Maeve Brennan’s ‘The Bohemians’ contains my favourite lines of hers: “They were a fine battered pair, marked for life by their ravenous hopes. They both had the glittering, exploring eyes of people who have never learned to control their dreams.” If it’s possible to be compassionately vicious, that assessment is. She was good at people with lives like chicken coops, which just about kept the fox out but very efficiently penned everything else in. But the story I like most is ‘I See You, Bianca’. It’s about Nicholas, and his two-room New York apartment, a “floor through” with a window at each end. Nicholas and his room, and his ailanthus, “New York’s hardship tree”, and his cat Bianca. Brennan’s focus seems to be wholly on the room, and the way Nicholas lives in it, and what he wants from it and from his city. There’s no narrative, just Brennan’s subjectivity, restless, aware, souped-up, into every shadow of the apartment, interrogating someone else’s expectations; but quite soon you recognise that Nicholas’s way of life is doomed. Brennan describes the room like this: “Sometimes it seems to be the anteroom to many other rooms, and sometimes it seems to be the extension of many other rooms. It is like a telescope and at the same time it is like what you see through a telescope.” This is a careful description of her own work, which is both what’s seen and the means of seeing it. All fictions should be instruments like this. Here, she encourages us to use the instrument to look out at Fourth Avenue in the rain, “with the cheerful interest of one who contemplates a puzzle he did not create and is not going to be called on to solve.” Because a view “is where we are not. Where we are is never a view.”
Can this piece, with its nonfictional structure and cleverly abrupt ending, actually be described as fiction? It’s perilously close to being one of her Long Winded Lady pieces for the New Yorker. I’m not sure I care. Though it appears to be more an assessment than a narrative, the tension is appalling, it mounts and mounts. And then there’s a massive resettlement of perception and intention concentrated across the last page or two. That’s enough for me. An event occurs, is recorded and is encouraged to roll over the reader in an unpredicted fashion, leaving no way out. You’re forced up against an understanding about the central character, but you aren’t sure what it is.
First published in The New Yorker, June 11th 1966. Collected in The Rose Garden, Counterpoint, 2001
A Personal Anthology 
“I see you, Bianca” is strikingly beautiful. It isn’t a short story, it is a poem. Each sentence of it is like a painting in a museum, from which you want to step back and savor it at a distance for some time. Precision in use of words, crystal clear ideas, coherence of the plot – everything one wants in a work of fiction is there. Then the emotional impact it leaves! I keep returning to this piece as I keep returning to a favorite Schubert sonata, exquisitely performed.
“I see you, Bianca” was the first Brennan’s work that I have read. I then read everything else that she had published, and was disappointed. If not this story, I wouldn’t be impressed with her writing at all. But if it was the only work of hers, it would be enough reason to place her among the greatest writers of all times.
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