The Daily Telegraph - Saturday - Review
There’s more to Maeve Brennan than meets the eye
Out of print for 25 years, the chilling tales of the late, great Irish writer expose the oddness of even the most ordinary existence
While reading Maeve Brennan’s stories in The Springs of Affection in fits and starts beside the fire, or else marooned in bed, I began to experience distinct tapering sensations. Sensations that, invoking a line from Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Black Cat” – a horrifying tale of alacritous perversity, which the narrator introduces as “a series of mere household events” – gave me to wonder if there isn’t perhaps a Gothic turn to Brennan’s unflinching imagination.
No one here hangs a cat. In Brennan’s world, the worst thing that could happen to a cat is that it might be kept outside until morning if Martin Bagot is home from work early. And where is home? It’s 48 Cherryfield Avenue, Ranelagh, Dublin. Always. The characters in the stories may change (although the Brennans themselves and two fictional families, the Bagots and the Derdons, recur throughout), but the house – the author’s childhood home – remains the same. William Maxwell, a friend of Brennan’s and editor at The New Yorker, where all but one of these stories appeared between 1953 and 1973, described the residence this way:
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.
Brennan seemed compelled, each time she wrote a “Dublin story”, to precisely set down the same inventory of household features: the three steps down to the kitchen, the thin brass rods holding the wine-red stair runner in place, the two coal scuttles, the brilliant laburnum, the folding doors. These quotidian particulars, however, do not situate us within the judicious sphere of social realism. Rather than providing a penetrating portrait of daily life, which reveals and critiques the power structures that hold sway over it, the Catholic Church being the most forcible, Brennan’s uncanny mode of verisimilitude draws a curtain back on the interior worlds of her characters, revealing a suite of subjectivities that are isolated and preoccupied. As the poet HD wrote in A Tribute to Freud, “We are all haunted houses”.
Houses loom large in Gothic fiction. They are two-faced. There to offer protection and provide comfort, they occasionally like to turn on us, catching us off guard. It frequently feels personal when one stubs a toe on the stairs, as if one is being made fun of, taught a lesson, put in one’s place. And how often do we enter a room and immediately forget why we have done so? No amount of doggedly standing there will aid recollecting the purpose – that will only resurface once we’ve left the room entirely and returned like a fool to the very spot where it was devised. Some parts of the house don’t feel right at all. It doesn’t matter if every stick of it is moved around this way and that and the walls painted a different colour, still one is inclined to traverse the dispiriting area light-footedly, or else to avoid it altogether.
Gaston Bachelard’s great 1958 work, The Poetics of Space, identified and explored the influence the character of a house and all its facets has on its inhabitant and her imagination. “It is,” he announced, “the human being’s first world.” Bachelard’s survey of human dwellings is charmingly utopian and accordingly posits a romantic conception of the home, enabling the French philosopher to declare that “the house shelters daydreaming, the house protects the dreamer, the house allows one to dream in peace”. I think it’s reasonable to presume that on no occasion did Bachelard open his front door and pass into his abode only to immediately observe the closing of an interior door further down the passage.
This peculiar fate is exactly what befalls Herbert Derdon one evening when he returns home from work. “At the same instant that he was hanging his raincoat on the rack, he looked down the hall and saw the kitchen door close quickly and quietly, but not quickly enough to prevent him from seeing that Rose was down there.” This glitch in the Derdons’ habitual proceedings sets the rest of the evening off-kilter and, as we have learned in a previous story, “Hubert disliked having the order of his day disturbed”. Very put out indeed, Mr Derdon spurns his tea tray and wilfully plunges into a state of agitated reverie and reflection that can hardly be described as poetic. “Nothing in his life made sense” is one of many inglorious revelations that occur to him as he hangs on, uncomfortable and angry, in the front room, at a loss as to what to do with himself. Another damning admission soon follows, this time directed at his mysteriously truant wife. “He was ashamed of her”, instigating a relentless and virulent dissection of Mrs Derdon’s disposition, which, in its eventual slackening, proffers the bloodless observation that “Rose had not always been the same, but there was no one now to tell what she had been or to see her as she had been seen”.
That is one of the most chilling sentences I’ve ever read; word by word Mr Derdon effectively buries Mrs Derdon alive. I would have preferred it if he had buried her alive. But Brennan doesn’t stray beyond what is generally conceivable in ordinary reality. Her characters never become monsters and that is precisely why they are so compelling. They exist within what Freud designated “the world of common reality” not in “poetic reality”. The latter being a far-flung realm populated with “daemonic influences” and “departed spirits” whose sinister activities frighten us but don’t quite disturb us; these creatures get up to strange and terrible things as a matter of course.
In his 1919 essay “The Uncanny”, where this distinction is identified, Freud introduces the concept “heimlich”, meaning “homely”, and explains it thus: “On the one hand, it means that which is familiar and congenial, and on the other, that which is concealed and kept out of sight.” These related qualities of familiarity and secrecy overlap like flickering flames in the hearth of Brennan’s vision of home. In an eye blink Mr Derdon witnesses Rose make a decision. The woman who “had never made up her mind about anything” chooses to postpone reassuming the role of Mrs Derdon just a while longer – and the act of making a decision, never mind that it involves privacy and a hiatus, renders her alarmingly distinct on the one hand, yet utterly unknown to him on the other. It is this confounding combination that unsettles and enrages Mr Derdon. The domestic pattern is scattered hither and thither by alterity. The only way things can be set right is for the woman he is accustomed to to be promptly reinstalled. The woman he is ashamed of, the woman he can’t stand to watch eating. How can he permit anything else at this advanced stage of their marriage? “It is too late for Rose,” he muses. What he really means of course is that it is too late for him to see her any other way. Mr Derdon will simply sit and wait for habit to reassert itself, smoothing over this temporary aberration, putting everything back just so. “Bedtime would come. It was only a matter of waiting until the normal routine of the house washed him out of the corner he had been forced into.”
Homes are places where soft furnishings, adjustable lighting, and artfully arranged succulents share space with sickening secrets, obdurate resentments, and many unspoken words. It is no surprise then that the Gothic mode should make such delicious use of domestic settings. And the more sumptuous the setting, the deeper into a chasm of depravity its occupants are likely to plunge. Brennan’s writing is so psychologically acute that it invokes tension without having to tap into extremes. More often it is stirred up by the simplest gesture. Such as when Mrs Bagot leaves a bowl of flowers in Mr Bagot’s bedroom to mark their 12th anniversary: “The room he was standing in spoke only of love.”
But Mr Bagot does not want Mrs Bagot’s “ceaseless care” – he cannot return it, and neither can he avoid it. The presence of the flowers makes all that very clear to him: “They made him feel sick.” He has no choice but to get rid of them at once, to put the flowers downstairs. “And if she mentioned them he would simply say that he did not like flowers in his room.” This callous rebuttal is derailed when the bowl slips from Mr Bagot’s hand and falls to the floor. There it is now in pieces. There is Mr Bagot now, with his head in his hands. “He knew that for the rest of his life he would be stealing down the stairs in this sleeping house with the bowl of flowers in his hands.” He knows very well that his intention was much worse than what actually came to pass. And because his dreadful impulse was arrested when it was at its fullest, it will remain trapped in his psyche. An awful involuntary secret that will continue on and on to haunt him, almost in the fashion of a double life, or an unrepentant soul in limbo.
Martin Bagot knows that the house transforms him and he doesn’t like who he is at home. “When he was in the house he was hateful to himself.” It is not only the husbands who get all twisted out of shape: Mrs Derdon and Mrs Bagot, who spend infinitely more time on the domestic front, are emptied, alienated, and made helpless by the minuscule scale and monotony of their lives. Mrs Derdon comes undone completely when Mr Derdon throws water on a skittish fire, turning it into “black soup”. “She hid her face behind her hands and then she pushed her hair about and then she wrapped her arms about herself and rocked in grief.” Latent grief – in Freud’s term, melancholia – is often at the core of dramatic horror and there are reasonable grounds for suspecting that it underlies Mrs Derdon’s psychological instability. Her adored and adoring father died when she was a child, and her only son, John, left the family home as a young man to enter the priesthood. Many of her fantasies involve living with him and managing his house. In this new and better life “she would wear only black”. That she fixates upon an image of mourning is a painful indication that suppressed loss and bereavement are etched deeply into her psyche.
Mrs Bagot, whose firstborn son “died at three days”, has a less anguished relationship with the deceased and it gives rise to one of the book’s most tender scenes. The children are with relatives in the country and Mr Bagot is at work. Alone in the house and not expecting anyone imminently, Mrs Bagot discovers that the “house was full of secret light that she never noticed when the children were at home”. Secret light that produces secret shades. There on the wall in the children’s room she sees her mother’s shadow, “the thin line of the cheek, the indentation at the eye, the high curve of the forehead, and above all,
Her wives are emptied by the minuscule scale and monotony of their domestic lives
the little straying hairs that always escaped the brush to wave independently at the sides of her mother’s forehead and at the back of her neck”. This discovery lifts Mrs Bagot’s spirits, she does not feel tired any more, she feels hopeful: “It was wonderful knowing that the shadow was upstairs and that it would never go away. It was almost like having somebody in the house.”
“This is the way of life my husband and I have fallen into, inadvertently, as though we had fallen into a well and decided that since there was no way out we might as well stay there and set up a chair and a desk and a light of some kind...” This is not from one of Brennan’s stories, it is a line from Life Among the Savages, a riotous memoir by Shirley Jackson, a writer with a fabulously wicked imagination who overtly merged domesticity and horror in her novels and short fiction. From the mid1940s Jackson contributed many stories to The New Yorker. In an excellent essay titled “Enemies ForIt eign and Domestic: Shirley Jackson’s New Yorker Stories”, Ashley Lawson points out that the magazine featured work by Jackson that was firmly rooted in the real world – “even a hint of the supernatural” would not have been tolerated. The New Yorker had exacting guidelines and writers wishing to appear within its hallowed pages had to adapt to them. Shirley Jackson successfully played down the more outlandish aspects of her storytelling inclinations and made the grade.
is impossible to know to what degree The New Yorker style shaped Brennan’s own output, though Maxwell’s comment that she would work away on a story for years, producing multiple drafts, might be interpreted as a subtle clue. One of her earliest works of fiction, written in the 1940s when she was in her 20s, is a novella called The Visitor. It tells the story of a young recently orphaned woman returning home to Dublin to live with her grandmother. She is barely through the front door when her grandmother makes it plain that she isn’t welcome. It is a chilling, abject tale that concludes with an awful image of the castoff waif barefoot in the dark street outside the forbidden house, singing “sudden and loud” an old song from her school days. It is an exceptional, deeply disquieting novella, redolent of Henry James’s The Turn of the Screw, yet it wasn’t published until after Brennan’s death – no one knows why.
Brennan died in 1993 in New York. In the last years of her life she occupied a box room beside the woman’s lavatory at The New Yorker offices and was frequently admitted to a series of mental hospitals. She had been married, but only briefly, to the magazine’s managing editor, St Clair McKelway. They split amicably in 1959 when Brennan was 42. She never remarried and she didn’t have children. After divorcing McKelway, Brennan resided in a succession of well-appointed hotels and rented apartments. She also spent long periods in the country. According to editor Gardner Botsford she could “transport her entire household, all her possessions, and her cats – in a taxi”. In one Manhattan apartment she went to the considerable expense of installing parquet flooring, but decamped to the Algonquin Hotel, leaving the flat vacant until the lease ran out.
The details pertaining to the final chapter of Maeve Brennan’s life are typically related in tones that convey regret and pity. The beautiful smart Manhattanite who wandered alone, who observed a city that she could never quite settle in, who died with too much lipstick on in the back rooms of the magazine where she reigned supreme for many years, and so on. I don’t suppose it was the most decorous way to go. But so what? So what that she didn’t settle down? So what that she went crazy? Brennan was a brilliant, courageous, hard-working, independent and mysterious woman who was, according to those who knew her best, a great deal of fun.
Let us save our pity for the likes of Mrs Derdon. When she dies her husband discovers recipes for dinners she never cooked, dressmaking patterns for gowns she never had cause to wear. Dreams, all dreams. Mrs Derdon “vanished without a trace... she had made no impression”. The same cannot be said of the uncompromising Maeve Brennan, or of the haunting stories that she left behind.