The Visitor by Maeve Brennan

Author:Maeve Brennan [Brennan, Maeve]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781619026520
Publisher: Counterpoint

EDITOR’S NOTE

Saul Bellow once said that most writers come howling into the world, blind and bare. A few, a handful in every generation, arrive with nails, hair, and teeth, and with eyes that see everything. They speak clearly and coherently, and immediately take up fork and knife at the grownups’ table.

The late Maeve Brennan was one of the few. A native Dubliner and a longtime member of the staff of The New Yorker, she published her first short story in 1950, when she was thirty-four. “The Holy Terror” was not an apprentice piece; it was the early work of a mature writer, one already in full command of her style and signature subject matter. It tells the story of Mary Ramsay, the ladies’ room lady in the Royal Hotel in Dublin, who for thirty years kept a tireless, sour vigil from “a shabby, low-seated bamboo chair set in beside a screen in the corner of the outer room.” “She was all eyes and ears.” “She took a merciless pleasure in watching women as they passed before her in their most female and desperate and comical predicaments.” “Her dislike of these women possessed her completely.” “She bore in her heart a long, directionless grudge, a ravenous grudge.”

Mary Ramsay, or rather the spirit that animates her, recurs in a number of Maeve’s other stories. It is there in Mary Lambert, who in “A Young Girl Can Spoil Her Chances” attempts to “talk sense” to her daughter’s suitor, to discourage him from marrying the foolish child who has so often embarrassed her and who now enrages her with the prospect of leaving home. It is there too in Min Bagot, who in “The Springs of Affection” takes revenge on her beautiful, despised sister-in-law by surviving her and appropriating her many fine things.

And it is there in Mrs. King, the grandmother in The Visitor. This novella, recently discovered in a university archive and published here for the first time, is the earliest of all of Maeve’s known writings. It is also the most representative. It is the ideal place for one to begin with her work, for not only does it show where she set out from but it also explores so much of her later fictional world in small compass. The completeness of vision of The Visitor, and the ease with which the novella takes its place among her finest stories, is astonishing. This ferocious tale of love longed for, of love perverted and denied, is one of her finest achievements.

Mrs. King is an embodiment of one side of the Irish temperament, the selfish, emotionally unreachable side. She takes great satisfaction in bringing pain to those who would come between her and her happiness, and her happiness lies in the total possession of her son. There is little natural affection in her, and even less compassion. Her motive force is contempt, especially for those who think her capable of softheartedness.

Mrs. King smiles, but only in anger. Her granddaughter, Anastasia, craves nothing so much from her as a smile of kindness, of approval.

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