship—the useful, the pleasant, and the good—but 84 Charing Cross Road shows how easily those categories can collapse into each other. At the beginning, it’s all business, with Doel responding quite formally to Hanff’s requests. Gradually, though, she thaws his coldness with her biting wit, and he responds in kind. Theirs is a friendship animated by a shared interest, a curiosity about old books—not merely their contents, but the form, shape, and touch of something held by many sets of hands.
I suspect that when people mourn the death of letter writing, they have in mind this sort of correspondence as much as any family epistles or missals flung at the editor of the local paper. There’s something exhilarating in discovering an oddball passion shared by another person; that moment of “What? You, too? I thought I was the only one” so skillfully described by C.S. Lewis in The Four Loves. While the Internet has made it possible to find communities spread across the globe who share your taste for, say, antique fly fishing lures, these more easily discovered affiliative networks lose some of their appeal by their very breadth. The feeling of finding that single other mind, equally as curious and passionate as your own—that creates a bond sturdier and more invigorating than a comment section.
Here we see friendship consisting in the sharing of expertise, of both minds pointing in the same direction of some external object.
And make no mistake: Hanff’s tastes are decidedly recherché. Typically, if a bookish American professes their fervid Anglo-bibliophilia, they mean that they appreciate Shakespeare more than most, or find themselves falling for Mr. Darcy every time they pick up Austen. Hanff’s tastes are much more obscure; no fan of fiction (though she eventually catches Austen fever herself), Hanff revels in the essayistic non-fiction of the seventeenth, eighteenth, and nineteenth centuries; names, like Walter Savage Landor and Leigh Hunt, not normally heard outside the dustiest corners of Brit lit academia. Her most recognizable heroes are churchmen: John Donne and “dear goofy” John Henry Newman. She reads Donne sermons to relax in the evenings, and paws lovingly over the first edition of Newman’s Idea of the University sent to her by Doel.
Though Doel’s own reading preferences never emerge in the book, we see him animated by the same passion as Hanff’s. He takes clear pleasure in hunting down curios for her—the more obscure, the better. He searches England, rifling through estate sales, looking for that elusive treasure, a “good clean copy.” In his professional role, at least, he treasures books for their physical characteristics, the condition of their binding and pages, the decorative elements that make them stand out. Gradually his careful expertise wins over Hanff as well. In her first letter to Marks & Co., she specifies merely that she wants cheap used books that avoid both extremes, being neither “expensive rare editions” nor “Barnes & Noble’s grimy, marked-up schoolboy copies.” But as Doel sends her more and more nice books, she realizes that secondhand need not mean shabby. When the bookshop sends along the Newman, she melts in appreciation:
All that gleaming leather and gold stamping and beautiful type belongs in the pine-panelled library of an English country home; it wants to be read by the fire in a gentleman’s leather easy chair—not on a secondhand studio couch in a one-room hovel in a broken-down brownstone front.
Here we see friendship consisting in the sharing of expertise, of both minds pointing in the same direction of some external object. In W.H. Auden’s great Good Friday poem Horae Canonicae, he describes vocation as “that eye-on-the-object look” of someone with a “rapt expression, forgetting themselves in a function.” Doel possesses that eye-on-the-object look when dealing with used books, but he also manages to teach that vision to Hanff.
Books, of course, primarily function to relay some story or idea or aesthetic impression via words on the page. But books, like letters, also have significance as physical objects. My copy of 84 Charing Cross Road emits that wonderful musty smell of a cheap used paperback stored for too long in a cardboard box. Its back cover has half-dissolved, likely due to the major water damage indicated by dark, butterfly stains in the back half of the book. Two separate ex libre stamps tell me it belonged to my mother before me, bought during my parents’ ten years in Australia, as it is the British/Australian edition. She, like Hanff, liked used books, and sure enough the author’s biographical page bears another stamp, from a Rev. John Hill of Port Fairy, Victoria. On the back of the front cover, someone has made a more personal mark: “Ruth Hill,” scrawled hastily in blue pen. Who really owned the book—the good reverend or his (presumed) wife? Who sold it to my mother?
Book inscriptions, especially those imbued with personal meaning, have an evocative power that lasts beyond the literal meaning understood by the book’s owner.
One of the delights of 84 Charing Cross Road is that it develops its idea of correspondence on two levels. Not only do Hanff and Doel build a transatlantic friendship on the basis of their shared interests, but Hanff finds another sort of unlikely companionship in her books: in the notes and marks of those who owned the copies before her. Her preference for used books lies not just in their reduced cost, but in the sense of history they convey:
I do love secondhand books that open to the page some previous owner read oftenest. The day Hazlitt came he opened to “I hate to read new books,” and I hollered “Comrade!” to whoever owned it before me.
Reading, so often depicted as a solitary activity, thus becomes communal, as we read the marks that have been left behind for us to find. Like medieval scholars scribbling away at marginalia, book owners leave traces of their own minds behind for others to discover. Hanff, for her part, intends to pay this practice forward. Speaking of a book Marks & Co. has sent her as a Christmas gift, she says:
I’ll have [it] till the day I die—and die happy in the knowledge that I’m leaving it behind for someone else to love. I shall sprinkle pale pencil marks through it pointing out the best passages to some book lover yet unborn.
Thus reading, at least active reading, becomes a form of correspondence with those that come after; another instance of what Chesterton called “the democracy of the dead.” Pointing out those best passages to future readers, Hanff provides that same form of friendship to future readers that she and Doel have shared, an expertise that points out the good, true, and beautiful in that shared endeavor of reading. But such correspondence across time does not merely consist in intellectual discussion, but equally in a sharing of the self. At a different point in the book, Marks & Co. sends Hanff another book as a gift, after which she chides them for writing the inscription on a separate card, rather than in the book itself.
It’s the bookseller coming out in you all, you were afraid you’d decrease its value. You would have increased it for the present owner. (And possibly for the future owner. I love inscriptions on flyleaves and notes in margins, I like the comradely sense of turning pages someone else turned…).
Book inscriptions, especially those imbued with personal meaning, have an evocative power that lasts beyond the literal meaning understood by the book’s owner. Inspired in part by Hanff’s insistence, I make sure that every book I give to someone comes with a handwritten note, recording not only the giver, the receiver, and the date or occasion, but also a sense of why: why this book for this person at this time. My hope is that the recipient will be able to crack open the cover, years later, and instantly return in time to that particular crossing of our paths, and that those who read it later will sense, despite not knowing the details, that they have stumbled across an act of friendship.
Ultimately, the friendship between Doel and Hanff lasts for two decades because it has evolved from something merely external to something both external and internal.
Ultimately, the friendship between Doel and Hanff lasts for two decades because it has evolved from something merely external to something both external and internal. That’s the trick of solidly grounded friendships, according to Lewis:
The common quest or vision which unites Friends does not absorb them in such a way that they remain ignorant or oblivious of one another. On the contrary it is the very medium in which their mutual love and knowledge exist… If, at the outset, we had attended more to him and less to the thing our Friendship is “about”, we should not have come to know or love him so well.
If Hanff had randomly sought out a pen pal, her odds of success in sustaining a friendship would have been greatly diminished; the shared passion of old books fed her friendship with Doel in its early days, to the point where they came to know each other in deeper ways. Her decision to send food packages to the employees at Marks & Co. marks the moment at which her friendship begins to deepen beyond something merely useful or pleasant to a friendship rooted in the desire to do good for the other. But absent those other stages of friendship, the act would have been only charity in its plain sense, not the richly developed charity of friendship.
Looking around at the way that I and my contemporaries use social media, I sense that so much of our stumbling past each other has its roots in our deep desire, often explicitly stated, that we have people who know and love us for who we really are. That cry of authenticity is understandable, even deeply sympathetic, especially as technology makes unreality the most salient fact of everyday life. Yet, as 84 Charing Cross Road hints to us, friendship must develop over time, through a correspondence of the mind and heart (if not the pen), and true friendship is liberating because it helps us move beyond our private selves, into a shared passion that transcends our individual emotions. What if, instead of seeking validation through posting idealized images of ourselves, we went and found someone to teach us a new skill we have always wanted to develop, like woodworking or speaking Catalan or collecting bugs? These pursuits feel secondary to friendship itself, but we may be surprised by who we befriend, or how deep those friendships go, if we step outside ourselves.
Asher Gelzer-Govatos is a Visiting Assistant Professor of English at Doane University in Crete, Nebraska, where he lives with his family. He also co-hosts The Readers Karamazov, a podcast about literature and philosophy.