Backlisted - The Springs of Affection by Maeve Brennan

Episode Date: November 15, 2022

There can be few writers more deserving of Backlisted’s attention than the Irish writer, Maeve Brennan. An adopted New Yorker, Brennan died there in 1993 and was by that time so thoroughly forgotten in her native land, that she received no obituaries in any Irish papers. We are joined by the writers Sinéad Gleason and David Hayden to discuss her collection, The Springs of Affection – subtitled ‘stories of Dublin’ – which was first published posthumously by Houghton Mifflin in 1997, although all but one of these first appeared in the New Yorker, where Brennan was a staff writer for twenty-seven years. It was the enthusiastic praise from other writers including Alice Munro, Edna O’Brien and Mavis Gallant among others, that helped get The Springs of Affection the kind of international attention that the two collections published in Maeve’s lifetime failed to achieve. Since then, Maeve Brennan’s reputation has grown steadily, and her stories are now regularly and favourably compared to those of Joyce, Chekov and Colette. In Ireland, in particular, she has won the admiration of a new generation of women writers, who in Anne Enright’s phrase, see her as ‘a casualty of old wars not yet won.’ This episode also features Andy revisiting the Linda Nochlin’s classic 1971 essay, Why Have There Been No Great Women Artists? while John is impressed by Orlam, P.J. Harvey’s dark and brooding verse novel, written entirely in Dorset dialect. Timings: (may differ due to variable advert length) 08:44 - Why Have There Been No Great Women Artists? by Linda Nochlin 16:16 - Orlam by P.J. Harvey 22:46 - The Springs Of Affection By Maeve Brennan * To purchase any of the books mentioned in this episode please visit our bookshop at https://uk.bookshop.org/shop/backlisted where all profits help to sustain this podcast and UK independent bookshops. * For information about everything mentioned in this episode visit www.backlisted.fm * If you'd like to support the show, receive the show early and get extra bonus fortnightly episodes, become a Patreon at https://www.patreon.com/backlisted Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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I'm calling from Dublin, which I think feels very apt given the subject of our conversation later in the show. Well done for going there specially. Yeah, that shows huge commitment to the cause. David, where are you, please? I'm calling from the least Irish place in England, Norwich. One of the weird things about Norwich that sticks in my head, I was a huge fan of those, the Arthur Ransom books when I was a kid. And you know, the opening

sentence of The Big Six, which is set on the Norfolk Broads is, Norwich station is a terminus. which is set on the Norfolk Broads, is Norwich Station is a terminus. That's the sentence. It's kind of always... I remember going to Norwich Station, and indeed it is a terminus. It's that idea that it's the end of the line, right? Not just beautiful, but factually accurate as well. There's Arthur Ransom. Good.

When I first came to Norwich, I went out on the Broads with my kids, and the guy who was on the boat that we we we went on said um ah yes you've come from london it's like well norwich is the place where dreams come to die so and you know um all my kids jaws was like dropped to the chest. It's brilliant. There's a David Hayden short story right there. This is a broad spread, let's be honest, a geographically broad spread of places for us to be thinking about an Irish writer, of which more I am. But we normally have somebody calling in from North London. And I think Nicky Birch, our producer,

is taking care of that today. Am I right, sir? East London, but North London. And I think Nicky Birch, our producer, is taking care of that today. Am I right, sir? East London, but North London at heart. Okay, well, as long as North London is always represented on this show somewhere, that's fine. John, shall we? Okay. Hello, and welcome to Backlisted, the podcast that gives new life to old books. Today, you find us in the garden of a terraced house in the newly built

suburb of Ranla in South Dublin. It's the early 1920s and a woman is carefully picking flowers with a pair of scissors. A rough white-haired terrier follows her hopefully as she assembles a small bouquet of pinks, marigolds, daisies, a sprig of forget-me-not. She intends to put it in a vase to brighten up the small upstairs room her husband has taken to sleeping in. I'm John Mitchinson, the publisher of Unbound, the platform where readers crowdfund books they really want to read. And I'm Andy Miller, author of The Year of Reading Dangerously, and today we're joined by two guests making their bat-listed debut.

Fresh blood, welcome Sinead Gleeson and David Hayden. Hello, both of you. Welcome, welcome, welcome. I'm delighted to be here. I'm such a fan of this podcast, so thank you. Oh, David is strangely silent. I'm stunned with gratitude and happiness to be here. Oh, thanks, David.

Makes note. Sinead's essay collection, Constellations, Reflections from Life, was published by Picador in 2019 and won Non-Fiction Book of the Year at the 2019 Irish Book Awards and the Dolce Literary Award for Emerging Writer. It was also shortlisted for the Rathbones Folio Prize, the James Tate Black Memorial Prize, and Michael Dion Prize.

She is the editor of The Long Gaze Back, an anthology of Irish women writers. Which writer, Sinead, inspired the title of The Long Gaze Back? Well, only one, really, and titles are very tricky, as you know. Yeah. But I guess that project itself was an act of sort of redivivus. It was an act of reclamation. And one of the writers I included

was the wonderful Maeve Brennan, because she was the one among many women in Irish canonical terms that got overlooked, omitted, excluded, and didn't have their brilliant work talked about with the same volume as a lot of her male contemporaries.

So I stole the line at The Long Gaze back from a wonderful novella called The Visitor by an Irish writer called Mae Brennan, who was one of my favourite Irish writers. And somebody, one of those writers I try and press on people all the time if they haven't heard of her, because I think there's only a small body of work, a couple of short story collections, one novella, and a collection of nonfiction, and that's it. There was no novel, there were no plays. So there's enough to be able to get through quite quickly.

But if people haven't heard of her, I love telling people to read Maeve Brennan. Well, that's why we have provided you with this platform today. I'm so grateful. She's also the editor of The Glass Shore, short stories by women writers from the North Island, and The Art of the Glimpse, 100 Irish short stories. Sinead also collaborates with artists and musicians, with commissions from The Welcome Collection, BBC,

Freeze and various galleries. This year with Kim Gordon, Exonic Youth. She co-edited this woman's work, Essays on Music, published by White Rabbit Books, and has just completed her debut novel. Wow, you've been busy. Amazing. Thank you. Thank you for coming on and doing this.

We're all busy, aren't we? Yeah, sure, sure, sure. Come on, you're finishing a book. Yeah, I might be, I might be. Anyway, David Hayden, he was born in Ireland and lives in England, as we've established. If you didn't skip the informal chat at the beginning, which many do, he lives in the little island in the bog, Norwich in Norfolk, to give it Alan Partridge's term. His writing has appeared in a public space, Granter,

the Dublin Review and Winter Papers and on BBC and RTE radio. He is the author of Darker With The Lights On, which was chosen as one of the Irish Times Books of the Years. And a million years ago, like John and Andy, it says here, Andy, that's me, he worked as a bookseller in Waterstones.

David, how do you feel about Waterstones losing its apostrophe? Because in our day, it was a company that belonged to a man called Waterstone, wasn't it? So it had an apostrophe in its name. But now it doesn't. It's Waterstones, as though they were a thing. David, how do you feel about that?

I can only choose one. Waterstones are actually a thing. You sharpen knives with them. So, you know, you go into waterstones you can't sharpen a knife there there is there's books and i hate the fact that we lost the apostrophe this is the best answer to this question i hate it david i hate it too although it is the sort of question a customer would come in and ask where are your knife sharpeners they would have just done that wouldn't they where are your tires completely completely i am i remember there's loads of these but i remember one occasion somebody came in and

said do you have any books by kirk agard it's probably my favorite probably my favorite of those of which there are many i'm sure you've got your own yeah we all will have i had a person once asked for shakespeare short, which was fun. No, really, I worked with someone who asked me for a recommendation. This is a fellow bookseller. He asked me a recommendation of Graham Greene, which Graham Greene novel to read. And I said, well, maybe The End of the Affair.

And she said, what, The End, not the whole thing? Absolutely true, ladies and gentlemen. And that former bookseller is now a millionaire, and that's true. So there you go. Just goes to show you can be clever about Graham Greene, it'll get you nowhere. We should say what we're... I mean, we've probably already kind of given you a bit of a clue that the book we're here to discuss, or books,

because it's more than one, really. But the main book is The Springs of Affection, a collection of stories by the Irish writer Maeve Brennan, which was first published by Houghton Mifflin in 1997. Although all but one of the stories in that collection appeared originally in the New Yorker, where Maeve Brennan was a staff writer for 27 years. So an adopted New Yorker, Brennan died there in 1993, and was by that time so thoroughly forgotten in her native land that she received no obituaries in any Irish papers.

The publication of this collection was to change all that. Anyway, we'll get on to that in a moment. First, I've got to ask the old familiar question, Andy. What have you been reading this week? Thanks, Andy. What have you been reading this week? Thanks, John. I've been reading a 50th anniversary edition of a book entitled Why Have There Been No Great Women Artists? It was written by Linda Nochlin, who died in 2017. And she described the title of this book, Why Have There Been No Great Women Artists, as silly.

So if you are listening to this thinking, well, of course there have been great women artists. Linda Nochlin beat you to it. The point of the book, and this is what I found so fascinating about reading it 50 years after it was written and published, first as an essay, is it's a textbook example of an argument which when it was first made by Linda Nochlin seemed insurrectionary and challenging and difficult and perhaps preposterous,

but when we return to it 50 years later, seems merely like common sense. The answer as to why there are no great women artists is not because women aren't great at art, but because society is stacked in such a way to prevent women achieving status or greatness or at least it was at the time Linda Nochlin was writing and arguably not terribly arguably definitely still is so it's from the early it's from the dawn of feminist writing and thinking in the traditional 70s sense.

It's also been republished by Thames & Hudson with an additional essay, which Linda Knockley wrote 30 years after this one was published. And I'd just like to read a little bit. It probably sounds quite dry. It's not quite dry. It's tremendously funny and witheringly acerbic

in places as well. I just thought it was wonderful. Can I ask if anybody, has anybody here read this? I have quite a while ago. And it's, you're dead right, it is very funny because I think it was pitched as quite an academic book and yet it's very humorous. But it was extremely groundbreaking, as you say, to frame the title with the question. But it's really striking to me, particularly at the moment, how many books have come out very close together. You've Katie Hessel's book,

you know, The Story of Art Without Men. You have Jennifer Higgy writing about this. You have Frances Borzello, who's written about female portraiture. There's been loads of books that are literally books just going, we're not going to put any men in these books. And I think Linda kind of started

that conversation 50 years ago, at a time when, you know, people like Judy Chicago and all these other feminist artists would have been around. Yeah, it's a super book and I'm glad to see it's been reissued because it can be hard to find. It took me a while to track it down. I bought it second hand.

It was a terrifically sharp piece of writing and it was like it started a tsunami of engagements with it and, you know, it almost gave rise to the whole new world of of feminist art criticism as well as in encouraging new art practice amongst women and you know absolutely brilliant provocation you can see the bones of the provocation in it and yet you'd be hard-pressed now to find anybody who wouldn't go, yeah, sure, what she's saying is obviously true.

That doesn't mean it wasn't groundbreaking then, but fascinating how an idea can go from left field to centre field in that way. Anyway, I really, really enjoyed this. I would like to thank Becky Nolan for putting me onto this because it's relating to something I'm trying to write about at the moment and it was the perfect thing I needed to read. So thanks, Becky. I'm just going to read a bit from the book about Rosa Bonheur, the artist.

Linda Nochlin writes, yet at the same time that Rosa Bonheur frankly rejected the conventional feminine role of her times, she still was drawn into what Betty Friedan has called the quotes frilly blouse syndrome that innocuous version of the feminine protest which even today compels successful women psychiatrists or professors to adopt some ultra feminine item of clothing or insist on proving their prowess as pie bakers core times, times have changed, haven't they? Or maybe not so much. Despite the fact that she had early cropped her hair

and adopted men's clothes as her habitual attire, following the example of Georges Sand, whose rural romanticism exerted a powerful influence over her imagination, to her biographer, she insisted, and no doubt sincerely believed, that she did so only because of the specific demands of her profession. Indignantly denying rumours to the effect that she had run about the streets of Paris dressed as a boy in her youth, she proudly provided her biographer with a daguerreotype of herself at 16 years years dressed in perfectly conventional

feminine fashion except for her shorn head which she excused as a practical measure taken after the death of her mother who would have taken care of my curls she demanded and then and then this goes on yet at the same time Rosa Bonheur is forced to admit quote my trousers have been my great protectors many Many times I have congratulated myself for having dared to break with traditions which would have forced me to abstain from certain kinds of work due to the obligation to drag my skirts everywhere. Yet, the famous artist again feels obliged to qualify her honest admission with an ill-assumed femininity. Quinity quotes despite my

metamorphoses of costume there is not a daughter of eve who appreciates the niceties more than i do my brusque and even slightly unsociable nature has never prevented my heart from remaining completely feminine unquote and linda knockling goes on to observe, unsparingly, it is somewhat pathetic that this highly successful artist, unsparing of herself in the painstaking study of animal anatomy, diligently pursuing her bovine or equine subjects in the most unpleasant surroundings, industrially producing popular canvases throughout the course of a lengthy career, firm, assured, and incontrovertibly masculine in her style, winner of a first medal in the Paris

Salon, officer of the Legion of Honour, commander of the Order of Isabella the Catholic and the Order of Leopold of Belgium, friend of Queen Victoria, that this world-renowned artist should feel compelled late in life to justify and qualify her perfectly reasonable assumption of masculine ways for any reason whatsoever, and to feel compelled to attack her less modest trouser-wearing sisters at the same time, in order to satisfy the demands of her own conscience. For her conscience, despite her supportive father, her unconventional behaviour and the accolade of worldly success still condemned her for not being a quote-unquote feminine woman.

It's just a spectacularly enjoyable piece of almost bell-letcher, I think. A really, really thought-provoking, enjoyable and correct book by Linda Nochlin, Why Have There Been No Great Women Artists. John, what have you been reading this week? I have been reading a book that will almost certainly sound stranger in some ways than it is. It's a verse novel by P.J. Harvey, the singer-songwriter, musician, Polly Jean Harvey, called Or Lam. It's basically a coming

of age. The main character is a nine-year-old girl who lives in a village in a kind of version of Dorset. The book is written in verse, and each verse is produced in Dorset dialect. And also there's a translation on the facing page into more conventional English. One of the fun tricks is the more difficult the dialect, the lighter the type of the English translation. So there's a kind of a coding system that goes through. The poems also come with footnotes. A lot of the poetry is based on traditional Dorset folk rhymes. The story is very basically narrated by a lamb's eyeball. Orlam is the eyeball of an all-seeing lamb's eyeball. It's about Ira Abel, as I say, coming of age. She suffers an assault in a terrible place called the Red Shed

and restores herself by going to Gore Woods, which is the woods next to her house in this strange village. It's like a kind of dark almanac. It goes through each month of the year, the sort of ritual of each month, but also the kind of the landscape, the changing landscape, the changing animals. At the centre of the story, there's a sort of love affair.

She discovers what we can only assume is the ghost of a Civil War soldier who is rather brilliantly called Wyman Elvis. He's a kind of saviour figure, like a Christ-like figure, and love me tender is the burden of his kind of philosophy and wisdom. I know that all sounds very weird, but actually it's brilliantly done. Channeling, a bit of Ridley Walker, there are links I think with um max porter's lanny as well if i read you just a two little tiny bits and you can get give you the flavor of it this is on

under wellum is the village that she lives in which is which is good fun and i'll read it in my attempt at a dorset dialect uh don't at me if i get it wrong the old village in a hag ridden hollow all ways to it winding all roads to it narrow overlooked bog veiled in fog zirt over under cretin rank with seepings jays fluid slurry sweat and pus anus grease squirters jizz and blood you don't really need that translating it reminds me also there's a brilliant jonathan mead's collection of stories called uh filthy english there is that sense of extremely almost almost kind of uh the star cadders you know of stella gibbons a cold comfort far veryart. Very threatening. But the poetry, I think, is amazing. And it's often very beautiful.

Another quick one, just to give you a sense of the weird way that she somehow enables you to believe that there is a Civil War soldier who is also weirdly Elvis. This is called Lonesome Tonight. Gorbards, hark the greening of the earth. Curled ferns yet to uncurl. This is called Lonesome Tonight. This is from April, sort of Easter. In her satchel, Pepsi fizz, peanut and banana crusts, for this man her shepherd is, parts her bready lips of love. Are you Elvis? Are you God? Jesus sent to win my trust. Love me tender, are his words.

As I have loved you, so you must. Thriceice she draws her lips to kiss mouthing for his mouth in vain thrice her lonesome kisses miss my love will you come back again and then there's a footnote here saying obviously there's a quote from the bible as I've loved you so you must love one another but then is your heart filled with pain? Shall I come back again? Tell me, dear, are you lonesome tonight? Are you lonesome tonight? I mean, it's the kind of thing I love. It's as mad and strange and complex. You know, often this stuff is written, this strange, weird folk stuff is written by men. It's not often you get a woman doing it in this vein, in this dark, strange, seething, odd narrative. It's not a book you can read particularly quickly, but I've gone back to it.

I've read it over a series of months, and each time I go back to it, I get more out of it. So highly recommend it. Okay, so that's called Orlam, P.J. Harvey, published by Picador, and it's a really beautiful bit of bookmaking as well. It has a touch of the Pender's Fen. Do you remember Pender's Fen? It does indeed.

Sinead, you've met PJ Harvey, haven't you? I have. I used to be, I was a music journalist a long time ago and I went to London. I thought it was White Chalk. It was actually Let England Shake. And when I think about it and this book, I think there are definite parallels

between Let England Shake and the landscape and blood. And like even the bit you read, John, is very visceral and gutsy and bloody and all of those things. And I think that I remember reading nearly every album

she would go back and learn a new instrument. So I think she learned how to play like an auto harp. And then I remember reading, this is obviously predates this book, where she had gone to do a local course down the road think she learned how to play like an auto harp. And then I remember reading, this obviously predates this book where she had gone to do a local course down the road in Dorset to learn about

iambic pentameter because she wanted to write poetry. So I love the idea that you don't ever stop learning if you're a writer or a performer or a musician. There's always something, even if you're as brilliant as Polly is, there's always something new that you can learn. So yeah. Sinead, I too have met PJ Harvey about 30 years ago

where I drunkenly congratulated her on the set that she just played before she'd actually gone on stage. So I've never been able to listen to any of her work ever since without a terrible feeling of mortification about having made that slight gaffe. So really we should turn our attention back to Maeve Brennan now. The Springs of Affection, subtitled Stories of Dublin, is a collection of 21 stories, roughly divided into three sections.

The first section is autobiographical and features incidents from Maeve's childhood in suburban Dublin. The second explores the painful complexities of the marriage of Rose and Hubert Durden, who live in the same or a similar house and suburb that Maeve grew up in, as do the Baggarts, the family that are the subject of the final eight stories, including the long final story that gives the book its title, and which her friend and editor William Maxwell considered to be one of the greatest stories of the 20th century.

This was a view shared by the Canadian Nobel laureate and short story writer Alice Munro, and it was the enthusiastic praise from Munro, Edna O'Brien and Mavis Gallant, among others, that helped get the springs of affection, the kind of international attention that the two collections published in Mavis' lifetime, In and Out of Never Neverland in 1969, and Christmas Eve in 1974, failed to achieve. Neither of those books was even paperbacked or published in either Ireland or the UK. However, since the posthumous publication of The Springs of Affection in 1997, Mae Brennan's reputation has grown steadily and her stories are now regularly and favourably compared to those of Joyce, Chekhov and Corlette. In Ireland, in particular, she has won the

admiration of a new generation of women writers, who, in Anne Enright's phrase, see her as a casualty of old wars not yet won. In 2016, the Irish publisher Stinging Fly published both The Springs of Affection, with an introduction by Anne Wright, and The Long-Winded Lady, a collection of Maeve's New Yorker columns. And in February, next February, the London-based Indy Peninsula Press have announced they're publishing a new edition of The Springs of Affection with an introduction by the novelist Claire Louise Bennett. So the Brennan revival continues with today's podcast,

as we've got two writers here who are both passionate admirers of and advocates for Maeve's writing. David, let me start with you. Can you remember where you were or who you were when you first read the work of Maeve Brennan? I read a single story in two different anthologies and kind of moved on. One of them was Frank Delaney's anthology that he did for the Folio Society, and the other was the massive Colin Toy being one. And then a few years after that, a friend emailed me saying, God, I just read this amazing anthology and the best thing in it that I read was by Maeve Brennan. And that anthology was The Long Gaze Back. And he said, I've got to read more. I've got to read more.

And then we both kind of like went away and went, oh my God, I sort of didn't get to grips with this writer. So I went and I found the Counterpoint edition of The Springs of Affection. And it was just, you know, two stories in was just completely, I just couldn't believe that I hadn't immersed myself in this writer and then just read everything. So, yeah, it's thanks to this anonymous friend and Sinead,

you know, got me to this place where, you know, she's now a favourite writer. Sinead, similar question to you. Can you remember when you first, where you first encountered the stories in The Springs of Affection? Well, I didn't come to Maeve via the stories, first of all. And in fact, my first experience of Maeve was on, do you remember the old Guardian Saturday reviews, a full colour photograph as opposed to a kind of text? And they had this now iconic photograph of Brennan on the front, taken by Carl Bissinger, where she's sitting looking very elegant, smoking a cigarette, dressed in black. And I just looked at the photograph and thought, who is this? I'm very intrigued. And I read on and there was a large extract from Angela Burke's Homesick at the New Yorker.

It's the first kind of landmark work about Maeve. And I think a big act of reclamation, a big act that without that book, a lot of people wouldn't be talking about Maeve at all. So I read on and immediately thought I was in a book club at the time and I told everybody in it. And one of the women in the book club said, I have a book of hers. I have a small book called The Visitor do you want to borrow it? Which was a novella

which had been published in Ireland by New Ireland who published The Long Gaze back in 2000 so I just dived into it and thought okay I have to read more

and again as David said it was very hard it was only the US stuff available and in 2005 the Irish Independent a newspaper here did a series of 20

Irish novels one a week on a series of 20 Irish novels one a week on a Saturday for like five quid and they did in a horrifying design I might add but they did

The Springs of Affection so I was able to buy it for a fiver so that was when I so 2005 is when I first read the stories and again the first thing I thought

and I've had this many times with compiling anthologies where you go digging around and doing literary archaeology to find people I felt a wave of delight, but also anger as in why is nobody talking about her? Why has she been forgotten?

Where has this work gone? I can't believe she's as good as anybody that everybody talks about in terms of the Irish canon. And I was kind of furious because the stories were exceptional. This is how long these episodes take to percolate listeners. I can remember you saying several years ago, you know, well, I'd love to do Maeve Brennan. I had never heard of Maeve Brennan and I ordered up a copy of The Springs of Affection and read two or three of the stories

and immediately Sinead had the same response to you as you of just thinking, but wait a minute, this is preposterously, self-evidently first rate. How do I not know, you know, about this writer? This is so obviously good. Can I quote you? Anne Enright wrote the introduction to The Springs of Affection for The Stinging Fly. And she says in it, Mae Brennan didn't have to be a woman for her work to be forgotten, though it surely helped. And I think that sums it up quite a lot. Why have there been no great women artists, right? You were saying about Linda Nochlin earlier and it made me think of the Joanna Russ's book, How to Suppress Women's Writing.

And everything that you need to know about why Maeve Brennan wasn't read until she was recovered is in Joanna Ross's book, How to Suppress Women's Writing. Well, I would like to ask John Mitchinson, who we've been making this show for seven years, why, John Mitchinson, you are all over New Yorker writers. You are all over Maxwell. You knew Maxwell. Even when we were talking about Salinger, you and I both had a moment of thinking,

well, actually, you know what? Salinger probably must be pretty good because he was published in The New Yorker. That's how much we respect The New Yorker. And had you read Brennan before? Yes. What happened was when I went to see Maxwell in New York in 97, we were bringing out all his novels amazingly amazingly in the uk for the first time as he hadn't been published in in the uk um and as well as giving me a copy of his first book

they came like swallows in a which uh which he signed and also a copy of his correspondence with sylvia townsend warner which is a wonderful book he said there is a book coming out from a colleague a former colleague of mine in the New Yorker who died a few years ago called Maeve Brennan before you leave New York make sure you get a copy of uh of the book and that's what I bought I bought bought it then. I read, like you, some of the stories on the plane, thought they were incredible. And then came back to, it's just, no one I knew had heard of her. No one had, nobody, I guess, had remembered. And then I found one old friend of family friend. He was a person who'd lived in in New York and she said she used to write the best talk of the town pieces and they were all collected together in a book

and I remember trying to find the long-winded lady and I couldn't I mean I just I tried in a few bookshops so and then I forgot about her for a, long time after that and moved out of publishing. And it was that nagging thing every time I'd see a copy of it or somebody would mention it. And I remember when Stinging Fly brought out their edition, must go back to read the whole of Springs of Affection, must go back to find out more. springs of affection must go back to to find out more the thing is i i feel i feel that slight almost slight shame that this because these stories are so good these stories are so so good uh you say uh ireland i would put her up there in the in the front rank of of great short story writers of the 20th century without any doubt i mean i i think she occupied a kind of birth in the new yorker didn't she she know not dissimilar to molly panther downs who had a regular feature called letters from london in the new yorker which meant that she was tremendously well known

in the states and barely known in the in the uk and to some some extent Brennan has a similar situation. Her relationship with the New Yorker means she's known in New York but less well known at home. And yet that doesn't apply to people like Mary Lavin, Elizabeth Bowen, Frank O'Connor and the huge wealth

of Irish writers who published substantially with the New Yorker. I could never quite figure that out. I mean, over 40 stories Brennan published. That's a huge body of work. And the fact that, I mean, she started, I think, in 1949. She got a staff job at only 32. In 1949, the year Ireland became a republic as

well. But I think it's that thing. It's also like, I talk about Nora Holt, another writer in the Long Gaze back some time who left Ireland because her parents had died and spent a lot of time being shunted back and forth between the UK and Ireland. And Louise Kennedy, the great Irish writer, has written an introduction to another book about Holt

and said she kind of fell between two stools. And I think that happened a little with Maeve, the fact that, you know, it was enough for her to get the acclaim over there, but nobody in Ireland was talking about her. She wasn't, she didn't come back very often. She did in the later parts of her life. Came back to Roddy Doyle's family.

She's related to Roddy Doyle and Roddy Doyle reads Christmas Eve on the New Yorker Fiction Podcast about it. But yeah, it's surprising to me that the volume of work was there. In terms of Talk of the Town, and we may talk a bit about that in a moment, it's been called columns and magazine-y and it's quite throwaway to some people. But I think of her as one of the early Irish female essays for sure based on those columns. But she's also the first woman to write those columns. They were also unsigned, so a lot of people didn't know who she was. And even giving herself the kind of the subracaive like the long-winded lady suggests she's kind of this gossipy old bag as opposed to this woman

with this really sheer-eyed, kind of clear-eyed perception of walking around the city as a woman, as an immigrant, as a lone woman in that kind of psychogеographic flanews kind of way that, you know, that Vivian Gornick has done so well about New York, that Rebecca Solnit has done so well. And I think a lot of people talk about the fiction, but I always

like to talk about the nonfiction as well. But yeah, it's staggering. A huge body of work as a New Yorker. And I always come back to O'Connor and think, you know, he was writing about the short story and wrote a brilliant book about the short story about how it gives voice to the submerged voices, the people on the

hinterland, the people on the outside which you know a woman in 1940s America who wasn't married that would absolutely have been Brennan but he certainly didn't champion her and bring her into that inner circle of writers which always has disappointed me to this day. I wonder whether the New Yorker was such a nice place to work.

That's one of the things that I think about. I always think, well, you know, that excellence, that emphasis on excellence means, you know, collegiate. It either was or wasn't. It seems like it was quite you know a lot of drinking massive amount of I mean it it always feels to be very mad men that the whole when you when you you think about was like any and that sort of somebody I think that I was listening to something it was actually an interview

with with Angela Burke and she I think they even said Maeve was a bit like the Peggy Olsen character. Except that I have to say that everything you read about her was she was incredibly, she wrote brilliant, short, pungent book reviews. She was very witty. She was good at put-downs. She was a lot sassier than I think Peggy Olsen in Mad Men is. David?

Yeah, I was going to say Angela Burke does this kind of almost incidental flyover of the New Yorker culture, depression, alcoholism, suicide attempts, successful and unsuccessful. And you just go, this is the horror workplace, you know, really quite a terrifying place to work. terrifying place to work but she also says that you know if there was laughter coming from the water cooler chances are that it was coming from something that may brennan was saying in fact she was moved they she was moved in the office because she was such a disruptive influence on people trying to write it was too amusing um that um she there's who wouldn't want to be remembered like that? The most amusing person at New York. For O'Connor not championing her,

you know, William Sean took a punt at her and Maxwell was so good to her her whole life and always, always stayed in her corner and encouraged her work. And I think that might have been a bit more unusual at the time. He just saw something in the writing that maybe other people didn't necessarily and was a lifelong beacon in a way.

He sort of always lived for it. And wrote for obituary and wrote a beautiful introduction to the spring perfection. So because we're talking about short stories and essays, we can't, to the same extent, say what the book is about, what the through line is or the the story is because there isn't one doesn't work like that um but i wonder therefore if we could first hear

from you shenaid and then you david please read us a piece of prose of may brennan's prose which you feel communicates to listeners what is so special about how she put her sentences together? It's really hard to pick. There's so much about the work that is so minute. It's the specificity, whether she's writing about New York streets or she's writing about the house in Ranelagh. And I must tell you, actually, I have been in that house in Ranelagh, Maeve's house.

And the woman who owns the house is called Maeve and I just sent her a letter one day and asked if I could you know thinking she wouldn't get back to me and she did and said yes of course you can come and look around and it's been renovated a lot but it was heart stopping to see that the three steps that go down from the hall out to the

garden are still there and the bay window is still there and all the rose ceilings so all the out to the garden are still there and the bay window is still there and all the rose ceilings. So all the things from the stories are still there. So yeah, please give us a paragraph. Yes. This is from The Eldest Child. Mrs Baggett had lived in the house for 15 years,

ever since her marriage. Her three children had been born there, in the upstairs front bedroom, and she was glad of that, because her first child, her son, was dead. And it comforted her to think that she was still familiar with what had been his one glimpse of earth. He had died at three days. At the time he died, she said to herself that she would never get used to it. And what she meant by that was as long as she lived, she would never accept what had happened in the mechanical subdued way that the rest of them accepted it. They carried on, they talked and moved about her room as though when they tidied the baby away they had really tidied him away and it seemed to her that more than anything else they expressed the hope that

nothing more would be said about him. They behaved as though what had happened was finished, as though some ordinary event had taken place and come to an end in a natural way. There had not been an ordinary event, and it had not come to an end. It's pretty devastating. It was that final lie.

David, do you have something that you particularly like that you could share with us I was just you know there were some things you said you had nine pieces I was going to read a little bit there are some images and tropes that turn up again and again

there's mirrors and there's shadows and and there's shadows. And it's that, it's the watchfulness of the description is part of what's extraordinary about it. I can't think of another writer that does what she does. And you end up with, I mean, she's, you know, she's brilliant syntactically, but she's not scared of the short, simple sentence that just turns you inside out, basically. So here's a short passage that has mirrors and shadows in it from the story, The Shadow of Kindness.

She bent forward to the mirror again and carefully pushed a loose strand into the neat bun at the back of her head but as she moved something moved with her something much larger and even more silent than she was her shadow was on the wall to the side of the mirror, and it was following her. And now it was bending with her, bending toward her, and she stared at it. The light in her own bedroom gave her no shadow that she had ever noticed. She paused, and the shadow paused also, waiting for her as she waited for it. She looked closer, and at that moment, as it bent its head, she knew what she was looking at. That was her mother's shadow there on the wall. There was no mistake about it. That was her mother.

That was her mother. So good. I'm laughing only because that's so good. I'm laughing. Again, I'm picking up the thing I said earlier. How can something be that good and unknown, Sinead? You were saying about how angry and frustrating it is. Do you think there's something, though, Sinead,

that's changed in taste? I mean, I'm just... I'm struggling to think how at any time that wouldn't seem like very great, very original, very distinctive writing. And very unsentimental. You know, you talk about Connor, but, you know, he was, you know, there's plenty of sentimentality in his stories, but not a trace of it ever in these stories of Mae Brennan's.

I just wonder what's changed that makes us now able to see them more clearly? I think in Brennan's case. I think in Brendan's case I mean she's very, I think of her not just as an Irish writer but intrinsically a Dublin writer and I think of Joyce like that and I think of Beckett like that as well in that you know, not just because it's so specific to the addresses and the

spaces and the house and the garden. I think in a way there's a line where I think herself and Maxwell didn't, they were falling over the fact that she wouldn't read Elizabeth's Bowen. And she said that she had a fear of the bog and thunder variety of Irish writing that was voiced abroad in the name of Irish writing. And I think she desperately tried to stay out of that. So you don't while you do find priests, you don't find the traditional kind of priests you do in her stories. And, you know, there aren't farms.

There isn't the same kind of alcoholism. There isn't a lot of the kind of things that we saw in Irish stories. And, you know, there aren't farms, there isn't the same kind of alcoholism, there isn't a lot of the kind of things that we saw in Irish stories for a long time. So to me, I feel that they're very much aligned to Joyce. And I think I mentioned the kind of psychodruggery and the flanusing aspect of them, which is the New York stuff.

But for me, I think there's a, Joyce had the epiphanies and Brennan had what you call moments of recognition. And I think that those are the two things that draw people to both of those writers' works. And it is exactly as you say, there's something timeless. It doesn't matter if she's writing about, you know, 30s Dublin or 50s New York.

It doesn't feel like that to me. It doesn't feel old. It feels very, very fresh because what she's talking about is the interiority of people's lives, of families, of family dramas, of homes. And even when she's writing, and it's possibly one of the reasons the work doesn't often get picked up, where she's writing about sofas or carpets and those kind of like, you know, domestic MacGuffins, because that's what they are talking about. You know, a house, a room that has, one has lino and one has carpet, one is heated by gas. It's about those kind of brutal hierarchies that go on in families. The Durden's been a case in point, a kind of very

toxic relationship and family. So I think the fact that she's able to burrow into those things that never go away, the dysfunctional horribleness of breaking down relationships, of families, of feeling trapped, of feeling your life didn't turn out the way you wanted it to. All those things are timeless.

And I think that's what she does so well. It doesn't matter that they're in a small house in Dublin or, you know, in New York that's long gone. New York that she was writing herself was falling down and changing all the time when she was living there. It doesn't matter. The prose and the ideas and the themes are completely timeless. Yeah, I was just thinking about, you know, William Maxwell compared her to Geniav. Didn't compare her to an American writer or an Irish writer. He compared her to one of the greatest writers in world literature.

And normally when somebody does that, you hear comparisons of short story writers to Chekhov all the time, and you just think a person just needs to go and stand in the corner and be ashamed of themselves because it's almost certainly not true. But cool your head. In the case of Maeve Brennan, you can completely see that. You know, the great Russian writers were immensely important to the development of modern Irish literature.

And Frank O'Connor himself, Sean O'Fallon, were both enormous admirers of Chekhov and Tegenev, but not as good though. Much of the time with Brennan, you go, yeah, okay, Tegenev, you get that. It's the lightness and the density, the felicity, the terrific ear, the universalizing of the specific. It's all there. Sinead? I was also, another person who was a friend of hers and admirer was Edward Albee, the playwright,

who dedicated a play to her, but also he said it's only right to mention her in the company of Chekhov and Flaubert. I mean, again, I think it's very key that she wasn't compared to, you know, to Somerville and Ross or to Irish writers who came before her. She was compared to the greats, international greats.

And I think that's right. All men, interestingly, as well. I would like to just read you the end of the story, The Day We Got Our Own Back, which is clearly, like those early Dublin stories, very autobiographical, based on her own childhood. like those early Dublin stories, very autobiographical, based on her own childhood. And as we're speaking of great writers, I'm going to mention Ray Davis of the Kinks,

who always says that what he likes to do in a song that really works is save something up till the last line of the song. And the last line is where it hits. So the whole song is waiting for you, the listener, to arrive at the last line is where it hits so the whole song is waiting for you the listener to arrive at the last line and the last line is what will recast the previous three minutes that you've heard that's one of Ray's techniques and I when I read this story I thought oh right I recognize that in this Maeve Brennan story all you really need to know is that the house in which she and her family are living has been raided, that a tremendous mess has been caused, and that a man has stuck his head up their chimney and come down with a face full of soot.

Here's the end of the story. When they had gone, my mother gazed about her at all the work they had made. It would be a long time before she had the house neat again. We all trailed down into the kitchen and surveyed the mess there. This time there was no question of making tea because the tea was on the floor along with the flour and the sugar we had seldom heard my mother's voice raised in laughter she began to tremble and to smile. Oh, she cried, to see the look on his face when he came back out of the chimney. My little sister and I began to jump around, cackling. Oh, cried my mother, what warned me not to have the chimney cleaned? Oh, thanks be to God I forgot to have the chimney cleaned. And with us chattering, a delighted, incredulous accompaniment,

she laughed as though her heart might break. There it all is, packed into the last three or four words. It's just spectacular, really. I find these... You know, she's an example of a writer, John, that I find moving to read, sometimes because there's a kind of drift to sentiment, but often not.

It's just the kind of bravery and the precision of the thing. I agree. The artistry of it the artistry is exactly what I was going to say so many of these stories I'm reading them and I'm thinking you don't often get it actually I find, that you think this is this is structured and layered

in such a careful and intelligent way that I'm going to have to read the story again almost immediately to get the full resonance. She has this extraordinary ability to say simple things that you might not pay attention to. And maybe this is part of the problem. Maybe people read these stories too quickly and don't. I just to you know i was all having a go i just wanted to read the beginning of the last story in the hubert last story chronologically in the hubert and rose durden sequence it's called the drowned man and there's a shock from the first sentence because you realize that Rose Rose's died after his wife died Mr Durden was very anxious to get into her bedroom to have a look round on his

own with the door closed and with no one there to watch him and wonder how he was feeling it was not anxiety or grief or any sensation, not longing or yearning or anything like that that drew him into the room, but curiosity. He wanted to look at it, that room that had hardly existed for him while she was alive, that he'd seldom entered, although he had occasionally stood in the doorway or at least paused in the doorway to call something into her on his way out of the house. or at least paused in the doorway to call something into her on his way out of the house. The room now seemed mysterious to him, the way an empty house will suddenly seem mysterious and even frightening to children who never noticed it when it was occupied, and the way a bird's nest, lying empty on the ground after a summer storm,

will crowd the mind with thoughts that have nothing to do with wings and food and warmth and song thoughts of vacancy and thoughts of winter and of winds that are too violent and nights and where no one cares to walk. The little nest, cast to the ground, contains an emptiness that is too big for us to understand. We cannot imagine how it must feel. It is a limitless emptiness and beyond us, although we would like to be able to understand it and examine it from all angles and mark its limits and bring it under control and then put it away in a comfortable place and forget about it. But the nest is nothing, no more than a scrap. The empty nest is only a brazen image of the fear that is so commonplace that we cannot merely walk through it every day pretending we do not notice it, place, that we cannot merely walk through it every day pretending we do not notice it,

but can walk through it and pretend it is not there. As long as the nest is there empty, we look into it, but then it is gone, and we think no more about it. As long as the door of his wife's bedroom, in which she had died, remained closed and the room behind it empty, Mr. Durden thought of nothing else. They're so poisonous, those stories. Sinead, I've got a question for you about this. So she writes about the Durdens and the Baggots. So she writes about the Durdens and the Baggots. She doesn't write the stories in chronological order. She keeps circling round, much like my, you know,

my heroine, Gwendolyn Riley. She keeps returning to the same territory to explore how she feels about it at intervals. Are the Durden and Bagot stories episodic novels or are they discrete stories? I actually, particularly Rose's story, I think when Rose appears in these handful of stories, I think Brennan tells us enough about her. There's a novel's worth.

I feel I've got a novel about Rose's life out of reading those handful of stories. And I think novel's worth. I feel I've got a novel about Rose's life out of reading those handful of stories. And I think it's that sort of these eddies that she goes around in over and over again. Even, you know,

the Durdens, they're kind of almost, the horribleness, the horror they have of each other, there's a moment where I think at one point there's a lot of standing at doors,

as David says, where he's standing in a doorway at some point and he said, you know, he just liked her so much he smiled. And there's a lot of standing at doors as David says where he's standing in a doorway at some point and he said you know he just liked her so much he smiled and there's so many little toxic bombs within the stories and I think that by going back all the time and

circling and revising Brennan is making us look it's sort of it's that you can't look away it's so horrible it's so painful but again you're talking about a lot of the stories are set in an Ireland which would have been a very painful and repressive place. There wouldn't have been divorce. There would have been a very set of strict

codes of morality after McQuaid and the era of De Valera. And it was De Valera who sent her father to America to be the first Irish ambassador anyway. So a very restrained and horrifying time that the house would have been. At one point it talks about Hubert's job. He works in a shop in Graff

Street in Dublin, but that's the only reference to him going outside. The whole thing, all of those stories are so claustrophobic, it's very much set within those four walls of the home, deliberately so. You're not meant to leave, Brennan doesn't want us to leave, she wants us to stay, to look around, to eavesdrop and absorb the horror

of these dysfunctional people and the hatred that they have for each other. So that's why that's why we don't get to leave. And that's why there are all these returns and echoes all the way through. And it's to remind you all the time there's no escape from the life these people have chosen. You were saying about visiting the house earlier. You were saying about visiting the house. You know, the idea of her as a writer of the domestic environment, the horror that can be contained in the same space that is both a place of security and, you know, domestic stability is also a place of torture and trauma. Yeah, it's like the unheimlich, you know, the house. It can be a horror house in a horror film

or it can be a place of bliss and, you know, safety. But I think to me, the fact it's the quietness of the stories. They're not bombastic. They weren't dealing with the same kind of things that we were used to seeing in Irish writing, the kind of the tropes and themes that we get kind of along the way with Irish writing. But for me, I think it's that quietness.

It's that, again, to go back to that term, the moments of recognition. I think she saw things in people, in situations, in cultures that lots of other writers, Irish otherwise, just don't pick up on and could never hope to encapsulate and grab into their writing. And I think that's one of the reasons that she stands out. And again, I think there's a lot of love for me because she is the embodiment of the forgotten Irish

writer and the forgotten Irish female writer as we said at the start of the programme to be so good and to be so overlooked is almost criminal I would like to just lob in an adjective used by William Maxwell and ask each of you what you think he meant by this.

He called them ferocious stories. David, this gives the other two a chance to contemplate their answers. So, David, I'm waffling to give you a moment to think. Maxwell gives them ferocious stories. What does he mean? So I think it's ferocious in a number of ways. I mean, the clarity of vision of the disappointments of relationships, you know, sibling relationships,

family relationships that are so important you can't escape from them. The relationships that you choose with partners, the failings, the everyday failings of small cruelties, and that's all over those stories. But also I think this is maybe one of the reasons why they were difficult to take root in Ireland until relatively recently, is that it is a fairly ferociousrophobia and loss and disappointment and a lack of life and all of those things from 20s, 30s Dublin and Ireland generally. And she's so dispassionate about that.

She doesn't give you anywhere to look. It's straight at you. Sinead, ferocity. Yeah, I agree with that. Ferocious. What does Maxwell mean there? I think because they're ferocious in that they're almost unbearable.

They're quite painful to read. They make you flinch reading them. You almost feel yourself flayed. You feel that smarting sense of pain when you're reading the story. You feel very intrusive reading the stories and that I often feel like, you know, you're standing in those roundelay rooms and it's not because I've seen them.

We've all got a picture of what they look like. But I almost feel like I'm standing in the room listening to somebody's argument or something very private that shouldn't be revealed. And also, I think there was a mythology held up about what was going on in Irish family homes and every marriage was happy. Everybody was fine. Everything was wonderful. And the church were at the head of this, encouraging all this, you know, canubial bliss. It's amazing. And of course, it wasn't for a lot of people, you know, and usually they had one son and he was now gone. And all they were left with after these years of marriages is that they don't really like each other. And they're not very fond of each other. And that would then in turn impacts on their own

individual happiness and life. So this kind of being, this umbilical collection they have together is very poisonous. So I think the ferocity for me is that, again, Maeve didn't fear saying these things because I think holding up a mirror to that kind of, you know, buckling, puncturing the idea of what the Irish happy marriage was and what goes on again, as we know the term behind closed doors, you didn't talk about that in Ireland. And there is the good room in the house, that so-called good room you'd bring the priest to. And I think she wasn't afraid to sort of call out

that it isn't always wonderful, it isn't always happy. And the ferocity is, for me, is that I find them deeply uncomfortable to read sometimes because they're too real and they're too brutal. But they feel like relationships you know about. You know this happens in relationships now, but we didn't know that those things happened in Ireland in marriages

because we just didn't see them in literature. John, for me, there's a kind of Riesian... The ferocity is the Riesian reckless commitment to telling the truth. You know, I detect that in Brennan as well. I don't know what you feel about the kind of ferocious element of that. Yeah, the incredible title story, Springs of Affection, which is almost a novella in itself, which is sort of narrated by Min,

the Martin Baggett's sister, who's like, it's almost Dickensian, the way she's kind of lording over the fact that she's got all the furniture and she's got his ring she's wearing his ring and she's but she remembers that it's one of the most heartbreaking things I've ever read is she she remembers talking to him before he dies Martin dies and she says there was nothing to delia and he says he reminds the sister that she'd sent the other sister to an asylum she says claire was mad martin says there was nothing to delia that's a weight off my mind i know where i am now i always knew where i was with her even though i didn't know what she was and now i still don't know what she was. And now I still don't know what she was. And God knows I don't know where I am without her.

But there was nothing to her. That fact that he would agree, oh, my God, that is so bleak. You know, at the end of his life, there was nothing to my wife. And we know. We've had most of the book telling just what she was trying to do with her children and her garden and her animals and her her family and where she came from and who she was it's just oof yeah i mean that it that's ferocious yeah david you were saying earlier about her as a writer about new york as well that she has a kind of outsider's view of New York City, which is invaluable, right?

She doesn't take Central Park for granted. I always think about New York writers. They always go, oh, Central Park, right? But she can see it from some other perspective. It reminded me of two filmmakers. One, Jonas Mikas, and his kind of portraits of New York, which are so joyful usually. And then Chantal Ackerman's wonderful film, Home in New York, where she's, you know, there's this wonderful long, long shots of the streets of New York in a fairly shabby state in those days. of the streets of New York in a fairly shabby state in those days.

And then her ringing her mum at home and that connection between home and New York, home being Belgium. That external look at New York really shows you the city. And when somebody is acute and, you know, actually, like I come back to that word watchful, there's something quiet and determined in her apprehension of the city and its people. And a sympathy that is not there. She's not like an uptown person looking down on people. She's looking at the same level as those people.

With their hurt, their confusion, their lostness, their self-exile. And she captures all of that. And she does it in the Long-Winded Lady. These miniatures are so terrific. It's an immense skill to do that. And Maxwell said that she was a big fan of the 18th century spectator essayists, particularly Hazlitt.

And you can see that because, you know, that is the very highest art of the essay. If you can aspire to be as good as Hazlitt, and she does and she pulls it off, but in these very, very small ways. Could you give us an example of that? Is there a piece you could read us that demonstrates that? Yes. Let me know when you're ready, David.

OK, so this is a New York interior from a piece called Howard's Apartment. The rain is falling fast and as black as ever. The windows of the front apartment, where the party is, must be streaming with rain, frothing almost, and 10th Street must be streaming too, and frothing black. But a cocktail party has to expand if it can, and now the people in front have opened their door and left it open. What a lot of noise they are making with glasses and bottles and music and voices. They must have hundreds of

people in there. Once in a while, over the low roar of conversation, there is a loud laugh, and once in a while, a little shriek. Outside, all the noise in the world is being hammered into the earth by the rain. And inside, all the noise there is, is effervescing at the cocktail party. Only in this room, there is stillness. And the stillness has gone tense. The room is waiting for something to happen. I could light the fire, but my friend forgot to leave me any logs. I could turn on a lamp, but friend forgot to leave me any logs. I could turn on a lamp, but there is no animal feeling in electricity. I stand up again and walk over to the phonograph and switch it on without changing the record that I played this morning.

The music strengthens and moves about, catching the pictures, the books, and the discoloured white marble mantelpiece as firelight might have done. Now the place is no longer a cave, but a room with walls that listen in peace. I hear the music, and I watch the voice. I can see it. It is a voice to follow with your mind's eye. La brave, Settel. There is no other. Billie Holiday is singing. Yeah, I just... John just... Yeah, brilliant.

I mean, what can you say? Thank you so much. And with that, we must sadly leave the suburbs of Dublin. Huge thanks to Sinead and David for acting as our guides through Maeve Brennan's world, to Nicky Birch for making us sound like we're all sitting around a table in Beaulies, and to Unbound for the walnut furniture. You can download all 173 previous episodes,

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Your generosity helps us to do that. All patrons get to hear backlisted episodes early. And for less than the price of an L of velvet cloth from Ramsey's, lot listeners get two extra lot listed a month. Our very own suburban house where we three set fires, gaze at the garden and eat cake while regaling one another with tales drawn from the books, films and music we've enjoyed

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Let us turn to our guests. David Hayden, is there anything you wish to say about Maeve Brennan or the Springs of Affection that we have not had time to cover that you would like to get on the record now? That everybody should just go out and buy it on trust and read it immediately

It'll be the best thing you do this year. He's right listeners he's right. Sinead same question to you. What would you like to tell us about Maeve Brennan or The Springs of Affection or anything, any of her writing that you feel we might not have covered today

so far? I don't think you can say this about a lot of writers but I think you'll be utterly changed by the work of Maeve Brennan if you read it. You won't be the same person again having read her work. And I can't stress that enough. So there's only two short story collections, a novella and a brilliant collection of columns that I consider to be essays.

So read them all. But yeah, you'll never be the same after reading her. That's what I want to say. John, do you want to be the same? I don't. She sent a little note to William Maxwell. She said, dear William, it is all a fairy tale. Best love, Maeve.

And then she says, these are our lives. Lives in italics. I can't get over it. These are our lives. These are our lives. Can't get over it these are our lives these are our lives can't get over it thanks so much David and Sinead

that's been one of the most moving episodes of this thing we've ever done thank you so much we really really appreciate your time and your enthusiasm and your commitment I mean I feel like Maeve Brennan is you know there's lots of authors who fit the backlisted definition but in a sense she is the the thing right she is so good

so unknown so deserving of david as you said please just go and buy the work and read the work and shanae as you said you won't be the same after that so amazing anyway. Thanks very much everybody we'll see you next time and David and Sinead thanks so much. See you next time. Bye bye. Bye bye. © BF-WATCH TV 2021