A New Yorker with Hartford Roots
Written by Jeffrey Partridge
“Wherever I go in the world, I make a point of demonstrating that there is scarcely a single event of historic importance…that I cannot successfully link to Hartford, Connecticut.”
– Brendan Gill, “The Center of My Universe”
Fiction Forged in Hartford
Brendan Gill’s name is best known in New York City, but his fiction owes its greatest debt to Hartford.
Gill’s association with New York was deep. He was a New Yorker magazine staff writer for six decades, from 1936 until his death in 1997. His most popular books – he wrote more than 20 – are Here at the New Yorker and A New York Life. He reviewed New York theater and maintained a column on architecture for The New Yorker. As a preservationist, he championed important New York landmarks and is credited, together with Jacqueline Kennedy Onasis, with saving Grand Central Station. In 1987, Onasis helped establish the Brendan Gill Prize to annually recognize a singular work that “best captures the spirit and energy of New York City.” Upon his death, The New York Times called Gill “a pillar of New York’s civic, social and literary life.”
Gill’s other books of nonfiction include biographies of Tallulah Bankhead, Cole Porter, Charles Lindbergh, and Frank Lloyd Wright. But according to his New Yorker colleague Adam Gopnik, Gill’s “heart belonged in his fiction.”
And his fiction – its themes, characters, and preoccupations – was forged in Hartford.
Gill’s Hartford Roots
Gill was born in Hartford on October 4, 1914. His childhood was a vestige of Hartford’s Gilded Era glory, when Hartford was considered one of the wealthiest cities in the nation. Gill was raised in an upper-middle class Irish-Catholic family. His childhood home was a large Victorian with a housekeeper on Prospect Avenue, a street lined with elms and maples and traversed by trolleys.
Gill was one of six children born to Dr. Michael Henry Richard Gill and Elizabeth Pauline Duffy Gill. His father was a popular Hartford physician with a state-wide reputation, and his mother was a homemaker who died when Gill was seven years old, a tragic event that would figure prominently in his fiction.
Gill began publishing poetry in Hartford at the age of ten, and he was editor of literary magazines at all three Connecticut schools he attended: Noah Webster School, Kingswood School, and Yale. His parents were his earliest literary influences. His mother taught him the beauty of the Irish cadence through poems and songs she learned from her Irish immigrant parents (Meanor). His father’s influence was a bit more mercenary – Dr. Gill would pay his children to memorize Shakespeare and other classical writers at the established rate of one dollar per line (Meanor). Writing, but especially writing for a living, was clearly Gill’s destiny.
Inventing Highlands, Connecticut (a.k.a. Hartford)
Elements of this Hartford upbringing appear regularly in Gill’s fiction, including Irishness, Catholicism, loss of mother figures, streets lined with elms and maples, streetcars (once ubiquitous in Hartford), prep schools, and an awareness of the role of domestic help in a privileged childhood.
His earliest literary successes were stories published in The New Yorker and The Saturday Evening Post. The early stories from the Post are set outside of “Highlands, Connecticut.” With some literary detective work, we can establish that Highlands is Gill’s pseudonym for Hartford and that the subject matter of these stories is drawn from his life.
In “Together,” a 15-year-old girl writes home from summer camp in the Berkshires, accusing her father of sending her away because she reminds him painfully of her recently deceased mother. The trip home takes her to “Highlands” by way of the Torrington bridge, Avon, Canton, and finally to her house on Prospect Avenue. Highland Avenue is adjacent to Prospect Avenue, where Gill grew up, so this may be the source of the pseudonym.
The story most directly reflecting on Hartford is “All the Right People,” published in the Post when Gill was 26. The story taps an ambivalence toward the protagonist’s hometown of Highlands that is resolved in the end. Webb is at the end of his freshman year at Yale, where he has gradually distanced himself from his “Podunk” friends from Highlands, associating with classmates who came through Andover, Taft, and Hotchkiss rather than his lowly prep school “Kingsforest” (recall that Gill went to Kingswood School in West Hartford), and idolizing those who associate with “all the right people.” In the end, Webb visits his dance instructor, whose New Haven home and family remind him of all the people he grew up with in Highlands. With a little shaming from the dance instructor, Webb finally reflects with appreciation on his hometown and its people.
Winner of the National Book Award for Fiction
Gill’s first novel, The Trouble of One House, won the National Book Award for Fiction in 1951. The novel is set in a large home in an unnamed city on a prominent street lined with elms and maples and traversed by streetcars. The household comprises a doctor who is well-known in the city, his dying wife named Elizabeth, their three young children (the youngest is a boy aged seven), and a hired housekeeper. The city is not named in the novel and is therefore just a fictional place, but the parallels with Gill’s personal life story suggest that he is drawing from his Hartford past.
The novel is a remarkable study of the vortex caused by a beloved young mother’s slow and untimely death. Like William Faulkner’s As I Lay Dying, but without the narrative shifts, each character’s reactions to Elizabeth’s death are explored in psychological depth that reveal hidden anxieties, strained relationships, and some surprising secrets. The quality of Gill’s prose and storytelling make this an engaging novel that should have stood the test of time, yet it is unfortunately no longer in print and is difficult to obtain. The two chapters reproduced in this anthology explore the family tensions in the immediate aftermath of Elizabeth’s death.
The Day the Money Stopped and Ways of Loving
Gill’s other major works of fiction are the novel The Day the Money Stopped (1957) and a book of short stories with two novellas called Ways of Loving (1974).
In The Day the Money Stopped, the tension between New York City and Yankee Connecticut that runs through Gill’s fiction animates the novel. Richard Morrow is taking over his father’s law practice in New Haven, a place he and his sister Kathie never dreamed of leaving. On the other hand, their brother Charlie found the town limiting and mired in tradition, so he sought his fortune and pleasure in “wicked” New York City.
Reviews of the novel were positive. S. N. Behrman said in The New Yorker that the novel was equal to the works of Ibsen but with more “wit and wild humor.” However, upon rereading his own novel in 1995, Gill called it “unsatisfactory” and drew two tongue-in-cheek conclusions: “favorable reviews are even more likely to be inaccurate than unfavorable ones, and time is not on an author’s side – only excellence is.”
Whether literary excellence was on Gill’s side is, of course, a matter of opinion. The National Book Award judges saw it in The Trouble of One House. Others see it in his short fiction collection Ways of Loving: Gale’s Contemporary Novelists describes Gill’s short stories as his “major accomplishments,” and Gopnik predicted that Ways of Loving would be Gill’s lasting literary legacy. To facilitate that legacy, five stories from Ways of Loving are included in this anthology with introductory notes.
With some alterations, Brendan Gill’s childhood home at 735 Prospect Avenue stands to this day. And with some alterations, that Hartford setting lives on in his fiction.
Anthology Selections
from The Trouble of One House (Chapters 22 and 23)
from Ways of Loving
“The Knife”
“The Mischievous Sinfulness of Mother Coakley”
“The Triumph”
“Country Fire”
“Something You Just Don’t Do in a Club”