Year III March 1 to March 31
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Dublin
I first read the work of Maeve Brennan during Irish Short Story Month I in 2011 when I listened to a wonderful podcast of of the story on the webpage of The New Yorker in which Roddy Doyle reads the story. During Irish Short Story Month Year II in 2012 I posted on a truly wonderful cat story, set in her adopted home town of New York City, "Bianca, I Can See You".
Maeve Brennan's life should have been a perfect fairy tale of happiness. There is a fey beauty in her face but I also see fear and a dark hunger.
Brennan's life should have been a fairy tale of one happy and exciting day followed by another. It was not.
Brennan's father was the first Irish Ambassador to the United States. Her father fought for freedom from British rule in the Irish War for Independence. The British imprisoned him for a while. Brennan and her family lived in Washington DC until 1944 when her father returned to Ireland. She stayed on in the US and moved to New York City where she got a job writing copy for Harper's Bazaar. She also wrote a society column for an Irish publication. She began to write occasional articles for The New Yorker. In 1949 she was offered a job on the staff of the magazine. She was incredibly beautiful, very intelligent, witty, petite, always perfectly dressed and made up. She moved about frequently and had extravagant tastes. Some people feel she was the inspiration for Holly Golightly, the lead character in Truman Capote's Breakfast at Tiffany's (1958). In the 1960s people began to observe that she was now beginning to appear unkempt. In the 1970s Brennan became paranoid and was an alcoholic. She began to drift in and out of reality and was hospitalized several times. She ended up living either in transit hotels or in the ladies room at the offices of The New Yorker. (I also read William Maxwell's introduction to one of her collections of short stories published posthumously and learned that to its great credit the magazine had secured for her a place where she could stay and be fed but she rarely went there.) In the 1980s she all but disappears. She died in 1993 in the Lawrence hospital, a ward of the state. As I read this I could not help but be reminded of Jean Rhys but I think the story of Brennan is more tragic in that Rhys partially recovered from her years of darkness and was seen as a great writer while still alive.
"The Lie (it was first published in The New Yorker and then reprinted in a posthomous collection of her stories, Springs of Affection: Dublin Stories in 1998) is a story that begins on day a seven year old girl takes her first confession. There are several well known short stories by Irish writers that deal with confessions but none are any better than this one and none let us really understand what confession can mean to a seven year old, and her mother. On the day set for her first confession when her and her mother arrive there is a long line of girls waiting to confess. The priest sees her and asks the mother if this is her first confession. He then takes her to be the first person to confess to day, shocking all the other girls and their mothers. At first the girl has no idea what sins she can confess to her then the priest gently prompts her with questions like :were you disobedient?" He assigns her three Hail Marys. I hate to tell to much of this story. The girl goes to confession on a regular basis, always assigned the same mild penance as she has no real sins. Then she commits an intentional act of deceit and cruelty directed at her baby brother when her mother will not let her sit in her lap.
Brennan does a brilliant job in making us understand this experience from the point of view of the seven year old girl and her mother also.
If you do a Google Book Search on her you will find this story online along with several of her other works.
A post on your favorite or your first encounter with one of her short stories would be a very good guest post!
Mel u
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