Maeve Brennan’s stories: ‘a bid for sanity, one sentence at a time’

Roddy Doyle introduced me to Maeve Brennan. Not literally, but literary-ily, in 2008, when he read her story Christmas Eve (first published in the New Yorker in 1972) in the magazine’s fiction podcast series. She was new to me then, and his reading, and his telling of the time she spent living with his family years before (Maeve Brennan was a cousin of his mother’s) was curious, and sad, and clear: a life of threadbare elegance seen through the disinterested eyes of a teenager, then reconsidered through the filter of adulthood. She was the first divorcee to ever sit in his house, he commented, which for his family “was verging on science fiction”.

I began then with The Springs of Affection, first published in 1997 and republished this year by the Stinging Fly Press. I made the rookie mistake and read it straight through, turning it into a novel in my head, desperate to pull the threads of the characters’ lives together into a bigger, joined-up (and, I’ll admit it, happier narrative). The language and icy construction were beautiful in a frightening sort of way but the lonely, tight compass of the characters’ world was far too stifling for a sustained read. I learnt my lesson. The very sentences were unsettling. The stories pick you up and put you down again in the same place, even though it feels as though everything has shifted, grown darker in the time you were sitting by their fire. The Derdons and the Bagots lived in a Dublin I never knew, but my memories of my own grandmother’s house meant I could smell the same mixture of dust stirred by furniture polish, hear the same click of shoes pad to and fro across cold, tiled floors, controlled by the metronome of mealtimes. Maeve Brennan’s Dublin is a place where characters don’t recover from the actions of others.

In her role as the Laureate for Irish Fiction (a job she described as akin to “a professorship without a college”), Anne Enright, in association with The Stinging Fly and the Arts Council, gave a lecture on Maeve Brennan in Queen’s University Belfast. And – because there is no one finer at reading her own work aloud than she is – there were bonus tracks too, in the form of excerpts from The Green Road (“She was so cross the car drove itself… On and on they went until they came to the edge of things.”).

I had poured The Springs of Affection into me too quickly, and found the stories like drinking tonic water for thirst: the thirst is gone, yet it doesn’t leave you feeling the way you wanted to. When Anne Enright described Maeve Brennan’s Dublin stories and “their tales of visits, disappointments and interminable, small cruelties” as “lovely and unbearable”, I realised that was exactly what I had felt but couldn’t articulate. (And this description of Maeve Brennan put me in mind of how I felt when reading Anne Enright’s own The Forgotten Waltz: that sense of the sharpness of her blade as it cuts the characters open for us to dissect, and how it forces us into uneasy complicity with their choices.)

She spoke of Maeve Brennan collecting her New Yorker wages only to go downstairs and give the money away on the street. I picture a slight figure at a corner, an arm outstretched, creating a brief connection with strangers that is more transaction than donation (she gives, they take, she feels inexplicably unburdened). It’s such an arresting image, so at odds with the posed and poised shots of Maeve Brennan, all cigarettes and hothoused flowers and up-dos. And yet it was so revealing about the inner life of a woman who spent her adult life making, as Anne Enright called it “a bid for sanity, one sentence at a time”.

Anne Enright said the revelation of the power of Maeve Brennan’s work came to her “slowly and in a low key”. She described her as “a lost woman’s voice”, and “a casualty of old wars not yet won”. Maeve Brennan was writing at a time when to leave Ireland was to be diminished, separated from family; yet that same Ireland was deaf to women. It was a time when women’s voices were denied or fractured, or used as a chorus. When she died she wasn’t homeless – as has often been reported – but certainly destitute, and with no reputation at all in Ireland. No paper here carried an obituary for her.

Which took me to back to 2008 and Roddy Doyle’s gentle comment during his New Yorker podcast: “Maeve Brennan became a ‘new Irish writer’ about eight years after she actually died.”

Henrietta McKervey is the author of What Becomes of Us and The Heart of Everything