Chapter 1: What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
Hi, it's John here. Hello, it's Andy. And welcome to one of the archive episodes of Backlisted from the far distant... Well, it's not that distant past this one, is it, Johnny?
It's 2022 and it is the episode dedicated to the springs of affection by Maeve Brennan. an Irish writer who spent most of her working life in America. She was a staff writer for the New Yorker and wrote a very lauded column on the New Yorker called The Long-Winded Lady. Although it wasn't signed Maeve Brennan, it was a column that people loved and
In this podcast that you're about to hear, we're joined by two guests, the novelist and memoirist Sinead Gleeson, author of Constellations and Hagstone, and David Hayden, who is fated as a brilliant contemporary short story writer. Both of them huge Mae Perrin fans. We talk about the springs of affection, but we also do talk about the columns as well, the nonfiction columns as well.
And you get to hear Andy talking about a very influential essay by Linda Nochlin from the 1970s, I think. I believe so, yes. Called Why Are There No Women Artists? And I do my best Dorset accent to extol the virtues of the little regarded at the time novel by P.J.
Chapter 2: Who was Maeve Brennan and why is she significant?
Harvey, the great Polly Harvey, called Orlam. novel that I had completely forgotten until I re-listened to the episode. It's narrated by a lamb's eyeball.
Well, there. These aren't spoilers. These are incentives to keep listening. I don't remember anything about most of what John said. And that's good because if I did have, as we know, if we could all remember anything, we wouldn't do anything. We'd be too mortified to continue.
Also, let's just be honest. Maeve Brennan, if you were going to construct a backlisted artist, Maeve Brennan... I mean, brilliant short story writer compared not just to other Irish short story writers, although, you know, given that that's Frank O'Connor and James Joyce and John McGahan, that wouldn't be a bad thing. But she's compared by, you know, Mavis Gallant and other... Edna O'Brien.
She's compared to... Chekhov and Colette, the very greatest short story writers in the genre. But when she died in 1997, she was so unknown in Ireland that she didn't even get an obituary. So she's a writer of the highest quality Stretches from New York to Ireland. In this collection of stories, it's all set in the suburbs of Dufflin.
She died in obscurity. And is good. And she loved a drink. And therefore fulfills all the criteria of a backlisted subject. They're poor agents, everyone. They're poor agents. Right, quickly, let me talk about what we've got coming up on the Patreon.
If you come over to our Patreon at patreon.com forward slash backlisted, you will find all manner of treats, written treats, listening treats, and a couple in particular we want to flag up with you now. you can sign up for Posh Bingo, which is our appropriation of Julian Barnes's name for the Booker Prize.
We will be discussing Profit Song by Paul Lynch, which won the Booker Prize for Fiction in 2023. You can contribute to that show via the Patreon and we'll read out your messages and you get to hear the three of us chewing the fat about that particular novel.
And we've also got coming up in our already hit series, Backlisted Readers, where we ask our regular listeners to bring a book to the table and we talk about it. We've just posted one about three men in a boat, which was great fun. And coming up soon to continue the Irish Dublin connection from Maeve Brennan, we have a discussion of... Flan O'Brien's at Swim2Birds.
And that's available only behind the Patreon. One of the things that John and I are really enjoying about this season of Batlisted is that Nicky is now having to do much more reading than either of us. In a dramatic reversal of the previous few years. So anyway, we hope you enjoy this episode that's coming up now about Maeve Brennan, Springs of Affection.
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Chapter 3: What themes are explored in 'The Springs of Affection'?
It's that idea that it's the end of the line, right?
Not just beautiful, but factually accurate as well.
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 went on said, ah, yes, you've come from London. It's like, well, Norwich is the place where dreams come to die. So, you know, all my kids' jaws was just 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.
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 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.
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Chapter 4: How did Maeve Brennan's work gain international recognition?
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, 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 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, has anybody here read this?
I have quite a while ago. And 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 Burzello, 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 secondhand.
It's a terrifically sharp piece of writing and it was like it started a tsunami of engagements with it and it almost gave rise to the whole new world of feminist art criticism as well as encouraging new art practice amongst women. Absolutely brilliant provocation.
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Chapter 5: What influences shaped Maeve Brennan's writing style?
It reminds me also, there's a brilliant Jonathan Mead's collection of stories called Filthy English. There is that sense of extremely, almost, almost kind of the star cadders of Stella Gibbons' Cold Comfort Fart. Very, very threatening. But the poetry is, 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 enables, somehow enables you to believe that there is a Civil War soldier who is also weirdly Elvis. This is called Lonesome Tonight. Gorwoods, hark the greening of the earth. Curled ferns yet to uncurl. Hark the singing of the birds. Girl yearns yet to ungirl.
Beach and Olla, Woken Birch, Biddle, Bullhead, Squirrel's Dray, Willow Aspen, Elder Larch, Soldier King on Maundy Day. 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.
Thrice 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 several... I mean, 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 recommended. Okay, so that's called Or Lam, PJ 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. All of that. 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 even the bit you read, John, is very visceral and gutsy and bloody and all of those things.
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Chapter 6: How do the guests relate to Maeve Brennan's stories?
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 at 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 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.
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Chapter 7: What insights do the guests share about Brennan's character development?
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. The thing is, I feel that almost slight shame because these stories are so good. These stories are so, so good. You say Ireland, I would put her up there in the front rank of great short story writers of the 20th century without any doubt.
She occupied a kind of birth in the New Yorker, didn't she, Sinead? Not dissimilar to Molly Panter 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 U.K., And to 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 Lavan, 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 she had 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 sometimes 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 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 soubriquet of like the long-winded lady suggests she's kind of this gossipy old bag as opposed to this woman with this really sheer, 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 psychodeographic flaneuse kind of way that, you know, that Vivian Gornick has done so well about New York, that Rebecca Solnit's done so well.
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Chapter 8: What is the lasting impact of Maeve Brennan's work on literature?
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 amounts.
I mean, it always feels to be very madmen, the whole when you drink.
you think about was like 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 in except that I have to say that everything you read about it was she was incredibly she broke brilliant short pungent book reviews and She was very witty.
She was good at put downs. She was sort of, 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.
But she also says that if there was laughter coming from the water cooler, chances are that it was coming from something that Mae Brennan was saying. In fact, she was moved. She was moved in the office because she was such a disruptive influence on people trying to write. She was too amusing. Who wouldn't want to be remembered like that?
The most amusing person at New York.
Wow. 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.
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