A life, in writing

Today is Helene Hanff's birthday. She would have been 91 and probably on her second martini by now.

I first met Helene in 1997, about 2 months after she died. She literally fell on me. It was the end of the day, and I was shelving my last cart of books in the 400 section - languages, for those unfamiliar with the increasingly archaic Dewey Decimal System. The stacks were taller than me, and as I reached up to make room on the already packed shelf, one of the books came loose, hitting me smack in the forehead. It was a slim paperback, old and dusty, the spine held together with clear tape.

Working in a library is monotonous, even on a good day. (On a really exceptional day, the police show up and arrest the local flasher, but that's an entirely different story.) More often than not, I gave in to the distraction of browsing through random books whose covers intrigued me. Generally I preferred the 100s (philosophy & psychology) and 200s (religion) because they had the books about serial killers and astrology, respectively. On this particular day, I was looking to procrastinate before I started to work in the 500s (science - not as fun as deviants and multiple homicide), so I picked up the little book that escaped from the shelf and started flipping through it. It was 84, Charing Cross Road.

It's a simple thing on the surface - the book is a collection of letters, and it's barely 100 pages. Helene Hanff was a struggling writer in 1940s New York City who wrote to the Marks & Co. bookseller in London with regards to finding cheap copies of obscure or out-of-print books. The correspondence eventually lasts 20 years, until Frank Doel, the store's manager and her intellectual soulmate, passes away. They never met face-to-face. As I sat on the floor of the 400s, I felt the burning of impending tears as I finished the last letter, from Helene to her friends on their imminent departure to London - a place she has dreamt of since she was a little girl and is yet to go: "If you happen to pass by 84 Charing Cross Road, kiss it for me? I owe it so much."

On Easter Sunday in 1998, I did exactly that, feeling the same sense of pilgrimage that I'm sure Helene felt on her first trip to London. It was a bright but bitterly cold day. I walked through Trafalgar Square to Charing Cross Road. The street is winding and narrow with a seemingly never-ending stream of second-hand bookstores and other unglamorous retail. Two older English ladies asked me if I was lost. I sheepishly told them the address I was looking for.

"Oh, the bookstore," one of them said and smiled. "It's just another block. It's still there, don't worry."

It was still there, barely. Empty and all but boarded up. The address was painted in simple, stark white letters. But just above eye level, implanted into the brick, there was a plaque: "84, Charing Cross Road. The booksellers Marks & Co. were on this site which became world-renowned through the book by Helene Hanff."

When I went back five years later, the storefront was gone. In its place was a Pizza Hut. I like to think that they hung the plaque somewhere behind the register, in between the posters for Stuffed Crust Pizza and Cinnastix, but I really couldn't bring myself to go in and find out. Some things are just too heartbreaking to confront directly.

Eventually, 84, Charing Cross Road was made into a Broadway play and a movie, which is pretty amazing for the fact that the letters were never intended to be published at all.

"I never stop being awed by the incredible things that happen to me," she wrote later.

After reading 84, I tracked down everything Helene had ever written, which amounted to another four books and a handful of magazine articles. I felt an intense kinship with her immediately. Not only did she, like me, have an almost giggly affection for all things English, she came to New York with the idea that she would be a playwright. I spend an ungodly amount of money on an education to be a filmmaker. Also like me, she was outstandingly bad at it. So spectacularly inept, in fact, that it was enough to fill her first memoir, Underfoot In Show Business. She managed to write about the business of being a bad writer in such a way that it made me wonder why anyone in their right mind would want to write plays for a living. Writing about not being a very good playwright was so much more intriguing. Writing about life in general began to fascinate me.

Helene was born in Philadelphia, but she's always been my favorite New Yorker. My first apartment on the Upper East Side was only nine blocks from where she lived most of her adult life. I used to walk down 72nd Street on summer afternoons, passing her building and feeling as though I was living a parallel life in many ways. I envied the way she had been able to translate her seemingly ordinary experiences into stories - Letter From New York was a collection of her scripts from the BBC Women's Hour radio broadcast. She had been given 15 minutes every month to capture a snapshot of life in New York City for the English listening audience who simply couldn't imagine real people living in such tall buildings. She was tasked with humanizing an entire city.

Helene gave me a lot of things, not the least of which was an unwavering belief that real life could be made funny or heartbreaking or compelling all in the way the story was told. She showed me the kind of writer that I want to be.

"I wrote my life." She says it almost as though it was a realization that genuinely surprised her. She wrote a lot of things: plays, TV scripts, children's books, letters. But her best writing really came in the way she described her neighbors and their dogs, the difficulty in hosting Thanksgiving dinner in a studio apartment, and how it feels to take the elevator to the top of the Empire State Building when you're deathly afraid of heights. I imagine she was every bit in person the way she was in print - short-tempered, funny, unpretentious. One of my great sorrows in life was that I couldn't be one of the people she took tea with in the lobby of her building. She was continually amazed that people wanted to meet her at all.

In her last book, she begins with her accidental introduction to the work of Sir Arthur Quiller-Couch, who was responsible for much of her love of English literature: "Q and I first met on a summer morning when I was 18, at the main branch of the Philadelphia Public Library where I'd gone in search of a teacher."

Sometimes the teacher finds you. Sometimes she hits you right smack in the face when you're finishing up your cart of 400s. How fitting.