CBR 17 BINGO: School, because Helene has Trinity and Oriel Colleges in Oxford on her must-see list and has a hissy fit when she almost doesn’t get to see them
BINGO: School, Diaspora, G, Border, Work
One of the surprising benefits of stumbling upon a beautiful, used copy of 84, Charing Cross Road is that it prompted me to read Helene Hanff’s follow-up memoir, The Duchess of Bloomsbury Street.
I hadn’t known this book existed until very recently. Apparently, after 84, Charing Cross Road was published in England, Hanff became a minor celebrity. She traveled to London in 1973 to promote the book, parlaying it into a 5-week adventure where she was feted by friends and strangers alike. While the book’s fanbase may have been relatively small, they were an enthusiastic bunch. Hanff writes, “84, Charing Cross Road was no bestseller, you understand; it didn’t make me rich or famous. It just got me hundreds of letters and phone calls from people I never knew existed; it got me wonderful reviews; it restored a self-confidence and self-esteem I’d lost somewhere along the way, God knows how many years ago. It brought me to England. It changed my life.”
In addition to doing book signings and photo ops at the former site of the famous bookshop (it had closed by this time), Hanff meets Nora and Sheila Doel, the widow and daughter of her friend Frank. On top of that, everyone Hanff has ever known who has a connection with someone in England hooks her up, so that she finds herself being toured through the country on a literary pilgrimage. She visits a pub that Shakespeare frequented (she admits that she’s not much for the typical “birthplace” sites, but she gets pretty chuffed upon leaning her head against a wall where Will may have rested his own pate); she attends a sold-out-impossible-to-get-tickets-to performance of A Midsummer Night’s Dream; she sees the churchyard of Thomas Gray’s “Elegy,” her mother’s favorite poem. She receives so many invitations to parties and dinners that she jokingly dubs herself the “Duchess of Bloomsbury Street,” Bloomsbury being the location of the Kenilworth Hotel where she’s staying.
Hanff is mostly a perfect guest throughout her stay, even while her New York attitude and humor shine through. At one point she can’t stop herself from showing a bartender how to make a proper gin martini (“MORE gin?”), and she nearly loses it after a day of being toured through Oxford and Cambridge. Her guides disregard her requests to see Oriel and Trinity Colleges, thinking she couldn’t possibly want to see those sites when there are so many other more interesting places to visit. She does, in fact, want to see those sites, because “John Henry Newman, who taught Anglican theology at Oriel College and died a Catholic cardinal and was cracked in many ways but who wrote English like few men on God’s green earth ever wrote English, one of the few being John Donne, and they both went to Trinity-Oxford. . . .” The well-meaning escorts drive her to distraction until she finally hollers, “WHEN ARE WE GONNA SEE SOMETHING I WANT TO SEE?” God, I wish I could sit down for a gin martini with this woman, and I don’t even drink martinis.
As her whirlwind adventure through England winds down, Hanff teases herself, “Next week the ball will be over and Cinderella will be back at the pots and pans and typewriter in an old pair of jeans and a hand-me-down T-shirt, same as always.” I’m joyful that this writer who brought so much joy to others had this fairy-tale-like experience, where she was Duchess for a short while. As one of her devoted fans, I almost feel like I was there with her. Hanff died in 1997, but like those of John Henry Newman and John Donne, her words will always be with us.