By 1965 Brian Friel was already finding success as a playwright – Philadelphia, Here I Come! would soon open on Broadway – but that same year he told Acorn, a Derry-based university magazine, “I don’t concentrate on the theatre at all. I live on short stories. This is where my living comes from. As for playwriting it began as a sort of self-indulgence and then eventually I got caught up more and more in it. But the short story is the basis of all the work I do.” At this point Friel was publishing regularly in the New Yorker, at a time when doing so made for a decent living. Yet within just a few years he would abandon the short story forever. His subsequent plays, among them Faith Healer (1979), Translations (1980), and Dancing at Lughnasa (1990), established him as one of the great Irish dramatists of the last century.
Friel’s growing dissatisfaction can be seen, hiding in plain sight, in his next reply to the Acorn interviewer: “The short story is… self-contained. You write a short story and you’re totally responsible for it. You can delude yourself that the people who read it think exactly as you think and are highly appreciative. It never occurs to you that it’s being read by people in dentists’ waiting rooms or waiting for a train.” The connection between his work and its audience came to be of the utmost importance to Friel. For a short story writer that connection must be assumed or imagined; in the theatre, it is central.
Yet Friel’s short stories, while in some cases providing the groundwork for later plays, should not be seen as apprentice work. His two collections, The Saucer of Larks (1962) and The Gold in the Sea (1966), are of a high standard, and contain a handful of masterpieces. The best of them are found in Stories of Ireland, which duplicates the choices Friel made for his Selected Stories, published in 1994, and adds three chosen by his widow, Anne (these, it must be said, are somewhat weaker than the rest). Reading the book, it is possible to see both why Friel grew frustrated with stories, and to regret that he didn’t produce at least a few more in his lifetime (although some might argue, considering the many stories and lengthy monologues incorporated into his plays, that he did).
The setting for nearly all Friel’s work, in either form, is the northwest of Ireland, on either side of what he describes, in the opening lines of ‘My Father the Sergeant’, as “the grey-black mountains that keep County Tyrone [in Northern Ireland] and County Donegal [in the Republic] apart from one another.” Friel was born outside Omagh, County Tyrone, in 1929. The son of a primary school teacher (“My Father and the Sergeant” and “The Illusionists” both explore the mixed feelings of boys taught by their fathers), he trained for the priesthood but lost his faith before ordination, then became a primary and middle school maths teacher for ten years, producing stories, plays, and newspaper columns on the side. In 1960 he resigned his position to devote himself to writing. While Friel’s dramatic work of the 1970s and 80s often deals with the Troubles, which only began after he had stopped producing short stories, later plays, including Dancing at Lughnasa, saw him return to some of the same personal material from which the stories draw. While the later work in no way replicates the earlier, its shared sources lend his body of work a circularity that seems fitting for a writer so bound to his part of the world.
Friel’s stories often involve the collision of modernity with an older, more mysterious sense of place, or way of being. In “The Diviner” it takes a water diviner to locate the body of a drowned man in the “bog-black water of Lough Keeragh” when more practical methods – the locals’ dragnet, two English frogmen from across the border – have failed. In “A Saucer of Larks” a police sergeant assigned as escort to a couple from the German War Graves Commission (which repatriated the bodies of German soldiers throughout the 1950s) brings his charges to the unmarked grave of an airman in a remote, idyllic hollow at the end of a promontory jutting from the Donegal coastline. The Sergeant, whose name we never learn, tells his subordinate, Burke, that there are men who would give their fortunes for such land, and that if they got their hands on it:
“‘They would destroy it! That’s what they would do! Dig it up and flatten it out and build houses on it and ring it round with cement. Kill it. That’s what they would do. Kill it. Didn’t I see them myself when I was stationed in Dublin years ago, making an arse of places like Malahide and Skerries and Bray. That’s what I mean. Kill it! Slaughter it!’”
Surprising himself, the Sergeant pleads with the Germans to disobey their orders and leave the dead soldier where he lies – “he’s part of the place by now. Leave him in it. Let him rest in peace” – but his request is ignored. When he later raises the incident with Burke, claiming to be baffled by what came over him, the younger man pleads ignorance. But the story leaves us with the sense that the Sergeant is part of a vanishing world and will soon be supplanted by his younger deputy, who is enamoured by the Germans’ efficiency and the dispassion with which they could disinter the airman, as if “digging potatoes for the dinner.”
While the Sergeant tries and fails to arrest a changing world, other characters in Friel’s work must retreat into fantasy to make their lives tolerable. In “The Illusionists”, a schoolteacher and a visiting magician, sharing a bottle of whiskey, expose the self-aggrandising lies they must tell themselves to survive their disappointments. By the time the bottle is finished they are trading insults, each calling the other a fake, and a failure. In “The Potato Gatherers”, two brothers, bunking off school for the day to help a farmer with the harvest, list the fine things they will buy with their pay while knowing their mother will most likely take it from them. In “The Gold in the Sea”, a fine example of Friel’s pronounced gift for dialogue and ability to give his characters distinct voices – and a good showcase for his comic gifts – a salmon fisherman hides the truth of an old wreck and its supposed cargo of gold from his younger crewmates. He saw the wreck being stripped but wants them to believe its riches still lie beneath the waves and might one day be theirs.
The finest example of the power of illusion in Friel’s work, and perhaps his masterpiece as far as short stories are concerned, is “Foundry House”, which he rewrote for the stage as Aristocrats (1979). Joe Brennan, a radio and TV mechanic, is granted permission to move back into the house in which he grew up, the old gatekeeper’s lodge belonging to the local big house where the Hogans, once one of the great Catholic families of Northern Ireland, still live.
When Mrs Hogan asks to borrow a tape recorder from Joe so that she, her husband and their son can listen to a message sent by her daughter Claire, now a nun, from her mission in Africa, Joe enters the big house for the first time in years and sees that the place is falling apart. Mr and Mrs Hogan have retreated into a single dilapidated room. Mr Hogan, in particular, has been ravaged by the years, “his face, fleshy, trembling, coloured in dead purple and grey-black, and… the eyes, wide and staring and quick with the terror of stumbling or of falling”. Yet when Joe returns home, shaken by what he has seen, and his wife asks what it was like, he tells her the Hogans are well and the house beautiful. “The same as ever – no different.”
If the theme and setting of “Foundry House”, a crumbling manor inhabited by people who have outlived the social system that created them, justifies comparisons with Chekhov, so too does Friel’s willingness to pose questions he does not answer. Why have both children joined the clergy? Why will Claire never be home again, “even for a death”? Why does Mr Hogan, who likely has dementia, never speak except to scream his daughter’s name, then black out, when he hears the tape? It is as if Friel’s characters are all standing at the lip of a crater, but the event that caused such devastation remains obscure.
In 1982, Friel said to Fintan O’Toole, “I know now why I stopped writing short stories. It was at the point when I recognised how difficult they were.” He was talking not about his talent for writing them, but his ability to innovate within the form. He described his two collections in a 1991 profile as “stammerings from the past”, and even at their best his stories operate entirely within parameters established by the great mid-century masters, Frank O’Connor and Sean O’Faolain. That doesn’t lessen the great power of a work like “Foundry House”, but between Friel’s retirement from the short story and his conversation with O’Toole, a new generation of writers – John McGahern, John Banville, Julia O’Faolain, Desmond Hogan, Neil Jordan, Dermot Healy – had remade the Irish short story. For Friel, the path to becoming not just a skilled practitioner but an original one, too, lay on the stage.
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