Maeve Brennan left Dublin for America in 1934, when she was seventeen. While her entire thirty years’ writing career was conducted under the aegis of The New Yorker and while she became, both in her fiction and her New Yorker column and “Talk of the Town” pieces, one of the sharpest chroniclers of mid-century New York, the Dublin of her faithfully remembered childhood remained as immediate to her as her adopted city. It is the backdrop for her fictional masterpiece, the six-story cycle about an unhappy couple, the Derdons (republished three years ago in Houghton Mifflin’s selection of Brennan’s stories, The Springs of Affection), and in fact for all of her finest stories.

The Springs of Affection brought together twenty-one of Brennan’s short stories, and now Counterpoint Press has done her admirers the favor of publishing the remaining nineteen, plus an impressionistic sketch from her New Yorker column, “A Snowy Night on West Forty-ninth Street,” in a collection they have named The Rose Garden. Five of these stories are set in Dublin, the rest in and around New York City.

Brennan, who died in 1993 after a decade of mental illness, was not a prolific fiction writer, but she was a remarkably able one. A denizen of the shabby hotels and bars in the Times Square area, she was marvelous at evoking the impermanence and the tarnished beauty of New York, “the most cumbersome, most reckless, most ambitious, most confused, most comical, the saddest and coldest and most human of cities.” Here she is, for instance, bringing to life a winter night in her chosen neighborhood:  

The little side streets that live off Broadway also live in the shadow of Broadway, and there are times, looking from the windows of the hotel where I live at present, on West Forty-ninth Street, when I think that my hotel and all of us here on this street are behind the world instead of in it… . It was a gray morning and the afternoon was gray, but tonight is very dark, and when I walked out of the hotel into the withering cold of this black-and-white night, West Forty-ninth Street seemed more than ever like an outpost, or a frontier street, or a one-street town that has been thrown together in excitement—a gold rush or an oil gush—and that will tumble into ruin when the excitement ends.

This sort of descriptive grace can be enjoyed at length in Houghton Mifflin’s collection of Brennan’s journalism, The Long-Winded Lady: Notes from The New Yorker, but it adorns her fiction as well. Over the years Brennan became a master of The New Yorker house style, which of course had its limitations: that familiar controlled pathos tempered with irony, established in the early years by E. B. White and subsequently spreading like smallpox, could make the work of even its best writers look tailored-to-fit. When Brennan dealt with less New Yorker-ish, more personal material, though, she sometimes transcended all classification and rose to a very high level indeed.

The centerpiece of The Rose Garden is a series of seven stories set in the fictional Herbert’s Retreat, a rich and social enclave on the Hudson some thirty miles north of New York, transparently based on Sneden’s Landing, Brennan’s home during the years of her high-flying and hard-drinking marriage to fellow New Yorker writer St. Clair McKelway. The stories are a sometimes awkward blend of satire and farce, with characters too cartoonish to affect us deeply. Still, they are always funny and always, on one level or another, true to the milieu and the mores they describe.

What things are dearest to the hearts of the thirty or so ladies of Herbert’s Retreat? The care and beautification of their eighteenth-century houses; their views of the Hudson; their status in the community (for the world outside Herbert’s Retreat hardly counts). Husbands and children, unless they provide additional status, are a long way down on the list. Misery and angst are caused, more than anything else, by social fear. Liza Frye, a newcomer to Herbert’s Retreat, puts the old guard into a tizzy: “Right off, her modern furniture outraged all the other women, who had been concentrating on early American.” Another woman is thrown into a fit at discovering that her husband and his first wife had had a “divine” eighteenth-century kitchen fireplace bricked over; after one cocktail too many she forces her husband to knock it open, right in the middle of a dinner party. A third, the socially aspiring young widow Leona Harkey, is so irritated by the unsightly cottage that blocks her view of the river than she marries its unsuspecting owner so that she might take possession of it and raze it to the ground.

The ubiquitous Irish maids provide a sharp running commentary on their mistresses’ odd preoccupations.

“Them and their views. You’d think it was a diamond necklace, the way they carry on about their views. Mrs. Giegler is just the same. The minute a person walks into the house, it’s me view this and me view that, and come and look at me view, and dragging them over to the window and out on to the porch in every sort of weather. Damp, that’s all I have to say about it. Damp.”

The maids never miss a trick, and have a nice knack for summing up their employers. (“He’s her admirer,” the cynical Bridie says in explanation of the many weekend visits paid by the flashy New York critic Charles Runyon to Mr. and Mrs. Harkey. “He admires her, and she admires him. They admire each other.”)

But Brennan is too canny a writer to make the maids any less foolish than their employers; “I am human,” her motto might be, “and nothing stupid is alien to me.” Over and over the maids artlessly expose their pettiness and vanity. The final story in the cycle, “The Servants’ Dance,” is a delightful tale of mutual one-upmanship between the social classes. Leona, Charles and their crowd descend patronizingly, dressed to the nines, upon the annual servants’ ball: “Of course, they’re honored that we come to their little party,” Charles says. “Why, it’s positively feudal. And whether they know it or not, that’s why they enjoy it.” It never occurs to them that they might not be irresistible. “Well, of course some of the maids must cherish secret passions,” the wife of the Retreat’s handsomest man observes complacently. “Poor things. How they must look forward to tonight.” Finally jolted out of their habitual phony servility by such arrant condescension, the maids boycott the gentry and won’t ask them to dance, inflicting much comical discomfiture.

The best character in this series is not the social climbing Leona, nor the perennial cadger Charles, but a ridiculous Irish poet who appears in only one story, a “waif” invited to Christmas dinner by a smug Lady Bountiful. Vincent Lace is a discarded friend of his hostess’s father; once a popular poet and wit, his glory days are long behind him. He is intolerable:

“My poems drive the fellows at home stark mad… . All that crowd thinks of is making pretty-sounding imitations of Yeats and his bunch. Yeats, Yeats, Yeats, that’s all they know. But my masters are long since dead. I go back in spirit to those grand eighteenth-century souls who wandered the bogs and hills of our unfortunate country, and who broke bread with the people, and who wrote out of the heart of the people.”

And yet, he has real pathos; we really pity him as he hopefully arrives at the feast “in what he imagined to be his best form— roguish, teasing, sly, and melancholy.”

The Irish Vincent rings completely true in a way that the American inhabitants of Herbert’s Retreat do not, and while the Herbert’s Retreat stories in The Rose Garden are wickedly amusing, the Irish ones are real. “The Holy Terror,” Brennan’s first published story, tells of a dreadful old heap, the ladies’ room attendant in a Dublin hotel, evil-minded, power-hungry, and hideous.

Her rudeness passed for independence, and even for wit. Women smiled ingratiatingly at her contemptuous face in the mirror… . The ladies’ room satisfied her and suited her. Her dislike of the women she served possessed her completely, and she watched their posturing with a hard, avid pleasure.

But the modern world, in the form of an efficient new assistant manager, is encroaching; Mary Ramsay’s days are numbered. The story of her downfall is both grotesque and pitiful.

“The Rose Garden,” the title story and perhaps the best in the collection, describes the secret yearnings of a grim, limited Dublin woman, proprietor of a small grocer’s shop. Mary Lambert never smiles:

she believed that people only smiled in order to curry favor. People like herself, at any rate. “People like us,” she was always saying, “people like us,” but she did not know what she meant, unless it was that the rest of the people in the world were better off, or that they had some fortunate secret, or were engaged in a conspiracy in which she was not included.

Yet even she has a poetic inner life: she lives for, and off, the single day every year when the nuns in a nearby convent open their magnificent garden to the public. “She spoke to no one about her longing. This was not her only secret, but her happiest one.”

“The Bride” is the beautiful story of a young Irish maid who, driven to despair by the indifference of her beloved mother, marries a man she doesn’t love. “The Beginning of a Long Story” and “The Bohemians” both echo stories and material in The Springs of Affection. The former is a subtle, gentle family tale in which Brennan draws on memories of her family and the Ranelagh neighborhood she grew up in with its small houses separated by walls and looking out, in back, onto a tennis court. “The Bohemians” is the story of an artistic but untalented couple who encourage their equally untalented son to pursue a poetic career, and of the son’s desperate sense of loss and futility after their deaths.

Not all Maeve Brennan’s stories are first-rate: this volume winds up, for instance, with some New York tales—several featuring a black Labrador named Bluebell—that are charming but insubstantial, and a little too cloyingly New Yorker-ish. But at her best she was one of the most affecting and subtle artists of her generation, clear, unsentimental, and occasionally heartbreaking.

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