by Helene Hanff
The dinner party was at a Hungarian restaurant called Victor’s. Victor is a close friend of André Deutsch, they’re both Hungarian but Victor is more so. He bowed and kissed my hand and told me I was “beautiful” and “Queen of London for a month” and my book was also “beautiful.” I told Deutsch:
“He’s straight out of Molnar.”
And Deutsch looked at me in mild surprise and said:
“Oh, did you know Ferenc?”
No, I didn’t know Ferenc but Deutsch did. If any Molnar fan is still alive and reading this, you pronounce it Ference.
The dinner was in a private upstairs dining room; we paraded up the carpeted stairs, about eight of us, and into a dining room, where a large round table was just jumping with wine glasses and flowers and candles. I sat between Deutsch, very old-world and courtly, and the “distinguished journalist” whose name I didn’t get.
Everybody at dinner was bowled over to learn I was going to meet Joyce Grenfell. I know her as a comedienne in British films but she’s much more famous over here for her one-man shows, which I never saw. She writes all her own material and the show always sells out. So now of course I’m nervous about meeting her.
Over coffee, somebody passed a copy of 84 around the table for all the guests to sign for me. Above the signatures somebody had written a flowery tribute to “an author who combines talent with charm” and sociability with something else, and Deutsch read it and nodded vehemently and signed his name and handed the book to me with a flourish. And Victor read it and said Yes, Yes, it was So! and signed his name (“Your host!”) and kissed my hand again, and dessert was a fancy decorated cake with WELCOME HELENE on it in pink icing.
Got home at midnight, swept into the lobby and informed Mr. Otto and the boys at the desk I am hereafter to be known as the Duchess of Bloomsbury. Or Bloomsbury Street, at least.
The two desk clerks are students from South Africa. One of them has to go back in a few days, and the other advised him conversationally:
“If the police come after you, eat my address.”
Wednesday, June 23
Nora and I were taken to lunch by a rare-book dealer, and over lunch a bizarre story from Nora.
I gather book dealers are as clannish as actors, and the closest friends Frank and Nora had for ten years were a book dealer named Peter Kroger and his wife, Helen. The Doels and Krogers were inseparable despite the fact that the two men were competitors. One New Year’s Eve, the Doels gave a party, and Helen Kroger arrived looking very exotic in a long black evening dress.
“Helen, you look like a Russian spy!” said Nora. And Helen laughed and Peter laughed and a few months later Nora picked up the morning paper and discovered that Helen and Peter Kroger were Russian spies.
“All the journalists came swarming round to the house,” Nora told me, “offering me a couple of thousand quid to tell them about ‘the ring.’ I told them the only ring I knew anything about was my wedding ring.”
She visited the Krogers in prison and Peter asked if she remembered telling Helen she looked like a Russian spy.
“It must have given them a turn,” I said.
“I don’t know,” said Nora. “He just asked if I remembered it. Then we talked about something else.”
She and Frank went to the trial and discovered that everything the Krogers had told them about their past lives had been invented. I asked if this bothered her, Nora said No, she understood it.
“They were the best friends we ever had,” she said. “They were fine people, lovely people. It was all political, I s’pose they had their reasons.”
A year later the Krogers were exchanged for a British spy held by the Russians. They live in Poland now. Helen and Nora still write to each other at Christmas.
Phoned Joyce Grenfell at dinner time, told her what movies I’d seen her in and she said:
“Then you’ll know me, I’m the one with the bangs.” I’m to meet them for dinner Monday at the Waldorf, which is next door to the theater.
Thursday, June 24
I finally got a day to myself and did the Regent’s Park area on foot. Walked around the Nash Crescent twenty or thirty times, saw the house on Wimpole Street where Robert Browning came to call on Elizabeth, walked Harley Street—and also Devonshire Street, Devonshire Place, Devonshire Mews, Devonshire Close and Devonshire Mews Close, this is a lovely city.
There was a note at the desk for me when I came back. No salutation.
Can you be here at twelve noon sharp on Saturday? We are driving down to Windsor and Eton and have rather a lot to do.
In haste—
P.B.
We are driving down to Windsor and Eton. Me, this is.
I love the way he never uses a salutation. It always aggravates me, when I’m writing to some telephone-company supervisor or insurance man, to have to begin with “Dear Sir” when he and I both know nobody on earth is less dear to me.
I’m writing this in the Kenilworth Lounge. Not to be confused with the Kenilworth TV Room, where everybody sits bolt upright on little straight chairs in total darkness staring at some situation comedy. The Lounge is just off the lobby. It’s a pleasant room with easy chairs and a sofa, but if you want to write in your journal you have to slither an eye around the door before entering. If there’s a woman alone in here she’s looking for somebody to talk to. If there are two women already talking, they’re gracious and friendly enough to include you in the conversation, and you can’t decline to be included without seeming ungracious and unfriendly.
Tonight when I came in there was only a man at the desk writing letters, he just left. He asked me for a light, and when he heard my American accent he told me he’d lived in New York for a year.
“And then one day I was walking down Fifth Avenue with an American friend and I said to him: ‘Why are you running?’ And he said: ‘I’m not running!’ And then I knew it was time to come home.”
People here ask you for “a light” only if you’re smoking and they can light their cigarette from yours. Nobody would dream of asking you for a match, it would be like asking you for money. Matches are not free over here. There are none in ashtrays in hotel lobbies and none on restaurant tables. You have to buy them at the store, I suppose they’re imported and too expensive to fling around the way they’re flung around at home.
A lady just came in, she asked Am I the writer? she heard about me at the desk. She lives in Kent, she doesn’t care for London, she’s here because her brother’s in the hospital here but at least she’s seeing a bit of Bloomsbury, he just won’t hear of her staying in the room all day, so this afternoon she went out to the Dickens House in Doughty Street, have I been there?
She wants to talk so we’ll talk.
Friday, June 25
I got the first week’s hotel bill this morning, much steeper than I’d anticipated, what with assorted lunches and dinners and a 12 per cent surcharge added for tips. I just took it up the street to Deutsch’s, to Mr. Tammer, their accountant. He’s a solemn, bespectacled gentleman who gives you a sudden warm smile when you say hello to him. He’s got all my “advance” money in cash in the office safe and he’s doling it out to me weekly. He gave me cash to pay the hotel bill and ten pounds, which is my Allowance for the week; when I run short I dip into my brother’s hundred. I had ten of the hundred with me for him to change into pounds, and he got out all his charts and machines and figured the latest exchange rate very tensely and meticulously, God forbid he should cheat me out of fifteen cents.
There was a letter for me at Deutsch’s which intrigues me, it’s from a man I never knew existed. Nobody I corresponded with at Marks & Co. ever mentioned him.
Dear Miss Hanff,
I am the son of the late Ben Marks of Marks & Co. and want you to know how delighted I am that you are here, and how very much my wife and I would like you to dine with us.
I do not know where you are staying so could you please ring me at the above telephone numbers? The second one is a
n answering service and any message left there will reach me.
We’re both looking forward to meeting you.
Sincerely,
Leo Marks
The secretary who gave me the letter told me he called and asked where he could reach me.
“But we never tell anyone where you’re staying,” she said. “We just ask them to get in touch with you through us.”
I took a very dim view of this and went into Carmen’s office to straighten it out.
“Carmen, dear,” I said, “I am not the kind of author who wants to be protected from her public. Any fan who phones might want to feed me, and I am totally available as a dinner guest. Just give out my address all over.”
She said there are at least two interviews to come and she’ll make them both over lunch. Some interviewer asked me if I planned “to buy silver and cashmere here—or just books?” I said I planned to buy nothing over here, everything I see in a shop window has a price tag reading “One Day Less in London.”
Off to Parliament.
Midnight
I’VE BEEN TO THE OLD VIC, shades of my stage-struck youth, walking into that theater was a thrill. Nora and Sheila and I saw Mrs. Warren’s Profession. The theater has the atmosphere of the old Met in New York and the Academy of Music in Philadelphia; the audience files in with a kind of festive reverence, like people going to church on Christmas Eve.
Sheila had trouble parking the car, she got to the theater three minutes after the curtain was up and was promptly shunted off downstairs to the lounge to watch the first act on closed-circuit TV, you do not trail down the aisle after Mass has started.
I’ll never understand why they did Mrs. Warren’s Profession in turn-of-the-century costumes. Politicians and businessmen don’t own whorehouses any more? Poor girls are not expected to starve virtuously rather than eat unvirtuously any more? Moral pillars of society don’t keep mistresses in country cottages any more? Who does such a play as a costume piece belonging to some other era? Bernie Shaw would have a fit.
I asked Nora about Leo Marks, she said she only met him and his wife a few times but “they seemed a nice young couple.” She said he’s a writer.
I’m sitting here eating vitamin C, think I’m getting a cold. Tried reading Mary Baker Eddy once, should’ve stuck with it.
Saturday, June 26
It finally turned sunny and warm, thank God, so I could wear a skirt for PB. (Headline in the newspaper read ENGLAND SWELTERS IN 75-DEGREE HEAT.) Wore my brown linen skirt and the new white blazer, and he beamed and said, “You look charming,” and asked if the brown-and-white scarf came from Harrods. (I borrowed it off the cocktail dress.)
He said as we drove that we wouldn’t be able to go through Windsor Castle after all, “the Queen’s in residence,” but we would stop at Windsor for sherry with two elderly sisters, he thought I’d find them and their house delightful.
On the way to Windsor there’s a Home for Tired Horses. Their owners visit them on Sundays and bring them cream buns.
Windsor is full of casual anachronisms. The sisters live on a seventeenth-century street in one of a row of Queen Anne houses, each with a car parked at the curb and a TV antenna sticking out of the roof. PB parked at the back of the house by the rose garden and we were met there by the dominant sister, who cut a pink rose for me to wear and took us into the house and along a narrow old-fashioned hall to the living room, where the shy sister met us. The shy sister poured sherry and both of them regretfully informed PB that their ghost had gone.
The ghost was living in the house when they bought it twenty years ago and he stayed on. He was very quiet and no trouble most of the time. But he liked the house to be lived in, he liked people about; and every time the sisters packed up for a trip and made arrangements to close the house, the ghost went berserk with fury. Pictures were knocked off the walls, wine glasses went hurtling off the sideboard and broke, lamps crashed to the floor, pots and pans went clattering and banging round the kitchen all night long. The rampage lasted till the sisters left for their holiday. For twenty years, this happened every time they went up to London during the season or into the country or abroad. This year, for the first time, the sisters made plans to go away, they packed for the trip—and the house remained silent. The pictures and wine glasses and lamps were undisturbed, the kitchen was quiet, the ghost had gone. The sisters were rather sad about it, they’d got fond of him.
One of the sisters took me up to the top-floor bathroom to look out the window. They run up there to see whether the Queen has arrived. From the bathroom window you can see the Windsor Castle flagpole. If the Queen’s in residence the flag is flying.
They apologized for not giving us lunch, they were going to watch Philip play polo.
PB and I picnicked on the Windsor lawn. He (or the daily) had packed a basket with three kinds of sandwiches, a thermos of iced tea, peaches and cookies—and after-dinner mints, I love him to death, there’s an Edwardian finishing touch to everything he does. Like the china ashtray he keeps on the front ledge of his car, he obviously doesn’t care for the tin one that comes built in.
There’s a footbridge connecting Windsor and Eton. PB wore his Eton tie, and the gate keeper saw it and said, “You’re an Eton man, sir!” and let us into rooms not open to tourists.
If you’re born in the U.S. with a yearning love of classical scholarship and no college education, you are awed by a school in which for centuries boys have learned to read and write Greek and Latin fluently by the time they’re in their teens. PB took me into the original classroom, five hundred years old, and made me sit at one of the desks. They’re dark, heavy oak, thickly covered with boys’ initials scratched into the wood with pocket knives. Five hundred years’ worth of boys’ initials is something to see.
We went into the chapel where the senior boys worship, there’s a roll book hanging from the aisle pew of each row so that every boy’s presence can be checked off by a monitor. We read the names in one—“Harris Major. Harris Minor. Harris Tertius”—Eton never does in English what it can do in Latin.
Along the hall outside the classrooms the high oak walls have names cut into them as thickly as the initials in the desks. PB told me when a boy graduates he pays a few shillings to the college to have his name carved in the wall. We saw Pitt’s name and Shelley’s (and PB showed me his own). You could spend a month crawling up and down the walls looking for names.
Heart-rending plaques to Eton’s war dead. One family lost eight men in World War I, seven of them in their twenties. The Grenfells (Joyce Grenfell’s husband’s family) lost grandfather, father and one son—and six men in the Boer War a dozen years earlier.
We went outside and saw the playing fields where all those wars were supposedly won. Boys were playing cricket, a few strolled by swinging tennis rackets. On Saturdays the boys are allowed to wear ordinary sports clothes but we saw several in the Eton uniform: black tail coat, white shirt, striped trousers. PB says they don’t wear the top hat any more except on state occasions. (Those top hats kept the boys out of trouble. If an Eton boy tried to sneak into an off-limits pub or movie, the manager could spot that top hat from anywhere in the house and throw him out.)
The faces of the boys are unbelievably clean and chiseled and beautiful. And the tail coats—which must have looked outlandish in the 1940’s and 50’s—look marvelously appropriate with the long hair the boys wear now. What with the cameo faces, the long hair brushed to a gleam and perfectly cut tails, they looked like improbable Edwardian princes.
We drove back to London at four; PB wanted to take me through Marlborough House and it closes at five. We drove to Marlborough House but couldn’t go through it, the guard explained the house is closed for cleaning. The Royal Chapel is open, and PB told me to go to services there one Sunday. He said it’s never crowded or touristy since few people know it’s open to the public. Queen Mary was married there, so I’m going, out of affection for her and Pope-Hennessy.
Later
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Laura Davidson just phoned from Oxford. She wrote me a fan letter telling me her husband, a Swarthmore professor, was working at Balliol for a year and that they and their fifteen-year-old son were fans of the book and wanted me to come to Oxford. I wrote back and told her when I was coming to London and she actually rescheduled a Paris vacation just so she’d be in Oxford when I came. When I picked up the phone just now and said hello, she said:
“Hi, it’s Laura Davidson, how are you, when are you coming to Oxford? My son is dying of suspense.”
We settled on next Friday. She said there are trains almost every hour, call and let her know which one I’m on and she’ll meet it. She’ll carry the book so I’ll know her.
I’m paranoid enough about traveling when I’m home and healthy, and the prospect of strange railroad stations and train trips over here kind of wears me out. But Oxford I have to see. There’s one suite of freshman’s rooms at Trinity College which John Donne, John Henry Newman and Arthur Quiller-Couch all lived in, in various long-gone eras. Whatever I know about writing English those three men taught me, and before I die I want to stand in their freshman’s rooms and call their names blessed.
Q (Quiller-Couch) was all by himself my college education. I went down to the public library one day when I was seventeen looking for books on the art of writing, and found five books of lectures which Q had delivered to his students of writing at Cambridge.
“Just what I need!” I congratulated myself. I hurried home with the first volume and started reading and got to page 3 and hit a snag:
Q was lecturing to young men educated at Eton and Harrow. He therefore assumed that his students—including me—had read Paradise Lost as a matter of course and would understand his analysis of the “Invocation to Light” in Book 9. So I said, “Wait here,” and went down to the library and got Paradise Lost and took it home and started reading it and got to page 3, when I hit a snag: