by Mark Bailey
Fair enough, I suppose. Remington Steele also drove an Auburn Speedster what seems to me like a long time ago. We are all allowed to stay at the table only so long. But still, and most important, by then Rex Ingram—a wanderer, a restless soul, a true artist—had left his mark on Hollywood and at a time when Hollywood was just discovering who it was and what it could become. So it is a shame that his life and work are not better remembered.
Of course, I realize that this may be something of a sad ending. And having lived in Hollywood now for over thirty-five years, I know well enough that sad endings are not welcome. Better to say, wasn’t it grand—for an Irish boy, the son of a minister, raised in the little town of Kinnitty—wasn’t it one hell of a life? And it was. But still—it was sad too. And Rex, likely, would not have wanted it told otherwise.
THE AUTHOR
Maeve Brennan (1917–1993)
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 deca
de, 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. Sh
e 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.”
