A liberal voice
Sunday, September 26, 2004
The double serindipity that I threatened to refer to involves a book by Helene Hanff.
When I used to work at a branch of Waterstones - on the Charing Cross Road - a book that was much in demand was Hanff's '84 Charing Cross Road'. This coincided with the height of my book snobbery so there was no way I was going to read it myself. I was ignorant of the content of the book but somewhere I imagined it as a sort of love story in letters, with a naive and simple American being put straight on things by a British bookseller.
A little off the mark, as it transpires.
In the Oxfam book shop I found another Hanff - "Q's Legacy". I picked it up out of interest partly because I knew so little about Hanff that I wasn't aware she had written another book. From the blurb alone I was driven to read the first few pages and leaned against the biography shelves as I read.
Her first pages immediately made us friends. They tell of how she came across Quiller-Couch's essays and used him to guide her to more books. That was ger serendipity echoing my own and my beliefs in its efficacy.
It is a sad book in many ways because it is a book about loneliness. There are rumours that Hanff had a long and passionalte affair with an important American writer during many of the years covered by the book but she writes primarily as a loner, cherishing her books and her own company. Money was obviously always a problem, too. The saddedst thing, of course, is that she never met her correspondent at 84 Charing Cross Road. She delayed travelling to London for many reasons and when at last she could go, Frank was dead.
But the most rewarding thing about reading this book - and what reminds me of E B White's essays - is that it alerts you to the presence of a liberal and humanist strand in American thought that is mostly buried these days. Perhaps it is there but its current emanations tend to take the form of the rather crude satire of Michael Moore. We need to be reminded more forcefully in Europe that those who support Bush are not in the majority and that America is so much more than the rabid fundamentalism of the neocons and their hate-filled small-mindedness. Tolerance and humour existed and the rest of the world was seen as a source of knowledge and experience not as something to be sneered at, feared, or treated with distrust or disdain.
E B White and Helene Hanff are both dead and they didn't live to see what the US has become and how it is feared and loathed around the world in equal measure. It is a country they may not have recognised.
When I used to work at a branch of Waterstones - on the Charing Cross Road - a book that was much in demand was Hanff's '84 Charing Cross Road'. This coincided with the height of my book snobbery so there was no way I was going to read it myself. I was ignorant of the content of the book but somewhere I imagined it as a sort of love story in letters, with a naive and simple American being put straight on things by a British bookseller.
A little off the mark, as it transpires.
In the Oxfam book shop I found another Hanff - "Q's Legacy". I picked it up out of interest partly because I knew so little about Hanff that I wasn't aware she had written another book. From the blurb alone I was driven to read the first few pages and leaned against the biography shelves as I read.
Her first pages immediately made us friends. They tell of how she came across Quiller-Couch's essays and used him to guide her to more books. That was ger serendipity echoing my own and my beliefs in its efficacy.
It is a sad book in many ways because it is a book about loneliness. There are rumours that Hanff had a long and passionalte affair with an important American writer during many of the years covered by the book but she writes primarily as a loner, cherishing her books and her own company. Money was obviously always a problem, too. The saddedst thing, of course, is that she never met her correspondent at 84 Charing Cross Road. She delayed travelling to London for many reasons and when at last she could go, Frank was dead.
But the most rewarding thing about reading this book - and what reminds me of E B White's essays - is that it alerts you to the presence of a liberal and humanist strand in American thought that is mostly buried these days. Perhaps it is there but its current emanations tend to take the form of the rather crude satire of Michael Moore. We need to be reminded more forcefully in Europe that those who support Bush are not in the majority and that America is so much more than the rabid fundamentalism of the neocons and their hate-filled small-mindedness. Tolerance and humour existed and the rest of the world was seen as a source of knowledge and experience not as something to be sneered at, feared, or treated with distrust or disdain.
E B White and Helene Hanff are both dead and they didn't live to see what the US has become and how it is feared and loathed around the world in equal measure. It is a country they may not have recognised.
