GANEIDA'S KNOT.

Go mbeannai Dia duit.

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Quaker by conviction, mother by default, Celticst through love, Christ follower because I once was lost but now am found...

Tuesday, July 5, 2011

How to get an education...

WHAT KIND OF A BLACK PROTESTANT BIBLE IS THIS! Kindly inform the Church of England they have loused up the most beautiful prose even written. Who ever taught Dr. Tindall the Vulgate Latin. They'll burn for it, mark my words. It's nothing to me, I'm Jewish myself, but I have a Catholic sister-in-law, a Methodist sister-in-law, a whole raft of Presbyterian cousins, through my late Uncle Abraham who was converted, and an aunt who's a Christian Science healer. And I'd like to think none of them would countenance an Anglican Latin Bible if they knew it existed. As it happens, they don't know Latin existed. ~Helene Hanff


If books delight the book lover the next best thing is talking books with someone who loves them as much as you do.  So I happen to owe a good bit of my education to a lady I never met, a lady who loved books even more than I do & who happened to have absolutely irreproachable taste.  She acquired all her reading material from a little bookshop at 84 Charing Cross Road ~ & then she delighted the rest of us by sharing her correspondence with this bookshop over the course of 20 years.

If I had to choose just one word to describe Helene Hanff it would be irascible.  She was smart, sharp & witty ~ & she tolerated no fools.  She was also Jewish & American dealing with a very constrained British establishment & her pithy prose is an absolute delight to read. And unlike me she had a love for reality: Pepy's Diaries, Walton's Lives, Newman's University...

I know, the correspondence between an irate Jewish/American writer & a staid British bookseller sounds terribly dull ~ & no doubt it would be if written by anyone else.  Hanff is quirky.  She pays for her books by sending her money through 2 mail systems [without consulting exchange rates], much to Frank Doel's consternation & she is not above abusing the man.

March 25, 1950
Frank Doel, what are you doing over there, you are not doing anything, you are just sitting around...

Where is Leigh Hunt?  Where is the Oxford Verse?  Where is the Vulgate & dear goofy John Henry...?

I require a book of love poems with spring coming on.  No Keats or Shelley, send me poets who can make love without slobbering....

Well, don't just sit there! Go find it! I swear I don't know how that shop keeps going.

For 20 years, through post war rationing when she sends food parcels over, to the psychedelic 60's, Helene bombards Marks & Co with requests for obscure & out of print reading material, always promising that One Day she will visit the London she has fallen in love with from afar. One day....

Ah, you will have to read her book to find out what happened.

5 comments:

Jeanne said...

Yep, Helene and I are great mates as well...

Mommy to three said...

Oh, how I enjoy her! You should read Q's Legacy and any of her other books for that matter. The movie based on this book was a wonderful little gem that I only discovered last year (it stars Anthony Hopkins and Anne Bancroft)

Ganeida said...

Jeanne: of course you are.☺ How could a booklover not love this woman?

Mommy to three: I have read The Duchess of Bloomsbury Street [naturally☺] but have found her other works hard to come by out here. Still, I could always harass an American bookstore. ;P

Anonymous said...

Most fortunately Helene Hanff wrote a number of other equally quirky, idiosyncratic and delightful books. I love her prose and return to her again and again, along with the other Helen(no 'e') (Garner).

Siano

Anonymous said...

Uh, Ganeida, you could also ask me to bring HH's books next time I visit. Sorry I haven't in the past; thought you'd already have read them...

S