posted on 04 Apr 2020

Letter from New York by Helene Hanff

The odds are that if you know the name Helene Hanff, it’s likely to be because of her most famous book, 84 Charing Cross Road, and the even more well-loved movie of the same title with Anne Bancroft in the lead role. Hanff’s letters to the staff of a British second-hand bookshop in the immediately post-war years are at once sentimental and incisive – revealing as much about the social conditions of the late 1940s as they do about Hanff herself and the main recipient of the letters, Frank Doel.

What is irresistible for me about 84 Charing Cross Road is the way in which the gulf between the two trans-Atlantic cultures is laid bare. Where Doel and his staff have the almost stereotypical diffidence we associate with austerity Britain at that time, Hanff, a native New Yorker with a sharp, irreverent literary Jewish background cuts through the niceties with aplomb.

Hanff, who never married, earned her living as a jobbing writer, playwright and sometime broadcaster and was quintessentially an observer of human behaviour – and needless to say a great reader; hence the letters to the Charing Cross Road bookshop.

In 1978 when Hanff’s reputation was already established through the publication of her most famous book, she was wined and dined in London and persuaded to undertake a series of short broadcasts for BBC Radio’s Women’s Hour – 5 minutes once a month – in which she’d give the listener a snapshot of her New York life. The scripts for these talks, which had started life as a six month experiment, are gathered here and actually cover a period of six years. We can assume that the radio listeners found them a success and they are, if you want some kind of comparison, a more gentle and less stressed counterpoint to Alastair Cook’s more cerebral Letter from America – a series that seemed to be an unending part of my more youthful years.

In her two or three page vignettes of day to day life, Hanff’s hard-bitten New York carapace is very easily breached and a fundamentally good natured communitarianism pours out. None of these pen portraits are going to change your life substantially and you’ll pass through most of them with a smile and you'll feel like you're taking the reading equivalent of an unhurried walk through the park on a sunny afternoon. She loves dogs, isn’t so keen on cats, can spot an idiot from a mile, is a good neighbour and a really talented writer who makes all this simple, brusque common-sense stuff look like it’s easy to write. It isn’t, though.

She shares anecdotes and her view from her cubbyhole of a flat on the Upper East Side of Manhatten while at the same time artfully and without malice she dissects the social politics of the city’s geography. The overwhelming feeling is of an ordinariness that is in itself extraordinary. So many people crammed into so little space might, you’d think, excuse the legendary grouchiness of the New Yorker but Hanff confounds all of that by showing just how much the neighbours care for each other without making an issue of it.

Hanff has that magic touch – the ability to exactly pin, or perhaps I should say skewer,  someone or something with the exactly right and telling phrase. That’s an ability some writers might use to score hurtful, easy points but not Hanff: hers is a world of solid decency at a time when those values were becoming distinctly unfashionable. She never lived to see the technological revolution – she died in 1997 at the age of 80 – but I suspect she’d have taken to blogging like a natural.

You’ll have no trouble finding a copy of this in hard or paperback editions at very affordable prices.

 

Terry Potter

April 2020