In Which Maeve Brennan Wears A Rose In Her Lapel

Please Solve In One Line

by ELIZABETH GUMPORT

There are some lives that seem determined to be lead, people doomed to be themselves. New Yorker writer Maeve Brennan is one of them: born in Dublin in 1917, she arrived in America as a teenager, on a ship called the Manhattan. After spending several years with her family in DC, where her father represented the Irish Legation, she moved to the real Manhattan. She found work as a fashion copywriter at Harper’s Bazaar, which was considered at the time “a kind of Mecca for lively young women who had too much vitality to expand it all on social life.”

At the office, Brennan was noticed for her sharp wit, tiny waist, and tailored dresses, and also for the roses she always wore in her left lapel. Rumors identified her as the inspiration for Breakfast at Tiffany’s Holly Golightly. “To be around her,” said her longtime editor William Maxwell, “was to see style being invented.” At home, she wrote fiction.

In a mock obituary from the 1950s, Brennan described herself as heartsick and drunk. At McSorley’s, she was known as an “honorary man,” and she and New Yorker writer Brendan Gill often drank together at Costello’s Saloon on Third Avenue and 44th Street, a few blocks from the magazine’s offices. Once, while waiting on a street corner for Roosevelt’s motorcade to pass, Philip Hamburger saw Gill — who was married — coming out of Brennan’s apartment on East 10th Street. The two men said hello and decided to run alongside the president’s car as it drove down Fifth Avenue. In his autobiography, Gill called New York “the ideal place in which to commit adultery.”

In 1949, on the advice of Gill and other editors at the magazine, William Shawn hired Brennan as a staff writer at The New Yorker. Over the next two decades, the magazine would publish dozens of Brennan’s short stories, but her finest contributions were the Talk of the Town pieces she published under the name The Long-Winded Lady. Written between 1953 and 1968, Brennan’s wry, generous sketches of New York City are testaments to the singular joy of being alone around others.

In one installment, the Long-Winded Lady eavesdrops in the Bergdorf Goodman shoe department; in another, she watches a brass band share a New Year’s meal. A solitary dinner is an opportunity to enjoy the “lavish solitude provided by a little sea of calm white tablecloths, and look about you, even stare, be as curious or as indifferent or as watchful or as lazy as you are inclined to be — in other words, be yourself in a public place and still consider yourself polite.”

At The New Yorker, Brennan continued to wear her roses, as well as red lipstick and Russian Leather perfume. She filled her new office with plants and painted its ceilings Wedgwood blue. Happiness is a decision made daily, a sensation maintained by means of a series of small, considered pleasures.

The number of people moving around New York alone serves as cover for the actually lonely. The city’s size permits them the small pride that comes with keeping misery private. “What makes a waif?” Brennan wonders in one of her early short stories. “What begins it? When do people get that fatal separate look?”

Up close, there’s no mistaking decadent solitude and desperate isolation. The former is a temporary state of being, like taking a cruise, the latter a lifelong voyage. An early Long-Winded Lady letter describes “a shabby tall man with red eyes, who had obviously been drinking heavily since the cradle” deciding between different canned dinners at the supermarket. “It was plain that what he really wanted wasn’t food at all. . . Later on it occurred to me that, putting it roughly, there is usually only one thing we yearn to do that’s bad for us, while if we try to make the effort to do a virtuous or good thing, the choice is so great and wide that we're really worn out before we can settle on what to do.”

In 1953, Brennan fell for another New Yorker staffer. Charismatic, manic-depressive, and often drunk, St. Clair McKelway had been married and divorced three times. Like Brennan, he was careless about finances, behaving, in the words of Harold Ross, as if “all the money were going to be called in at midnight.” By the time she met McKelway, Brennan had moved out of the apartment on East 10th Street, first to 22nd and 9th and then to 15 East 9th Street. As always, she lived by herself.

Reading Brennan’s Long-Winded Lady pieces is like receiving postcards from the past, which is rendered like a foreign country. Roosting pigeons, fruit markets, the price of martinis, each and every meal: these are the details documented by tourists, who observe the prosaic rattle of city life with the same electric interest they bring to famous sights, and also Brennan. “I might as well,” she announced, “have been in Amsterdam for all the attention I was giving the city.” It is possible to inhabit life entirely, to submit ourselves thoughtfully and entirely to our present circumstances and to treat those circumstances as worthy of reflection.

Ours, of course, are not quite identical to Brennan’s. Longchamps, the Grosvenor Hotel, the Astor Hotel, the Adano, Schrafft’s: the list of the departed is long, and some of the places on it have been gone for over half a century now. “All my life,” Brennan wrote, “I suppose, I’ll be scurrying out of buildings just ahead of the wreckers.” They demolished the Holley Hotel — Brennan’s first Manhattan residence – in order to build the NYU dormitory Hayden Hall. In 1954, Brennan’s building on 9th Street was also knocked down. Soon afterwards she married McKelway.

“It may not have been the worst possible marriage,” Maxwell later remarked, “but it was not something you could be hopeful about.” In the two years before her wedding Brennan had published twelve stories in The New Yorker, but afterwards her output slowed. The couple traveled to Dublin, where McKelway began acting erratically. Both he and Brennan drank heavily, frequently appealing to Maxwell for money. They divorced in 1959.

Brennan returned to Manhattan, where she once again found herself living alone, often in hotels or houses loaned to her by friends. For company she kept cats and a dog named Bluebell. She continued to turn to Maxwell for financial and editorial assistance, describing in one letter a troubled bit of writing and concluding, “please solve in one line.”

As deeply as Maxwell cared for Brennan, their friendship was an uneven one, and she knew it. He was one of the best things that ever happened to her. All she could offer in return for his support were reassurances that she was not unhappy, that his help had reached her and provided some contentment. “Life is easy,” she wrote to him, “if you let it have its way.”

Attitude alters experience like light transforms Manhattan. The position of the sun in the sky determines whether an office tower looks like a vast black tombstone, or sheets of light held brilliantly together by steel. As the 1960s wore on, Brennan found herself increasingly unable to turn brightly towards her own life. Shadows, she felt, had long been massing on the horizon. As she put it in a short story from the mid-60s: “In an instant of sickening panic, Mrs. Bagot saw all the mistakes of her life rush together to congeal into the one fatal mistake that had made everything go wrong from the beginning.”

A few years later, Brennan wrote to Maxwell from Wellfleet, where friends were letting her stay in their house: “I am getting very old looking and I hate it.” Shortly afterwards she disappeared, leaving her cats behind.

By the time her first collection of short stories was published in 1969, Brennan often appeared disheveled and paranoid. She accused friends of stealing money, then handed out cash on street corners. In debt and effectively without a home, she spent her nights in the bathroom at The New Yorker.

In 1976, Maxwell left the magazine and Brennan was banned from the office. A new door — with a lock — was installed outside the receptionist’s desk on the twentieth floor.

Before the 1970s were over, Brennan’s friends had her hospitalized twice, but eventually she stopped speaking to them, or anyone else. She continued to withdraw money from an account that had been set up for her. From time to time, someone would spot her sitting with the other homeless people in Rockefeller Center.

There is no record of Brennan’s activities between 1981 and 1992, when an English professor named Richard Rupp found her living at the Lawrence Nursing Home on Long Island. When he visited, both the staff and Brennan herself were surprised to learn she had once been a writer.

Perhaps the reason Brennan wrote so well about waifs — about the shabby tall men and Mrs. Bagots of the world, about everyone who gest stuck outside our lives — was that she felt herself fated to join their ranks. There are people who believe themselves to be invulnerable, and there are people who worry that their livelihood and dignity could go up in smoke at any minute. In their fear of failure, they seem almost to court it. To see the abyss is to take the first step towards it.

A few months after locating Brennan, Rupp contacted her relatives in England, and in 1993 her niece made plans to visit. Brennan died before she arrived.

Elizabeth Gumport is the senior contributor to This Recording. She is a writer living in New York. She twitters here, and you can find her website here. She last wrote in these pages about her favorite novels. You can find an archive of her writing on This Recording here.