"I don't know whether in Ireland she is considered an Irish writer or an American. In fact, she is both, and both countries ought to be proud to claim her." So wrote William Maxwell, the main short story editor of the New Yorker in 1993.
An Irish answer to him at that time would certainly have been: "Who is this writer? Who in Ireland has ever read her - has ever even heard of her?" The writer was Maeve Brennan, born in Dublin in 1916. She died in New York in 1993, aged 76.
She lived in Dublin until she was 17, when in 1934 her father, Robert Brennan, was appointed Ireland's ambassador to the United States and the whole family moved to Washington. At the end of Robert Brennan's term there in 1947, he and his family returned to Ireland, but Maeve stayed in New York. She worked first as a copywriter for Harper's Bazaar, where her first short story was published in 1950, but in 1949 she joined the staff of the New Yorker, in which all her subsequent stories appeared, her last one being in 1973. Her death in 1993 came after more than a decade of mental illness during which she frequently suffered psychotic episodes.
I first came across a Maeve Brennan story, The Springs of Affection, in the New Yorker of March 18th, 1972. I had been getting the magazine at the Irish Press, where I edited the weekly "New Irish Writing" page, and for me The Springs of Affection was one of the best short stories I had ever read.
It was set in Ireland, and the writer was clearly Irish. The biographical note said that her first collection, In And Out of Never-Never Land, had been published in 1969. I visited every bookshop in Dublin, but not one had the book or had ever heard of the writer.
I inquired from some source in the US and eventually was able to get a copy. It contained 22 stories, almost all of them Irish. I published one of the stories, The Carpet With The Big Pink Roses On It, in "New Irish Writing" on September 29th, 1973, and another one, Christmas Eve, on December 22nd, 1973. It had appeared in the New Yorker a year before, and in 1974 was the title story of her second collection.
Sometime, I think early in 1973, Maeve Brennan returned to Dublin on a visit. I contacted her and asked her if she would have dinner with my wife and me in our home. She came, we had a pleasant evening, and when she was leaving she invited us to have lunch with her in the flat she had rented in Ballsbridge.
My wife and I arrived at the right place and time, but when the front door was opened by a lady and we asked for Maeve Brennan, we were told that only a few days before Miss Brennan had without any warning upped and gone back to the US. When she died 20 years later, and we read in the American obituaries of the frequently harrowing years of her final decades, we presumed that her sudden departure from Dublin in 1973 must have happened during one of her psychotic episodes.
No other book of hers was published before her death, but by 2000 four books under her name had come out. The material of three of them comprised reprints of her stories and of a series of sketches about daily life in Times Square and Greenwich Village written between 1954 and 1981 for the New Yorker's "The Talk of the Town" feature. The fourth book, however, was not a reprint of previously known work. It was a suddenly discovered novella, and when published was hailed as a 20th-century classic, confirming Maeve Brennan's reputation as one of the best Irish writers of stories since Joyce.
The title of the book is The Visitor, published by Counterpoint in 2000. The 80-page manuscript is now in the University of Notre Dame, which in 1982 bought the business files of the defunct Irish publisher Sheed & Ward. Maeve Brennan had known Maisie Ward, a guiding spirit of Sheed & Ward, since 1940, and had probably sent her The Visitor.
It is known that it was completed in the mid-1940s, the Manhattan address on the manuscript's cover page being the writer's home at the time. That Maeve Brennan's greatest work was most likely the first she ever wrote is proof of her very rare genius.
And one must also add a note of praise for the foresight of the Irish imprint New Island, which obtained permission from the US publisher to bring out The Visitor in Ireland, the first time a book of Maeve Brennan's was speedily made available to her readers in the land of her birth.
For me, that whole story doesn't end quite there. When I learned about the amazing discovery of The Visitor manuscript, I began to think about its author and to feel there was some connection with her, some relationship, that just wouldn't surface.
At last it came to me - another of those 50-year-old memories that had somehow reawakened. It was about Maeve Brennan's father, Robert Brennan: I had published in the March, 1952 edition of the Irish Writing quarterly a story he wrote for me about his escape one day in 1921 from the Black and Tans.
He was riding on the top of an open-top tram that was stopped on Baggot Street Bridge by a party of Auxiliaries and khaki-clad soldiers. Brennan had in his pocket decoded messages for the underground Republican Government from its agent in Germany, and he knew he had no hope of escaping with his life when the Auxiliaries searched him. Suddenly a passenger in a nearby seat, whom he recognised as an American journalist he had met a few days before, moved beside him and asked: "Have you got anything on you?"
Brennan told him he had some papers. The journalist took them and put them in his pocket. "I have an American passport," he said. "They won't search me."
The soldiers searched Brennan but not the journalist, and when the tram was allowed to move off, the journalist gave Brennan back his papers and got off at the next stop.
Perhaps the title of Maeve's novella, The Visitor, was what reminded me of her father's lucky escape from his unwelcome visitors on that day in 1921.