▼

11 March 2024

Destination: Montreal



Of This Day's Journey
Constance Beresford-Howe
New York: Dodd, Mead, 1947
240 pages

A second novel, Of This Day's Journey followed the author's debut by a little over a year, during which she earned her MA and had begun work on a PhD. Beresford-Howe was all of twenty-four years old when it was published.

Camilla "Cam" Brant, the novel's protagonist, is also all of twenty-four. The earliest pages take place as she's preparing to leave Blake University, somewhere in New England, for her Montreal home. Cam had been hired a year earlier as a seasonal lecturer in English and has been living with the wonderfully-named Olive Pymson, spinster secretary to Andrew Cameron, Blake's tall, lanky president.

Of This Day's Journey is divided into three parts – Morning, Afternoon, Evening – each featuring a different narrator; plain Miss Pymson, the most endearing and attractive, is the first. It was quite unlike her to open up her home to Cam, but she'd been taken by a sudden urge to shake up her life. The two hit it off from their first meeting, an unlikely duo with a shared taste for dry humour.

The second part, Afternoon, is told by Cam herself. The shift in perspective is an eye-opener. For example, Job Laurence, whom Olive had thought a good match for her new housemate is seen with fresh, younger eyes as a physically unattractive man who is much older than herself. It's to Beresford-Howe's credit, I think, that Cam's narration is slightly less engaging. She is, after all, a different person. In this middle part we learn that Cam's reason for leaving Blake has to do with her love for the older – but not Job Laurence old – Andrew Cameron. This should not come as a surprise to the reader; in Morning, Miss Pymson provided enough hints. The front flap of Dodd, Mead's dust jacket isn't nearly so subtle.

The Gazette,
10 May 1947
Lastly, in Evening, we have Andrew – not as seen by Olive Plymson or Cam Brant – rather as how he is: a man exhausted by obligation and responsibility. He abandoned his academic pursuits and interests in order to steer Blake, an institution co-founded by one of his great-grandfathers. Homelife centres on care for his once-adulterous wife Marny. Her series of affairs was brought to an abrupt end by a car accident. Who knows whether the child she was carrying – the child she lost – was Andrew's. Now confined to a wheelchair, Marny refuses to leave the house, and so her husband must attend functions stag... functions also attended by Cam.

The only possible happy ending to such a scenario would have Marny succumb to her infirmity, thus freeing Andrew to be with Cam. But Beresford-Howe, all of twenty-four, was already too good a writer for such contrivance. Of This Day's Journey is far superior to her debut, The Unreasoned Heart (1946).

Beresford-Howe's third novel, The Invisible Gate, was published the month she turned twenty-seven. She'd almost completed her PhD by that point. Given her trajectory, I'm betting it's the best of the three.

Object and Access: A hardcover bound in grey boards with uncredited dust jacket. I purchased my copy, the American first edition, five years ago from a Rochester, New York bookseller. Price: US$9.94 (w/ US$18.00 shipping).

A British edition was published in 1955 by Hammond & Hammond (above). There has never been a Canadian edition.

As of this writing, two copies are listed for sale online, the cheaper being a jacketless copy of the Hammond & Hammond being sold at £17.50. The other is an inscribed edition of the Dodd, Mead edition:

Hardcover. Condition: Near Fine. Dust Jacket Condition: Poor. 1st Edition. HARDCOVER W/dj; NF/poor, 240pp. SIGNED.inscribed by author ffep. Newspaper sad [sic] for this title laid in. First edition. Please email w/questions or to request picture(s); refer to our book inventory number.
Tempting, but at US$49.00, with a further US$53.00 for shipping, I'm taking a pass.

Related posts:

at

2 comments:

  1. Susan D15 March, 2024 12:13

    Until I read this, I had no idea (though I should have) that Constance Beresford-Howe had written anything before The Book of Eve.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Brian Busby15 March, 2024 17:39

      Susan, I was introduced to Constance Beresford-Howe's work in CEGEP - not in any course, rather though Carol, my first serious girlfriend. She pushed The Book of Eve into my hands, along with The Women's Room by Marilyn French, and Nancy Friday's My Mother/My Self. My own teenage self liked them all.

      Looking back, I find it odd that neither of us thought to explore further. Beresford-Howe had by then followed The Book of Eve with two novels: A Population of One and The Marriage Bed.

      Beresford-Howe's bibliography is intriguing: four novels published between 1946 and 1955, followed by an eighteen-year silence. After her 1973 return with The Book of Eve, the author published a book every three or four years until she hit her seventies.

      In my my twenties, shortly after the publication of A Serious Widow, her final novel, I met Constance Beresford-Howe at the opening of a new Toronto bookstore. This would've been around the time of her seventieth birthday. I thought of her as a nice old lady.

      Must say, seventy doesn't seem at all old today.

      Delete