Reading Note:
The Hell and High Water of Family Life
20 May 2015
Last night, I finished reading Angela Bourke’s biography of Maeve Brennan. I’ve still got some of Brennan’s stories to read, and also her novella, The Visitor (written early but published poshumously), to get through. For the moment, though, I know everything that there is to know, conveniently, about this funny but elusive writer. And it seems to amount to nothing.
When I ask, Why was she such a loner?, I am merely betraying my own conviction that everyday life would be unendurable without a dear companion — or, at the very least, the memory of a long and dear companionship. I don’t think that I’d know how to make sense of the chaotic flush of small-time experience if I lived alone; I might learn to stop noticing it altogether, simplifying my days into unbearable sameness. But there are hints that the illness that overtook Brennan in late middle age was not unforeseeable. She seems always to have kept her distance. Her poise, her fashionable attire, her careful makeup — these were the tools of a geisha, attracting the interest of others even as she withdrew behind her appearance. Either she spoke with wit and humor, or she stayed silent. She was never, despite the moniker, long-winded. Long-winded speakers get lost in their own talk; they forget what they really want to say; they repeat themselves. Brennan never does any of these things. Everything that she writes is just as beautifully presented as she herself was, at least until the interior disorder became too distracting. She was not available (on the evidence that I’ve seen) for casual contact. Even when she stayed up late, drinking too much with the boys, she remained self-contained.
What was that interior disorder? Sometimes, it sounds like schizophrenia, because, without her medication, Brennan lost touch with reality, and frequently descended into paranoia. Sometimes, though, she sounds like the victim of some monstrous abuse, the memory of which could no longer be borne. Brennan’s penchant for disappearing without a trace — she was quite good at this — suggests occasional breakdowns, and a fatigued inability to deal with some kind of horror. This doesn’t mean that any horror actually occurred. There is no evidence of abuse in the family history that has survived — none whatever. Perhaps the horror was simply the realization, arrived at in childhood, that none of the options open to a woman in the Ireland of that time could sustain her, for the simple reason that Brennan was deeply, constitutionally disobedient. This trait was masked by an accord with convention and a belief in politeness. She dreaded commitment. So she would never be a mother, she would never be a nun, and she most certainly would never be the spinster who could be relied upon by her family to take care of everybody else. Brennan was a writer in a country that did not grant women the autonomy that the writing life requires. She was in exile before she ever left Ireland.
She later claimed that she had fallen in love with Walter Kerr, when they were both graduate students at Catholic University, in Washington, and that her heart was broken when he redirected his attentions to the woman who would become his wife (and famous, as the author of Please Don’t Eat the Daisies, for being so). Well, maybe. Brennan strikes me as too steely to snap after one disappointment.
I come away not wishing that I had known Maeve Brennan well but rather wishing that more of her snappy commentary had been written down. Her impertinence could be delicious. Replying to a New Yorker reader who wanted more stories set in Herbert’s Retreat, she pretended to be her editor, William Maxwell, and announced that Miss Brennan was dead, having shot herself in the back “with the aid of a small handmirror” in St Patrick’s Cathedral; whereupon fellow Irish writer Frank O’Conner, who was “where he usually is in the afternoons, sitting in a confession box pretending to be a priest and giving penance to some old woman,” stuffed her corpse into the poor box, whence it took six strong priests to extract her. New Yorker colleagues were summoned, and they bore her body back to the magazine’s premises “on the door of her office.”
I am glad to know that someone remembers her. As for her, I am afraid that she would only spit in your eye. She was ever ungrateful. One might say of her that nothing in her life became her.
This is great, huge fun, but what a warning those closing lines convey! I wish I’d been sitting at the next booth at Costello’s.
***
Speaking of funny writing, I’ve got Nina Stibbe’s novel, Man at the Helm, and it’s a good thing I’m taking four heart medicines. Every other word is shockingly funny. The story, so far, is droll and amusing. Two sisters seek to find a husband for their mother, lest, without a man at the helm, she go completely to pieces, and her children become wards of the court — victims of what we call the Child Protective Services. The mother, trying to recapture the glory of having been a produced playwright at the age of sixteen, and obsessed with the failure of her marriage, writes plays, or The Play, with dialogue such as the following:
Adele: I see you’ve remarried.
Roderick: Yes, a more accomplished woman with a nice tinkling laugh.
Adele: But plumper?
Roderick: Well, not a boyish stick like you.
Adele: But you like boyish sticks.
Roderick: Not any more. I now prefer accomplished pears.
Accomplished pears. There you have it. The story is smilingly good, but the writing is surgically hilarious. Really, if Stibbe were running electrodes over the funny bones in your brain, you couldn’t laugh any harder. Here are the sisters in confab:
“We don’t want too many unmarried candidates, they might not have the necessary.”
“The necessary what?” I asked.
“Experience etc. If they haven’t experienced the hell and high water of family life, they might go to the bad with the shock of it.”
Now, there is a sentence worth memorizing. Another example from these early pages: “When our mother told us this news, we didn’t think it very important, as you often don’t with important things until you realize.” There is a whole world of young-adult nightmare in that final but drastically incomplete clause, until you realize. The breeziness of Stibbe’s narrative voice confers something of the madcap transgressiveness of Kay Thompson’s Eloise, so much so that I should not be at all surprised to discover, within the next chapter or two, that the girls have transformed their new home, right under the eyes of their distracted, bibulous mother, into a bordello.