SOURCE: Maxwell, D. E. S. “Background and Themes: The Short Stories.” In Brian Friel, pp. 15-47. Lewisburg, Penn.: Bucknell University Press, 1973.

[In the following essay, Maxwell provides a sociopolitical and historical context to Friel's short fiction and delineates the major thematic concerns in his stories.]

I

Brian Friel's “Johnny and Mick” (SL [The Saucer of Larks]) is a story about two boys wandering the streets of a Northern Irish town. They roam from the central Diamond, “where black soldiers of the War Memorial towered in taut menace above them,” along “the brown stagnant water” of the quays, past “a mountain of scrap metal,” by empty, echoing sheds, and “the rusted track” of the railway to the complacent suburbs. A suburban street is a challenge to them. It slopes down, “as wide as three ordinary streets,” with its vivid gardens, soft lawns, and “careful curtains,” to the river—which here “lay cool and sparkling at its feet.”

They skylark, shout, disrupt the respectable stillness. A frail old man from one of the houses buys for his grandson, a childish replica of himself, the chestnuts that Johnny and Mick have gathered. Johnny sees a prospect of wealth. The two boys collect a great pile of chestnuts to sell to the effete children of these houses. Mick, trying to jump the pile, scatters it, and the two of them frolic down the road, kicking the chestnuts in all directions. By the river they sober up and wordlessly set off for their Tintown squatters' homes, where “they said the briefest of goodbyes to one another and parted.”

Their afternoon has made them aware, inarticulately, of social division and of their own impotence. The river, as the images discreetly imply, sets apart the two worlds of town and suburb. Even its own waters alter with the viewpoint. The town is decaying, moribund; the suburban road opulent, well-groomed, secure, “a long distance from” Tintown. Johnny's life has taught him a precocious knowingness—“look the policeman or probation officer straight in the eye and smile.” He is contemptuous of “soft guys with money,” of little boys, wearing unnecessary overcoats, who can't climb their own trees. But he is vulnerable, as with his chestnut scheme, to the “chill voice” of the middle class. He and his plans exist only as a momentary convenience or a passing vexation. It is not all malice or hardheartedness. The old man is innocuous, doting. But the two worlds are worlds apart. Johnny and Mick are the losers, though there may be a resilience that will sustain them.

The author's role is unobtrusive. His words project this or that image of a setting, give the dialogue its tone and resolution, control the transitions of scene and mood. The details consolidate themselves into the story's statement. The two rivers in one, the contrasting silences of town and suburb, the chestnuts Johnny and Mick sensuously revel in and the chestnuts the old man buys, Johnny's patronage of Mick and their final shared abashment: these are left to speak for themselves. The statement they make is Friel's, but not by explicit declaration. The voice is personal, but assimilated to its material, setting up inferences in scene and action. It is the novelist's only sort of “objectivity”: “Johnny and Mick” has all the power that its reticence can confer.

The story has a strong social attachment, not narrowly political, but sensitive to the quality of individual life in a particular community. Its representativeness depends upon its realizing a distinctive, individual situation. The setting here is in fact precisely identifiable. The topography of the fictional town is close to that of Derry City, in Northern Ireland. There, Ferryquay Street leads to the Diamond and War Memorial, to Shipquay Street and the quays, and, across the river Foyle (unnamed in the story), there is a Browning Drive, though the “Browning Drive” of the story is in a different part of town, its model being Duncreggan Road with its Mature Detached Residences. More fundamental, the shaping of “Johnny and Mick” registers Friel's deep sense of Derry's divided community, though it is not restrictively about Derry.

This is the only one of the stories to take as its subject the town where Brian Friel lived for twenty-seven years. No doubt it may be argued that its identification has the interest mainly of autobiography or even just gossip. Change the street names and the story's effect would not diminish. It is important, though, as a fairly direct indication of the way in which Friel's work reaches back, however obliquely, into personal experience. Its roots are in observation and knowledge of his own region, the northwestern counties of Ireland.

II

Brian Friel now lives a few miles outside Derry, in the village of Muff, County Donegal, over the Irish Border in the Republic. He also has a cottage near Kincasslagh on the west Donegal coast, where he spends most of the summer. It is by a small, beautiful beach, and on a fine day could be the Glennafuiseog of “The Saucer of Larks.” The setting of Philadelphia, Here I Come! is a fusion of Kincasslagh and Glenties. Friel's main family associations are with Derry, the home of his grandfather and father; and, through his mother, who was born in Glenties, with Donegal. His wife too is from Derry, and the Friels both went to school there, as do their children now.

Since his success as a dramatist, Friel has traveled widely, in the United States in particular, though not for long periods. He has remained intimate with his upbringing and his locality. He shows no desire to leave them for the cosmopolitan world of international theater. Friel's reason is not any sense of superiority. He admires and likes the actors and producers who bring his plays to the stage. He enjoys conversation, company at home, and the friendship especially of many of the Irish writers who are his contemporaries Simply, he stays put for the continuing contact with the scenes, the characters, the circumstances that absorb his imagination.

Irish writers have a nomadic tradition. Friel has not shared this, though he had the additional motive for departure of being a Catholic in Northern Ireland, and understandably hostile to its Government's notion of democratic rule. He is one of the Northern minority, which in his native city is the more keenly aware of minority treatment because there it is in numbers a majority. Friel's father was a Nationalist member of the (now suspended) City Corporation, and Friel was himself brought up in the traditional Nationalist assumptions.

On the whole these did not produce much more by way of policies than the ideal of uniting Ireland. Anti-British sentiment was still a lively impulse. When, at the age of ten, he returned with his family to Derry in 1939, Friel says, “We believed that Germany was right and England was wrong, that sort of thing” (Eavan Boland, “The Northern Writer's Crisis of Conscience,” in The Irish Times, 12, 13, 14 August 1970). The Northern Nationalist Party grew out of the domestic ruptures over the 1921 Treaty (and subsequent Civil War), which established the Irish Free State and in effect ratified the separate existence of Northern Ireland. As Northern Ireland opted out of a united Ireland, so did the Nationalist Party, as a parliamentary opposition, opt out of Northern Ireland. Every election became a plebiscite on partition. The Northern government had no more to do than stage-manage the victories, which weight of numbers—and where necessary gerrymandering—had made inevitable.

In these orthodox loyalties and animosities, the politics of Northern Ireland stagnated. The normally recognized poles of Left and Right found no accommodation. Socially, the two religious groups went each its own way. Even holiday patterns were symptomatic. Derry Protestants went to the seaside towns of Portrush and Portstewart. Catholics went to Donegal or elsewhere in the South. Both would stay, if at all possible, in hotels or boarding-houses owned by someone of their own faith.

The controls exerted by these almost ritualistic observances disquieted Friel. He has been fully conscious of the dismal record of almost all clerics of all the churches, his own included. His favorite “thin book” is My Contribution to Ecumenism by—a dignitary of the Catholic Church in the North. As well as the many delinquencies of the Protestant majority, he recognizes the Catholic suspicion of any enterprise—not that many were offered—designed to bring together people of different faiths. A “little theatre” begun in Derry in the late 1940s languished, and soon foundered, at least partly on that distrust. Friel is a practicing Catholic. But he found his Maynooth experience “very disturbing,” and his writings, when they touch on the Church and its servants, are far from reverential. He has offended not only Unionist, but Nationalist and Catholic, sensibilities.

It was in the mid-1960s that the Civil Rights movement set out systematically to disturb both traditions of thought. Like all Northern writers, Friel has often been asked to pronounce on the political upheaval that has followed. Until The Freedom of the City he has never taken it, or for that matter old-style Northern politics, directly as a subject. But it is worth consideration here. It epitomizes in a particularly brutal and revealing way the division that is an inescapable part of Friel's inheritance. It has compelled him to examine his responsibilities as a writer in circumstances that increasingly drive loyalties to extremes, to riot and killing. It was exactly in the Derry of “Johnny and Mick” that these things happened.

The Civil Rights Movement in Northern Ireland has from the start been far from homogeneous. It included moderate reformers, like John Hume in Derry, who hoped to unite people on a nonsectarian basis around a few straightforward issues like religious discrimination in housing, or the undemocratic franchise for local government elections. In its early days it won some Protestant support. The first and very considerable show of unity was over the location of the second Northern Irish university, which went not to Derry but to the more generally Protestant district of Coleraine. On more overtly political issues, perhaps fifty Protestants joined the Derry Civil Rights march of 5 October 1968, which was first banned and then, when the ban was defied, used for a display of police force. The movement also undoubtedly attracted many Catholics who were anti-Unionist in a perfectly orthodox Nationalist sense. Bernadette Devlin has recalled how in Enniskillen the organizers of a Civil Rights march found their supporters more interested in singing “Papish” songs than “We shall Overcome.” She, with Michael Farrell, and Eamonn McCann of Derry, represented another district entity in the Civil Rights Association, the People's Democracy.

Their premises were specifically Marxist. They assented to the tactic of peaceful demonstration, but looked beyond particular grievances to the power structures that, in their view, kept the poor divided. Consequently they opened up terms of reference that were quite novel, though they did hark back to the United Irishmen of 1798, and more nearly to James Connolly's model of an Irish Socialist Republic.

But it was less the radical ideas of the 1916 rebels than simply their martyrdom that brought Irish independence closer. Left-wing activism is an exotic growth in Irish politics. Its hold is narrow and tenuous. In Derry in the 1970 General Election for one of the seats at Westminster, the Unionist won as usual. Of the two opposition candidates to him, Eamonn McCann ran a bad second to Eddie MacAteer, who with the support of John Hume stood as a “Unity” candidate, but had been for many years the Nationalist Party M.P. in the Belfast Parliament. The votes that in the same election returned Bernadette Devlin to Parliament were, with perhaps a few bizarre exceptions, Catholic votes.

Certainly, while the Civil Rights Association held briefly together, its People's Democracy members contributed positively to pushing a reluctant Government into either measures of reform or the promise of them. But like most small Left-wing movements, the People's Democracy proved highly fissile. Since its first successes, the Civil Rights Association has fragmented, in part at least because of leadership and doctrinal squabbles within the People's Democracy. Neither the movement as a whole nor any of its components has extinguished habits of response made almost instinctive by tradition and upbringing. Indeed, a commentator from the Republic, John Feeney, has argued that the main effect of Civil Rights activity has been to impede nonsectarian cooperation within the Labour Party and the Trade Unions (The Irish Times, 15, 16 September 1970). A moderate Northern observer, Martin Wallace, points out that, whatever the reforms, “the bulk of the power will rest with the Protestant majority,” and the prospect of beneficial results from reform legislation has dwindled because Protestant attitudes “have hardened as leadership of the Catholic minority has tended to pass from civil rights moderates to more extreme republicans intent on bringing down the government” (“Reform in the North,” Eire-Ireland, Autumn 1970).

Protestants are easily persuaded that the C.R.A. cloaked a combination of simple Republicanism and anti-Protestantism—the precise converse of their own sectarian attitudes—with some Maoist/Marxist (international) subversion thrown in for good measure. Catholics continue to distrust Protestants. Working-class unity remains an ideal, not a fact. Pointless violence continues. Inherited hatreds persist. The conventions of thought and attitude that enshrine them are as potent as ever. They begin in childhood and are then, as Seamus Heaney has put it, “solidified by adult events” (Boland). Most Northerners remain political fundamentalists, for whom the Treaty supplies, one way or the other, a satisfying theology.

Anyone venturing to pronounce on so mutable a situation will be mainly conscious of dissenting voices. For instance Owen Dudley Edwards, (in his The Sins of Our Fathers), unlike Feeney and Wallace, would support the aims and methods of Civil Rights activism, and especially of the People's Democracy, and be kinder about its achievements and prospects. For Andrew Boyd, “the Northern Ireland Labour Party has been, and still is, led by men who, because of fear, ingrained pro-British prejudice, political ignorance or plain political opportunism, are incapable of organising an effective opposition to the Unionists” (“The Guilty Men of Ulster,” Everyman, no. 3, 1970). Friel himself, though mindful of perplexed and ambiguous motives, finds the radical awakening congenial and exciting. He could conceive of no lasting resolution that did not embody a united and politically independent Ireland. At present he is more aware of the new complexities than hopeful of any settlement.

Predictably, this state of affairs has opened to contemporary Irish writers the question of their own responsibilities when politics have taken to violence and the streets. As people once demanded “war poets,” or in the 30s “communist literature,” they now in Ireland ask writers, particularly in the North, to make the political turmoil their subject. Hibernia's “News in the Arts” (28 August 1970) has hinted at the need for an even larger zeal. Recalling Brecht's procrastination in the 1953 Berlin uprising—“the rebellion went down to defeat with the artist sitting by his tape-recorder, inglorious, unbloody, uninvolved”—the columnist adds, rather enigmatically, “a clear message for the artist in Ireland today, North and South.” A month later in the same journal, Maurice Leitch urges exactly the opposite view, that such admonitions are impertinent, for the “situation … if [writers] are to be honest to themselves and to their work, must be folded away into the brain for some sort of ripening process to take place.”

Writers have in fact turned their craft to the subject. Seamus Heaney's “Docker” was published in 1966, before the violence became commonplace. Though it regards its subject with wit, it is plainly conscious of a perpetual menace:

That fist would drop a hammer on a Catholic—
Oh, yes, that kind of thing could start again;
The only Roman collar he tolerates
Smiles all round his sleek pint of porter.

John Boyd's The Assassin was produced with great impact at the 1969 Dublin Theatre Festival. It is a powerful, Brechtian treatment of the political murder of a Northern Protestant agitator, its dark causes and bloody sequel.

At a less consequential level, the Peacock Theatre presented, in September 1970, A State of Chassis, described as “a political-polemical-satirical review,” written by a Northerner, John D. Stewart, and two Southerners, Thomas MacAnna and Eugene Walters, and dealing with people and events in Northern Ireland. At the first night, Eamonn McCann demonstrated against its “trivialisation” of serious issues—players “jumping around for the delectation of the people of Dublin who can afford 17s.6d. a seat” (Irish Times report, 17 September, 1970). The Northern Opposition M.P.s who were present, though less vehement, also found the piece offensive. Two months later Mr. McCann, opening an Exhibition by a student of the Dublin College of Art, explained his view of the artist's role. He commended the student whose works were on exhibition because he was politically involved in a dispute at the College of Art, and another student for his involvement in the cement workers' strike. “No art,” he said, “is neutral.” Its only defensible function is “to contribute to the struggle of the people against exploitation” (ibid., 4 November 1970).

So rigidly doctrinaire a view is unacceptable to Friel, though he has, inevitably, considered the schism and its bitterness as a possible subject. One problem has been the form that for him would best express it. He has ceased to write short stories; he finds neither Boyd's Brechtian theatre nor Stewart's satirical revue appropriate to himself; and he is in any case suspicious of a theme or subject that does not generate its own answer to the question of form.

As long ago as 1965 (in Acorn, Magee College Derry, Spring 1965), Friel repudiated crusading art and plays designed, like Osborne's or Wesker's, to put across a social message. The writer's job is rather to present “a set of people and a situation with a certain clarity and understanding and sympathy and as a result of this one should look at them more closely; and if one is moved then that one should react accordingly. This is the responsibility of a reader or an audience, but I don't think it's the writer's.” Nevertheless, Friel recognizes fine distinctions. Though it should not be the writer's end purpose, his work may admit to an audience's mind a response, an illumination, that may, sometime, lead to action. And the writer has his arrogance. This is how things are, he is saying, with the expectation that his audience will concur.

Since then, Friel has applied these principles to his own circumstances. A basic impediment to his taking a Northern political subject is that he is “emotionally too much involved about it”; and the situation itself “is in transition at the moment.” A play on this theme “will not be written,” he hopes, “for another ten or fifteen years” (“The Future of Irish Drama,” The Irish Times, 12 February 1970). In a later interview he has elaborated, and perhaps somewhat modified, these propositions. He recalls a demonstration about housing in Derry, “before the big burst.” “I happened to be in it,” he comments, “not because I was involved, but because I was an interested spectator at that point.” Subsequently, he took up the idea of the artist as spectator:

Graham Greene has said that every writer is like a housewife who won't discard a piece of string in case she may use it. The crisis is there, and I keep wondering how it can be of use to me. I know this may seem a very selfish attitude. But it is, after all, a professional approach to the situation. On a personal level, of course, we're all terribly involved in it. But for the writer, I think his position is better as a sideline one, as against an involved one. This is against the feeling of the moment where writers everywhere are becoming more and more committed socially.

(Boland)

On the personal level he refers to, Friel has contributed to what little is being done to enlighten mutual incomprehension. He has persistently urged on the Northern Ireland Arts Council the need for a “National Theatre,” preferably located outside Belfast. In March 1970 he adjudicated a drama festival presented by the four Derry grammar schools, two Catholic and two Protestant. In 1970/71, he arranged and took part in a series of lectures and seminars given by distinguished Irish writers and performers at the University College in Derry—Presbyterian founded, now an appendage of the New University at Coleraine. Elsewhere, but not in Northern Ireland, these activities would not be cause for special comment.

Professionally, Friel still gives precedence to the literary craft and its autonomous ends. Friel does hold that an artist is all the better for a viewpoint, whether it be Communist, Catholic, Civil Rights, or whatever, so long as he can avoid any factional association. He has no desire, in a situation characterized by flux, to be identified with, for example, a traditional Nationalist/Catholic policy line, and was disturbed by the Hume/McAteer electoral alliance in Derry. But Friel quite rightly believes that his opinions, and the very fact of having opinions, place no obligation on him to import them directly into his work. “People keep insisting,” he has said to the present writer,

why don't you write a play about Civil Rights, Biafra, the Bomb, the Arms Trial … the Disappearance of the Small Family Grocer, Smoking and Lung Cancer, etc. etc. And when I explain that it seems to me that such a request implies a confusion of the artist's and the journalist's function I'm told I'm not “of my time.” (May I exclude the Small Family Grocer. He sounds minutely interesting.) In other words I know of no Irish writer who is not passionately engaged in our current problems. But he must maintain a perspective as a writer, and—equally important—he will write about the situation in terms that may not relate even remotely to the squalor of here and now.

Other writers have made a similar point.

Seamus Heaney, Michael Longley and Derek Mahon have all spoken of how the Northern situation may have a kind of subterranean presence in works that ostensibly have nothing to do with it. Mahon recognizes even in some love poems “metaphors for the Northern situation” taken from quite private dilemmas. More particularly, Heaney cites his poem, “The Last Mummer.” It portrays this representative of a dying art parading the suburbs, angry with frustration, and throwing stones at the houses. “I didn't,” Heaney comments, “mean this to be a poem about Northern Ireland, but in some way I think it is” (Boland).

Some such formula accounts for Friel's assimilation to his work of the social and political strain in his background. He is not out to convey a social message, still less to incite political action. “Johnny and Mick” is unusual in allowing that sort of inference. Even there it is, so to speak, the emotional premises, not a political conclusion, that the story states.

“The Potato Gatherers” (SL) is perhaps rather the same. Early on a freezing November morning two young boys set out to help a farmer dig his potatoes. But despite the day off from school—which will be paid for in punishment—and the prospect of spending what they earn, their excitement stales in the bitter cold: “… their bodies shuddered with pain and the tall trees reeled and the hedges rose to the sky.” At the end of the day they are left the one forlornly clinging to his hopes, the other sullen in exhaustion.

The point is not that the story acquires political substance because it is about the children of a poor family. But it unquestionably embodies social comment. It is in the sense of loss, of humble pleasures flawed, so intimately bound in with the images: of the tractor's sound broken off against the cold air and “drumming at the back of [Philly's] eyes,” of the hard clay, encaging landscape, motionless sky—images of constriction and inflexibility, which are an image of one disposition in a society, and of a response to it. The stories uncover other dispositions too, and of a kinder sort. They create a variety of relationships between their fictional world and its counterparts in reality. In their themes and images is the spirit of the place, the quality of experience that led to confrontation in the streets. Friel's stories of the people and the places he knows remark the whole of which this is a part.

III

The “real” world of Brian Friel's short stories reaches from Kincasslagh in the west of Donegal through Strabane, Derry City, and Coleraine to Omagh and County Tyrone. Alongside, at times superimposed on, these actual places are the imagined towns, villages, and country districts—Beannafreaghan, Glennafuiseog, Corradinna, Mullaghduff. These are composites and extensions of reality, given substance by an intense receptiveness to the atmosphere of a day or season, to the run of landscape, the play of light and shade, all the tangibles that localize a time and place. The vibrant solidity of the settings is perhaps the strongest single impression left by the world of these stories, memorable because never merely a background décor.

In “The Saucer of Larks” (SL), the scene is the story's impulse. Landscape, mood, and human feeling are inseparably mixed. The place is Donegal. Two men from the German War Graves Commission, guided by the local Sergeant and Guard, have come to remove the body of a wartime pilot, buried where he crashed on an Atlantic promontory, to the official graveyard.

It is a spring morning, “with the sea spreading out and away into a warm sky and a high, fresh sun taking winking lights out of the granite-covered countryside.” The grave is in Glennafuiseog, where a hill cuts off the sea breeze and “they heard the larks, not a couple or a dozen or a score, but hundreds of them, all invisible against the blue heat of the sky, an umbrella of music over this tiny world below.” Under this Arcadian colour and tranquility, the land's harsher foundation remains: “obdurate, peaty, rocky earth,” “barren bogland,” “an occasional gnarled tree.”

Something in the scene and their errand precipitates in the Sergeant recognition of an elegiac appropriateness in “being buried out here in the wilds.” Shocking himself, he suggests that they leave the dead airman where he lies, but the Germans go methodically about their business, while “the emptiness was filled again by the larks, slowly at first, then more and more of them until the saucer-valley shimmered with their singing.”

The party returns to the police station. The Sergeant cautions Guard Burke to keep his mouth shut about this aberration and walks to his office, “for a man of his years and shape … with considerable dignity.”

Glennafuiseog combines three or four real places and a particular kind of day. As the story fuses them, they move beyond reality to express what the Sergeant cannot quite find words for—he “was not too sure that he had made himself clear.” But it is not only the description—so economically evocative of heat, of an indomitable solitude, of rest—that works to this end. The Sergeant's lamer words have their own colloquial eloquence. They counterpoint the lyrical descriptive passages, the Germans' matter-of-fact orderliness, Guard Burke's stolidity. The Sergeant is the focus; it is the scene that most fully voices his half-apprehended feelings of loss and sanctuary.

Like the Sergeant, the protagonists of these stories often have very strongly the feeling that they are of a piece with a place. They are, however, anything but creatures of circumstance. The kinship between man and place may satisfy because it has the assurance of familiarity. But the familiarity may be harsh, demanding; and it is inexhaustible, liable always to disclose unsuspected outlines. There is a process of learning and readjustment. The individual remains his own man.

In “The Flower of Kiltymore” (GS [The Gold in the Sea]), old Sergeant Burke, having one day neglected his duty more through the fault of others than himself, is saddled with the blame for a local disaster. Oddly, the disgrace gets rid of an emptiness in his recent life. Since the death of his thwarted, scoffing wife he had been ignored by his village tormentors, the “Blue Boys,” a wild set of rapscallions, who played vicious enough tricks on him. Now in his humiliation they hound him again—he has killed “the flower of Kiltymore.”

Their renewed attentions are not unwelcome. They are part of the life ended by his wife's death, the life of courtship, marriage, hopes, childlessness and modest ambitions disappointed, of the Blue Boys' mindless abuse. It might seem a life fitly represented by the lone tree in Burke's garden, “a frail trunk, and agonized leafless branches that leaned away from the barracks … as if they were appealing for comfort.” But on the day of the disaster Sergeant Burke welcomes its renewal of “so many familiar things.” He knows he can endure. His “life had suddenly, happily, slipped back into its old groove.”

The Sergeant is a “failure,” certainly a butt. No one takes him seriously. Yet through all his humiliations, like his exchanges with his gleefully mocking Guard, he keeps within himself a dignity that nothing can violate. The story achieves the difficult transitions from comic to tragic. “Mr. Sing My Heart's Delight,” (SL) with a more purely comic emphasis, exuberantly displays another facet of the will to endure, in circumstances that seem likelier to extinguish it.

The narrator recalls his annual winter visits as a child to his Grandmother's one-room house, deep in Donegal, while his Grandfather worked in Scotland. The story has links with the Rabelaisian tradition of Irish writing. Granny's daughter, the narrator's mother, was not the child of Grandfather. Now, secluded in the wilds by a possessive husband, Granny's prodigal spirit survives in a free but innocent swearing and a boisterous vitality, singing, dancing, running the moor, romancing about the liners that pass the coast: “Lords and Ladies,” she would say. “The men of them handsome and straight as heroes and the women of them in bright silks down to their toes and all of them laughing and dancing and drinking wine and singing.”

The cheap wares brought one day by an Indian packman, whom she christens “Mr. Sing my heart's delight,” stimulate her dreams of exotic lands and people. She gives him food and lodging for the night, and when he leaves he presents her with his ring, “now black, now blood red, now blue, now the colour of sloes in the August sun.” She thinks compassionately of his life on this alien soil, “rocky, barren, uneven, covered by a brown heather that never blooms”; and of her own life too. She is in a way an alien spirit herself, in her extravagant fancies unlike the region. Yet she is also of the place and its stark beauty, like the “wild geese spearing through the icy air high above the ocean.” Her imagination and her generosity are part of it.

It is a complex story, full of images of flight, passage and the home, exile and communion. It is also about experience recalled, the adult now seeing fully what had eluded the child. Many of the stories turn upon reminiscences of childhood, and in a variety of ways. “Among the Ruins” (SL) returns a family for a day to Corradinna, where the father spent his childhood holidays. Tempers fray; the day goes sour, reducing his past to illusion. But finally, after the day's fluidly shifting moods and alliances, his memories are reasserted as in the tender conclusion he recalls his own son's fancies that day, “donging the tower”:

magic and sustenance in the brief, quickly destroyed happiness of their children. The past did have meaning. It was neither reality nor dreams, neither today's patchy oaks nor the great woods of his boyhood. It was simply continuance, life repeating itself and surviving.

Past and present interact here, each endorsing the truth of the other, which it had threatened to deny.

Elsewhere, more like “Mr. Sing,” the past takes shape within a present that makes no real entrance into the story. Such are “The Illusionists” (GS) and “My Father and the Sergeant” (SL). Both narrators look back to a boyhood as the son of the Principal of an insignificant primary school in County Tyrone, the first some miles from Omagh, the second in “Knockenagh.” Though some of the detail does overlap, their histories are distinct.

M. L'Estrange, an itinerant conjurer, makes a yearly visit to the school where Mr. Boyle is Principal. Each visit follows a pattern of oddly capricious emotion, conveyed early in the story by a narrative montage of the habitual events. To the children, L'Estrange is “the most wonderful man in the world.” Boyle is the impresario, genial, enthusiastic, but growing morose and in the end insulting the conjurer, both of them by then half drunk. To Mrs. Boyle, L'Estrange is “that old trickster.” During his performance the class is rapt, the father “relaxed and smooth with content,” L'Estrange seedily elegant, enacting his routine with “soft, sad eyes” and “tired smile.”

The story describes his last visit, when young Boyle had secretly decided to run off as an assistant magician with L'Estrange. In a marvelously comic scene the two men pursue their antiphonal monologues. Each is his own hero in a world where wishing has made it so. L'Estrange has been the darling of cosmopolitan audiences, Boyle's integrity has held him loyal, against a thousand temptations, to his ramshackle school. Around them, mother and son go about the work of the home.

In their conclusive quarrel the two mock each other's self-deceptions. The boy's final disillusionment is to find L'Estrange grandiloquently drunk in the bleak night, lying beside his bicycle, his gimcrack props, his torpid rabbit. The mother comforts her son with memories of their summer pastimes. In her conviction of happiness he recognizes truth. It is the truth of hard knocks, tedious chores, and their easement in living pleasures, against the vexatious dreams of the two illusionists. The story's opening phase formulates the pattern and glances at its eventual disintegration in the second. Its structure precisely reflects the boy's own movement into clearer recognition of the world he really lives in, which does not exclude compassion for the two old losers.

Mr. Hargan, Principal of Knockenagh Elementary School, is both “my father” and “the Sergeant” (his nickname) of the title. His career resembles Mr. Boyle's—early success and then a career in the same deteriorating backwater school, “served by one dry toilet whose stale odour lay heavy on our playground.”

Hargan has hung onto reality more tenaciously than Boyle. Instead of celebrating imaginary triumphs he sets himself to coaching four pupils, among them his son, to win regional scholarships, “troubled by an ambition I never understood until years later.” We never learn the outcome of this, nor is it important. The story's issue is the critical turns in human relationships, not just contrived narrative suspense.

Joe sees his father as two quite distinct people—the kindly, taciturn parent, and the rigid, autocratic “Sergeant.” Though in a way confusing, keeping the two isolated each in his own sphere is a practical working arrangement. Here too, events disrupt the pattern. Hargan has the minor victory of being needed in and answering to a crisis. The pattern is restored, at least in its externals. The school is its drab self, the instruction dry as ever. Hargan is unchanged. But, however briefly, Joe has seen his father and “the Sergeant” as one, and perhaps, in this new perspective, begun the process, consummated “years later,” of understanding him.

This story, unlike the almost claustrophobic “The Illusionists,” places the family situation firmly out in the surrounding life of Knockenagh. For Joe, his father is one concern among a myriad others that the story keeps before us. It does not finish with any neat reckoning of an isolated experience. The reader's strongest impression is of interlocked circumstances working their untidy way to open up fresh views of accepted and familiar associations.

Both these are stories of crisis recollected from childhood, of a moment or a sequence of events that refashioned attitudes and feelings, though acquiring definition only in much later retrospect. In “Foundry House” (SL), “a vague deference to something long ago”—certain childhood relationships—impregnates and influences the present, in which the main action takes place.

Derry City, remotely, furnishes the scene. Outside the town is Victoria Park, a residential area, wooded, stretching from a hillside to the main Derry-Strabane road and the river, in the story “a million momentary flashes of light that danced and died in the vegetation.” On the riverbank stood an attractive little railway station (now a spirit warehouse), which becomes the foundry of the story. It is a place that can be quite evocative of “something long ago.” In a setting like this, Joe Brennan encounters the sadness of old age, separation, and decay.

He has come back with his family to the gate lodge, where his father had lived as an employee, then a pensioner, of Hogan's foundry. Mrs. Hogan of Foundry House remembers Joe from the youth of her children, Declan and Claire, both now in religious orders. Mr. Hogan, whom Joe recalls as “a large, stern-faced man with a long white beard and a heavy step and a walking stick,” is a useful bogeyman for the Brennan children, though he is never seen. In this situation, on an October evening “uneasy with cold breezes,” Mrs. Hogan calls to ask if Joe will bring a tape-recorder to play a message from Claire, who will never come back from her mission in Africa.

At the door of the Hogan house, Joe remembers taking messages there from the foundry in his boyhood. This is his first time to enter. Father Declan, professionally effusive, welcomes him and, when the recorder is installed in the dilapidated breakfast room, brings down his father. He is a great ruin of a man, a “huge, monolithic figure that inched its way across the faded carpet … his face, fleshy, trembling, coloured in dead purple and gray-black … the eyes, wide and staring and quick with the terror of stumbling.”

Claire's recorded message, grotesquely ironic, is addressed to the house she knew, imagining her parents as they were in the now-abandoned drawing room. In her memory they still go about affairs long beyond their powers or interest. Finally she plays an old tune on her violin. Wordless since his entrance, Mr. Hogan, “the veins in his neck dilating, the mouth shaping in preparation for speech,” calls out his daughter's name and collapses in his chair. Having helped put Mr. Hogan to bed, Joe is left alone downstairs and goes home without either farewell or the tape-recorder.

A brief sequel, with Joe back at home, returns to the framework opened at the beginning. It avoids interpretation. We have impersonal stage directions, dialogue, no more. Quizzed by his wife, Joe is unresponsive. Claire's message was “lovely,” and “they loved it”; Father Declan is “a fine man. A fine priest”; Mr. Hogan, though older, “unchanged”; the house “lovely,” “beautiful.” Caressing the newest baby, Joe “crooned into the child's ear, “A great family. A grand family.” He means the Hogans. The reader, undistracted by the stirred-up sediment of memories, is aware of more intricate responses than Joe will utter.

There is a theatrical quality in the story's main scene, with the ritualized family gathering, the disembodied voice of the tape-recorder, the old man's gruesome entrance, and his seizure bringing about the collective exit. These histrionic effects embody the highly charged emotions that flicker through the scene. We are seeing it as it strikes Joe, responsive to his memories and the accumulating tensions of past and present coming together.

Friel is speaking almost entirely through the events. We have only what we see and hear to go by. There is no commentary on what the characters think and feel, and in this way too the mode of presentation has the character of drama. Friel has himself spoken of underwriting as a fault in his work. He means a reluctance to clinch by express comment a motive or a conclusion. “Foundry House” is one of the stories in which the “omniscient author” is wariest of declaring his access to the unspoken.

In a way, the story transplants a familiar tradition in Irish writing, tales of “the Big House,” especially in its decline. The priest in Sean O'Faolain's “A Broken World,” all his life hostile to the planter gentry, feels in their departure almost a bereavement, private and communal: “they in their octagon and we in our lighted cabins, I mean to say, it was two halves of a world.” Even the narrator, impatient of Irish lethargy, cannot “deny to the wintry moment its own truth.” Similarly in “Lord and Master,” also by O'Faolain, the old schoolteacher finally recognizes between himself and Lord Carew, within their conflict, a sympathy of interest. In these two stories the Big House, envied, detested, is yet in its decay an object of regret, a relic of the Anglo-Irish achievement, uneasily detached from and intimate with Irish life. There is perhaps a hint of the relationship in Friel's “Everything Neat and Tidy” (GS), set in County Tyrone, where, although people of substance, the “MacMenamins never had the wealth or the position of Lady Hartnell of Killard.”

But “Foundry House” does not grow out of the long and complex traffic between Gaelic Ireland and Anglo Ireland. The afflictions of its Big House are more personal than social and historical. The Hogans are Northern Catholic bourgeois; Joe Brennan is an artisan. Though their lives are separate, they have a more homogeneous world in common.

Friel's regional background and his period give him a quite different point of departure from that of O'Faolain's squireens and peasants. Yet the story produces similar perceptions of past working into present, of waning life, and the prospect of new growth. For all its melancholy, “Foundry House,” like “Among the Ruins,” leaves as its final impression, “continuance, life repeating itself and surviving.”

It is an arduous survival. Adversity, self-deception, illusion, are the constant challenges in the homogeneous world that knits together even from this selection from the stories. We are not in the stereotyped Ireland of holy peasants and farcical roisterers. Defeated, or clinging to reality, the characters have the perplexed humanity that earns them Friel's compassion. Though they will not confess, they may recognize, their own illusions, which do not supplant reality but make it tolerable.

Con, in “The Gold in the Sea” (GS), knows the rough life and meager rewards of a Donegal small farmer/part-time fisherman. Voluble, ebullient, he sets off with his partners, Philly his nephew, and Lispy, on the fishing trip the story describes. The main sequence is antiphonal dialogue, authentic and inventively comic, the idiom unfaked. Con recounts legends of his travels, and of the bullion in the sea under their boat, left when the Boniface was sunk there in 1917. From time to time Philly corrects him, without conviction. Lispy throws in his inconsequential proverbs. They net six fish. Now tired, old-looking, Con admits to the narrator that the gold in the sea, if it was ever there, has long been salvaged. He keeps up the pretense for the sake of Philly and Lispy—“they never got much out of life. Not like me.”

It is as much if not more his own pretense, though not cherished like the travels he so embroiders. Sensing his need for assurance, the narrator affirms Con's eminence as a traveled man. The lies are harmless ones, necessary to Con. They are his release from hard work and poverty. More important, they represent a vigor and an imaginative vitality whose truth he can speak only through his tall tales. Con is not a refugee from facts. At the end, a new story is clearly flowering in his mind. With it, his strength for life is returning, and as he has asserted earlier, “By God, there'll be another day,” and “The fish is there.”

The realities of Con's life are subsistence farming and parish horizons, romantic to the tourist, but for the locals meaning drudgery and, often, little-minded parochialism. This parochialism figures in the Ireland of these stories, along with its aging bachelors and outnumbered women. It has its share of stifling respectability, ever ready to be outraged or titillated. At the end of “The Diviner” (GS), Nelly Doherty weeps because she has not lived down her first husband's drunken escapades and established “a foothold on respectability.”

Nelly's second husband, apparently “the acme of respectability,” has lived quietly with her for three months. They keep themselves to themselves. Then, before the whole village, he is found drowned in the lake, with two whiskey bottles in his pockets, and the masquerade collapses. The diviner, brought from outside the county, in locating the body also brings its secret to light. The story is not, as many scenes in Philadelphia are, corrosively satirical of village life. It does not lampoon the villagers. All of them act generously; and they see the reason for Nelly's tears—not only because of “twenty-five years of humility and mortification but, more bitter still, tears for the past three months, when appearances had almost won.” Yet, within the conditions of “respectability” imposed by the village, Nelly's “happiness” (keeping up appearances) is not much preferable to her misery.

“The Highwayman and the Saint” (GS), set in Omagh, is more mordant about small-town prudery and sanctimoniousness. Madge Wilson's invalided mother has two interests in life. The first is her reverence for St. Philomena, whose shrine dominates her bedroom. The second is ringing her hand-bell to interrupt the courting on the living-room couch between her daughter and Andy, the narrator. To avoid suspicious silences, Andy recites “The Highwayman,” while Madge throws in occasional snatches of small talk. But the tactic has no great success. The courting is less regular than nightly prayers in Mrs. Wilson's bedroom.

Eventually they marry, but go to live in the Wilson home, not the house Andy has bought. Madge's resentment against her mother mysteriously diminishes. The crisis is Andy's discovery that the Vatican has forbidden devotions to St. Philomena, who may never have existed. He gets drunk and gives the news to Mrs. Wilson. Madge becomes her mother's ally and Mrs. Wilson—“her face was white and sad and holy looking”—selects a new (and secret) saint for her devotions. Andy ends up like the late Mr. Wilson, defeated, spending his leisure sheltered behind the old man's unnecessary binoculars, bird-watching in the tiny garden of the Wilson house.

Some of the comedy is broad and boisterous. Andy accompanies his denunciation of St. Philomena by the fifteenth verse of “The Highwayman,” a kind of secular replacement for the Rosary normally recited in the bedroom. “The family that prays together stays together” becomes for him, “The family that thinks together drinks together.” Friel is devastating in his observation of ready-made devotional platitudes. Here they happen to be Catholic, but they have their dour counterparts in any religion practiced in the North of Ireland. Friel's target is not faith, but a faith whose observance is mechanical, outward, self-righteous.

The one-act play “Losers,” based on the story, makes hilarious use of this lifeless canting in the really hair-raising unctuousness of Mrs. Wilson and her neighbor. But despite the comedy, the events are ultimately depressing, and even more so in the story, where humor, however astringent, has a less conspicuous part. Andy is a victim of the war, Irish style, between the sexes and between the aged and the middle-aged; of the genteel pretensions of an old-maidish religion. It is a situation commonly enough taken up by Irish writers, from Joyce's “The Boarding House” to O'Faolain's “Childybawn” and Brian Moore's The Feast of Lupercal. The subject does not, then, have a peculiarly regional origin. But the place of religion in Friel's writings does have regional implications.

The environment of his stories is a Catholic one. He is not an artist of the whole community, Protestant and Catholic. It is likely impossible that he could be. So widely are the two groups set apart by different school systems, by divergent historical loyalties, by sectarian government, that neither has any real and natural intimacy with the other. As John Cronin has argued (“Ulster's Alarming Novels,” Eire-Ireland [Winter 1969]), none of the Northern Writers, of either persuasion, has been able to “transcend the divisions of the region,” where sectarian politics thrive on the archaic enmities it is their business to foster. Yet it is also true that Friel's stories betray no least hint of rancor in their author, and, though not “political,” irradiate political correspondences, in their recurring motifs of flight and exile, and the whole complex medley of the shifting alliances between man and place.

Friel's settings are mostly rural and the people he writes about poor. The discussion of the stories referred to here, only about a third of the total in the two collections, undoubtedly makes too little of their humor. However, although the characters are often hardy, spirited, and their presentation lighthearted, the tone of the stories seems to me predominantly elegiac: for loves, friendships, observances, past or fated to pass. They establish a transient but crucial mood, generated by the traffic between past and present, place and person. The moments to cherish are those that isolate the quality of a life, of a relationship with one's fellows or one's region. The participants sense rather than define their significance; and the stories' purpose is not only to state the moment but to preserve that indeterminateness. As Bernard feels at the end of “Aunt Maggie, the Strong One” (SL), knowledge “of all he had witnessed could no longer be contained in the intellect alone but was dissolving already and overflowing into the emotions.” The stories too retain within themselves a core of meaning that resists paraphrase.