I have edited all four of Maeve Brennan’s posthumous books. While the others drew on previously published material, most of it from The New Yorker, this book marks the first time I’ve worked on her prose in typescript. I approached it not as a textual scholar but as a trade book editor; that means I cut a repetition here, identified a speaker there, and made a number of small, silent, thrice-considered changes throughout. There were no major cruxes, yet I worried over some of what I did, and still have many questions that I wish I could ask the author, including the very biggest: Why did you never publish this? Was it too short for a first book? Too long for a magazine story? Did you misplace your only carbon of the original? Did you even make a carbon? Or did you just move on, having so many stories yet to tell?
William Maxwell, Maeve’s editor at The New Yorker, told me that she was a shrewd judge of her own prose, never showed him work in progress, and never submitted a story until she could stand by every word of it. I don’t know — maybe no one living knows — her own shrewd judgment on The Visitor. I can only hope that it was kind, and that she would have stood by this, the published version.
Christopher Carduff