In a review of John Cheever’s debut novel The Wapshot Chronicle in the New Yorker in 1957, Maeve Brennan writes that the secret of Cheever’s power is between him and each of his readers. It struck me, reading this new anthology of “sketches” inspired by Brennan and her work, that the same can be said of her: a writer whose relatively small backlist of two short story collections, a selection of her Long-Winded Lady columns and a posthumous novella, The Visitor, has had an extraordinary afterlife since her rediscovery in the 1990s by the late American editor Christopher Carduff.
An essay by Fintan O’Toole in this paper in 1998, followed by Angela Bourke’s brilliantly comprehensive biography in 2004, brought Brennan to the attention of contemporary Irish readers. The arc of her fascinating life, from her republican roots, to her lengthy career as a staff writer at the New Yorker, to her eventual mental decline, no doubt helped to garner interest but it is Brennan’s probing, forensic writing that continues to sustain it.
As evidenced from the variety and scope of the essays in An Asylum for My Affections, Brennan’s work, like Cheever, has the ability to resonate deeply and in brightly unique fashion with each of her readers. Great writing can often be generative and so it is with this fine anthology of authoritative, thoughtful pieces that seek, in the words of editor Molly Hennigan, to centre Brennan in the conversation.
This aim is certainly achieved. One of the most notable things on reading through the 11 (including Hennigan’s introduction) sketches is that they exceed the typical connotations of that word. There is, for example, nothing rough or unfinished about Belinda McKeon and Niamh Campbell’s respective essays on Brennan’s short stories. McKeon’s insightful piece considers the Herbert’s Retreat stories, written by Brennan in the 1950s and set in an exclusive community in Sneden’s Landing in upstate New York, in which “the most important fact, not vague at all ... is that only the right people live there.”
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McKeon is reminded of this line when she takes a drive around the lovely surroundings in her battered, unlovely car. The bemused looks she gets from the wealthy natives make her feel like an outsider and offer a clue as to why she had resisted for years the Irish maid subplots so integral to the stories.
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Campbell’s essay on the arrested development of the character of Rose Derdon, “a grotesque of the femme enfant”, mixes personal reflection with searing textual analysis, displaying a formidable restless intelligence that recalls the style of Brennan herself.
Sinéad Gleeson’s contribution, on Brennan and New York, is beautifully written, succinct yet dense with knowledge on the overlap between life and art: “[She] was a literary miniaturist and the specificity she offers – with an ice-glint in the prose – is why the pieces feel so familiar.” Drawing on her folklorist background, the Laureate for Irish Fiction Éilis Ní Dhuibhne’s highly original piece explores the many interesting similarities between Brennan’s story A Free Choice, published by the New Yorker in 1964 and Alice Munro’s Red Dress in 1946, published in the Montrealer the following year.
Brennan’s Long-Winded Lady columns provide inspiration for Darran Anderson, whose vivid trip around New York in a deluge opens the anthology. Jessica Traynor’s inventive (and ultimately failed) attempt to pull off a Dublin Long-Winded Lady reads as an ode to Brennan’s singular talents as observer: “She sits like a bird on a telegraph wire, attuned to some pole-driven migratory drive that eludes us down here on earth.”
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In the anthology as a whole there is a good balance between the academic, critical and personal, which Hennigan’s clever arrangement highlights. Among the most impactful essays are those from Mary Cregan and Kate Phelan; both pieces weave personal and familial experiences of mental illness into studied reflections of Brennan’s life and work.
Arnold Thomas Fanning’s penultimate piece looks at the trouble in her later years, wanting to understand “the power of her nightmare”. Roddy Doyle is given the final word, fittingly, as his mother Ita was Brennan’s first cousin and she stayed with the family for a time when Doyle was a teenager. In typically unsentimental fashion, his description of her – and the sound of her typewriter at night – humanises the icon, takes us away from the myth: “[She was] treasured and admired and just plain liked.”
Throughout An Asylum for my Affections, the title of which comes from Brennan’s description of her mother Una, certain things crop up repeatedly: Brennan’s style, wit, intellect. Her affinity with outsiders. The precision in the prose that seems so unlike the chaos she courted in life. Finally, and most forcefully, the things she could not lay down and returned to time and again in her fiction, following in some guise or other in all of her work the fortunes and misfortunes of “the child grown old and in the dark”.
