Two Bossy Dames: Distant Communion

Hello, friends. I am officially over being socially distant AND YET we could have months more of this ahead of us.

We Are All Javert Now.

I am extremely lucky: I am employed full-time at a job that delights and challenges me. I have roommates whose company I actively enjoy. My friends and loved ones are safe, healthy, and (mostly) still employed, but we still have time to be heartily in touch by text and phone and Zoom. Many of those friendships have always been long-distance, so not being able to see people is not even that much of a change. I do not have stir-crazy children to look after or a partner I am slowly realizing I hate constantly underfoot. When the whole has not been shut down by a global pandemic, I typically run around so much that being press ganged into homebody life for a stretch has, honestly, felt nice. I am using my record player constantly. I am cleaning my room, even the clutter corners I normally don’t exist. I am… aspiring with sincere intent to hang up more art. I’m cooking (sometimes). I’m making my own cocktails (CONSTANTLY). There is a lot in my life to enjoy and I am intensely grateful about all of it.

And yet.

And FUCKING yet. 

I miss everything. I want to sit at the end of a bar pretending to read but actually eavesdrop on strangers. I want to sit in a dark movie theater and watch something utterly transporting. I want to browse my local library and serendipitously discover a book I hadn’t realized I was desperate to read. I watch my friends’ Instagram Stories hungrily, inhaling footage of their babies and toddlers and kids and teenagers like it’s a drug— delighting in their antics and feeling palpable yearning to ruffle a silken hair, gnaw upon a sumptuous cheek, or embrace a newly-lanky frame. I think about how much they will have changed by the time I next see any of them. I would like to kiss… honestly anyone. Maybe everyone? Watch this space for further updates— social iso-longing is really doing a number on me. I WOULD LIKE TO HUG MY MOTHER rather than waving at her from 6-feet-away as I complete contact-free grocery deliveries. And I won’t be able to do any of that for who the FUCK knows how much longer. 

It is a luxury to worry about things this small. It is a luxury to worry about abnormal because it means I do not yet have to contend with devastating. I know that and I am thankful to have concerns this petty. But. But. Even petty concerns can be crushing when there’s no way to know how long they’ll last.

All of which brings me to today’s recommendation, mentioned a few times in this newsletter before, but freshly pertinent right now: Helene Hanff’s memoir-in-letters 84 Charing Cross Road. This book is very short— not even 100 pages long, and scant few of those pages truly full of text— so reading (or re-reading) it is the work of an afternoon. According to the annotations in my copy, it took me days, but only because I read it while I was (gasp) at work— I started it behind my old library’s circulation desk and ended up so engrossed that I finished it at the circulation desk.

In my defense: the library was *really* quiet in the evenings.

The book consists, simply, of twenty years worth of letters— spanning from 1949 to 1969— between Helene Hanff, a self-described “poor writer with an antiquarian taste in books” who lives in New York and the staff of Marks & Co, the secondhand bookshop at 84 Charing Cross Rd., London, to whom she turns, initially, for “clean secondhand copies” of her “most pressing concerns” and then, increasingly and mutually, for friendship. 

In addition to being a testament to how close people can become without ever seeing one another in real life, so many other small details feel especially apt to right now. Helene is not under quarantine, but she spends the 20 years in question so broke that you rarely ever read about her leaving her apartment. When Frank Doel, the scrupulous head clerk of Marks & Co who is Helene’s chief correspondent, urges her to get a postal money order instead of simply sending loose dollar bills to the shop in envelopes, Helene refuses, pointing out that if she goes all the way down to Rockefeller Plaza to stand in line for a $3.88 money order, she won’t have the $3.88 any more by the time she gets there. Even her living arrangements are relatable:

I live in moth-eaten sweaters and wool slacks, they don’t give us any heat here in the daytime. It’s a 5-story brownstone and all the other tenants go out to work at 9 A.M. and don’t come home until 6— why would the landlord heat the building for one small script-reader/writer working at home on the ground floor? 

When the letters begin, Britain is still under strict food rationing, so one of the first bits of friendly escalation comes when Helene sends the staff a Christmas gift of real eggs and a 6-pound ham— a very quarantined version of kindness. In short, it all feels familiar in the material details, but without the oppressive sense of impending doom that suffuses our every waking moment presently.

When I last wrote about this book, I said “I have a hard time imagining anyone who likes our newsletter failing to adore it,” and I stand by that statement with all my heart. Moreover,  stand by my further recommendation: if you have read Charing Cross Road, but not delved further into Hanff’s work, please try her proper memoir, Underfoot in Show Business. In fact, if I had a Marks & Co. of my own, I would write to see if they could find me a clean, affordable, secondhand copy of the original 1961 edition I first borrowed from the library. It’s the only edition I can find that had little cartoon illustrations and, the thing is, I still have a crush on the one I remember of Tom Goethals, the “six-feet-four, lean, and shy-looking” Harvard graduate who volunteers to teach Helene Latin and Greek for free. I’m pretty sure it’s the social iso-longing again, but even typing the description of him is making me blush. It’s not worth $125 for me to see it again— yet. But talk to me in three weeks and we’ll see where I’m at.

Hopefully, Helene is the same balm for you she’s been for me. I hope that every concern pressing upon you at present is as petty as possible and that, petty or not, the distant communion we share through this newsletter makes bearing all the rest of this a little easier for you. I know it does for me.

XO/Dame M.