SOURCE: Bonaccorso, Richard. “Back to ‘Foundry House’: Brian Friel and the Short Story.” The Canadian Journal of Irish Studies 17, no. 2 (December 1991): 72-7.

[In the following essay, Bonaccorso deems “Foundry House” Friel's best-known story, and asserts that is one of his most impressive achievements “given its cultural interest, quiet intensity, and subtle characterization of its protagonist.”]

Considering the emerging power of Brian Friel's plays since the mid-Sixties, one looks back to the stories (mostly published in A Saucer of Larks, 1962, and The Gold in the Sea, 1966) with fascination. A close reading reveals their considerable intrinsic value.

Though Friel's major critics have justly given greatest attention to the plays, there is agreement among some of the most thorough readers regarding the achievement of the stories. D. E. S. Maxwell deems that the “stories too retain within themselves a core of meaning that resists paraphrase” (47). Seamus Deane praises the achievement of a tone that is “perfectly appropriate” to the form of the story (11). George O'Brien, while considering the theatre “an artistic rebirth” for Friel, remarks upon “the fundamental humanity that graces all of his work, and of which the stories remain the first, and not necessarily least, revealing articulation” (29). Friel himself has commented on the strategic differences of the genres, suggesting that in the story the writer, enjoying a more conspiratorial relationship with the reader than the playwright does with an audience, has a more immediate opportunity to express the subversive idea (“Theatre” 15). Stating elsewhere that “I abandoned short story writing before I grew tired of it,” he has also considered the possibility of a creative return to the form (Hickey 224).

“Foundry House,” collected in A Saucer of Larks, is Friel's most well-known story, and perhaps justly so, given its cultural interest, quiet intensity, and subtle characterization of its protagonist. Its teasing paradoxes have stimulated critics to respond from a wide range of perspectives, from the satiric to the elegiac and from the sociological to the psychological.

There is a divergence between early and later readings which can be partially attributed to an awareness of Friel's play, Aristocrats (1980), a work which repeats much of the story's situation, but which essentially alters the thematic considerations by shifting the aristocratic family from background (the Hogans of “Foundry House”) to foreground (the O'Donnells of Aristocrats). There are similar concerns, however, at the heart of both works, one being Friel's longstanding interest in the psychology of class confrontation. (Indeed, one can find a nearly identical theme in one of his earliest published works, “The Visitation,” a story published in Kilkenny Magazine in 1961.) An examination of the thematic relationships between these works (not the intention of this paper) suggests that though Friel has what might be called a consistency of interests, his response to them is multiple.

“Foundry House” concerns thirty-three year old Joe Brennan, a radio mechanic and struggling father of nine. The Brennans live in the old gate lodge of Foundry House, the ancestral home of the Hogans, a once-powerful Catholic family in Northern Ireland. Shared religion is about all the two families have in common. Not only do they represent opposite social classes, it is also clear that the Brennans, for all of their economic hardship, have a vitality that the Hogans, for all of their past eminence, have lost.

Joe remains in awe of the Hogans. He has childhood recollections of the once-thriving foundry which employed his father for over fifty years and of the grand house with its apparently serene lifestyle (Joe had never entered it as a child). He also recalls the patriarchal reputation of Mr. Hogan (called Mr. Bernard and mythologized by the community as a larger than life figure). Yet all of these conditions have changed, and Joe knows that the Hogans and the house are disintegrating. Nevertheless his respect holds. He thinks of the Hogan children, now a priest and a nun:

Sister Claire and Father Declan—just the two of them, and both of them in religion, and the big house up above going to pieces, and no one to take over the foundry when the time would come. Everything they could want in the world, anything that money could buy, and they turned their backs on it all. Strange, Joe thought. Strange. But right, because they were the Hogans.

(55)

Even their decadence is admirable to Joe, who recalls that the laws of their existence never required them to be practical like everyone else. But the world seems to have outgrown the kind of useless beauty that the house represented, and utilitarian buildings block the common man's view of it:

The main Derry-Belfast road ran parallel to the house, and on the other side the ground rose rapidly in a tangle of shrubs and wild rhododendron and decaying trees, through which the avenue crawled up to Foundry House at the top of the hill. The residence was not visible from the road or from any part of the town; one could only guess at its location somewhere in the green patch that lay between the new housing estate and the brassiere factory.

(53)

Friel's symbolism here not only suggests historical change, it presents an aesthetic contrast between old and new worlds that contributes to our understanding of Joe's sensibility.

When Joe is called to Foundry House and actually enters it for the first time, he directly observes its ruin and finds the Hogans reduced to physical decrepitude and economic want. The ultimate mystery of the story derives from Joe's continuing respect, indeed reverence, for the Hogans even after he has witnessed their collapse, while keeping the pathetic aspect of his visit to himself.

Joe calls the event “lovely” when his wife asks him about his visit. He had heard a tape of Sister Claire's voice (she is an African missionary who will never come home again) with her old parents and Father Declan. Yet the recording and the immediate reaction it inspires is anything but lovely. The tape, as O'Brien states, is “excruciating bathos,” (16) and Joe is somewhat aware of it as such: “This sounded more like reading than speaking, he thought—like a teacher reading a story to a class of infants, making her voice go up and down in pretended interest” (63). Mrs. Hogan and Father Declan seem stupefied by her singsong recitation, but decrepid and apparently demented Mr. Bernard nearly dies (his counterpart in the play actually does) of emotional shock upon hearing his lost daughter's voice.

It is a story that can be and has been read in a number of ways, depending on the emphasis that one places upon the ironies that give it its dimension. One can opt for a satiric, mainly sociological reading by emphasizing the story's evocation of two bankrupt worlds, of the physically decayed Hogans and the intellectually mundane Brennans. In such a reading Joe Brennan's idealization of the Hogans can be seen as self-deceiving, vicarious wish-fulfillment. For example, Edmund J. Miner emphasizes Joe's disillusionment and his desire to conceal it after he has been to Foundry House (95), and John Wilson Foster suggests that Joe is one of those several Friel characters who “demonstrate vividly the connection between social deprivation and sentimental fantasy” (64).

But one can also respond to the story as elegy, investing more of the work's emotive force in Joe's character rather than seeing him as a typical member of the serving classes confronting his “betters.” Maxwell emphasizes the elegiac, stating that in “Foundry House” the past “impregnates” the present (38). Ulf Dantanus, Deane, and O'Brien all focus on the curiosities of Joe's imagination in accounting for his paradoxical response to his visit. Dantanus sees that response based on “the strength of his childhood memories” and, in Joe's state of “personal crisis,” as a reaction to the “mediocrity” of his life (49-50, 66). Deane, suggesting that the sense of individual “dislocation” in Friel's stories is to be attributed to “a failure in the transaction between individual and society,” adds that in “Foundry House,” “the only true aristocrat is the imagination” (13, 14). O'Brien also responds more sympathetically than satirically to Joe, considering him the possessor of a “latent, undemonstrative idealism” (17).

Part of the problem in interpreting the story stems from Friel's artistic reticence. Indeed, as Maxwell points out, the story suggests the dramatic mode, for it is delivered only by “what we see and hear” and “there is no commentary on what the characters think and feel” (41). The critic must therefore respond to the unique effects of the work while taking Friel's “obsessions” into account. There are many thematic features in “Foundry House” that are general in Friel's work. One is the sense of an all-but-overpowering cultural inheritance that produces a likely but not necessarily determined response. Another of Friel's general motifs is the tendency to manipulate reality with a compensating and yet self-tormenting imagination. A third signature theme is that of thwarted communication, the inability to share one's innermost being.

In “Foundry House” Joe is a type character of the working classes, but he is also individuated. Though Friel gives us sociological reasons for Joe's kind of personality, his mentality is not entirely to be explained in sociological terms. Friel evokes an appreciation for a subtle interior life in this externally unremarkable man. As is usual in Friel's characterizations, Joe has achieved a measure of individuality by understanding the inadequacies of his existence. He understands that his emotional depths are in some way alien to his public life as radio mechanic, middle-aged husband and father. Such an understanding devalues his external condition but gives him a touch of artistic detachment and perspective, and makes it possible for him to imaginatively translate a childish awe into an adult sense of beauty. His external world is completely given over to economic struggle, to the needs of his nine children and a wife who does not recognize his deepest emotional sensations (who would consider them laughable extravagances if she could), and to limiting physical panoramas consisting of, for example, the housing estate and the brassiere factory.

Joe's unswerving respect for the pathetically decayed Hogans is not a case of failing perception, nor is it entirely a matter of truth-evading sentimentality. He sees the unmistakable marks of their decline and yet he feels the glamor of his reveries. Joe is filled with admiration for a past that seems superior to his present, for a world of aristocratic might that had given people like the Brennans an adjunct part to play in what seemed a more significant life drama. The Catholicism of the Hogans eliminates the suggestion of political subservience, and instead provides a sense of identification (albeit distant) between the two families. To Joe the Hogans represented achievement in a world that for Catholics had little of it, and now, on a more personal basis, they represent dignity in a world that has precious little of it. There is a sociological meaning to the story, then, but it is qualified by Joe's individual sensibility, one that, for example, clearly differentiates him from his wife.

There is an element of sentimentality, of psychological self-defense, about Joe's response, but his emotions are as creative as they are evasive. Joe has an emotional stake in the Hogans. As Deane states it:

Between the squalor of his own existence and the remembered splendor of theirs he has created a contrast which is both illusory and necessary. His imagination needs to believe in an alternative existence ….

(14)

Joe's extreme emotional isolation adds greater intensity to his imaginative experience. O'Brien adds that “it is only in his own mind that Joe can preserve and cherish the family's significance” (17). Joe realizes that he contains within him a lost world that once enveloped him. No longer a servant, he has arrived at an adulthood of the emotions. The story seems to strike its most elegiac note in this sense rather than in its consideration of the fate of the Hogans.

From the beginning to the end of the story, when Joe, in his own house, declares the Hogans “A great family. A grand family,” Friel maintains a delicate balance between evocations of absurdity and beauty, steering his story between satire and sentiment toward a truth about human nature: that although we are very prone to defensive self-deception, we are also capable of an imaginative maturation that enhances individuality.

In its dramatization of the subtle interplay between folly and wisdom, “Foundry House” seems the most Turgenev-like of Friel's stories. It tells us, as do Friel's plays, that there is no absolute truth, only relative, humanized truths which must stand a test of experience and change. When they cannot, their possessors fall into despair and sentimentality. When those individuated truths can adapt to a mutable existence, they provide their keepers with the relative freedom of genuine personality, which, in spite of its limitations, is the ultimate freedom.

O'Brien observes that Friel's stories establish the imagined world that we later find in the plays (29). It is not merely a world of similar externals, but of similar creative response. Because of his artistic maturation Friel finds his own voice and manner most emphatically in his plays; however, having sensed his deeply intellectual vision in them, one can go back to the quieter, less public-oriented stories and find that same vision fully engaged. At first glance, some of the stories may seem no more than delicate, local-color sketches of rural reverie. Some may betray a derivative tonality, suggesting Frank O'Connor, for example, in their burlesque depictions of native extravagance. But their lightness is only apparent, and a good deal more than nostalgia lingers. At the substrata, where the real Friel story lies, there is more intellectual challenge and less emotional catharsis than one finds, to use the same example, in O'Connor. This is so in “Foundry House,” where beauty itself is put to the test of truth.

Friel's stories deserve more critical attention, and not merely as background to the plays. Though clearly in the established European tradition of the modern story, their complex implications stir fresh responses. While evoking the inevitabilities of a particular Irish world, they invest the private experiences of “common” people with uncommon significance. Inherited disadvantage and profound isolation may prevail, yet these stories tell us that the individual remains responsible for his essential condition. Some stories, such as “The Diviner,” “The Flower of Kiltymore,” “A Man's World,” “Stories on the Verandah,” and “Foundry House,” are early gems of a master. In these Friel takes full advantage of the powerful intimacy that is unique to the short story.

Works Cited

Dantanus, Ulf. Brian Friel: The Growth of an Irish Dramatist. Goteborg: Acta Universitatis Gothoburgensis, 1985.

Deane, Seamus. “Introduction” to Brian Friel. The Diviner. Dublin: O'Brien Press, 1983.

Foster, John Wilson. Forces and Themes in Ulster Fiction. Totowa: Rowman and Littlefield, 1974.

Friel, Brian. The Gold in the Sea. Garden City: Doubleday, 1966.

———. The Saucer of Larks. Garden City: Doubleday, 1962.

———. Selected Plays. Washington: Catholic University, 1986.

———. “The Theatre of Hope and Despair.” The Critic 26, 1 (Aug.-Sept., 1967): 12-17.

———. “A Visitation.” Kilkenny Magazine (Autumn-Winter, 1961): 8- 14.

Hickey, Des, and Gus Smith. Flight from the Celtic Twilight. Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1973.

Maxwell, D. E. S. Brian Friel. Lewisburg: Bucknell University Press, 1973.

Miner, Edmund J. “Homecoming: The Theme of Disillusionment in Brian Friel's Short Stories,” Kansas Quarterly 9, 2 (Spring, 1977): 92-99.

O'Brien, George. Brian Friel. Boston: Twayne, 1990.