Memories of Maeve

Mary Kenny Twitter Email

August 03 2013 04:04 AM

It was famously laid down by Ernest Hemingway that the first condition for a writer is to have an unhappy childhood. I assumed that Maeve Binchy was the exception to the Hemingway principle, as she always spoke about the idyllic nature of her childhood.

Born to middle-class parents in Dalkey, the adored eldest child of four, praised and supported by her mother and father all their lives – her father sent her early letters from an Israeli kibbutz to the Irish Independent as he thought them so brilliant, and the paper published them too – she never entertained the slightest criticism of her family life, or of the enlightened convent school (the Holy Child, Killiney) to which she was sent.

Yet she did encounter that crucial element of formative misery that makes a writer: as a schoolgirl, and especially as she entered adolescence, she came to feel wretched and rejected.

She would go to a dance – "hops" were a central feature of Irish social life – and absolutely no one would ask her to dance, although she was a good dancer. She hardly ever even got talking to a suitable boy, let alone acquire a boyfriend, at this sensitive teenage time.

She wasn't as bright an academic achiever at school as she might have been, and she was reckoned to be a failure at sport – another mandatory area of social popularity – until her precocious height, at 6ft 1, made her an ace netball striker.

The defeated teams complained that Maeve's surprising height gave her an unfair advantage, and, as Piers Dudgeon notes, they may have had a point: he reveals in this semi-authorised biography that Maeve's real birth date was a year earlier than her 'official' date of birth, which was 1940 (she threw a big party in 2000 to celebrate her 60th). She was actually born in 1939, a fact that, puzzlingly, her mother Maureen concealed from the world.

Maeve was unhappy as an adolescent partly from general teenage angst, but partly because she was a big girl from a young age, and from her mid-teens, never weighed less than 14 stone, and often more. Being stout was the bane of Maeve's life, but she learned to compensate by developing and nurturing her inborn talents for story-telling and entertainment.

Because she knew she'd never be the cleverest or prettiest girl in the class, she became the funniest and the best conversationalist, continually honing her communicative skills. Maeve was indeed one of the most gifted conversationalists I have ever encountered, and one of the first women I ever knew who could command a roomful (let's be honest – a bar-full) of men who would listen to her without ever trying to compete or top her narratives.

Maeve made her way in the world first through teaching, then the kibbutz experience (which provided much material), then, eventually through journalism – though it took her five years to break into the media. She was a fine reporter, but, as Dudgeon observes, what she wrote was often a short story in disguise. In her 20s, her search for love continued, and she was disappointed on several occasions – not an unusual trajectory: we've all been dumped, haven't we? – and according to Molly Parkin's testimony, it was a brief affair with the actor Jack MacGowran which hurt Maeve most deeply.

Maeve wanted to love and be loved, and I knew that someone had inflicted an emotional wound which caused her tears to flow – but also, provided a rich source for the writer in her. A remarkable number of the Binchy short stories are about women who are involved in a doomed relationship with a married man: the woman either gradually realises that the guy will never leave his wife, or, in a couple of poignant narratives, the protagonist ends up in a London abortion clinic dealing with a termination which she will never reveal to her lover, so as to spare him embarrassment.

But for Maeve, everything turned out well, and she met and married Gordon Snell and they were blissfully happy for 35 years: a marriage of true minds, body and soul.

Dudgeon's biography is a conscientious chronicle of Maeve's life, and it is especially authoritative on publishing matters – he was himself a successful publisher for many years. As it is aimed mainly at the British and American markets, the Irish reader will find some of the Irish material a little over-simplified and it might have been wise for the author to employ a fact-checker (as the Americans do).

The late woman's editor of the Irish Independent was Janet McCutcheon, not Mary Anne; the names of Marianne Heron and Elgie Gillespie are misspelled (L.G. Gillespie!); married women were not unknown in Irish journalism in the 1960s (June Levine, Terry Keane, Monica Sheridan, Ruth Kelly were all married and employed) – the "marriage bar" only had statutory application for the civil service and state bodies. The Pill was never unavailable, as a contraceptive, though some doctors wouldn't prescribe it. No Catholic catechism alleged that Protestants were damned to Hell (they were said to be 'in error', and the compliment was returned).

The men executed in 1916 were not "martyrs to a Catholic cause". And I cannot fathom why Kevin Barry, in picture and song, adorns this book – apart from having been a UCD student alongside her uncle in 1918, there is scant connection with Maeve, and the ultra-Republican ballad was not to her taste.

Video of the Day

However, those who loved Maeve and her writing will be grateful that her life has been dutifully documented, and that she has formally taken her place in the canon of Irish literary – and media – life.

An Irish Independent columnist, Mary Kenny was a friend of Maeve Binchy's since 1970, when they were rival women's page editors on Dublin newspapers.