the long winded lady
February 2nd 2024
Wonderful to be back in the West End on a Friday night. It's not quite a glitzy West End show but in the audience of a discussion on the top floor of Foyle's bookshop with the sound of sirens and cycle rickshaws seeping through the walls is a great combination of emotion and intellect.
I'm hearing about Maeve Brennan, an Irish writer who came to Manhattan in the 30s, made a career writing essays for The New Yorker magazine under a pseudonym and lived through arguably the golden age of New York City. Her observational style is described in her own words that I found compelling
As a traveller she is interested in what she sees, but she is not very curious, not even inquisitive. She is not a sightseer, never an explorer. Little out-of-the way places have to be right next door to wherever she happens to be living for her to discover them. She has never felt the urge that drives people to investigate the city from top to bottom. Large areas of city living are a blank to her. She knows next to nothing about the Lower East Side, less about the Up- per East Side, nothing at all about the Upper West Side. She believes that small, inexpensive restaurants are the home fires of New York City. She seldom goes to the theatre or to the movies or to art galleries or museums. She likes parades very much. She wishes we could have music in the streets- strolling violinists, singers, barrel organs without monkeys.
Maeve Brennan, 1969
It's a brilliant twist on the archetype of the flaneur and yet there is a real parallel to street photography. Her writing describes moments in the city, of individuals caught unknowingly in her gaze, distilling the essence of living in a city.
The choice for the cover of her book of a photograph by Helen Levitt seems entirely apposite .