The Invisible Gate
Constance Beresford-Howe
New York: Dodd, Mead, 1949
241 pages
I met Constance Beresford-Howe at the 1991 opening of a Toronto bookstore. She was sixty-nine at the time. I thought she was much older. This had less to do with appearance as bibliography. Her debut novel,
The Unreasoning Heart, had been published a full forty-five years earlier. What I didn't know was that she'd been a 23-year-old McGill undergraduate at the time.
Of This Day's Journey, her second novel, was published the following year while she was writing her Masters thesis. Constance Beresford-Howe was working on her PhD at Brown when
The Invisible Gate hit bookstores.
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| The Montreal Gazette, 19 November 1949 |
Looking back on old posts, I see that I didn't think much of her first novel, thought better of her second, and predicted that I'd like the third even more.
That prediction proved correct.
The Invisible Gate is set in Montreal. It begins with protagonist Hannah Jackson stepping off a city bus and walking home through Notre Dame de Grace Park. The month being November, she notes the bare trees though her mind is on local boy Will Ames. The year being 1945, Will is on his way home from Europe. His most recent letter estimated the would arrive on Sunday:
"I've thought of you so often, Hannah, these last few months. It may seem funny to you after we've been friends for so long. But I think of you differently now than ever before. It's taken three years of war and three thousand miles to show me; but if you'll let me, I want to talk pretty seriously when I get home, about marriage."
Hannah is returning from her work at a law office. Her home is a bit of a wreck, but she does what she can:
Mother and father, poor lambs, couldn't help dying – they hated leaving me with the kids. And I hated it, too. Fourteen is no age for that responsibility. Those brats, John and Pen, and Laurel, so delicate. Aunt Marge may have been our guardian, but she was so twitter-brained! It was me that worried all the time over shoes and bills and report cards, me who sat up nights with croup, me that whaled Pen for stealing... it made me old... old at twenty... older now at twenty-eight, and I'll never be young again. And John ... buried in Africa now; joined up just when he was beginning to be a real brother, and left me with nothing but his baby...sweet old Fan!
Quite the info dump.
Now a toddler, Fan is a delightful handful. Her mother, John's widow, didn't stick around long before decamping to California. Fifteen-year-old Pen hangs around with a tough crowd, but is otherwise reformed. He does what he can to support the household. Not so twenty-year-old-sister Laurel. Willowy, gorgeous, fragile, and blonde, she's fallen in with a crowd of artistic types.
Returning to Hannah, did you not sense a lack of passion in Will's letter? He arrives earlier than expected accompanied by Noel Carter. The two had bonded during the Blitz. Noel is tall, dark and close to handsome. English-born, his parents divorced when he was a tot. As neither wanted him, Noel was sent to an aunt in Montreal. She didn't want him either. As soon as Noel turned seven, he was sent to a Toronto boarding school. "Let me add that I richly deserved it," Noel tells Hannah, "and have led a thoroughly bad life ever since."
Noel is slightly taller, slightly older, and much more self assured than Will. As a very young man, he'd moved to New York with aspirations of becoming a serious novelist. After his first novel received its first rejection, he threw it and all other literary writing in the fire, then dove into the commercial. Noel made good money dashing off scripts for the radio serial Joanna Miller, Small-town Girl. During the war he was awarded the Military Cross, the DSO, and a half-dozen other medals, achieving the rank of major.
But what of Will?
We learn more about Noel's backstory in that early scene than we do Will's. In fact, we never do know much of Will's history, the suggestion being that there isn't much worth noting.
By the end of the evening, Noel has moved into the room of dead brother John, hotel rooms being hard to come by. I was worried about scandal – a man rooming in a house with two unmarried women – but that fear proved unfounded.
Remember Will wanting to "talk pretty seriously" about marriage when he gets home? Well, it takes him a while to get around to it. After three years of war, he feels a need to acclimatize. Not so, nearly-handsome Noel. He's a go-getter. When Will declines the offer of a job in the bond market, Noel picks it up. Next thing you now, he's bought a new car, yet still keeps his room in the Jackson house.
I had a sense of where this was heading and expect you do, too.
Proven correct, my initial reaction to The Invisible Gate was that it wasn't quite up to Constance Beresford-Howe's previous efforts, but then scenes began to haunt. Hannah's lunchtime meeting with Noel is one of the most uncomfortable I've encountered. Noel's later confrontation with Hannah in her home's basement laundry room is another. I'm sure that this latter scene would've been even more powerful had it been for the self-censorship of the time.
The Invisible Gate was better than The Unreasoning Heart and Of This Days Journey because at age twenty-six she had become a better, more mature writer, even if the plot is just as unimaginative.
I must admit that the reason I prefer this to her two previous efforts is personal. The novel made me nostalgic for Notre Dame de Grace – NDG – where I lived many years as a young man.
Though fleeting, I enjoyed the depiction of Montreal's nightlife, something rarely seen outside the novels of David Montrose, Douglas Sanderson, the early pulps of Brian Moore, and the non-fiction of William Weintraub. Constance Beresford-Howe is the first woman I've read to write about Montreal as a sin city.
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| The corner of Sherbrooke and Girouard, 1941. |
And then there's my late mother. She grew up on Old Orchard Avenue. She would've stepped off a city bus hundreds of times, then walked home through NDG Park. Like Hannah Jackson, she would've gazed at the bare trees of November 1945.
Dedication:
Constance Beresford-Howe's father was born in 1890 in Calcutta. The 25 July 1958 edition of the
Westmount Examiner informs that he was educated at Cheltinham College, the London School of Economics, and the Tilley School of Languages in Germany before his 1913 immigration to Canada. Once here, he studied at McGill, met his wife Marjorie, and found long employ as an insurance agent with North American Life.
His end, not at all peaceful, came nine years after The Invisible Gate was published.
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| The Westmount Examiner, 25 July 1958 |
Bloomer:
"I suppose she's gone off somewhere tonight with her musician friends, and didn't tell me because she knows I think they're queer and drink too much."
Trivia: Will informs Hannah that he will be home early because Noel managed to "double-talk" a Ferry Command pilot into transporting them to Gander aboard a LC-4. "We had to crouch eight hours among a lot of packing cases in the tail, but it was worth it," says Will.
The LC-4 was built by Kansas-based Buckley Aircraft Company in 1930. Number produced: 1. The author may have been thinking of the Douglas DC-4.
Trivia (personal): The Beresford-Howes – Russell, Marjorie, daughter Constance, and son John, – lived in Montreal at 2063 Marlowe Avenue. According to the 1931 census, the family had a live-in domestic named Noella Cadieux.
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| 2063 Marlowe Avenue (left door, bottom flat) in October 2020. |
I was born at the Queen Elizabeth Hospital, 2100 Marlowe, which is on the very same block!
About the author: Having be part of the committee responsible for he Constance Beresford-Howe plaque, I thought I knew a lot about the author, but I had no idea as to her weight at birth.
The bio errs with "
The Invisible Gate, like her previous novels, is laid in her native Montreal." Beresford-Howe's first novel,
The Unreasoning Heart, is set in the city, but her second,
Of This Day's Journey, takes place at a college somewhere in New England.
The Invisible Gate was her third novel.
Object and Access: A slim hardcover with black boards, the jacket-less copy I read was bought several years back in Toronto as part of a lot. It was once property of Wellington Consolidated Schools, which I assume to have been a school board that once existed in and about Wellington County in Southwestern Ontario. It has since been replaced in my dusty bookcase by a copy with dust jacket I happened upon earlier this month.
It would appear that the Dodd, Mead edition enjoyed nothing more than a single printing. A UK edition was published three years later by Hammond. Was it also a single printing? I ask because I've found two different dust jackets.
As I write, one copy of the Dodd, Mead edition is listed for sale online. With no jacket, it's going for US$40.00. Shipping to Canada will set you back even more.
I'm interested in the first UK edition, published in 1952 by Hammond. As far as I can tell, it enjoyed just one printing, yet appears to have had two very different dust jackets. Sadly, neither is currently listed for sale online.
