BY KATHLEEN HILL
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 seventeen 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 “traveller 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 almost every one of the Dublin stories, the house on Cherryfield Avenue in Ranelagh, on the south side of Dublin, provides the setting. Sometimes the characters who live in the house are called Rose and Hubert Derdon. In another sequence, they are Delia and Martin Bagot, a couple who in many ways resemble Rose and Hubert. Or, in the earliest brief autobiographical stories published between 1953 and 1955, the children living there are called Emer and Maeve and Derry. But the house they variously occupy never changes. The front door opens onto a narrow front hallway that passes a staircase to lead down a few steps into a kitchen with a coal-burning stove. In the front sitting room, where there is a fireplace, a large bay window looks out on the houses across the street, as does the bay window in the bedroom just above it. The stairs are covered by a red runner held in place at each step by a brass rod. The back sitting room, or dining room, as it is sometimes called, is warmed by a gas fire and overlooks the small garden in back. Rose, or it might be Delia—both passionate gardeners—step outside through a heavy wooden kitchen door painted green. In spring the laburnum tree in back explodes in a profusion of tiny yellow blossoms.
Every corner of the house is meticulously cared for by the unceasing labors of the women who live in it. In one of Brennan’s earliest published stories, “The Day We Got Our Own Back,” written before Rose Derdon or Delia Bagot appeared on the scene, the terror inflicted one day during the Irish Civil War when the Free Staters raid the house looking for evidence of the father’s Republican activities is measured by the chaos they leave behind: the beds torn apart and the mattresses bundled together, the books taken from their shelves and shaken out for suspicious notes and letters, the drawers emptied, the tins of tea and flour and sugar dumped onto the red tiles of the kitchen floor, the scarred oilcloth on the dining room floor the mother had been polishing when they burst in with their revolvers. “Still they had found nothing, but the house looked as if it had suffered an explosion without bursting its walls.”
Maeve Brennan was almost five in 1921 when her parents, Bob and Una Brennan, bought the house in Ranelagh at the outbreak of the Irish Civil War. The year 1921 had marked the end of the Irish War of Independence; a truce had been struck in July, ending what had been largely a guerrilla war of attrition. A few months later, however, when the terms of the treaty Michael Collins had negotiated in London became public, a civil conflict erupted perhaps even more terrible than the one waged against the Crown: fellow patriots who’d shared prison cells and fought alongside each other for years became bitter enemies. It was de Valera who led the opposition to the new treaty that required of elected representatives an oath of allegiance to King George V and allowed Britain to retain the six counties in the north. These terms, for members of the Anti-Treaty Irish Republican Army, like Maeve’s father, Bob Brennan, betrayed the Irish Republic as declared in the proclamation of 1916.
For safekeeping during this desperate time, Maeve’s parents sent her, along with her older and younger sisters, for long spells to Coolnaboy in the Wexford countryside, where her mother had grown up and where they were fondly cared for by their grandmother and young aunt and uncles. Emer, Maeve, Deirdre: these were the names—all taken from ancient Irish sagas—that Bob and Una gave to their daughters. Between her older sister Emer and Maeve there’d been another child, a boy, Manus, who’d lived less than a year. Later on, in 1928, Robert was born and, like his father, was called Bob.
Maeve Brennan’s years at 48 Cherryfield Avenue were her school-going years: first at St. Mary’s National School, a short walk away, then later on with her sister Derry (Deirdre) for a couple of years at a boarding school in County Kildare called Cross and Passion. After she returned to Dublin at thirteen, she attended Scoil Bhrighde, a Catholic Irish-speaking day school run by Louise Gavan Duffy, the daughter of the Irish rebel Charles Gavan Duffy. It was housed in Duffy’s townhouse on St. Stephen’s Green and distinguished by the fact that it employed only lay teachers and that all of its classes were taught in Irish. The school encouraged the use of that language outside the classroom, and years later Brennan’s school friends wrote to her in Irish. Here she distinguished herself in English and laid the foundations of a lifetime interest in French language and literature.
During the summer holidays, after she and her sisters had spent a couple of weeks at Coolnaboy, where their Bolger cousins, who included Ita—the future mother of Roddy Doyle—were also visiting, they would be driven to Wexford, where Bob had grown up, to stay with their father’s mother and two of his grown sisters. Later on, both places and the people who lived in them would come to figure in her stories, in fact, counterpointing each other in her last published story, “The Springs of Affection.”
When in 1934 the Brennans moved out of the house in Ranelagh after more than a decade, Maeve was turning eighteen, and de Valera had become head of the Irish government and had appointed Bob Brennan as the first Irish envoy to the United States. Long afterward, when Brennan’s life had come apart, she told a friend who visited her in the hospital that she had felt “desperate about being uprooted” when the family left Ireland to relocate to Washington, DC. You could say the house at 48 Cherryfield Avenue was her only home, irreplaceable. When she lost—or found—her way and after her many years at The New Yorker began to wander the streets, it seems she could locate its shadow on the pavement beneath her feet, anywhere.
MAEVE BRENNAN WAS born in Dublin on January 6, 1917, eight months after the Easter Rising. Her parents, both early members of the Gaelic League, were Republicans, sworn members of the secret Irish Republican Brotherhood. They took part in the rising not in Dublin but in County Wexford, in Enniscorthy, one of the few towns outside Dublin that engaged in armed struggle. By the end of Easter week, following Patrick Pearse’s surrender to the British, Bob and Una, along with other Wexford patriots, were taken to Mountjoy Prison and charged with “armed rebellion.” Although Una was released after a few days, Bob, like his Dublin counterparts, was quickly court-martialed and sentenced to death. On May 3, Pearse as well as Thomas MacDonagh and Tom Clarke were shot. But as the executions rolled on day after day and as the tide of sympathy in Ireland and the United States turned toward the insurgents, Bob’s sentence along with others’ were commuted to five years of penal service in Britain.
On the January day Maeve was born, the Feast of the Epiphany, Bob Brennan was serving his sentence in Lewes Prison in Sussex. Under a general amnesty in June 1917, the Irish prisoners were released, and Maeve’s father returned home and met his five-month-old daughter. During the following years he’d be arrested again and again, serving prison time both in Ireland and Britain, using false names, spending nights in one safe house or another, rapidly skipping between places to avoid arrest, seldom at home with his wife and little daughters. In 1918 he produced the Irish Bulletin, a daily paper whose purpose was to counteract British propaganda and make the underground-elected government’s political positions known. As a Republican during the Irish Civil War, he continued his life on the run and had a breakdown during that time, perhaps more than one. It wasn’t until later, after the hostilities had ended and the state was established, that Éamon de Valera asked him to be managing editor of the Irish Press.
As an adult, Brennan would distance herself from the ardent nationalism of her parents’ generation. But she made distinctions. William Maxwell, her editor and close friend at The New Yorker for more than twenty years—editor also of J. D. Salinger, Eudora Welty, John Cheever, Isaac Bashevis Singer, and Frank O’Connor—writes in his introduction to The Springs of Affection that he and she became friends over shared literary affinities: Tolstoy, Turgenev, Colette. “The only bone of contention between us I was aware of was that she refused to read the novels of Elizabeth Bowen because Bowen was Anglo-Irish. On the other hand, she venerated Yeats, who was also Anglo-Irish, and she knew a good deal of his poetry by heart.”
But Yeats had thrown in his lot with the cause for Irish independence. Indeed, he later worried that the early play he’d written with Lady Gregory, Cathleen ni Houlihan, had sent men to their deaths. On the other hand, Bowen’s feelings about the rebellion were more ambivalent, a fact Maeve would have carried in her bones but that may have been lost, sometimes, on even her closest American friends.
MAEVE AT SEVENTEEN had no choice but to move with her family to Washington, DC, in 1934. Though later on she visited Ireland a number of times, she couldn’t have known when she left that she would never live there again, nor even return for many years. At twenty-four she moved by herself to New York City, where she lived for the rest of her life. During the years in Washington, she’d graduated from Immaculata Seminary, a junior college run by the Sisters of Providence, and then from American University, where she’d completed the final two years of her bachelor’s degree. Afterward she studied library science at the Catholic University of America.
Years later, she told a friend that in Washington she’d been in love with Walter Kerr, who would later become a noted drama critic, that he’d broken their engagement and married someone else. Whether it was for this reason or another she moved to New York, it seems she left home against the wishes of her parents. Her break from them wouldn’t be permanent, but when they returned to Ireland, she didn’t go with them.
Long afterward, in about 1970, she described in a letter to William Maxwell a terrifying dream she’d had of that initial rupture with her family.
I woke with the most painful feeling of irrevocable separation from something I could put my hand out and touch—I was in New York City and had come from Washington and they were in Washington & the sense of time drawing tight from nowhere to nowhere was . . . agonizing, as if the feeling I woke up with was incurable and 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.
Could these words describe some deep and terrified aspect of the emerging writer Brennan remembered herself to have been at the time, the horrified anticipation of chasms that would widen as she wrote from the place of family pain and loneliness? Of antipathies that refuse to soften? Inconsolable longings that neither disappear nor give way to something else?
On the other hand, perhaps this letter written in her early fifties, so soon before her own unraveling, is in itself a cry of warning, an anguished premonition of what lay ahead. It may have been the expression of some dreaming part of herself that both feared and longed for the destruction of memory—in itself a kind of death—that had risen up at last to signal the approach of what people call madness. Brennan herself might have named it the “delirium of loss,” the affliction suffered by Rose in one of the Derdon stories, “An Attack of Hunger”: “The only ease that could come to her would come if she could just get down on the floor and put her face in the corner and let her mind wander away into sleep, very deep and distant, where there was no worry and where her mind would not be confined in dreams but could float and become vague and might even break free and sail off like a child’s balloon, taking her burden of memory with it.”
By 1970 Brennan had carried the burden of memory for years, had labored to give those memories shape, trace in them the pattern it was hers alone to decipher. She gave everything of herself to her stories. She worked very hard, producing little. Sometimes she labored on a story for years, refusing to release it to publication if it seemed unfinished to her or if William Maxwell’s editorial hand had seemed to disturb its integrity, as was the case with “The Rose Garden.” The meticulous beauty of her sentences is spun out of the chaos of the past. Their disturbing grace must have been personally costly to herself, but while she was at work on them, it can be hoped she was in a state of vibrant tranquility.
BY THE TIME Bob and Una were at last recalled to Dublin, the war was over and with it Bob’s uneasy diplomacy in the face of Ireland’s declared neutrality. In June 1948, Maeve’s father wrote to her referring to the recent visit she’d made to see them not long after their return. By then, she’d lived for five years in New York City, working briefly at the public library on Forty-second 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 Forty-fourth 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 twenty-seven 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.”
Anastasia, an orphan, twenty-two years old, arrives on the train from Paris following the recent death of her mother, desperate to find a home in her grandmother’s house in Dublin. It is the house in which her parents’ unhappy marriage had been played out under the cold eye of the grandmother, whose ferocious grip on her only son remained unshaken, the house in which Anastasia had grown up. Now her grandmother, resolute in her intention to expel Anastasia from under her roof, is all politeness, all chained fury, exquisitely in control of herself, implacable, immune to any appeal to mercy or love. “There is no comfort in her,” Anastasia quickly understands. For Anastasia has committed an unforgivable sin. At sixteen, she’d followed her mother, who, “like some kind of madwoman,” her grandmother says, had fled the house for Paris, abandoning Anastasia’s father, the beloved son. Now six years later Anastasia, aching for love, for a place to call home, is repelled. The chill of her grandmother’s dislike, indeed of her hatred, surrounds her as the two sit silently, one on either side of the fire in the enormous, shadowy room. “There was no movement in the room except the wild movement of the fire-flames and the light they let go. The light washed up and down the room like thin water over stones.”
There is an inside and there is an outside. Anastasia, condemned to be a visitor, is somewhere between. She is inside, but her lease is up. She is on her way out onto the streets, where the poor are to be observed from the windows, sometimes playing a violin or a tin whistle, but welcomed in by Katherine, Anastasia’s grandmother’s servant, who gives them a meal at her own table beside the roaring oven in the basement kitchen. “Don’t ever say beggar,” said Katherine in a fierce whisper. “He’s a poor man, God help him.” And in the final pages Anastasia becomes one of those on the outside. Evicted from her home, she is on the way to the mail train, by which she’ll return to Paris, when she turns back for a final glimpse. Just outside the house, taking off her stockings and shoes, leaning against a lamp post, she steps barefoot into the street, her eyes fixed on the window—where her grandmother and Katherine will soon appear—and begins to sing, “loud and sudden as one in a dream, who without warning finds a voice in some public place”:
There is a happy land
far far away. . . .
And those passing by stop to listen.
Anastasia cannot choose both parents: they are at odds, and therein lies her misery. She is excluded because she has chosen one. It is not the other, her father, who would have denied her; it is his mother, who cannot forgive her son for marrying at all. That is the primal sin, to choose outside the family. Yet what is the alternative if not incest, symbolic if not actual? Sexual choice comes with the charge of family disloyalty, with the fierce disapproval of those held longest and closest.
Again, the unyielding grudge, the unflagging sense of betrayal. Indeed, very like the spite to which, in one of the Derdon stories, Rose is subjected by her mother, who mocks her openly, maliciously, in front of her suitor, Hubert, names her a “poor soft thing with no respect for herself or her family.” Or like Min Bagot in “The Springs of Affection,” whose life is embittered by what she sees as her twin brother’s betrayal of his mother and sisters by marrying, who slips her dead brother’s wedding ring from his hand and puts it on the fourth finger of her own left hand. To save it from grave robbers, she tells herself.
The ones set adrift, the outsiders, are doomed by coldness of heart, the pinched refusal to take in another’s ravenous need. They are the dispossessed, in silent sympathy with the poor, the wanderers. But the punishment for holding out against the needy is claustrophobia, confinement to the prison within: slow suffocation between ever narrowing walls.
And what is to be found in the spaces outside, where Anastasia is exposed to wind and weather? For one, the laburnum tree in the back garden that is seen in so many of the Dublin stories. And the parade of seasons as Anastasia broods on the passage of time: “Next winter and next winter and next winter. In the mind they passed all slowly, like clouds across a summer sky, but a sudden call or turn of the head and they disappeared in a rush, shuttling quickly one after the last till nothing was left but a strangeness in the mind, a drop of thought that trembled and was gone, perhaps.”
It is on the street that Anastasia finds her voice “loud and sudden as one in a dream,” not within the confines of the house. In taking off her stockings and shoes, she joins the poor and the dispossessed. The ones who stop to listen to her are not her longtime familiars but those she meets in passing, strangers all.
WHEN DID MAEVE Brennan become an exile? And for what or where is she homesick? It seems she returned to Ireland for the first time after fourteen years away, exactly the same number of years the missionary bishop in one of Brennan’s last published stories, “Stories from Africa,” was first absent from Ireland. “You could say that an exile was a person who knew of a country that made all other countries seem strange,” the bishop thinks. But then he stops himself:
Anyone listening to him would imagine he thought Ireland to be a pretty little oasis of one kind or another, a kind of family paradise. He thought of his country, where terrible pride and terrible humility stand together, two noble creatures enslaved, enthralled, by what defines them, the bitter Irish appetite for humiliation. No, there was no complacency there, no complacency and no chance of any. He thought of his country and sighed in admiration, and grinned, although he knew he was being guilty of self-satisfaction.
Is exile, then, a question of geography? Is it distance—chosen or compelled—from a state of mind particular to the place that has shaped you? A national temper that can lucidly be seen for what it is but neither renounced nor embraced? And is Anastasia’s wrenching departure a condition for her song? Surely she would have remained if she could. “There was no comfort there.”
And in time it may have been that distance became a necessity for Brennan, a writer whose preoccupation with the close interior spaces of her childhood drew her always more deeply into the inexhaustible lives of those she imagined moving in the same rooms, dreaming in them, looking out at the ever-shifting clouds through their windows.
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 fifteen 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 thirty-seven 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 twelve 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.
And she continued to work on 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.
Because the sequence of Derdon stories is mostly set within about the same period in the Derdons’ marriage—after their grown son, John, has gone off to be a priest—and because the backdrop is the same rooms looking out on the same garden, it can be hard, on first reading, to distinguish one story from another, to recall in which one a particular incident breaks the surface of their quiet, tormented life together, a memory takes hold. Or a shining image rises unbidden from the mysterious undercurrent of life itself. The dramatic confrontations between Rose and Hubert are often wordless, or rather the words break through only after long silent periods of brooding, of baffled efforts to make sense of themselves or each other. Their lives circle in a timeless space, heavy with misunderstanding and foiled attempts to catch each other out in trivial matters. There is Hubert, setting out to his job in a men’s clothing store, subtly shaming Rose by failing to leave the household money as usual on a Friday morning because she isn’t there at the doorway to ask for it. Her helpless fear of Hubert and his own anger at that fear; her cringing smile of defeat; her rough, dry hands, his daintier ones. Hubert’s irritation with the way Rose eats, her greater appetite, her preference for poor people, her curiosity about them matched by his own dislike. Her grief at the loss of John, her fascination with the changing sky as the clouds “melted slowly into each other and slowly drew apart.” His devastating assessments: “It is too late for Rose.” Her clogged need for love balked in childhood by the death of a beloved father; her sly, tortured attempts to make of their child, John, an ally. Hubert’s attempts too to make peace, to comfort her after the loss of John with the gift of a blue hydrangea, a tea tray after an illness. Or his sustained determination to hold out against her: a long moment of regret, a sky growing dark, and the understanding that there is nothing to be said.
Or a story too may be backlit by memories of their life as a couple, by glimpses of an inscrutable moment, as in “Family Walls,” when Hubert, in the wake of a prolonged spell of silent recrimination, looks out the window and sees Rose working in the garden. She lifts her arm to smooth a loose strand of hair, “and as the sleeve fell back, her upraised arm gleamed. Hubert saw her wrist and her elbow and in that fragment of her he saw all of Rose, as the crescent moon recalls the full moon to anyone who has watched her at the height of her power.”
“The bitter Irish appetite for humiliation”: would that be an appetite for feeling humiliated, or rather an appetite for humiliating someone else? Rose is married to Hubert who has a “great gift for cutting people down when they got above themselves.” Or so Hubert puts it to himself by way of naming his “great gift.” As for Rose’s life at home as a child, “her mother had always said she had too good an idea of herself.” Called her “Miss Importance.” In the face of Hubert’s disdain, Rose’s moments of passionate revolt exhaust themselves at last in a craven, trembling smile, her expressions of outrage more often than not giving way to a pitiful appeal for mercy.
A domestic version, perhaps, of the humiliated Irish subject’s long history of rebellion, of furious uprisings against the colonial master followed by collapse into submission, into making-do. Of the calm and pitiless attempt of those in power to subdue another spirit when it rebels, as it is sure to do. Because sometimes the humiliated will look to humiliate another in turn: gross distortions in the exercise of power in the public sphere will find subtle echoes in the most intimate spaces, as in a marriage. For isn’t this one of the ways of soothing injured pride? The blind attempt to shame someone else, someone close at hand? The Derdon stories, in particular, dissect the cruelties that spring from one person’s settled assumptions of superiority over another, the damage done in the name of maintaining order, of keeping someone “in their place.” But the personal costs to those who allow themselves relief of this brutal kind—as do Hubert or the grandmother in The Visitor or Min in “The Springs of Affection”—are dramatized as well: an anguished state of paralysis, a furtive retreat from the unpredictable and vulnerably human life of feeling.
Rose Derdon, like Anastasia, in the face of humiliation and banishment, makes common cause with those on the outside, “the poor.” The man with the wounded hand, for instance, who comes to the door every Thursday afternoon: “His eyes, blue, seemed weary enough to die, but still the poor natural mouth, obedient to its end, a mouth so lonely it appeared to have no tongue, opened itself to her in a thin bashful smile of recognition and supplication. Never mind, never mind, never mind, no blame to you nor to me nor to anybody, the mouth said, only fill me.”
Then one day she encounters him on a bridge over the River Liffey, and he looks at her with welcome, with the kindness of recognition. Much to her dismay, he fails to come to her door the following Thursday, then reappears the next week: “He held up his sore hand and gazed at her without a sign of the radiance that she had seen in his face on the bridge. If he felt ashamed that he had given himself away there was no sign of that either. He was too far gone in want. He was gone out of reach. It gave her great comfort to see him at the door again.”
The Bagot stories were begun later—even while Brennan was still at work on the Derdon stories—and if Delia and Martin Bagot are less fiercely locked in opposition than the Derdons, it may be because the husband is less frequently on the scene. They have lost an infant son early in their marriage and now have two little girls. When Martin returns from work late, he sleeps alone in the box room over the kitchen. The lonely and neglected Delia may be found at home longing for her children’s return from a holiday in the country or caring for the beloved dog and cats Martin would be rid of altogether. But these stories are less desolating than the stories about the Derdons, and Delia finds some comfort in her children, in a kindly shadow on the wall, in the little terrier “who brushes against her every chance he got . . . who lived in the blazing humility of perfect love.”
Then one day she is introduced by a visitor—the exiled old missionary bishop, her dead father’s long-ago boyhood friend in the Wexford countryside, where Delia too had grown up—to a life, her own.
The captive monkey, reduced by grief and age to the lowest and farthest corner of her cage at the zoo, watches the crowd that stares at her with an acceptance so profound it shines like sympathy. All struggle had vanished from the old Bishop’s eyes, and Mrs. Bagot gave him a smile of tremulous indignation, showing how, one morning, she would face her own death.
“We have tea all ready for you, Your Grace,” she said.
“God bless you,” he said, “but never mind ‘Your Grace.’ I’m a very plain priest. ‘Father,’ or ‘Father Tom,’ whichever you like. Delia, is it? Am I right? You’re the image of your grandmother, Delia.”
He asked her about her life, and as they spoke she had the feeling she was talking about someone who was very well known to her although they had never met. She was talking about herself, and she was amazed to find how much there was to be said about this person, herself, who had come into the conversation from nowhere and who was now becoming more real, although invisible, with every word that was spoken. In response to the Bishop’s trust in her she spoke as though in Braille, feeling her way eagerly and with confidence along a path that she found she knew by heart, every inch of it, in the dark. And as she spoke, that path, her life, became visible.
The bishop, who has thoughts about Ireland’s appetite for humiliation, is the exile who has returned to Ireland to die. Like the monkey “reduced by grief and age to the lowest and farthest corner of her cage,” like the man dying of want, he is now on the outside. It is he who recognizes Delia, as the poor man recognizes Rose. Is it, then, that the kingdom of heaven belongs to the poor in spirit? That grief and want are conditions for vision?
Maeve Brennan achieves a supreme mastery in these late stories: “Family Walls,” “A Girl Can Spoil Her Chances,” “The Drowned Man,” and “The Springs of Affection.” A single story may encompass an entire life, and the sequence of Derdon stories and the sequence of Bagot stories each has the artistic integrity of a novel. Alice Munro wrote that she counted “The Springs of Affection” among her favorite stories of all time, and it isn’t hard to imagine that she may have learned something from Maeve Brennan about the possibility of folding the span of a character’s life into a few pages. No wonder, either, that Edward Albee compares Brennan’s stories to Chekhov’s: In each the same luminous precision of detail, the same sense of suffering humanity. The tenderness toward the forgotten.
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. 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.
At about the same time that Carduff’s editions started to come out in 1997, Mary Hawthorne, who’d been hired to work at The New Yorker in 1981, wrote a piece about an encounter with Brennan that sparked interest when it appeared in the London Review of Books. Not long afterward Angela Bourke undertook the formidable task of exploring Brennan’s life while many people who had known her were still alive. Bourke’s biography, Maeve Brennan: Homesick at The New Yorker, to which I am much indebted, appeared in 2004. In 2012 Emma Donoghue wrote a play based on Brennan’s life, The Talk of the Town, for the Dublin Theatre Festival. And in the spring of 2016, a new edition of The Springs of Affection was published by Dublin’s Stinging Fly Press, with an introduction by Anne Enright.
The paroxysms of the Irish rebellion that shaped Maeve’s early life have been given shape and voice by numbers of writers. Whether in novels or poems or plays or memoir, many have written about the era of the struggle for Irish independence with the authority of witnesses. Maeve Brennan writes too as one who was there, as child-witness, as girl-witness: the armed men breaking into the house protected by the helpless mother, the heart-stopping search for the father. But it may be that Brennan’s own early terrors of whatever kind were translated in her fiction into the anguish of love withdrawn or love denied: these flash in and out of The Visitor and the Derdon stories, in particular, like searchlights illuminating a wasteland where disappointment and confusion rise up the more terribly because it had been just here, on this island of home and security, that comfort had been most hoped for. It’s the specter of want, “the delirium of loss,” that stalks Maeve Brennan’s Irish stories, the sense of something that is not there. They take their place in a long tradition of tales of exile and displacement, of spellbinding metaphor carried by song.
The lost and irreplaceable home can be restored only from within, painstakingly. And like the exiled bishop who describes for his African students over and over again the particulars of the beloved road leading to the house in the Wexford countryside where he was welcomed for so short a time, so that his students and he make a game of “Going to Poulbwee,” so Brennan, spinning her sentences—scrupulous, lyrical, devastating—allows us to enter that first place. Only as irretrievably lost is it open to reclamation. It is hers to cultivate the ground of memory, to entertain the wealth of details that swarms restlessly until set down, one by one, in its destined place; to make something uncompromising and beautiful where love has been misplaced or betrayed and so to redeem that loss; to find solace in rendering whole what has come undone. Hubert Derdon, wearied at last by a long bout of simmering resentment against his wife, happens to look out, toward the end of “Family Walls,” at the absorbed Rose working in her garden:
She was intent on placing the plant in its exact place, and she was as anxious at her work as though she had taken the future of the world between her hands and must set it right once and for all because there would be no second chance—no second chance for her, at least—to prove that if it was left to her, all would be well. For this moment the weight of the world was off her shoulders and in her hands.