Few writers are as lucid and at the same time mysterious as Maeve Brennan. Her sentences are precise; they accumulate to create a hard brilliance. The beauty of these stories is immediately apparent, but the meaning is not. They can be read as cruel or humane, hilarious or devastating, depending on what you would like to find. It’s as if a secret is hidden behind a mirrored surface; we look for it and see only ourselves reflected back.
In her introduction, Angela Bourke laments the editors who read Brennan’s work for laughs and missed the deep sadness in it. In their defence, it’s easy to do. Many of the stories are structured like a joke, but the punchline is just a little too harsh not to raise suspicion. In The Bride, a girl waits for her groom, thinking of all the ways she despises him, and wondering how to escape their marriage. Yet when he arrives, she speaks politely, warning him not to come into her room “because her wedding dress was hanging there and she didn’t want him to see it ahead of time, for fear of bringing bad luck on the two of them”.
The Bohemians appears to be a swift satire of a couple of artistic types, but suddenly the ground drops out from under it and we are left with a baffling, piercing vision of the lacrimae rerum: it’s hard to be left in the world when the ones you love are gone. These stories refuse to behave; they rise and fall in unexpected places.
[ Maeve Brennan, a writer who was at home in neither Ireland nor AmericaOpens in new window ]
The publication of The Rose Garden completes The Stinging Fly’s three-volume collection of Maeve Brennan’s published work. The first, The Springs of Affection, contains her Dublin stories: autobiographical but oddly uninterested in self-revelation. The Long-Winded Lady gathers Brennan’s sketches of New York, in which she wanders around the city like a disembodied eye, letting impressions record themselves on her.
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The Rose Garden is the least coherent but perhaps the most fascinating. It gathers stories written across almost three decades, arranged thematically, and we can see her imagination returning to the same locations and concerns, the way a ghost haunts the site of something unresolved. Part of the pleasure of reading this collection is in puzzling out the unseen personal charge behind the stories.
