From the 1950s through the early 1970s, the New Yorker published a writer self-described as "The Long-Winded Lady." She wrote extraordinary pieces about the ordinary, everyday life of New York City, be it walking the dog or observing people drinking in a bar. That loquacious lady was Dublin-born Maeve Brennan, a gifted writer, who was equally beautiful and eccentric. Brennan was all but forgotten until 1997, four years after her death, when Houghton Mifflin, under the aegis of editor Christopher Carduff, reissued her collected Long-Winded Lady columns and also a volume of short stories, The Springs of Affection: Stories of Dublin.
Those reissues soon found the late Brennan a biographer, Angela Bourke, whose Maeve Brennan: Homesick at The New Yorker: An Irish Writer in Exile has just been published by Counterpoint. PW caught up by phone with the frantic Bourke, a senior lecturer in Irish at University College Dublin, breathlessly packing for her trip to the University of Notre Dame, where she is spending the fall as the Naughton distinguished professor. Both Brennan and Bourke have a lot in common besides being writers—they share a Dublin neighborhood, Ranelagh, and both are Irish speakers. With so many similarities PW is forced to ask, what makes you different?
"I'm bigger than she was," laughs Bourke. "I'm 5'7"; she was barely five feet tall. I suppose my childhood had a big affinity with hers in that I would have been the same kind of very verbal, quite cleaver lower-middle-class child growing up in Dublin, spending summers in the country. I really wanted to know what her experience had been like. She's much more glamorous than I am. She lived in the magazine world while I live in the academic world. I would have loved to have her as an aunt."
When friends in Cambridge, Mass., told Bourke of Brennan's reissued work, she was surprised. "I would have considered that I knew at least the names of most of the important Irish writers," says Bourke, "but this was obviously an important Irish writer, and she had written about Dublin, and I had never heard of her. That in itself was interesting." Bourke was immediately drawn to Brennan. "It's the intimacy of the portraits she paints," Bourke says. "You know I love Alice Munro's work. Alice Munro loves Maeve Brennan's work, but I think Maeve Brennan has some of the qualities that Alice Munro has, which is an absolutely truthful depiction of social circumstance and then with steely and absolutely determined ability to lay bare the unlovely parts of what's going on in human relations and human feelings. She's merciless—and yet she's so tender."
Brennan was born into a fervent Irish Republican family in 1917. Her father, Robert Brennan, was associated with Eamon De Valera and Michael Collins in the fight for Irish freedom, and when De Valera came to power in 1932, Brennan found himself as the Irish Free State's minister in Washington, basically the Irish ambassador to the U.S. Maeve moved with the family to Washington and later moved to New York to work at magazines.
Bourke is best known on these shores for The Burning of Bridget Cleary, a true story of faeries, superstition and the incineration of a young wife in County Tipperary in 1895, which earned her rave reviews when it was published by Viking in 2000. Her first challenge on the Brennan bio was to interview as many of Maeve's contemporaries as possible because so many of them were in their 80s. Her next move was to find a publisher, and Brennan's guardian, Christopher Carduff—then at Counterpoint, now publisher of Black Sparrow, an imprint of David R. Godine—quickly came to mind. "Chris was tremendously helpful to me from the beginning," recalls Bourke.
Brennan was known for her eccentricities. "She was a real gypsy, going from apartment to apartment, hotel to hotel," says Bourke. "She never grew up, and part of the reason that she never grew up was her childhood was fractured." Her eccentricities, Bourke believes, may have led to one of the great characters of literature. "Truman Capote's Holly Golightly may owe quite a lot to her," says Bourke. Brennan and Capote apparently knew each other from their time at Harper's Bazaar and the New Yorker.
"I think it is a speculation," continues Bourke. "It doesn't do justice to the totality of who she was, because Holly Golightly comes across as a bit of an airhead and Maeve was emphatically not that—she was an intellectual and a worker. But certainly 'Miss Holiday Golightly, Traveling,' as you see on the doorbell in the first chapter of Breakfast at Tiffany's: Maeve called herself a 'Traveler in Residence.' Maeve always had a cat. Maeve wore big glasses. She would have worn the little black dress and the hair piled high. And that kind of elusive quality. It wouldn't surprise me in the least if she had been the model for Holly Golightly. I refer to Breakfast at Tiffany's in the book, but I didn't want to lay any weight on that because I don't want to reduce her. Holly Golightly's a wonderful character, but she's not Maeve and Maeve's not like Holly Golightly, but I think some of the ways she influenced people and the way people saw her, there was that incredibly attractive, very elusive, maddening kind of quality about her. She'd be absolutely charming—then she'd be gone."
Brennan spent the latter part of her life suffering from mental illness. At times she refused to take her medication, exacerbating her condition. "There was a kind of bloody-mindedness about her that just said, the hell with everybody, and why should she be bothered to behave well. In some ways, being mentally ill entails behaving badly—and so it was a license to behave badly, maybe?"
