`Snapshots Taken During a Long, Slow Journey'

Can we say with justice that Maeve Brennan is best known for her short fiction when in fact she is hardly known for anything because most readers have never heard her name and those who have have probably forgotten it? Born in Dublin, she died in New York City in 1993, age 76, after years of mental illness, alcoholism and literary oblivion. Her name was briefly resurrected a decade ago by her friend and one-time editor at The New Yorker (she joined the staff in 1949), William Maxwell, who ushered into print The Springs of Affection, The Rose Garden and The Visitor. Like every story writer she’s been likened to Chekhov, with some justice. If that sounds enticing, track down her wonderful books.

It’s Brennan the nonfiction writer I most admire. Between 1954 and 1981 she had one of the best jobs in the world, writing sketches of street life in Manhattan for “The Talk of the Town” department in The New Yorker. Her persona was The Long-Winded Lady, and a collection with that title was published in 1969. Houghton Mifflin issued an expanded paperback edition in 1998.
The style and tone of Brennan’s nonfiction are less raffish, more casual than those of her colleagues A.J. Liebling and Joseph Mitchell. She is matter-of-fact, bemused but not coyly faux-naïf. In her author’s note, Brennan says:

“Now when I reread through this book I seem to be looking at snapshots. It is as though the long-winded lady were showing snapshots taken during a long, slow journey not through but in the most cumbersome, most reckless, most ambitious, most confused, most comical, the saddest and coldest and most human of cities.”

A snapshot implies casualness and a desire to preserve, the secret to Brennan’s charm and success. Her sketches just seem to happen, as in early Chekhov, and they almost never neatly resolve. They end abruptly but artfully. They are never portentous. She specializes in unexpectedness and odd connections. The Long-Winded Lady is attuned to loss, failure, grief and various species of unhappiness, but not like a professional do-gooder (again, like Chekhov – or Stevie Smith). She draws no sociological or political conclusions. Her pet theories are personal and make no claims on the world. In “Balzac’s Favorite Food,” published Sept. 21, 1963, she visits a bookshop on Forty-eighth Street. In one volume she learns Balzac’s favorite meal was sardines and some other ingredient mashed together and smeared on bread. As she tries to find the other ingredient she’s interrupted:

“…my ears were insulted by hard voices screeching right outside the door – people making remarks about the books in the window. `Hey, Marilyn Monroe has been reduced!’ a man’s voice shouted. `Five seventy-five to one ninety-two!’ There were squawks of laughter, and then a woman’s voice said (it was a harridan speaking), `Wait till she goes down to a dollar.’ `Too much! Too much! A dollar is too much!’ the man shouted, and then these horrors were trooping into the shop, and I took off my glasses to get a look at them. Cruelty and Stupidity and Bad Noise – there were three of them, a man and a woman and another, but I did not see the third, who was hidden behind the tall spindle bookcase they were all looking at and making merry over. They called out names and titles, and made a lot of feeble puns, ruining the place for everybody, and I paid for the books I had under my arm, and left.”

This is Brennan as New York satirist, in Dawn Powell mode, but she seldom leaves it at that – funny but too easy. Her humor is rooted in something deeper and probably Irish. She walks to a restaurant called Le Steak de Paris (Long-Winded Lady spends a lot of time in small restaurants), where she orders sardines and bread, and vows not to think about the “hyenas” in the bookshop:

“Their capacity for arousing violence will arouse somebody who IS violent one of these days. (That is what I told myself.) They will trip over their own shoelaces. Time will tell on them. They will never know anything except the miserable appetite of envy. They will learn, like the boy who cried wolf, that people who mock the Last Laugh are incinerated by it when it finally sounds. I don’t care.”

She resolves to return to the bookshop: “Before the evening is finished, I will know exactly what the Master’s favorite food was, and I will also know how it tastes today.” It’s typical of Brennan that she seeks something forgotten, elusive and scorned. Delicately, without pretension, the Long-Winded Lady stands up for civilization. Time has only burnished the quiet dignity and sadness of these stories. Her world has vanished. Two months after this story appeared, President Kennedy was murdered and the real sixties, the decade of hyenas, was started. In a piece from 1967, Brennan quotes another Irish writer, Oliver Goldsmith:

“Innocently to amuse the imagination in this dream of life is wisdom.”

This is from the section on water fowl in A History of the Earth and Animated Nature. Four sentences later, Goldsmith concludes his chapter like this:

“Even those, that are tyrants by nature, never spread capricious destruction, and unlike man, never inflict a pain but when urged by necessity.”