[In the following essay, O'Connor argues that Friel's stories are radical in the way they provoke thought about the social, moral, and political problems that face his characters.]

The short stories of Brian Friel are to be enjoyed in their own right, not merely seen as apprentice work of a playwright and therefore interesting as a means of understanding his development as one of Ireland's leading literary figures. Some of the stories may be viewed as trial pieces not for public scrutiny but occasionally lifted out of their relative obscurity for specialists—rather like objects of archeological interest. In this article I propose to look at the ten stories which first appeared together in 1979 as The Diviner: The Best Stories of Brian Friel with an introduction by Seamus Deane, and which are currently available, minus the introduction, as Selected Stories (1979, 1994). Friel is a story-teller, whether telling the story on the page or on the stage. He tells, in the sense of feeding the story to his audience, giving the settings all the vividness and the characters all the individuality that together make them live in the reader's mind. Authorial comments are so woven into the fabric of the stories that they are not obvious. But they are there all the same and may be discovered by looking at Friel's choice of theme, situation or character. He was very conscious of the personal, domestic and social/political problems that faced the people he knew best in their daily lives. My article aims to show this and to argue that Friel's stories are far more radical than they appear to be. Their quiet apolitical scenarios and traditional form belie their power to provoke the thought which is necessary before any kind of amelioration may begin. Like a diviner's hazel-twig, each story is sensitive to the underground water or the hidden Ireland of the mid-twentieth century.

BACKGROUND AND BEGINNINGS

Friel's Ireland is the north-west of Ulster which straddles the Border between Northern Ireland and the Republic. It takes in Co. Tyrone and Derry city, both under the jurisdiction of the United Kingdom, and the beautiful, wind-swept county of Donegal which is part of the Irish Republic, where he lives and where he spent many holidays as a boy. “Friel Country” is steeped in history because Tyrone is the hereditary land of the O'Neills, Donegal that of the O'Donnells and Derry the city of St. Columcille. After the defeat of the leading chieftains of the Irish/Gaelic resistance to the forces of Elizabeth I of England, Hugh O'Neill, and Red Hugh O'Donnell, at the battle of Kinsale in 1601, Ulster was systematically planted by English and Scots settlers in the early seventeenth century. Ulf Dantanus in Brian Friel: A Study outlines Friel's family background:

The name Friel/O'Friel carries distinct local connotations. Statistics relating to the modern distribution of the population show that it is seldom met with outside County Donegal and the contiguous areas. It is the anglicized form of the Irish O Firghil (pronounced and often written Frighil, with the same meaning as Farrell/O Fearghail “man of valour” and can be traced back to Eoghan, brother of St. Columcille. The Chief of the leading Friel family had the hereditary right to inaugurate the O'Donnell as lord of Tirconnell (Donegal).

(31)

Dantanus also researched Friel's immediate family background, pointing out that his paternal grandparents were Irish-speaking and that his father was involved in Nationalist politics in Derry, and making connections between these facts and Friel's political plays (32-43). He associates Friel's great love of Donegal with his childhood visits to his mother's family home near Glenties, one of the wildest and most beautiful parts of the county and an area that qualifies most of all as Friel country, and the hinterland of his composite Ballybeg/Small Town.

George O'Brien in Brian Friel, Dantanus, and Neil Corcoran have mapped Friel's transition from the short story to the stage and how he worked out certain themes in ways that the stage allowed or inspired. Corcoran's essay, “The Penalties of Retrospect: Continuities in Brian Friel” in The Achievement of Brian Friel edited by Alan Peacock deals with this transition in the light of what Seamus Deane says in his introduction to Selected Plays of Brian Friel and the ideas of Edward Said in his book Beginnings. Corcoran qualifies Deane's and the generally accepted account of Friel's transition from his early work as a repudiation of its “almost unexamined Irish and Irish-American emotionalism and commercialism” for sailing out “dangerously into the uncharted waters of a more deeply perturbing and perturbed consciousness of self and society.” Corcoran sees another dimension of the process:

But in thinking […] about Friel's beginnings as a playwright, I want to think too about those elements in his work which have retained a continuity from origin to protean present. Deane adumbrates an account of how the later Friel is a re-writing of the earlier; in this essay I want to retain a consciousness of that perception, but also to enquire more closely into the possibilities for interpretation of what Edward Said, the pre-eminent theorist of textual origins, puts at its pithiest in his book Beginnings (40): “The beginning as primordial asceticism has an obsessive persistence in the mind, which seems very often engaged in a retrospective examination of itself.”

(14)

The steady flow of commentaries on and the interchange of ideas between critics about Friel's work are concrete evidence of how much there is in it to be mined. O'Brien sketches Friel's beginnings as a writer in his study of the stories:

His father, a native of Derry, taught at a local primary school. Friel's mother was from Donegal, where the author-to-be frequently spent holidays that were to have a formative effect on his imagination, as his stories in particular suggest, and that no doubt influenced his view of himself as “a sort of peasant at heart” […]. The appeal of the rural hinterland of Donegal was enhanced by the relocation of the family in Derry city when Friel was ten, his father having transferred to a teaching position in the Long Tower school there.

What is notable in the formative years of Friel's career is his commitment to writing, which cannot have been easy while carrying on a full-time teaching career and becoming a family man (he married Anne Morrison in 1954, and they have four daughters and a son). Clearly he was helped by a contract with the New Yorker, which had first refusal on his stories. By 1960, the year Friel quit teaching to write full-time, he had published many of the short stories collected in The Saucer of Larks (1962), and he had had his first dramatic efforts—for radio—accepted. At this point Friel was preeminently a short story writer, working in the essentially pastoral mode of the Irish short story in the interwar period, whose best known exponents are Frank O'Connor and Sean O'Faolain, though Friel's work is nearer in tone and touch to the lesser known and unjustly neglected Ulster story writer, Michael McLaverty.

(1-2)

DRAMATIC QUALITIES AND FORM

It is paradoxical that Friel's stories are more dramatic than some of his plays. Reading “The Diviner,” for instance, is imagined theatre; watching Faith Healer (1979) was being read to—and in a way that limits the listener to the timbre of a particular voice in each monologue. Molly Sweeney (1994) also falls into an equivocal category somewhere between telling and showing—a view that verges on the heretical in relation to these plays, but which throws the dramatic qualities of the stories into relief. The stories have an immediacy of impact, vivid characterization as much through dialogue as through action, and underlying tensions that make them both entertaining and thought-provoking.

First of all they have a strong sense of locale. Whether this is the wind-swept headland off Donegal that makes the sergeant in “The Saucer of Larks” exclaim: “Dammit, it's lovely, isn't it?” or the pigeon loft of the terraced house in “The Widowhood System,” we get a setting as concrete as any stage set and then changes of scene as we read. This quality of Friel's technique was there right from the very beginning. From the child listening on the stairs to the sounds of his parents fighting downstairs in “The Child” to the vivid descriptions of the hospital grounds in “Everything Neat and Tidy,” the reader is seeing and hearing in the theatre of the imagination. “The Child” leaves an indelible impression on the memory. It has never been republished because Friel expressly forbade this, though it is seminal in demonstrating the dramatic turn of his imagination and his preoccupation with the gulf that divides the world of men from that of women, with unhappy consequences for themselves and their child—it generally is an only child or a child that lives in a world of his own. It is not far thematically to Philadelphia, Here I Come! nor to “The Illusionists” and other stories where lack of communication is central.

The settings and scenes of Friel's stories are defined in simple, clear language, like uncluttered stage sets. Sounds “off” and on stage are both evocative and realistic. There is no vagueness or any kind of doubt about the characters' being people immersed in the mundane realities of life which, I would argue, become universal for the reader, like Jane Austen's Hampshire. “The Potato Gatherers” begins:

November frost had starched the flat countryside into silent rigidity. The “rat-tat-tat” of the tractor's exhaust drilled into the clean, hard air but did not penetrate it; each staccato sound broke off as if it had been nipped. Hunched over the driver's wheel sat Kelly, the owner, a rock of a man with a huge head and broken finger-nails, and in the trailer behind were his four potato gatherers—two young men, permanent farm hands, and two boys he had hired for the day. At six o'clock in the morning, they were the only living things in that part of County Tyrone.

(49)

This is scene one: location. It is followed by introduction of characters whose chat then feeds the reader information and gives each a distinct personality. The second scene is the potato field and the beginning of the gathering:

The field was a two-acre rectangle bordered by a low hedge. The ridges of potatoes stretched lengthwise in straight, black lines. Kelly unfastened the trailer and hooked up the mechanical digger. The two labourers stood with their hands in their pockets and scowled around them, cigarettes hanging from their lips. […] The tractor moved forward into the first ridges, throwing up a spray of brown earth behind as it went.

(51)

Scene three divides the story into “morning” and “afternoon/evening” and into “hope” and “doubt,” to be followed by “exhaustion” and “disappointment.” The stark writing matches the bleak field and dwindling strength of the boys, especially the younger boy, Philly's. The closing scene is at dusk and the exhausted boys are in Kelly's trailer. Philly is now painfully aware of how hard potato-gathering really is and in his heart he knows that very little of the money Joe and he have earned will be theirs to spend; his realization that Joe knew this all along makes his disappointment all the keener. The contrast between the relaxed labourers and the boys at the end is the climax of both the plot and the juxtaposition by which Friel strengthens the form of this story.

This division of a story into clearly defined scenes is not, of course, peculiar to Friel but, coupled with his ear for dialogue, it enables the reader to experience the story as an imagined play. In “The Potato Gatherers” the difference between Joe and Philly is brought out by Philly's wild western expressions and bravado: “Nor me neither, mistah. Meet you in the saloon” (53). Joe is guarded in what he says in reply to Philly's questions about what he'll buy with his money: “Aw, naw. Naw … I don't know yet” (52). The labourers are laconic throughout the story, while Kelly's lines are direct commands or short but not unkind comments. All in all, this story ranks with the best of Friel's contemporaries and could hold its own farther afield. It is the story that I associate with him as a writer in this genre, thus disagreeing with John Cronin in “‘Donging the Tower’—The Past Did Have Meaning: The Short Stories of Brian Friel,” one of the essays in The Achievement of Brian Friel:

The great short story writers tend, naturally enough, to be associated with their most masterly tales: Joyce and “The Dead”; Lawrence and “Odour of Chrysanthemums”; Sean O'Faolain and “A Broken World”; Frank O'Connor and “Guests of the Nation.” It may not be entirely without significance that one does not tend to think of Friel and his stories in this way. Admirably skilful as many of them are, no great classic of the form leaps to mind at mention of his name.

(1)

Friel's outlook on life as ascertained from his stories is overtly neither searching nor transforming. He does not create characters who consciously probe into the sociological/historical or psychological backgrounds of the situations they find themselves in. He presents the situations as given, to be lived in rather like the physical setting of the story, while his characters fall into two main categories—those who endure and those who react. They are observed rather than analysed or themselves given to analysis. In this respect I would describe Friel as a presenter of TV documentaries which leave conclusions and assessments to their audience, but which draw the audience into the personal predicament of the principal character(s) in an entertaining way. This is precisely what short stories are best able to do; they do not, perhaps should not, intend to be analytical for this is where novels are in their element. His stories singly or collectively do not examine the reasons which cause the conflict between the protagonist and his/her circumstances, so they are not searching in the sense of overtly looking beneath the surface of the mid-twentieth century Ireland presented to the reader. Cumulatively, however, Friel's stories reveal his awareness of the social and economic limitations which hemmed in the lives of his characters.

This is the point that Valerie Shaw makes in her The Short Story: A Critical Introduction when discussing the place of the short story in the late nineteenth and early twentieth-century literary pantheons. Was it journalism? Was it apprentice work of would-be novelists? Was it comforting entertainment for the leisured readers of magazines? Shaw refers to Henry James's appreciation of the short story as a genre in its own right with two particular aptitudes: the ability to bring a facet of life to a reader's awareness and collectively to illuminate a society. As an artist James worked to perfect the short story and, though conscious of its limited scope, he also thought that “a collection of short stories could be made to reflect life's diversity” (12). Shaw goes on to stress James's conviction that the short story could mirror contemporary life and epitomize modern conditions (17). Such observations have been validated by Friel's stories which, as I argue below, reflect the society he lived in and wrote about. This was a task made all the harder by its being largely a society of negatives: not losing one's dignity or not having one's dreams fulfilled, and the grinding force of poverty.

The ability of a short story to reflect anything, let alone a society, accurately and with emotional power depends on the intensity of the writing coupled with the capacity to “see” and then present the story as a coherent whole. Shaw is quite clear about this, having little patience with stories that tend to either of the extremes: bland entertainment at one end and at the other “specific kinds of formal intricacy, sometimes treating short fiction as though it were always at its best when aspiring to the complex condition of a metaphysical lyric poem.” She concludes that “the qualities needing emphasis are the immediacy, compression and vitality which the short story shares with journalism of the highest standard” (8).

These qualities may be found in stories of such diverse formal structure that make form relatively unimportant when it comes to assessing the merits of a particular short story. Friel used the form of the Irish Short Story which in the hands of O'Connor, O'Faolain, O'Flaherty and Lavin had already won critical and editorial approval. His stories are well shaped and chronological, with a clear beginning-middle-and end. Form for Friel the author of short stories was structurally necessary but hardly an end in itself; his interest was focused on his subject matter. His dramatic gifts, however, seem to have been latent as if waiting for the chance to break out of the restrictions of the page. He uses “scenes” rather than the gradual flow of time to move the plot forward, a technique that not only prefigures his plays but also suggests adaptation for TV drama. Though most of his stories are told by an omniscient but unobtrusive narrator, sometimes impartially as in “The Diviner” and sometimes clearly from one character's angle as in “Foundry House,” he is there only to let the characters act and speak for themselves. The narrator in “The Gold in the Sea” has the curiosity and detached interest of an observer which lets the story unfold unimpeded, whereas the voice in “The Illusionists” is that of the adult who as a child was powerless to interfere in the domestic situation he is now describing. Friel as a writer was himself observing the circumstances of people's lives which he personally could not change, but which he could bring to the surface for scrutiny. In this sense he was a diviner in a closed and secretive society.

THE HIDDEN IRELAND OF FRIEL'S STORIES

As they are presented to us, the characters in Friel's stories feel trapped in situations that they make little or no effort to understand, not because they consciously do not want to but because they are not able. The normal leaders of a rural society, the local gentry, priests, teachers and politicians give no help in this regard. On the contrary, such priests and teachers as appear in the stories are paternalistic and reinforce the conventions and ignorance that made Irish society so narrow in the 1940s and 1950s. Life was hard then in rural Ireland, rarely above subsistence farming for most. In country towns it was, if anything, worse for anyone below what Friel calls “the better-off”; there would not have been space to keep a cow or grow enough potatoes to eke out wages or pensions. The generally depressed state of the Irish economy after World War II has been documented by historians, including Joe Lee in Ireland 1912-1985: Politics and Society. He gives the relevant chapter the title: “Malaise: 1945-1958” (271-328), and points out that lack of imaginative initiative and the political will to carry out such plans that might have been hatched were significant factors of the economic stagnation of the country. Up to 1967 formal education stopped at the age of fourteen for the majority of Irish children. There were a few County Council scholarships to enable clever ones to go on to secondary schools; otherwise families had to be able to afford fees. Though these were generally not high since most secondary schools were run by religious Orders, they were beyond the reach of the majority. In pre-television Ireland the sociological effects of such limited educational opportunities were profound. Not only were people divided by relative material wealth and poverty, they were divided even more so by their education or lack of it. Granted that such education as was offered by nuns and Christian Brothers was itself academically narrow, single-sex, and often puritanical, it was still a pathway to University, Training College and the Civil Service. This is the world of Friel's stories, a world which he documents faithfully and with a degree of admiration for the courage, imagination or sheer endurance of his protagonists who try to break out of it or at least be distracted from it in whatever way they can. He is aware of how personal freedom and feelings, especially those between men and women are stunted or thwarted by convention and respectability. The word “dignity” sums up the most precious part of many of his characters—as if that alone is all they can maintain in a stern world.

The Sergeant in “The Saucer of Larks,” who cannot understand why he felt so strongly about the disinterment of the German airman that he suggested that orders be disobeyed, feels that he has to redeem his dignity in the eyes of his subordinate, Burke. When the papers are signed, and the Germans gone, he turns to Burke's duties: dog licences and tillage returns. Burke takes the hint and promptly snaps to attention:

“Good,” said the Sergeant. “That'll be that, then.” The moment of efficiency died in him as quickly as it had begun. His shoulders slumped and his stomach crept out. “I don't know a damn what came over me out there,” he said in a low voice, as if he were alone.

“What's that, Sergeant?”

“What in hell came over me? I never did the like of it in my life before. Never in all my years in the force. And then before foreigners too.” He raised his cap above his head, slipped his fingers under it and fumbled with his scalp. He lowered the cap again. “I'm damned if I can understand it. The heat, maybe. The heat and the years … they're a treacherous combination, Burke, very treacherous.”

“What are you talking about, Sergeant?” said Burke with exaggerated innocence.

“You know bloody well what I'm talking about. And I'll tell you something here and now, Burke.” He prodded the guard's shoulders with his index finger. “If ever a word of what happened out there at Glennafushog breaks your lips, to any mortal man, now or ever, as God's my judge, Burke, I'll have you sent to the wildest outpost in the country. Now, get along with you and distribute them hand bills.”

“Very good, Sergeant.”

“And report to me again when you come back.”

“Righto, Sergeant. Righto.”

The Sergeant turned and waddled towards the building. For a man of his years and shape, he carried himself with considerable dignity.

(116-17)

This excerpt demonstrates Friel's sensitivity to the embarrassment of allowing feelings to surface in public and to the effort to appear as society expects. Here the distinction between “dignity” and “respectability” is blurred: is the Sergeant dignified in Burke's eyes, in ours, or in his own? Many of the stories are variations on this theme. One such is “The Diviner” which begins:

During twenty-five years of married life, Nelly Devenny was ashamed to lift her head because of Tom's antics. He was seldom sober, never in a job for more than a few weeks at a time, and always fighting. When he fell off his bicycle one Saturday night and was killed by a passing motorcycle, no one in the village of Drumeen was surprised that Nelly was not heartbroken. She took the death calmly and with quiet dignity and even shed a few tears when the coffin was lowered into the grave. After a suitable period of mourning, she went out to work as a charwoman, and the five better-class families she asked for employment were blessed for their prompt charity, because Nelly was the perfect servant—silent, industrious, punctual, spotlessly clean.

(11)

The division between the five “better-class families” and the rest of the village is the order of the day, as is the division between respectability and its opposite. In setting the scene Friel uses irony to establish his authorial stance. “Prompt charity” and double negatives let us know that there is more being told than the facts of the case; we see the village from the auditorium as the story of Nelly's second husband moves from scene to scene to the climactic arrival of the diviner and the dragging of the lake lit in stripes by the headlights of cars, lorries and tractors. This story stands out from the others by its ironic tone, as well as being in itself a metaphor for Friel the storyteller and forerunner of Faith Healer. The latter's dramatic ending contrasts with the understated ending of the former. When McElwee, the diviner, reluctantly produces the two dark-green pint whiskey bottles that he finds with the drowned man—instead of the rosary beads the priest piously expects—Friel shows us Nelly's reaction: she mourns the death of her respectability. The diviner is no longer centre stage; the ordinary must win:

While they prayed, Nelly cried, helplessly, convulsively, her wailing rising above the drone of the prayers. Hers, they knew, were not only the tears for twenty-five years of humility and mortification but, more bitter still, tears for the past three months, when appearances had almost been won, when a foothold on respectability had almost been established.

Beyond the circle around the drowned man, the diviner mopped the perspiration on his forehead and on the back of his neck with a soiled handkerchief. Then he sat on the fender of a car and waited for someone to drive him back to County Mayo.

(21)

The development of themes or situations from the short story to the stage is an aspect of Friel's work that has invited study as he added play to play. Some stories are obvious forerunners of plays; others hint at ideas later more fully treated.

Two such forerunners are “Foundry House” and “A Man's World,” the latter not included in Selected Stories—understandably, in my opinion, for its transformation into Dancing at Lughnasa would make any writer want to bury the story in a literary museum. “Foundry House,” on the other hand, is a wonderful story in its own right and as forerunner of Aristocrats. The Hogan family is seen through the eyes of Joe Brennan, who has returned with his family to live in the gate lodge, where he had grown up. His memories of the Hogan family as it was in his childhood are juxtaposed with his shocked discovery of its present decay. The contrast between Joe's respect and humility towards the Hogans and his wife's no-nonsense attitude underlines the story's theme: life goes on and the past has to give way to the present. Her remark: “Aren't they supposed to be one of the best Catholic families in the North of Ireland?” is meant to strengthen her insistence that Joe mention their nine children in his letter asking for the tenancy of the gate lodge on his parents' death. The vitality of these children impresses old Mrs. Hogan whose celibate son and daughter spell the end of the family and make her husband's illness and their decline from former wealth all the more poignant. Sister Claire in Africa and Father Declan, a Jesuit, are no substitute for the confusion of a large, struggling family. Joe realizes this, yet cannot bring himself to explain his disillusionment to Rita:

The kitchen at home was chaotic. The baby was in a zinc bath before the fire, the three younger children were wrestling in their pyjamas, and the five elder were eating at the table. Rita, her hair in a turban and her sleeves rolled up, stood in the middle of the floor and shouted unheeded instructions above the din.

“So you came home at last! Did you have a nice afternoon with your fancy friends?”

He picked his way between the wrestlers and sat in the corner below the humming gas jet.

“I'm speaking to you! Are you deaf?”

“I heard you,” he said. “Yes, I had a nice afternoon.”

(69)

Each time his answer to her eager questions is similarly vague: “Very nice,” “a fine priest,” “a lovely room.” At last Rita understands that she is not to get any gossipy details, and we understand that Joe's disappointment will be suffered in the silence of his heart.

Elmer Andrews in his study The Art of Brian Friel comments on Friel's ability to chart the silent deserts that separate people from each other: “It is the paradox of art that Friel's finely articulated and beautifully crafted story can convey the breakdown and failure of communication, the loss of coherence and fluidity, the sense of a pathetic, lonely entrapment” (40). In particular Friel exposes the separate worlds of men and women. His men are dreamers, often impractical to the point of irresponsibility; his women are worn out by bearing and rearing children, poverty and their husbands' improvidence and/or irresponsibility. The mother in “The Illusionists” is at first seen in the harsh light of her opposition to all that M. L'Estrange, the illusionist, stands for. To her he is temptation personified, waiting to lure her son away from her world of practical realities as he already has lured her husband farther into alcoholic self-glorifying memories. The boy is fascinated by L'Estrange and his tawdry tricks and feels himself helpless as the battle between his parents gives way to the drunken argument between his father and L'Estrange. In the end it is the mother's illusions that work on the boy's mind, not because what she said was true, but because he was convinced by her certainty. Here Friel touches on a point that, if more fully worked out, could lead to some form of common ground between husband and wife: they each need their illusions, however flimsy, and if they could talk to each other about them instead of using them to escape from each other they would be happier people—though if they could talk to each other they might not need such illusions. As far as the story is about lack of communication between adults, it is unresolved. Friel's concluding lines here are too pat to be a conclusion and, instead, underline his point that men and women see the world differently and are condemned to unbridgeable misunderstanding. Each has as much a need for an illusion of escape as the other; the pity is that neither can begin to understand this, let alone begin to share a common illusion. Friel is here, as elsewhere an uncompromising writer, a fair one too in that he allows us to see each person's point of view. Maybe in this story his bias towards the boy comes out in the boy's being the narrator. He certainly captured the child's need to feel secure in stressing the shaky grounds of his belief in his mother's certainties.

“The Widowhood System,” though it also deals with marital relations and the need for escape, contrasts with “The Illusionists” not only in its happy resolution but in the way this grows out of the interaction of characters and the plot. For once there is a good-humoured, warm-hearted and quick-witted woman playing against a trio of bachelors, not quite musketeers but romantic in their passion for racing pigeons. The story has a lightness of touch that belies its serious theme: life can slip by without ever having been fully lived. Judith takes the initiative to teach this lesson to Harry through the very racing technique that he was engrossed in perfecting. She uses the pigeons to get what she wants: Harry and herself into their matrimonial bed. The story builds up to this through the interplay of Judith's unspoken longing for marriage and Harry's use of sexual attraction between pigeons to fulfill his ambition to breed a champion racing pigeon. At the beginning we are in Harry's situation and feeling his impatience:

From the very day his mother was buried, Harry Quinn set about converting the two attic rooms, from which she had ruled the house for the last nineteen years of her impossible dotage, into a model pigeon loft, so that he could transfer his precious racing birds from the cold, corrugated-iron structure in the back garden. The house, at 16 Distillery Lane, in chaotic condition, already consisted of Harry's ramshakle grocery shop on the ground floor and the flat of Handme Levy, a tailor, on the second. Handme—short for Hand me Down the Moon (he was six and a half feet tall if he was an inch)—helped with the task of reconstruction … Fusilier Lynch gave a hand, too, out of the goodness of his heart. For six days the three men worked, stopping only to eat the meals that Judith Costigan, who lived next door in Number 15, made for them.

(32)

The job done, there is the celebratory drink and Harry's declaration that he intends to tell them something “that's been in my nose for nineteen years.” Although Handme's guess: “You're going to marry Judith!” is rebutted by Harry's “I'm going to produce the best racing pigeon Mullaghduff has ever seen” (33), it is truer than the men suspect. Friel works out the plot from this scene, using dialogue to carry it forward and to make the characters live. His ability to paint the set is matched by his portraiture, exemplified here by his descriptions of Handme, Fusilier Lynch and Judith:

Handme's face was permanently fixed in the expression a man has immediately before he sneezes—mouth open, teeth bared, eyes wide, forehead wrinkled. On him, it became a look of wild delight and anticipation. That, on top of a thin, gangling body, made the young girls of the town scared stiff of him. […] The Fusilier was short, stocky, silent. He was in his late forties, the youngest of three bachelors. He was better at greyhounds and whippets than at birds, but a good all-rounder. […] It was a funny sight to see Harry swaying in the middle of the kitchen floor, his hand on his chest, his cheeks streaming with tears, and Judith, plump, smooth, hazel-eyed, fresher-looking than her forty-four years, nodding her head and laughing generously at him.

(33-35)

For all its light-heartedness this story deals with one of the most deeply felt results of the lack of education and the general economic depression of Ireland in the post-war years. Countless men and women could not afford to marry or, if they could, there was often an ageing parent to make marriage either impossible or very unattractive. This state of unwilling celibacy has been the subject of many Irish writers, from Brian Merriman's savage attack on it in his satire, Cuirt an Mhean-Oiche/The Midnight Court (c. 1780) to Patrick Kavanagh's The Great Hunger (1942) passionate in its plea for sexual fulfilment. William Trevor's well-known short story, “The Ballroom of Romance” (1972), depicts this yearning from a woman's point of view. Friel in his story makes a woman's natural desire for a family the energizing force that brings about the resolution of the plot and, we are led to believe, the personal happiness, sexual and otherwise, of Harry and Judith. To underline her role, Friel gives the actual lines of the marriage proposal to Judith: “The only clear memory of their reunion that would always remain sharp and clear to him was of her whispering to him, at some stage, ‘Will you marry me, Harry?’ and of himself kissing her on the mouth in love and gratitude, because somehow, at that moment, the question seemed apt. More than apt—inspired” (47). While his mother still “ruled the house” (32) Harry would have been as unfree to marry Judith as he was to re-house his pigeons, nor would she have found the prospect of being “ruled” congenial. The fact that Friel explicitly tells us that the Fusilier “in his late forties was the youngest of the three bachelors” (33) and that Judith is forty-four points to his awareness of this far from satisfactory aspect of Irish society until economic expansion began in the mid-sixties. Figures in Lee provide the sociological context:

Total population which fell from 2.96 to 2.82 million between 1951 and 1961, then rose to 2.98 million by 1971. Lemass (the then Prime Minister) prated little about the sanctity of “the family.” But 4 percent economic growth and a rise of about 50 percent in material living standards during the 1960s at last made it feasible for the number of families to increase. […] The number of marriages rose from a trough of 14 700 in 1957 to 16 800 in 1966 and 22 000 in 1971. […] Mean age at marriage for men fell from 30.6 to 27.2 years, and for women from 26.9 to 24.8 years, between 1961 and 1973.

(360)

The alternatives to celibacy were emigration or marriage. Emigration in the Selected Stories is a backdrop; marriage as it comes under Friel's scrutiny is not a happy state. Poverty, large families and lack of communication between husband and wife were factors largely outside their control, with the first two of these interdependent and very likely the cause of the third. Birth control was forbidden by the Catholic Church so that the size of a family was related to the age at which a woman married, rather than to the family's means and least of all to conscious decisions about having children. Friel's reticence about such matters does not indicate that he was unaware of how they affected family life in general and the relationship between couples in particular, but that he was in tune with the period he was writing about and the time of the stories' composition. In “Foundry House,” for instance, Joe at thirty-three has nine children so it is no wonder that Rita pushes him to mention them in his letter to Mrs. Hogan and when he returns from his visit expects him to take over from her at home: “She sat resolutely on the opposite side of the fireplace, to show that she had done her share of the work; it was now his turn to give a hand” (69). Such domestic tensions were part of the hidden Ireland of the mid-twentieth century. Tom, the first-person narrator of “Ginger Hero,” is acutely aware of what marriage has done to his wife Min, whom he chose as “softer” than her sister Annie. Ten years and eight children later, he compares the sisters: whereas the childless Annie is a cheerful woman, his wife is worn and tired from child-bearing. Nevertheless, Tom thinks that if Billy “had not had such an obsession about being childless, he could have been the happiest man in Donegal” (84). These stories say a great deal about married life, and not just in Ireland, before contraception and any form of fertility treatment were available. It also says a great deal about Friel that he dealt with this intimate side of marriage with compassion and delicacy and as directly as society permitted at the time.

If cock-fighting is a form of compensation for Billy, Annie and Tom, Friel does not labour the point. Instead, here as in so many of his stories and plays, he shows how having something to hope for—even if this is as “trivial” as winning a cock-fight—can make the vital difference in lives otherwise dulled by circumstances. Racing pigeons for Harry Quinn, the magic of the illusionist for the boy in “The Illusionists,” Joe's memories of the vanished grandeur of the Hogans in “Foundry House” and the submerged bullion in “The Gold in the Sea” have their counterparts in many of Friel's plays, though these become more abstract or complex as the plays themselves did. Whereas for Gar O'Donnell in Philadelphia, Here I Come! (1964) there is a concrete place to escape to, the alternative “place” in Translations (1980) is not specified. Right through his work Friel shows how people need to feel that there is an escape route, an alternative to the sense of being trapped. In his stories these feelings and hopes are private; whereas in his plays they became increasingly public and/or political as the tensions within Ulster broke out into open violence. As the political situation became more and more intractable, Friel was among those who saw that asking questions could be as positive as providing answers or immediate remedies. In this regard his work with that of his colleagues in Field Day was part of the slow groping towards peace which led to the Good Friday Agreement of 1998, to which the people of Ireland gave their assent by their resounding “Yes” vote in the referendums held simultaneously North and South on 22nd May 1998. Reading his stories to-day one can see the same process: awareness leading to reflection which may be either a means of healing or of evasive action.

“The Gold in the Sea,” the title story of his 1966 collection and included in Selected Stories, is thus a metaphor for Friel's work in being about giving people hope when they have nothing or very little else. It is a graphic story, a candidate for TV drama with its scenic setting off the coast of Donegal and its opportunities for character acting, particularly the part of Con the much travelled skipper, who is central to the story. The Regina Coeli, a “twenty-footer of graceless proportions, without sails, and with two sets of oars,” plays her part well in providing the props for the illegal fishing expedition and responding to the movements of sea and wind in the silent hours of the night. The crew consists of Con, his nephew Philly, another young man, Lispy, and the Friel-like summer visitor, who tells the story:

All three men were full-time farmers and part-time fishermen, and by any standards they were very poor.

Two miles out from the harbour, free from the shelter of the headland, we were struck by a brisk Atlantic wind. We were now part of an inpenetratable blackness.

“At this very moment, friend,” Con proclaimed, “you're sitting on top of more gold than there is in the vaults of Fort Knox.”

“We'll get our share,” I said, thinking he was referring to the salmon, which he had described earlier as being so plentiful that you could dance a reel on their backs and not wet a toe.

“Real gold!” he said. “At this very spot, on an August morning in 1917, the Bonipart was sunk by a German submarine on her way from England to the USA. Fifty fathoms straight below us. A cargo of bullion.”

(23-24)

The narrator's misunderstanding prepares us for the ending of the story. When Con eventually admits to him that the gold has in fact been salvaged by a Dutch crew, he adds: “I don't want Philly or Lispy to know this. It's better for them to think it's still there. They're young men … they never got much out of life. Not like me” (31). Hope is more important than knowing the truth; it is better to have dreams than to sink into the inertia of despair or alcohol. These ideas as dramatized in the stories are like a watermark that they share with the plays. He works them out, though, in a variety of ways, some of them quite critical of unquestioning hope.

In “Everything Neat and Tidy,” for instance, hope takes the shape of a farm belonging to the well-to-do MacMenamins, the family of Johnny Barr's wife. It is not, however, an El Dorado to Johnny, the local taxi-driver. It had been neglected by the MacMenamins whose carelessness simultaneously baffled, annoyed, attracted and unsettled him. But for Johnny it meant a waste of good farming land that was shameful and wrong, even if it had a certain glamour. The story is thus different from “The Gold in the Sea” and others where whatever stands for hope in the protagonists' lives is accepted blindly and clung to. Johnny's story is his discovery of what he really feels about the MacMenamins' way of life that contrasted with his family's in a way that he could not at first understand:

The whole set-up confused and annoyed him, and yet fascinated him. When he was with them, he was conscious only of importance. What a business he would have made of that place! How he could have run it! Yet when he went home to his own house in the town—before he married, he lived in three rooms as natty and precise as a doll's house, above the bakery where his father was night-watchman—he forgot the chaos and decay and remembered only the tranquillity of their lives. He would look at his mother, birdlike, shrivelled, sharp with the lifelong battle against poverty, and think of Mrs. Mac, who had floated serenely above hardships. […] The contrast between the life he had been reared to and the life he now tasted made him dissatisfied with both.

(121)

The story is resolved by a dawn of understanding very similar to that which resolves “Among the Ruins.” Both Johnny and Joe realize that they have to come to terms with the past. Its power has to be engaged with, either through a long and mostly unsettling process of thought like Johnny's, or through a sudden recognition of an insight like Joe's as he was driving home from the outing to his old family home: “The past did have meaning. […] It was simply continuance, life repeating itself and surviving” (109).

CONCLUSION

The meaning of Friel's stories and his work as a whole could be summed up by this last sentence. We inherit a past in the form of character, family, landscape, and history and at each level it needs to be understood before it may be accommodated in the present or used as the foundation for a better future.

His short stories testify to how early in his career as a writer Friel looked below the surface of people's lives to their psychological needs. Though these needs took different and sometimes pathetic forms—a yearning to be respected, distracted, uplifted, excited, or given a utopian dream of finding gold in the sea—his tone never slights the individual for feeling as he or she does. Whatever satire there is in the stories is directed at the petty differences to be found in the society they reflect so perceptively. Even then it is gentle, as if implying that society itself has been formed by its past and has yet to understand the forces that made it the way it is. The stories raise no serious moral/ethical issues or depict life-or-death situations; no scintillating ideas race through the heads of the characters. Yet they are profoundly moral in being about the mores of a particular society, and about how to survive when circumstances hem one in. What makes them scintillate is the tension between the vitality of the writing and their hard core of meaning. For this reason Friel may be described as a water diviner who is able to reveal the underground water below the surface of the society he writes about.

Works Cited

Andrews, Elmer. The Art of Brian Friel. Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1995.

Cronin, John. “‘Donging the Tower’—The Past Did Have Meaning: The Short Stories of Brian Friel.” The Achievement of Brian Friel. Ed. Alan Peacock. Gerrards Cross: Smythe, 1993.

Dantanus, Ulf. Brian Friel: A Study. London: Faber, 1988.

Friel, Brian. Selected Stories. 1979. Meath: Gallery, 1996.

Lee, Joseph. Ireland 1912-1985: Politics and Society. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1989.

O'Brien, George. Brian Friel. Dublin: Gill, 1989.

Peacock, Alan, ed. The Achievement of Brian Friel. Gerrards Cross: Smythe, 1993.

Said, Edward. Beginnings: Intention and Method. New York: Columbia UP, 1985.

Shaw, Valerie. The Short Story: A Critical Introduction. London: Longman, 1983.