by Mark Bailey
The Bagot stories were begun later—even while Brennan was still at work on the Derdon stories—and if Delia and Martin Bagot are less fiercely locked in opposition than the Derdons, it may be because the husband is less frequently on the scene. They have lost an infant son early in their marriage and now have two little girls. When Martin returns from work late, he sleeps alone in the box room over the kitchen. The lonely and neglected Delia may be found at home longing for her children’s return from a holiday in the country or caring for the beloved dog and cats Martin would be rid of altogether. But these stories are less desolating than the stories about the Derdons, and Delia finds some comfort in her children, in a kindly shadow on the wall, in the little terrier “who brushes against her every chance he got . . . who lived in the blazing humility of perfect love.”
Then one day she is introduced by a visitor—the exiled old missionary bishop, her dead father’s long-ago boyhood friend in the Wexford countryside, where Delia too had grown up—to a life, her own.
The captive monkey, reduced by grief and age to the lowest and farthest corner of her cage at the zoo, watches the crowd that stares at her with an acceptance so profound it shines like sympathy. All struggle had vanished from the old Bishop’s eyes, and Mrs. Bagot gave him a smile of tremulous indignation, showing how, one morning, she would face her own death.
“We have tea all ready for you, Your Grace,” she said.
“God bless you,” he said, “but never mind ‘Your Grace.’ I’m a very plain priest. ‘Father,’ or ‘Father Tom,’ whichever you like. Delia, is it? Am I right? You’re the image of your grandmother, Delia.”
He asked her about her life, and as they spoke she had the feeling she was talking about someone who was very well known to her although they had never met. She was talking about herself, and she was amazed to find how much there was to be said about this person, herself, who had come into the conversation from nowhere and who was now becoming more real, although invisible, with every word that was spoken. In response to the Bishop’s trust in her she spoke as though in Braille, feeling her way eagerly and with confidence along a path that she found she knew by heart, every inch of it, in the dark. And as she spoke, that path, her life, became visible.
The bishop, who has thoughts about Ireland’s appetite for humiliation, is the exile who has returned to Ireland to die. Like the monkey “reduced by grief and age to the lowest and farthest corner of her cage,” like the man dying of want, he is now on the outside. It is he who recognizes Delia, as the poor man recognizes Rose. Is it, then, that the kingdom of heaven belongs to the poor in spirit? That grief and want are conditions for vision?
Maeve Brennan achieves a supreme mastery in these late stories: “Family Walls,” “A Girl Can Spoil Her Chances,” “The Drowned Man,” and “The Springs of Affection.” A single story may encompass an entire life, and the sequence of Derdon stories and the sequence of Bagot stories each has the artistic integrity of a novel. Alice Munro wrote that she counted “The Springs of Affection” among her favorite stories of all time, and it isn’t hard to imagine that she may have learned something from Maeve Brennan about the possibility of folding the span of a character’s life into a few pages. No wonder, either, that Edward Albee compares Brennan’s stories to Chekhov’s: In each the same luminous precision of detail, the same sense of suffering humanity. The tenderness toward the forgotten.
BRENNAN’S FIRST COLLECTION, In and Out of Never-Never Land, was published by Scribner’s in 1969 and included the Bagot and the Derdon stories that had been published up to that point. It included neither “The Springs of Affection” nor “Family Walls,” two of her greatest stories, which would appear in The New Yorker only three years later. In 1974, another collection, Christmas Eve, was also published by Scribner’s that included these newer stories as well as several from the 1950s. There was no paperback edition of either one. And as she had no Irish publisher, her Dublin stories went largely unnoticed in Ireland where so many of them were set. At about this time William Maxwell said he thought her the best living Irish writer of fiction, but in her own country she was almost entirely unknown.
By the early 1970s Brennan’s friends had become aware of painful changes in her behavior. She was no longer a young woman in a working world still dominated by men: she was middle-aged now and alone. Her father and Gerald Murphy had died within a few weeks of each other in the fall of 1964, and her nearest companion, Bluebell, was also dead. She was having trouble writing. Pursued by an accumulation of debts and creditors, she stayed in increasingly rundown hotels. She had always moved from place to place, but now she began moving rapidly, as her father had done long ago when he was on the run and staying in safe houses. Sometimes she camped out—like a similarly bereft Bartleby—in the offices where she worked: in the New Yorker offices in a little space next to the ladies’ room, at one point tending a wounded pigeon. Then she had a severe breakdown and was in the hospital for a time. When things were better she returned to Ireland, thinking perhaps to remain there. But it must have been too late. For a few weeks she stayed with her cousin Ita Bolger Doyle. She wrote to William Maxwell from the garden studio on September 11, 1973:
The typewriter is here in the room with me—I hold on to it as the sensible sailor holds on to his compass. . . . What I am conscious of, is of having the sense of true perspective . . . that is in fact only the consciousness of impending, imminent revelation. “I can see.” But “I can see” is not to say ‘I see.’ I don’t believe at all in revelations—but to have, even for a minute, the sense of impending revelation, that is being alive.
Sometime after her return to New York from Ireland, things again fell apart; her movements became increasingly hard to track. She’d always been known for her generosity; now she began rapidly to divest, handing out money in the street. She was occasionally seen by her old colleagues sitting around Rockefeller Center with the destitute. Then she fell out of the public eye altogether. She had unequivocally become an outsider now, one of the poor and afflicted among whom she’d always counted the visionaries. It wasn’t until she seemed quite forgotten—until after her death in 1993 in a nursing home in Queens where she wasn’t known to be a writer—that she again swam into view.
Christopher Carduff, a senior editor at Houghton Mifflin at the time, encountering Brennan’s work by chance in the late 1980s, “fell in love,” as he put it, and undertook to get it all in print, including the recently discovered novella The Visitor. In 1997, for the first time, the Derdon stories as well as the Bagot stories could be read in sequence when they appeared in The Springs of Affection: Stories of Dublin. William Maxwell wrote a foreword to the volume. One of the many writers who greeted the publication was Mavis Gallant: “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.”
One of the literary puzzles indeed: Perhaps her colleagues and friends at The New Yorker tried and failed to intervene on her stories’ behalf when Brennan was unable to do so herself? To help see her existing volumes into paperback? Or press for the Dublin stories to be compiled and arranged, as did Christopher Carduff? Would things have been different if she had been “one of us”? A man rather than a woman, a compatriot? Unknowable and complex factors, surely, must have played their part, but it’s painful to remember that Brennan’s furious dedication to her art had been witnessed by so many.
At about the same time that Carduff’s editions started to come out in 1997, Mary Hawthorne, who’d been hired to work at The New Yorker in 1981, wrote a piece about an encounter with Brennan that sparked interest when it appeared in the London Review of Books. Not long afterward Angela Bourke undertook the formidable task of exploring Brennan’s life while many people who had known her were still alive. Bourke’s biography, Maeve Brennan: Homesick at The New Yorker, to which I am much indebted, appeared in 2004. In
2012 Emma Donoghue wrote a play based on Brennan’s life, The Talk of the Town, for the Dublin Theatre Festival. And in the spring of 2016, a new edition of The Springs of Affection was published by Dublin’s Stinging Fly Press, with an introduction by Anne Enright.
The paroxysms of the Irish rebellion that shaped Maeve’s early life have been given shape and voice by numbers of writers. Whether in novels or poems or plays or memoir, many have written about the era of the struggle for Irish independence with the authority of witnesses. Maeve Brennan writes too as one who was there, as child-witness, as girl-witness: the armed men breaking into the house protected by the helpless mother, the heart-stopping search for the father. But it may be that Brennan’s own early terrors of whatever kind were translated in her fiction into the anguish of love withdrawn or love denied: these flash in and out of The Visitor and the Derdon stories, in particular, like searchlights illuminating a wasteland where disappointment and confusion rise up the more terribly because it had been just here, on this island of home and security, that comfort had been most hoped for. It’s the specter of want, “the delirium of loss,” that stalks Maeve Brennan’s Irish stories, the sense of something that is not there. They take their place in a long tradition of tales of exile and displacement, of spellbinding metaphor carried by song.
The lost and irreplaceable home can be restored only from within, painstakingly. And like the exiled bishop who describes for his African students over and over again the particulars of the beloved road leading to the house in the Wexford countryside where he was welcomed for so short a time, so that his students and he make a game of “Going to Poulbwee,” so Brennan, spinning her sentences—scrupulous, lyrical, devastating—allows us to enter that first place. Only as irretrievably lost is it open to reclamation. It is hers to cultivate the ground of memory, to entertain the wealth of details that swarms restlessly until set down, one by one, in its destined place; to make something uncompromising and beautiful where love has been misplaced or betrayed and so to redeem that loss; to find solace in rendering whole what has come undone. Hubert Derdon, wearied at last by a long bout of simmering resentment against his wife, happens to look out, toward the end of “Family Walls,” at the absorbed Rose working in her garden:
She was intent on placing the plant in its exact place, and she was as anxious at her work as though she had taken the future of the world between her hands and must set it right once and for all because there would be no second chance—no second chance for her, at least—to prove that if it was left to her, all would be well. For this moment the weight of the world was off her shoulders and in her hands.
THE PEACEMAKER
Niall O’Dowd (1953– )
BY MARY JORDAN AND KEVIN SULLIVAN
A dark hotel bar in Dublin. Just after Christmas, 1992.
Niall O’Dowd was new to the secret agent game, and more than a little awkward at it. He was an Irish-born journalist who had been living and working in America for thirteen years, and now he found himself in an odd and audacious position.
President Bill Clinton’s White House wanted to make contact with the Irish Republican Army. Clinton was intrigued by the notion he could help bring peace to Northern Ireland, which had been wracked for years by violence between Protestants and Catholics known as the Troubles. Peace would only work if the IRA was interested in a cease-fire—but the American president couldn’t exactly send his secretary of state to Belfast for a cheery sit-down with a group considered terrorists in Washington and London.
There needed to be a no-fingerprints, totally deniable approach to the overture.
And into that opportunity walked O’Dowd, a soft-spoken writer, illegal immigrant, Gaelic football player, and house-painter who had risen to become publisher of two influential publications based in New York, Irish America magazine and the Irish Voice newspaper.
O’Dowd offered to serve as a clandestine, off-the-books bridge between the two powerful and skittish players, who just might be interested in ending three decades of bloody misery.
After making his pitch to a man in New York with “friends” in Belfast, O’Dowd received a cryptic handwritten note. A man from Sinn Féin, the political party closely associated with the IRA, would meet him at 11:30 a.m. in the bar at Wynn’s Hotel, just off Dublin’s famous O’Connell Street. His contact would be reading the Irish Times, with a pint of Guinness in front of him.
O’Dowd arrived drenched with rain and twenty minutes late, frantic that he had messed up his first attempt at amateur spy craft. He stumbled into the half-empty bar, where a couple of regulars were drinking pints. There at a table was a tall, bearded man with thick, graying hair who was dressed in jeans and a casual jacket. He looked up over his Irish Times, a Guinness on the table.
“Ted,” he said, holding a hand out and introducing himself.
“Niall,” O’Dowd replied.
Ted started ordering more pints, but O’Dowd had long since sworn off alcohol. So he settled for a very un-007 mineral water.
O’Dowd felt out of his depth with his water and his proposal for peace, which began to sound wackier and wackier the more he explained it.
Ted just looked back at him, difficult to read. O’Dowd wasn’t sure if he was interested or annoyed that O’Dowd was wasting his time.
O’Dowd made the pitch: He’d personally spoken to Clinton a few months earlier, and Clinton had made it clear that he wanted to get involved in Northern Ireland. But not publicly, at least not yet. O’Dowd was in contact with people in Senator Edward Kennedy’s office who could relay messages to and from the White House. O’Dowd told Ted that he could put together a group of sympathetic Irish American businessmen and politicians who would come to Belfast and publicly meet with representatives from all sides of the conflict—including an unprecedented meeting with Sinn Féin.
The idea was to “internationalize” the issue—to give this domestic British problem the kind of international attention that had helped undermine apartheid in South Africa.
Sinn Féin’s bloody campaign against British rule in Northern Ireland had left it out in the cold, isolated. In return for any thaw in relations, the IRA would have to first agree to a weeklong cease- fire during the American group’s visit to the north, O’Dowd said. It would be a goodwill gesture to prove that it was serious about wanting to work toward peace.
Peace in Northern Ireland had always topped O’Dowd’s list of priorities, and he wrote about it constantly. He believed in the IRA’s cause of kicking the British out of Northern Ireland and reuniting it with the Irish Republic but disagreed with its violent tactics. At the same time, he knew how much blood had been spilled in the violent clashes between Protestant unionists loyal to Britain and the Catholic Irish nationalists opposed to British rule. Some thirty-six hundred people had died in the guerrilla war. And in order to have what he called “an honorable peace,” an agreement had to be seen as respectful to those on both sides. An IRA official had once told O’Dowd that the IRA could only accept a deal “the dead can live with.”
O’Dowd stressed to Ted that his group could have no official status from the White House, but that it would be “very well connected.” If the IRA took that first step, O’Dowd said it was very possible that Clinton would buck pressure from London to not get involved and appoint a U.S. peace envoy to Northern Ireland. Britain, the United States’ closest ally, was fervently opposed to U.S. involvement in what it considered its internal affairs. And, O’Dowd said, it was possible that Sinn Féin leader Gerry Adams might finally be able to break a long-standing logjam and receive a visa to visit the United States—a long-term goal in Sinn Féin’s campaign to have the world hear its voice.
Don’t miss the opportunity, O’Dowd told Ted. The conditions had never been this favorable.
Ted looked at his eager, idealistic partner—soggy from the rain, clearly nervous, a thirty-nine-year-old man of average build who did not stand out in any way except for the dimple on his chin. The rumpled journalist play
ing secret statesman listened as Ted said that Sinn Féin wanted to engage with America, wanted peace negotiations. “Part of our objective is that our movement is not isolated,” he said, without committing to anything, but without rejecting anything, either.
Ted hadn’t laughed at him, and he hadn’t walked out. Trying to read the hard man sitting opposite him, O’Dowd sensed that Ted thought the idea wasn’t totally crazy.
If it did go forward, Ted said, here’s how communication would be handled: All documents would be destroyed after being read. There would be a code: the Irish American effort would be called “the project,” Gerry Adams would be “chairman,” letters would be hand-delivered by trusted couriers. The IRA would be “the local football team”; U.S. ambassador to Ireland Jean Kennedy Smith would be “dream woman,” a reference to a mythical figure in Gaelic poetry; and Senator Kennedy would be “the brother.”
Without another word, Ted got up and left.
O’Dowd felt overwhelming relief. “I had not been laughed out of the court,” he would say later. “The American connection was up and running.”
NIALL (PRONOUNCED “KNEEL”) Oliver O’Dowd, born in County Tipperary in May 1953, was one of seven children and thought he would be a schoolteacher like his father. His family moved to Drogheda, an industrial port north of Dublin, when he was nine, and as he grew older, he felt the small island was too constricting. “The sons of lawyers became lawyers, sons of doctors became doctors, sons of teachers, as I was, became teachers,” he says now. “A few hours’ drive in any direction,” he said, “and you fall into the ocean.”