One of the last stories Maeve wrote about the Bagots, “The Springs of Affection,” is in form, if not quite in length, a novella and far outdoes anything she had previously written. It belongs with the great short stories of this century. Both Delia and Martin are dead and the whole sweep of their lives is dealt with in a masterly fashion by moving in and out of the mind of Martin’s twin sister, Min, who kept house for him after Delia died and who is now a very old woman. She hated Delia. She wears Martin’s wedding ring on her finger. She has brought back to Wexford as much of the Bagots’ books and furniture as she can crowd into her small flat and sits in happy possession of it. What in the earlier stories was an at times almost unbearable sadness is now an unfaltering irony. Dominated by false pride, ungenerous, unreachable, unkind, the old woman is the embodiment of that side of the Irish temperament that delights in mockery and rejoices in the downfall of those whom life has smiled on.

Many men and women found Maeve enchanting, and she was a true friend, but there wasn’t much you could do to save her from herself. Though she lived in the country from time to time, she never learned to drive a car; when she wanted to shop for groceries she called a taxi. She put parquet floors in a city apartment she did not own and then found she preferred living in the Hotel Algonquin, leaving the apartment empty until the lease expired. Then she rented a little house near Rindge, New Hampshire. Inevitably she got into debt. She had a valuable library of books by Irish writers, which she would hock when there was no other way she could lay her hands on some money. The books were rescued a number of times by a colleague who was given to anonymous acts of benevolence, and then they disappeared forever. When she returned to the city, The New Yorker stepped between her and destitution by seeing to it that there was a place she could go to when she chose, and be fed and sheltered. There is no way of knowing how often she took advantage of this. She had begun to have psychotic episodes, and she settled down in the ladies’ room at The New Yorker as if it were her only home. Nobody did anything about it, and the secretaries nervously accommodated themselves to her sometimes hallucinated behavior, which could turn violent. During the last decade of her life she moved in and out of reality in a way that was heartbreaking to watch and that only hospitals could deal with. Long long before this she wrote on my wall, under the quotation from Yeats: “A certain degree of self-esteem is necessary even in the mad. Conrad.”