If you read The New Yorker in the 1950s, ’60s and ’70s, perhaps you remember a delicious series of “Talk of the Town” items written by “The Long-Winded Lady.” Or perhaps you have memories of some short stories of middle-class Irish life by a writer named Maeve Brennan.
“The Long Winded Lady” and Maeve Brennan were one and the same, and Angela Bourke’s welcome biography, “Maeve Brennan: Homesick at the New Yorker” (Counterpoint, 333 pages, $25), simultaneously introduces Brennan to a wider readership and deepens our understanding of who she really was.
Brennan’s largely autobiographical stories are observed with utter acuity. The compassion comes not in some gloppy frosting ladled over the story but from the characters’ gradually revealed humanity and Brennan’s total immersion in their lives. William Maxwell, her editor at The New Yorker, said he thought she was the best living Irish writer.
Bourke’s book begins disastrously, with what feels like an endless encyclopedia entry about the Irish troubles. It’s a grindingly dull 60 pages, because the central character is offstage. While Irish politics formed much of Brennan’s father’s life — Bob Brennan was, among other things, a novelist, playwright and Irish ambassador to the U.S. — they had little to do with her own life, which was spent mostly in New York.
Once Brennan follows her father to America, and the outlines of her personality begin to take shape, the book rights itself and sails on to the end.
Brennan was an isolate, often pensive and withdrawn, and that was her glory as a writer and quite possibly her destruction as a human being. She related better to animals than to people and didn’t cope well with human failures. An early love affair with Walter Kerr ended when he married another woman, and Brennan seems never to have gotten over it.
Brennan was an editor at Harper’s Bazaar during World War II; when she got to The New Yorker in 1949, there was a brief relationship with Charles Addams and probably one with the married Brendan Gill.
Her only marriage was to writer St. Clair McKelway, who was an alcoholic given to nervous breakdowns. Brennan didn’t have a drinking problem, but she was nearly as improvident as her husband. When the marriage ended after a couple of years, there were ruinous debts.
More Top Picks Best Drawing Tablets With Screens For Professionals
Aside from these liaisons, Brennan had little romantic life; most of her energy and intent went into writing, and as she proceeded through middle age, that began to turn on itself.
She developed obsessive-compulsive disorder. She stopped living in a succession of rented apartments and began to live in a cubicle next to the women’s bathroom at The New Yorker. When she got paid, she’d cash her check and begin handing out money to passersby.
Nobody at the magazine knew what to do. Alcoholism and sex are the common dysfunctions of the writer, not out-and-out madness. Medication helped, but she’d go off it, and every time she did she was a little worse off than before.
By the late ’70s she was homeless, living on the street. In 1981 she showed up at the office, sat by the receptionist’s desk for two days, then disappeared. In 1990 a professor tracked her down at a nursing home in Arvene, N.Y., near Rockaway Beach in Queens.
Brennan died of heart failure in November 1993 at age 76. Since her death, her work has been collected in book form and remains in print. That work, and this biography, are more than worthy of your interest.