[In the following essay, Cronin unfavorably compares Friel's short stories to his drama and accentuates the significance of the past in his work.]

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. An early reviewer of his second collection, The Gold in the Sea, while he commended the general competence of the performance, also noted that ‘we do not, finally, have much sense of a searching or transforming view of life behind these tales’, and concluded the review with what, in view of Friel's subsequent career, can be seen as a canny perception that it would not be in this genre that Friel would most effectively express his genius:

Although they often impress, they remain disparate and self-contained, and thus their effect, when collected, is a muted one. The talent is there, but it is not yet in full possession of its characteristic and identifying mode.¹

The ‘characteristic and identifying mode’ was, as we now know, to be found subsequently in the drama, and the result is that commenting on the short stories a quarter of a century later, from beyond the major achievement of the plays, is a rather daunting task. It is inevitable that, viewed from the impressive heights Friel has scaled in the theatre, the early work in the stories will seem, however unfairly, somewhat diminished and shrunken by comparison. Pointless, ultimately, to view the stories in complete isolation from the plays and yet, enshrined as they are in two neat volumes, The Saucer of Larks (1962) and The Gold in the Sea (1966), they seem somehow to demand separate consideration in their own right.

In the main, the stories precede the plays, if we exclude such early efforts as the two radio plays, A Sort of Freedom and To This Hard House, and two early stage plays which Friel seems keen to disown, A Doubtful Paradise and The Blind Mice. The two radio plays were broadcast by the Northern Ireland Home Service of the BBC in 1958 and both were, as D. E. S. Maxwell indicates, somewhat similar to the short stories:

Friel wrote these plays while he was still primarily occupied with the short story. They recall ‘The Illusionists,’ ‘The Flower of Kiltymore,’ ‘The Gold in the Sea,’ whose characters are similarly engaged in their various degrees of compromise with disappointment and the hard life. The plays, however, do not achieve their design with the authority of the stories. In both of them there is perhaps some uncertainty about their intention … With the disappearance, too, of the stories' narrative and description, the dialogue has to assume new obligations that it is not yet able to fulfil. There is no equivalent to the mediating voice that in the stories suggests directions of understanding and sympathy.²

As this suggests, Friel had yet to achieve an effective transition from the private art of the short story to the public art of the theatre. He himself remarked the distinction between the two kinds of literary endeavour in the course of a public lecture in 1967:

The dramatist does not write for one man; he writes for an audience, a collection of people. His technique is the very opposite of the short story writer's or the novelist's. They function privately, man to man, a personal conversation. Everything they write has the implicit preface, ‘Come here till I whisper in your ear’.³

This echoes both Flann O'Brien's tongue-in-cheek account (in At Swim-Two-Birds) of the play as something ‘consumed in wholesome fashion by large masses in places of public resort’ and Frank O'Conner's description (in The Lonely Voice) of the short story as ‘a private art to satisfy the standards of the individual, solitary, critical reader’, an art which rings ‘with the tone of a man's voice speaking’. Whereas Friel the dramatist was to prove a daring and exciting innovator, as a short story writer he is strictly in the traditional line of development from such as O'Faolain, O'Connor and fellow Northerner, Michael McLaverty. His Field Day associate, Seamus Deane, has noted this:

Brian Friel is, technically speaking, a traditional writer. The dislocations and the nuanced egoism of many modern texts are sternly avoided, even rejected here.⁴

The reader of the stories, then, experiences first of all a sense of familiarity. Neither matter nor manner is strange in the best modern way. Predecessors in the form come frequently to mind as we read. Friel's first published story, ‘The Child’, scarcely more than a vignette, had appeared in The Bell in July 1952, and his literary debt to that most famous Bell-man, Sean O'Faolain, is evident in a number of the stories. It emerges clearly, for example, in the calculatedly genial tone of the mild, anti-clerical mockery indulged in by Thomas, narrator of ‘The Highwayman and the Saint’, a story which vividly recalls O'Faolain's ‘Childybawn’. ‘The Death of a Scientific Humanist’ is yet another successful venture by Friel into O'Faolain's favourite territory of urbane satire against the inhumane rigidities of Catholic Church dogma. Least satisfying among Friel's stories are the quasi-autobiographical, first-person tales which incline to neatly formulaic closures, often reminiscent of correspondingly contrived climaxes in the stories of Frank O'Connor. O'Connor's favoured comic ploy, the innocent child's viewpoint on the strange world of the adults, is often in evidence, with correspondingly cloying effects. ‘The First of My Sins’ seems to owe much to O'Connor's well-known ‘First Confession’. Stories like ‘The Fawn Pup’, revolving around the remembered teacher-father figure, smack of the incidental hilarities of the ‘R. M.’ stories of Somerville and Ross, while ‘Segova, the Savage Turk’ produces an even flimsier comedy, scarcely lifting the central episode of the boy narrator's disastrous shaving of his body hair much beyond the level of comic triviality. ‘Ginger Hero’, the final story in The Gold in the Sea, inevitably challenges comparison with Michael McLaverty's classic tale, ‘The Game Cock’, though the reticent McLaverty would hardly have found the rather contrived sexual climax of Friel's story much to his taste. A contemporary reviewer of The Saucer of Larks suggested that these early stories suffered from the dictates of a particular house-style:

If the reader is left faintly dissatisfied it is perhaps because too many of the stories fall so neatly into the formula of slightly dotty recollection now so popular with the New Yorker.⁵

It would, clearly, serve little real purpose to dwell unduly on the weaker, more derivative aspects of prentice work by a writer who had yet to discover his true medium. More to the point to note the emergence in this early work of themes and preoccupations which were to come to full artistic fruition later, in the plays. The best of the stories at once identify Friel's chosen territory of Tyrone and Donegal and also effectively explore his deeply-felt involvement with the shaping themes of love, language and a torturing nostalgia for an irretrievable past. All of these concerns cohere powerfully in ‘Among the Ruins’, a story in which a family sets out together, at the wife's suggestion, to revisit the father's birthplace in Donegal. The serious issues probed here are lightly carried on an eminently credible thread of narrative, with the two children squabbling in the car, the wife efficiently organising the picnic food, and the father, Joe, at first reluctant to risk this trip into his past but gradually becoming more and more excited by the prospect of revisiting once familiar and much-loved surroundings:

‘I don't see the point,’ he had said. ‘I don't see the point at all.’

But she had persisted, and that night and the next day his stubbornness gave way to a stirring of memory and then to a surprising excitement that revealed itself in his silence and his foolish grin. And now that they were about to set off, there was added a great surge of gratitude to her for tapping this forgotten source of joy in him. She knew and understood him so well.⁶

The place names, always of central importance in Friel's writing, come back to Joe as they drive westwards: Corradinna, Meenalaragan, Glenmakennif, Altanure. They recall boyhood vigour and youthful joy in the natural scene. The reality, when they eventually arrive at Joe's humble birthplace in Corradinna, is a dreadful anti-climax—a ruined house, a trickle of water instead of the remembered river, and the ‘bower’ where the child Joe hid with his sister gone forever. The past, full of intensely experienced and vividly remembered joy, is desecrated by the drab, ruined realities of the present. The journey has, clearly, been a frightful mistake:

Was that his childhood? Why, Joe wondered, had he been so excited about the trip that morning? What had he expected to find at Corradinna—a restoration of innocence? A dream confirmed? He could not remember. All he knew now was that the visit had been a mistake. It had robbed him of a precious thing, his illusions of his past, and in their place now there was nothing—nothing at all but the truth.⁷

Forced by his wife's insistence that he explain to her the youthful fun he so clearly recalls, Joe can only lamely recount what now seem ludicrously silly word games played with his sister in the long ago:

‘What did we laugh at?’ An explanation was necessary. We must have laughed at something. There must have been something that triggered it off.

‘Are you not going to tell me?’ Margo's face had sharpened. She stood before him, insisting on a revelation.

‘Susan and I—’ he mumbled.

‘I know,’ she said quickly. ‘Susan and you in the bower. Once you got there together, you laughed your heads off. And I want to know what you laughed at.’

‘She would make up a word—any word, any silly-sounding word—and that would set us off,’ he said, clutching at the first faint memory that occurred to him. ‘Some silly word like—like “sligalog,” or “skookalook”. That sort of thing.’

‘“Skookalook.” What's funny about that?’

‘I don't know if that was one of them. I meant just any made-up word at all. In there, in the bower, somehow it seemed to sound—so funny.’

‘And that's all?’

‘That was all,’ he said limply.⁸

The story briefly veers towards possible tragedy, with the sudden disappearance of the little boy, Peter, who wanders away to play on his own. The panic-stricken Joe eventually finds the child:

Peter was so engrossed in his play that he was not aware of his father until Joe caught him by the shoulder and shook him. He was on his knees at the mouth of a rabbit-hole, sticking small twigs into the soft earth.

‘Peter! What the hell!’

‘Look, Daddy. Look! I'm donging the tower!’

‘Did you not hear me shouting? Are you deaf?’

‘Let me stay, Daddy. I'll have the tower donged in another five minutes.’⁹

Impatiently, Joe drags the child away from his game of ‘donging the tower’ and, as they drive homewards, Joe ponders on what the day has brought in the way of disenchantment. He realises that he should not have gone back to Corradinna ‘because the past is a mirage—a soft illusion into which we step to escape the present’. He is saved from despair by the sudden recollection of the odd phrase used by his little son to describe his solitary game at the rabbit burrow, ‘donging the tower’. A seemingly meaningless word embraces a moment of private joy and Joe is granted a consoling sense of a continuity transmitted to him through the child's baby-talk:

Through the mesmerism of motor, fleeing hedges, shadows flying from the headlights, three words swam into Joe's head. ‘Donging the tower.’ What did Peter mean, he wondered dreamily; what game was he playing, donging the tower? He recalled the child's face, engrossed, earnest with happiness, as he squatted on the ground by the rabbit hole. A made-up game, Joe supposed, already forgotten. He would ask him in the morning, but Peter would not know. Just out of curiosity, he would ask him, not that it mattered … And then a flutter of excitement stirred in him. Yes, yes, it did matter. Not the words, not the game, but the fact that he had seen his son, on the first good day of summer, busily, intently happy in solitude, donging the tower. The fact that Peter would never remember it was of no importance; it was his own possession now, his own happiness, this knowledge of a child's private joy.¹⁰

The story ends with a brave assertion, and with a neatly generalised simplicity which, later, the plays will constantly call in question:

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.¹¹

This comforting nostrum will be rejected in play after play. In Philadelphia, Here I Come!, Gar struggles in vain to persuade his father that the boat they fished from sixteen years earlier was a blue boat and that his father had suddenly sung ‘All Round My Hat I'll Wear a Green Coloured Ribbono’. His father insists that he never knew that song and that the boat may have been brown in colour, not blue at all. In the play, Friel has found, in the brilliant device of the two Gars, Public and Private, a vehicle for the expression through savage comedy of many painfully conflicting views of the past and, at the end, old Madge, pragmatic voice of present reality, is not permitted any placebo about the comforting continuity of the generations:

When the boss was his (Gar's) age, he was the very same as him: leppin, and eejitin' about and actin' the clown; as like as two peas. And when he's (Gar) the age the boss is now, he'll turn out just the same. And although I won't be here to see it, you'll find that he's learned nothin' in-between times. That's people for you—they'd put you astray in the head if you thought long enough about them.

(SP 98)

Cass McGuire is another stalwart who does battle against the dangerous lure of the past, determined not to be trapped by its delusive seductions. She holds out as long as she can against the pressure from Trilbe and Ingram before she yields to them by sitting in the winged chair and retreating with them from grim reality into a world of fantasy. In Act 2, she had railed against ‘this gawddam going back into the past!’ and asked ‘who the hell knows what happened in the past!’ and had fought against the temptation to flee the unbearable pain of the present:

CASS: (to Trilbe) Leave me alone, will you? (To audience) They think they're going to run me back into the past but by Gawd they're not … I live in the present, Harry boy, right here and now. Where are you? Stick with me.

TRILBE: Catherine!

CASS: Go away! Gooks … real gooks living in the past, but not Cass McGuire.¹²

In the end, she can accommodate herself to the hideous reality of her existence in Eden House only by joining Trilbe and Ingram in their escapist, illusory world of dream and story-telling.

Crystal and Fox offers perhaps the most ferocious comment of all on the human tendency to retrospection, with Fox setting about the appalling business of refashioning his early idyll with Crystal by killing Pedro's beloved dog and even betraying his own son to the police. ‘Among the Ruins’ is, indeed, uncharacteristically reassuring about the onslaughts of time, and a later story, ‘The Wee Lake Beyond’, provides an altogether bleaker view of the relationships between the generations, a view much closer to that of the plays. Unrepresentative though ‘Among the Ruins’ may be, however, in the optimism of its conclusion, it is entirely typical of Friel's stories in its deeply felt involvement with a beloved locality. As Joe drives back to his birthplace in Donegal, the petty irritations of squabbling children and his wife's nagging objections to his fast driving all fall away, as he sees once again the hills and valleys he roamed as a boy:

At this moment, I don't give a damn, he thought without callousness; at this moment, with Meenalaragan and Pigeon Top on my left and Glenmakennif and Altanure on my right. Because these are my hills, and I knew them before I knew wife and children.¹³

This note of strong personal involvement with beloved places, this habit of uttering their names in a kind of litany of passionate reminiscence, is everywhere in the stories, as it is also, later, in the plays. As D. E. S. Maxwell notes:

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.¹⁴

The Sergeant in the title story of The Saucer of Larks ‘had been twenty years in Donegal but there were times when its beauty still shocked him’, and it is, indeed, the startling beauty of Glenn-na-fuiseog, the ‘valley of the larks’, which moves him to try to persuade the visiting German police officers to disobey their superiors by leaving untouched the grave of the German airman whose body they plan to disinter. The recitation of the names of much-loved places in the stories prepares us for the potent naming and cataloguing of places in plays such as Faith Healer and Translations.

Not surprisingly, when Friel turned to plays in place of short stories, characters, themes and preoccupations made familiar in the stories tended to surface in the new medium as well. Indeed, one can clearly sense the impulse to the dramatic form already manifesting itself in the liveliness of the dialogue assigned to some of the characters in the stories. In ‘Straight from His Colonial Success’, for example, the conversation between stay-at-home Joe and the friend, Bryson, who has returned from abroad bringing with him a tantalising flavour of exotic places and a cosmopolitan sophistication, powerfully presages many of the exchanges between the two Gars in Philadelphia. The vigorous alternation of mood and attitude in the short story is energetically handled and Joe's pathetic efforts to recapture the elusive image of a younger, brasher Bryson bring the occasion much closer to the generally pessimistic mood of the plays than to the rather facile optimism of ‘Among the Ruins’. Some of the memorably dominant characters in the plays have already been given, as it were, a kind of trial run in the stories. Thus, the gallantly despairing Cass McGuire is clearly prefigured by the title character of ‘Aunt Maggie, the Strong One’. Aunt Maggie, like Cass, is consigned to an old people's home at the end of her days. Like Cass, she smokes too much. Like Cass, she professes an unconvincing independence of her relatives. Here again, as in Philadelphia, the past is evoked by mention of a song which the narrator's father used to sing. When story and play are considered together, one can readily sense how the gallant, loud-mouthed, doomed Maggie has broken out of the smaller confines of the story form and mutated into the figure of Cass McGuire, who voices a similarly resolute outlook on life but does so through dramatic encounters with a wider range of characters. The story had allowed Maggie to respond only to her nephew, Bernard, and the smaller form's insistence on concentration and sharpness of focus had required that Maggie be encountered by the reader only at the moment of her death, when all her battles have finally been lost. In the play, in the form of Cass McGuire, she will be given longer to rage against the dying of the light.

Sometimes, an entire story, and not merely a single character, will develop towards dramatic form. ‘The Highwayman and the Saint’ becomes the play, Losers, with remarkably little in the way of additional business or detail. Just one new character, the sickeningly pious Cissy Cassidy, is added, to become Mrs. Wilson's companion in cant, and the poem hilariously recited by the unfortunate Andy during his constantly frustrated attempts at love-making becomes Gray's ‘Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard’ in place of ‘The Highwayman’ by Alfred Noyes. The short story, which is very much a satire in the O'Faolain manner on sexual repression and craw-thumping religiosity, is very close indeed to the play it becomes. The move here between the two forms has been accomplished with striking ease, almost as though the near-farce of the story had already achieved as much in the way of dramatic form as was necessary to its somewhat limited targets. On the other hand, the process by which a very different type of story, ‘Foundry House’, was eventually transformed into the play, Aristocrats, seems altogether more complex. Friel is engaging here not with the stock Aunt Sallies already much targeted by such predecessors as O'Faolain and O'Connor, but with concerns closer to his own searching imagination, so that, this time, the move to dramatic form opens up much greater possibilities. While some of the story's most effective details, such as the eerily recorded and tinny voice of the missionary nun in Africa, are retained and developed in the play, Aristocrats casts its net much more widely, to explore at greater length issues which can only be hinted at in the more constricted form of the short story. Here again, the essential distinction is between the short story's necessarily sharp focus on a single character, the subservient Joe Brennan, and the greater freedom granted by dramatic form for the searching exploration of numerous figures and many issues. In ‘Foundry House’, the Hogans are described as ‘one of the best Catholic families in the North of Ireland’ and their decline appears to derive from the decision of their son and daughter to enter the celibate world of the religious, with the daughter finally exiled to distant Africa and the son a priest in another part of Ireland. The ruinous sterility of the offspring of the Big House is clear. We are told about ‘fat, blue-eyed Claire, who had blushed every time she passed the gate-lodge’ and the epicene quality of the son, Fr. Declan, is hinted at throughout. Joe Brennan and Fr. Declan are the same age, thirty-three, but already Joe is the father of no fewer than nine children. When the priest opens the front door of the Foundry House to admit the stolidly matter-of-fact Joe, the contrast between the two men is pointed up sharply:

Father Declan was fair and slight, and his gestures fluttering and birdlike. The black suit accentuated the whiteness of his hair and skin and hands.¹⁵

Fr. Declan's fingers are depicted ‘playing arpeggios’ over the recording machine which Joe has brought at Mrs. Hogan's request, and he stands ‘poised as a ballet dancer before the fire’. When the recording sent by Sr. Claire from Africa is being played to the assembled company, the first person addressed is the priest, whose languid pose is noted even by the uncritical Joe:

She addressed the priest first, and Joe looked at him—eyes closed, hands joined at the left shoulder, head to the side, feet crossed, his whole body limp and graceful as if in repose.¹⁶

The robust health of Joe's nine offspring is constantly emphasised, being noted in particular by Mrs. Hogan, and contrasts forcefully with the general sterility and decline of the Hogans. The old father, terror of Joe's youth, is by now an almost paralysed hulk. The shocking climax of the story is reached when he utters his one strangled cry on hearing his daughter's voice on the tape-recorder:

The dead purple of his cheeks was now a living scarlet, and the mouth was open. Then, even as Joe watched, he suddenly levered himself upright in the chair, his face pulsating with uncontrollable emotion, the veins in his neck dilating, the mouth shaping in preparation for speech. He leaned forward, half pointing toward the recorder with one huge hand.

‘Claire!’¹⁷

For all its powerful contrasts, however, the story suggests no explanation for the Hogans' decline, other than the celibate state of their two unimpressive offspring. When Friel casts this material into play form, he effects radical alterations. To begin with, he shifts the location significantly. Foundry House in ‘the North of Ireland’ becomes instead ‘Ballybeg Hall, County Donegal, Ireland’ and the O'Donnell family, who replace the Hogans here, are professional people, long involved in the legal system of the country at senior level. Traces of the effeminate Fr. Declan survive, perhaps, in the son, Casimir, whose hectic, overstated behaviour creates a kind of feverish excitement throughout. As he tries to explain to Eamon in Act 3, he has long been aware of his own oddity:

I discovered a great truth when I was nine. No, not a great truth; but I made a great discovery when I was nine—not even a great discovery but an important, a very important discovery for me. I suddenly realized I was different from other boys. When I say I was different I don't mean—you know—good Lord, I don't for a second mean I was—you know—as they say nowadays ‘homo-sexual’—good heavens I must admit, if anything, Eamon, if anything I'm—(Looks around.)—I'm vigorously hetero-sexual ha-ha.

(SP 310)

The embittered Eamon, now married to the alcoholic daughter, Alice, though he once loved her older sister, Judith, outlines the family's professional decline to the American researcher, Tom Hoffnung, in caustically comic manner:

And of course you'll have chapters on each of the O'Donnell forebears: Great Grandfather—Lord Chief Justice; Grandfather—Circuit Court Judge; Father—simple District Justice; Casimir—failed solicitor. A fairly rapid descent; but no matter, no matter; good for the book; failure's more lovable than success. D'you know, Professor, I've often wondered: if we had had children and they wanted to be part of the family legal tradition, the only option open to them would have been as criminals, wouldn't it?

(SP 295)

Most significantly, perhaps, Friel suggests in the play that the decline of the O'Donnells is somehow related to their culpable detachment from the violent affairs of nearby Northern Ireland, thereby giving to the issue a political colouring totally lacking in the short story. When Tom Hoffnung quizzes Alice about Eamon and Judith, it emerges that Eamon has lost his Dublin diplomatic post through his involvement with the Civil Rights movement in the North, and that Judith brought about her father's first stroke by taking part in the Battle of the Bogside and fighting with the police. In reply to Tom's question concerning her father's attitude to the Civil Rights campaign, Alice replies:

ALICE: He opposed it. No, that's not accurate. He was indifferent: that was across the Border—away in the North.

TOM: Only twenty miles away.

ALICE: Politics never interested him. Politics are vulgar.

(SP 272)

Direct involvement in the vulgarity of politics runs counter to the family's careful avoidance of commitment in the past, as Eamon's savagely comic account makes clear, when he advises the American that his proposed book about Catholic Big House influence should be turned into fiction rather than fact:

A great big block-buster of a gothic novel called Ballybeg Hall—From Supreme Court to Sausage Factory; four generations of a great Irish Catholic legal dynasty; the gripping saga of a family that lived its life in total isolation in a gaunt Georgian house on top of a hill above the remote Donegal village of Ballybeg; a family without passion, without loyalty, without commitments; administering the law for anyone who happened to be in power; above all wars and famines and civil strife and political upheaval; ignored by its Protestant counterparts, isolated from the mere Irish, existing only in its own concept of itself, brushing against reality occasionally by its cultivation of artists; but tough—oh, yes, tough, resilient, tenacious; and with one enormous talent for—no, a greed for survival—that's the family motto, isn't it? Semper permanemus.

(SP 294)

This comprehensive indictment of the O'Donnells as ‘Castle Catholics’ carefully indifferent to the political struggle of their co-religionists in the North is a far cry from the vignette of the Hogans supplied by the more exiguous short story form. Furthermore, Aristocrats provides Friel with yet another opportunity for airing his favourite view of history as a creation of the fertile imagination rather than a record of identifiable fact. The amiable but literal-minded Tom Hoffnung is peddled a litany of historical improbabilities by all and sundry but particularly by Casimir. His brain reels in the presence of the string of notables who, according to Casimir, visited Ballybeg Hall in its great days. Chesterton, John McCormack, Gerard Manley Hopkins, Cardinal Newman, Yeats … will the line stretch out to the crack of doom? Hoffnung establishes to his own satisfaction that mere chronology makes all this impossible but, when Casimir appeals to Eamon for support for his fantasies, Eamon comfortingly replies that ‘there are certain things, certain truths, Casimir, that are beyond Tom's kind of scrutiny’. That there is a truth greater and more complex than mere historical fact is Friel's most constant assertion, repeated in play after play, from The Freedom of the City to Making History. He had spelt out the notion quite explicitly in the course of an account of his own boyhood, where he recalled a fishing trip on which his father had taken him at the age of nine. This vivid personal reminiscence lies behind many such moments in the plays and powerfully echoes such short stories as ‘The Wee Lake Beyond’:

And there we were, the two of us, soaking wet, splashing along a muddy road that comes in at right-angles to Glenties main street, singing about how my boat can safely float through the teeth of wind and weather. That's the memory. That's what happened. A trivial episode without importance to anyone but me, just a moment of happiness caught in an album. But wait. There's something wrong here. I'm conscious of a dissonance, an unease. What is it? Yes, I know what it is: there is no lake along that muddy road. And since there is no lake my father and I never walked back from it in the rain with our rods across our shoulders. The fact is a fiction. Have I imagined the scene then? Or is it a composite of two or three different episodes? The point is—I don't think it matters. What matters is that for some reason … this vivid memory is there in the storehouse of the mind. For some reason the mind has shuffled the pieces of verifiable truth and composed a truth of its own. For to me it is a truth. And because I acknowledge its peculiar veracity, it becomes a layer in my subsoil; it becomes part of me; ultimately it becomes me.¹⁸

The stories occasionally hint at the past's complexities but it is the plays which most memorably provide space for the multiple perspectives required to shuffle the pieces of verifiable truth and extract from them their peculiar veracity. Where the protagonists of the stories assert, sometimes a little desperately, that ‘the past did have meaning’ and seek to recapture that meaning in a phrase such as ‘donging the tower’ or in the chance survival of a name, as in the closing lines of ‘Kelly's Hall’, it was to be in the public art of the theatre that Friel would set in exciting opposition to one another the many voices which would, between them, embrace the complexity of his particular vision of truth.

In a typically self-deprecatory piece of jocosely imagined interview, Friel has posed for himself a set of stock questions and answered them with characteristic modesty:

When did you know you were going to be a writer? The answer is, I've no idea. What other writers influenced you most strongly? I've no idea. Which of your plays is your favourite? None of them. Which of your stories? Most of them embarrass me.¹⁹

Embarrassment is needless. The stories, early as they are and, often, clearly derivative in tone and theme, nevertheless contain frequent hints of necessary explorations to come. Reading them, we are, as it were, watching the dancer exercising at the barre before he moves into the spatial freedom of his essential art.

Notes

1. TLS, 28 April 1966, p. 361.

2. D. E. S. Maxwell, Brian Friel (Lewisburg, Bucknell University Press, 1973), p. 50.

3. Brian Friel, ‘The Theatre of Hope and Despair’, Everyman, 1 (1968), p. 19.

4. Seamus Deane, Brian Friel: Selected Stories (Dublin, The Gallery Press, 1979), Introduction, p. 9.

5. TLS, 19 April 1963, p. 261.

6. Brian Friel, The Saucer of Larks (London, Victor Gollancz, 1962), p. 20.

7. Ibid., pp. 27-28.

8. Ibid., pp. 24-25.

9. Ibid., p. 26.

10. Ibid., p. 29.

11. Ibid., p. 30.

12. Brian Friel, The Loves of Cass McGuire (Dublin, The Gallery Press, 1984), p. 49.

13. The Saucer of Larks, op. cit., pp. 21-22.

14. Maxwell, op. cit., p. 31.

15. The Saucer of Larks, op. cit., p. 57.

16. Ibid., p. 63.

17. Ibid., p. 65.

18. Brian Friel, ‘Self-Portrait’, Aquarius, 5 (1972), p. 18.

19. Ibid., p. 17.