Maeve
Brennan could stop traffic. According to her colleague Roger Angell, she laid
waste to a ‘dozen-odd’ writers and artists after the New Yorker hired her as a
staff writer in 1949. She makes a cameo as the magazine’s ‘resident Circe’ in a
biography of the cartoonist Charles Addams; legend tells that she was Truman
Capote’s inspiration for Holly Golightly in Breakfast at Tiffany’s. Was it the
clothes? As a fashion editor at Harper’s Bazaar, Brennan wore white gloves to
the office, and her vintage wardrobe and showy up-dos must have seemed exotic
in the New Yorker’s ascetic halls. She sported a rose in her left lapel, and
carried a black and white skunk bag she was ‘inhumanly fond of’. No woman, she
said, should wear a bra that cost less than $50 at Saks.
There
are plenty of photographs of Brennan, but the one I remember is Karl
Bissinger’s from 1948. Her black collar is high, and her eyes look behind him
to a corner of the room; she’s not avoiding the camera so much as making
herself opaque to it. (‘To turn away,’ one of her characters says, caught
gazing at a lover, ‘would be to admit that she had been turned towards him.’)
In New Yorker lore, the platitudes used of her – ‘changeling’, ‘fairy princess’
– point to something fugitive, just as the Dublin stories, on which her
reputation as a fiction writer depend, have a preternatural ability to seem
intimate while keeping the reader at arm’s length. The Bissinger portrait, which
appears on the cover of Brennan’s reissued collection The Springs of Affection,
reinforces this quality, seeming to echo the ‘lovely’ but ‘unyielding’
sentences that Anne Enright describes in the volume’s introduction. It’s
difficult to look at Brennan here and not think of the words she puts in a
missionary’s mouth in ‘Stories of Africa’: ‘You could say that an exile was a
person who knew of a country that made all other countries seem strange.’
Maeve
Brennan was born in Dublin on 6 January 1917. Her parents had both been
involved in the Easter Rising. Her mother, Una, was one of the three women who
raised the tricolour in Enniscorthy in April 1916, and one of only two women to
be admitted to the Irish Republican Brotherhood. After the Rising was suppressed,
Robert, her father, narrowly escaped the firing squad, and was in Lewes Prison
when Maeve was born. Her childhood was punctuated by raids from ‘unfriendly men
dressed in civilian clothes carrying revolvers’; they were looking for her
father, who was often on the run. After de Valera came to power in 1932, Robert
Brennan became the first Irish emissary to the United States. Maeve was 17 when
the family emigrated. In Washington, she took a degree in library science at
the Catholic University, and became engaged to the playwright and theatre
critic Walter Kerr. He broke her heart. (Years later William Shawn told a
colleague that Kerr would never write for the New Yorker ‘because of Maeve’.)
In 1941,
Brennan moved to Manhattan and soon found work at Harper’s Bazaar, where she
stayed for seven years, rising through the ranks from a copywriter to an
editor. Life profiled her in 1945 as a model of modern flânerie, scouring the
boutiques of New York for things to include in her columns. Brennan is pictured
window-shopping for ceramics on Madison Avenue, and vacillating over a pair of
leather sandals (shoes were rationed because of the war); there’s no hint of
the crippling anxiety her new status inspired. ‘All my life,’ she told William
Maxwell, her closest friend, ‘I was as ashamed of having a little talent as
another would be of being born without a nose.’ Good old Catholic guilt. At
convent school, the nuns had confiscated her poems and diaries. ‘Don’t go
getting any notions,’ Maeve is warned by her little sister in an early
autobiographical sketch.
At the
New Yorker, with her ‘longshoreman’s mouth’ and ‘tongue that could clip a
hedge’, she made her opinions known. Daphne du Maurier was ‘witless’, Jean
Stafford her ‘bête noire’. Brennan immediately set her sights on grander things
than the fashion notes and short reviews she’d been hired to write. In 1952,
her first story appeared; two years later, she had a piece in ‘The Talk of the
Town’, the section of the magazine over which Shawn kept the tightest of reins.
Brennan’s male colleagues, including Addams, Joseph Mitchell and Brendan Gill
(all of them her lovers at one time or another), joked that she had served her
apprenticeship in hemlines. But it was the ability to spot the difference
between ‘beige’ and ‘bone’ at fifty yards that made her a natural diarist. John
Updike said her ‘Talk of the Town’ pieces ‘helped put New York back into the
New Yorker’.
Her
first column, in January 1954, was about a careless dry cleaner, and began the
dispatches from ‘a rather long-winded lady’ whom the New Yorker heard from
‘occasionally’. Introducing 47 of these pieces for a collection published in
1969, Brennan gave a sketch of her alter ego. She ‘thinks the best view of the
city is the one you get from the bar that is on top of the Time-Life Building’;
she likes taxis and ‘travels in buses and subways only when she is trying to
stop smoking’. These columns have the quality of interludes; they’re records of
time idly passed between more meaningful events. The long-winded lady skims a
beauty magazine over a commuter’s shoulder on the A train; at 5 a.m. she sips a
lonely coffee in Bickford’s, and at 3 p.m. she plunges a half-drunk martini out
of the sightline of two passing nuns. But it’s all quite gloomy and solitary,
as if she’s stuck in an Edward Hopper painting. The effect of reading about the
lady is strange; you’re struck by the poignancy of your own mundane rituals, as
if, all of a sudden, you were drunk.
Brennan
wanted to write ‘as though the camera had never been invented’. She’s a born
snoop. Hidden behind a detective novel, she eavesdrops on ‘a socialist who is
interested in lust’. She spies on a couple having a row, and wonders how ‘she’
must have felt to see ‘him’ – ‘Animal Lover, Persecutor of Women at six o’clock
in the morning’ – bend down to pet a poodle when he’s just jilted her in
Washington Square Park. But what worries race through the lady’s head as she
loiters off Fifth Avenue, ‘feeding an expensive Plaza Hotel brioche to some
pigeons’? The absence of clues to her thought is curious, not least because
Brennan had battled to be allowed to write her pieces in the first person.
What I’m
looking for, maybe unfairly, is a way of reconciling the Brennan who basked in
the ‘lavish solitude’ of ‘small, inexpensive restaurants’ – ‘the home fires of
New York City’ – with the Brennan who sparkles in her colleagues’ memoirs. The
New Yorker columns bear no trace of the woman who went to a party hosted by
E.B. White and silenced the room by yelling: ‘Fuck you, Brendan Gill, you
goddamn Roman Catholic!’ In her own telling, or the lady’s, her evenings sound
desperately lonely: Billie Holiday on a loop, all that rain, all those cats.
It’s difficult to imagine this being the same woman who, working on a corridor
nicknamed Sleepy Hollow, pegged the door open, brought in potted plants, and
painted her office ceiling Wedgwood blue. Maxwell remembered ‘so much slipping
of notes under [Gill’s] door, and hers, and mine, and so many explosions of
laughter as a result of our reading them that … Mr Shawn decided it wasn’t good
for the office morale’; Brennan was moved to the other side of the building.
Her impression of Broadway, a fray of contradictions – ‘so blatant and secret,
so empty and alive, so unreal and familiar, so private and noisy’ – reads like
a self-diagnosis.
In 1954, aged 37, Brennan married St Clair
McKelway, formerly the New Yorker’s managing editor, an ex-pilot and manic
depressive who was fond of women and drink. Maxwell wrote that ‘it may not have
been the worst of all possible marriages, but it was not something you could be
hopeful about.’ To another acquaintance, they were ‘like two children out on a
dangerous walk: both so dangerous and so charming’. When they weren’t hiding
out in McKelway’s country house upstate, they could be found chain-smoking in
Costello’s on 44th Street, downing martini after martini, ‘until in the early
morning’ Brennan would ‘punish him by passing out, and her exquisite head would
pitch forward upon the
bar, as if guillotined’. Attempts to dry out were unsuccessful; Brennan
returned from one visit to Ireland to find McKelway waiting for her boat,
completely slaughtered. ‘I thought you were on the wagon!’ she wailed. ‘I got
up to give my seat to a lady,’ he shot back. In December 1959, the couple
agreed to divorce. Brennan never remarried, and she all but abandoned romance.
‘What makes a waif?’ she had asked in her story ‘The Joker’ (1952). ‘When do
people get that fatal separate look? Are waifs born? … Sometimes you could
actually see people change into waifs, right before your eyes. Girls suddenly
became old maids, or at least they developed an incurably single look … It was
a shameful thing to be a waif, but it was also mysterious.’ She told Edith
Konecky she’d never enjoyed sex, and had it ‘out of pity’ for the men whose
company she liked: ‘They wanted it so much, poor things.’
After
splitting from McKelway, Brennan moved from hotel to hotel. She was ‘like the
Big Blonde in the Dorothy Parker story’, Gardner Botsford wrote: she could ‘transport
her entire household, all her possessions, and her cats – in a taxi’. Searching
for an area in which to ‘settle down’, she tried Hudson Street, 22nd Street
near Ninth Avenue, Sullivan Street, Ninth Street near Fifth Avenue; but nowhere
stuck. She had parquet floors installed in an apartment she was renting in
Greenwich Village, then left it empty until the lease expired because she
preferred living in the Algonquin. What she liked about it – as with the
Westbury, Lombardy, Royalton, Iroquois, Prince Edward and all the others – was
the idea that she could check out at any time. The appeal of Manhattan, it
seems, was its ‘tacky temporary air’. Brennan wrote beautifully of the
‘transience’ of the city’s ‘two horizons’: one architectural (‘impermanent and
stony’) and the other natural (‘created when water and sky work together in
midair’). Her best columns are records of a city under siege from urban
developers; of streets choked with ‘white wrecker’s dust’ clearing the way for
‘noseless architecture’. When Midtown was levelled in 1968, she felt the thrill
of a child who sees their dolls’ house opened up: ‘One minute the brownstone is
standing, deserted, stripped, and empty, and the next minute … its front is
gone and its insides are showing, daylight streaming like cold water over
curved staircases and papered walls and small interiors – doors and ceilings
and corners that remain secret even with everybody looking at them.’ Her
columns are vivid depictions of what Jane Jacobs called ‘the ballet of the city
sidewalk’, but they also display a fascination with the forces that were making
that life extinct. In ‘The Last Days of New York City’ (1955), she considers
the ‘rumour’ that Robert Moses planned to run ‘an underpass through Washington
Square’, and imagines her hotel with its roof off: ‘It would make a creditable
corpse.’ ‘All my life,’ she wrote, ‘I’ll be scurrying out of buildings just
ahead of the wreckers.’
It was
Brennan’s gift, and her trouble, that she saw things most clearly when they
were half-destroyed. In her non-fiction, the transience of Manhattan is
described with an intensity befitting a love affair. Listen to her talking
about Sixth Avenue: it ‘possesses a quality that some people acquire, sometimes
quite suddenly, which dooms it and them to be loved only at the moment when
they are being looked at for the very last time’. This makes it all the more
strange that one house stands immovable at the centre of her fiction: 48
Cherryfield Avenue in Ranelagh, Brennan’s childhood home. The Dublin stories
that made her name are, almost without exception, set here. Collected
posthumously as The Springs of Affection (1997), they appeared in the New
Yorker between 1953 and 1973, and consist of early autobiographical sketches
and two short-story cycles about unhappy marriages. First, there’s the doomed
union of Rose and Hubert Derdon, whose only son, John, has ‘vanished forever
into the commonest crevasse in Irish family life – the priesthood’. Later,
Brennan wrote about Martin and Delia Bagot, whose daughters are based on Maeve
and her younger sister. To read The Springs of Affection is to allow 48
Cherryfield Avenue to become part of your mind: the narrow staircase with its
wine-red runner, the panel of brass around the hearth, the long French windows in
the front room, the laburnum in the back garden and the tennis club behind
that.
Maxwell
said that Brennan’s fiction was distinguished by ‘almost clinical descriptions
of states of mind’. The emotions in her stories – envy, pettiness, regret – are
those that find expression in the footnotes of life. A penny is lost between
two floorboards; a couple bicker over the last slice of fruit cake; a dying man
reaches for the font of holy water only to find that it’s dry. Brennan had a
term for the digs, from name-calling to tantrums and pranks, that people ruined
by disappointment use to get their kicks: she called it ‘evil mirth’. In The
Visitor, an early novella unpublished in Brennan’s lifetime, Mrs Kilbride
threatens suicide if the daughter she calls ‘Other Self’ marries the architect
she’s fallen in love with. Hubert Derdon punishes John’s fetish for holy
pictures (and Rose’s devotion to their son) by spreading an image of St
Sebastian on his bread, as if it were butter, and biting it. In ‘The Rose
Garden’, the crippled Mary curses her little girl for siphoning off her
husband’s love: ‘I wish to God she’d been born crooked the way I was. There’d
have been no pet child then.’
Brennan
had the remarkable ability to move from a brutal one-liner to something more expansive
and humane, as if she were merely switching camera angles:
When Hubert first saw Rose, he thought how
light and definite her walk was, and that her expression was resolute. He never
learned that the courage she showed came not from natural hope or from natural
confidence or from any ignorant, natural source, but from her determination to
avoid touching the two madnesses as they guided her, pressing too close to her
and narrowing her path into a very thin line. She always walked in straight lines.
She went from where she was to the place where she was going, and then back
again to the place where she had been.
The
rhythm of the long middle sentence gauges the movement of a body on a
tightrope; the commas fall like knives, as one foot is placed in front of the
other. Rose’s agility, we’re made to understand, derives not from grace but
fear. This is Hubert, remembering her expression at the moment he proposed to
her: ‘“It was careless of me to fall into this deep water,” her face seemed to
say, “and I am all to blame for not having learned to swim, but even though I
was stupid, not learning to swim, and even though the water is deep, I do not
want to drown.”’ We never know, maybe couldn’t know, which one controls the
other’s future; who’s holding the knife and who’s going under it. There’s such
subtlety to Brennan’s writing that one might momentarily forget who’s in
command of the narrative; that only Brennan could write Rose out of this
situation, or force Hubert to empathise with his wife. No chance. Again and
again, we watch her bid farewell to the people she’s made, as they edge towards
the unhappy ending she’s prepared for them.
To be
around Brennan, Maxwell wrote, ‘was to see style being invented’. But at what
cost? In a letter from 1965, she cast the writing process as a precarious
endeavour, requiring something like Rose’s spurious agility. There’s a
‘specific difference’, she explained, ‘between those writers who possess the
natural confidence that is their birthright, and those fewer writers who are
driven by the unnatural courage that comes from no alternative. It is something
like this – some walk on a tightrope, and some continue on the tightrope, or
continue to walk, even after they find out it is not there.’ The painstaking
composition of her Dublin stories – some of which took a decade to finish – was
a sort of compulsion. It arose, at least in part, from her desire to transfer
‘the disgusting guilt’ about her family to her ‘poor work’. Angela Bourke’s
biography is good on the diffidence of Rose Derdon and Lily Bagot, and its
roots in Brennan’s disillusion with her mother, a radical who was ‘reduced to
silences and domesticities’ in her middle age. And even those sceptical about
conflating a writer’s life and work will find it difficult not to see Bob
Brennan as the prototype for the jealous parents who haunt his daughter’s
stories. It was on account of his writerly aspirations that Brennan was riven
by guilt at her own success. ‘The pain radiated by the Envious One,’ she wrote
to Maxwell, ‘is terrible to endure’; a month after her father’s death, she
confided to her diary: ‘I see him, bones, white hair, faded eyes, courage,
wonder, naked envy, malice, longing, & high dreams, dedication,
bewilderment.’ No doubt she connected his ‘frightful’ bitterness to his
politics. She herself turned away from her father’s Fenianism, believing it
involved ‘licking old wounds instead of getting on with things’; then again,
‘licking old wounds’ would do as a shorthand for most of her stories, and she
occasionally proved far from immune to the romance of Irish insurrection. When
Maxwell suggested she read the Anglo-Irish Elizabeth Bowen, Brennan took back,
without a word, a favourite portrait of Colette that she had hung behind his
desk. Later, visiting London, she was ‘outraged’ to find that the only
available map of the city was ‘the one with the “Bastion of Liberty” on it’.
(‘Blood tells,’ she wrote.)
Did
Brennan keep writing about her family because she couldn’t get them off her
mind, or was dwelling on her family what enabled her to keep writing? Probably
both. More than thirty years after she left home, the ‘disgusting guilt’ still
gave her nightmares:
The last week or so, 2 or 3 times, I woke
up with the most painful awful feeling of irrevocable separation from something
I could put my hand out and touch – I was in New York City & had come from
Washington & they were in Washington & the sense of time drawing tight
from nowhere to nowhere was, the 2 or 3 times or so, agonising, as though the
feeling I woke up with was incurable & would last for every minute as long
as I lived. It was as though I could see them & they were wondering about
me & didn’t know I was dead. And I didn’t want them to know.
From the
mid-1960s onwards, Brennan spent long periods alone in the country, and less
and less time at the office. ‘All we have to face in the future is what has
happened in the past,’ she complained, as she retreated further into it. She
began to dictate her reviews over the phone. The more solitary she became, the
more life flowed into her fiction, as if isolation and memory were twin
preconditions for its creation. (‘The fewer writers you know the better, and if
you’re working on anything, don’t tell them’; ‘You are all your work has. It
has nobody else and never had anybody else.’)
She had
financial troubles. ‘I feel as Goldsmith must have done,’ she confessed to
Maxwell, that ‘grown-ups ought to pay the big ugly bills.’ In January 1964, the
credit manager of Saks wrote to the New Yorker making a final request for
Brennan’s outstanding balance of $1840.70. Not for the first time, the magazine
stepped in. But Milton Greenstein, who took control of its purse strings in
1966, was less tolerant of Brennan’s spending than his predecessor had been.
During their marriage, neither McKelway nor Brennan had bothered to file tax
returns, and in 1970 the government noticed. Brennan begged for Maxwell’s help
– ‘If they come in with a lien all that business of the LETTER will come up
again … Milton will die of ulcers’ – and, once more, the New Yorker bailed her
out. Brennan continued to live in the country and continued in the red. ‘I
can’t even pay the milkman for my cottage cheese and orange yoghurt, and I have
to walk 2 miles to make a phone call.’ And then, the kicker: ‘Of course it may
be that none of this is really happening and that I have gone stark staring
mad.’
What’s
disturbing about reading Brennan’s stories alongside her biography is the
growing sense that they were destined to converge. Everywhere in the fiction
you encounter beggars, waifs, homeless unfortunates. Rose Derdon has a
‘constant stream of poor men and women … coming to her door to ask for food or
money’; she hands out heirlooms – her dead mother’s brooch, her son’s baptismal
shawl. In an early autobiographical story, Brennan’s mother is harassed by a
ninety-year-old man who comes to her house every Thursday selling apples. In
‘The Joker’, Isobel takes a beggar in on Christmas Day, and he punishes her
kindness by plunging a cigar into the sauce for the plum pudding. The Visitor
ends with Anastasia being refused a home by her spiteful grandmother; when we
last see her, she’s walking barefoot in the street and singing, a lost girl
‘full of derision and fright’.
Brennan’s
best, most controlled stories were published just as her life was unravelling.
‘The Springs of Affection’, widely acknowledged as her masterpiece, appeared in
the New Yorker in 1972, the same year Konecky met her at MacDowell Colony
wearing a brown paper bag over her head. It’s spoken in the voice of Min Bagot,
a spurned twin who harbours a lifelong grudge against the sister-in-law who
dragged her brother Martin ‘all out into the open where blood didn’t count’.
This is a story about ‘the gradual destructiveness of love, the erosion of the
spirit through need’, as Brennan wrote of Colette’s work; Bourke describes it
as a ‘kamikaze flight’ in which Brennan reaches her pinnacle as a fiction
writer through a ‘suicidal assault on her own family’. For Min, Brennan
borrowed the biographical details of a great-aunt, Nan Brennan, but transformed
her into a monster; through the thinnest of veils, she was effectively alleging
that she had committed her sister to an asylum not because she was mentally ill
– which does appear to have been the case – but because she had given away the
German china their mother had treasured. After ‘The Springs of Affection’
appeared in the New Yorker, Nan took a ten-year-old photograph of her niece and
scrawled on the back: ‘Maeve: greatly changed for the worse, 1972.’
In the
early 1970s, Brennan’s paranoia became full-blown. She began to suffer
psychotic episodes, hiding in a colleague’s apartment because ‘they’ were
trying to lace her toothpaste with cyanide. She took to sleeping in the cubicle
next to the ladies’ room in the New Yorker building, and would cash her
paycheque at the Morgan Guaranty Trust so she could hand out cash to
passers-by. Greenstein tried to counter this by paying Brennan in instalments;
she threatened to sue. (She was fond of Conrad’s claim that ‘a certain degree
of self-esteem is necessary even in the mad.’) Her colleagues begged Shawn to
intervene, but he would bustle away, repeating only: ‘She’s a beautiful
writer.’ The final straw came when Brennan trashed Philip Hamburger’s office,
wreaking particular violence on photos of his sons. Not long afterwards, she
was persuaded to get psychiatric help.
After
she was released from hospital in the summer of 1973, Brennan spent some time
in Dublin, but the rain was ‘not the constant rain’ she’d been ‘half hoping
for’, and the estate agent couldn’t find a property that pleased her. Returning
to the US, she moved into a hotel near the New Yorker, and by 1975 had once
again stopped taking her medication. The magazine’s staff were ordered not to
let her into the office. Brennan died in a nursing home in Queens in 1993; her
last twenty years were troubled and peripatetic, and their particulars are
largely lost to us. As early as 1973, she was writing to Maxwell from Dublin
with a sense that her life was winding down:
If you
think, sadly perhaps, that I have regrets, you are wrong. I have no regrets at
all … It is nice to be able to say that I spent my years. I would hate to have
to say that I misspent them. If I should be hit by a car, please comfort yourself
with the knowledge that I died happy, although, dear me, outside the church.
THE church.
Much is
made of Brennan’s darkness, but even in those bleakest of days she could sound
a terrific comic note.
In ‘The
Lie’, Maeve throws her sister’s sewing machine out of the window, and then
confesses to the priest. Does it take being dragged up in the faith to
understand the twisted logic that makes her mother angrier about the telling
than about the throwing? And would those who were never herded into the choir
of an Irish convent know that Brennan isn’t overstating the case when, in ‘The
Devil in Us’, a poor singing voice is taken as an indication of resident evil?
‘If God had been on our side,’ one of the tone-deaf girls thinks, ‘surely He
would have given us the voice to sing His praises.’
The Rose
Garden, which contains some of her funniest stories, was the only collection of
Brennan’s work not reissued for her centenary last year. Its stories are set in
‘Herbert’s Retreat’, ‘an exclusive community of about forty houses on the east
bank of the Hudson, thirty miles above New York City’. (Its real-world
counterpart, Snedens Landing, was the location of McKelway’s country house.)
These are Upstairs, Downstairs comedies in which Irish servants wreak gossipy havoc
on their American bosses. Maxwell never liked them as much as the Dublin
stories, feeling they ‘lacked the breath of life’; nothing is further from the
truth. Of a gold-digger: ‘That rip hasn’t got a nerve in her body.’ Of the
gold-digger’s first husband: ‘He was dead drunk and ran himself into a young
tree. Destroyed the tree and killed himself. She had to get a new car.’ Of the
gold-digger’s pursuit of a river view: ‘Cut the hedge. God almighty, she
couldn’t get it down soon enough. I thought she was going to go after it with
her nail scissors.’ These stories cackle with ‘evil mirth’. When one New Yorker
reader wrote to the magazine in 1959, asking for more of the Irish hired-helps,
it was Brennan, in the spirit of those stories, who drafted a reply:
I am terribly sorry to have to be the first
to tell you that our poor Miss Brennan died. We have her head here in the
office, at the top of the stairs, where she was always to be found, smiling
right and left and drinking water out of her own little paper cup. She shot
herself in the back with the aid of a small handmirror at the foot of the main
altar in St Patrick’s Cathedral one Shrove Tuesday. Frank O’Connor was where he
usually is in the afternoons, sitting in a confession box pretending to be a priest
and giving penance to some poor old woman and he heard the shot and he ran out
and saw our poor late author stretched out flat and he picked her up and
fearing a scandal ran up to the front of the church and slipped her in the poor
box. She was very small. He said she went in easy … We will never know why she
did what she did (shooting herself) but we think it was because she was drunk
and heartsick. She was a very fine person, a very real person, two feet, hands,
everything. But it’s too late to do much about that now.
Yesterday afternoon, as I walked along
Forty-second Street directly across from Bryant Park, I saw a three-cornered
shadow on the pavement in the angle where two walls meet. I didn’t step on the
shadow, but I stood a minute in the thin winter sunlight and looked at it. I
recognized it at once. It was exactly the same shadow that used to fall on the
cement part of our garden in Dublin, more than fifty-five years ago.
Here is
Maeve Brennan hanging on, recording a solitary encounter in her last published
piece in The New Yorker. On the sidewalk of the city where she had come to live
in her twenties and spent the rest of her life, she recognizes, that sunny
winter’s day in 1981, the stamp of the house in Dublin where she had passed her
childhood. Maeve Brennan and her work had already been lost to public view when
she died in 1993. Never eager to establish a home, moving from one rented room
to another, staying in friends’ places while they were away, she disappeared by
degrees, at last joining the ranks of the homeless. But four years after her
death, with the publication of The Springs of Affection: Stories of Dublin, her
work appeared in a new edition. For the first time the Irish stories could be
read in a sequence that made strikingly clear the remarkable depth and
originality of her art.
An exile
whose imagination never abandoned its native ground, Maeve Brennan was in
perpetual transit. Her emigration was not chosen, although in time it became
so. She would not have left Ireland at the age of 17 if she’d been given the
choice, and yet in her adult years she didn’t choose to return. A displaced
person, always on provisional ground. When writing about New York City she
described herself as a “traveler in residence.” She was staying for a while,
poised to depart. And in that displacement she may be a figure for the Irish
American a little disoriented as to notions of home, or for any immigrant who
finds herself elsewhere without having chosen to leave where she came from. In
time, Maeve Brennan’s status as traveler had become a habit, a preference, an
identity. But at one time there had been a home, a fixed address at 48
Cherryfield Avenue. Lost, it could only be remembered.
The
particulars of Maeve’s wandering life were often elusive, even to her friends.
But in her art, for which she sacrificed so much, she is everywhere felt in her
dedication to the poetry of place, whether in Dublin or New York. It is in her
work we find her.
In June
1948, Maeve’s father wrote to her from Ireland referring to the recent visit
she’d made to see her parents not long after their return from his
ambassadorship in DC. By then, she’d lived for five years in New York City,
working briefly at the public library on 42nd Street before being hired at
Harper’s Bazaar in 1943 by the editor Carmel Snow, also Irish. There she’d been
drawn into a world that included writers and editors, some at Harper’s and
others, like Brendan Gill, at The New Yorker. She frequented Tim and Joe
Costello’s, at 44th and Third Avenue, a favorite drinking and eating place for
Irish writers, and increasingly writers of any stripe. As a young man Tim
Costello had known her father as a fellow Republican in Dublin, and he now kept
an eye out for her. While she’d adopted many aspects of American fashion and
culture, her speaking voice remained the one she’d grown up with. She was
“effortlessly witty,” as William Maxwell wrote of her later, had a lively sense
of the ridiculous. She was generous, sometimes extravagantly so, bestowing
lavish gifts, pressing on friends things of her own they admired. Costello’s
was only a few blocks away from The New Yorker, and on the basis of a few short
pieces she’d written for that magazine she was hired there by William Shawn, in
1949, at Brendan Gill’s urging.
But
during those years at Harper’s she began and completed a novella, The Visitor,
that was only discovered years later, in 1997, in the library of the University
of Notre Dame among the papers of Maisie Ward—of Sheed and Ward—who with her
husband had founded a Catholic publishing house in London that had moved to New
York. The manuscript can be dated by the address—5 East Tenth Street—written on
its cover sheet. Brennan was living there in 1944, when she was 27 and working
at Harper’s. By the late 1940s she’d moved. Maisie Ward must have read the manuscript
or at least received it. But who else? And why was it never published? Did
Brennan, who sometimes worked on a story for decades, never revisit it? Did she
keep a copy herself? This novella announces her great themes and obsessions,
and who can say but that she herself was shy of it.
With The
Visitor, the harrowing novella that seems to have been Maeve Brennan’s first
completed work, the reader, with a jolt of recognition, enters a world that is
at once new and strangely familiar. How simple the writing, evoking the crowded
but lonely mood of a train arriving in Dublin on a rainy November evening. And
then, seamlessly, the story opens, and we’re in a place known better in dreams,
in the murkier places of the unconscious. “Home is a place in the mind. When it
is empty, it frets. It is fretful with memory, faces and places and times gone
by. Beloved images rise up in disobedience and make a mirror for emptiness.
Then what resentful wonder, and what half-aimless self-seeking. . . Comical and
hopeless, the long gaze back is always turned inward.”
In 1949, the following year, Maeve was hired by
The New Yorker, and her life changed again. While Harper’s had been a woman’s
world—run by a woman who hired other women—The New Yorker, arguably the most
powerful literary magazine in America at the time, was a magazine dominated by
men. As elsewhere during the 1950s, a woman’s value—however that might be
assessed—would have been assumed to be different from a man’s. In her early
thirties Maeve wore her thick auburn hair in a ponytail that made her look
younger than she was. Later she piled it on her head. Just a little over five
feet, she wore high heels, usually dressed in black, a fresh flower, often a
white rose, pinned to her lapel, a bright dash of red lipstick across her
mouth. Several of her colleagues would become good and constant friends—Joseph
Mitchell, Charles Addams, Philip Hamburger, and, of course, William Maxwell—and
some lovers as well. But she was an outsider, a stylish and beautiful Irish
woman in a world of American men. As Roger Angell put it, “She wasn’t one of
us—she was one of her.” Although she would live in an assortment of furnished
rented rooms and hotels in Manhattan—and as the years went by, increasingly
obscure ones—her place at The New Yorker, however
alien at first, provided a kind of sanctuary where her work would be fostered
and edited and published.
Early in
1954 Brennan began writing the unsigned pieces for the “Talk of the Town” in
the voice of “the long-winded lady.” They would appear in the magazine for more
than 15 years, but only in 1968 would the writer be identified as Maeve Brennan
when she chose some of her favorites to be published as a selection. In a
foreword Brennan describes her persona:
If she
has a title, it is one held by many others, that of a traveler in residence.
She is drawn to what she recognized, or half-recognized, and these forty-seven
pieces are the record of forty-seven moments of recognition. Somebody said, “We
are real only in moments of kindness.” Moments of kindness, moments of
recognition—if there is a difference it is a faint one. I think the long-winded
lady is real when she writes, here, about some of the sights she saw in the
city she loves.
Indeed,
she declares her love for the city in an ode to the ailanthus, New York City’s
backyard tree, that appears like a ghost, like a shade, beyond the vacancy left
by the old brownstone houses speaking of survival and of ordinary things: “New
York does nothing for those of us who are inclined to love her except implant
in our hearts a homesickness that baffles us until we go away from her, and
then we realize why we are restless. At home or away, we are homesick for New
York not because New York used to be better and not because she used to be
worse but because the city holds us and we don’t know why.”
When
Brennan was 37 she married St. Clair McKelway and joined him where he lived in
Sneden’s Landing, a community just north of the city on the west bank of the
Hudson. He worked at The New Yorker as a nonfiction staff writer, was three
times divorced and 12 years older than herself, and known to be a compulsive
womanizer. Like Brennan, he was volatile, hard-drinking. And like her too,
incapable of handling money. “I think I feel as Goldsmith must have done,”
Maeve wrote to Maxwell, “that any money I get is spending money, and the
grown-ups ought to pay the big ugly bills.” During the three years she was
married, her mother died, a death she grieved for a long time, and she and St.
Clair fell into calamitous debt. Her stories from that period are often set in
Herbert’s Retreat, as she calls Sneden’s Landing: unlike the Dublin stories,
they tend to be ironic, even brittle, in tone; they have to do with affluent
households looked after by knowing Irish maids who observe and appraise their
employers’ lives from the kitchen.
And on
St. Patrick’s Day, 1959, Brennan wrote a reply to a letter from a reader asking
when more Herbert’s Retreat stories would appear in The New Yorker, a letter
that was making the rounds in the office. When it reached her, she wrote a
reply on the back before passing it on.
I am terribly sorry to have to be the
first to tell you that our poor Miss Brennan died. We have her head here in the
office, at the top of the stairs, where she was always to be found, smiling
right and left and drinking water out of her own little paper cup. She shot
herself in the back with the aid of a small handmirror at the foot of the main
altar in St. Patrick’s cathedral one Shrove Tuesday. Frank O’Connor was where
he usually is in the afternoons, sitting in a confession box pretending to be a
priest and giving a penance to some old woman and he heard the shot and he ran
out and saw our poor late author stretched out flat and he picked her up and
slipped her in the poor box. She was very small. He said she went in easy.
Imagine the feelings of the young curate who unlocked the box that same evening
and found the deceased curled up in what appeared to be and later turned out
truly to be her final slumber. It took six strong parish priests to get her out
of the box and then they called us and we all went and got her and carried her
back here on the door of her office. . . We will never know why she did what
she did (shooting herself) but we think it was because she was drunk and heartsick.
She was a very fine person, a very real person, two feet, hands, everything.
But it is too late to do much about that.
It was
only after she had amicably separated from St. Clair during the winter of 1959
and was alone once more that Brennan returned to the Dublin stories she’d been
working on during the years leading up to her marriage. The solitary life had
fostered her writing earlier, and now she would again live by herself,
accompanied by her beloved black Labrador retriever, Bluebell. During the early
1960s when Brennan was writing steadily, she spent the summers in the city and
the winters alone in East Hampton, renting houses off-season close to her
devoted and nurturing friends Sara and Gerald Murphy, on whom F. Scott
Fitzgerald in Tender Is the Night had modeled Dick and Nicole Divers. She wrote
about the sea and shore and seagulls, and about children too. She wrote about
the progress of the day as seen through the eyes of her animals—her cats and
Bluebell—with the radiant simplicity of Colette.
But most of all she continued to work on the
stories for which she is remembered, the Derdon stories, to publish them, and
began to write about the Bagots. What she required, it seemed, was a room where
she could be alone with her typewriter.
She
would go on writing of lonely marriages as lived out in the house at 48
Cherryfield she’d grown up in. And though by this time she’d had her own
intimate experience of marriage, and there are many echoes of her parents’
lives in the stories, her portraits are originals. Both couples—Hubert and Rose
Derdon and later on Martin and Delia Bagot—are shadowed by fear and regret and
shame. They experience self-misgivings, a ravished sense of having made some
first mistake, of having missed out on some crucial knowledge that everyone but
themselves has grasped and so are condemned to solitude.
Brennan’s
first collection, In and Out of Never Never Land, was published by Scribner’s
in 1969 and included the Bagot and the Derdon stories that had been published
up to that point. It included neither “The Springs of Affection” nor “Family
Walls,” two of her greatest stories, which would appear in The New Yorker only
three years later. In 1974, another collection, Christmas Eve, was also
published by Scribner’s that included these newer stories as well as several
from the 1950s. There was no paperback edition of either one. And as she had no
Irish publisher, her Dublin stories went largely unnoticed in Ireland where so
many of them were set. At about this time William Maxwell said he thought her
the best living Irish writer of fiction, but in her own country she was almost
entirely unknown.
By the
early 1970s Brennan’s friends had become aware of painful changes in her
behavior. She was no longer a young woman in a working world still dominated by
men: she was middle-aged now and alone. Her father and Gerald Murphy had died
within a few weeks of each other in the fall of 1964, and her nearest
companion, Bluebell, was also dead. She was having trouble writing. Pursued by
an accumulation of debts and creditors, she stayed in increasingly rundown
hotels. She had always moved from place to place, but now she began moving
rapidly, as her father had done long ago when he was on the run and staying in
safe houses during the Irish Rebellion. Sometimes she camped out—like a
similarly bereft Bartleby—in the offices where she worked: in the New Yorker
offices in a little space next to the ladies’ room, at one point tending a
wounded pigeon. Then she had a severe breakdown and was in the hospital for a
time. When things were better she returned to Ireland, thinking perhaps to
remain there. But it must have been too late. For a few weeks she stayed with
her cousin Ita Bolger Doyle. She wrote to William Maxwell from the garden
studio on September 11, 1973:
The typewriter is here in the room with
me—I hold on to it as the sensible sailor holds on to his compass. . . What I
am conscious of, is of having the sense of true perspective. . . that is in
fact only the consciousness of impending, imminent revelation. “I can see.” But
“I can see” is not to say ‘I see.’ I don’t believe at all in revelations—but to
have, even for a minute, the sense of impending revelation, that is being alive.
Sometime
after her return to New York from Ireland, things again fell apart; her
movements became increasingly hard to track. She’d always been known for her
generosity; now she began rapidly to divest, handing out money in the street.
She was occasionally seen by her old colleagues sitting around Rockefeller
Center with the destitute. Then she fell out of the public eye altogether. She
had unequivocally become an outsider now, one of the poor and afflicted among
whom she’d always counted the visionaries. It wasn’t until she seemed quite
forgotten—until after her death in 1993 in a nursing home in Queens where she
wasn’t known to be a writer—that she again swam into view.
Christopher
Carduff, a senior editor at Houghton Mifflin at the time, encountering
Brennan’s work by chance in the late 1980s, “fell in love,” as he put it, and
undertook to get it all in print, including the recently discovered novella The
Visitor. In 1997, for the first time, the Derdon stories as well as the Bagot
stories could be read in sequence when they appeared in The Springs of
Affection: Stories of Dublin. William Maxwell wrote a foreword to the volume.
One of the many writers who greeted the publication was Mavis Gallant: “How and
why the voice of these Dublin stories was ever allowed to drift out of earshot
is one of the literary puzzles. Now The Springs of Affection brings it back, as
a favor to us all, and it is as true and as haunting as before.”
One of
the literary puzzles indeed: Perhaps her colleagues and friends at The New
Yorker tried and failed to intervene on her stories’ behalf when Brennan was
unable to do so herself? To help see her existing volumes into paperback? Or
press for the Dublin stories to be compiled and arranged, as did Christopher
Carduff? Would things have been different if she had been “one of us”? A man
rather than a woman, a compatriot? Unknowable and complex factors, surely, must
have played their part, but it’s painful to remember that Brennan’s furious
dedication to her art had been witnessed by so many.
Maeve
Brennan: On the Life of a Great Irish Writer, and Its Sad End. By Kathleen Hill. Literary Hub , March 16, 2018
Maeve Brennan
didn’t have to be a woman for her work to be forgotten, though it surely
helped. She did not have to become a bag lady for her work to be revived,
though that possibly helped too. The story of her mental decline is terrifying
for anyone who works with words, who searches her clean, sour sentences for
some hint or indication of future madness, and then turns to check their own.
Brennan
is, for a new generation of female Irish writers, a casualty of old wars not
yet won. The prose holds her revived reputation very well, especially the Irish
stories. These feel transparently modern, the way that Dubliners by Joyce feels
modern. It is partly a question of restraint. Benedict Kiely, Walter Macken,
perhaps even Mary Lavin, ran the risk of being “Irish” on the pages of the New
Yorker, which is to say endearing. Frank O’Connor was the cutest of the lot,
perhaps, as well as the most successful. Brennan remains precise, unyielding:
something lovely and unbearable is happening on the page.
Despite
the lack of surface charm, Brennan was very Irish indeed. Her mother, Una, took
part in the fighting during Easter 1916, alongside her father, Bob, who was
arrested and sent to prison for it. Maeve was born 37 weeks later: conceived
along with the Irish state you might say, she was a true daughter of the Rising.
A few years later, Bob Brennan left his young family to take part in the war of
independence and in the Irish civil war. He spent months in hiding and on the
run and Maeve’s childhood home was raided several times by men carrying guns.
After the state was founded, he set up the Irish Press for Éamon de Valera, and
in 1933, when Maeve was 17, her father was appointed to Washington as Ireland’s
first envoy to America. The Brennans could not have seen this remarkable future
when they fell in love in the Gaelic League in Wexford, but they both saw some
great ideal. Their three girls were named after ancient Irish queens: Emer,
Deirdre and Maeve.
She was
a “Gaelic princess”. Her hair was chestnut, her eyes were green. A pixie, a
changeling, she was admired for the sharpness of her wit. It is hard to find a
description of Brennan that is not code for her ethnicity. In 1941 she moved to
New York and found a job at Harper’s Bazaar and when her family returned to
Ireland, she stayed behind. Already reclusive, she moved from one rented room
to another and rarely had a kitchen to call her own. Still, she seemed to miss
some idea of Ireland, or of domesticity. Her biographer Angela Bourke wrote
that: “Throughout her adult life, to the point of eccentricity, Maeve drank tea
and sought out open fires.”
In 1949, at
the age of 32, she secured a staff job at the New Yorker where she had the
great good fortune to be edited by William Maxwell, who became a loyal friend.
“To be around her,” he wrote, “was to see style being reinvented.” Brennan was
a beautiful, unmarried woman in a dingy office full of men. She wore a fresh
flower in her lapel and smelled of Cuir de Russie, a perfume designed by Chanel
for women who dared to smoke in public. She worked all the time, produced very
little, and ate boiled eggs to keep her figure neat.
By the early
1950s the descriptions of her Irishness had tipped from fey to fierce. Her
tongue “could clip a hedge” she had “a longshoreman’s mouth”, she said “fuck”
in company and drank in Costello’s on Third Avenue. Once, when nobody came to
take her order as she sat in a booth there, she lifted a heavy, full sugar bowl
and dropped it on the floor. There was no sense, when she married her New
Yorker colleague, St Clair McKelway, fellow drinker – fellow madman, indeed –
that he was taking a virgin Irish bride. Brennan was 36. They were, a friend
said, “like two children out on a dangerous walk: both so dangerous and
charming”.
It is worth
saying that no middle-class Irish woman at the time would set foot in a Dublin
pub. Irish drinking culture, for all its famous good fun, was deeply
shame-bound. Maeve’s thirst had its origins in a terrific social uncertainty,
but also in a great want. As her posthumous editor Christopher Carduff said,
her work showed “a ravenous grudge, a ravenous nostalgia and a ravenous need
for love”.
Brennan’s
progress as a fiction writer was far from steady. She wrote a column of city
observations as “The Long-Winded Lady”, and short pieces of memoir, in the sad,
bright tone the New Yorker did so well. Her first published stories were
lightly satirical and set in America. These were published between 1952 and
1956, after which came silence. The Irish stories, on which her reputation was
revived, did not start to appear until 1959, a year after her mother’s death,
when her marriage had fallen apart. There was a second rush, of more hopeful
fictions, after the death of her father in 1964.
The stories
involve two couples, the Bagots and the Derdons, who live in Ranelagh, where
Brennan grew up. The Bagots are happier than the Derdons, but it can be hard to
distinguish the memoir pieces from the fiction and one couple from another –
they are all so lonely and their compass so small. They live, interchangeably,
in Brennan’s childhood home at 48 Cherryfield Avenue, they climb the same
little stairs and look out on the same laburnum tree. The stories are painful
acts of reclamation. Brennan circles around the few events of these people’s
lives. A new sofa arrives at the house, to great excitement. A man selling
apples knocks at the door. People get married, they walk in the park, go to
work and die. There are visits, disappointments and interminable, small
cruelties – especially between the Derdons, whose only son John becomes a
priest, leaving his mother bereft. Some of the most affecting stories are
almost entirely without incident. A man goes into his dead wife’s bedroom and
finds nothing there. A woman sees her own shadow on the wall of her children’s
room, and is comforted by it.
In the 1950s,
there was nothing to indicate, as you read a New Yorker piece, whether it was
true or made up and the writer’s name, if it was given, came at the end. This
put a wonderful pressure on the sentences, and the order in which they
happened. A high value was placed on precision and physical detail; revelation
came slow and in a low key. The culture of the pages may add to the feeling
that Brennan is always starting out, somehow. Some of the pieces, as Maxwell
observes, stay slight. They are, however, “definitely stories, written with
great care and radiant with the safety and comfort of home”. (This was a nice
thing to say, but there is little comfort in the story of the Derdons, who
annoy each other to death, almost, never mind the warm fires and the many cups
of tea.)
A collection
of The Long-Winded Lady’s columns was published in 1969 and reviewed in the
Atlantic magazine by John Updike. Brennan, at 52, was neither the impeccable
style queen of her youth, nor the mad woman of her old age. She was “a woman of
legendary but fading Irish beauty, spectacular red hair and marvellously
eccentric intelligence”, or so said the writer William McPherson. A collection
of stories was published that year, too, under the slightly whimsical title, In
and Out of Never-Never Land. This was well received but did not make it across
the Atlantic, or into paperback. It was a promising start, in publishing terms,
for a career that was already over.
In her New
York Times review of this collection, Anne O’Neill-Barna wrote about how hard
it could be to tell Irish writers apart: “The intoxicating mention of Dublin
street names … or of country counties and towns with their surges of inhibition
and passion … could have been the possession of any of the New Yorker Irish
writers.” It must have been suffocating to be so mixed up like that, especially
for Brennan, who was obsessed with the particularity of things.
She was a
Dublin writer, there are no rural cadences rolling through Brennan’s prose. She
was, besides, impatient of “the bog and thunder variety of stuff that has been
foisted abroad in the name of Ireland”. The Irish oral tradition has a
performative aspect that can tip a writer’s persona into “personality”, but
Brennan’s characters had very little “character” to speak of. Even the word
“voice” caused her anxiety.
Brennan is
described by those who knew her as stylish or Irish and they seem to know what
these terms mean, but she is also described as either silent or voluble, and it
is hard to reconcile the two. Perhaps she was like her mother. When Maeve
brought her husband home in 1957, Una, who had long suffered bad health, was
changed: “Instead of the pale, patient and suffering cypher that used to
confront people, McKelway has seen only a bad little woman who hisses like a
cat, laughs like a fiend, and chatters from morning to night telling
interminable stories … none [of them] containing, as McKelway said, a good word
about anyone.”
In “The Clever
One”, a piece about her own childhood, her sister Derry was “always with me,
and always silent, while I talked endlessly”. Silent but ruthless. The young
Maeve announces that she wants to become an actress and Derry says, “Don’t go
getting any notions into your head.” These memoir pieces circle around ancient
difficulties, and refuse to move on. Maeve is wrongly accused of mouthing the
words at choir practice, and is obliged to sing in front of the whole school as
punishment, but when she opens her mouth, only a dreadful cawing comes out –
proof, if it were needed, of the devil at work in her.
“Why couldn’t
you have kept your mouth shut?” her mother asks in “The Lie”, a strange
non-story that works like a negation of Frank O’Connor’s classic “First
Confession”. Maeve breaks her sister’s sewing machine in a fit of envy, and
confesses the sin, along with the fact that she lied to her mother about it.
But there is no absolution, no victory over the maddening sister. Speech itself
is the mistake.
Long after Una
died, Brennan told Maxwell how she longed to find her mother’s voice again. It
was “the voice you can say anything in … infinite, always changing, endlessly
responsive, and capable of containing anything, and everything”. She also said
it was the voice she heard in a Mozart symphony, which is a big description for
a small woman, even if she was her mother.
Maeve’s
letters, that end anguished and delusional, start witty and sad. In 1959 a
reader wrote to the magazine asking if any more of her stories were on their
way and Brennan wrote a fake reply: “I am terribly sorry to have to be the
first to tell you that our poor Miss Brennan died. She shot herself in the back
with the aid of a small handmirror at the foot of the main altar in St
Patrick’s Cathedral one Shrove Tuesday. Frank O’Connor was where he usually is
in the afternoons, sitting in a confession box pretending to be a priest.”
O’Connor was
by this time a mainstay of the magazine. He often wrote about priests, he felt
the loneliness of their vocation echoed that of the writer. Brennan was not so
enthusiastic. When Father John Derdon comes back to his family home, “the black
cloth gave him a bad air” and his priesthood (whatever that is) is not entirely
believed. “There was something thin and jaunty about him, in the tilt of his
head, or in one of the conscious, unnecessary gestures he was always making,
that belonged more to an actor than to a priest.”
The later
stories are occupied by the idea of “notions”, with the sense that people are
not made foolish by their desires so much as fraudulent. In “The Springs of
Affection”, Min cannot believe her twin brother wants to leave to get married.
“It was as though a bad trick had been played on them all.” The whole family is
devalued, when he goes. “Instead of being reflections of Martin they became
copies of one another, or three not very fortunate copies of a face that was
gone.” Delia, the woman he marries, is of no consequence, nor is the idea that
he might love her.
Anxiety about
madness runs through “The Springs of Affection”. Min’s own father, whom she
holds in contempt, is described as queer, and her sister Clare takes after him
– 30 years after the wedding, Min feels “obliged” to have her “locked up in the
Enniscorthy lunatic asylum”. Perhaps it is the effort to stay sane that makes
Min vicious. There is no tenderness in her, even as a girl. “Min despised her
father,” Brennan writes, “but she hoped her mother wouldn’t hit him.” It is
hard to think of another Irish writer who would put such a flat and finished
thought into the mind of a child.
By his own
account, Bob Brennan suffered a breakdown in 1921 and again in 1922, under the
pressure of the fight for Ireland’s independence, and it is possible that Una
had her problems too. Maeve expressed huge guilt about leaving her family, but
it does not seem to inhere in the usual things – sex, religion or lifestyle.
Her biggest sin was writing itself.
In 1963 she
wrote from Dublin: “The pain radiated by the Envious One is terrible to endure.
The pain that envious people feel, it is frightful, it must be. And this shame
I feel all my life – I was as ashamed of having a little talent as another
would be of being born without a nose.”
The Envious
One is her father, who was, like his daughter, a writer. Over the years, he had
sent her his unpublished stories as well as published books and Maeve was
convinced he was jealous of her success. This may be true – Bob might have been
a bit mad – or it might be a mad thing to say. Already, in this letter, she
could not distinguish between his pain and her own.
If you look at
the Irish women who were successful after Brennan, many of them were some man’s
daughter. Jennifer Johnston’s father was the playwright Denis Johnston. Julia
O’Faolain is the daughter of Seán Ó Faoláin. Eavan Boland is the daughter of
another Irish ambassador – this time to the UK – and all of these women wrote
at a time when few women made it on to the published page. Many of them were,
like Mary Lavin, born and educated abroad. The sons of writers did not survive
their Oedipal impossibilities to imitate this trend.
If Bob Brennan
was jealous of his daughter, he must have been keenly aware of Frank O’Connor
who, like him, had been involved in the fight for independence – they had even
worked together on the Cork Examiner in 1922. O’Connor grew famous in Ireland,
a country where Maeve remained completely unknown. He was, for a while, manager
of the Abbey theatre and some of his work was banned by the Irish censorship
board. By the time he was invited to lecture at Harvard in 1952, his reputation
was secure both at home and abroad.
Publishing in
the New Yorker might enhance a reputation at home, but it could not make one.
The country, still deep in postwar poverty, remained wary of foreign influence
and jealous of foreign success. Maeve Brennan may also have managed that female
trick of being both well regarded and completely unimportant, one that played
out in America, often enough – but the deafness to the female voice in Ireland
made these issues of reputation moot.
On the same
day in 1969 that a review of her short stories appeared in the New York Times,
the paper led with a long piece about Philip Roth’s Portnoy’s Complaint. They
also reviewed Simone de Beauvoir, as well as diaries and recollections by Ann
Bridge, Lesley Blanch and Cynthia Asquith. In the main pages there were more reviews
of books by women than by men, and some of those names endured. In the
corresponding Saturday edition of the Irish Times, the books reviewed are all
by men. None of them is now well known (EV Cunningham, anyone?), as though the
aversion to female writers bent the critics towards forgettability. It is a
miracle that Brennan made it into the paper in 1998; the paper has only
recently stepped up – it was still blithely publishing male-only book pages in
2013.
No Irish paper
published an obituary when she died in 1993, in a nursing home where no one
knew her history, not even Brennan herself. “I write every day in the Irish
Press and get paid,” she wrote in one of her last letters. A perfect life,
clearly. The New Yorker never happened. She was back on the pages her father
had made.
In 1997,
Christopher Carduff published The Springs of Affection in America and the Irish
stories were warmly endorsed by Alice Munro and Edna O’Brien. She was
introduced to the Irish public by Fintan O’Toole, then an arts columnist for
the Irish Times, in January 1998. Brennan was one of the “children of the
revolution”, he said, who, by the end, “more or less lived in the women’s
toilets in the New Yorker building”. He found in her work “a vague but powerful
anxiety about how women’s lives could get lost”.
Angela
Bourke’s landmark biography came out in 2004. It was a great work of literary
reclamation, and Brennan’s reputation as an Irish writer was set. The image of
Brennan as lost or discarded, destitute and psychotic, was offset by iconic
photographs taken by Karl Bissinger, of a beautiful, fragile woman. Feminist
editor Sinéad Gleeson laments the current interest in Brennan’s “vintage
wardrobe and fabulous up-dos, as opposed to the world she created on the page”.
Roddy Doyle’s
mother, Ita, is Brennan’s cousin and he remembers a long visit she made to the
family in Kilbarrack, when she was sober, hard-working and completely normal.
Some of Brennan’s surviving relatives wrote to complain to the Irish Times when
she was depicted onstage as “foul-mouthed” (in Emma Donoghue’s 2012 play The
Talk of the Town). They never heard her swear, they said. “She may have picked
up some vulgar language at the New Yorker, but it would not have been part of
her Irish heritage.”
The house at
48 Cherryfield Avenue was part of a new suburb when Una and Bob moved there in
1921. This was a time when a certain kind of Irish life became set in bricks
and mortar and the house still exists just as described. There is a small,
provisional looking shop on the corner, a commercial garage abutting the back
wall, and a sports ground beyond. It is possible the laburnum tree still blooms
in the garden. My mother’s family lived in a mirroring terrace on the north
side of the city, a slightly bigger house in the less affluent suburb of
Phibsboro. The walnut furniture described in “The Springs of Affection” matches
the furniture my grandmother bought at around the same time the Brennans set up
home. I spent 40 years eying the veneer, in a room where a whole family was
made, born, died. When Brennan’s work was republished in the 1990s, I did not
think of her as beautiful or lost. I thought of her as being from these new
suburbs: the world on the page as familiar and horrible as your own foot. As
with Dubliners, the language moves through the stasis of her characters’ lives
with a beautiful and painful precision. Each one of Brennan’s stories is a
victory over sameness and the loss of meaning: she makes a bid for her sanity,
one sentence at a time.
Anne Enright:
In search of the real Maeve Brennan. By Anne Enright. The Guardian, May 21 , 2016.
Saul Bellow
once said that most writers come howling into the world, blind and bare. A few,
a handful in every generation, arrive with nails, hair, and teeth, and with eyes
that see everything.They speak clearly and coherently, and immediately take up
fork and knife at the grownups’ table.
The late Maeve
Brennan was one of the few. A native Dubliner and longtime member of the staff
of the New Yorker, she published her first short story in 1950, when she was
34. The Holy Terror was not an apprentice piece; it was the early work of a
mature writer, one already in full command of her style and signature subject
matter. It tells the story of Mary Ramsay, the ladies’ room lady in the Royal
Hotel in Dublin, who for 30 years kept a tireless, sour vigil from “a shabby,
low-seated bamboo chair set in beside a screen in the corner of the outer
room”. “She was all eyes and ears.” “She took a merciless pleasure in watching
women as they passed before her in their most female and desperate and comical
predicaments.” “Her dislike of these women possessed her completely.” “She bore
in her heart a long, directionless grudge, a ravenous grudge.”
Saul
Bellow once said that most writers come howling into the world, blind and bare.
A few, a handful in every generation, arrive with nails, hair, and teeth, and
with eyes that see everything.They speak clearly and coherently, and
immediately take up fork and knife at the grownups’ table.
The late
Maeve Brennan was one of the few. A native Dubliner and longtime member of the
staff of the New Yorker, she published her first short story in 1950, when she
was 34. The Holy Terror was not an apprentice piece; it was the early work of a
mature writer, one already in full command of her style and signature subject
matter. It tells the story of Mary Ramsay, the ladies’ room lady in the Royal
Hotel in Dublin, who for 30 years kept a tireless, sour vigil from “a shabby,
low-seated bamboo chair set in beside a screen in the corner of the outer
room”. “She was all eyes and ears.” “She took a merciless pleasure in watching
women as they passed before her in their most female and desperate and comical
predicaments.” “Her dislike of these women possessed her completely.” “She bore
in her heart a long, directionless grudge, a ravenous grudge.”
Mary
Ramsay, or rather the spirit that animates her, recurs in a number of Maeve’s
other stories. It is there in Mary Lambert, who in A Young Girl Can Spoil Her
Chances attempts to “talk sense” to her daughter’s suitor, to discourage him
from marrying the foolish child who has so often embarrassed her and who now
enrages her with the prospect of leaving home. It is there too in Min Bagot,
who in The Springs of Affection takes revenge on her beautiful, despised
sister-in-law by surviving her and appropriating her many fine things.
And it
is there in Mrs King, the grandmother in The Visitor. This novella, recently
discovered in a university archive and published here for the first time, is
the earliest of all of Maeve’s known writings. It is also the most
representative. It is the ideal place for one to begin with her work, for not
only does it show where she set out from but it also explores so much of her
later fictional world in small compass. The completeness of vision of The
Visitor, and the ease with which the novella takes its place among her finest
stories, is astonishing. This ferocious tale of love longed for, of love
perverted and denied, is one of her finest achievements.
Mrs King
is an embodiment of one side of the Irish temperament, the selfish, emotionally
unreachable side. She takes great satisfaction in bringing pain to those who
would come between her and her happiness, and her happiness lies in the total
possession of her son.There is little natural affection in her, and even less
compassion. Her motive force is contempt, especially for those who think her
capable of softheartedness.
Mrs King
smiles, but only in anger. Her granddaughter, Anastasia, craves nothing so much
from her as a smile of kindness, of approval. This troubled young woman is
another of Maeve’s archetypes. There is something of her in Delia Bagot, a
woman who features in so many of Maeve’s best stories, another unloved soul
whose neediness drives her toward madness, another motherless daughter who
sometimes sees ghosts. There is even more of her in the long-winded lady, the
“I” of Maeve’s first-person sketches for the New Yorker’s Talk of the Town. The
longwinded lady is the Flying Dutchman of Manhattan, an exile from a lovingly
remembered past, doomed to roam the city with no real home of her own. She is a
sad, self-conscious, but exquisite observer, a traveller in residence, a visitor
to this life.
In the
music of Maeve Brennan, three notes repeatedly sound together – a ravenous
grudge, a ravenous nostalgia, and a ravenous need for love. In The Visitor she
plays this chord for the first time, announcing the key of all the songs to follow.
It is
not known exactly when Maeve began to write The Visitor, but she completed it
sometime in the middle 1940s, when she was living at 5 East Tenth Street, in
her adopted Manhattan. If the year is uncertain, the address is not – it is
pencilled on the cover sheet to the original, an 80-page, double-spaced,
fair-copy typescript.
This
typescript – the only extant copy of the work – is now in the archives of the
University of Notre Dame. It came to the library in 1982 as part of its
purchase of the business files of Sheed & Ward, the premier Catholic
publisher of its day. Maisie Ward, a guiding spirit of the firm, was a
well-known figure in the Irish life of mid-century Manhattan, a life that
welcomed Maeve upon her coming to the city in 1940. Both women were daughters
of illustrious Irishmen – Maisie’s father,Wilfrid Ward, was editor of the
Dublin Review; Maeve’s father, Robert Brennan, was the first Irish ambassador
to the United States – and it seems that their paths crossed more than once.
Maeve probably sent Maisie Ward The Visitor, perhaps for possible publication,
more likely for general literary advice. All of this is conjecture; exactly how
it came to Sheed & Ward is unknown and, according to everyone who knew
Maeve, will probably remain so. She was modest, even secretive, about her
literary business, and she seldom saved a letter.
I have
edited all four of Maeve Brennan’s posthumous books.While the others drew on
previously published material, most of it from the New Yorker, this book marks
the first time I’ve worked on her prose in typescript. I approached it not as a
textual scholar but as a trade book editor; that means I cut a repetition here,
identified a speaker there, and made a number of small, silent,
thrice-considered changes throughout. There were no major cruxes, yet I worried
over some of what I did, and still have many questions that I wish I could ask
the author, including the very biggest: Why did you never publish this? Was it
too short for a first book? Too long for a magazine story? Did you misplace
your only carbon copy of the original? Did you even make a carbon? Or did you
just move on, having so many stories yet to tell?
William
Maxwell, Maeve’s editor at The New Yorker, told me that she was a shrewd judge
of her own prose, never showed him work in progress, and never submitted a
story until she could stand by every word of it. I don’t know – maybe no one
living knows – her own shrewd judgement on The Visitor. I can only hope that it
was kind, and that she would have stood by this, the published version.
Christopher
Carduff, August 4th, 2000 - This is the editor’s note to The Visitor
Maeve Brennan’s The Visitor: the key of all the songs to
follow. By Christopher Carduff. The Irish Times, January 5, 2017
