Nine Irish Lives

by Mark Bailey

  Anastasia, an orphan, twenty-two years old, arrives on the train from Paris following the recent death of her mother, desperate to find a home in her grandmother’s house in Dublin. It is the house in which her parents’ unhappy marriage had been played out under the cold eye of the grandmother, whose ferocious grip on her only son remained unshaken, the house in which Anastasia had grown up. Now her grandmother, resolute in her intention to expel Anastasia from under her roof, is all politeness, all chained fury, exquisitely in control of herself, implacable, immune to any appeal to mercy or love. “There is no comfort in her,” Anastasia quickly understands. For Anastasia has committed an unforgivable sin. At sixteen, she’d followed her mother, who, “like some kind of madwoman,” her grandmother says, had fled the house for Paris, abandoning Anastasia’s father, the beloved son. Now six years later Anastasia, aching for love, for a place to call home, is repelled. The chill of her grandmother’s dislike, indeed of her hatred, surrounds her as the two sit silently, one on either side of the fire in the enormous, shadowy room. “There was no movement in the room except the wild movement of the fire-flames and the light they let go. The light washed up and down the room like thin water over stones.”

  There is an inside and there is an outside. Anastasia, condemned to be a visitor, is somewhere between. She is inside, but her lease is up. She is on her way out onto the streets, where the poor are to be observed from the windows, sometimes playing a violin or a tin whistle, but welcomed in by Katherine, Anastasia’s grandmother’s servant, who gives them a meal at her own table beside the roaring oven in the basement kitchen. “Don’t ever say beggar,” said Katherine in a fierce whisper. “He’s a poor man, God help him.” And in the final pages Anastasia becomes one of those on the outside. Evicted from her home, she is on the way to the mail train, by which she’ll return to Paris, when she turns back for a final glimpse. Just outside the house, taking off her stockings and shoes, leaning against a lamp post, she steps barefoot into the street, her eyes fixed on the window—where her grandmother and Katherine will soon appear—and begins to sing, “loud and sudden as one in a dream, who without warning finds a voice in some public place”:

  There is a happy land

  far far away. . . .

  And those passing by stop to listen.

  Anastasia cannot choose both parents: they are at odds, and therein lies her misery. She is excluded because she has chosen one. It is not the other, her father, who would have denied her; it is his mother, who cannot forgive her son for marrying at all. That is the primal sin, to choose outside the family. Yet what is the alternative if not incest, symbolic if not actual? Sexual choice comes with the charge of family disloyalty, with the fierce disapproval of those held longest and closest.

  Again, the unyielding grudge, the unflagging sense of betrayal. Indeed, very like the spite to which, in one of the Derdon stories, Rose is subjected by her mother, who mocks her openly, maliciously, in front of her suitor, Hubert, names her a “poor soft thing with no respect for herself or her family.” Or like Min Bagot in “The Springs of Affection,” whose life is embittered by what she sees as her twin brother’s betrayal of his mother and sisters by marrying, who slips her dead brother’s wedding ring from his hand and puts it on the fourth finger of her own left hand. To save it from grave robbers, she tells herself.

  The ones set adrift, the outsiders, are doomed by coldness of heart, the pinched refusal to take in another’s ravenous need. They are the dispossessed, in silent sympathy with the poor, the wanderers. But the punishment for holding out against the needy is claustrophobia, confinement to the prison within: slow suffocation between ever narrowing walls.

  And what is to be found in the spaces outside, where Anastasia is exposed to wind and weather? For one, the laburnum tree in the back garden that is seen in so many of the Dublin stories. And the parade of seasons as Anastasia broods on the passage of time: “Next winter and next winter and next winter. In the mind they passed all slowly, like clouds across a summer sky, but a sudden call or turn of the head and they disappeared in a rush, shuttling quickly one after the last till nothing was left but a strangeness in the mind, a drop of thought that trembled and was gone, perhaps.”

  It is on the street that Anastasia finds her voice “loud and sudden as one in a dream,” not within the confines of the house. In taking off her stockings and shoes, she joins the poor and the dispossessed. The ones who stop to listen to her are not her longtime familiars but those she meets in passing, strangers all.

  WHEN DID MAEVE Brennan become an exile? And for what or where is she homesick? It seems she returned to Ireland for the first time after fourteen years away, exactly the same number of years the missionary bishop in one of Brennan’s last published stories, “Stories from Africa,” was first absent from Ireland. “You could say that an exile was a person who knew of a country that made all other countries seem strange,” the bishop thinks. But then he stops himself:

  Anyone listening to him would imagine he thought Ireland to be a pretty little oasis of one kind or another, a kind of family paradise. He thought of his country, where terrible pride and terrible humility stand together, two noble creatures enslaved, enthralled, by what defines them, the bitter Irish appetite for humiliation. No, there was no complacency there, no complacency and no chance of any. He thought of his country and sighed in admiration, and grinned, although he knew he was being guilty of self-satisfaction.

  Is exile, then, a question of geography? Is it distance—chosen or compelled—from a state of mind particular to the place that has shaped you? A national temper that can lucidly be seen for what it is but neither renounced nor embraced? And is Anastasia’s wrenching departure a condition for her song? Surely she would have remained if she could. “There was no comfort there.”

  And in time it may have been that distance became a necessity for Brennan, a writer whose preoccupation with the close interior spaces of her childhood drew her always more deeply into the inexhaustible lives of those she imagined moving in the same rooms, dreaming in them, looking out at the ever-shifting clouds through their windows.

  In 1949, the following year, Maeve was hired by The New Yorker, and her life changed again. While Harper’s had been a woman’s world—run by a woman who hired other women—The New Yorker, arguably the most powerful literary magazine in America at the time, was a magazine dominated by men. As elsewhere during the 1950s, a woman’s value—however that might be assessed—would have been assumed to be different from a man’s. In her early thirties Maeve wore her thick auburn hair in a ponytail that made her look younger than she was. Later she piled it on her head. Just a little over five feet, she wore high heels, usually dressed in black, a fresh flower, often a white rose, pinned to her lapel, a bright dash of red lipstick across her mouth. Several of her colleagues would become good and constant friends—Joseph Mitchell, Charles Addams, Philip Hamburger, and, of course, William Maxwell—and some lovers as well. But she was an outsider, a stylish and beautiful Irish woman in a world of American men. As Roger Angell put it, “She wasn’t one of us—she was one of her.” Although she would live in an assortment of furnished rented rooms and hotels in Manhattan—and as the years went by, increasingly obscure ones—her place at The New Yorker, however alien at first, provided a kind of sanctuary where her work would be fostered and edited and published.

  Early in 1954 Brennan began writing the unsigned pieces for the “Talk of the Town” in the voice of “the long-winded lady.” They would appear in the magazine for more than fifteen years, but only in 1968 would the writer be identified as Maeve Brennan when she chose some of her favorites to be published as a selection. In a foreword Brennan describes her persona:

  If she has a title, it is one held by many others, that of a traveler in residence. . . . She is drawn to what she recognized, or half-recognized, and these forty-seven pieces are the record of forty-seven moments of recognition. Somebody said, “We are real only in moments of kindness.” Mo
ments of kindness, moments of recognition—if there is a difference it is a faint one. I think the long-winded lady is real when she writes, here, about some of the sights she saw in the city she loves.

  Indeed, she declares her love for the city in an ode to the ailanthus, New York City’s backyard tree,

  that appears like a ghost, like a shade, beyond the vacancy left by the old brownstone houses . . . speaking of survival and of ordinary things . . . : New York does nothing for those of us who are inclined to love her except implant in our hearts a homesickness that baffles us until we go away from her, and then we realize why we are restless. At home or away, we are homesick for New York not because New York used to be better and not because she used to be worse but because the city holds us and we don’t know why.

  When Brennan was thirty-seven she married St. Clair McKelway and joined him where he lived in Sneden’s Landing, a community just north of the city on the west bank of the Hudson. He worked at The New Yorker as a nonfiction staff writer, was three times divorced and twelve years older than herself, and known to be a compulsive womanizer. Like Brennan, he was volatile, hard-drinking. And like her too, incapable of handling money. “I think I feel as Goldsmith must have done,” Maeve wrote to Maxwell, “that any money I get is spending money, and the grown-ups ought to pay the big ugly bills.” During the three years she was married, her mother died, a death she grieved for a long time, and she and St. Clair fell into calamitous debt. Her stories from that period are often set in Herbert’s Retreat, as she calls Sneden’s Landing: unlike the Dublin stories, they tend to be ironic, even brittle, in tone; they have to do with affluent households looked after by knowing Irish maids who observe and appraise their employers’ lives from the kitchen.

  And on St. Patrick’s Day, 1959, Brennan wrote a reply to a letter from a reader asking when more Herbert’s Retreat stories would appear in The New Yorker, a letter that was making the rounds in the office. When it reached her, she wrote a reply on the back before passing it on.

  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 one 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 a penance to some 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 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 is too late to do much about that.

  IT WAS ONLY after she had amicably separated from St. Clair during the winter of 1959 and was alone once more that Brennan returned to the Dublin stories she’d been working on during the years leading up to her marriage. The solitary life had fostered her writing earlier, and now she would again live by herself, accompanied by her beloved black Labrador retriever, Bluebell. During the early 1960s when Brennan was writing steadily, she spent the summers in the city and the winters alone in East Hampton, renting houses off-season close to her devoted and nurturing friends Sara and Gerald Murphy, on whom F. Scott Fitzgerald in Tender Is the Night had modeled Dick and Nicole Divers. She wrote about the sea and shore and seagulls, and about children too. She wrote about the progress of the day as seen through the eyes of her animals—her cats and Bluebell—with the radiant simplicity of Colette.

  And she continued to work on the Derdon stories, to publish them, and began to write about the Bagots. What she required, it seemed, was a room where she could be alone with her typewriter. She would go on writing of lonely marriages as lived out in the house at 48 Cherryfield she’d grown up in. And though by this time she’d had her own intimate experience of marriage, and there are many echoes of her parents’ lives in the stories, her portraits are originals. Both couples—Hubert and Rose Derdon and later on Martin and Delia Bagot—are shadowed by fear and regret and shame. They experience self-misgivings, a ravished sense of having made some first mistake, of having missed out on some crucial knowledge that everyone but themselves has grasped and so are condemned to solitude.

  Because the sequence of Derdon stories is mostly set within about the same period in the Derdons’ marriage—after their grown son, John, has gone off to be a priest—and because the backdrop is the same rooms looking out on the same garden, it can be hard, on first reading, to distinguish one story from another, to recall in which one a particular incident breaks the surface of their quiet, tormented life together, a memory takes hold. Or a shining image rises unbidden from the mysterious undercurrent of life itself. The dramatic confrontations between Rose and Hubert are often wordless, or rather the words break through only after long silent periods of brooding, of baffled efforts to make sense of themselves or each other. Their lives circle in a timeless space, heavy with misunderstanding and foiled attempts to catch each other out in trivial matters. There is Hubert, setting out to his job in a men’s clothing store, subtly shaming Rose by failing to leave the household money as usual on a Friday morning because she isn’t there at the doorway to ask for it. Her helpless fear of Hubert and his own anger at that fear; her cringing smile of defeat; her rough, dry hands, his daintier ones. Hubert’s irritation with the way Rose eats, her greater appetite, her preference for poor people, her curiosity about them matched by his own dislike. Her grief at the loss of John, her fascination with the changing sky as the clouds “melted slowly into each other and slowly drew apart.” His devastating assessments: “It is too late for Rose.” Her clogged need for love balked in childhood by the death of a beloved father; her sly, tortured attempts to make of their child, John, an ally. Hubert’s attempts too to make peace, to comfort her after the loss of John with the gift of a blue hydrangea, a tea tray after an illness. Or his sustained determination to hold out against her: a long moment of regret, a sky growing dark, and the understanding that there is nothing to be said.

  Or a story too may be backlit by memories of their life as a couple, by glimpses of an inscrutable moment, as in “Family Walls,” when Hubert, in the wake of a prolonged spell of silent recrimination, looks out the window and sees Rose working in the garden. She lifts her arm to smooth a loose strand of hair, “and as the sleeve fell back, her upraised arm gleamed. Hubert saw her wrist and her elbow and in that fragment of her he saw all of Rose, as the crescent moon recalls the full moon to anyone who has watched her at the height of her power.”

  “The bitter Irish appetite for humiliation”: would that be an appetite for feeling humiliated, or rather an appetite for humiliating someone else? Rose is married to Hubert who has a “great gift for cutting people down when they got above themselves.” Or so Hubert puts it to himself by way of naming his “great gift.” As for Rose’s life at home as a child, “her mother had always said she had too good an idea of herself.” Called her “Miss Importance.” In the face of Hubert’s disdain, Rose’s moments of passionate revolt exhaust themselves at last in a craven, trembling smile, her expressions of outrage more often than not giving way to a pitiful appeal for mercy.

  A domestic version, perhaps, of the humiliated Irish subject’s long history of rebellion, of furious uprisings against the colonial master followed by collapse into submission, into making-do. Of the calm and pitiless attempt of those in power to subdue another spirit when it rebels, as it is
sure to do. Because sometimes the humiliated will look to humiliate another in turn: gross distortions in the exercise of power in the public sphere will find subtle echoes in the most intimate spaces, as in a marriage. For isn’t this one of the ways of soothing injured pride? The blind attempt to shame someone else, someone close at hand? The Derdon stories, in particular, dissect the cruelties that spring from one person’s settled assumptions of superiority over another, the damage done in the name of maintaining order, of keeping someone “in their place.” But the personal costs to those who allow themselves relief of this brutal kind—as do Hubert or the grandmother in The Visitor or Min in “The Springs of Affection”—are dramatized as well: an anguished state of paralysis, a furtive retreat from the unpredictable and vulnerably human life of feeling.

  Rose Derdon, like Anastasia, in the face of humiliation and banishment, makes common cause with those on the outside, “the poor.” The man with the wounded hand, for instance, who comes to the door every Thursday afternoon: “His eyes, blue, seemed weary enough to die, but still the poor natural mouth, obedient to its end, a mouth so lonely it appeared to have no tongue, opened itself to her in a thin bashful smile of recognition and supplication. Never mind, never mind, never mind, no blame to you nor to me nor to anybody, the mouth said, only fill me.”

  Then one day she encounters him on a bridge over the River Liffey, and he looks at her with welcome, with the kindness of recognition. Much to her dismay, he fails to come to her door the following Thursday, then reappears the next week: “He held up his sore hand and gazed at her without a sign of the radiance that she had seen in his face on the bridge. If he felt ashamed that he had given himself away there was no sign of that either. He was too far gone in want. He was gone out of reach. It gave her great comfort to see him at the door again.”