Anne Enright made a shortlist of two.
Back in the spring of 2016, the novelist was asked by the New Yorker’s fiction editor Deborah Treisman to select one story from the archive to read and discuss on a podcast.
She’d recently written for the Irish literary magazine the Stinging Fly about fellow Dubliner Maeve Brennan, who died in 1993 largely unknown at home.
The alternative was one of the more than 40 stories that Frank O’Connor had published in the New Yorker from the 1940s through to the ‘60s.
It would be hard to write the history of Irish writers and the New Yorker, which celebrates its 100th anniversary this month, without reference to both Brennan and O’Connor.
Ultimately, Enright, a New Yorker contributor since 2000, opted for O’Connor’s “The Masculine Principle,” published in the magazine in 1950, because “he’s good fun and it reads so easily.” And while a "very benign patriarchy" is a work in his stories, but one of the attractive things about them for a young reader, she said, is that the women "have so much personality and character." (Listen to it here.)
He led the way for the Irish at the New Yorker, but not just in fiction -- each of the four sections of his biography, “An Only Child,” which was about growing up Michael O’Donovan in Cork City, were published in four editions of the New Yorker.
Maeve Brennan.
The non-fictional Irish contributions have continued with contributions by writers like the National Book Award winner Colum McCann.
Brennan’s case was different in that she was recruited as a staff writer in the late 1940s. William Shawn, who was taking over the editorial reins from founder Harold Ross (who was born in Colorado to an Ulster Protestant father), lured her away from her job at Harper’s Bazaar. She became a reviewer and social diarist, and, as the Long-Winded Lady, wrote pieces for the “Talk of the Town” column. She’d come to the United States at age 17 in 1934 as one of the children of diplomat Robert Brennan, and stayed on. Some of her fiction was set in Dublin against the backdrop of the Irish revolution, in which both her County Wexford-born parents were involved. William Maxwell, who edited all of her 40 or so stories, called “The Springs of Affection,” one of the great short stories of the 20th century.
In the early 1970s, Brennan made one of her periodic visits to Ireland. For a time, she stayed in the north Dublin suburbs with the family of her cousin Ita Doyle, which included son Roddy, a future New Yorker contributor.
Back in the U.S., from that point on, the writer, in the words of her biographer, “slowly slipped into madness.” It hadn’t helped that she’d become the fourth wife to another New Yorker writer, St. Clair McKelway, a womanizing alcoholic who enjoyed the high life as much as she did; nor that the person she really loved had ended their relationship and married someone else.
Maxwell and her other New Yorker friends ensured Brennan’s work remained in print, with columns by the Long-Winded Lady collected in one volume and her short fiction in two others, even as she herself contended with her illness and bouts of homelessness. She died at a nursing home in upstate New York, at age 76, and was buried in Queens. Eleven years later, in 2004, Angela Bourke’s “Maeve Brennan: Homesick at the New Yorker” was published. Reading for the first time in 1998 the short stories that were largely set in Ranelagh, the University College Dublin lecturer realized that Brennan had “left us an intimate history of Ireland in the 20th century.”
The magazine played a fairly central role in O’Connor’s life also. “The North American academy and the New Yorker gave him the kind of personal space and economic security in which he flourished in career terms as short story writer and author of critical books in a way that he would scarcely have been able to do so in 1950s Ireland,” wrote Trinity professor Terence Brown in “Frank O’Connor,” a 2007 volume of essays edited by Hilary Lennon.
Frank O'Connor.
His second wife, Harriet O’Donovan Sheehy, in the same book recalled as “edgy” the period the couple and their young child spent in Ireland from 1958. That although he “had a certain amount of financial security from what is known as a ‘first reading agreement’ with the New Yorker, he was not about to retire from the fray or assume that people would be delighted to meet his new wife.”
In fact, “quite a few people felt that Michael [she used his real name throughout] had done something unforgivable by getting divorced and remarrying.”
In 1960, Brian Friel signed a first reading agreement, “an expression of our confidence in you and of our desire to see everything you write for magazine publication” in exchange for a retainer and payment rate per word that was a “significant boost over the BBC [Radio in Belfast] and 60 times more than the defunct [Dublin-based] Bell magazine,” in the words of biographer Kelly Matthews.
As part of her research, she met at age 98 Roger Angell, the editor of Friel’s New Yorker stories. In later years, Angell was famous as the magazine’s baseball writer (Yankees manager Joe Torre when talking to a group of young reporters would say, “Roger, am I getting that right?”), but back in the day, he was the most exacting of literary editors.
Friel wrote to him at an early stage of their relationship, “Your criticism of past stories has been very astute and always accurate and now that my bread and butter depend on my typewriter, I am more than anxious for good guidance.”
Angell, writes Matthews, saw in one submission, “Among the ruins,” much “to admire in the ‘genuine’ tone and ‘feeling’ and hoped that Brian would attempt ‘some revisions and some fairly large re-writing’ to strengthen the story’s ending.”
In another context, Friel said, “I have now come to accept that endings are my weak point.”
But laboring with Angell for a good conclusion to “Among the ruins” was a part of a process, in Matthews’s account in “Beginnings,” that “shored up Brian’s faith in himself as a writer and confirmed American readers’ interest in stories of memory and nostalgia, a thread that would tie in Brian’s Broadway success with ‘Philadelphia, here I come!’ and, much later, ‘Dancing at Lughnasa.’”
“Outside the offices of The New Yorker, its fiction editors were rumored to routinely delete the final paragraph of any story accepted for publication,” novelist Jonathan Franzen wrote in an introduction to a collection of its short stories a decade ago.
There was such a phenomenon known as “the New Yorker story,” he said, adding that “its emphasis on sentence craft and its rejection of neatly tied-up endings, can be understood, in part, as a retreat from the pressure of commercial TV.”
Its best-known practitioners, like John Cheever and John Updike, wrote about the middle-class suburban experience, though “The New Yorker story” was a “stereotype…and inevitably an unfair one—Shawn ran dozens of shtetl stories by I. B. Singer and Irish country stories by Frank O’Connor.”
Of course, O’Connor was from the city and not the “country” as the Irish understand it, but plenty of other writers were. In Treisman’s podcast series for instance, Colm Tóibín in 2017 read and discussed Mary Lavin’s 1961 story “In the Middle of the Fields” (listen here) and, in 2020, Elizabeth Strout chose to feature “Bravado,” a 2007 New Yorker story from William Trevor (listen here), who inherited O’Connor’s mantle as the master of the Irish short story.
The tradition has continued with writers like Claire Keegan and representatives of the most recent Irish generation, such as Sally Rooney and Colin Barrett, whose New Yorker career began soon after the 2013 publication of “Young Skins,” short stories set in his native County Mayo.
