home salon writing writers University of Adelaide contact Maeve Brennan In the spirit of giving some air to writers whose work has slipped off the shelves, Carol Lefevre read from the title story of a collection entitled The Rose Garden, written by one her favourite writers, Maeve Brennan. Maeve Brennan left Ireland for America in 1934, when she was seventeen. In 1949 she joined the staff of The New Yorker, to which she contributed for more than thirty years. She gathered her short stories in two volumes, In and Out of Never-Never Land and Christmas Eve, from which The Springs of Affection is a posthumous selection. Maeve Brennan was the aunt of the contemporary Irish writer, Roddy Doyle. She died in New York, in 1993, at the age of seventy-six. According to her longtime editor, William Maxwell, "she set great store by W.B. Yeat's statement 'Only that which does not teach, which does not cry out, which does not persuade, which does not condescend, which does not explain, is irresistible.'" An extract from THE ROSE GARDEN by Maeve Brennan During the whole year, there was only one occasion, apart from Mass time, when she willingly went outside the door, and that was in June, on the Feast of the Sacred Heart, when the nuns of the Holy Passion, who occupied a convent on a hill over the town, opened their famous rose garden to the public..... Their rose garden was very old......Surrounded by its own particular wall, and sealed by a narrow wooden door, the gardens lay and flourished some distance behind the convent and it could be reached only by a fenced-in path that led directly out of the back door of the convent chapel. Only the nuns walked there. It was their private place of meditation, and because of its remoteness, and also because of the ancient, wild-armed trees that dominated the old estate, it could not be viewed from any window of the convent. All during the year the nuns walked privately in their garden and opened it to ordinary people only the one day. It is a pity that everyone in the world could not be admitted at one time or another to walk in that garden, best of all to walk there alone, it was so beautiful in the sun. The nuns walked there undisturbed, apparently, and still it was altogether a stirring place, warm red, even burning red, the way it filled the nostrils and left a sweet red taste in the lips, red with too many roses, red as all the passionate instruments of worship, red as the tongue, red as the heart, red and dark, in the slow-gathering summertime, as the treacherous parting in the nuns' flesh, where they feared, and said they feared, the Devil yet might enter in............... But with the coming of June the roses arrived in their hundreds and thousands, some so rich and red that they were called black, and some so pale that they might have been white, and all the depths between - carmine, crimson, blush, rose, scarlet, wine, purple, pink, and blood - and they opened themselves and spread themselves out, arching and dancing their long strong stems, and lay with lips loose and curling under the sun's heat, so that the perfume steamed up out of them, and the air thickened with it, and stopped moving under the weight of it. Mary loved that burning garden. From one summer to the next, she never saw the nuns, nor did she think of them. She had no interest in them and there was not one of them who as much as knew her name. It was their urgent garden she wanted. She craved for her sight of the roses. Every year she made her way up the hill, alone, and went into the garden, and sat down on a stone bench, covering the bench with her skirt so that no one would offer to share it with her. She would have liked to go in the early morning, when few people would be there and she would have a better look at the garden, but she was afraid she would be too much noticed in the emptiness, and so she went in the middle of the afternoon, when the crowd was thickest. Once she had seen the garden in the rain. That was the year she remembered with most pleasure, because the loitering, strolling crowd that usually jammed the narrow paths between the rose beds was discouraged by the weather. She had the garden almost to herself, that time. Wet, the roses were more brilliant than they ever had been. Under the steady fine rain the clay in the beds turned black and rich, and the little green leaves shone, and the roses were washed into such brightness that it seemed as though a great heart had begun to beat under the earth, and was sending living blood up to darken the red roses, and make the pink roses purer. Another year, the day turned out old and all the roses stood distinctly away from each other, and each one looked so delicate and confident in the sharp air that Mary thought she could never forget one of their faces as long as she lived. She had no desire to grow roses herself, or even to have a garden. It was this red garden, walled, secret, and lost to her, that she wanted. She loved the garden more than anyone had ever loved it, but she did not know about the forsythia that came in December to light up the end wall. No one had ever told her that the forsythia bloomed, or how it looked. She would have liked the forsythia very much, although it could not have enveloped her as the roses did. All during the year she thought backwards to her hour in the garden, and forward to it. It was terrible to her, to think that the garden was open to the nuns and closed to her. She spoke to no one about her longing. This was not her only secret, but it was her happiest one. The Rose Garden. Washington, D.C. Counterpoint, 2000. For more on Carol Lefevre click here and/or visit her website by clicking this link; www.carollefevre.com Top