Moments of Recognition

Posted Monday, Jul. 1, 1974
CHRISTMAS EVE—13 STORIES

by MAEVE BRENNAN

244 pages. Scribners. $7.95.

Maeve Brennan is the kind of writer who can transform the arrival of a sofa in a lower-middle-class Dublin household or the cleaning of a carpet (one with big pink roses on it) into an extraordinary celebration of family love. She does this by a steady accumulation of detail and alternate flashes of passionate statement and raw insight. The accomplishment is formidable—something few writers attempt without sounding precious, dull, or both.

Her gift is flawlessly demonstrated in the title story from Christmas Eve, Maeve Brennan's first book in five years. Tis the night before Christmas, in a cramped suburban house in Dublin. The husband, Martin, stands downstairs in the hall, listening to his wife Delia putting their two small girls to bed. Between husband and wife are the stairs and the dark length of the hall, containing a coatrack, an umbrella stand and a chair. "Nobody ever sat on the chair and nobody ever stood long in the hall," Brennan writes. "It was a passageway—not to fame, and not to fortune, but only to the common practices of family life, those practices, habits and ordinary customs that are the only true realities most of us ever know and that in some of us form a memory strong enough to give us something to hold on to to the end of our days."

Love that is largely unexpressed, and the fear of losing it, dominates the lives of most Brennan characters. All of them, whether they survive in shabby Dublin gentility, bask in fashionable East Hampton, or simply hang on by their fingernails in New York City, live in a world of secret thoughts and elaborate private rituals that they cannot share. Brennan has always specialized in the involuntary victims of such isolation—children and animals. She has even written successfully about a large Labrador retriever named Bluebell.

Most of the stories in Christmas Eve were first published in The New Yorker between 1953 and 1973. The oldest and least characteristic deal with Herbert's Retreat, a cozy riverside community near New York that somewhat resembles Sneden's Landing. It is a world where the worst that can happen is to lose your Irish maid or private view of the Hudson. Plots turn on such matters as who will get nightly custody of an antique stone hot-water bottle. Though she deals ironically with such elegantly dated doings, Brennan never substitutes malice for wit—not even when skewering a truly obnoxious theater critic who is not above stealing his neighbor's copy of the Times.

For 20 years now, Maeve Brennan's sharp-eyed alter ego, "the Long-Winded Lady," has been posting bulletins about the city and its inhabitants in The New Yorker's "Talk of the Town" section. A self-styled "traveler in residence," she has always been able to turn quite ordinary things—two people looking in a store window, a small parade, a cat crouching under a parked van—into "moments of recognition." Her old-fashioned method is the unabashed use of straight description, as in A Snowy Night on West Forty-Ninth Street, the one New York story in Christmas Eve. It begins, characteristically, in a very low key, as a painstaking portrait of a small French restaurant, and the people who shelter there from the snow. But the author finally produces a freeze-frame of private desperation, the characters savagely revealed in a moment of vulnerability and compromise.

Maeve Brennan is one of those people who love New York "because the chances for being invisible are so much greater." Small and given to wearing dark glasses, she spends much of her time looking and listening, with only an open book for camouflage: "Nobody has ever noticed that I never turned the page." She keeps her observations in a large calendar book: "If you're writing about people in the street, you have to describe their clothes, all of them. Clothes tell a lot."

"In the old days," Brennan recalls, "I would get up at 6 a.m. no matter what. Now you can't walk around at 6. At 7 it's safe. But you can see the 6 a.m. people still up." She lives alone in a midtown hotel on West 44th Street—"just opposite the Algonquin" and only a few steps away from The New Yorker —and she has a canny, survivor's eye for a bargain. "The coffee at Bickford's is only 16¢," she will say, "but they rob you at Childs." She broods on the differences between Woolworth's and Lamston's.

Maeve Brennan came from Dublin to America with her family in 1934, when she was 17. She has lived here ever since. She worked at first for Harper's Bazaar, but in the 1940s her work caught the eye of New Yorker Editor William Shawn, who encouraged her to do the Long-Winded Lady pieces and stories as well. Her seven-year marriage to Fellow New Yorker Writer St. Clair McKelway ended in divorce.

For some years she lived in East Hampton and loved it. She also spent time wandering around New Hampshire with a Labrador (the prototype of Bluebell) and all kinds of cats. "The dog got arthritis and died," she says sadly, "and the cats are all gone now."

She has been quietly sidestepping the literary life for years and treasuring anonymity. As she remarks, with a sidelong smile: "The fewer writers you know the better, and if you're working on anything, don't tell them."