Joseph Payne Brennan (1918-1990)-Part One

Author, Poet, Essayist, Bibliographer, Editor, Publisher, Newspaper Staff Worker, Librarian
Born December 20, 1918, Bridgeport, Connecticut
Died January 28, 1990, New Haven, Connecticut

Brennan: Young Life, Young Writer

Joseph Payne Brennan, Jr., was born on December 20, 1918, in Bridgeport, Connecticut, to Joseph Payne Brennan, Sr., (1868-1938) and Nellie Wilkerson Holborn Brennan (1895-1992). He had one older sister, Loetta Mary Brennan (1916-2011), who long outlived him. As you can see by their dates, the Brennan men lived their allotted threescore and ten, while the women made it into their nineties. Nellie Brennan lived long enough in fact to bury her only son. There is a certain sadness and an ineffable sense of something lost and irretrievable in the life of that son, the author Joseph Payne Brennan. He saw it and knew it himself, and it showed in the poems, stories, and interviews he left for us after he died.

Brennan's career as a writer began when he was a freshman in high school and first fell under what he called "the all-powerful spell of [Edgar Allan] Poe." That spell set him off on a quest for everything he could find in the field of supernatural horror and fantasy. His quest led him in about 1934 or 1935 to Weird Tales, then edited by Farnsworth Wright and dominated by the magazine's Big Three authors, H.P. Lovecraft, Robert E. Howard, and Clark Ashton Smith. Brennan read every issue of Weird Tales--every issue he could find anyway--from front cover to back, over and over again. "I think my life's goal at that time," he recalled, "was to become a Weird Tales contributor." Money was tight in the Great Depression, though, and gathering enough to pay for a typewriter was out of the question. Instead, Brennan the teenaged author hand wrote his stories (one of which he had entitled "The White Wolf"), and that's how he submitted them to Weird Tales. Not surprisingly, Farnsworth Wright showed no interest. Even Lovecraft had a hard time marketing his handwritten stories and was usually persuaded to type them or let someone else do it for him.

Joseph Payne Brennan attended St. Boniface School and New Haven High School (then or now called James Hillhouse High School) in his hometown. In his senior yearbook, he stated his simple plan for the future for all to see: "Intend to write." In 1936, without anything to show up until then for his freelance efforts, Brennan entered Junior College of Commerce, now Quinnipiac University, in Hamden, Connecticut. His college career was cut short, though, with the death of his father in 1938. Brennan went to work to support himself, his mother, and his sister Loetta. He landed a job as an $11-a-week office boy, often working late and always six days a week. That left little time for writing, but he finally made a sale in the form of a poem, "When Snow Was Hung," published in 1940 in the Christian Science Monitor. By then he was working on a New Haven newspaper as a steno clerk.

In late 1942, when he registered for the draft, Brennan was employed by Jack W. Schaefer (1907-1991), the editor and publisher of Theatre News, also at one time the associate editor of the New Haven Journal-Courier. Schaefer and Brennan were both from the eastern half of the country, yet both broke into the business of writing for story magazines with tales of the Old West. Schaefer blazed the trail with "Rider from Nowhere," a serial published in Argosy beginning in July 1946. (1) His stories appeared not only in Argosy but also in slick magazines such as Collier's, The Saturday Evening Post, and finally Boys' Life. Schaefer's biggest success was Shane, published in 1949 and adapted to film in 1953 with Alan Ladd in the title role. That success, coupled with Schaefer's continued devotion to writing Westerns, led him to move to New Mexico in 1955. Brennan's writing career on the other hand was interrupted by three years' service in the U.S. Army, from January 20, 1943, to January 2, 1946. Brennan's first published Western arrived more than two years after Schaefer's with "Fast-Gun Freedom," published in Western Short Stories in December 1948. (2) In all, Brennan had about two dozen stories in Western magazines from 1948 to 1956.

Here is a poem by Joseph Payne Brennan, Jr., from 1948:

To be continued . . .

Notes

(1) "Rider from Nowhere" is the first story by Schaefer listed in the online The FictionMags Index.

(2) Brennan actually sold his first Western in 1948, but that story, "Endurance," wasn't published until February 1950 in the magazine Masked Rider Western.

Joseph Payne Brennan, Jr., nicknamed "Jo," from the New Haven High School yearbook, The Elm Tree, 1936. It's fitting that Brennan, a nature poet, would first be pictured in a book named for a tree and that his war poem would be about poppies and clover, creepers, grasses, roots, and leaves.

Original text copyright 2022, 2023 Terence E. Hanley