Biography: The theme of home is central to Angela Bourke's biography of Maeve Brennan, and was, to anyone who has read Brennan's fiction, pivotal in her writing life.
There it is - in the title - and it percolates through Bourke's narrative, dwindling away to a lost cause as debt-ridden Maeve Brennan drifts from apartment to apartment, to cheap hotels and eventually into homelessness in New York, the city she desperately tried to, and failed to, inhabit.
Brennan was born in 1917, the second daughter of Co Wexford parents, Bob and Una Brennan. The family had an exemplary Republican pedigree. Her father was a staunch De Valera man, jailed for his part in the 1916 Rising, who worked for Fianna Fáil all of his life. Her mother, as a young woman, was also a Republican activist, a member of Maud Gonne's Inghinidhe na hÉireann and, allegedly, the author of a vaguely feminist column in the Enniscorthy Echo in the early 1900s.
Maeve was born nine months after the Rising, and spent the early years of her life with "the rumbling of Crossley tenders and armoured cars" in her ears, and enduring the perilous absence of her father - often on the run and in hiding in safe houses. One of her early stories, 'The Day We Got Our Own Back', is an innocent and gently comic tale of their house being raided by Free Staters hunting for her father.
So, at an early age, Maeve's sense of home was compromised. But she had her own safe house - 48 Cherryfield Avenue, Ranelagh, Dublin - which she enshrined in her fiction. The house appears again and again in her stories, lovingly and minutely recreated in all its light and shade.
In 1934, Bob Brennan was appointed as secretary to the Irish delegation in Washington DC, representing the Fianna Fáil government, which had swept to power in 1927. Maeve was 17 and completed her university education in the States. Along with her sisters, she was also expected to partake in - and adorn - the hectic diplomatic socialising involved in her father's new role. By the time Bob Brennan was recalled to Ireland in 1947, Maeve had already - guiltily, she admitted - abandoned the family and moved to New York, where she got her first job at Harper's Bazaar as a fashion copywriter.
In 1949, she joined the staff of the prestigious New Yorker magazine. It was a meteoric rise for a young woman, all the more impressive at a time when the New Yorker was an almost totally male preserve, and she was an Irish woman among the literary blue-bloods - and decidedly red-blooded ambience - of the New Yorker. She started off writing 100-word book reviews, eventually making it into the columns of the Talk of the Town - the first woman to do so - writing regularly under the pseudonym of the Long-Winded Lady. These were brittle, funny and waspish pieces, a million miles away from the fiction she had started to write - short stories about her extended family in Co Wexford, thinly disguised, and her childhood world of Ranelagh.
Angela Bourke's real achievement is the charting of Maeve Brennan's early years. A historian and an Irish scholar, Bourke merges beautifully the small milestones in the young Maeve's life with the large public events that were going on around her - the bitterness of the Civil War and its dispiriting aftermath for Republicans, the beleaguered romantic nationalism of her father - himself a prolific writer with literary ambitions - and the narrow social distinctions that marked out the fledgeling State. She deftly builds up a tapestry-like texture of Maeve Brennan's young life, which the author herself so successfully mined in her fiction.
But once Brennan moves to the US, Bourke seems to lose her sure footing and her instinctive feel for the writer in the making. A distance emerges between Bourke and her biographical subject, and instead of empathy, we get a rather cool catalogue of events which keeps Brennan at arm's length, reduced to an isolated, alienated individual battling with demons, never named or identified. The demons drove her to excessive drinking and bouts of hospitalisation and led, inexorably, to her rather sad end in a nursing home in upstate New York in 1993.
It's not as if the reader wants a tabloid, tell-it-all account of her decline - but a terrible discretion seems to overtake Bourke, frustrating the reader's attempts to understand the rupture that occurred in Brennan's life. A disastrous love affair with the critic Walter Kerr in her 20s is hinted at as one reason. Her failed marriage to the alcoholic St Clair McKelway, a thrice-divorced reporter with the New Yorker, is another. But of the inside of either of these relationships we get no real insight.
Her most successful relationship was a literary one - with New Yorker fiction editor and author William Maxwell, who championed her literary work in the magazine, and was her mentor and faithful friend throughout her life. He became, as Bourke notes, "the person for whom she wrote".
That she was a successful Irish writer, unrecognised in her own land and only now gaining a literary reputation here for her piercingly clear-eyed fables of a Dublin childhood, certainly must have contributed to her sense of dislocation. But the deracination of her long-term exile is never fully excavated here, and the reader is ultimately left still puzzling over how the bright, strong-willed and glamorous young woman of the 1940s became the ill-kempt homeless woman of the 1970s who is eventually barred from the New Yorker for her violently unpredictable behaviour.
It is clear that she was alienated from some authentic sense of self - the fiction, at one level, is an attempt to refashion an old identity. In 'Christmas Eve', one of her last published stories, she writes:
It is the solid existence of love that gives life and strength to memory, and if, in some cases, childhood memories lack the soft and tender colors given by demonstrativeness, the child grown old and in the dark knows only that what is under her hand is a rock that will never give way.
Unfortunately for us, Maeve Brennan remains that child "grown old and in the dark" - still unknowable and as mysterious as her art.
• Mary Morrissy is a writer and critic