Sir, – We have just been to Dublin to see Emma Donoghue’s play, The Talk of the Town, based on Angela Bourke’s biography of our aunt and cousin Maeve Brennan, and we are dismayed by the way the play misrepresents Maeve’s speech and personality.
It depicts her as foul-mouthed, habitually swearing in coarse Dublin slang, and gives the impression that the use of crude expletives was part of Maeve’s normal persona.
It was absolutely not.
We are not saying that Maeve never swore, but it was not her style at all. If she was heard to do so at the New Yorker offices, it would have been partly for the dry pleasure of shocking her male colleagues. (Remember this was during the patriarchal 1950s when even the word “damn” uttered by a woman would have the men reaching for their smelling salts.) Maeve was independent, highly articulate and had a deadly wit, but she was never coarse. As her writer friend, Edith Konecky says: “Maeve may have said a lot of crazy things but I can’t recall her ever swearing . . . I knew Maeve at the end of her life when she was slipping into madness and had begun to mistrust everyone and to behave irrationally and sometimes offensively, but I still can’t recall her using language like that. I think it would, even then, have been beneath her and her respect for language.”
Donoghue’s misunderstanding of Maeve is further illustrated by a comment in the theatre programme where, in the context of saying that Maeve Brennan “never fully cloaked her Irishness”, Donoghue is quoted as calling her “the foul-mouthed Irishwoman . . . a jester figure”.
Where did Donoghue get this idea? Even allowing for the fact that Donoghue is a writer of fiction, it is an extraordinary thing to say about a woman who spoke clearly and concisely, and was fastidious in her use of language.
Expletives were never a feature of Maeve’s normal speech, and neither we, nor other members of her family, in Dublin and Wexford, ever heard her talk that way.
Maeve was raised by well-spoken, educated, Wexford parents and was taught mainly by Irish speakers and nuns: Miss Gavin-Duffy, the Cross Passion sisters and the Catholic University in Washington, where her father was the first Irish minister to the city. She was a studious, if spirited, child who had a great love of literature and the Irish language from an early age.
So, at what time during this education would Maeve have morphed into a “foul-mouthed Irishwoman”? She may have picked up some vulgar language at the New Yorker, but it would not have been part of her Irish heritage.
Lest this play should leave people with a false impression of Maeve Brennan, I would like to put the record straight: Maeve was a vivid personality, warm, kind, extravagant and generous to a fault. She was a tiny person, and yet she dominated any room she entered, simply by her presence. She had an inner stillness that drew people to her like a magnet.
She was an observer of life rather than a joiner-in but, in company, her introspective nature was often masked by her twinkling eyes, her wide smile and her mischievous sense of humour.
She was full of mirth and self-mocking wit, and had an acute sense of irony. She would talk as if life was a great joke – sometimes a bitter joke, but a joke nonetheless – and she joked all the time. The only things she was absolutely serious about were her writing, her many cats, and her beloved dog Bluebell. – Yours, etc,