In praise of Maeve Brennan, by Mary O’Donoghue

“Home is a place in the mind,” writes Maeve Brennan in The Visitor. “When it is empty, it frets. It is fretful with memory, faces and places and times gone by. Beloved images rise up in disobedience and make a mirror for emptiness.” This mid-1940s novella is likely Brennan’s earliest work, and is poised on economy, melancholy, and anti-nostalgia. I came to it later than Brennan’s stories in Springs of Affection and The Rose Garden and was drawn to its terse reserve. I love that the same author worked as “The Long-Winded Lady” for the New Yorker, documenting the city’s facades and peccadilloes in pensively observant essays. Her piquant account of subway etiquette “On the A Train” could sit companionably with the essays of Robert Walser: the inconsequential magnified to high psychological seriousness and comedy. She does not accept the offer of a subway seat and misses her stop. “Sometimes it is very hard to know the right thing to do.” She was a pigeon-feeder and hotel-dweller, and I like to think she crossed paths with Nikola Tesla, another quietly lost virtuoso.

Mary O’Donoghue’s short stories have appeared in the Sunday Times, Georgia Review, Kenyon Review, Irish Times, Stinging Fly and elsewhere. She is currently on the longlist for the Sunday Times EFG short story award.

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