84 Charing Cross Road – Love sometimes comes in tiny packages

The other day, I was trying to figure out how to avoid the big project I have been working on this summer and I picked up a slender little book that it looked like I could read in about an hour.  It wasn’t until I was finished with it (I didn’t time it, but it couldn’t have taken more than two hours at most), that I discovered that my reluctant sister had given it to me on my birthday more than thirty years ago.  In her inscription, in addition to sending her love, she also warned me away from the movie starring Anne Bancroft and Anthony Hopkins (something the book cover trumpets).  I have no problem sending along her advice – I’m sure it is wise counsel, but I must admit that I am so taken with the book that I may be tempted, next time I need a diversion, to see if it is available.

84 Charing Cross is the address of a bookseller in London that, sadly, my quick google search informs me, is now at least partly a McDonald’s restaurant.  It was the place, in the days before Amazon, when Helene Hanff, the (partial) author of the book ordered her books.  One could say it was the precursor of Amazon, but that would be a grave injustice. 

I was introduced to Amazon in 2008 or so by a fellow academic who assured me that it was a tremendously easy and wonderful way to get books quickly and efficiently.  Who knew what it would become? 

Marks & Co., the bookseller at 84 Charing Cross Road, London, was hardly quick but it was efficient in its own quirky manner.  Miss Hanff did not communicate with them via email, but by post from the upper west side of Manhattan, typing her missives not into a screen, but through a manual typewriter onto sheets of, I’m sure, quite thin paper that was sent in the mail, sometimes along with a few dollar bills to cover the costs of the books.

And the books.  Unlike the book that I was holding in my hand – with a very light poster board cover and thick pages of newsprint quality paper glued into a functional if not elegant package – the books she ordered were lovely.  They were on the thinnest of paper and bound by the finest leather with true art work adorning the inside covers and gilt lining the page edges.  They were used – with marginalia from previous owners and they opened to the places that the last owner most visited, something that Miss Hanff treasured.  She liked being guided by an unknown guide to the best spots.

The cover of my clunky paperback promises a “transatlantic love affair by mail”.  Well, that seems to me to hint at a bodice ripping romance, even if the bodice is ripped only in fantasy.  This is no bodice ripper, but the teaser is an apt description.  Miss Hanff does fall in love with Frank Doel (rhymes with the Christmas Noel), her primary correspondent at Marks & Co., but also with his wife and children and with the other staff at the booksellers.  And the center piece of all of that love is the love of books – and with the real lived experiences that those books bring.

A cursory read of the book titles I have reviewed in these posts will clarify that I am in love with fiction.  Not so Ms. Hanff.  She is invested in history.  She wants to hear from those who have lived that history- she loves diaries and memoirs.  Non-fiction is the stuff of her reading life – and her writing life – she was an author who wrote for stage and screen – especially for The Hallmark Hall of Fame.  And this book is, then, appropriately the actual correspondence between herself and her fellow lover of books, Frank Doel (who, I believe, should be credited, along with a few others, as co-author).

And what an interesting and intimate love affair it is.  She idealizes him and the place that he works and lives in – so much so that she never quite makes the trek, even though you expect her to at any moment.  Instead she preserves it as a place she can visit in her mind – keeping it whole and untrammeled.  And we visit it with her.  I could smell the mustiness of the book store that neither of us will ever visit as I read the letters that were written there. 

But the intriguing thing to me is not Miss Hanff's idealization of Mr. Doel and the bookstore, but the remonstrating that she engages in – the good spirited, clearly loving, but also clearly critical tone she takes with him.  He is someone whom she idealizes but also comes ever so close to treating as her personal lackey.  He is in her employ – and he is rigidly and consistently proper in the best British manner – and this allows Miss Hanff, I think, to take liberties. 

Those liberties are invariably in the form of demanding from him the level of service that she believes him capable of delivering.  As caustic as her notes get, they are leavened both by the quality of Miss Hanff’s writing and by the affection that her criticism exudes.  It has the tone of chiding rather than scolding.  She is railing at him for being the very person that she loves.  And he, in his formal English manner, seems to take it in the spirit that it is given.  He is always working to provide the best possible service.

Now it helps that she is also sending gifts – and emissaries – friends who carry her good wishes across the seas.  She is on the side of these people who have been left bereft by the war.  She is embarrassed by the largesse that the Americans are bestowing on the Germans while our English allies can’t, for the life of them, find a decent ham for Christmas.  So when she sends a ham it demonstrates her love.  But the gifts are not intended to balance out her bullying – for her criticism is not bullying – it is a very deep form of affection.  It is the calling forth of the best that one can get from another person – and an appreciation of who it is that they are.

So this correspondence is a lived record of a love – the kind of love that the efficiencies of Amazon will never replace.  For we love people, with all of their quirks and all of the ways that their interacting irritate us.  We love it that we can’t count on a used bookseller to provide exactly what we want, but that what shows up sometimes turns out to be better than what we would have ordered.  The universe sometimes knows what we want more than we ourselves do.  

And perfection is not what we want in a partner – six sigma be damned.  It is clearly what we expect from Amazon, but from the people we love, we want responsiveness – we want someone who thinks about us and knows us and gets who it is that we are – and who cares enough to stay in touch both with who we are and with who we could be.  And that allows us to muddle through – to bump along – enjoying the bumps – while others speed past us on the smooth superhighway of perfection. And it is an illusion - to those on that highway, including ourselves when we are there - that perfection will be a substitute for love.  It isn't.

In closing, I would like to take this idealized relationship into my own sphere and hold it as an example of how the analyst and the analysand should, under the best of circumstances, interact.  Who is whom?  Is it Frank or Helen that is the analyst?  The funny thing is that both are each.  For analysis mirrors life and we both expect the best out of each other and work hard to provide it and at times we may be Frank – whether analyst or analysand – and at times we may be Miss Hanff, but when things are going well, we are thinking of each other, and giving and receiving that greatest gift of all, an unexpected and novel way of looking at the world – just as my sister did some thirty plus years ago.

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