Maeve Brennan and James Joyce

Abstract

As a New York writer, Maeve Brennan forges a relationship with Ireland as home that speaks to the separation and imaginative return so strongly associated with James Joyce while at the same time putting a careful distance between her work and Joyce’s formidable influence. Drawing on archival material at the University of Delaware and the New York Public Library, which amplifies our understanding of some of the intentions and motivations in Brennan’s work, this essay examines how Brennan transforms Joycean modes and motifs in her careful mapping and writing of New York in her essays for The New Yorker. Written under the pseudonym “The Long-Winded Lady”, Brennan’s essays for the magazine break imaginative ground in the city that she lived in for most of her life and expand outwards from the self-contained domestic world of Cherryfield Avenue so central to her Dublin stories. The main concern here is with Brennan’s adaptation of Joycean motifs and the different ways in which she positions herself in a direct line of inheritance to Joyce as she negotiates her position as a transatlantic writer in the middle of the twentieth century.

Keywords:

• James Joyce
• Maeve Brennan
• influence
• transatlantic literature
• The New Yorker

Acknowledgements

I would like to thank the literary estate of Maeve Brennan (represented by Massie & McQuilkin) for kind permission to reproduce material from the Maeve Brennan Papers in the Special Collections at the University of Delaware and for permission to cite from Brennan’s correspondence with Howard Moss held in the Berg Collection of the New York Public Library.

Notes

1. MS243 Maeve Brennan Papers. Series II, Box 5, Folder 29, 4.

2. Bourke, Maeve Brennan: Homesick at the New Yorker, 100.

3. Brennan, “Just a Pair of Show-offs,” 255.

4. Brennan, “A Snowy Night on West Forty-ninth Street,” 246.

5. Reynolds, “Introduction,” 1.

6. Carpentier, “Introduction,” 1.

7. Eliot, “Ulysses, Order, and Myth,” 175.

8. Attridge, “Irish Writing after Joyce,” viii.

9. For an extended discussion of Brennan and exile see my article “No Place is Home, It is as It should be,” 95–111.

10. Joyce, “A Little Cloud,” 68–9.

11. Reynolds, “Introduction,” 3.

12. MS243 Maeve Brennan Papers. Series II. Box 5, Folder 30.

13. Brennan, “The Joker,” 54.

14. Ibid., 56.

15. Attridge, “Irish Writing after Joyce,” xi.

16. Brennan, “The Joker,” 56.

17. Ibid., 56–7.

18. MS243 Maeve Brennan Papers. Series II. Box 5, Folder, 30, 9.

19. Brennan, “The Joker,” 57.

20. For a detailed discussion of Donn Byrne see Stubbs, American Literature and Irish Culture, 78–83.

21. Brennan, “The Joker,” 62.

22. Jackson, “Come Dance with Me in Ireland,” 225.

23. MS243 Maeve Brennan Papers. Series II. Box 5, Folder 29.

24. MS243 Maeve Brennan Papers. Series II. Box 5, Folder 29, 2.

25. Brennan, “The Joker,” 61.

26. Walter, Outsiders Inside, 54.

27. Attridge, “Irish Writing after Joyce,” x.

28. MS243 Maeve Brennan Papers. Series II. Box 5, Folder 29, 3–4.

29. Howard Moss Papers, Berg Collection, New York Public Library. Maeve Brennan Folder, Item 12.

30. Attridge, “Irish Writing after Joyce,” ix.

31. Brennan, Author’s Note, 3.

32. Elkin, Flâneuse: Women Walk the City, 22–3.

33. Remnick, Wonderful Town, xi.

34. Brennan, Author’s Note, 1.

35. MS243 Maeve Brennan Papers. Series III. Folder 60–3.

36. MS243 Maeve Brennan Papers, Series III.5.

37. Brennan, Author’s Note, 2.

38. Lopate, Writing New York, xvii.

39. Brennan, “The Ailanthus, Our Back-yard Tree,” 142.

40. Ellmann, James Joyce, 292.

41. Ibid., 28.

42. Rogan, “Moments of Recognition,” 62.

43. Brennan, “A Busload of Scolds,” 105.

44. Brennan, “The Name of Minnie Smith,” 205.

45. Brennan, “The Traveler,” 119.