Joseph Payne Brennan (1918-1990)-Part Seven

"Well, I suppose there's no denying I have what you might as well call an obsession with time. I possess, you might even say, a fierce desire to go backwards in time or to be freed of the time stream. [. . .] Yet the idea of being caught on the treadmill of time without being able to get off, horrifies me. I have a terrific urge to escape from it, and since I can't personally, I suppose I do it in my stories. Part of it ties in with my desire to go backwards into another era, which would obviously mean escaping the time stream." (From Etchings & Odysseys #7, 1985, p. 60)

In his life, Joseph Payne Brennan was haunted by the passage of time, by decay and loss, pursued and finally caught by what he must have seen as the forces of doom and fate. I have written before that weird fiction is about the past, but maybe in a larger sense it's about time, just as science fiction is about time, in its case about progress and the future. But then maybe all of our obsessions and all of our art--all of our acts of creation and destruction--everything that we attempt and do--is about time, about the passage of time, about our awareness of time and its passage, about being trapped in what Brennan referred to as this inescapable stream of time. Time is a river without banks, as the saying goes. We cannot beach ourselves. We are borne ceaselessly on--or ceaselessly back if you're F. Scott Fitzgerald. For his part, Brennan hoped to escape from time, "hoped for immortality, particularly in the area of poetry," as one journalist put it. Did Brennan make it? Does anyone in this life? Not quite a dozen years before his end, Brennan said, "Perhaps after I'm dead 50 years, they'll decide I wrote two or three good verses." (1)

Brennan, again, lived a double life as a writer. He wrote weird fiction, detective fiction, Westerns, and poetry of the macabre. He was also a straight writer, all or mostly in verse. He was at a writer's festival at the Taylor Library in Milford, Connecticut, in September 1961. On January 18, 1962, he won an award from the Poetry Society of America at an event held at the Astor Hotel in New York City. He was in good company that year, for Richard Wilbur (1921-2017) won the main prize, the Melville Cane Award. Like his father, Brennan married late in life. His wife, Doris McIntyre Philbrick Brennan (1921-1995) was also a poet. She had been married previously to their tying the knot in 1970. Both worked as librarians, Joseph Payne Brennan at the Yale University libraries. His papers, on the other hand, are in the John Hay Library at Brown University, the same place that holds H.P. Lovecraft's papers.

Born at the end of autumn, Joseph Payne Brennan died in the heart of a New England winter, on January 28, 1990, in New Haven, Connecticut. He was only a month and a week past his seventy-first birthday. Except when they're feuding, Irish families tend to stick together. The Brennan family was no exception, for they nearly all lie together in a family plot in Saint Bernard Cemetery in New Haven, Brennan, his grandparents, his parents, and his wife, who followed him to the grave in 1995. These are their names and dates:

• Joseph Payne Brennan's grandfather: Joseph Brennan (Apr. 25, 1841-Dec. 24, 1896)
• His grandmother: Josephine Cecelia Kirk Brennan (Aug. 16, 1847-Jan. 10, 1908)
• His father: Joseph Payne Brennan (Sept. 10, 1868-Feb. 8, 1938)
• His mother: Nellie Wilkerson Holborn Brennan Place (Feb. 12, 1895-Jan. 12, 1992)
• And his wife: Doris McIntyre Philbrick Brennan (July 30, 1921-Aug. 2, 1995)

Brennan's sister, Loetta Mary Brennan Sullivan (Oct. 15, 1916-Nov. 11, 2011) lies buried in another place. Brennan authored more than a few poems about the end of things. I'll leave it to you to search them out.

Joseph Payne Brennan's Stories, Poems, & Letters in Weird Tales

• "The Green Parrot" (short story, July 1952)
• "Slime" (novella, Mar. 1953) (Source for the 1958 film The Blob.)
• "On the Elevator" (short story, July 1953)
• "The Calamander Chest" (short story, Jan. 1954)
• "Orchids from Author"--Letter to "The Eyrie" (Summer 1974)
• "Fear" (novella; Weird Tales paperback version No. 2, Spring 1981)
• "John Mason Sidd" (poem, Spring 1988)
• "Because" (poem, Summer 1988)
• "Haunted House" (poem, Summer 1988)
• Letter to "The Eyrie" (Summer 1988)

Further Reading

The best source on Joseph Payne Brennan you're likely to find on the Internet is the guide to his papers held at the John Hay Library, Brown University, Providence, Rhode Island, here. There is also of course an article on him in Wikipedia and incomplete and overlapping lists of his works on The FictionMags Index and the Internet Speculative Fiction Database. I found an article about him called "Master of the Macabre" by Joseph F. Pisani in the Sunday magazine of the Hartford Courant, November 25, 1979, pages 163ff. There are also these sources: "Etchings & Odysseys Interview: Joseph Payne Brennan," in Etchings & Odysseys #7 (1985), pages 57-63; and a section on him in Conversations with the Weird Tales Circle (Centipede Press, 2009), pages 327-340. Finally, the best account that I have found of Brennan's life and career written in his own words is his remembrance of "The Unique Magazine" in The Weird Tales Story, edited by Robert Weinberg and published in 1977 by Fax Collector's Editions (pp. 59-61).

Note

(1) Quoted in "Master of the Macabre" by Joseph F. Pisani in the Hartford Courant Sunday magazine, Nov. 25, 1979, page 169.

A final note (Apr. 2, 2022): Joseph Payne Brennan cast himself as the sidekick of Lucius Leffing. We speak of fictional characters and events in the present tense. For example, Sherlock Holmes lives, not lived, at 221B Baker Street. By inserting himself into his own stories, Brennan also entered into the eternal present. Did he thereby make himself immortal?

Joseph Payne Brennan in the Sterling Library stacks, Yale University, 1979. Photograph by Tony Bacewicz. Look for the bat-shape above Brennan's head.

Thanks to Randal A. Everts for sources on Joseph Payne Brennan.

Original text copyright 2022 Terence E. Hanley