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Praise for The Springs of Affection

PRAISE FOR

The Springs of Affection

“Masterly … A cause for rejoicing … The richness of Brennan’s meticulous fiction is truly a treasure rediscovered.”

— Claire Messud, Newsday

“How and why the voice of these Dublin stories was ever allowed to drift out of earshot is one of the literary puzzles. Now The Springs of Affection brings it back, as a favor to us all, and it is as true and as haunting as before.”

— Mavis Gallant

“There is enormous power in Brennan’s recording of her characters’ sensations … There is great beauty and indomitable humanity … She was a magical writer.”

— Michael Pakenham, Baltimore Sun

“I have always counted the title story of this volume among my favorites for all time, but I had forgotten how pure and strong so many of Maeve Brennan’s other stories are. It is a great joy to me to have these all together.”

— Alice Munro

“Superb … Maeve Brennan is a marvelous, idiosyncratic writer whose work should be far better known than it is.”

— Brooke Allen, The New Criterion

“Wonderful vignettes of a bygone Dublin, with a truth and freshness that makes them timeless.”

— Edna O’Brien

“The Springs of Affection should bring Brennan back to the table of modern fiction, where her place has been empty for too long.”

— Jay Parini, New York Times Book Review

Also by Maeve Brennan

Also by

Maeve Brennan

______________

The Long-Winded Lady

Notes from “The New Yorker”

THE SPRINGS OF AFFECTION

INTRODUCTION

__________

BY WILLIAM MAXWELL

Because I had been her editor I was asked to write the obituary notice that appears in the November 15, 1993, issue of The New Yorker. It begins: “Maeve Brennan died a few days ago, at the age of seventy-six. She was a small, charming, effortlessly witty, generous woman with green eyes, hugely oversized horn-rimmed glasses, and chestnut hair worn in a vast beehive.”

In 1934 her father, Robert Brennan, was appointed the Republic of Ireland’s first envoy to Washington, and he brought his family with him. Maeve was seventeen. At the end of her father’s term he and the others went back to Dublin, and she stayed on in this country through the rest of her life. I don’t know whether in Ireland she is considered an Irish writer or an American. In fact, she is both, and both countries ought to be proud to claim her.

Before she came to The New Yorker she wrote copy for Harper’s Bazaar. She was hired by William Shawn, The New Yorker’s managing editor (and editor in chief after Harold Ross died), to write about women’s fashions. She then moved on to doing short notices of novels and whodunits and an occasional lead review. The unsigned fashion and book notes are untraceable at this point. The lead reviews are so original and well done that they raise the question, Why wasn’t she asked to do more? The answer perhaps is that W. H. Auden was also reviewing books for The New Yorker during this period.

For a while her office was next to mine, on the twentieth floor of 25 West Forty-third Street. I was aware of the quick sound of her heels and her beautiful Dublin accent before I caught a glimpse of her disappearing down the hall. She was in her early thirties and wore her hair in a ponytail, which made her look younger than she was.

I think we became friends because we both liked Tolstoy’s The Death of Ivan Ilyich and Turgenev’s The Sportsman’s Notebook and the novels and music-hall reminiscences of Colette. A story she submitted, about a Lady Bountiful rather too pleased with the idea of her own kindness toward the unfortunate, was taken, and for the next twenty-one years her fiction passed through my hands on its way to Mr. Shawn or the printer.

She would wander into my office, sit down, and say thoughtfully, “Time magazine is all a dream.” Or talk about Oliver Goldsmith, whom she was so fond of it was almost as if she had known him. She used as a kind of talisman a sentence of his: “Innocently to amuse the imagination in this dream of life is wisdom.”

She had a large framed photograph by Louise Dahl-Wolfe of Colette in old age, looking as if nothing in the way of human behavior, no matter how odd or perverse, would surprise her. One morning when I walked into my office it was hanging on the wall above my desk. It remained there for a month or so and then it was gone. I knew I had said or done something Maeve didn’t approve of. After a short while the picture was back. It came and went, like a cloud shadow. I never knew why and thought it would be a poor idea to ask. 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.

One day I found a quotation from Yeats written in pencil on the plaster wall where I could read it sitting at my desk: “Only that which does not teach, which does not cry out, which does not persuade, which does not condescend, which does not explain, is irresistible.” In time there were other such statements for my mind to be caught by in moments of abstraction. One of them was “It is dangerous to mock a fool. God.” Even so, she did frequently.

All but one of the stories in this book originally appeared in The New Yorker and then were published in two collections, In and Out of Never-Never Land (1969) and Christmas Eve (1974), both long out of print. Her best stories are always set in Ireland and have no characters that are not Irish.

The group of stories that are written in the first person are, I assume, autobiographical since the narrator is called Maeve and the narrator’s brother and sisters have the same names as Maeve’s brother and sisters. They live in a small brick family house on a dead-end street in a suburb of Dublin. It is where she lived as a child and it is her imagination’s home. Also, these stories do not read as if they were fictitious. Though slight, they are definitely stories, written with great care and radiant with the safety and comfort of home. Even when the house is brutally ransacked by plainclothesmen — the father is for the Republic and against the Irish Free State and was at the time on the run — nothing really bad happens. The house is protected by love.

Over a period of fifteen years Maeve published, in “The Talk of the Town,” what were presented as “communications from our friend the long-winded lady.” They were anything but long-winded — two to four printed columns. Half descriptive, half reflective, they are visually as true to nature as the prints of Hokusai. They are always about New York City — about a rainstorm watched through the window of a borrowed apartment, about a man she sometimes sees who is always combing his hair, about a bad-mannered dog, about invisibility, about self-service elevators that creak and carry on as if they were unsafe and frequently stop at the wrong floor, about the light from the sky at a certain time of day, about a part of town where the atmosphere is of shabby transience, about the states of mind of people seen only once or who are imaginary, about a cageful of tiny birds for sale in the basement of a five-and-ten-cent store, about apprehension that has no known cause, about a young man waiting for his date in the bar of what turns out to be the wrong hotel, about what lies behind the curiosity that leads her to turn first to the obituary pages of the morning paper. Forty-seven of these pieces were published as a book under the title of The Long-Winded Lady (1969).

One of the long-winded lady’s observations is that “the impulse toward good involves choice, and is complicated, and the impulse toward bad is hideously simple and easy.” After holding back from marrying anyone for a long time, in 1954 Maeve became the fourth wife of St. Clair McKelway. It may not have been the worst of all possible marriages but it wasn’t something you could be hopeful about. He was one of the most gifted of the New Yorker reporters, and if there was anyone who disliked him I never heard of it, but he was a heavy drinker and a manic depressive and subject to what he called “blank-outs,” during which he did not always know who he was and his behavior was sometimes highly bizarre. What money he had he spent as fast as possible and it was against his principles to pay any bill. His wives were all beautiful and charming women, and his marriages tended to be brief. He courted women ardently until the vows were said and then his interest in them faded.

He and Maeve lived together for a number of years, mostly in Sneden’s Landing, north of the city on the west bank of the Hudson River, and then parted amicably. During this period she wrote a series of stories about a bohemian enclave, which she called Herbert’s Retreat. They are satirical in tone, and seem to me to be heavy-handed and lack the breath of life.

Brendan Gill’s office was next to Maeve’s and there was so much slipping of notes under his door, and hers, and mine, and so many explosions of laughter as a result of our reading them that — we learned through the grapevine — Mr. Shawn decided it wasn’t good for the office morale, and Maeve was moved down the hall to the other side of the building.

Who bothers to preserve funny remarks? If they survive in the memory it is usually by accident. Recently, between the pages of my copy of In and Out of Never-Never Land, I came across a carbon of a New Yorker form letter addressed to a Mr. Boyce, who had written to the editors expressing a hope that they would print more of Maeve Brennan’s Herbert’s Retreat stories. This carbon was sent to Maeve as a matter of office procedure. Across the bottom on the reverse side she had written a second, corrective letter:

Dear Mr. Boyce:

I am terribly sorry to have to be the first to tell you that our poor Miss Brennan died. We have her head here in the office, at the top of the stairs, where she was always to be found smiling right and left and drinking water out of her own little paper cup. She shot herself in the back with the aid of a small handmirror at the foot of the main altar in St. Patrick’s Cathedral on Shrove Tuesday. Frank O’Connor was where he usually is in the afternoons, sitting in a confession box pretending to be a priest and giving penance to some poor old woman and he heard the shot and he ran out and saw our poor late author stretched out flat and he picked her up and fearing a scandal ran up to the front of the church and slipped her in the poor box. She was very small. He said she went in easy. Imagine the feelings of the young curate who unlocked the box that same evening and found the deceased curled up in what appeared to be and later turned out truly to be her final slumber. It took six strong parish priests to get her out of the box and then they called us and we all went and got her and carried her back here on the door of her office. We will never know why she did what she did (shooting herself) but we think it was because she was drunk and heartsick. She was a very fine person, a very real person, two feet, hands, everything. But it’s too late to do much about that now.

I have a lot of live authors, Mr. Boyce, if you would like to ask about any of them, if there is anything you would like to know about any of them, I’ll be happy to oblige. Most of them have studio portraits, ready for framing, some life size, some even en famille, as we say around here in our amiable but decidedly spirited, even brisk, New Yorker Magazine Way. And thank you for your kind interest in the unfortunate Miss Brennan. I am glad to know that someone remembers her. As for her, I’m afraid she would only spit in your eye. She was ever ungrateful. One might say of her that nothing in her life became her.

Sincerely,

William (Bill) Maxwell

After she was living alone again, Maeve began to write what are clearly her finest stories. They are about a couple named Rose and Hubert Derdon, and they live in that very same small house in a suburb of Dublin. It has a bow window, and there is a tiny grass plot in front, a walled garden in back with flowers and a yellow laburnum. The front door leads into a narrow hall. Past the stairs, down three steps, is the kitchen. The front and back sitting rooms are separated by folding doors. One room is heated by a coal-burning fireplace, the other by a gas fire. Upstairs, there is linoleum on the floor of the back bedroom, none in the front one. The tone of these stories, however, is entirely different.

At the beginning of their married life the Derdons lived in a flat in Dublin, and Hubert had a friend named Frank who was given to fits of merriment that were contagious. But then they moved to this house, and Frank dropped out of their lives, and there is no more laughter. They are now in their fifties. They have only one child, a son named John, who has left home to study for the priesthood. Leaving Rose a prey to fantasies.

At times … she would become terribly excited and run to the front windows knowing that John was coming home, that he was at this exact moment walking along the street carrying his suitcase, and that she would have to wait only a minute or so to get her first sight of him, coming around the corner from the main road. But of course he wasn’t coming, and he wouldn’t be coming, and the excitement inside her would flatten out and stupefy her with its weight, and her disappointment and humiliation at being made a fool of would be as cruel as though what she had felt had really been hope and not what it was, the delirium of loss.

Hubert goes off every morning to the center of town — he is a sales clerk in a men’s outfitters in Grafton Street — and comes home again in the evening. The reader is not allowed past the front gate and can count on the fingers of one hand the times the two characters in these stories are seen going to Mass or walking down O’Connell Street or wandering among the flower beds of St. Stephen’s Green. Totally forlorn without her son to look after, Rose becomes obsessed with her husband’s remoteness. His mind is to the same degree fixed on what he considers her shortcomings — her country ways, her insecurity with strangers, her possessiveness with her son. As a study of one kind of unhappy marriage these stories are surely definitive. When Hubert dresses in the morning the last thing he puts on is a garment of lies, which do not, even so, conceal the fact that where there should have been feeling there is none — only the desire for privacy and solitude. Because he is too clever for her, her anger turns against herself. She is also afraid of him, of what he might say or do if she drives him too far. This in turn increases his anger against her. Their moments of understanding do not bring them closer but instead only serve to drive them farther apart. They try unsuccessfully to deceive each other in very small matters. They both want it to appear that nothing is amiss. Their hatred and anger are almost palpable.

There is much to admire in these ferocious stories — the storytelling art; the prose, which is plain and exquisitely precise, at times passing over into poetry without ever becoming “poetic”; the gift for dramatic confrontations; the ability to suggest something devastating while seeming to be making an innocuous statement; the at times almost clinical descriptions of states of mind. For example:

“When Rose appeared in the doorway Hubert felt such dislike that he smiled.”

And “how could he grieve for what he could not define, or mourn for what had vanished without a trace?”

While Maeve continued to write stories about Rose and Hubert Derdon, she began to write stories about another couple, Delia and Martin Bagot. These stories are gentler, though the marriage is again unsatisfactory and is in some ways similar. The Bagots have two little girls, born two years apart, and some cats and a dog — a stray that Delia rescued from boys who were tormenting him. Martin hates animals. He also longs to be free of his family, which he regards as an encumbrance; he is by temperament a bachelor and should have remained one. There was a little boy, who died when he was three days old, and Delia has never recovered from the shock of his death. It has made her vague, ineffectual, given to falling asleep in the daytime. What keeps her from slipping over the edge into insanity is the children’s need for her. She was brought up on a beautiful farm in County Wexford and has a way with flowers. There are moments of happiness, when she introduces a new piece of furniture into the house or when, in “Stories of Africa,” a retired bishop of the South African Missions, who was a close friend of Delia’s father, comes to tea and by his saintliness and the sweetness of his nature and his memories of her childhood home restores to Delia a sense of who she is. So far as the Bagots’ marriage is concerned, the bishop’s visit does not alter the situation or provide a way out. There is no way out.

Maeve had a fondness for the rundown neighborhood bordering on Times Square — the visible remains of past grandeur, the crowded colorful untidy fly-by-night air of its inhabitants, the mixture of tourists and transients of every kind all appealed to her imagination, and she sometimes lived there in one small hotel or another. She also lived in the Wellfleet woods and in Amagansett. Fortune had up its sleeve one last great pleasure for her: she formed an intimate friendship with Gerald and Sara Murphy. The Murphys were old enough to have been Maeve’s parents, and they had lived in France during the twenties and known everyone of any importance among the expatriate writers and artists. It is said that Gerald served as the model for Dick Diver, the hero of Scott Fitzgerald’s novel Tender Is the Night. While living in France he painted six or eight large cubist paintings and then stopped because after the death of his two young sons he had no more heart for painting. His canvases are now highly valued by museums. He too had a gift for aphorisms, one of which Maeve was given to quoting: “As we grow older we must guard against a feeling of lowered consequence.” He had a Yeats letter, which he promised Maeve would have when he died, but he neglected to put this in writing.

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