The Sigla Blog

Every nation has its literary kings and queens and Ireland, is no exception. For a such small nation, we have never had any problem making ourselves heard, particularly in terms of the arts, and notably writing. For every writer that is firmly ensconced in Irish literature’s Hall of Fame, there are many that have been overlooked or whose work is only starting to come to light. Although not entirely unknown, I often think of Benedict Kiely in this way, and of his tour de force novel The Captain with the Whiskers. It battled to free itself of parochialism and looked to modernity in the way an idealistic country youth dreams of the city. And yet, it’s this examination of parochialism that makes the novel so incendiary and ahead of its time. But if there is one writer above anyone else, who seems to have slipped between the cracks, until recent years anyway, it’s Maeve Brennan.

I had never actually read any of her writing but recalled reading somewhere that she was an ex-lover of Philip Larkin. One Saturday in mid 2004, the Guardian Review carried a striking image on the cover of a young woman. Turning to look over her shoulder, her red hair is pulled back from her face in a bun; she is dressed in black and smoking a cigarette in a New York apartment. It was the epitome of mysterious grace and the accompanying article (which sadly, I can’t locate in the Guardian archives) was written by her biographer Angela Bourke ahead of the publication of Maeve Brennan: Homesick at The New Yorker.

When she died in 1993, Maeve Brennan was a relatively obscure figure in the canon of Irish writing, perhaps because she died in the US, having spent most of her life there. Her father Robert was the first Irish Ambassador to America and when the family eventually returned to Ireland, Maeve, enamoured of New York, landed a prestigious job at The New Yorker. There, she wrote about fashion, reviewed books and eventually penned her famous column, The Talk of the Town, about Manhattan life. Her first short story, The Holy Terror, was published in 1950 and is a remarkable debut. In it a ladies room attendant in a Dublin hotel, uses years of bile and anger in an effort to save her job. Mary Ramsay is a “garrulous, greedy heap of a woman” and is typical of the septic matriarchs that frequent much of Brennan’s writing.

In her novella The Visitor, a young woman returns to Ireland after her mother’s death in Paris, hoping to find solace in her childhood home. Instead her unfeeling grandmother rejects her and destroys the idyll of what ‘home’ represents. Despite a seemingly charmed life with the glitterati in New York, Brennan constantly returned to Ireland metaphorically, with her themes, locations and characters. In The Visitor’s opening pages, the image of Anastacia King returning on the mail train is so filled with pathos, encapsulating the notion of exile perfectly.

The writing drips with loneliness and the sense that isolation can be the ruination of people. Mary Ramsay’s bitterness is a product of being too self-sufficient, while Norah Kilbride in The Visitor sacrifices her one chance of happiness, and ends up alone. Brennan acutely taps in to the conflict that often exists between women, be they mothers and daughters or old women threatened by young arrivistes. She rails against the rigidly defined role of women; of Norah, whose only chance of love was furtive coupling on an old settee; and of Anastasia’s mother who is punished after death for fleeing an unhappy marriage in life.

Brennan’s output for the New Yorker was substantial and her columns were later published in book entitled The Long Winded Lady - Notes From the New Yorker. The magazine also published many of her short stories but all of her collections were published posthumously. The Springs of Affection (sub-titled ‘Stories of Dublin’), a short story collection The Rose Garden and her only novella The Visitor, are arresting in the way that great writing should be. Edward Albee said of Maeve Brennan: “To mention her in the company of Chekhov and Flaubert is only proper”. In terms of the short story’s artistry, I would also include Elizabeth Bowen, Molly Keane and Katherine Mansfield alongside her.

If you’d like to read some of her writing and have a spare fiver today, pick up a copy of The Irish Independent. As part of their Great Irish Writers series, you can get a hardback edition of The Springs of Affection (most shops will have the actual book so you don’t have to send away), which is a perfect introduction to her work.