“It was shameful thing to be a waif, but it was also mysterious. There was no accounting for it or defining it, and over and over again she was drawn back to her original idea—that waifs were simply people who had been squeezed off the train because there was no room for them. They had lost their tickets. Some of them never had owned a ticket. Perhaps their parents had failed to equip them with a ticket. Poor things, they were stranded. During ordinary times of the year, they could hide their plight. But at Christmas, when the train drew up for that hour of recollection and revelation, how the waifs stood out, burning in their solitude. Every Christmas Day (said Isobel to herself, smiling whimsically) was a station on the journey of life….She, Isobel, looked them all over and decided which ones to invite into her own lighted carriage. She liked to think that she occupied a first-class carriage—their red-brick house in Herbert’s Retreat, solid, charming, waxed and polished, well heated, filled with flowers, stocked with glass and silver and clean towels.”—Maeve Brennan, from “The Joker,” in The Rose Garden: Short Stories (2000)
In Isobel’s formulation, waifs simply don’t fit in anywhere. The same might be said for longtime New Yorker contributor Maeve Brennan (1917-1993), who created a slim but choice body of short stories and “Talk of the Town” pieces but died in relative obscurity.
I first came across Brennan in her posthumous short-story collection set in her native Dublin, Springs of Affection (1997). To my knowledge, Brennan—who came to the U.S. when her father was appointed first Irish ambassador to the U.S.—published two Christmas stories. “Christmas Eve,” in Springs of Affection, is written through the eyes of a child and the mother who wants to protect her from life’s sadness. It’s a lovely piece whose nostalgia serves as slim but necessary gauze covering deep, ordinary family unhappiness.
“The Joker,” which appeared in the December 27, 1952 issue of The New Yorker, is different in tone. “Herbert’s Retreat” was inspired by Sneden’s Landing, a Rockland County, N.Y. community that, over the years, has become a kind of arts enclave, with such famous residents as Gerald and Sara Murphy (the Riviera expatriates who served as the models for Dick and Nicole Diver in F. Scott Fitzgerald’s Tender Is the Night), Angelina Jolie, and Al Pacino.
Already, by the end of the paragraph quoted above, Brennan telegraphs that Isobel fancies herself a kind of Lady Bountiful. Instead of three magi, it’s three “waifs” who come to her cottage.
In his warm and perceptive appreciation of his colleague prefacing Springs of Affection, New Yorker fiction editor (and short-story writer) William Maxwell finds some of Brennan’s Herbert’s Retreat stories to be “satirical in tone, and…heavy-handed.” Well, “The Joker” is satirical, but I prefer “tough-minded” to “heavy-handed” in describing its impact.
Its sentences, dense with detail, summon a world of gentility—even if, as in this case, it results more from a husband’s high corporate position rather than earlier generations' inherited wealth—and unconscious condescension: “The tablecloth was of stiff, icy white damask, and the centerpiece—of holly and ivy and full-blown blood-red roses—bloomed and flamed and cast a hundred small shadows trembling among the crystal and the silver.”
According to recollections by Brennan’s niece, Yvonne Jerrold, the writer did not conform to the conservative mores expected of women in deValera-era Ireland. Part of her Catholic education, however, must have left a bone-deep impression, for Brennan’s portrait of Isobel shows a modern, female Pharisee, who fulfills the letter but not the spirit of the religious law: “She felt it was only fair that she should help those less fortunate than herself, though there was a point where she drew the line. She never gave money casually on the street, and her maids had strict orders to shut the door to beggars. ‘There are places where these people can apply for help,’ she said.”
These people…places they could apply for help…Isobel would be horrified by the suggestion, but you can hear an echo of Ebenezer Scrooge’s inquiry about whether the workhouses and the Poor Law weren’t still in effect. It turns out that she’s also somewhat like Mrs. Jellyby from Dickens' Bleak House: i.e., someone all for humanity in the abstract, but not in the nearby, smelly, needy flesh.
Of the three “waifs,” Vincent Lace—Irish would-be poet, failed academic, confirmed drunk—is the most finely wrought. You sense from his pretensions (even the surname suggests insubstantiality and “lace-curtain Irish”) that this was a type Brennan knew all too well.
The fact is that Isobel really does not care for the waifs she’s invited. And when a fourth unexpected visitor that she treats as another waif turns out to be “the joker” of the title, Isobel discovers that those she invited return her ill opinion.
It’s bad enough that Isobel’s sense of philanthropy springs from misplaced pride—an instinct to guard against especially in this season. But she also exhibits either little compassion for the forces that brought “the waifs” to their present state, or appreciation for what makes them human beings in the first place.
I’m not sure why this story is not anthologized more. Even the man Brennan eventually wed, in a disastrous misalliance, St. Clair McKelway, had a “Talk of the Town” casual reprinted in Christmas at the New Yorker. Brennan’s tale deserves to be read, and the fine career and warm personality that preceded her own waif-like ending (she died homeless and destitute after a number of years of alcoholism and mental illness) deserve to be remembered.
In Isobel’s formulation, waifs simply don’t fit in anywhere. The same might be said for longtime New Yorker contributor Maeve Brennan (1917-1993), who created a slim but choice body of short stories and “Talk of the Town” pieces but died in relative obscurity.
I first came across Brennan in her posthumous short-story collection set in her native Dublin, Springs of Affection (1997). To my knowledge, Brennan—who came to the U.S. when her father was appointed first Irish ambassador to the U.S.—published two Christmas stories. “Christmas Eve,” in Springs of Affection, is written through the eyes of a child and the mother who wants to protect her from life’s sadness. It’s a lovely piece whose nostalgia serves as slim but necessary gauze covering deep, ordinary family unhappiness.
“The Joker,” which appeared in the December 27, 1952 issue of The New Yorker, is different in tone. “Herbert’s Retreat” was inspired by Sneden’s Landing, a Rockland County, N.Y. community that, over the years, has become a kind of arts enclave, with such famous residents as Gerald and Sara Murphy (the Riviera expatriates who served as the models for Dick and Nicole Diver in F. Scott Fitzgerald’s Tender Is the Night), Angelina Jolie, and Al Pacino.
Already, by the end of the paragraph quoted above, Brennan telegraphs that Isobel fancies herself a kind of Lady Bountiful. Instead of three magi, it’s three “waifs” who come to her cottage.
In his warm and perceptive appreciation of his colleague prefacing Springs of Affection, New Yorker fiction editor (and short-story writer) William Maxwell finds some of Brennan’s Herbert’s Retreat stories to be “satirical in tone, and…heavy-handed.” Well, “The Joker” is satirical, but I prefer “tough-minded” to “heavy-handed” in describing its impact.
Its sentences, dense with detail, summon a world of gentility—even if, as in this case, it results more from a husband’s high corporate position rather than earlier generations' inherited wealth—and unconscious condescension: “The tablecloth was of stiff, icy white damask, and the centerpiece—of holly and ivy and full-blown blood-red roses—bloomed and flamed and cast a hundred small shadows trembling among the crystal and the silver.”
According to recollections by Brennan’s niece, Yvonne Jerrold, the writer did not conform to the conservative mores expected of women in deValera-era Ireland. Part of her Catholic education, however, must have left a bone-deep impression, for Brennan’s portrait of Isobel shows a modern, female Pharisee, who fulfills the letter but not the spirit of the religious law: “She felt it was only fair that she should help those less fortunate than herself, though there was a point where she drew the line. She never gave money casually on the street, and her maids had strict orders to shut the door to beggars. ‘There are places where these people can apply for help,’ she said.”
These people…places they could apply for help…Isobel would be horrified by the suggestion, but you can hear an echo of Ebenezer Scrooge’s inquiry about whether the workhouses and the Poor Law weren’t still in effect. It turns out that she’s also somewhat like Mrs. Jellyby from Dickens' Bleak House: i.e., someone all for humanity in the abstract, but not in the nearby, smelly, needy flesh.
Of the three “waifs,” Vincent Lace—Irish would-be poet, failed academic, confirmed drunk—is the most finely wrought. You sense from his pretensions (even the surname suggests insubstantiality and “lace-curtain Irish”) that this was a type Brennan knew all too well.
The fact is that Isobel really does not care for the waifs she’s invited. And when a fourth unexpected visitor that she treats as another waif turns out to be “the joker” of the title, Isobel discovers that those she invited return her ill opinion.
It’s bad enough that Isobel’s sense of philanthropy springs from misplaced pride—an instinct to guard against especially in this season. But she also exhibits either little compassion for the forces that brought “the waifs” to their present state, or appreciation for what makes them human beings in the first place.
I’m not sure why this story is not anthologized more. Even the man Brennan eventually wed, in a disastrous misalliance, St. Clair McKelway, had a “Talk of the Town” casual reprinted in Christmas at the New Yorker. Brennan’s tale deserves to be read, and the fine career and warm personality that preceded her own waif-like ending (she died homeless and destitute after a number of years of alcoholism and mental illness) deserve to be remembered.
1 comment:
Maeve Brennan is one of the most important New York City writers of the twentieth century. Sadly, she is also one of the least recognized. Thank you for recognizing her here.
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