Let the Right One In

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.

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.

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.

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.  

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.

Related posts:

Reason Over Passion in a Bland Bachelor's Lap

Destination: Montreal

Constance Beresford-Howe Memorial Plaque

Quick! To the Customs House!

Montreal Customs House, c. 1916

I've been on something of a Constance Beresford-Howe kick this past week, all to do with her 1947 novel Of This Day's Long Journey. It's a remarkable achievement from a young woman who was otherwise working on her MA and PhD. What struck most was the maturity of voice. Written by a twenty-four-old academic, it concerns a twenty-four-year-old academic, yet seems in no way autobiographical. Believe me, I've tried to find some sort of link between Constance Beresford-Howe and her heroine Cameron Brant; my first book, Character Parts, dealt with characters modelled on real people.

One resource I used in my search is Google's increasingly unstable, moribund News Archive.  

As might be expected, clicking "Petite, Pretty, Young Writer Teaches Mcgill Niaht School" brought me to this, in which I learned that the novelist was more than a mere cutie pie:

Beresford-Howe taught "The Art of Shorter Fiction;" Somerset Maugham's "Rain" and Hemingway's The Old Man and the Sea, published just the previous year, were amongst the works discussed. One lecture was titled "Bad Fiction and How to Recognize It."

According to the article, the petite, pretty, young successful novelist was at the time completing her most ambitious project, "Drink Thy Wine With Joy," a historical novel inspired by a 16th-century English divorce. I recognized it as 1955's My Lady Greensleeves:

This Google News Archive link was even more interesting. 

'Facts Tout' brings to mind 'Bonjour Hi!' It's the very thing to get Premier François Legault's knickers in a twist. 

Speaking of knickers, are you not intrigued by "Panties Customs Dust?" I was! Clicking on the link brought some disappointment:

I shouldn't complain because columnist Harriet Hill's focus is Beresford-Howe's first, unpublished novel. In publicity material, publisher Dodd, Mead had teased of this bit of juvenilia, but provided few details. This is the most I've ever read about the manuscript:

Where is "Gillian" today? By the time the manuscript would have landed there, the eight-story Customs House had grown to take over an entire city block. It's occupied today by the Canada Border Services Agency, the descendant of the Department of Customs and Excise. I like to think that "Gillian" is somewhere in that building, perhaps close by seized copies of The Temple of Pederasty and By Grand Central Station I Sat Down and Wept.

Who knows? Given Pierre Poilievre's announced intention to give away six thousand federal buildings to developers, it might just turn up in a dumpster on rue Normand.

Related posts:

Destination: Montreal

The Dustiest Bookcase: B is for Beresford-Howe
Hard Copy
Elizabeth Smart Burned and Banned?   

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:

Constance Beresford-Howe Memorial Plaque

Celebrating Constance Beresford-Howe
Passion Over Reason in a Bland Bachelor's Lap
About Those Butt-Ugly Laurentian Library covers

Six Forgotten Novelists at the Atwater Library

This coming Thursday – September 30 – I'll be speaking on "Forgotten Montreal Novelists" at the Atwater Library.

Forgotten Montreal novelists? Where to begin! I've selected six. I'll be talking about their lives with a focus on a novel by each.

These being strange days, I won't be appearing in person. Wish I could. The good thing is that you can watch through Zoom. The link to register is here.

C'est gratuit!

Celebrating Constance Beresford-Howe

McGill student Constance Beresford-Howe had just received her BA when word came that she'd won the Intercollegiate Literary Fellowship Prize.

Old McGill, 1945

The accomplishment was duly recognized in the 12 May 1945 edition of the Montreal Gazette:

Beresford-Howe was back at McGill working on her MA when The Unreasoning Heart (1946) was published. That same academic year she wrote Of This Days Journey (1947), her second novel.

Eight more novels followed, the most celebrated being The Book of Eve (1973), the first volume in her Voices of Eve trilogy.

Tomorrow evening, the Writers' Chapel in Montreal will be holding an event in celebration of the life and work of Constance Beresford-Howe, culminating in the unveiling of a plaque in her memory.

Collett Tracey and Jeremy Pressnell, the author's son, will speak.

A wine and cheese reception will follow.

The Writers' Chapel

St Jax Montréal

1439 St Catherine Street West (Bishops Street entrance)

Friday, October 11th at 6:00 pm

This is a free event.

All are welcome!

Related posts:

Constance Beresford-Howe Memorial Plaque

John Glassco Memorial Plaque

A.J.M. Smith Memorial Plaque

F.R. Scott Memorial Plaque

Hugh MacLennan Memorial Plaque

Gwethelyn Graham Memorial Plaque
Louis Hémon Memorial Plaque
Mavis Gallant Memorial Plaque

A.M. Klein Memorial Plaque

Hugh Hood Memorial Plaque

Louis Dudek Memorial Plaque

Constance Beresford-Howe Memorial Plaque

Four weeks from today, Montreal's Writers' Chapel will be celebrating the life and work of Constance Beresford-Howe. The event will end with the unveiling of a plaque in her honour. A Montrealer, Beresford-Howe's earliest writing was published as a McGill  student in the pages  of the Daily and the Forge.

Old McGill 1945

During her studies, she was awarded a Intercollegiate Literary Fellowship, which resulted in the publication of her first novel, The Unreasoning Heart (1946). Nine novels followed, the most celebrated being The Book of Eve (1973), the first in her Voices of Eve trilogy. Beresford-Howe's last novel, A Serious Widow, was published in 1991.

This is a free event and will be followed by a wine and cheese reception.

The Writers' Chapel

St Jax Montréal

1439 St Catherine Street West (Bishops Street entrance)

Friday, October 11th at 6:00 pm

Related posts:

John Glassco Memorial Plaque

A.J.M. Smith Memorial Plaque

F.R. Scott Memorial Plaque

Hugh MacLennan Memorial Plaque

Gwethelyn Graham Memorial Plaque
Louis Hémon Memorial Plaque
Mavis Gallant Memorial Plaque

A.M. Klein Memorial Plaque

Hugh Hood Memorial Plaque

Louis Dudek Memorial Plaque

The Dustiest Bookcase: B is for Beresford-Howe

The Dustiest Bookcase:

Short pieces on books I've always meant to review (but haven't).

They're in storage as we build our new home.

Patience, please.

My Lady Greensleeves

Constance Beresford-Howe

New York: Ballantine, 1955

220 pages

The author's fourth novel – and lone historical novel – My Lady Greensleeves holds the distinction of being her worst received. Eighteen years passed before she returned with her fifth, The Book of Eve.

In the three-page "About Constance Beresford-Howe" tacked to the end of the novel, the author reveals that My Lady Greensleeves was inspired by a sixteenth-century scandale involving Anne Hungerford, husband Sir William Hungerford, and William Darrell, who was accused of being Anne's lover.

Beresford-Howe uses Anne as a model for the novel's Avys Winter; Sir William is Piers Winter, and Durrell becomes Avys's kissing cousin Henry Brandon.

I don't much care for historical fiction, but regret that I've not read this one. It would be interesting to see just how much the author drew from history. Sir William Hunderford's father was beheaded for violating the Buggery Act of 1533. Does Piers Winters' papa meet the same fate? All evidence indicates that William Durrell committed infanticide at the birth of a child he'd fathered with a servant girl. He was accused of tossing the newborn into a fire.

Kudos to the cover artist for depicting the heroine in green sleeves.

Related posts:

Passion Over Reason in a Bland Bachelor's Lap

About Those Butt-Ugly Laurentian Library Books

About Those Butt-Ugly Laurentian Library Books

"'Butt-ugly' is a bit harsh, don't you think?" writes a friend in response to my description of Macmillian of Canada's not-much-missed Laurentian Library.

I'm not so sure.

I bought my first Laurentian Library book, Canada's First Century by Donald Creighton, in preparation for my first semester at John Abbott College.* Its pages had turned brown before leaving the campus bookstore. My second Laurentian Library purchase, volume two of Mason Wade's The French Canadians 1760-1967,  developed a curled spine, yet I never read the thing.

(Volume two of Mason Wade's The French Canadians 1760-1967 is nearly six hundred pages long.)

The Laurentian Library was meant to be Macmillan's answer to McClelland & Stewart's New Canadian Library. Cousins, they shared many of the same afflictions. NCL suffered no spinal deformities, but its pages were similarly discoloured. The covers of both were susceptible to wear; as with Tsarevich Alexei, the gentlest handling might bring harm.

Begun in 1967, nine years after NCL, Macmillan's series was heavy with Macmillan authors: Hugh MacLennan, Morley Callaghan, Robertson Davies, Ethel Wilson, Mavis Gallant, W.O. Mitchell, young pup Jack Hodgins and others. It was an awkward list conceived with a weak eye on the academic market; the other concentrated on an effort to keep Macmillan titles in print and, by extension, in house. Robert Kroetsch's But We Are Exiles rubbed shoulders with Pierre Trudeau's Federalism and the French Canadians, which was followed by Erik Munsterhjelm's The Wind and the Caribou: Hunting and Trapping in Northern Canada.

The NCL offerings of the same years were the ugliest ever, but Laurentian Library's were uglier still. Future publisher Hugh Kane acknowledged as much in a 1973 memo to John Gray: "Our books are manufactured very cheaply, printed on newsprint, and do not contain introductions." Sadly, his push for a general editor, the introduction of introductions and proper production values were ignored.

Directionless, the Laurentian Library stumbled along for nearly two decades. In The Legacy of the Macmillan Company of Canada (University of Toronto Press, 2011), Ruth Panofsky counts fifty titles and pegs 1979 as the series' final year, but I know of over thirty more, including #77, The Periwinkle Assault by Charles Dennis.

I'd never heard of The Periwinkle Assault before today. The second volume of something called the Broken Sabre Quartet, it was followed by Mavis Gallant's neglected novels Green Water, Green Sky and A Fairly Good Time. The last Laurentian Library title of which I'm aware – #83 – is The Winter of the Fisher by Cameron Langford. It was published in 1985. Did The Winter of the Fisher mark the end of the series? If so, should we not acknowledge that the Laurentian Library went out on a fairly high note?

I'm not talking about the cover. I'm sure it was ugly.

Butt-ugly?

I've never seen a copy.

* September 1979, if you must know.

Related posts:

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About Those Awful PaperJacks Covers

News Stand Library Cover Cavalcade

The Stylish, Sophisticated Théâtre Canadien

Passion Over Reason in a Bland Bachelor's Lap

The Unreasoning Heart

Constance Beresford-Howe

New York: Dodd, Mead, 1946

235 pages

This review, revisited and revised, now appears in my new book:

The Dusty Bookcase:

A Journey Through Canada's

Forgotten, Neglected, and Suppressed Writing

Available at the very best bookstores and through

Biblioasis, Amazon, Chapters/Indigo, and McNally-Robinson.

Related posts:

About Those Butt-Ugly Laurentian Library Books

Dirty Old Town

The Town Below [Au pied de la pente douce]
Roger Lemelin [trans. Samuel Putnam]
New York: Reynal & Hitchcock, 1948

We open on thieves fleeing the scene of a crime. They scramble, descending on Quebec's Lower Town. Cops wait below, but can't catch them. No surprise there. These crooks are young, spry, and this part of the city, St-Sauveur, is their territory. They take refuge in the Lévesque family's garage; Lise Lévesque provides cover. By way of thanks, she's offered a share of the goods: apples stolen from the Dominican brothers'  orchard.

Lise, belle Lise, has just returned from convent school. Two of the gang, best pals Denis Boucher and Jean Colin, are immediately smitten. I was too, and prepared for a tale of friendship torn apart by the pursuit of the most beautiful girl in St-Sauveur. Instead, I encountered the finest social satire I've read in years. This isn't to say that the rivalry between Denis and Jean doesn't figure, rather that it doesn't dominate. For the better half of the book it is nothing more than another thread in the tangle of relationships, events and interests that clogs this working class neighbourhood.

The Globe & Mail, 12 April 1948

The Town Below is a first novel; as is my habit I made allowances. The chaos of that first scene sets a bad course. Lemelin crams and confuses by trying to accomplish too much all at once. Focus shifts, jarringly, between paragraphs, and there are simply too many characters. But who to cut? All are so fascinating! My personal favourites are Cécile and Peuplière Latruche, spinster sisters who have singled out one of St-Sauveur's dead consumptive kids for sainthood:

Prior to the discovery of their little saint, these parasites, disappointed at being refused admission to the Daughters of Mary and the Ladies of the Holy Family, had felt themselves to be of little importance, without an object in life. In view of this, it is not so hard to understand their sudden and furious devotion to this dead youth, whom they in a manner of speaking had rehabilitated. These elderly spinsters had a purpose now; and if their past was wholly taken up with their virginity, the Ark of the Covenant for them, their future was filled with the disembodied form of a heavenly stripling. 

Avant la découverte de leur petit saint, ces parasites, dépitées d'être refusées parmi les Enfants de Marie et les Femmes de la Sainte Famille, s'étaient senties comme diminuées. Aussi ne songeait-on pas à convaincre de futilité ces vieilles filles dont tout le passé était rempli par le conservatisme de leur virginité et dont tout l'avenir se remplirait des formes désincarnées d'un céleste jouvenceau.

I offer the original French because the greatest problem with The Town Below isn't Lemelin, rather translator Samuel Putnam. An American francophile who, one presumes, knew much more about France than Canada. After misspelling Wilfrid Laurier's name in the Introductory Note, he writes:

The term "restaurant" has here been employed in the Canadian sense, that of a small shop where candies, ice-cream comes, liqueurs, and the like are sold.

I have no idea what he's talking about.

Putnam stinks when it comes to dialogue – "Les flics, les gars!" becomes "It's the cops, fellows!" – but his greatest weakness is verbosity and explication. Au pied de la pente douce is 90,000 words long; The Town Below is 125,000. If anything, one would expect the reverse.

The beginning of the novel's fifteenth chapter has Denis walking home, books in hand, when he encounters Lise:

— Les beaux livres! Prêtuez-les moi.
Il eut sourire embarrassé.
— Ils sont à l'index.
Ell masqua son désire plus ardent de les lire.

Putnam's translation adds both dialogue and description:

     "What have you there?" she asked.
     "Some books."
     "How nice! Lend them to me, will you?"
     His own smile was an embarrassed one. "They are on the Index."
     That made her all the more anxious to read them, but she was careful not to let him perceive it.

The exchange serves as a reminder, as if any were needed, that this is a novel written and set in Duplessis-era Quebec. That it was published during that dark time, escaped the censor, sold over 25,000 copies in year one, and received the Prix David and the Prix de la langue française has had me questioning my understanding of the Grande Noirceur.

The Gazette, 15 May 1946

Putnam's translation, published by McClelland & Stewart (Canada) and Reynolds & Hitchcock (United States), garnered a good amount of attention, but soon slipped out of print. In 1961, The Town Below was revived as book number 26 in the New Canadian Library. It was reprinted four times in twelve years before being dropped from the series. One wonders why; there were other titles that didn't perform nearly so well.

Should we blame Constance Beresford-Howe, who in reviewing the NCL edition dismissed the novel as one that had a shock value long past?

Nah.

Margaret Laurence, whose opinion Jack McClelland regarded highly, thought The Town Below "a sprawling and savagely funny novel grotesque and evasive, endlessly interesting."

Lemelin's debut is every one of those things. A bit too sprawling perhaps, but I don't hesitate in recommending. Read it in the original if you can; read it as The Town Below if you can't. What you'll find is one of the finest first novels to have ever come out of Quebec.

It's so good that even a crummy translation is worth your time.

Bloomer:

There was silence, possibly filled by the stammerings of a limp and deflated Pritontin. He was heartbroken over what had happened in the church and no longer counted on anything less than a miracle. That firecracker had destroyed something more than his trousers.

Trivia: The Reynal & Hitchock edition confuses Lemelin's birthplace, Quebec City's St-Saveur, with the town of the same name three hundred kilometres to the west.

More trivia: Janet Friskney's New Canadian Library: The Ross-McClelland Years, 1952-1978, informs that Glen Shortliffe, who penned the NCL introduction, alerted M&S to "lapses in idiom and mistaken translations of particular words" found in Putnam's work. These were addressed by an in-house editor before publication.

Still more trivia: Lemelin's original title was Les grimpeurs.

Object: A 302-page hardcover in grey cloth with burgundy print. The cheap paper stock used by Reynald & Hitchcock makes for a book that is much slimmer than one might expect. My copy once belonged to W.F. Beckwith, who lived at 4194 Melrose Ave., Montreal, two blocks south from where I lived when attending university. It was bought for three dollars in 1988, the year after I graduated.

I can't believe it took so long to get around to reading it.

Access: First published in 1944 by les Éditions de l'Arbre, Au pied de la pent douce has ever been out of print. Its current publisher is Stanké. Samuel Putnam's translation was reissued two years ago with a new Introduction by Michael Gnarowski as part of Dundurn's Voyageur Classics series.

Two copies of the Reynal & Hitchcock edition are listed online; the better of the two – "Good" – is priced at twenty American dollars. The McClelland & Stewart hardcover is nowhere in sight. New Canadian Library copies can be had for as little as a Yankee buck.

Held by the best of our bigger public libraries and nearly all of our universities.

I have three.