Irony, Trauma, and Compassion: Brendan Behan’s and Maeve Brennan’s Mid-century Short Prose

105 IRONY, TRAUMA, AND COMPASSION: BRENDAN BEHAN’S AND MAEVE BRENNAN’S MID-CENTURY SHORT PROSE Klára Witzany Hutková DOI: https://doi.org/10.14712/2571452X.2024.67.7 Abstract: Born only a few years apart, Brendan Behan (1923) and Maeve Brennan (1917) were children of independent Ireland, raised by Republican families on the opposite banks of the Liffey. Although they probably never met – in Dublin or New York – there are fascinating parallels, as well as contrasts, in their biographies and in their writing. This article compares Behan’s and Brennan’s life-writing short prose, published predominantly in The Irish Press (1951-1957) and The New Yorker (c. 1950s-1960s), respectively. Brennan’s contributions to the “Talk of the Town” column under the pseudonym The Long-Winded Lady, as well as a few other autobiographical pieces, are analysed as a counterpart to Behan’s Irish Press column. The essay focuses on three common areas in the selected writing: irony as Brennan’s and Behan’s response to their positions of a female and working-class writer, respectively, their revisiting of personal and collective memories of traumatic moments in modern Irish history, and a socially aware and compassionate chronicling of the lives of ordinary people. Keywords: life writing, working-class writing, women’s writing, Maeve Brennan, The New Yorker, The Long-Winded Lady, flâneuse, Brendan Behan, travel writing, The Irish Press, modern Irish history Introduction Brendan Behan and Maeve Brennan both had interesting family backgrounds with some shared aspects, as well as many crucial differences. While Brennan was raised in middleto upper-middle-class conditions, Behan proudly identified with his working-class roots. Where Brennan’s childhood memories bring her back to the suburban area of South Dublin, Behan describes tenement housing on the opposite bank of the Liffey. In her late teens, Brennan moved with her family to Washington, D.C. as the daughter of the first envoy of the Irish Free State to the Klára Witzany Hutková 106 United States. She completed her high school and university education there, and by the 1950s was a writer-in-residence for The New Yorker magazine. An elegant and sophisticated urbanite, Brennan became a New York flâneuse, as well as a keeper of memories of the turbulent times that she had experienced in Ireland as a child. Six years younger, Behan lived in Dublin until 1939, when he was arrested on a mission for the IRA and sentenced to a borstal in England. This began a longer series of incarcerations outside of as well as in Ireland, during which time he would gather inspiration, read, write, and make useful acquaintances in the literary circles. In the 1950s, Behan established himself as a writer, playwright, poet, as well as a journalist in Dublin and abroad; the start of his literary career can be traced to his time in Paris in the late 1940s, where he was exposed to an artistically fruitful combination of contemporary intellectuals’ company, higher freedom of the press, but also material poverty.1 These different social contexts (and possibly also their gender) are reflected in the way that the writing of Brennan and Behan has been marketed. While the book covers for Behan’s published novels and plays would often make direct references to his alcoholism and bohemian reputation, bordering on stage Irishness, Brennan’s collected prose has been consistently published with references to elegance and sophistication. Especially the more recent covers often show her posing in a lavishly furnished living room on one of a several photographs taken by the photographer Karl Bissinger in 1948. The fact that Brennan, too, struggled with alcohol, as well as with keeping a balanced budget, is not thematised. Of course, she never became the celebrity that Behan was, and her public conduct was immeasurably more controlled. As Brennan’s biographer Angela Bourke explains, Bissinger himself thought of her as “watchful and disdainful.”2 There is also sadness about her on most of the publicly available photographs, including those taken by Bissinger. In different ways, both types of book covers emphasise the less positive elements in Behan’s and Brennan’s lives. However, the writing analysed in this article comes from a promising time of prolific activity and success for both (the 1950s for Behan and the 1950s-1960s for Brennan). Next to being commissioned to write a column in The Irish Press in 1954, Behan’s plays The Quare Fellow (1954, Dublin) and The Hostage (1958, London) were produced for the first time, and his autobiographical novel Borstal Boy (1958) was published. Over in the US, Brennan 1 For details, see Deirdre McMahon’s work on the subject, including her essay in the present volume. 2 Angela Bourke, Maeve Brennan: Wit, Style and Tragedy. An Irish Writer in New York (London: Pimlico, 2005), 147. Irony, Trauma, and Compassion 107 became a valued member of The New Yorker’s staff. Both also got married – Brennan in 1954 and Behan in 1955. Despite her marital unhappiness, which soon lead to a divorce, Brennan wrote actively until the early 1970s, when her life became increasingly erratic. She started suffering from mental breakdowns, moving “in and out of reality,”3 as her life-long editor and friend William Maxwell phrased it. When she died in a mental institution in 1993, she had been largely forgotten (although the writer herself seems to have hallucinated that she had become a regular Irish Press contributor towards the end of her life).4 Behan’s alcoholism and the related health issues ended his career a decade earlier than Brennan’s. Since 1962, he was no longer able to physically write, taping his work – later prepared for publication by his friend and editor Rae Jeffs – instead. Suffering from severe diabetes which brought him to hospital several times, Behan died from liver failure in 1964. According to John Brannigan, “celebrity killed him.”5 Despite their tragic ends, Brennan’s and Behan’s writing is characterised by wit, humour, and compassion with which they observe people around them. Transgressing various boundaries, especially those of gender and class, both also return to difficult memories of turbulent times in modern Irish history. Finally, their writing consistently questions the current state of society and subtly criticises social injustice. This essay examines these themes in Behan’s and Brennan’s selected life-writing prose. Unlike Behan, who is mostly famous for his plays and for Borstal Boy, Brennan’s almost entire oeuvre consists of her New Yorker contributions – a posthumously discovered novella, The Visitor (2000), and her early pieces for Harper’s Bazaar magazine are the only exceptions. Brennan’s short prose has been collected and published several times in her lifetime and after. This article draws on two volumes of the selected writing: The Long-Winded Lady: Notes from the New Yorker (1969) and, to a lesser extent, The Springs of Affection (1997). While the former is a selection of Brennan’s brief essays published in The New Yorker’s “Talk of the Town” column under her pseudonym The Long-Winded Lady, the latter contains short stories, including brief autobiographical sketches of her childhood in Ireland. Brannigan’s newly published collection of Behan’s newspaper contributions, A Bit of a Writer: Brendan Behan’s Collected Short Prose (2023), is made use of as the counterpart. Unlike the assorted volume The LongWinded Lady, this is a larger, chronologically organised book. It presents Behan’s 3 William Maxwell, “Introduction,” in Maeve Brennan, The Springs of Affection: Stories of Dublin (Boston and New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1998), 10. 4 Bourke, Maeve Brennan, 275. 5 John Brannigan, “Introduction,” in A Bit of a Writer: Brendan Behan’s Collected Short Prose, ed. John Brannigan (Dublin: The Lilliput Press, 2023), xvii. Klára Witzany Hutková 108 column and other occasional pieces, predominantly published in The Irish Press, from the period between 1951 and 1957. As such, A Bit of a Writer represents a more unified corpus than the various existing volumes of Brennan’s work do (while also containing significantly more material than Jeffs’s earlier selection of Behan’s Irish Press pieces published as Hold Your Hour and Have Another in 1963). Brennan’s writing for The New Yorker is more varied than Behan’s journalistic output, including a large number of short stories, and it is generally not organised in chronological order in published collections. Behan’s Irish Press contributions follow a standardised pattern in terms of style and length. Only a few pages long and containing subheadings, they can be described as brief life-writing essays as well as social commentaries and, in many cases, travel writing. A suitable counterpart to these are Brennan’s Long-Winded pieces. They too were intended for a specific column, and signed by a persona created for the purpose. A distinct style and length are carried over from one piece to another. These contributions span a slightly longer period – the 1950s to the early 1970s. Additionally, The New Yorker also published a few life-writing pieces by Brennan in the early 1950s, where she returns to her childhood in Ireland. These are brief, written from a first-person perspective, and signed by her (as opposed to the Long-Winded writing), which makes them another suitable counterpart to Behan’s Irish Press prose. Serious Writers Brennan and Behan both came from Irish Republican families where much value was placed on literature. Behan’s father Stephen was “a passionate reader of literature,”6 as Brannigan has phrased it, while his wife Kathleen introduced Brendan and his siblings to a variety of Irish folk songs. Behan quotes from some of the songs from the family repertoire in his articles, as well as bringing attention to the fact that his uncle, Kathleen’s brother Peadar Kearney, was the author of the Irish national anthem. Working in domestic service for Maude Gonne MacBride, Kathleen was also acquainted with people of importance in the arts and in politics, especially from the revolutionary circles.7 In both families, writing was also intertwined with politics. Maeve’s mother Úna Brennan, née Anastasia Bolger, had been an active member of the non-sectarian feminist organisation Inghinidhe na hÉireann before becoming a housewife, and it is likely that she had been contributing to the “Women Ways” column of the newspaper Echo.8 Robert was 6 Brannigan, “Introduction,” xiv. 7 Brannigan, “Introduction,” xiv. It is thus possible that she had met Brennan’s parents, although no evidence of this seems to have been preserved. 8 Bourke, Maeve Brennan, 11, 17-20. Irony, Trauma, and Compassion 109 a journalist, writer, playwright, and diplomat. He was also one of the founding members and the general manager of The Irish Press, which he left in 1933 when Éamon de Valera appointed him Secretary of the Irish Legation in Washington, D.C.9 However, he contributed to Irish newspapers throughout his life, including The Irish Press.10 Despite these family backgrounds, Brennan’s and Behan’s prose expresses selfdoubt as far as their own identity as writers is concerned, mostly in connection to their gender and social class, respectively. In her biography of Behan, Jeffs remembers suddenly discerning insecurity behind his boisterous demeanour as they were about to publish Borstal Boy: “I had not realised, until this moment, how real was his lack of confidence in himself as a writer, or how much it mattered to him what people thought of his work.”11 Both Brennan and Behan treat the issue with irony and by way of subtle, witty remarks, as this section of the article will illustrate. In the 1950s, both established themselves as respected writers. Each had written and published some work already in the 1940s and talent, as well as acquaintances, played a role in the building of their careers. In 1951, Behan started contributing to The Irish Press, and he was offered a regular column two years later. Brannigan points out that Jim McGuinness, the editor behind this decision, knew Behan from the Curragh camp, where both had been interred in the 1940s for their IRA activities. However, Brannigan also highlights the young man’s previous success: “It is evidence of the impact that Behan had already had as a young writer that McGuinness chose to ask him alongside more established writers such as Lennox Robinson and Francis MacManus.”12 Over the Atlantic, Brennan’s career had followed a not too different trajectory. The writer was headhunted by The New Yorker in 1949, where she remained for the rest of her career. Brennan had previously written for the female-led fashion magazine Harper’s Bazaar, a position that might have been offered to her due to family connections.13 The New Yorker was a prestigious weekly magazine, focusing on a variety of topics and genres, including new fiction. Brennan’s period of prolific writing – the 1950s and 1960s – partly overlaps with that of Behan who, as Brannigan has phrased it, “was at his most confident and conscientious as a writer”14 in the former decade. However, Ireland was extremely conservative at the time, which manifested itself, among else, in 9 Bourke, Maeve Brennan, 111-14. 10 Bourke, Maeve Brennan, 105, 198. 11 Rae Jeffs, Brendan Behan: Man and Showman (London: Hutchinson & Co, 1966), 59. 12 Brannigan, “Introduction,” xi-xii. 13 Bourke, Maeve Brennan, 138. 14 Brannigan, “Introduction,” xii. Klára Witzany Hutková 110 vigorous censorship of literature. Despite being based primarily in Dublin, he felt that “Dubliners were slow to recognize his talents,”15 according to Brannigan. Behan became a celebrated author and playwright internationally, and he would travel abroad to France, Britain, and the US to see his plays staged or to negotiate writing contracts.16 In contrast, Brennan’s fiction was primarily intended for and read by an American audience. Her short prose would first have been published in the US, and it was only occasionally republished in Ireland during her lifetime,17 the country fully claiming the writer as its own only after her death. In the US, however, she was considered an Irish writer, despite spending her entire adult life in and around New York City and travelling abroad only sporadically. Rather than their nationality, it was Brennan’s gender and Behan’s workingclass background that placed them in somewhat insecure positions in terms of identity as writers, especially at the beginning of their careers. Despite her social privilege, Brennan was a woman in a male profession. While she was lucky to have a supportive office atmosphere, The New Yorker’s “subscribers and editors were mostly men, although women read it and wrote for it,”18 as Bourke summarises. She was employed there when the magazine came under attack from the critics Tom Wolfe and Ben Yagoda in the mid-1960s, who had accused it of catering to the suburban middle-class, expressing strong reservations about the quality of its female staff.19 In 1954 (the year when Behan started publishing his Irish Press column), Brennan invented the persona of the Long-Winded Lady. According to Bourke, she might have chosen the pseudonym “to draw ironic attention to the prevailing feeling that women talk too much,”20 thus responding to gendered stereotypes that could be used to diminish her work. In contrast to Behan, she also positioned herself as an upper-middle-class urbanite by referring to herself as a “lady,” as well as through the style and content of her writing more generally. The Lady frequents elegant Manhattan cafés, she knows fashion and dresses with taste, and her language is highly elegant. The readers learn very little about her as a person, besides the fact that she loves to read, write, and people-watch. Behan, on the other hand, shares many biographical and personal details about himself in his prose. 15 Brannigan, “Introduction,” xii. 16 Although it is unlikely that he met Brennan when staying in New York, they were almost certainly located in the same city for at least some time. 17 Bourke, Maeve Brennan, 198, 267. 18 Bourke, Maeve Brennan, 163. 19 Bourke, Maeve Brennan, 190-91; Ann Peters, “A Traveler in Residence: Maeve Brennan and the Last Days of New York,” Women’s Studies Quarterly 33, no. 3/4 (2005): 66-67. 20 Bourke, Maeve Brennan, 191. Irony, Trauma, and Compassion 111 He also commonly engages with people, reporting his interactions with friends and strangers alike. In contrast, the Lady observes those around her from a distance, becoming a new generation of the flâneuse. Next to referring to such feminine consumerist activities as clothes shopping, she demonstrates her good education and cultural capital (such as by referring to canonical writers and works of literature), which strengthens her position as a narrator. Finally, a specific sense of irony and self-irony is a typical feature of the Long-Winded writing. It is soft, in-between-the-lines, yet subversive. Doubling down on the stereotype that women not only speak too much, but what they say is also of little consequence, some of the pieces cleverly push the boundaries of how much personal musing the readers will tolerate. For instance, in “A Young Lady with a Lap” (1966), we encounter the narrator closely observing a young girl in a “fluffy white mink stole around her shoulders and bosom.”21 The Lady wonders about the girl’s transparent handbag, containing “nothing except a gold lipstick” (66): She must have had a pocket in the stole, where she kept her money. In that case, why not put the lipstick in the pocket and leave the handbag at home? She must have had a very well considered reason for carrying the handbag, and it would have to be a better reason than that the handbag matched the shoes. I wish I knew what her reason was. And then, of course, there may not have been a pocket in the stole. (68) Presenting herself as somewhat ridiculous by sharing thoughts that many of her readers will consider too trivial, the Lady also demonstrates her skill with language. She describes the girl’s “tight white crepe dress” as “much whiter than flesh,” while in the handbag, her lipstick “roll[s] around like dice” (66). In her introduction to The Long-Winded Lady: Notes from the New Yorker, Belinda McKeon talks about an “act of rebellion” in this context: She made no apologies for her nosiness, and she made no apologies for the defiantly quotidian detail of her errands, of her routes on foot, of the random thoughts and wonderings and memories which popped into her head and back out again.22 21 Maeve Brennan, “A Young Lady with a Lap,” in The Long-Winded Lady: Notes from the New Yorker (Dublin: The Stinging Fly, 2017), 66. Further references to this edition are given in parentheses in the text. 22 Belinda McKeon, “Introduction,” in Maeve Brennan, The Long-Winded Lady, xiii. Klára Witzany Hutková 112 Navigating her insecure position as a professional writer for a well-established, primarily male magazine, Brennan engaged with gendered stereotypes about women in a creative and subversive way, bringing attention to them while also proudly claiming her femininity. In contrast, Behan’s somewhat precarious position as a writer was tied to his working-class background, and his work thematises a double identity, in his case that of a trained housepainter and a talented young writer. Sometimes, Behan searches for a validation that writing is a legitimate and worth-while activity for an adult man. He receives such reassurance when visiting the Aran Islands: “Nowhere else have I found it so easy to sit down at the typewriter, and work away, without feeling that I was in any way regarded as a criminal lunatic of idle tendencies.”23 In this 1953 piece titled “These Fishermen Publicise Gaelic at Its Best,” Behan feels encouraged in his writing by the value that people on the islands place on storytelling, and by extension, literature. In other situations, writing is also seen as a respectable activity, but people doubt that Behan himself engages in it in a serious manner. In “Journey to the Jewel of Wicklow” (1952), he explains to a fellow passenger the purpose of his trip to the country: “I’m going to – er – write.”24 Both he and his interlocutor express uncertainty about this, and the latter starts questioning him: “Write what? Do you mean you will write today? Tomorrow?” Oh, any day, now. “Tomorrow, probably.” “What sort of thing will you write?” “An article for a magazine in Paris.” “Paris, hey?” “Oh, and a Ballad Maker’s Saturday Night.” His face improved. “Really.” But then suspicious. “You mean the radio programme. Are you sure?” “Oh, honest, sir. I have a contract form here in my pocket. I do it often, sir. Really, I do, sir.”25 Except on the Aran Islands, a writer is presumably someone from a higher social stratum, and Behan here implicitly thematises this prejudice. His reaction at the end seems exaggerated, and the triple use of “sir” reads as a joke at the fellow passenger’s expense. 23 Brendan Behan, “These Fishermen Publicise Gaelic at Its Best,” in A Bit of a Writer: Brendan Behan’s Collected Short Prose (Dublin: The Lilliput Press, 2023), 31. 24 Brendan Behan, “Journey to the Jewel of Wicklow,” in A Bit of a Writer, 17. 25 Behan, “Journey to the Jewel of Wicklow,” 17. Irony, Trauma, and Compassion 113 As in Brennan’s writing, the writer responds to any potential disrespect with irony. Not by accident does Brannigan’s collection take into its title a part of the dialogue in “To the Mountains Bound” (1951). Commencing a new job as a house painter, Behan is called by his boss “a bit of a writer.”26 In his head, the former begins to cite a positive review of his previously published work, word by word: “Mr Behan handles a delicate subject with sensitivity and taste […] above all he has inherited the virtue of his race of writing as he talks and talking as he sings in word arrangements, sensuous, syntactical.”27 He has even memorised the full bibliographic information of the review. If this makes the young writer seem a little ridiculous, his Irish audience might consider the reviewer’s description of their “race” even more so. The multi-layered irony permeating this section results in ambiguity where Behan is able to complain about the lack of appreciation that Ireland has for his talent, praise his own writing, and amuse his readers at the same time. In Brennan’s case, even a decidedly positive response to her work provoked a playful, yet dismissive response. When an enthusiastic reader, Mr. Boyce, wrote to The New Yorker in 1959 asking for more stories by this writer, she deflected the implied homage. Informing him that “poor Miss Brennan died,”28 she wrote a full letter in response, signing it “William (Bill) Maxwell.” Poking fun at both her gender and nationality, she reports having “shot herself in the back with the aid of a small hand mirror at the foot of the main altar of St Patrick’s Cathedral on Shrove Tuesday.” (5-6) After adding more details, “Maxwell” makes an offer: I have a lot of live authors, Mr. Boyce, if you would like to ask about any of them, if there is anything you would like to know about any of them, I’ll be happy to oblige. Most of them have studio portraits, ready for framing, some life size, some even en famille, as we say around here […]. (6) Here, Brennan demonstrates what Bourke refers to as “a finely tuned sense of the ridiculous,”29 while also constantly diminishing herself and her (allegedly posthumous) achievement. Will there be life-size portraits of Brennan when she actually dies? 1959 was also the year of her divorce. With no children and the majority of relatives living in Ireland, Brennan may have felt it unlikely that any of her portraits would be “en famille.” Considering how she will be recalled, her 26 Brendan Behan, “To the Mountains Bound,” in A Bit of a Writer, 3. 27 Behan, “To the Mountains Bound,” 3. 28 Maxwell, “Introduction,” 5. Further references are given in parentheses in the text. 29 Bourke, Maeve Brennan, 25. Klára Witzany Hutková 120 Amused, Behan admires both sides’ determined effort to bridge the language gap. The piece also documents in vivid colours the meeting of two minority cultures that have by now been largely transformed, that of the rural Gaeltacht with that of the Irish Travellers. In stories with an urban setting, Behan devotes much space to reports of conversations between himself and the characters Bard, Crippen, Mrs Brenning,59 and Maria Concepta. Meeting in pubs, these are veterans and their widows, and Behan is a listener to a larger extent than elsewhere. As Brannigan observes, “[t]here is a prevailing sense of nostalgia for the receding generations and communities of the early twentieth century – the rebels of 1916, the veterans of the Boer War and the First World War,”60 in his writing. Told with many interruptions from those around the table, key historical events are recalled through short personal anecdotes and reminiscences. Left out of the textbooks, such stories and perspectives would have been lost when this generation was gone, save for the writing of those like Behan. Jeffs remembers: “He was always passionately interested in people and would remember how they acted, talked, looked and smelt down to the very last detail; and his memory was far more accurate than any camera.”61 Both Behan and the Long-Winded Lady often turn their gaze to the mundane, marginal, and overlooked, which they describe with meticulous attention to detail. As Brannigan explains with respect to the former, he was “a collector and teller of stories,” valuing those about famous people to the same extent as those about his family and neighbours.62 This is even more true about Brennan, who seemed genuinely disinterested in the celebrities that she occasionally met in Manhattan. “I like seeing movie stars as I go on my way around the city,”63 she explains in “Movie Stars at Large” (1960). But to her, their value is in casting a long shadow: “I like recognising them and knowing who they are and knowing that just by being where I am they make me invisible – a face in the crowd, another pair of staring eyes.”64 Hiding in the glow of a film star, the Lady can carry on with her flânerie unobserved. Unlike Behan, who interacts with people in a deliberate manner, often and with enjoyment, Brennan’s flâneuse strives to remain out of sight. 59 This is Behan’s nickname for a Mrs Brennan, who seems to be a soldier’s widow and bears no resemblance to Maeve Brennan, her mother, or her sisters Emer and Derry. A different woman with this surname, a Mrs John Brennan, also appears briefly in “Advice from an Emigrant” (1955), in A Bit of a Writer, 277-79, but there is no connection to Maeve Brennan’s family either. 60 Brannigan, “Introduction,” xiii. 61 Jeffs, Brendan Behan, 17. 62 Brannigan, “Introduction,” xiii-iv. 63 Maeve Brennan, “Movie Stars at Large,” in The Long-Winded Lady, 88. 64 Brennan, “Movie Stars at Large,” 88. Irony, Trauma, and Compassion 121 Both Behan and Brennan also commented on the rebuilding of their respective cities, once more with attention to people and their lives. Brennan conscientiously mapped the tearing down of old buildings in New York, expressing distrust and fear concerning the city’s ongoing metamorphosis. A constant threat that one of the Lady’s favourite cafés or restaurants will be forced to close down, due to the whole street being demolished, keeps hanging in the air in many pieces. She also worries about the people currently living in the city, drawing attention to the lonely and the poor. There is often a stark contrast between the fashionable establishments the Lady frequents and the surrounding New York streets. She keeps her distance from beggars and strange individuals walking by, but she often writes about them, thematising guilt over the social gap between herself and the less fortunate. In “Giving Money in the Street” (1960), she passionately argues against those who withhold money for fear of being deceived: I say that I would rather give the quarter and walk on free than not give it and pay out the rest of the day, or even an hour or ten minutes of the day, in doubt: should I have given it after all, the chances are surely fifty percent against the person’s being a fraud, and so on.65 In Behan’s column, much less attention is paid to beggars and people without a home. However, injustice is thematised throughout, especially as regards the working class. In “A Word for the Brave Conductor” (1955), the writer takes a stance in favour of bus drivers and dustmen: “I’m sorry to say that all of us are inclined to be unreasonable with public servants who are, after all, not paid to be public doormats.”66 Behan also saw the modernisation of Dublin, especially the slum areas, in a positive light and as a necessity. In “Dublin Is Grand in the Sun” from 1955, he explains: The new houses at St Anne’s Estate in Clontarf made me feel so proud that when a foreign newspaperman asked me what he should see I wanted to bring him here. (He wasn’t having any; it wasn’t what he came for.)67 The fact that visitors rather prefer the status quo is also mentioned in “What Are They at with the Rotunda?” (1954), where Behan counters: “Let them tear the whole lot down and build new modern flats for the people.”68 Arguing that the 65 Maeve Brennan, “Giving Money in the Street,” in The Long-Winded Lady, 142. 66 Brendan Behan, “A Word for the Brave Conductor,” in A Bit of a Writer, 312. 67 Brendan Behan, “Dublin Is Grand in the Sun,” in A Bit of a Writer, 242. 68 Brendan Behan, “What Are They at with the Rotunda?” in A Bit of a Writer, 134. Klára Witzany Hutková 122 Dubliners’ welfare should be reason enough not to conserve the city as a history museum, Behan also brings attention to the social inequality that is present in its current architecture: The Wide Streets Commissioners built well in their day for a class that only allowed the ancestors of the later inhabitants into their beautiful homes as servants. But let Ireland, building for its own people, do the best that modern technique can do for them.69 Different delineations appear in Brennan’s and Behan’s writing about people and urban architecture. While the former is usually separated from the less fortunate by an invisible wall, the latter doesn’t hesitate to engage in conversation with anybody he meets. However, both writers share a focus on the mundane and also on the unjust, and although expressed in different ways, their sense of compassion is comparable. Conclusion Just as their parents may have known each other from the Dublin Republican circles (although there is no evidence of this as yet), Behan theoretically could have met Brennan when he visited New York in the 1960s. While such an encounter probably never took place, this essay has attempted to create a conversation between their writing, similar yet different in a variety of aspects. Through their use of irony, Brennan and Behan both subtly thematise their insecure positions as writers – the former as a woman, albeit socially privileged, in a predominantly male profession, and the latter as a working-class Irishman. Both grew up in Republican families, which partly shaped their experience of Ireland, especially as children. Some of the writing addresses personal and collective memories of traumatic events in modern Irish history, especially relating to the revolutionary period (personal particularly in Brennan’s case, and collective in Behan’s). Brennan’s prose also comments with disapproval on the Catholic educational system in Ireland. Most significantly, the two writers share a deep interest in other people and their lives, with special attention to ordinary and marginalised groups and individuals. While Behan would chronicle interactions between Dubliners, including war veterans and those he met during his travels around Ireland and Europe, Brennan focused on New Yorkers, reporting mostly from a distance, yet meticulously and with compassion. 69 Behan, “What Are They at with the Rotunda?” 134. Irony, Trauma, and Compassion 123 Acknowledgement I would like to thank Mike Stoddart for bringing my attention to Maeve Brennan and for providing invaluable insights into her writing. BIBLIOGRAPHY Behan, Brendan. “Dublin Is Grand in the Sun.” In A Bit of a Writer: Brendan Behan’s Collected Short Prose, edited by John Brannigan, 241-42. Dublin: The Lilliput Press, 2023. 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