Edward Albee compared Maeve Brennan to Chekhov and Flaubert but for me there are echoes of two other great Irish writers here — Elizabeth Bowen and William Trevor. Both Bowen and Trevor were masters of mannered spite and emotional dislocation. Maeve Brennan could also be an elegant and savage satirist. Her stories set in Herbert’s Retreat explore the malice and vulnerability of the rich. Baiting the weakest member is the community’s favourite sport, while they in turn are watched and tyrannised by their domestic servants. Most of Brennan’s short and powerful body of work has a common theme of spite and vulnerability. Everybody is afraid of something. Someone can and will find our weakness. But while her consummately skilled and sophisticated short stories convey their themes with irony, The Visitor is an intimate engagement with loneliness and despair.
In a short story called “The Door on West Tenth Street”, Maeve Brennan wrote an imaginary history for a small bird found dead in a shabby New York park. “He was a sparrow, whatever that is. Samuel Butler said life is more a matter of being frightened than being hurt. And the sparrow might have replied, ‘But Mr Butler, being frightened hurts.’ ”
In spite of her glamour and her brief eminence, there was something of the sparrow to Brennan. John Updike wrote: “She is constantly alert, sharp-eyed as a sparrow for the crumbs of human event, the overheard and the glimpsed and the guessed-at, that form a solitary person’s least expensive amusement.” It is likely that the key to the enigma of Maeve Brennan’s disappearance into the shadows lies in this. Even at the height of her fame she was always solitary. Her stark and pure vision of the world was also a frightening one. And being frightened hurt.
Clare Boylan
The Visitor
The mail train rushed along toward Dublin, and all the passengers swayed and nodded with the uneven rhythm of it and kept their eyes fixed firmly in front of them as though the least movement would bring them to the end of their patience. Luggage had been piled hastily out in the corridor, and some people left their seats and stood there, leaning against windows all cloudy with breath and smoke.
Anastasia King rubbed a clear spot in her window and stared out, but in the rushing darkness only a few stray lights were discernible, blurred by the rain. She turned back into the corridor and took out a cigarette.
Around her in the garish yellow trainlight faces were shadowed and withdrawn, indifference heightened by the deafening clatter of the train. The din automatically raised a barrier of hostile irritation to daunt the chummy souls. She was glad of this.
A man spoke to her, standing very close because of the noise, startling her.
“May I borrow a match?”
“Of course.”
She frowned nervously. It occurred to her that he might have asked some other person, and she looked along the corridor. He caught the direction of her glance. He smiled a little.
“They all looked half-asleep,” he said, “but I saw you look out through the window there.”
“I looked out but I didn’t see much. It’s raining hard and it’s very dark.”
“It was raining when I left here. That was nearly two years ago.” His voice was idle and friendly. “Have you been away long?”
“Oh, yes, a long time. Six years last month.”
“That is a long time. You haven’t been back at all?”
“No.”
After a moment she said, “I’ve been living in Paris, with my mother. We moved there, six years ago.”
“I see.” He rubbed a place in the window and peered out. “Well, it’s raining all right. You know, if I wasn’t sure I’d been away I might think I hadn’t gone at all. It was exactly like this the day I left.”
He continued to stare out and Anastasia looked at her suitcases again.
I might be leaving too, she thought, instead of coming back.
She rocked with the train, her back to the window, and felt once again that she was remembering a long dream.
The future is wearisome too. I can’t imagine it now. It’s very late in the evening.
Her thoughts went back to Paris; dwindling uncertain pictures formed in her mind. Again she was saying goodbye to her father. There he was in miniature, and she also, in a clear cold miniature room. He turned and faded out through the hotel door that opened inward. He looked a bit like a tortoise, all bent and curving in on himself, carrying his hat in his hand. For the first time she had wanted to say she was sorry, at last to say how sorry she was, but he was already down the corridor and around the corner and gone.
He was alone and sad. Behind her in this tiny hotel room of memory her mother sat in a chair near the window. Her mother’s face was soft from crying, her hands were clasped upturned in her lap, and she met her daughter’s gaze with a glance of passive recognition and that was all.
The man beside her turned suddenly from the window to face her.
“Ah, I’m glad to be back again,” he said with a contented sigh. “I suppose you are too. People to visit, places to see. But you’ll find a lot of changes too, and so will I, I suppose. Even two years is a long time, these days.”
He smiled and she nodded at him and smiled too. He straightened himself and looked at his watch.
“Well, I’ll run along and get my stuff together. We’ll soon be pulling in. Thanks for the match. Goodbye now.”
A few steps away he turned.
“Have a nice holiday now,” he yelled above the train noise.
“It isn’t a holiday.”
“Oh, well.” He was uncertain. “Have a good time. Goodbye.”
“Goodbye.”
Bags were tumbling down from racks and coats were being pulled on. She looked out again into the darkness, but now there was nothing to be seen but the distorted reflection of the excited scene behind her.
“Here we are in Dublin,” said an English voice close to her.
Her eyes filled with tears. She bent to her suitcases. Somewhere in her mind a voice was saying clearly, “Ireland is my dwelling place, Dublin is my station.”
Then the porter had found her a taxi and was putting her bags in. She thanked him and tipped him and climbed in alongside the luggage.
She put one hand out to balance the smaller bag, which was in danger of falling, and then suddenly they had left the dim taxicab lane and were in the street, and there were many people, ordinary people, not travelers, walking along the rainy streets. The faces looked just as self-intent and serious as the faces in the strange cities she had seen; they seemed no different.
In a moment the windows were blurred with running water and the streets slid by unnamed and unrecognized. The rain fell slantwise on rows and rows of blank-faced houses, over the slate roofs, past their many windows. Anastasia slumped lower into her seat, trying not to recognize the sudden melancholy that was on her. The cabman drove without a word and his silence seemed sullen. She felt rebuffed for no reason.
It seemed too long to her grandmother’s house, but she was startled when the car drew up at last, and she looked up apprehensively and saw the familiar door of years ago. The lights were on in the front hall. They had been waiting for her, her grandmother and Katharine. The door opened wide and lighted the steps for the cab driver, who was struggling up to the door with her bags.
She kissed her grandmother hastily, avoiding her eyes. The grandmother did not move from the door of the sitting room. She stood in the doorway, having just got up from the fireside and her reading, and contemplated Anastasia and Anastasia’s luggage crowding the hall. She was still the same, with her delicate and ruminative and ladylike face, and her hands clasped formally in front of her. Anastasia thought, She is waiting for me to make some mistake. Katharine stood as ever in the background, anxious and smiling in her big white apron, her scrubbed hands already reaching to help with the luggage, her eyes lively with pleasure and curiosity.