Maeve Brennan (1917–1993)

While reading this, I kept encountering Maeve Brennan in other people’s stories. She came up as one of Phillip Larkins’ lovers, while he was in a long-term relationship with Monica Jones. But it sounds like gossip, so I take no further interest. It feels like it will diminish my reading experience. Though it does tell me Brennan was deeply part of mid 20thC literary life. Yet she doesn’t seem widely read now. She’s too good to forget, though. And I have a soft spot for writers who show more fall away. She was "The Long-Winded Lady" in The New Yorker for some time. Success did come to her.

The collection is grouped into the following three families – the early shorter works, revolve around the life and perceptions of a young girl living in suburban Dublin. The second, longer stories are about Rose, her family, husband, absent father. The third, also longer about Mrs Bagot, her family, husband, children. All suburban Dublin, probably the same street. But each story tells itself as though it has no connection to the one before. They exist on their own, yet form a whole. Perhaps life stages are like that, there are plenty of those here. We suddenly become a different person, same reference points, new story, like the past, but not exactly so.

I tried to describe these stories to someone and ended up using the author’s biography to explain them. I shouldn’t but it fits. They are exceptional despite the author’s biography, just a little more poignant, that’s all. Brennan moved to the USA with her family aged seventeen. Her father, a militant republican was always chased by the authorities, he was always absent either in hiding or prison. The absent father theme recurs. As does the life left behind. Most of the stories are like the recreation of the life the author might have lived if she had stayed. Perhaps exiles, immigrants are always bound to repeat the same stories about an imaginative territory.

The word 'appetite' embarrassed him, and the knowledge he had of her appetite, which was so much greater than his own, made her mysterious to him, but not in a way that aroused his interest or affection.

There’s a wonderful metaphor of the disorienting effect of time in Rose’s life. Her father died two days before her tenth birthday. The effect of this never leaves her, forty-three years on she relives it, it is as powerful as the first time, that her birthday is always wound around the death of her father. None of these stories are mawkish. They are deeply modern in styling, spare in telling, rich in narrative and language effects.

But it was no the loss of the present or the loss of the birthday, or even the loss of her father that afflicted Rose so much as the knowledge, which she alone possessed, of that lost fragment of time between the moment of his death and the moment that marked her birth. A big piece of time had been broken off and it had gone down, and maybe it had taken others besides him with it, but if it had, she did not know of them. The terrible thing was that no one besides herself seemed to notice that a piece of time, a fragment, had been shattered off their lives, and that nothing had happened during that time – no minutes or hours or anything like that.

Maeve Brennan’s writing is often a kind of third person stream of consciousness. It loops around, repeating, revisiting the exact locations or subjects - a room, floor lino, the window, the back room half way up the staircase, the laburnum tree. Places fill with the intensity of how we experience what we know – we fixate on things. The writing is wonderfully mesmerising at times as you’d expect. The narrator is never distant, but voices an intimacy.

Maeve’s life ended badly. That is worth reading up about, too. Reading about her later life makes for a destabilising after effect. show less

A charming and bitter-sweet set of essays, The Long-Winded Lady brings together dozens of Irish-born Maeve Brennan's contributions to The New Yorker. Mostly written during the 1950s and 1960s, they are vignettes of a long-vanished city in transition, as brownstone houses and small businesses were sacrificed to what Brennan terms "the God of Office Space." Maeve Brennan's voice is crisp and cool—you learn very little of her life outside the moments of observation captured here—though with show more an occasional tendency to be too self-consciously arch. Overall though, a lovely example of the flâneuse's art. show less

A suffocating novella. Brennan's writing is spare and undramatic. Her control over the angry drama and stifling despair is superb. Her prose is often lyrical, her imagery vivid and sad. Even in this early work, her understanding of and interest in loneliness and placelessness is apparent and unsettling. The ending left me disturbed. Warrants a second (and third) visit.

I can't say I felt at ease with all of these stories, but they are magnificent in their way. I hope to read the Bagot stories especially over and over to see just how she does it. Tremendous work.