84, Charing Cross Road (1987)

“It's against my principles to buy a book I haven't read, it's like buying a dress you haven't tried on...”

Anne Bancroft as Helene Hanff: “If you happen to pass by 84, Charing Cross Road, kiss it for me? I owe it so much…”

I wish you hadn't been so over-courteous about putting the inscription on a card instead of on the flyleaf. 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, and reading passages someone long gone has called my attention to.

Letter to Frank Doel, Marks & Co., Helene Hanff, 84, Charing Cross Road.

Here’s a rather wonderful, moving and understated film, based on a rather wonderful, moving and understated book. It’s 84, Charing Cross Road, first published in 1970 by André Deutsch and based on a twenty-year correspondence between writer and Hollywood script-reader Helene Hanff (in New York) and antiquarian bookseller Frank Doel (in London). From 1949 to 1969: an an era that spans two very different worlds. The book is a love affair of sorts: a love letter to English Literature (which, I suspect, will very much appeal to us bookish types on Substack) and also, to some extent, a love letter to London, which Helene explores in her charming sequel, The Duchess of Bloomsbury Street (1973), in which, despite being strapped for cash, she finally manages to visit London, town of her literary dreams.

Helene Hanff, 84, Charing Cross Road, Andre Deutsch, First Edition, 1970.

An Anglophile, Helene Hanff was born in Philadelphia in 1916 to a Jewish family. Her education was more or less autodidactic. Roy Plomley interviewed Helene for the BBC’s Desert Island Discs, and she comes across as a delight: immensely likeable, funny, modest and charming — dry quips modulated in an eloquent voice as smooth as the silk of her patterned bandana. The film, released in 1987, was directed by David Jones, with a screenplay by Hugh Whitemore based on the play adapted from the book by James Roose-Evans. And as Wikipedia, rather pretentiously, puts it: ‘The film has become something of a cult classic among bibliophiles and epistemophiles.’

I'm a fan of both Whitemore and Roose-Evans. Whitemore for his numerous television adaptations: Anthony Powell's Dance to the Music of Time (1997), Daphne du Maurier's My Cousin Rachel (1983) and the BBC Rebecca (1979) starring Jeremy Brett and Joanna David, the 1974 version of David Copperfield, and Fall of Eagles (1974), charting the demise of the European monarchies before and during the First World War. Hugh Whitemore also wrote the screenplay for The Return of the Soldier (1982), based on Rebecca West's novel of 1918: a favourite film and novel we covered last year. I loved James Roose-Evans books as a boy, especially Odd and the Great Bear (1974), which I borrowed over and over again from the local library. From memory, there's an Arthurian element with Merlin, Camelot and the Welsh Mountains. And 84, Charing Cross Road (the film) has the added advantage of Anne Bancroft (as Helene), star of Young Winston (1973), in a memorable casting as Lady Randolph Churchill, and Anthony Hopkins (as Frank Doel), one of our finest actors, who, as ever, puts in an equally elegant and sensitive performance.

‘Anthony Hopkins: an understated and elegant performance…’