[In the following essay, Dantanus outlines the nature of Friel's literary landscape through an examination of his short stories.]

RURAL IRELAND VISITED AND TRANSFORMED

In the Introduction and in Chapter I [of Brian Friel: The Growth of an Irish Dramatist] I have tried to map out Friel's real-life and fictional habitat and suggest ways in which its distinctive climate of thought and feeling could begin to assume a “spirit of place” that would work on individual human beings exposed to it. The physical landscape itself provides the first fundamental (some people would say the most fundamental) element in the formation of the mental landscape of a locality. It is only, however, when this inanimate nature is activated by the existence of human nature that historical, intellectual, cultural, racial, social, economic, and religious factors begin their play. And even so, these circumstances exist, so to speak, in abeyance, until they are given expression by some witness who has experienced them. The result is a creative and highly individual interplay between what is expressed and the individual who expresses. Therefore, literature deals with people in more than one sense. The characters in a work of fiction are an expression not only of a particular place but also of a particular imagination. In this sense the mental landscape of a place becomes the literary landscape of the writer. The example of Synge might again be worth mentioning. He found his material and characters in the Aran Islands and in the mountains and glens of Wicklow. But, as Corkery has remarked, he came there, not naturally as one of the native inhabitants, but carrying with him the conditioning of an alien culture and, more importantly, his own personality. It was this clash or interplay of one with the other that produced Synge's characteristic genius. For Friel, the West or North-west of Ireland was nothing like the discovery that the Aran Islands were to Synge. The nature of the interplay between place and writer was different in Friel's case. His literary landscape therefore looks different from that of Synge. Synge immersed himself as much as possible in the daily life of the natives of the Aran Islands while still remaining an outsider. He dealt in his prose and plays directly with these people, trying to describe them as they appeared to him. They are the farmers, fishermen, and tinkers that he had actually met on his travels. Friel's contact with his fictional habitat is at once more natural and close and yet one step removed. In the stories set in Omagh and County Tyrone there is a stable background full of autobiographical detail with the teacher/father frequently being in the narrative focus. In stories set in Donegal Friel's description is more indirect, incorporating in the fiction an element of strangeness, a visitor or newcomer to Donegal, that Synge cut out, containing in himself this distancing effect. In most of the Donegal stories there is some sort of intrusion into the community, either in the shape of human beings, the young boy in “A Man's World”, the German officials in “The Saucer of Larks”, the Indian packman in “Mr. Sing My Heart's Delight”, the diviner in “The Diviner”, the newcomer in “The Skelper” and the holidaying fishermen in “The Gold in the Sea” and “The Wee Lake Beyond”, or in the shape of an inanimate object like the gramophone in “Kelly's Hall”. This intrusion sets up a contrast and reveals the basic qualities of the landscape described.

In order that we may get a clearer idea of the exact nature of Friel's literary landscape we must first establish for ourselves some general view of the mental landscape of the region Friel took as his fictional habitat, and here, in their descriptions of the West of Ireland (or rural Ireland) as opposed to the East of Ireland (or urban Dublin), both writers describe, in some important respects, the same mental landscape but at different times. The principal characteristics of this community are the same as those of any pre-industrial society: traditional, rural, homogeneous, with strong communal interests, and where the dependence on the land was almost total, its population existing in close contact with nature, and where spiritual values were expressed in a need for religion. The Industrial Revolution, of course, changed all that. The post-industrial society is associated with strongly disparate values: modern, urban, secular, heterogeneous, individual, industrial, materialistic, a society characterized by flux rather than stability. But in Ireland, superimposed on these developments, there are further complications and divisions, with mainly racial and religious overtones. The simple opposition of Irish (or Gaelic) and English hides a wealth of underlying and contrasting values. It is true, of course, that England went through the normal phases of pre- to post-industrial society. The fundamental and tragic complication for Ireland has been the confusion about “the national question.” In his preface to John Bull's Other Island Shaw observed that: “A healthy nation is as unconscious of its nationality as a healthy man of his bones.”¹ In Ireland the broken bones have not been allowed to heal. In Ireland, furthermore, the loss of the traditional Gaelic community was not the simple outcome of the Industrial Revolution. The whole process was aggravated and complicated in its early stages by the fact that it was officially engineered by the English Government.

The basic structure and values of rural Ireland and the tremendous changes that have taken place, the confrontation between the old order and the slow infiltration of modern 20th century urban civilisation play a significant part in Friel's literary landscape. The impact of this transformation receives a comic treatment in an early story, “Kelly's Hall”, where the coming of the first gramophone to Beannafreaghan in Co. Donegal suggests the initial onslaught of modern times. The machine comes, significantly, from Dublin, where it was picked up by the narrator's grandfather, Clarence Parnell Kelly. The attraction of this novelty is at first enormous, and despite some preliminary opposition from the Church in the guise of the Canon and the narrator's grandmother—the people had “given themselves over completely to the devil”—there is a distinct prospect of success.² “Concerts” are organised, and the people who come to listen to the new invention sense that they are “pioneers, innovators, the first witnesses of a new era.”³ In the early stages the concerts were free, but the organisers soon realise the financial rewards open to them. The Canon lends his support (the roof of the parish hall needed mending) and large audiences are tempted from the surrounding areas. But it all goes terribly wrong. Neither the community nor the Canon can control the situation, and when the gramophone cannot achieve the expected feat of producing the popular “Poor Blind Boy” himself, the meeting breaks up in chaos. Afterwards, with the gramophone destroyed and the records broken, everyone involved in the venture realises their mistake. “‘Sure hadn't we far better fun the way it was,’ Maggie Square is supposed to have said to him [the Canon].”⁴ The gramophone and records, insignia of modernity, cannot immediately be accommodated into the settled pattern of life in Beannafreaghan. They cause havoc, not only to practical life, but also in the imagination of the simple people of the West. They are set out to become an addition and enrichment to life there, but the West is not quite ready for these modern luxuries. The story is told with the benefit of hindsight, from a modern point of view, and at a time when the gramophone would cause little fuss. The suggestion is not so much that the process has been going on for some considerable time, but that it has been (or is) changing traditional rural Irish conditions and values. The emphasis of the story is on the comic possibilities of the situation described. Any suggestion of nostalgia for the innocence of a lost paradise would be extrinsic to the purpose of the story, but it is nevertheless there. The same inability to deal with mechanical modernity is symbolised by “the gargling meter” in “Downstairs No Upstairs”.⁵ In this comic and lighthearted story “the limiter system” disrupts the life of the narrator's family. For a fixed amount of money a fixed amount of electricity was channelled into the house. If too much voltage was taken out the meter started gargling, and if nothing was done (one bulb has to be turned off before another is turned on) the whole house goes black. As expected, the worst happens and a visiting Inspector of Schools falls downstairs and fractures his kneecap. This put paid to the father/teacher's hope of promotion and forces the family to switch to “the silent, sneaky extravagance of the regular system.”⁶ The new system changes family habits and makes life in general much easier but the narrator finds that the “whole thing made me permanently suspicious of progress and efficiency.”⁷ At the end of the story, no doubt with a humorous intent, he sums up his experience:

I often think I would barter all—television, refrigerator, washing machine, tape recorder, and the other electric luxuries that have invaded our house—for the pleasant, dangerous gargle of the old limiter and for the family concord with which we fought him. And certainly I would trade them all for that honest £1/10/0 bill that used to come every quarter.⁸

Here, any hint of a serious conclusion is completely reversed in the final sentence. To deduce anything at all from these and other comic stories regarding the emotional leanings of the imagination behind them would be extremely hazardous. It seems to me, however, that there are certain qualities represented in the two stories discussed so far that indicate a creative sensibility that is at least prepared to attempt a more serious treatment of the problem of the past, and in particular, the Irish past. The repeated mention of traditional and distinctly nonmodern aspects of this question versus new and modern ones would point to this. The reference in the second story to the family and “the family concord” may be more significant than the mood of the story suggests. In its entirety Friel's work has always concerned itself with the family as one of the binding forces of society. In his Irish context it is part of the chain that unites concepts like ‘roots’ and ‘place’, which together originate ‘community’, and which in turn gives rise to societal and communal values like ‘home’ and ‘family’.

The expression of “the old order” is perhaps at its strongest and most consistent in “Mr. Sing My Heart's Delight”. The setting is solidly West of Ireland, and its isolation is established in the first sentence of the story. “On the first day of every new year, I made the forty-five-mile journey by train, mail car, and foot across County Donegal to my granny's house which sat at the top of a cliff above the raging Atlantic at the very end of the parish of Mullaghduff” (p. 58). This, no doubt, is the sort of place where you would be likely to find at least some vestiges of Gaelic civilisation. The barren desolation of the area is stressed by Friel and the precariousness of existence unavoidably felt. Again, Friel's technique of using the narrative point of view of grandson and grandmother establishes the time-scheme for the thematic development of the story and grants the reader the awareness of witnessing the remnants of a passing culture at play. The grandfather has had to accept economic reality and has joined thousands of other seasonal labourers in Scotland “to earn enough money to tide them over the rest of the year” (p. 58). The cottage is the traditional one—the window, the open door and the fire providing the only light—sparsely equipped and furnished. Grandmother was illiterate and a Gaelic speaker. “A constant source of fun was Granny's English. Gaelic was her first tongue and she never felt at ease in English which she shouted and spat out as if it were getting in her way” (p. 60).⁹ Her love of story-telling and delight in verbal exaggeration, “Christ, it's a calf I have under my foot and not a fluke at all!” (p. 61), are a vital part of her personality. The Irish-Gaelic atmosphere is further developed when exposed by the visit to the cottage of an Indian packman peddling a variety of “gaudy knick-knacks” (p. 62). His wares, like the simple and crude objects of beauty on the mantelpiece, engage grandmother's energetic imagination in an effort to counteract the bleak surroundings of the place. This mental compensation for material dearth and hardship frequently occurs in Irish literature, and I shall examine later the way that Friel handles it. In “Mr. Sing My Heart's Delight” the real insight of the story must arise in the reader himself. The implicit comparison between the place where the events of the story take place and the background of the visitor from the Punjab nicely suggests individual attitudes to one's own place. The packman first tries to convey to the grandmother the essential poverty of his own country. “Very warm. Very warm and very poor” (p. 68). But her idea of his place does not admit the reality of poverty, and it becomes “the Garden of Eden”. It is necessary to quote at some length here, not only to describe the way the grandmother transposes her own fantasies to the Indian background, but more importantly to suggest Friel's manner of using counterpoint to relate directly the two experiences.

‘And the women, strolling about in the sun under the orange trees and the sun taking lights out of their hair and the gallant men raising their feathered hats to them and stepping off the road to let them pass … in the sun … in the Punjab … in the Garden of Eden …’ She was away from us as she spoke, leaving us in the drafty, flagged-floor kitchen, listening to the wind ripping up the ocean below us and trying the weaker parts of the thatched roof. The packman's eyes were closed and his head nodded.

(p. 68)

The real insight of the story, it seems to me, lies in the suggested extension of the packman's reactions. Far away from his own country he seems to be prepared to forget the reality in favour of a more sentimental and nostalgic memory. Here, and elsewhere, Friel's characters sense the pull of the home-land or their own place. This attachment is difficult to define, it is emotional rather than intellectual, and it is difficult if not impossible to escape from it. In “Aunt Maggie, the Strong One”, the protagonist is taken from her home in Donegal to an old people's home in Dublin. As she is leaving the house where she had lived for over seventy years, she tries to shake off the emotional attachment. “‘Coming, Bernard. Coming.’ Then she laughed out. ‘Damn it all anyhow! What is it but bricks and mortar!’” (p. 187) In reality, though, Aunt Maggie goes to the city to die. She soon experiences the loss of dignity and independence that comes as a result of the move, and the inappropriateness of the name ‘home’ as applied to the Refuge becomes all too evident. In “Aunt Maggie, the Strong One” the East-West dichotomy forms an integral part of the story's thematic concerns without assuming total control. The central incident comes instead to rest with the narrator, and it happens on a purely individual level with no direct East-West relevance. This is true of many of the other stories as well. In some of them it is just mentioned briefly, in others it is only understood. But it always expresses a fundamental presence in the stories, an indispensable part of the background. Friel often uses a young narrator to suggest the difficult initiation into adult life of an innocent and immature child. The same technique is used to great advantage in a story which deals also with the possibility of the loss in young people of an awareness and knowledge of local culture and lore. After much fear and trepidation the young boy in “My True Kinsman” is ‘caught’ by the terrible grandfather. For years the boy's mother, “the eldest of a cautious, well-to-do family from County Louth,” has been warning her children about the depravity of her husband's father, “Aw, the dirty thing! The dirty thing!” (p. 113) The old man took a second wife when he was nearly seventy years old, “this time a flighty woman of forty-five from the village of Mullaghduff” (p. 113), and when she died “he took to the wild living” (p. 113). The puritanically inclined sensibilities of the narrator's mother are strongly offended and she takes every care to make sure the children will not meet the old man. On one occasion, however, without the protection of his mother who is out of action as a result of a fall from a ladder, the young boy has to venture into the village for some iodine. As expected, the grandfather descends on him. “This is an occasion! An unescorted Burke roaming the big, bad world all alone!” (p. 117) After the initial fear, the pent-up fascination for the old man felt by the grandchildren is soon richly rewarded. The boy is treated to a historical tour of the village. The exact verisimilitude of the account may leave much to be desired but to the young boy grandfather “spoke like a grand judge with wonderful words flowing out of him and he made the one main street that was Mullaghduff into the most romantic place in the whole of Ireland” (p. 118). There is an imaginative quality about grandfather's sense of history, but the more outrageous inventions are always balanced by and anchored in elements of recognisable and true events and names of Irish history. In between “Cromwell's troops,” “The Druid temple” and “Cathair Mor, King of Leinster,” there is “the silver river whose singing could be heard on Midsummer night only” and “a calf that had been born with two heads (one had been removed the week before we saw it)” (p. 119). In one sentence the reality of that spectre of Irish history, emigration, is hinted at, and yet fantastically exploded. “And we went to the harbour and looked across the Atlantic at New York where a hundred million lights burned day and night and where volcanoes threw whole streets sky high” (p. 119). The suggestion that the boy had been introduced to a previously unknown culture in which legend and the romantic imagination blend without restraint with the true facts of history, is pointedly brought out in his attitude to his mother. “I had forgotten completely about my mother. Indeed, had Grandfather kept on talking, I might never have remembered her” (p. 119). Later the boy subconsciously pays tribute to the experience bequeathed him by the grandfather. When the old man is refused “tick” in a public house the boy hands over the ten-shilling note intended for the iodine, thus cementing his relationship with previous generations. The contrast between mother and grandfather also incorporates an element of religious differences. “One other place I forgot,” said grandfather after the tour. “The chapel. But I think you have been there once or twice before” (p. 119). There is no place in grandfather's sense of his own background and locality for the kind of obsequious and puritanical devotion exhibited by the boy's mother. His own religion would be closer to that of the pagan pre-Christian Celtic population of Ireland. When they stood on the ground where the Druid temple had been, he “got down on his knees on the ground to demonstrate how those holy men worshipped the sun” (p. 119). The day's experience had liberated the young boy from the restraints of a dull, formal, unimaginative and begrudging existence, and the temptation of the romantic Irish past has become a reality. At the end of the story he can return home without fear of facing the mother, and in the final sentence “Grandfather” becomes synonymous with various aspects of Corkery's ‘hidden Ireland’. Walking home in the rain, protected by the old man's jacket, he feels safe in his new awareness.

And then, as I ambled along, I became aware again of the smell, the smell of Grandfather. It filled my cavern and floated around my nose and eyes. I raised my arm and smelt it. Now my arm was permeated with it and my chest and my whole body. The smell was through me and all about me. And I knew that as long as it lasted, I would have the courage to meet my mother and tell her the terrible news—that I had no iodine and no money and that Grandfather had got me.

(p. 121)

But Friel is no innocent believer in the virtues of ‘Irish Ireland’. In his work he has always been interested in the application and manifestations of these ideas, especially in their modern forms, and they were to receive their own mythic treatment in Translations (1980). There are no simple solutions or conclusions in Friel's work. Each statement automatically permits its own opposite. (As we shall see, Translations as a play was qualified by The Communication Cord two years later.) In the short stories, however, the attitude seems to be pitched in favour of a more romantic view of the past. Its attractions are obvious in “My True Kinsman”, but the reader must also be prepared to look critically at the proffered alternative, to see both the bleak reality of poverty and hardship, and the dangers of unbridled fantasy.

In another story, “The Saucer of Larks”, the East-West dichotomy is expressed in similar and different terms. The setting, in its wild, dramatic beauty, resembles that of “Mr. Sing My Heart's Delight”. Again, we are in the West of Donegal, but here the landscape seems to be more in unison with human life, and even possessing and expressing a life of its own. The physical qualities are insisted upon,“obdurate, peaty, rocky earth,” … “[b]arren bogland” and “an occasional gnarled tree” (p. 197). The central character, a police sergeant, had moved to Donegal from Cavan twenty-six years earlier, “but there were times when its beauty still shocked him” (p. 196). He has responded to the spirit of the place and sets it off against the Dublin he knew when he was stationed there. On the day on which the events of the story take place the Sergeant and his assistant, Guard Burke, are guiding two German visitors to the improvised grave of a young German airman whose plane had crashed on the tip of a Donegal promontory. The grave is to be opened and the remains, on the order of the German War Graves Commission, taken to a special cemetery in County Wicklow where there are already over fifty other German war dead. The contrast between being laid to rest in an isolated, solitary grave in the West or dumped in a more organised and formal manner in Wicklow, triggers off the main conflict of the story. The views of the Sergeant are clear. “D'you know, only that the missus is buried away down in the midlands, I wouldn't mind being laid to rest anywhere along the coast here myself” (p. 196). With nice ‘double-entendre’ he condemns all Dublin cemeteries. “I'm telling you: everything's dead in them places. Once they put you in them big cemeteries, you're finished, all right” (p. 197). The West is different, he claims, whether you are living or dead. “Out here, man, you still have life all around you. Dammit, there's so much good life around you, you haven't a chance to be really dead!” (p. 197) The main impetus of the argument here is, of course, comic. But just to make sure that the suggestions also have a serious edge, Friel extends the East-West conflict. The Sergeant has seen the ravages of modern times in Dublin, and issues a warning about prospectors and developers. But ‘the valley of the larks’ (Glennafuiseog) cannot be bought for money. What would they do if they could lay their hands on a place like that?

They would destroy it! That's what they would do! Dig it up and flatten it out and build houses on it and ring it round with cement. Kill it. That's what they would do. Kill it. Didn't I see them myself when I was stationed in Dublin years ago, making an arse of places like Malahide and Skerries and Bray. That's what I mean. Kill it! Slaughter it!

(p. 200)

The Sergeant tries in vain to persuade the efficient Germans to leave the young pilot in his Western grave. They are deaf to his pleas. “Let him lie here where he has all that's good in God's earth around about him. He has been here for the past eighteen years; he's part of the place by now” (p. 201). A fundamental rift opens between the Sergeant and the Germans in their differing attitudes to the situation. The Germans are not prepared to disobey and they carry out their orders with speed and energy. At this stage the story threatens to turn into an examination of the various merits of German versus Irish attitudes to efficiency, death, and place, but in his usual discreet and unobtrusive manner, Friel returns the focus of the story to the level of the individual. The Sergeant has given in to impulses that he felt but cannot explain or define. He has exposed himself to others by allowing deeply personal and individual feelings to come out in what should have been an impersonal formality, a situation where nothing but a strictly official attitude was necessary. “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” (p. 204). But with the foreigners gone, his one fear is now that his own local community will get wind of his lapse. Guard Burke receives a strong warning to keep quiet about the incident, or “I'll have you sent to the wildest outpost in the country” (p. 205). There is probably a considerable amount of unconscious irony in that final remark. It would be difficult to imagine a more feral area than that described in the story.

Even though the German-Irish contrast must not be exaggerated, and its purpose, where it comes at the end of the story, is largely comic, the comparison may nevertheless serve to point out a few notorious traits in the Western Irishman. There are suggestions of a sentimental attachment to the land and one's own place, a basically religious respect for death, and there is an almost pathetic attempt at German-like efficiency which is quickly forgotten. The Sergeant's willingness to forge the German documents is close to the traditional inclination of the rural Irishman to resist the workings of the official arm of the law, which is seen to be of English and therefore hostile execution. (A curious but telling effect of this can also be seen in the informal nomenclature of Sir Robert Peel's policemen, ‘peelers’ in Ireland, and ‘bobbies’ in England.) In this story, the fact that the disrespect for formal law emanates from one of its own representatives (albeit an Irish one) makes the presentation even keener. Similar attitudes are revealed in many of the other stories, stressing the difficulties of strict law enforcement among the free spirits of the West. In “The Skelper” poaching is “one of the few privacies that the village respected” (p. 236), and here the community stand united against what they see as unnecessary meddling in their own affairs by officialdom. In “The Gold in the Sea” the visitor to the West asks silly questions about the absence of lights on the fishing boats until he realises that most of them do not have one, and consequently no licence to fish.

As modern times move in the loss of many aspects of traditional Gaelic and Western ways becomes more and more obvious. In spite of the ravages of earlier centuries it is probably true to say that it is the twentieth century that has caused the greatest and speediest changes. In “Kelly's Hall” Friel seems to be curiously interested in documenting the timing of these mutations. The coming of the first gramophone to Co. Donegal happens in May 1901, and Friel places the birth of the boy/narrator in the same month. At the end of the story almost half a century has been taken into consideration, and the passing of time is emphasised. “I left Beannafreaghan during World War I and I was not back again until 1945. They have a fine new harbor there now with motorboats hitting up against its side. The old house has gone and the herring shed but the hall still stands four-square on top of its hillock.”¹⁰ The hall has become known among the locals as ‘Kelly's hall’, and is now used for showing films in three nights a week, a suitably contemporary use for the old parish hall. “I have been emphatic about the dates,” the narrator assures us, presumably because of their direct relevance for his own life, but also, one would think, for a more general purpose.¹¹ “I have before me now press cuttings from newspapers of that time” he goes on to establish, as if to lend more credibility to his story, in itself a modern concept since the story by itself would have been enough in the story-telling Gaelic civilisation.¹²

“FOUNDRY HOUSE” AND THE DIVIDED NORTH

So far, the attack of modernity has been seen as a facet of the old East-West dichotomy. This is also where it receives its most frequent and most eloquent expression, and the fact that the conditions in the West had to undergo more drastic and dramatic changes than anywhere else made them more dramatic as literary material. In “Foundry House” the issues become at once much more complex and much more comprehensive. It is still the passing of time and the changes in traditional ways that constitute the outlines of the thematic landscape, and it is still the personal perspective that dominates the story. In some ways at least, “Foundry House” can be seen as a key story when it comes to a final estimation of Friel's craft. (To judge by the critical interest taken in this story it would also merit attention.) It contains one of the best examples of an extended thematic exploration conducted on a high level of accumulated meanings in all of Friel's prose works, and it points forward to several of the plays both in relation to form and content. It is in fact typical Friel in the way it avoids clear-cut and definitive explanations or statements about the themes that are dealt with. His early dictum, as expressed in Acorn, can now be said to be one of the main artistic principles in his work.

All any writer does, whether he's a dramatist or a short-story writer, is to spotlight a situation. In other words, he presents a set of people and a situation with a certain clarity and understanding and sympathy and as a result of this one should look at them more closely; and if one is moved then that one should react accordingly. This is the responsibility of a reader or an audience, but I don't think it's the writer's.¹³

Inherent in this attitude lie the dangers of ‘underwriting’. If the story is too ‘underwritten’ the reader is left with too much work to do. The fundamental purpose of any creative writing, the communication between writer and reader, becomes difficult or even impossible. The critical reactions to “Foundry House” are interesting in the way that they relate to this question in varying ways. Friel himself is very much aware of his own tendencies towards ‘underwriting’. The editor of the New Yorker, he has said, “always maintains that I understate stories, that I am always underwriting. I agree thoroughly with this because I think there's nothing as annoying as an overstated story.”¹⁴ But first we must establish the vital distinction between the expression in a story of the themes a writer is dealing with, and something that many readers are expecting at the end of the story, the writer's own explanation (or expression) of its meaning, which can, of course, be done in many different ways. This becomes a question of literary technique, of arranging the material in a well-organised package. In literature the ending is important as a result of this arrangement, in life the ending is not important. Again, Friel is reluctant to say too much by way of explaining the motivation behind a character's actions or words. He hopes instead that they will provide this insight in themselves.

The simple theme of “Foundry House” is the complete destruction of a social class. The time scheme set up by Friel in this story again puts the developments described into proper perspective. The changes that have taken place are seen through the succession of different generations, caught at one particular moment, but suggesting extensions backwards and forwards in time. The main character, Joe Brennan, looks backwards to his own childhood and the position held by his father in the service of Mr. Bernard Hogan, the owner of the local foundry, and he is, in the course of the story, made strongly aware of revolutionary shifts in the old social order. For Joe the first step into childhood memories is occasioned by the move made by him and his family back to his old home, the gate lodge of Foundry House where he had been born and reared. This presents Friel with a symbolic point of departure, and puts Joe in a position where he cannot avoid the past. Immediately Joe is reminded of his father's subservient station vis-à-vis the Big House, the obsequious respect and fear come out in his behaviour towards his own children. He does not want them to play in the grounds of the Big House—“Why can't you play down below near your own house?” (p. 74)—but they are not likely to feel the same regard for the Hogans as he himself did as a child. The social link has been broken, Joe is a radio-and-television mechanic and the gate lodge is becoming like any ordinary house for Joe's wife Rita and the children. Only Joe is caught in between his father and his own children, in a transitional phase where he cannot forget his place in the old social order. He still retains his picture of the old house and the old Mr. Hogan and his dogs, and he is perhaps a bit slow in appreciating the significance of some of the changes that would point to the new circumstances. The gate lodge itself is a remnant from another time. There was no indoor toilet and no running water and Joe is having to apply for money from the urban council to be able to make the many necessary improvements. A symbolically important event had taken place when “the authorities had taken away the great iron gates that sealed the mouth of the avenue” (p. 72). The entry to the Big House is now permanently open, and its inhabitants can no longer cut themselves off from the rest of the area in haughty isolation. This one symbol is the first significant pointer to the new and different times. The central episode of the story comes when Joe is asked to supply and operate a tape-recorder for a family reunion in Foundry House. He has never been inside the house and his first visit will make him the witness of the end of an era. When confronted with the decay and debility of the house and the Hogans, Joe still retains his own regard and respect for the family, refusing to let their changed fortune suppress the stronger and more innocent memories of childhood. The reason for this is probably to be found as much in Joe's unwillingness to be swayed by the obvious material changes that have happened as in the strength of his childhood memories, which constitute in many ways a definition and justification of his own life.

Mr. and Mrs. Hogan and their son Declan, a priest, are gathered to listen to a tape-recording sent by their daughter Claire, a nun in Africa, from where she is never to return. So the family is destined for extinction, not from external causes, but through their own inability to procreate. Their end becomes absolute and self-inflicted. They “burn [their] own fuel” (p. 79), and they seem singularly out of place in a modern and mechanical society. Mrs. Hogan, as would be expected by a representative of that class, does not know the difference between gas and electricity. The decline is everywhere to be seen, frequently contrasted by a more glorious and no too distant past. The “door handle was of cut glass, and the door itself did not close properly. Above his [Joe's] head was a print of horses galloping across open fields; the corner of the carpet was nibbled away” (p. 80). The much awaited recording from Sister Claire is a disaster and serves only to confirm the treacherous qualities of the passage of time. Claire remembers her parents and the house as it was when she was still there, and the ironic contrasts between now and then multiply themselves. The old man suffers a stroke when hearing his daughter's voice on the tape and has to be carried back to bed. Joe is left alone in the breakfast room, where the old couple spend most of their days in a house now far too large for them. He obediently waits for a whole hour before he sneaks out quietly. Back home in the gate lodge, when forced to report to his wife about the events of the afternoon, he will not allow what he has actually seen to influence his own personal and long-rooted view of the Hogan family. “‘They're a great family, Rita,’ he said. ‘A great, grand family’” (p. 88).

There is in “Foundry House” a wealth of interrelated themes and ideas. There is no escaping the social, political and religious facts which condition the story. Of these the first is by far the most important, the last only in itself remotely relevant. All the characters are in fact Catholics, thus virtually cancelling the possibility of an exploration along conventional Catholic-Protestant lines. The difference in social class between the Hogans and the Brennans, on the other hand, and more specifically, the changing fortunes of both, is at the heart of the story's thematic concerns. Joe has ‘risen’ to become a radio-and-television mechanic, and his occupation points forward to the future. The Hogans are a spent force and represent what has been and what is lost. So much is evident from the story. The difficulty arises when we are faced with the problem of interpreting these two trends and the respective merits of both as they appear in the story. Here it is possible to detect differing critical responses and views. D. E. S. Maxwell declares that the ending “avoids interpretation,” and is unwilling to comment on the underlying currents of meaning.¹⁵ But Maxwell also stresses the role of the reader, who must, as I have suggested earlier, go on to examine the background of the story and Joe's reactions to the events. Edmund J. Miner complains of the great difficulty for the uninitiated to understand the complexities of the North of Ireland background. In his view “‘Foundry House’ … lays stress on the feature that distinguishes the North from the South: they are industrial, materialist, eager beavers at doing and making as contrasted with the more artistic dreamers of the South.”¹⁶ He then goes on to enumerate “the more sacred inhumanities of the Ulsterman,” losing sight, it seems to me, of the story itself, in an effort to interpret the meaning of the background.¹⁷ In his discussion on “Foundry House” in Forces and Themes in Ulster Fiction John Wilson Foster does not fight shy of interpretation. He even chides Joe for his failure to accept the true nature of the Big House in its present situation. Joe's “nostalgic mythicisation of the rural semi-feudal past” is dangerous.¹⁸ “The myth of social grandeur that is debunked and then reinstated in the story is in fact the glorified memory of a semi-feudal past of ruling haves and obsequious have-nots.”¹⁹ But the point that the story makes is precisely this, that it is for the reader to see the contrasts between Joe's nostalgia, which is, as I have pointed out, understandable and understanding in view of the close and important relationship that he had with the Hogans and the house, and his own awareness of their decline. He can see, as well as the reader, what time has brought them. But for him to reject their past outright would be to reject his own past and provenance, his father's life and his own existence. It must be remembered that Joe's statement comes immediately after the experience. With time, because the inevitable passing of time is very much part of the background of the story, Joe may have to temper his nostalgia. He might equally well, of course, hang on to it as sustenance from his own life. “It is a fine story, in which the only true aristocrat is the imagination,” says Seamus Deane in his introduction to Brian Friel: Selected Stories.²⁰ It would be equally accurate to say that the only true villain is the inevitable passing of time.

“Foundry House” is set in the North of Ireland, and it is different from most of the other stories in the way it sets out directly to deal with two separate social classes. The present divisions and their past history become an important part of the story. Similar divisions, though expressed more indirectly, can be seen to operate in “Johnny and Mick”. As Maxwell has pointed out, the place, without being mentioned, is almost certainly Friel's own Derry. The two young boys, 10 and 9 years old, spend an afternoon walking about in the suburban parts of the town, well away from the inferred poverty of “the squatters' huts at the outskirts of the town” where they live.²¹ They enter “a district that was new to them” where the streets are wide and the houses detached and secure.²² The social background from which they come is in sharp contrast to the clean and orderly area where they find themselves, and Johnny, at least, has already been in trouble with the police. He has learnt to “look the policeman or probation officer straight in the eyes and smile his happiest smile.”²³ There are images of a divided city, “one half in the sun, the other in the shade,” and in the story there is a brief confrontation between the two classes.²⁴ Johnny and Mick collect chestnuts, and they are pleasantly surprised to find that an old man from one of the houses offers to buy some for his effete grandson Wesley, who obviously cannot himself climb the trees. The contrast between them is further strengthened in Friel's description. The old man speaks a different language, the name of his house is Holmleigh, not “Hollem-lee” as Mick has pronounced it. The two boys briefly entertain a scheme to make easy money by selling chestnuts to other boys in the area. The scheme is quickly abandoned and their enthusiasm dies as the chestnuts scatter. Quietly, despondently, they make their way back to their own homes, leaving the suburban street behind them. The two young boys possess a reckless but unchannelled energy. They are too young to be wholly aware of their social plight, but they might also be two prospective civil rights marchers or even political activists. Again, Friel as the narrator is unobtrusive if not reserved in relation to the themes of the story. It does, however, clearly establish what Maxwell calls Friel's deep sense of Derry's divided community,” and inevitably suggests the social, political, and religious reality of that city, and by extension, the rest of Northern Ireland.²⁵

It may be dangerous to hazard too many generalisations about the differences between those of Friel's stories that are set in Donegal and those that are set in Tyrone or Derry. Nevertheless, it seems to me that there are some clearly identifiable similarities that unite the Tyrone stories. As I have suggested earlier the Tyrone stories seem to establish a clear and safe attitude to the place described, where, in the stories set in Donegal, we have frequently the introduction of a visitor or newcomer to the West learning to decode the language and habits of the people there. In many of the Tyrone stories one of the main characters is a teacher and often a teacher and father in one. This, as far as I can see, is not the case in any one of the Donegal stories. The Tyrone stories almost always incline eastwards rather than westwards, whereas many of the Donegal ones take us as far west as possible. The autobiographical background seems to be more solidly exploited by Friel, especially the father/teacher in Omagh and/or Tyrone, whereas the experiences of Donegal are “new”. These, I think, are incontrovertible facts. But there are also other aspects of the Tyrone stories that receive a wider and more explicit treatment than in the Donegal ones. In stories like “The First of My Sins”, “The Highwayman and the Saint”, and “The Death of a Scientific Humanist”, apart from being firmly set in Omagh/Tyrone, the subject of religion is allowed to take over to a degree uncommon in Friel's stories. It is true that they are mainly comic in their intention, but they also contain a not inconsiderable amount of irony with serious undertones. In the first of these stories the young boy preparing for his first confession is confused by the difference between his own definition of a ‘sin’ and that of his mother and the priest. He innocently refuses to mention in his confession the fact that he pulled his Aunt Mary's skirt: “I only wanted to see the colour of her knickers.”²⁶ To his mother this suggestion of sex is much more serious, and the boy will no doubt become aware of this as he grows up. To him, the fact that his Uncle George had stolen some knives and forks from the hotel in London where he was working was a much more relevant sort of sin, but when he tells the priest about this there is no reaction: “I told him again because he obviously did not understand the enormity of my sin.”²⁷ But the boy is summarily absolved, and can rejoin “the row of eager, smiling mothers kneeling at the back.”²⁸ In these three stories, and in some others, “Aunt Maggie, the Strong One” for example, the individual is subjected to the impersonal and dogmatic attitudes of institutionalised religion, and it is always the individual that has to bend. Friel's priests expect total obedience of their parishioners and will not accept any limitation of their authority. This demand frequently generates and encourages a hypocritical attitude on the part of the individual, of the kind evidenced by the narrator's mother in “The Death of a Scientific Humanist”. The presence of the nuns, we are told, “smothered her native spirit and reduced her to a simpering, sighing caricature of herself” (p. 20). At home her attitudes are far from reverential: “‘Thieves!’ she would say. ‘Sneaky, rotten thieves, with their oh-so-nice accents and their slithery eyes! Lord, but they'll have a lot to answer for, thon gang!’” (p. 20) More than anything else, it is when the demands of the church as institution, and of the priests and nuns as their representatives, become inhuman dogma and fail to consider the human needs of the individual, that Friel's sensibilities are offended.

Taken together the stories often display a balanced and comprehensive view of the issues dealt with. Friel moves backwards and forwards in time to look at a subject or theme from different angles, and the question of religious use or abuse is no exception. The innocent and natural simplicity of the child in “The Death of a Scientific Humanist” and “The First of My Sins” is in stark contrast to the studied hypocrisy of adult attitudes in the same stories and in “Aunt Maggie, the Strong One”. Even so, the adults suffer as well. Aunt Maggie is ‘tamed’—before she was taken into the Refuge she had said of the nuns: “Damned hypocrites! But they won't tame me, Bernard. They won't tame Maggie” (p. 188)—by a combination of old age, indignity at the loss of her own home and place, and the forbidding nature of life in the Refuge. The broad and burlesque farce of “The Highwayman and the Saint” hides the personal tragedy of Madge and Andy. Mrs. Wilson and Cissie Cassidy become the simpering symbols of blind, life-negating worship, combining to put out the fire of youth in Madge and Andy. The authoritarian Monseigneur Carroll in “My Father and the Sergeant” falsely allows the narrator's father to expect the headship of the new school, and then lets him read about the appointment of another man in the weekly paper. He goes on to exploit the loyalty of the father for his own, or the Church's, purposes—“I am depending on you, Jack” (p. 158)—to drag him prematurely from his sickbed after having summarily dismissed the replacement teacher. The latter had been accused of kissing one of his young girl-pupils, but in the story we are certainly led to believe that the accusation was false. The only witness, a young boy, takes great delight in using his imagination, and the father of the girl, O'Flaherty, “was known locally as a thick man, easily offended, easily risen to anger, difficult to reason with” (p. 155). Just as in “The First of My Sins” it is the spectre of sex that rears its ugly head, and Monseigneur Carroll shows his true colour in his reactions to it.

The stories set in Northern Ireland (Omagh, Tyrone, Derry) also give more scope to the background clashes between two classes and cultures. I have already mentioned “Foundry House” and “Johnny and Mick” and these two stories represent Friel's most direct and sustained handling of this theme. When examining “Everything Neat and Tidy” we would do well to remember Seamus Heaney's words about his own poem “The Last Mummer” quoted in my introduction. Although Friel's story again focuses on the individual, the pervasive qualities of certain background characteristics lead us towards an appreciation of the divided nature of the community described there. There is an insistence on the poor parentage of the main character and on the wasteful loss of the land of his parents-in-law. Johnny drives Lady Hartnell of Killard to the bank once a week and Mrs. MacMenamin, his mother-in-law, to the County Psychiatric Clinic twice a week. The Clinic, with its sharp contrast between the old and the new block, with “a dividing patch that was neither field nor lawn” (p. 100) in between, and indeed Mrs. MacMenamin's own ‘schizophrenic’ behaviour, could suggest elements of a basic condition in the province. Together, these details gather symbolic significance and set up a pattern which is largely absent in the Donegal stories. To a certain extent they may reveal the influence of Friel's own background on his creative writing. Belonging to a teacher's family there would have been some aspects of life he did not normally experience at firsthand. In “The Fawn Pup” the family, father, mother, and the young narrator, venture with little success into the dog-racing community of Omagh. The boy is disappointed by the general dilapidation of the track, “a muddy rectangular field cordoned off by a single, sagging length of wire” (p. 94), and his illusion of a “Derby Day” atmosphere is quickly shattered. The spectators, he realises, were “only farmers” and “I remember looking at them and realising that I was seeing gathered together for the first time all the people of the town whom Mother referred to, in her genteel way, as ‘the poor’” (p. 94). He becomes acutely aware of these class differences, and away from his secure and protected middle-class background he feels threatened. “Here they were loud and boisterous—quite unlike the way they were when they sometimes came knocking at our door—and I had an odd sense of fear” (p. 94). The event is a complete failure, mainly because they do not know the habits and rules of the community they have entered. The treatment is comic, but Friel's preoccupation with these basically social divisions manifestly reveal his awareness of them. On the strength of these observations I would be prepared to hazard the suggestion that the Tyrone stories show forth Friel's feelings of the North as a polarised society. The social differences are unambiguously projected, but the religious and political reality, of the North though not expressly stated, must be understood to be part of the overall atmosphere of the fiction.

COMMUNITY AND SOCIETAL PRESSURES

There is, of course, poverty in the Donegal stories too. But here, it seems to me, poverty is presented as a condition of life, a natural and unavoidable part of the community. Within that community there are no contrasts, no alternatives other than emigration or the city in the East for those who want to escape. There are social differences too, but the various social classes exist here on similar terms and, though not economically equal, are part of a more homogeneous society. The interdependence which cements this society demands a necessity for communal values which the modern city has lost. The individual must find individuality and self-hood while still subordinating himself to societal demands and pressures. He must comply with the habits and laws which determine the quality of life in the village. The strain on this relationship between community and individual may cause a disruption in the traffic between them. The contrast between the public and private man has to be deftly managed by the individual in his everyday transactions with the community. “The Diviner” shows how the community spirit can be both a strength and a curse. From the very beginning of the story Friel lays considerable stress on the various social groupings that make up the village of Drumeen. Nelly Devenny, recently bereaved of her husband Tom and free of his drunken and shameful antics, starts work as a charwoman with “five better-class families” (p. 44), the bank manager, the solicitor, the dentist, the doctor, and the prosperous McLaughlins (presumably business people). This initial contrast provides the story with a potential clash between the two. This, however, never really comes off. Their fundamental relationship remains unchanged throughout the story. They are separated in status but united within the village community. The conflict occurs instead in the traffic between individual and community. Nelly's attempts at respectability within are highlighted by the introduction of the diviner from without. When Nelly's second husband, a mysterious newcomer whom nobody knows anything about, goes missing on the lake, the whole community unite in the search for the body and share Nelly's grief. Their collective efforts fail, however, and the arrival of the diviner from Co. Mayo enforces the initial social differences. The respectable ‘pillars of society’, and they are again carefully enumerated by Friel, refuse to take the diviner out in a boat. The division is only temporary. When the body is found the common purpose is renewed, the community itself left intact. But for Nelly “a foothold on respectability had almost been established” (p. 57), and her tears, more than for the loss of her husband, are for herself and for the loss of her own attempted respectability. With the dead man are found two pint whiskey bottles, “one of them had no cork; the other had been opened, but the cork was still in it” (p. 57), and the implications are obvious. The humiliation she felt in her first marriage had made Nelly “skilled in reticence and fanatically jealous of her dignity” (p. 45), but her efforts have been in vain and the secret is out.

The two key words in the story are “respectability” and “dignity”. The first represents an acceptance of agreed communal values, the second becomes the individual's response. It takes considerable strength to ignore the demands of the collective to the extent of reaching individuality, and only the diviner can do it. At first he is judged solely on appearances. “The first impression, was, What a fine man! But when he stepped directly in front of the headlights of one car there were signs of wear—faded, too active eyes, fingernails stained with nicotine, the trousers not a match for the jacket, the shoes cracking across the toecap” (p. 52), the opposite of the “gabardine raincoat, checked cap, and well-polished shoes” (p. 46) of Nelly's second husband. He even has his hair “carefully stretched across a bald patch” (p. 52), and he “reeks of whiskey” (p. 54). But the diviner can get away with it, because he is not part of the community, whereas Nelly must suffer for her husband's weakness. This, surely, is the vital distinction between the two. In his introduction to the Gallery Books edition of Friel's stories Seamus Deane singles out both Nelly and the diviner as the only outsiders. It is difficult to see how Nelly could be one. Her position is different from that of the other members of the community only in that it is explicitly expressed, the hint being that the others may well have their own secrets to hide. In another sense too, Deane's conclusion seems incomplete. When the diviner arrives, we are told, curiously enough, the he was “dressed in the same deep black as Nelly and the priest” (p. 52). As a character in the story, the priest almost usurps the central role played by Nelly. It is this trio, the priest, the diviner, and Nelly that contain the meaning of the story. The authority of the priest, so relentlessly enforced on Nelly, is questioned by the presence of the diviner. The latter finds the body, the former accomplishes nothing. His charity extends to little beyond the mumbling of rosaries, as this exchange between him and Nelly about the diviner makes abundantly clear.

‘Father, what will he do? D'you think he's going to do anything, Father?’

‘A fake! A quack! A charlatan! Get a grip on yourself, woman! We'll say another rosary and then I'll leave you home. They're wasting their time with that—that pretender!’ And he blessed himself extravagantly.

(p. 54)

In his dealings with the community he might have used the same three words to describe himself. His failure becomes complete when, finally, after first having failed to realise the meaning of the whiskey bottles, he is guided solely by the standards of respectability, and it is McElwee, the postman, who has to say a rosary for the repose of the soul of the dead man. So Father Curran takes his place among the other priests, not quite able to unite the community or to relate in human terms to the individual. His religious authority has no counterpart in the everyday reality of the life of the parishioners. As the narrator's father says in “My Father and the Sergeant”: “And now the Monseigneur knows that too—now when it's too late, as usual” (p. 159). With the risk of going too far, it could perhaps be seen as a sign of the problems inherent in trying to penetrate the sort of society described in “The Diviner”, when in the final paragraph, two people are manifestly cut off from the rest. “Beyond the circle around the dead 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 remember to drive him back to County Mayo” (p. 57).

As one of the societal pressures to achieve conformity, religion is one of the strongest influences. Individuals who refuse openly to accept it become cranks and outcasts. Andy in “The Highwayman and the Saint”, Grandfather in “My True Kinsman”, and Uncle Cormac in “The Death of a Scientific Humanist” are all in this category. But the persistent and difficult search for personal dignity is of even wider application in Friel's stories. Perhaps there is an affinity here with a quality of life that has been construed as a natural part of the West of Ireland. Corkery refers to Synge and the Aran Islands “where the people's age-long trafficking with a range of thoughts beyond the needs of nature had induced in them a dignity and settled peace that Synge not only noted but envied.”²⁹ Many of Friel's characters seem to possess this natural dignity in the safe confidence of achievement. “Only the conquering fishermen were calm and aloof. In twos and threes, they came up the steep road to the village with the walk of kings” (p. 245). In “The Fawn Pup” the narrator's Father, a somewhat pompous character, cycles “with straight-backed dignity” (p. 92), but is forced to adopt a different posture after the humiliation at the race track. “Somehow we stumbled out of the field and away from those mocking voices. Not a word was spoken on the way home. Father walked at a brisk pace, and Mother did her best to keep up with him” (p. 99). To others, it becomes a necessary attitude in the face of adversity. Lobster O'Brien, the seedy dog trainer in the same story, “managed to carry himself with shabby dignity, like a down-at-heel military man” (p. 91). For the poor farmers in “A Fine Day at Glenties” to have your own cow becomes a basic and important indication of social status. But, as suggested earlier, dignity is an inner quality in the armoury of the individual in his dealings with society. Its greatest asset is its flexibility, the fact that it can be moulded to the needs of its owner. The individual is in complete control, and can decide what form it is to take when exposed to the outside world. The Sergeant in “The Saucer of Larks” is well aware of his moral misstep and has to compensate for it in his outward behaviour. “The Sergeant turned and waddled towards the building. For a man of his years and shape, he carried himself with considerable dignity” (p. 205).

Old age entails problems of its own kind. In Friel's work different generations often appear contrapuntally to illustrate different aspects of the same theme in order to complete the description. In a brief early story, “Ebb Tide”, old age clashes head-on with youth. The generation gap is as wide here as it will ever be. Friel sensitively explores the feelings of the old man and exposes the impatience of youth in their dealings with him. To be dependent is to relinquish part of one's pride and Tom Bonner resents their “dutiful solicitude for him,” a phrase suggesting also the dilemma faced by the other members of the community.³⁰ In a moment of crisis Tom's great knowledge and experience are needed. A distress signal is sent from the lighthouse off the coast, a pregnant woman needs help. In spite of the gales the young men are prepared to risk the passage, but first the old man's advice is asked for. This is his chance to be useful and respected again, to assert his dignity in front of the rest of the village. “Tom felt none of their anxiety; only importance that rose in him like hot blood and hurt his chest slightly and even made his dead hands tingle … Now he wanted to have them looking at him and waiting for him. He might never have the chance again. He needed to savor it.”³¹ The ending of the story shows clearly where Friel's thematic priority lies. Tom's eagerly awaited answer has an oracle-like ring to it. “‘Nobody goes nowhere yet,’ he said. ‘Not for two hours. You'll have nothing but a puff of wind then.’”³² We are not told whether he is right or wrong, and for the purposes of the story this is immaterial. Instead Friel underscores the old man's monumental loneliness and the rash insensitivity of youth. After having carried Tom back to his cottage the young men leave him there and decide to spend the next two hours in the local pub.

MATERIAL DEARTH—IMAGINATIVE WEALTH

Economic necessity often rules the lives of the people in rural Ireland. It is a condition of all of Friel's stories. Even where the relative comfort and higher status of the teacher/father and his family are central, the poverty of the background remains an overwhelming reality. When the visiting bookseller came to Beannafreaghan Primary School “no one ever bought anything” (p. 219), and a travelling theatre for schools is turned away by the teacher, who invents a reason for not allowing them to perform there. But “[t]he truth of the matter was that his twenty-five pupils could not afford to pay sixpence a head, not to talk of two-and-six, not even to see an international cast doing international plays” (p. 220). When M. L'Estrange performs, the teacher pays him out of his own pocket, “and during the following weeks badgered and cajoled his pupils to reimburse him” (p. 222). The mention, in several of the stories, of emigration or recurring stints of seasonal labour in Scotland or England, is a constant reminder of these hard economic facts. Sometimes the reference is casual and brief, betraying the normality and frequency of the circumstances. When the women of the village were condoling with Nelly, she “even had the presence of mind to inquire about a sick child or a son in America or a cow that was due to calve” (p. 47). In the same story there is what looks like another simple hint. When someone asked Nelly about her second husband's relatives “she said his people are all dead or in England” (p. 48). A perfectly normal statement in the situation. Or is it? Wouldn't it be interesting if the two conditions, being “dead or in England,” were intended to stand for one and the same thing? And the point is that neither the dead nor people in England can be notified of Mr. Doherty's death. In this light the simple sentence would grow into a statement of immense proportions. Seasonal labour in Scotland is mentioned in “Mr. Sing My Heart's Delight” and in “A Fine Day at Glenties”, which also has its ‘Boston Biddy’. Judith in “The Widowhood System” has a brother in Canada, and Aunt Rose, “the deep one” in “A Man's World” has received an offer of marriage from an Irish emigrant to America. The latter story is a fine example of Friel's sensitive exploration of the individual psyche and, at the same time, it is a case in point when discussing his tendency towards ‘underwriting’. Every August the young narrator and his family had been going to visit his five maiden aunts in Donegal. When he was eight years old his father lost his job and, since the aunts were reasonably well off, the whole family accepted their offer of help. They all go to live with the aunts but this time the experience is very different. Donegal in the winter is dark and cold and family relationships are severely tested. To entertain him Rose decides to let the young boy in on her great secret. She shows him a letter, dated 1906, and sent to her from Boston. “‘Dear Rose,’ it said, ‘I have now made enough money for your passage. If you will come out and marry me, I will send it to you. Please make up your mind and reply by return. In haste, Bill Sweeney.’”³³ The brief and reticent lines hide a poignant personal tragedy. The innocent simplicity of the child makes him impervious to the enormity of the complex feelings involved, the letter is simply boring. A more inquisitive mind might want some answers to the several questions that multiply themselves if an effort to disentangle the meanings is made. The central question is: Why did she not go? Bill Sweeney was obviously close enough to her to be able to make this offer. Can it be established that the decision not to go was made by herself only? Or did the sisters have anything to do with it? Perhaps she answered the letter and never received the money? These questions are patently absurd. Only the first question would require an answer; and the only possible answer would be: we do not know why she did not go, and we need not know. The story as it stands gives us all we need to know in the situation, i.e. that she did not go. We are free to make various tantalizing suggestions and interpretations in the certainty that they are all possible. To give a more detailed explanation of the underlying reasons would have contributed nothing to the structure of meaning in the story. Furthermore, and this is a consideration that applies to all Friel's work, there is an ironic distance between the awareness of the young narrator and the event described. Irony is an important ingredient in Friel's stories and plays. Ironic contrasts are used to show up the true colour of events and to look at the same problem from different angles. Things do not turn out as people expect but, in doing that, they provide unexpected insight into life. At its simplest, irony is looking at the same thing in two different ways. It could perhaps be argued that irony is a stance which is adopted with particular ease by creative writers in the North of Ireland with its bifurcated traditions. Every event, every characteristic quality has its own natural opposite. Irony needs, in order to flourish, a set of established, well-known contrasts, where one statement or suggestion immediately also suggests the other extreme. Friel's irony is on one level the classic irony of fate where human beings are thwarted in their aims, on another level it is more intricate and frequently humorous. In the North-of-Ireland situation it could also be construed as a way of avoiding simple dogma or inflexible partisanship. Seamus Heaney's now famous lines, “Whatever you say, say nothing,” are recognised as being a true statement on the contradictory nature of the province. As a result there seems to be an agreed reticence among all members of both communities which is different from the more adventurous verbal imagination of the South.

Several commentators, in particular Foster and Deane, have noted the tendency towards personal illusions in many of Friel's characters. They are “inveterate fantasists” who increase their own lives by entertaining dreams of an alternative existence.³⁴ Deane's attitude towards these people is understanding. “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.”³⁵ Foster's, on the other hand, is condemning. The problem here concerns the traditional Gaelic-Irish willingness to use mental compensation for material dearth and hardship in their dealings with reality. It is, as Deane suggests, a question of survival for the individual whose real-life existence affords him no sense of value or dignity. Lady Gregory, when collecting her Irish folk tales in the West of Ireland, was “moved by the strange contrast between the poverty of the tellers and the splendours of the tales.”³⁶ But the impetus behind this tendency cannot only be seen to emanate from the socio-economic conditions, not even in modern times. In simple terms, the Irish short story can be traced back through an oral tradition of story-telling to the old legends and sagas themselves. This heritage, pagan and popular but of great symbolic, almost religious, value accounts for an important part of the predominance and success of the short story as a literary genre in Ireland. Very likely, the Catholic religion also provides an interesting sidelight on the subject, not so much in the actual writing of stories as in the personal attitudes of a typical Irish character. Acceptance of one's material lot may be a virtue, but the life of the imagination cannot be similarly supervised, and on the individual level total licence is sometimes given to the creative act. At its most extreme, every confession could be seen as a creative act, with the priest as reader/audience. The young boy in “The First of My Sins” is free to arrange his material as he wants (within certain preconceived ideas which he may or may not decide to follow). The narrator's mother in “The Death of a Scientific Humanist” is “adjusting the truth slightly” (p. 26) in order to achieve the desired effect. In their dealings with “truth” many of Friel's characters adopt very irreverent attitudes. Commonly, and this is a very pertinent fact, ‘the adjusting of the truth’ is done with an audience in mind. The small labels on the records are given imaginative content and provide Grandfather with a few facts for “an entirely fictitious history of the composer and the music,” with which he regales his audience of farmers and fishermen in “Kelly's Hall”.³⁷ And yet the real background is not lost sight of, and Grandfather always returns to the recognisable facts of existence: “a poor humble fisherman called Strauss, a man like ourselves, who earned bread for his family by fishing mackerel in the Danubey sea … while his wife knit socks, he wrote songs … a waltz, a little faster than a hornpipe and a little slower than a jig.”³⁸ Con in “The Gold in the Sea” is one of Friel's most experienced ‘adjusters of the truth’. His whole personality is a mixture of the local and verifiable and the far and free. He too has an audience in mind. The story about the gold in the sunken ship is told for the benefit of the young men in the party, Con tells the narrator/visitor to Ballybeg. “‘I don't want Philly or Lispy to know this [that the gold is not there]. It's better for them to think it's still there. They're young men. … You see, friend, they never got much out of life. Not like me’” (p. 256). Within the framework of the story the exact nature of truth cannot be defined. Nobody knows, not even the narrator or the reader, what happened to the Dutch salvage vessel

‘Take my word for it,’ Con broke in. ‘They got nothing. Didn't I watch them through the glasses day and night? And didn't I tell you dozens of times they pulled up nothing but seaweed?’

‘You couldn't swear to it.’

‘For God's sake, I'm not a swearing man. I'm telling you—the gold's still down there in the Bonipart.’

‘Boniface.’

‘Call it what you like. It's all there, happy as an old lark.’

‘Maybe you're right,’ said Philly, with surprising amiability. ‘I'm not saying you're wrong. All I'm saying is that we don't know for sure.’

‘Take my word for it,’ said Con with finality. ‘We're sitting on a gold mine.’ He spoke with such authority that somehow we all felt that he must be right.

(p. 255)

Invention thrives in uncertainty, and an attractive story will, if repeated often enough, assume the stature of truth. Con is the sole judge of truth, but his truth is subjective. The illusion he wants to instill in Philly and Lispy for their edification, he himself demands from the visitor.

His voice trailed off, and I suddenly understood that he was asking me for something more important than money.

‘You saw the world, Con,’ I said. ‘You've been everywhere.’

‘Damned right I have!’ he said. ‘Canada, the United States, South America—right round the world before I was twenty!’

(p. 256)

The gold in the sea becomes a potent symbol of the force and nature of the imagination, and the need to have something to believe in, even if it may be an empty vessel on the bottom of the sea. And as if to reinforce the argument, the narrator himself is far from immune to the attractions of easy dreams. “Then, as one does when easy wealth presents itself, I built myself a chalet above Ballybeg, bought a boat, hired a crew, set up a canning factory and an export business” (p. 247). The big fish in “The Wee Lake Beyond” is a similar symbol, better left in the realm of the imagination, a private memory that must not be exploded. “I was glad too, for some obscure reason, that my fish had not shown himself to me again because, if he had, I might have known too much about him.”³⁹ Here, though, the motivation behind the symbol is not so much tribulation as the protection of a private dream that cannot be shared with anyone else.

In “Mr. Sing My Heart's Delight” the contrast between humdrum reality and the fertility of the imagination is at its greatest. The Irish imagination can no doubt be said to be verbal rather than visual, a fact completely forgotten by Foster in his discussion of the story. This is made abundantly clear at the beginning, where the bare essentials of the room are contrasted by the “rich array” of the mantelpiece. The young narrator and the colour-starved Granny both admire the motley collection which the reader is clearly meant to react to. “A china dog stood guard at each end and between them there was a shining alarm clock, two vases, a brass elf holding a cracked thermometer whose mercury had long since been spilled, a golden picture frame enclosing a coloured photograph of a racehorse, and the shells of three sea urchins, sitting on three matchboxes covered with red crêpe paper” (pp. 58-59). It is not strange then, that they also wonder at the “gaudy knick-knacks” of the Indian packman. But the interruption is temporary and they are quickly brought back to the actuality of their situation. “‘Shut up!’ she snapped with sudden venom, springing up to a sitting position on the bed and scattering the languor that had emanated from the dealer. ‘Shut up, Packman! We are poor people here! We have nothing! Shut up!’” (p. 66) This sudden and slightly uncharacteristic outburst from Granny is a true sign of her impatience with the packman and his wares. They have reminded her of her own poverty and, which is worse, made her hanker after material awards. She may not have much but what she does have she is ready to share with him. Her hospitality and generosity are unlimited, and her ability to invest reality with the magic of verbal beauty may well be one of her most typical qualities. The introduction of an exceptional event or individual into the West of Ireland has again served to point out some of its most enduring characteristics.

Giving in to illusions in an effort to embellish and increase one's life seems to be an ability that grows with age. Most of Friel's ‘illusionists’ that manipulate the facts of their past are approaching or have reached middle age. The young boys prefer to look forward to the future, and they react against an adult indulgence in nostalgic memory. “‘Come on, Granny,’ I said irritably. ‘The cow will think we're dead’” (p. 71). The young boy in ‘Mr. Sing My Heart's Delight’ pulls Granny back to the everyday task, having had enough of her romantic dreams. But in a life of cruel economic necessity the painful realisation of the hardship of adult existence comes early. In “The Potato Gatherers” the striking difference between the ‘dreams’ of the two boys clearly suggests Joe's early initiation into the comforts of a pretended existence. With the money they hope to receive for their hard day's potato-picking Philly, the younger of the two brothers, wants to buy, a shotgun, a bike, a leatherbelt, rabbit snares, a gaff or a scout knife, all real and functional implements, but also suggesting the playfulness of youth. Joe, only thirteen but more experienced than Philly in the true circumstances of the economic severity, first accepts the unlikelihood of them getting any money at all and then, in a vain, extravagant gesture which hints at his abandonment to illusion and dream, opts for “red silk socks” (p. 42). The premature draining of his youthful strength is a reminder of what life has in store for him. The background sounds of the other children playing in the playground at school stress the serious aspects of the nature of their own task. Their future may not be too promising in economic and material terms and they must be forgiven if, like other Friel characters, they allow themselves the luxury of investing their lives with colour and excitement. (The “red silk socks”, incidentally, could be seen as another reminder of the lack of visual beauty in the Irish imagination. They also serve to point out the contrast they would make with the background, thus becoming a symbol rather than a simple realistic item in the story.)

REMEMBRANCE OF THINGS PAST

Illusion, in all its different manifestations, is a pervasive theme in Friel's work. It is seen as an ordinary and natural part of an individual's life. It hovers somewhere near such words as ‘fact’ and ‘reality’, and what Friel does more than anything is to expose how thin the line between ‘fact’ and ‘fiction’ is. Friel's characters, far from being “inveterate fantasists,” as Foster suggests, realise fully, as does Friel, the mediocrity of their lives, and in reacting imaginatively to it, express a basic human urge. This does not make them lesser beings. Friel has caught them at a moment of personal crisis, when they experience some sort of insight into the mental qualities of life, and in their own relation to it. When Friel applies the idea of illusion to an individual's past and the nature of memory it becomes especially significant.

What Friel wrote in a rather obscure and local publication in 1979 may stand as a direct expression of an idea that can be seen working in a more literary form in his stories and plays. “One's life in retrospect seems to be defined by precise contours and primary colours: all summers were arcadian, all winters were arctic, pleasures were unqualified, disappointments were total. This remaking I imagine, is a conscious and deliberate attempt to invest mediocrity with passion and drama.”⁴⁰ But even a neat compartmentalisation of that kind belies the complex relation to one's past. Friel's ‘illusionists’ structure their past to conform to the requirements of a basic and necessary belief in themselves, in a justification of their own existence. It is a process at once conscious and deliberate, and subconscious and involuntary. An excellent example of the first of these can be seen in “The Illusionists”. M. L'Estrange is an ‘illusionist’ by profession, but the plural form of the title includes also the father/teacher in the story (and perhaps even the young narrator). After his performance for the children in the school, M. L'Estrange is invited for a meal and a bottle of whiskey (always a good aid to nostalgic self-aggrandizement). Later that evening the narrator and his mother witness a single combat in delusion between the two middle-aged men.

‘France is the country,’ said M. L'Estrange, turning his rings idly. ‘That's where they had appreciation. A hundred thousand francs for an hour's performance. La belle France.’ ‘Dublin—Cork—Galway—crying out for me. An old P.P. drove up the whole way from Kerry, three hundred and fifty miles, to ask me personally to take over a school in Killarney. “We would be honoured to have you, Mr. Boyle,” he said.’

(p. 226)

They do not even listen to each other, so intent are they on beautifying their own pasts. The audience becomes unnecessary in this most private of exercises. When they are made aware of each other again their self-esteem has to find another way to satisfaction, and they proceed to taunt each other.

‘Go home to your hovel, wherever it is!’ father roared. ‘Bloody tramp!’

‘Beannafreaghan is the place for you!’ M. L'Estrange called back. ‘The back end of nowhere!’

‘And where did you pick up the name L'Estrange, eh? I know who you are, Monsieur Illusionist L'Estrange: your real name's Barney O'Reilly, and you were whelped and bred in a thatched cottage in County Galway!’

‘They wouldn't give you a job in the town if there wasn't another teacher in the whole country!’

(pp. 228-229)

These middle-aged men need their rosy pasts. It provides them with a sort of retrospective hope they have now lost. In the young boy real hope is still strong, and, as in many other stories, the relevance of the thematic interest is extended by contrapuntal treatment. He had been hoping to go off with M. L'Estrange as an apprentice illusionist in order to escape the Dublin boarding school that was waiting for him (another of his father's grand dreams). When his dreams are reduced to tears his mother is at hand to comfort him back to the down-to-earth reality of their life. She is not an ‘illusionist’ like the others, she does not search for her dreams in France, Germany, Spain or India but in the there and then, in repeating the normal everyday tasks as a natural part of one's life. There may, however, be an element of deferred gratification in her final words, “when the good weather comes,” suggesting that even these simple pleasures are only arduously come by. The boy's reaction at the very end of the story is significant. “I stopped crying and smiled into her breast because every word she said was true. But it wasn't because I remembered that it was true that I believed her, but because she believed it herself, and because her certainty convinced me.” (p. 233)

It could be argued that Friel, in this and other stories, comes out in favour of the simple local pleasures as the best road to happiness, and against seeking one's fortune in other parts of the world, and that this implies a passive acceptance of one's lot. Foster would probably agree with this. He ends his discussion of Friel's stories with the following statement: “By unconsciously closing off his options, Friel severely restricts the universality of his work. It seems to me that Friel, by refusing to test or breach the social and moral premises of the rural area in which his stories are set, is in danger of confining his work within a regionalist framework.”⁴¹ By common critical consensus ‘a sense of place’ is one of the most pervasive qualities in Friel's work. His commitment to his own people is almost total as is his intention to describe them without judging them. Those are his self-chosen options. “If you write with a certain truth about any situation or any people, even though the rest of the world isn't well versed in the peculiarities, I think you can acquire a kind of universality,” Friel himself has said.⁴² Foster is looking for something that is not there because it was never intended to be there. His discussion is heavy-handedly interpretative, and it frequently goes outside the stories for his ideas and judgements.⁴³

The ending of “The Illusionists” (quoted above) is interesting in the way it presents the young boy's attitudes to his own past and the memory of past events. It suggests the emotional nature of memory and recognises the importance of outside influences on the ‘factual reality’ of these events. Friel himself questions the validity of facts in the shaping of individual memory. “The facts. What is a fact in the context of autobiography? A fact is something that happened to me or something I experienced. It can also be something I thought happened to me, something I thought I experienced. Or indeed an autobiographical fact can be pure fiction and no less true or reliable for that.”⁴⁴ So fact and fiction blend, the imagined becomes the truth and vice versa. Any human being becomes the author of his own past. Friel goes on to give as an example (interesting and relevant because of the light it throws on a similar memory in two stories, “The Wee Lake Beyond” and “Aunt Maggie, the Strong One” and in the play Philadelphia, Here I Come!) one of his own childhood memories:

The boy I see is about nine years old and my father would have been in his early forties. We are walking home from a lake with our fishing rods across our shoulders. …

And there we are, 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.⁴⁵

But his memory does not quite tally with the truth of geographic facts, “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.” This may be the logical conclusion to draw, but to Friel

[w]hat matters is that for some reason … 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.⁴⁶

It is part of Friel's technique to emphasise the past, and especially its emotional and less precise properties, as one of the shaping influences on any individual and his life. There is an acute awareness of the inevitable passing of time, and the author is always careful to extend the time scheme in different directions to enlarge and deepen the thematic development. To this end the father-son relationship in “Among the Ruins” also serves to include previous and later generations. The story represents Friel's most sustained effort in this line. It is a journey back to childhood and its memories, and its images and ideas dominate the story completely. In the course of the afternoon Joe is seeing again what had become since then a layer in his own ‘subsoil’. To start with, the outcome of the event seems to suggest little more than the common-place ideas of the ravages of time. Everything round the old farm is different, the river is only a “trickle of water,” the forest a “sad little cluster of oaks” (p. 11). But worse, much worse, is the fact that Joe finds reasons for doubting his own memory of things, and that he is reminded of certain negatives he had forgotten. What seemed to him at first “the uninterrupted luxury of remembering” (p. 9) soon turns into something different.

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.

(p. 16)

But there are more important and revealing correspondences within the story. The truth may not be enough to sustain the memory and the mind makes its own picture. This picture is personal and intensely private and cannot be communicated to any other human being. Joe cannot explain to his wife what was so funny about the words (“sligalog” and “skooka-look”) that he and his sister made up while playing in the bower. At first he does not realise the significance of his son's “donging the tower” all by himself, and he fails to unite these invented words which signify the same thing. Once the link has been established Joe believes he can reach a more understanding relationship with his past.

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

(p. 18)

Another example of this “continuance” is the way Joe and his sister Susan laugh at their own “privacies” and how this is projected into the future by Joe's children, Mary and Peter, when they “fell into a fit of laughing at their private joke” (p. 9).

References to the nature of memory are fairly frequent in Friel's stories. Sometimes they are momentary reflections only, not developed into the thematic context of the story, but nevertheless expressing an important quality. There is the short but explicit reference in “The Fawn Pup”: “Memory is strange—and kind—in many ways. It will play back short tantalizing sequences of the whole tape and then go silent” (p. 90); in “Aunt Maggie, the Strong One” there is a similarly mechanical metaphor: “Only his brain was crystal clear, sharp, alert, recording everything that was taking place for some future time when it would play it all back to him” (p. 191). Of a different kind is the creative Irish hyperbole in “Kelly's Hall”: “I can scarcely convince myself that I do not remember the scene although the baptismal water must still have been damp on my head that evening.”⁴⁷ Finally, however, it is the illusive quality about remembering that Friel returns to; how the mind seems to push away the less attractive memories. Johnny in “Everything Neat and Tidy” experiences this transformation: “Yet when he went home to his own house in the town … he forgot the chaos and the decay and remembered only the tranquillity of their lives” (p. 104). The emotional nature of memory is stressed; both in theory: “[k]nowledge of all he had witnessed could no longer by contained in the intellect alone but was dissolving already and overflowing into the emotions” (p. 195), and in action: “To this day, I have never been certain about what happened then: I have never been able to distinguish between what I felt and knew then and what I think now I must have felt and known then” (p. 120). These vague and wistful qualities determine the individual's response to the world around him. They are deeply emotional and personal and exist only within the individual himself. They cannot be communicated.

THE FAMILY AND THE PRIVACY OF THE EMOTIONS

In “Among the Ruins” Friel extends the treatment of the past to take in the impregnable and private aspects of the individual. In spite of the suggested truce between Joe and his past at the end the overwhelming impression is one of aloneness in emotional affairs, of people being largely “incommunicado.”

On the way home, a sense of aloneness crept over him. Once he gave in to the temptation to glance in the mirror, but it was already dark outside, and Errigal was just part of the blackness behind them. He should never have gone back, he knew: at least, he should never have gone back with Margo and the children [my italics].

(p. 15)

There are private regions that can never be reached by somebody else. “She knew and understood him so well” (p. 8), Joe confidently tell us at the beginning of the story, and so she does, as far as is humanly possible. But Margo can never “understand” Joe's private memories. Apart from some momentary irritation when she was trying to do just that, she is, however, very understanding towards the privacy and intimacy of Joe's memories.⁴⁸ The aloneness that Joe experiences, and that is one of Friel's most persistent themes, is existential and cosmic. It is a condition of life that has to be accepted for people to be able to relate to each other. Love is certainly possible, but far from perfect. For George Barrow in “The Visitation” the incommunicability of his own emotions is an unavoidable fact. Talking about his wife he says: “she understands better than Wilkinson did, he thought, counting the steps automatically as he always did now; but even she does not understand fully; no one can understand fully how I feel to-day; no one.”⁴⁹There is no reason why we should doubt the existence of love between wife and husband in these stories. The same is true of “Everything Neat and Tidy”. The difference is that whereas the wives in the first two stories have a considerable part to play, Johnny's wife, Mary, hardly figures at all. Johnny's loneliness is fresher and more acute than that of Joe in “Among the Ruins,” he has not yet come to terms with it. His mother-in-law, Mrs. Mac, has reached a calm that threatens Johnny's mental well-being.

Mrs. Mac had escaped. She was at peace, no longer frightened by the past and the morass of memory, but her release had deprived him forever of the farm and the Sunday afternoons and all the tidy, attainable ambitions of his single days. 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.

(p. 110)

His vicarious dreams of the farm have left a gap in him, his “attainable ambitions” are gone, and in order to survive with his dignity intact, he may have to embrace more unattainable dreams in the future. It is significant that both these men, who experience their loneliness so intensely, are married. The existence of a wife and children is not per se a cure against this loneliness. It may, however, help to alleviate the effects. Joe seems to have accepted it, Johnny may well do so in the future. For many of Friel's bachelors, on the other hand, the exposure to loneliness is even more intense and has a more distinctly physical quality. They are, in a sense, outsiders, and they are under pressure from all quarters to conform. In “The Highwayman and the Saint” Andy is forced to marry in order to escape being sent away to do a job in Belfast. Catherine in “Straight from His Colonial Success” keeps taunting their visitor about his unmarried state. Another bachelor, Maurice Barry in “Stories on the Verandah”, is sharply contrasted with two of the other inmates in the County Donegal Hospital for Tuberculosis, both of whom are married. The two of them suggest that Barry should get married—“It's a sheer waste, isn't it, Field?”—and these constant reminders unsettle Barry.⁵⁰ On his way home with his own two maiden aunts and Uncle George, Barry meets Mrs. Field with their eight children and Mrs. Porter, “wearing a dazzling scarlet frock and a mad yellow hat.”⁵¹ The expression may be a bit awkward and overcharged here but there is no mistaking its purpose. Barry's regrets are for the lack of a worldly wife and for the fear of a more permanent state of loneliness, and “he heard only snatches of what they said because a loneliness that was close to despair had settled on him, he knew, forever.”⁵² A similar realisation hits Harry Quinn in “The Widowhood System”. He, however, can convert it instantly into marriage thanks to the presence of the long-waiting Judith.

Talk of the cock led him to Handme and the Fusilier … sitting in the dusk of the loft, discussing automation, their feet ringed with empty bottles, waiting for replenishments. The more he talked of them, the funnier they seemed to be. Never before had they seemed funny. After all, they were his friends, his best friends. But now, for the first time, he saw them in another way, and they were ludicrous—two middle-aged men wasting their lives, waiting for a pigeon to come home? He began to chuckle. The chuckle grew into a laugh. In the end, he was laughing so that his sides hurt and his eyes were streaming with water. And in the crook of his arm Judith was laughing, too, and crying, too. And for that half hour, for all the crying, they were the happiest couple in the whole of Mullaghduff.

(pp. 142 - 143)

The unit of the family is, as suggested earlier, an important presence in Friel's work, partly because the society in which Friel finds his events and characters is a society where marriage and the family are especially significant. In spite of the fact that socio-economic factors and social mores made marriage particularly difficult and generally late, it has always been regarded as preferable to bachelor- or spinsterhood.⁵³ Once married, the tendency was for large families with many children. In Friel's stories images of infertility are frequently contrasted with vigorous fertility. They are particularly obvious in “Foundry House”, “Ginger Hero”, “The Widowhood System”, and “Stories on the Verandah”.

In certain respects the family can usefully be seen as a community, different from a village community, but with similar clashes between individual and society.⁵⁴ The family can also be a constricting influence on the individual member. There has to be a balance between the needs of the family and the needs of the individual. The father-son relationship is a recurring theme in these stories. As usual, Friel is trying to be ‘fair’ to both by shifting the point of view constantly. In most of the stories with a first-person narrator the child is the narrator, a more effective point of view for ironic insight into adult life, but in a few notable examples, “Among the Ruins” and “The Wee Lake Beyond”, the father becomes the focus and can express deeper and more experienced truths. The difficulty for the young boy to differentiate between his father at school and at home in “My Father and the Sergeant” is matched by the vacillating attitudes towards his son in the father of “Among the Ruins” and “The Wee Lake Beyond”. It seems as if the embarrassment level is at its chronically highest in the father-son relationship. There can be no direct genuine communication between them.“But still he seems watchful of me, as if I have some secret advantage I am concealing from him,” says the father in “The Wee Lake Beyond”.⁵⁵ This suspicion is hard to dispel and dominates the relationship. It is easier to communicate naturally with Grandfather or Grandmother, Uncle or Aunt than with one's own father. Nevertheless there is a finer affinity between fathers and sons in Friel's work than in any other relationship. But it operates underground and its expression is made difficult by the proximity and the complexities of the connection. The generation gap is always an important consideration in these stories. They span over the whole duration of human life to take in illness, old age, and death as well as early boyhood and youth. The “continuance” referred to in “Among the Ruins” operates on all levels. There is a sad awareness of the inevitable passing of time, and here the “continuance” is a comforting concept suggesting perhaps ‘intimations of immortality’.

The father-son relationship is also indirectly discussed in stories where the young narrator compares mother and father. In O'Casey's Juno and the Paycock Mary's expected child will not have a father but what is “far betther—it'll have two mothers.”⁵⁶ There are several Juno-like women in Friel's stories, though their idealisation is not as powerful as in O'Casey. Friel's women are strong and capable and include one or two viragos. Mothers generally are “purposeful and competent” like in, paradoxically, “A Man's World”, and they are the organising influences behind the family in “Among the Ruins”, “The Death of a Scientific Humanist”, “Foundry House”, “The Potato Gatherers”, “My True Kinsman”, and “Aunt Maggie, the Strong One”, more than enough for a pattern to crystallise. Men and fathers are inefficient and impractical. They never finish their crossword puzzles and are frequently lazy. The narrator's mother in “The Death of a Scientific Humanist”, who is left to make all the arrangements for Uncle Cormac's funeral, exclaims: “O God, protect me from useless men!” (p. 29) The mother in “The Illusionists” is certainly a doer rather than a talker. As the two men get progressively more drunk and their conversation more and more self-indulgent, her impatience with them grows: “You're nothing but a pair of bletherskites!” (p. 225) She leaves them to their futile talk. “Throughout the whole afternoon and evening she never stopped working, baking bread, washing clothes in the zinc bath, boiling nettles for the hens, scalding the milking tins, chopping vegetables for dinner the next day” (p. 225). In the underlying theory the position of Irish women is very strong. In Catholicisism and in the worship of the Virgin Mary Irish women are given the right of control over certain aspects of their lives and these are frequently enforced with great energy. But it is important to realise that these aspects are very much limited to the traditional role played by women in Irish society. Their position within the home and the family may be strong, but not in society generally, as a result of this strict division of labour. Friel's stories reflect this. His women are in charge of the home and the family, including, not surprisingly, religious affairs. They are tied to the home and in only one or two cases, the cleaning woman in “The Diviner” and Tom's wife running a small shop in “Ginger Hero”, is there any sign of women working independently of husband and home.

The predominance and excellence of the Irish short story has been frequently and variously commented upon. The only relevance of this tradition for the present purpose is to establish that Friel exists as part of this history. His stories are now very much part of his early literary career. Since the mid-sixties he has devoted himself completely to the theatre, and the stories must be said to take second place to the plays when it comes to estimate Friel's overall body of work. They were well received and it was certainly not for lack of success that Friel turned to drama. Sean MacMahon considered Friel “the most likely successor to Frank O'Connor as Ireland's leading exponent of the genre,” and hoped that he would not turn away from the writing of short stories.⁵⁷The Times Literary Supplement called The Saucer of Larks, his first collection, “an intelligent and pleasing book.”⁵⁸ Taken together the stories are remarkable in their consistent and sensitive treatment of a range of themes that Friel has explored in his close observation of the people who inhabit his well-known local habitat. The sense of rural and small-town Ireland is strong, and social, economic, religious circumstances combine in shaping the nature of life for his characters. There is an acute awareness of the shortcomings of the material background in satisfying these people's needs. A characteristic mood in these stories is sadness, a disappointment that time should pass so quickly, that existence should be so precarious and fragile, that the individual, who has little to rely on outside himself should be so painfully lonely. Friel's creative sensibility is tragic. His people are subjected to the inevitable and arbitrary workings of fate, a force that cannot be rationalised or defined. There is a wistfulness about the quality of life experienced by these people, who find it extremely difficult to live in the present, and prefer the past or the future. The present cannot be defined or arranged according to one's own will with the same control that can be exercised when it comes to expressing the past or the future. Children have a special place in Friel's stories, and their failure to understand the ways of adult life serves to point out some of its absurdities. Childhood and old age have more in common than either of them has with adulthood. There is nostalgia for the innocence of childhood, and respect and sympathy for old age. The imperfections of adulthood are all too obvious and treated with mild impatience.

Friel's handling of the short story is largely traditional. Most of the stories are intimate in their tone and personal in their concerns. The main crisis always happens on the level of the individual and affects the way in which this individual is used to dealing with life around him in all its different manifestations. When an insight into life is hinted at its expression is vague and wistful, a response that is emotional as well as rational, and the meaning of the story may not be entirely contained in the events described. This would be in line with Friel's idea of existence as only partially definable, confirming the view that one's grasp on reality is uncertain. There is a nucleus of dialogue which reveals Friel's interest in a dramatic medium of expression. His short stories are a very significant part of his work and represent a private expression of intensely felt impulses. The major themes as they reveal themselves in the stories were to return in the plays, the difference being that the public form of the theatre had required a different approach to the subject, an adoption of new techniques.

Notes

1. G. B. Shaw, John Bull's Other Island (London: Archibald Constable and Co., 1907), p. XXXIV.

2. Brian Friel, The Saucer of Larks (London: Victor Gollancz, 1962), p. 93. “Kelly's Hall” was first published separately in The Sign as “My Famous Grandfather.”

   In my treatment of Friel's stories references will be made to three different editions: the two original collections, The Saucer of Larks (London: Victor Gollancz, 1962) and The Gold in the Sea (London: Victor Gollancz, 1966); frequently, however, the reference is to a later collection, The Saucer of Larks: Stories of Ireland (London: Arrow Books, 1969), which contains stories from both the original collections. Since a majority of the references are to the latter edition these will be given parenthetically in the text. References to either of the two original collections, or to other sources, will be given in notes.

3. The Saucer of Larks, p. 93.

4. Ibid., p. 104.

5. New Yorker, 24, August 1963, p. 85.

6. Ibid.

7. Ibid.

8. Ibid.

9. In “Kelly's Hall”, too, the influence of Gaelic is felt. The English of the narrator's grandfather “was never very comfortable.” The Saucer of Larks, p. 94.

10. The Saucer of Larks, p. 104.

11. Ibid., p. 90.

12. Ibid., p. 96.

13. Acorn, pp. 4 - 5.

14. Ibid., p. 13.

15. Maxwell, p. 40.

16. Edmund J. Miner, “Homecoming: The Theme of Disillusionment in Brian Friel's Short Stories,” Kansas Quarterly, 9, No. 2 (Spring 1977), p. 95.

17. Ibid., p. 96.

18. Foster, p. 71.

19. Ibid.

20. Brian Friel: Selected Stories (Dublin: Gallery Press, 1979), p. 13.

21. The Saucer of Larks, p. 135.

22. Ibid.

23. Ibid., p. 132.

24. Ibid., p. 135.

25. Maxwell, p. 17.

26. The Gold in the Sea, p. 161.

27. Ibid., p. 168.

28. Ibid.

29. Corkery, p. 240.

30. The Saucer of Larks, p. 155.

31. Ibid., pp. 154 - 155.

32. Ibid., p. 155

33. The Saucer of Larks, p. 114.

34. Foster, p. 64.

35. Brian Friel: Selected Stories, p. 14.

36. Lady Gregory, Poets and Dreamers: Studies and Translations from the Irish (Gerrards Cross: Colin Smythe, 1974), p. 98.

37. The Saucer of Larks, p. 94.

38. Ibid.

39. The Gold in the Sea, p. 75.

40. “Salutation”, Pennyburn Boy's Anniversary Magazine 1954 - 1975 St. Patrick's Boys' School, Derry.

41. Foster, p. 72.

42. The Irish Times, 12 February, 1970, p. 14.

43. I fully support Seán McMahon's view of Foster's book: “The most obvious characteristic of Dr. Foster's book is the application of the heavy machinery of anthropological criticism to subjects that can scarcely bear the weight,” and “it has no equipment for measuring aesthetic worth.” Eire - Ireland, 10, 1 (Spring 1975), pp. 153 - 154.

44. Aquarius, No. 5, 1972, p. 18.

45. Ibid.

46. Ibid.

47. The Saucer of Larks, p. 91.

48. It is impossible to agree with Edmund J. Miner's view of Margo. “Neither man [Joe Brennan in “Foundry House” and Joe in “Among the Ruins”], of course, has a sympathetic or understanding wife: their husbands' boyhoods, in the final analysis, provide both women with some measure of amused contempt” (p. 99).

49. The Kilkenny Magazine, No. 5 (Autumn/Winter 1961), p. 14.

50. The Saucer of Larks, p. 213.

51. Ibid., p. 215.

52. Ibid.

53. On the link between marriage and socio-economic factors in general see, for instance, Brown, pp. 24-25 and 259-260.

54. In one of Friel's stories, “The Skelper”, the two concepts are joined. There was, about the Skelper, “an atmosphere of mocking superiority … that cut him off from the family oneness of the village” (p. 234).

55. The Gold in the Sea, p. 69.

56. O'Casey, I, 86.

57. Seán McMahon, Threshold, No. 21 (Summer 1967), p. 172.

58. The Times Literary Supplement, 19 April 1963, p. 261.

    In recent years there has been renewed interest in Friel's best stories. In 1979 the Gallery Press brought out a new selection, Brian Friel: Selected Stories, and in 1983 the same stories were published by The O'Brien Press in their Classic Irish Fiction Series under the new title The Diviner.