Exiled by Choice

Posted on November 28, 2021 by Art for Housewives

Her father was an IRA gunman dedicated to an independent Ireland. This meant that Maeve Brennan (1917-1993) was subjected to a rather unstable and tense childhood as her father was often arrested and jailed for his political activities. In fact, Maeve was born while her father was in prison. Imagine the mood swings Maeve’s mother must have gone through and the imprinting it left on Maeve.

Negotiating your identity in a hostile environment is not the easiest thing to do.

After Ireland gained independence from Great Britain, Maeve’s father was appointed first minister to the U.S. Thus, in 1934, the Brennan family moved to Washington D.C. but, in 1947, when it was time to go back to Ireland, Maeve said “No way!”. Instead, she moved to NYC and got a job at Harper’s Bazaar where another Dubliner, Carmel Snow, was editor-in-chief. In the role of The Long-Winded Lady, Maeve kept a social column and later published her short stories with Harper’s as well.

Maeve was described as a “small, charming, effortlessly witty, generous woman with green eyes, hugely oversized horn-rimmed glasses, and chestnut hair worn in a vast beehive.” * To be around Maeve and “the quick sound of her heels and her beautiful Dublin accent” was “to see style being invented” leading to the speculation that Breakfast at Tiffany’s Holly Golightly was based on Maeve.

In the 1960s, Maeve was at her apex. But then things began to deteriorate as if something inside of her had snapped. Or, more likely, after years of slow erosion, suddenly everything began to crumble. Her dam of self-containment broke and Maeve was swept away. To keep herself afloat, she drank.

Once known for her style and wit, Maeve was now unkempt and incoherent. By the 1970s, she was a low functioning alcoholic forced to live on the streets and wash herself in public restrooms. One day Maeve just disappeared and wasn’t heard of again until her obituary several years later. Destitute and sick, Maeve had been living in a nursing home where she died in 1993 at the age of 76.

Many of Maeve’s short stories are based in Ireland. It was as if Mauve could not get Dublin out of her mind despite the Atlantic that separated her from her hometown. James Joyce (1882-1941) faced a similar problem. In 1904, Joyce, in his early 20s, left Ireland for continental Europe. But the distance could not keep him from focusing on Dublin. Says Joyce: “For myself, I always write about Dublin, because if I can get to the heart of Dublin, I can get to the heart of all the cities of the world. In the particular is contained the universal.”

Joyce, educated by Jesuits, in 1914 published “Dubliners” a collection of 15 short stories all depicting Irish middle class life.  The characters in Dubliners experience epiphanies that change them within. Because, like an explosion out of darkness, an epiphany is a moment of sudden realization, a moment so long it can last forever.

In The Springs of Affection: Stories of Dublin, Maeve also wrote about Dubliners. In particular, she wrote about three families and their daily life. They are stories of those “ordinary customs that are the only true realities most of us ever know.”

Maeve’s stories are for women, women like me who can relate to all those nuances that go into creating a homey environment for one’s family. Take, for example, the story “The Sofa”.

It was Tuesday and Mrs. Bagot was waiting for her new sofa to be delivered. No given time had been set for the delivery other than “sometime during the day” meaning that Mrs. Bagot’s day would not belong to her until the sofa arrived.

Space had been made for the sofa leaving the living room looking naked save for the big rug in front of the fireplace. “The room looked very carefree with no furniture in it” and her daughters pranced around the living room until they were so tired, they laid down on the carpet. Mrs. Bagot should have sent them off to school but, thinking that when the sofa arrived, the girls would no longer be able to roll around on the carpet, she continued to let them play. Why tell them to stop and deprive them of the sensation of freedom, a sensation so rarely experienced.

At 2 o’clock in the afternoon, the sofa still hadn’t arrived and the anxiety of waiting kept Mrs. Bagot focusing on anything else.

Finally, the moment she had waited for all day–Mrs. Bagot watched as “the sofa began to emerge timidly from the van” and her daughters, seeing it, came running. Other children started running towards the Bagot house, too. A neighbor getting a new sofa was an event and had people on the streets blatantly watching or discreetly peeking from behind a curtained window. All eyes were glued on the sofa being carefully carried across the yard. Finally, once on the porch, the sofa’s grand tour ended and people went home.

Placed facing the fireplace, the sofa looked very well in the room—much better than expected. Mrs. Bagot and her daughters spent the rest of the afternoon walking around the sofa, contemplating it, stroking it, describing it, and above all, they took turns posing on it. And the excitement the sofa had caused kept them talking all throughout dinner.

Epilogue: There are big stories in small events.

“Or you could say that an exile was a person who knew of a country that made all other countries seem strange.” Maeve

*from her obituary written by William Maxwell of The New Yorker

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Related: Maeve Brennan finds a place at the table + Maeve Brennan « The Irish Aesthete + Maeve Brennan: Lessons and lessons and then more lessons + Maeve Brennan: loneliness elevated to an art form + Maeve Brennan podcast with her biographer Angela Bourke + A Maeve Brennan Revival? + The Springs of Affection by Maeve Brennan review: irresistible stories + A Look at the Inspiration Behind Truman Capote’s Breakfast at Tiffany’s Holly Golightly + Maeve Brennan: On the Life of a Great Irish Writer, and Its Sad End +

Maeve blatantly used her own childhood address for her some of her short stories: 48 Cherryfield Avenue, Ranelagh, Dublin.

The Springs of Affection: Stories of Dublin on archive.org HERE

Untouched since Joyce’s Heyday, Joyce was born at 41 Brighton Square, Rathgar, Dublin) + James Joyce and Italo Svevo, the story of a friendship + Italo Svevo + Joyce lived in Rome from 1906-1907 but didn’t like it +

Bibliography:

Bourke, Angela. Maeve Brennan: homesick at The New Yorker. Counterpoint. NYC. 2004.  Read on archive HERE

Brennan, Maeve. The Springs of Affection.

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Gum, Grit, and Storytelling

Posted on November 27, 2021 by Art for Housewives

She chewed gum while lecturing. It was a habit she picked up once when, while presenting her thoughts in front of an audience, the words got stuck in her throat. Chewing gum induced salivation and let the words flow once again.

Grace Paley (1922-2007), like Jennifer Lopez, was from the Bronx. But her parents were not. They were Jewish-Ukrainian immigrants who, along with other necessities, had packed their traditions along with everything else. But this was a problem for Grace and many other immigrant offspring. So Grace let her stories do the talking for her to expose the difficulties first generation Americans had– learn how to balance cultural traditions imposed upon them by their immigrant parents while simultaneously trying to integrate with the country they were actually living in. 

Grace was both a high school and a college dropout (she took a course with the British poet W. H. Auden at Hunter College). Married at 19 to a film camera man, Grace had two children and spent more time on the playground with the kids than at her desk writing. A typical story for so many women. Nevertheless, she was also a political activist focused on the ban of nuclear weapons and equal rights for women.

Not discouraged by the many rejections she initially received from editors, Grace used her semi-autobiographical character, Faith Darwin, to help tell her own story. And those of others.

Grace looked at life as if it were this big piece of fabric and all she had to do was simply cut out a part that interested her and then fabricate a story around it. Many of the stories were about a world of women unhappy in their domestic roles and of immigrants crowded into tenements. One such story is “Goodbye and Good Luck”. The story opens with Rose Lieber telling her niece, Lillie, about her past. Rose was an overweight ticket seller at the Russian Art Theater where she met Volodya Vlashkin, an almost famous actor known as the Valentino of Second Avenue. Rose falls in love with Vlashkin and decides to move in with him. Her mother, outraged, protests but Rose insists it’s her life to which her mother responds: “you, a nothing, a rotten hole in a piece of cheese, are you telling me what life is?”

Then Rose learns, casually, that the love of her life is married with kids. Not wanting to be a home wreaker, she leaves Vlashkin and goes back to live with her mother.

For the next several years, relatives try their hand at matchmaking but Rose isn’t interested. She just plods through life until one day, unexpectedly, Vlashkin shows up at her apartment. He says his wife has left him and now he can be with her forever. So Rose tells Vlashkin that for years, while he was married, she was his lover asking for nothing in return. But now that he is free, he should be ashamed of himself if doesn’t show her the respect she merits by marrying her.

Rose had never been against marriage. She just didn’t want to wind up like her own mom who married a man she didn’t love. So, compared to her mother, Rose is the winner as she loves Vlashkin and is going to marry him for that reason. Finally dressed for her wedding day, Rose asks her niece to wish her a long and happy life. And to “Hug Mama, tell her from Aunt Rose, goodbye and good luck.”

Grace Paley didn’t produce a massive body of work as she was too busy raising kids and being politically involved. She participated in many anti-war and anti-nuke demonstrations and was even arrested for her participation. Before her breast cancer related death, Grace said her dream for her grandchildren was that they could live in “a world without militarism and racism and greed—and where w4omen don’t have to fight for their place in the world.”

Epilogue: “Art is too long, and life is too short.” Grace

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Profiling Storytellers

Posted on November 26, 2021 by Art for Housewives

Before the FBI’s criminal profiling, there was Miss Marple. Miss Marple didn’t need an FBI profiler to know a criminal when she saw one. A careful observer of human behaviour, she relied upon her own experience to identify personality types. For example, she would observe someone then say “Oh, he reminds me of Jack, the butcher’s son, who was a petty theft.” Miss Marple had developed the art of abductive reasoning. That is, arriving at a conclusion not based on standardized theories but on careful observation followed by the search for the simplest explanation as to the why behind what’s been observed.

Jane Marple is a fragile looking old lady with twinkling blue eyes. She is not a busybody as much as a sleuth searching for answers. She has found a way to let her unsentimental understanding of human nature help her solve murders.

Agatha Christie (1890-1976), the creator of Miss Marple, was already a well-known author when the WWII broke out.  The summer of 1940, Germans had decided to bomb London to smithereens. The Blitz, as it was called, lasted for 57 days in a row with the Germans systematically dropping bombs on the capital of England. London’s 8 million inhabitants went underground like moles. It took people time to get used to the blare of sirens sending them off to shelters. But once it became the norm, people went to shelters prepared to spend time there. Books were a must as not only did they helped to pass time waiting for the raid to stop, it helped distract them. As a result, sales of books increased dramatically. Crime fiction was a favorite.

Agatha was homed schooled and, not having classmates to play with, she invented them. Agatha called her imaginary playmates “The Girls” and for each one of them she invented a physical look, a personality of her own. When playing with The Girls, as she called them, Agatha talked for herself and for them as well. This is probably where she learned to become so good at dialogue.

A writer of both novels and short stories, Agatha’s style was simple and easy to ready. She liked puzzles so the plot was more important that the murder itself. But her real interest was human nature. Every novel has at least one character who is going through a psychological struggle.

Much had been written about what had made her so successful. One theory was that, by keeping things simple via the use of plain language, short sentences, and much dialogue, she made it easier for the reader to follow the plot. Even experimenting neurolinguists had their say and said Agatha owed much of her success to repetition. If the author repeats words at least three times in a paragraph, the reader becomes more easily convinced.

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Related: My Friend Agatha + Miss Marple, my favorite profiler +

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Bedtime Stories for Adults

Posted on November 20, 2021 by Art for Housewives

Insomnia is still stalking me. I know, it’s all in my brain. Wide awake at 2 a.m. once again, I understood that I needed help in redirecting my thoughts. Maybe by reading.

Reading for just six minutes, according to some studies, can reduce stress related insomnia by at least 65% thus helping the body fall asleep. So what I need is a bedtime story–a bedtime story for grown-ups. A story that can distract me from myself.

My middle school Speech & Drama teacher, Ms. Bardwell, focused on getting her students to express themselves in a comprehensible way. One exercise she used was that of having the students learn a short story well enough to retell it in front of their classmates. The story I chose was Frank R. Stockton’s “The Lady or the Tiger?”

In a far-away land, a barbarous king used public trials and chance to decide a man’s fate. Once accused of a crime, the accused was taken to a public arena and told to choose between two doors in front of him. Behind one door was a lady and behind the other, a tiger. The accused must choose between the two doors. If the door he chooses has the lady behind it, it means he is innocent. However, he must marry the lady immediately whether or not he wants to. If he chooses the door with the tiger behind it, it means he’s guilty and, as punishment, must be devoured by the tiger.

When the king learns that the princess, his daughter, is in love with a handsome, young and caring man but who has zero social status and no money, the king has his daughter’s lover put on trial.

The princess, alarmed by what awaits her lover, is consumed by fear, jealousy, and doubt. She’s forever lost her lover regardless as to the door he will pick. Because he will either be eaten by the tiger or be forced to marry another woman.

The princess uses her connections in the palace to learn what’s behind each door. Once at the trial, the lover looks to the princess for help. Her eyes indicate the door on the right so he chooses it.

It’s a DIY ending as the reader is never told what’s behind the chosen door leaving the lover’s fate in the hands of the reader’s imagination.

“If you decide which it was—the lady or the tiger—you find out what kind of person you are yourself.”  Frank R. Stockton

Epilogue: Choice is a power.

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Related: “The Lady or The Tiger” by Frank R. Stockton pdf + The Lady, or the Tiger? Wikipedia + Short Stories: The Lady or the Tiger? by Frank Stockton online + Five Short Stories pdf + The world’s shortest stories on archive.org HERE + Chris Advansun Bedtime Stories to make you fall asleep, Sleep Stories

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The Aesthetics of Reading

Posted on November 18, 2021 by Art for Housewives

The Uffizi in Florence is a historical gallery containing masterpieces of the Italian Renaissance. One of the most visited paintings is that of Botticelli’s The Birth of Venus, a painting also famous for provoking Stendhal’s Syndrome. But the Uffizi is also the home of Botticelli’s St. Augustine in his Cell (1490). St. Augustine, a Manichaean, converted to Catholicism after coming in contact with the bishop of Milan, Ambrose.

In his “Confessions”, Augustine describes Ambrose as a small man with a neat beard and delicate hands. But what amazed Augustine the most was the time Ambrose dedicated to reading and, even more surprising, silent reading.

Initially, people read out loud. In fact, during the Middle Ages, carrels (cubicles) were used in monasteries to help minimize the cacophony created by all the monks reading out loud simultaneously. And that’s why Augustine was so surprised at Ambrose’s ability to read silently to himself. Surprised and irritated because, at the time, it was considered rude to read to yourself instead of aloud if other people were present.

Eventually reading became a more common practice and, as late as the 1700s, reading became a social activity. But with the spread of literacy, it became more and more common to read silently to one’s self. By the 1800s people began wanting to read alone. By silent reading, the reader was able to develop an intimacy with the written word and the meanings they tried to construct.

Psychologically, silent reading helps the reader create an interior space and thus emboldens them. It so emboldened women that by the late 19th cen. there was much concern about women reading in bed alone and risking having their thoughts provoked. Lying in bed to read was considered depraved. But silent reading in bed has many positive benefits.

The more you read, the easier reading becomes. Reading can improve one’s memory, lower the risk of Alzheimer’s, as well as increase brain connectivity. Reading can also lower the blood pressure and heart rate facilitating sleep.

Reading helps develop visualization skills—how can you not have images come to mind, for example, when this description given by Anne Bronte in The Tenant of Wildfell Hall:

“His heart was like a sensitive plant, that opens for a moment in the sunshine, but curls up and shrinks into itself at the slightest touch of the finger, or the lightest breath of wind.”

Visualization contributes to our everyday functioning. Being able to imagine scenarios, for example, helps us plan our future. Visualization can also influence our perception.

What I enjoy most about reading non-fiction is that it transports me elsewhere and helps me go beyond boundaries. It’s like taking a vacation from the self.

Reading increases empathy. Because imagining the scenes in which others find themselves is like “walking in their shoes” and helps us better understand why they did what they did.

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Related: The Material Culture of Literacy

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