[In the following essay, Deane explores the essential and enduring qualities of Friel's short stories.]

If a story takes its form from the author's desire, it also gives form to the desire of its reader. The reader of this selection of Brian Friel's stories will find his desire moulded into form by the pressure of that local, intimate detail which emerges out of the author's knowledge of his society's moral code. Each story is social in its setting, moral in its implication. Time and again we have the impression that the small-town or village society, no matter how sharply it may be observed in its conformity to the powers of Church or class, has a moral code that belongs elsewhere. The narrowness of the social life is bitter, but the complexity of the moral life within is generous. Yet Brian Friel does not counterpose the two for the sake of contrast. Instead, he illustrates their interdependence, eliciting from us the recognition that the formal structures of social life are what we live by, not what we live for. Yet what we live for is clarified only by the insufficiency of what we live by. This may be no more than glimpsed in these stories; it receives a more sustained and indeed harsher treatment in the author's plays. But the co-existence of two realms, one clearly etched and social, the other amorphous and imaginative, which constitute together the one and the only world is insistently asserted. The separation of these realms, often threatened by sudden disaster, farce or illumination, is never permitted in the stories. In the plays, especially the more recent, it is enforced. But here, the author's insistence on the actuality of event and on the reality of imagination is quite impartial. His linguistic diplomacy is directed towards gaining recognition for both sides. This must be conceded by the reader when it is achieved by the writer.

The concession can only be willingly made when the language has a suasion that disguises its coercive aim, when the modesty of tone and approach is such that we feel persuaded we have discovered what we have just been shown. The syntax and vocabulary of these stories present no apparent problems. Brian Friel is, technically speaking, a traditional writer. The dislocations and the nuanced egoism of many modern texts are sternly avoided, even rejected, here. Yet each paragraph has the tension of writing that demands unremitting care from the reader. Nothing wilful, nothing willed, the workaday words, only slightly coloured by figure or weighted by pronounced rhythm, manage to be so informative, so quickly and easily blended into a narrative medium that we are at first aware only of the story, not the teller. Take, for example, the following passage from the opening paragraph of “The Widowhood System”:

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 ramshackle grocery shop on the ground floor and the flat of Handme Levy, a tailor, on the second.

The language is given over to event. The circumstantial detail, none of it irrelevant, creates both intimacy and a sense of relaxation between reader and author. The latter's personality is never foregrounded, not even in those stories told in the first person. ‘Writing,’ said Freud, ‘is the record of an absent person.’ Few writers manage to be intimate and yet absent to the degree that Brian Friel does. Alienation of the teller from the tale for the sake of the telling, this is his style. Such a style gives greater prominence to tone than to trope or figure. The most persistently identifiable tone in these stories is that of gossip and reminiscence, a peculiar blend of circumstantiality and nostalgia perfectly appropriate to a form in which there is an exact and welcome relationship already established between the teller and the listener, the author and the reader.

The prominence of the short story in modern Irish writing since Moore and Joyce has not been an entirely unmixed blessing. Yet at its best this form, more than any other, acknowledges and even exploits the existence of an audience. Although there are many radical differences between a folk-tale and a short story (most of them described by Walter Benjamin in his essay on Leskov) they at least share the conviction that the audience and the teller have a common cultural identity. In Ireland, this is intensified by the further appeal to a regional familiarity, recognisable in Joyce's evocation of Dublin, O'Connor's of Cork, and Friel's of Donegal-Derry. The tone subsequently produced has a great charm for the reader, since it allows him entry to the story on the ground of an assumed common knowledge and experience. Such a tone defines the distance between writer and reader by the pretence of abolishing it. Listen, for example, to the opening of “Ginger Hero”:

At the time I'm thinking about, the year Billy Brogan and I bought our own fighting-cock and matched him against the best birds in Ireland, you would never have suspected that Annie and Min were sisters. Ten years earlier, when Billy married Annie and I married Min, they were as alike as two peas, although, strangely enough, it was Min who was the softer of the two then.

The phrases ‘At the time I'm thinking about,’ ‘you would never have suspected’ and ‘strangely enough’ (with its nicely proleptic assumption) do not merely presume an audience. They also create one that is flatteringly granted the knowingness of the narrator who is observing his past self and history. The skill of the writing is such that we are eased into a world that is actually much stranger than it initially seems. Because of his manipulation of tone, because of the normative detail of his descriptions the author retards or defers our recognition of its oddity. Such a deferment is quite in keeping, for most of the stories in this selection are concerned with the ways in which people defer the vital existence for the neurotic or the joyless one. Life in these towns and villages is lived vicariously. The illusions of gold in the sea, of champion racing-pigeons or fighting cocks, of ultimate success or respectability do not simply disappear when their surrogate quality is acknowledged. Instead, they seem to exemplify the necessity of illusion in a society which so severely distorts the psychic life, most especially in its sexual aspect. We are not reduced by this to the banal observation that Irish social life is limited, hamstrung by convention and authority. Brian Friel's people live in a state of permanent and alert disappointment. What they are is never fulfilled by what they do. Yet the very discrepancy from which they suffer sharpens their sense of what they are. Because the society is defective their need for imaginative compensation is fostered and still it is not a blind but a conscious use of compensation. In these stories, Brian Friel explores that passage in modern Irish experience which has produced a great deal of our most memorable literature. It is the passage from a declining communal life to one in which the cult of the individual flourishes. The cult of the individual does not, paradoxically, lead to personal fulfilment. With its emphasis on internal freedom and its repudiation of the absorptive effects of a settled community, it most often makes a virtue of alienation and a fetish of integrity. This is the world of Moore and Joyce. Its preoccupations manifest themselves in a conscious experimentalism of technique and an almost ideological aggression towards the shabby Irish community. But another Ireland remained, its communal sense imperfect, but still intact. Synge explored it in drama, Mary Lavin, Sean O'Faolain, Frank O'Connor and Brian Friel explored it in the short story. In it, the failure to wholly be oneself is seen differently. It is not simply the place's fault or the individual's. It is a failure in the transaction between individual and society. It is one in which the awareness of individual distance from social intimacy has been born but in which it has not reached an extreme degree of dislocation. The strained connections of this tenderly understood relationship are probably best exemplified here in the title story.

The catastrophe which befell Nellie Doherty in her long struggle for respectability gives the community of the village of Drumeen an opportunity to behave with impeccable sympathy and also in accordance with the tacit assumptions of class and caste distinction. In such a society to become respectable is to attain selfhood. Vertically imposed upon the horizontals of class is the system of authority officially represented by the priest and unofficially by the diviner. It is a form of authority which does not derive from class although it operates within and has effects upon the class system. After science (the divers from the British naval base), and religion (Father Curran with his rosaries) and society (the organised efforts of the professional classes) have all failed, the diviner's magic takes over. Authority in its most basic form grows out of a sense of mystery but in its more quotidian form out of an awareness of status. The two aspects are epitomised in Nellie herself, who is devoted to status, and her drunken husband, whose mysterious past and unexplained drunkenness belong to the same world as the diviner—socially shabby yet indicative of forces beyond the merely social. The account of the dredging for the body, the swathes of light and darkness through which it is conducted, the sympathetic behaviour of the various groups which make up the community, is a fine example of Brian Friel's tact. The search for the body is an exploration of the community itself and of the individual's relation to it. It has the force of analysis but the tenor of description. It does not enunciate a moral, yet a morality is implied, one which colours the conduct of all concerned, bearing witness to the fact that the differences between individuals are not so pronounced as to deprive the community of a unified temperament. In this story, individuality is shown to be a social achievement; society is shown to be the home of individuality. Yet it is also a story in which the attempt to achieve selfhood fails and in which society's compensatory gesture of sympathy is not quite enough. In the end, only Nellie and the diviner are the outsiders. The crisis of the night has passed and the community's weakness is as manifest as her vulnerability. In this instance, Brian Friel has written a story which gains in significance as our historical retrospect upon it lengthens.

Since he is best known as a dramatist, it is only just that we should also give especial notice here to “Foundry House,” the story on which the play Aristocrats is obviously based. In the story, Joe Brennan refuses to surrender his ideal childhood vision of the Hogans—‘A great family. A grand family’. Between the squalor of his own existence and the remembered splendour of theirs he has created a contrast which is both illusory and necessary. His imagination needs to believe in an alternative existence and thus the actual decrepitude of the Hogans cannot be admitted or articulated by him. It is a fine story, in which the only true aristocrat is the imagination. In the play, however, the illusions are broken and given up. Failure and collapse are publicly articulated after the catastrophic death of Justice O'Donnell. The disarray, emotional and financial, of his family allow no protection to myths or fantasies of the sort cherished by Casimir in Aristocrats. The imagery and the enactment on stage of speech stifled, speech electronically reproduced, speech rupturing silence (as in the case of Uncle George), demonstrate clearly how far Brian Friel the dramatist has moved beyond the world of Brian Friel the short-story writer. For in this and in other plays (Living Quarters and The Freedom of the City prominent among them) the relationship between community, familial and social, and the individual, alienated and stricken, has finally crumbled. Interaction between the two leads only to mutual destruction. In so far as a society depends upon the alliance between status and responsibility, it has become entirely defunct in the Ballybeg of Justice O'Donnell and in the Derry of British Law and Order. The friction between individual and group, between the demand for internal freedom and the system of embodied values is now intolerable. Here, in the development from stories to plays, Brian Friel's work registers a characteristic and irreversible development in modern Ireland.

The last sentence in “The Saucer of Larks” gives a pointer to the kind of morality with which these stories are suffused. The sergeant, somewhat embarrassed at having resisted the blank efficiency of the Germans who had come over to take away the remains of the German airman, turns away from the mock innocence of Guard Burke:

For a man of his years and shape, he carried himself with considerable dignity.

‘Dignity’ is the word to fasten upon here. However relentless Brian Friel may be in his exposure of cowardice or illusion, he never forsakes the notion that human need, however artificially expressed, is rooted in the natural inclination towards dignity. To recognise the squalor and insufficiency of one's life by the creation of an alternative fiction is itself an expression of dignity, not simply a flight from reality. In these stories, moral qualities are the final reality. Circumstance may determine human choice in one respect, but choice governs the role of circumstance in another. The resource to go on living in the light of convictions that are too deeply instinctive to be fully articulated in speech and can only be partially articulated in action is denied to none of his people. They have to assume responsibility even as they lose hope, like Johnny in “Everything Neat and Tidy,” a story that would deserve inclusion on the strength of its final sentence alone:

Chilled by this sudden personal disaster, he drove faster and faster, as if he could escape the moment when he would take up the lonely burden of recollections that the dead had fled from and the living had forgotten.

The nostalgic cadence of the sentence does not quite disguise the tonic effect of that moment when Johnny discovers he has to emerge from the world of behavioural role-playing into the world of adult conduct.

Although it is probably truer of Brian Friel's plays, it also illuminates something about the stories to say that they situate themselves upon a moment of crisis. The danger here is that the crisis may seem voulu, not quite congruent with the observed situation. However, what could be misunderstood as a taste for a melodramatic closure, seems to me something quite different. Even the quietest story here, “The Potato Gatherers,” shows the world to be a much harsher place than hope or fantasy could ever wish it. The brutal fact of money is more prominent here than in most of the others; but it is an undeniable pressure. More limiting than religion, more pressing than class distinction, work is something which the people in these stories attempt to convert into vocation or into a preliminary to the real life. This is, perhaps, the greatest seduction of all. The crisis in these stories and plays is brought about by the failure of work, the failure of long and unremitting effort to achieve a desired end. The crisis is not an exaggeration unless we allow to these stories what Adorno allowed to psycho-analysis when he said: ‘In psycho-analysis nothing is true except the exaggerations.’ Surely the decline of a traditional community, the assumption of a lonely individual burden, is mirrored most clearly in the disjunction between work and living? As Skinner in “The Freedom of the City” shows us, only the unemployed escape that dilemma, although they do so by exchanging it for another. The teachers and policemen, the shopkeepers and widows, the unemployed with their hobbies who populate these stories belong to a period of economic decline and exposure from which they inevitably receive psychological wounds. Perhaps their tragedy is that they feel these wounds as manifestations of their own personal incompetence; and perhaps on that account the illusions they breed are necessary to them.

So the enduring quality of these stories has nothing to do with an isolated moral quality, like dignity; nor has it to do with a general social decline and dilapidation. The quality resides in the tact and sympathy with which the interaction of these things is explored. It is a world of discriminations, not of decisions. When the narrator in “The Gold in the Sea” realises that Con, the creator of the fantasy, was asking him ‘for something more important than money’ we need not be at pains to decide what that something is. We see it as in a photographic negative, fully registered. It is the obverse of what hard, relentless work, old age and the need for money mean. It exists, as do they. To ratify its existence with such power is characteristic of Brian Friel's achievement. Con has given form to his desire and to that of the reader of his story. The actual has become real. This story and its companions enact that rare transmutation.