Apple of My Eye by Helene Hanff – #1977Club

 

Why am I always super busy during club weeks? I will do catch-ups properly towards the end of the week (yes, it is already towards the end of the week, SORRY) but I’m really excited to be getting the notifications that people are joining in. And Karen is on it like a pro.

My first 1977 Club read is one I picked up in a brilliant bookshop called J C Books in Watton, Norfolk. If you’re ever in Norfolk, make sure you get there. It’s Apple of My Eye by Helene Hanff – most famed, of course, for 84, Charing Cross Road, though I don’t hear a lot about her other books. Any fan of 84CCR should get a copy of Q’s Legacy pronto, which is sort of a sequel – but I’ve enjoyed all the books I’ve read by her, more or less.

A few years ago I read Letter From New York, which was about the apartment building she lived in, her neighbours, and generally life in the city – collected, if I remember correctly, from various articles over the years. I rather thought that Apple of My Eye would be the same thing – but it is not. Rather, Hanff had been commissioned to write the accompanying text to a book of photos of New York, designed for tourists to get the most out of the city. I don’t know quite what happened to that book, but Apple of My Eye rather wonderfully combines her recommended highlights with an account of visiting them herself and choosing what to include. It’s not a guidebook, it’s more a witty memoir of writing a guidebook – but could certainly function as an edited highlights of New York nonetheless (or, at least, New York in 1977).

Like many people who live in a touristy city, Hanff found that she had actually visited relatively few of the Must See Locations. (I, for instance, didn’t go to the Pitt Rivers for my first ten years in Oxford, and still haven’t made it to the Oxford Museum.) If you have all the time in the world to do something, then you never do – but Hanff realises she has to do all the things she hasn’t. And someone else who hasn’t is her friend Patsy – who also, apparently, has a couple of months to spare. So off they go!

Now, I’ve never been to New York, and I don’t really like travel guides even to places I have been. So my heart sank a little when I realised what sort of book this might be. But it was wrong to sink! While I couldn’t get my head around 5th Street this and 84th Street that, and have never understood how you know which two streets something like ‘6th and 8th’ might be – because surely that could be the same as 8th and 6th – I really enjoyed this anyway. And the reason is because Hanff is so funny about the experience of exploring – and about her friendship with Patsy.

Hanff is brilliant at writing about her friends. In Letter From New York it was Arlene (and Richard and Nina et al), and here it’s Patsy – she tells us enough about them to understand not only their characters, but how she relates to them and what their friendship is like. With Patsy, Hanff has clearly got to the point in the friendship where they can squabble slightly, tease each other, rely on each other, and say precisely what they mean. Patsy is enthusiastic about coming on this tour, but also openly reluctant to do many of the proposed activities (often because of her fear of heights). Her refrain is “write that down”, often for details Hanff considers irrelevant – though, self-evidently, did write them down. Much is also made of their East vs West friendly enmities.

Curiously, while I find all the south-of-the-river vs north-of-the-river chat in London quite tedious (mostly because they seem exactly the same to me), I really enjoyed the way Hanff wrote about East vs West. For example…

Generally speaking, West Siders look dowdy, scholarly and slightly down-at-heel, and the look has nothing to do with money. They look like what a great many of them are: scholars, intellectuals, dedicated professionals, all of whom regard shopping for clothes as a colossal waste of time. East Siders, on the other hand, look chic. Appearances are important to them. From which you’ll correctly deduce that East Siders are conventional and proper, part of the Establishment and in awe of it – which God knows, and God be thanks, West Siders are not.

Hanff, it should be noted, is from the East Side – though does feel like a fish out of water sometimes.

Luckily for me, Hanff assumes no knowledge of New York at all – up to and including telling us that theatre happens on Broadway. As she darts on buses all over the place, we see Ellis Island, the Empire State Building, Bloomingdale’s, Central Park, and all the things one would expect – with a few little-known gems thrown in for good measure. The strangest part to read about was the World Trade Center  – still having bits finalised at the time of Hanff writing. Obviously she could know nothing of its eventual fate, and to read of it as an exciting new development in the city, with the best restaurant available, felt rather surreal.

Hanff is very concise in her tour – my copy of the book was only 120 pages. Obviously volumes and volumes could be written about New York, and have been, but I think this is a wonderful little book – probably even more so for somebody familiar with New York. For me, it is a funny and charming account of friendship, which just happens to have a dizzying tour of New York as its backdrop.

84, Charing Cross Road by Helene Hanff

84 Charing Cross RoadI’ve written about a couple of Helene Hanff books over the years – you can see them from that ‘browse’ menu over on the right hand side – but I don’t think I ever wrote about her most famous book, 84, Charing Cross Road. Well, a beautiful new edition from Slightly Foxed Editions brought about an excellent opportunity. I suspect most of you know this book already (and I can also recommend the lovely film) but, for those who don’t, I have written about it over at Shiny New Books. Below is the beginning of my review; if your appetite is whetted, you can go and check out the rest.

Slightly Foxed Editions – and I never tire of saying how beautiful they are – offer two different, wonderful things to the world. Either they are an introduction to brilliant memoirs that were undiscoverable and unknown, or they give the opportunity to have much-loved classics in that inimitably lovely series. And, of course, 84 Charing Cross Road appears in the latter category.

Letter From New York – Helene Hanff

Letter from New York

Any of us who love books about books have surely read the lovely 84, Charing Cross Road, a collection of letters between American Helene Hanff and a London bookseller. Her other books aren’t as well-known, but I heartily recommend Q’s Legacy if you’d like to read more about the success of 84CCR – and now I can also recommend Letter From New York (1992). I took it to America to read there, and… read it in Worcestershire instead.

These letters were broadcast monthly on Radio 4 back between 1978-1984 (and nothing shrieks ’80s more than Hanff’s unstinting belief that formalwear necessitates a black velvet pantsuit and white satin blouse). They are, indeed, not letters so much as thoughts, and concern life in New York – but, more precisely, life in Hanff’s apartment block.

It reminded me a little of one of my all-time faves, The L-Shaped Room (if you’ve not read it – go and do so. I’ll wait.) in that I sort of fell in love with a building and its inhabitants. Not as much as I did with The L-Shaped Room (have you read it yet? I mean, you didn’t just glide past my previous parentheses did you? DID YOU?) because that will never happen, but Hanff is great at writing enough about her friends and neighbours to make you feel like you know them well. If she described them completely, she would seem (and make the reader feel) like an observer; by referring to them as though we already know them pretty well, Arlene, Richard, Nina, and the rest became friends. Here’s an excerpt…

Big excitement here a couple of weeks ago because the New York Times ran a story about Arlene, with a photograph of her that also included Richard.

Since you know that Arlene and I are opposites, when I tell you that I detest large cocktail parties and dinner dance,s you won’t be surprised to learnt hat Arlene earns her living organizing large cocktail parties and dinner dances. She runs the parties as fund-raising events for Democratic politicians who need money for their election campaigns. Her most famous fund-raiser was a birthday party for the Mayor of New York aboard the Queen Elizabeth II – ‘the QE Two’ to Arlene [Simon adds: …and to everyone else]. She phoned the office of the ship’s public relations chief, who was ‘at sea’ off the Bermuda coast and talked to her via ship-to-shore phone, and Arlene talked him into letting her use the ship for the Mayor’s birthday party. She hypnotized the chef into creating a replica of New York’s City Hall in margarine and a birthday cake bigger than the undersized Mayor.

As you see, Hanff deals not solely (or even much) with the grand moments in New York life – rather, we get the refreshing minutiae of her own life. That might be her neighbour’s dog being borrowed to perform as a greeter at an apartment party; it might be watching a bee in a roof garden; it might be a ticker-tape parade. All of it flows from Hanff’s pen lazily and contentedly; the tone you may remember from 84, Charing Cross Road, albeit mellowed a bit.

Hanff’s writing has three faults, in my mind. Only one of them really counts as a fault: the other two are that she prefers dogs to cats (there is a lot about dogs in Letter From New York) and that she prefers the city to the countryside. Those factors made it trickier for me to connect with her, but the only real ‘fault’ I noticed was that she has trouble with section endings. Each letter has a pat ending, a quip or neat sentence, that often felt a bit forced, or looped back to something she’d only mentioned for the first time a paragraph or two earlier. It’s a small thing, and it didn’t really affect my reading, but it brought about the only instances of Hanff’s writing feeling unnatural in a book that is largely characterised by being natural.

If you’ve enjoyed 84, Charing Cross Road, then Hanff will feel like a friend whom you should revisit. If you haven’t – good grief, go and get a copy! (And read The L-Shaped Room while you’re at it.)

 

Q’s Legacy – Helene Hanff

Amongst those of us who write or read book blogs, there are two varieties: those who love Helene Hanff’s 84, Charing Cross Road, and those who have yet to read it.  In case you have yet to have that pleasure, it’s the (true) letters between Hanff in America and Frank Doel, who worked in a London bookshop.  It’s charming and bookish, and a slightly can’t-believe-how-stereotypical-they’re-being encounter between brash American and restrained Brit.  I’ve bought a few Hanff books since I read 84, Charing Cross Road (and The Duchess of Bloomsbury Street, published together) eight or so years ago, but the first I’ve read was Q’s Legacy (1985) on the train home to Somerset.  And it was fab.

For some reason, I had believed that Q’s Legacy was Hanff’s first book, and settled down to it for that reason.  I was, at it turns out, wrong – most of this book is about the writing, success, and aftermath of 84, Charing Cross Road – but before I get to that, I’ll address the title.  You might, or might not, know that ‘Q’ is the author, essayist, poet, and anthologist Arthur Quiller-Couch (which rhymes with pooch).  I believe ‘Q’ dates from the time when writers in periodicals, particularly Punch, appeared under initials (hence A.A. Milne being known as AAM for some of his publications) – but Arthur Quiller-Couch could get by with just ‘Q’.  Although he pops up quite a lot in biographies I’ve read about other people, the only work I’ve read by Q is his poem ‘Upon Eckington Bridge, River Avon’ – because I grew up in the small Worcestershire village which boasts this bridge.  Barbara recently visited in on her travels, so you can see it here.

His legacy to Hanff came about by writing On The Art of Writing, which she stumbles across while trying to educate herself in literature.  In his five-volume collection of lectures, he covers the grand scope of literature, and inspires Hanff to go off hunting:

In the first chapter of On The Art of Writing he threw so many marvellous quotes at me – from Walton’s Angler, Newman’s Idea of a University, and Milton’s Paradise Lost – that I rushed back to the library and brought home all three, determined to read them all before going on to Q’s second lecture.  Which would have been perfectly possible if I hadn’t included Paradise Lost.  In Paradise Lost I ran into Satan, Lucifer, the Infernal Serpent, and a Fiend, all of whom seemed to be lurking around the Garden of Eden and none of whom my teachers at Rodeph Shalom Sunday School had ever mentioned to me.  I consulted my Confirmation Bible, but I couldn’t find Milton’s fearsome personages in Genesis.  I concluded that Lucifer and the Fiend weren’t Jewish and I would have to look in the New Testament for them, and since this was an entirely new book to me, Q had to wait while I read that one, too.
When she wants to source some out of print books mentioned by Q, can you guess where she goes for help?  Yes, that’s right – Marks & Co. Bookshop, at 84, Charing Cross Road – that’s how their acquaintance starts.

Alongside this autodidacticism, Hanff is trying to make it by writing.  She manages to eke out a non-lucrative career, slowly writing poorly paid history books for children.  She tries her hand at various other types of writing, with very little success – a lovely publisher called Genevieve encourages her along the way, with a mixture of blunt honesty and unrealistic optimism.

And eventually, while going through old boxes of letters, Hanff stumbles across the letters she received from Frank Doel, some twenty years later.  She thinks that they might, if edited, make a fun magazine article – and sends them to Genevieve.  She loves them, and passes them onto a niche publisher – and, without ever having intended to make a book out of them, Hanff finds that she will be published.  (She entirely glosses over how she got her half of the correspondence – perhaps she kept carbon copies, or perhaps Frank Doel’s then-widow sent them to her.)  Either way – a book was made.

For those of us who love 84, Charing Cross Road, this book is the equivalent of a Behind The Scenes clip on a DVD.  We get to see the creation, but we also get to see the aftermath.  Hanff writes self-deprecatingly and amusingly about being catapulted to fame (albeit the sort of fame a literary author gets; she’s no Lady Gaga) and having fans.  As she points out, including her current address in a book probably wasn’t the wisest move for anybody who wants any privacy – and, sure enough, many strangers phone or write, although none seem to turn up in the middle of the night with a horse’s head, so… that’s something.

But things do not finish there!  Hanff continues to document her experiences as 84, Charing Cross Road is turned into a 1975 TV programme and a 1981 stage play.  Had Hanff waited a couple of years to publish Q’s Legacy, she might have been able to include the film adaptation (which is very good, and even has a small role for Judi Dench, back when she didn’t really do films.)  Seeing the TV and stage adaptations behind the scenes, from someone tangentially involved but still wowed by the whole process, was a real treat.  I much enjoyed a lot of it very, very much – although when Q’s Legacy turned into diary entries, for Hanff’s trip to London, it lost some of its charm and momentum, in my eyes.)

Hanff admits that she struggles to create memorable or apt titles, and I can’t imagine there are many souls who leapt at the title Q’s Legacy (although some certainly do – like me), but I am glad that she chose it.  It’s fun to trace one’s literary tastes and career successes to a single decision – and generous of her to dedicate her writing, as it were, to a man who could never know anything about it.  Although Hanff is really only known for 84, Charing Cross Road, Q’s Legacy suggests that she should be known for rather more – and anybody who wishes that 84, Charing Cross Road were much longer will be happy to discover, in Q’s Legacy, that, if the correspondence cannot be extended, at least the tale of Hanff and Doel is.