Brennan’s The Springs of Affection – both the collection and the title story – are rightly celebrated by connoisseurs of the spiky and sharp: as William Maxwell put it, “as a study of one kind of unhappy marriage, these stories are surely definitive”. The unhappy marriage is that of Hubert and Rose Derdon, who spend their lives expertly crushing their own prospects of happiness. Rose is the focus for most of the time, but the story I have chosen is after the marriage has ended, when Rose has died, and Hubert is left alone. He finds he cannot express his (non-existent) grief to anyone, even his own sister when she comes to stay. “He could not speak to tell her that it was all only a masquerade and that he was only a sham of a man, and after a long time, when he finally got command of himself, it no longer seemed worthwhile to tell her, and the way it worked out he never told her, and never told anybody.”
First published in the New Yorker, 20 Jul 1963, where it can be read online, and collected in In and Out of Never-Never Land, Scribner, 1969, and The Springs of Affection, Flamingo, 1999; Peninsula Press, 2023
A Personal Anthology 