SOURCE: "Homecoming: The Theme of Disillusionment in Brian Friel's Short Stories," in Kansas Quarterly, Vol. 9, No. 2, Spring 1977, pp. 92-9.

[In the following essay, Miner addresses the theme of disillusionment in Friel's "Among the Ruins" and "Foundry House" by examining the details of the characters' reevaluation of childhood from an adult perspective.]

Brian Friel is probably best known to both Americans and Canadians for such commercially successful plays as The Loves of Cass McGuire and Philadelphia, Here I Come! Born in County Tyrone in 1929, he spent many years, like Bryan MacMahon, his compatriot and fellow-playwright, as a school-teacher. Since 1960, however, he has devoted himself almost exclusively to a literary career. A shareholder in the Abbey Theatre, he has been prominent in the field of contemporary Irish drama; he has also, however, earned an enviable reputation as a writer of short stories, many of which have appeared in The New Yorker. Two collections of short stories, The Saucer of Larks (1956) and The Gold in the Sea (1966) are deeply rooted in his beloved Tyrone as well as in Donegal, where he now lives. The earlier book contains some of Friel's finest and most representative writing, in both the serious and the comic vein; not all the stories are masterpieces, but the collection as a whole is worth reading and a few individual pieces are eminently entertaining. Irish commentators have singled out "Among the Ruins" and "Foundry House" as especially memorable, and these stories serve to illustrate as well as any Brian Friel's pervasive theme of disillusionment, a subject which characterizes both his short fiction and his drama.

"Among the Ruins" is a brief recounting of a special outing which a young wife organizes to Corradinna in Donegal so that her reluctant husband may revisit his old homestead and afford his two young children the opportunity to see where their father had lived and played at their age. Neither child is actually interested—Peter prefers the seaside to a lot of ruins—but Margo fortes the issue and eventually persuades her husband with the argument: "Even if it's only to see if you have lost the feel of the place." Ironically, Joe's enthusiasm increases as the trip progresses, while Margo's diminishes as a result of the children's constant bickering and her husband's obvious relish.

Despite its simplicity, this is not a story for or about children. Brian Friel expects the reader to identify immediately with Joe, who, for a sentimental day, is to relive his own childhood by the remembrance of things past that cling to his old ruined house. The hero of a nostalgic tale is usually solitary so that he may give himself up wholly and undistractedly to his memories. The violation of this canon is what makes "Among the Ruins" different. Joe's wife, his son Peter, and his daughter Mary are painfully present on this pilgrimage and viewing all they see by the mere light of common day in fiat images, while Joe, with the double vision of then and now, revels in poignant contrasts or in mystical resemblances not noted by the others. For the day at least Joe alone views the world by stereopticon. Joe and Margo are Walter and Mrs. Mitty but in a minor mode, for Joe's trips into his fantasized past do not span such a vast valley of tears and laughter as do those of the timid little prototypal dreamer. This day is for Joe, however, one of successive disillusionments. True it is that the sight of his old home reminds him of his most vital years: chasing foxes with his dogs to the point of exhaustion, daring his sister to jump with him a veritable Mississippi of a river, rambling through a dense forest, inventorying the treasures of the old barn, glorying in the exhilarating freedom of their hideout in the garden bower. Epic days.

This romantic theme, though, is challenged by Margo's unimaginative scrutiny of facts. Beautiful golden hillocks inhabited by fairies in the moonlight of Joe's sentiment—even his grand mountains with their poetic names, Altanure, Glenmakennif, and Meenalaragan—becomemere dungheaps when exposed under the harsh noon sunlight of Margo's inspection. Joe remembers that at that age he was overcome with gales of laughter by the words he and his sister Susan had made up—words like "sligalog" and "skookalook." But Margo insists upon a law-court reply to her barrister's question: "Susan and you in the bower. Once you got in there together, you laughed your heads off. And I want to know what you laughed at." The "infinite moments" of Joe's childhood are reduced to mere instances of childish silliness under his wife's inquisition: "'Skookalook.' What's funny about that?" And later: "Poor silly, simple Joe."

The range of the story may be limited, the mood at times curiously uneven. Even the theme of disillusionment falls occasionally below the threshold of visibility. Competing themes rear their heads now and again to produce a multiplicity which threatens—but only threatens—the unity and strength of the story. Of these competing themes the most interesting may be Proust's—that we do not correctly evaluate nor do we appreciate direct experiences, that it is only in the second-told tale of recollection that we can really understand their import. Hence Joe does not insist upon explanations. When his nostalgic activity renders him oblivious to the fact that Peter has disappeared at departure-time, he finds the boy playing at a rabbit-hole, "donging the tower" he explains. Margo may demand explanations, but Joe knows that the heart of childhood—and the funnybone—have reasons which the reasoning mind cannot begin to understand. If he did not consciously realize it before, Margo has brought it home to him this very day. "Donging the tower" takes its place, together with "sligalog" and "skookalook," in the hallowed and unapproachable recesses of the mind of childhood.

It is the same nostalgic comprehension that impels Joe to sympathize with his son on the way home when the boy is reduced to tears first by Mary, then by his mother. Is not Peter Joe himself some years earlier? And when Margo slaps the boy for calling Mary a "liar," it is significant that the father has not cast the first stone: hasn't he too behaved like that to his own sister? For Joe has learned this day that despite his enthusiastic memories of childhood, the river and the forest have proven to be shockingly small. Even more, he recalls now that he and Susan did not spend all their times laughing in the bower; they had fought, too, and Susan had reported him and brought him many a punishment. Peter and Mary are Joe and Susan to the life. Strangely enough, this somewhat unsuccessful visit to ancient beloved ruins, with all the disillusionment, the squabbling of the children, and his wife's insistent and belittling cross-examination, has furnished Joe with a deeper understanding of his own young boy and girl. Reliving one's own life in one's children, Joe finds, makes for sympathetic insight.

Joe's education, encompassing but a few hours of one day, is best expressed in Brian Friel's two closing paragraphs:

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

Then, as he turned the car into the road that led to their house, a strange, extravagant thought struck him. He must have had moments of his own like Peter's, alone, back in Corradinna, donging his own towers. And, just as surely, his own father must have stumbled on him, and must have recognized himself in his son. And his father before that, and his before that. 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.

There is a difference, Joe realizes, between matter and spirit. Matter has no future: homes turn to ruins, rivers become trickles, giant forests are reduced to clumps of trees. Disillusionment with material things is of little consequence. What matters is that futurity is in the ensouled child and the continuity of the race.

It is tempting, as admittedly it often is in the case of Irish plays and short stories, to interpret "Foundry House" in terms of the political and religious conflicts which have plagued that unfortunate nation for so many years. For some readers with a traditional sense of what constitutes a short story, "Foundry House" lacks, perhaps, the clash of motive against obstacle, thus offering little suspense or intense interest. As a tableau vivant, it may be more intelligible, but it can be argued that it is scarcely vivant. When submitted on one occasion to an undergraduate English class, the story was rejected as anemic with regard to character, action, and atmosphere. The story does make good sense if viewed as a sociological palimpsest sounding the depths of politics, religion, and general culture by a succession of heavily-weighted symbols. The drama then shifts from the story itself to the reader's competence to read the symbols and judge their truth. Naturaly, it would take an Ulsterman's background to prepare one for this difficult task.

The situation of "Foundry House" is simplicity itself. Joe Brennan, a radio and television mechanic, upon his parents' deaths, applies for their house, the gate lodge to Foundry House. Mrs. Hogan, the wife of the wealthy foundry owner, for whom Joe's father had worked for half a century, is quite content to let him move into the place of his birth. Most of the story concerns a family reunion at Foundry House itself, to which Joe Brennan is invited in order to operate a tape recorder so that the Brennans' daughter, a missionary nun in Africa, may participate by means of a tape which she has mailed to her family. Like his namesake in "Among the Ruins," Joe experiences in the course of the afternoon a shattering of several of his childhood illusions.

In recent years the world's news media have regaled us with tales of the Ulster class struggle between unionist and nationalist, Protestant and Catholic, and the modern equivalents of the big house feudal lord and the peasant fief, the British-supported patron and the native suppliant. Now, "Foundry House" does not exactly symbolize this struggle and its accompanying atrocities, but it does help to define the cultural foundation and social background from which the conflict arises. If Brian Friel had written a story of the strife itself—and even in the fifties today's animosities were bitterly present—the result would have been a slight measure of history or a piece of propaganda for grim viewing by partisan or committed readers. And undoubtedly disillusionment would have been a strong ingredient of such a portrait: do we not find O'Casey's disillusionment with 1916 and its aftermath reflected in the ironies of so many of the characters and situations of his Dublin plays? But by making all the characters of "Foundry House" Catholic, the author has disburdened himself of an ugly and seemingly insoluble reality and has cleared the way for the pure exercise of the story art. Here that art deals only with the common culture of the North, whether for Catholic or Protestant; it presents the tilled field without pursuing the subsequent harvest of weeds and flowers.

The two families represent the polarized classes within Ulster itself. The Hogans are revered still as the inheritors of wealth and power in the county, a form of Catholic Ascendancy, the descendants of conquerors and entrenched greed. They have always owned the factory, the true source of their wealth, have used people like the Brennans for years, and now patronize them. Their home is desolate, except for dying oldsters. But where such Ulster diehards are decadent and dying out, the underling Celtic element, the Brennans, have a family of nine vigorous, fighting offspring. This contrast moves Mrs. Hogan to a regretful—if, indeed, not to a jealous and even insincere—utterance of praise: "I've seen them playing on the avenue. And so … so healthy." Here she echoes the fear of the decadent unionists, her own house decimated by emigration, palsy, and age.

"Foundry House," a shockingly inartistic name for a "big 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. The title also symbolizes who is possessor of privilege and patronage, who moulds life to his own pattern or will. The gatekeeping Brennans, tenants at will, are prisoners of Hogan demands. The two families know their distance from each other. When old Mrs. Hogan, in the course of the curious and pathetic reunion at Foundry House, says commandingly, "Quiet, boy," she reminds Joe Brennan of his place "Croppies, lie down."

These are the broad lines of the story's meaning, of its latent conflict, if we tend to regard Irish literature as almost invariably an expression of religious and political differences. When we start interpreting the shading of "Foundry House" from this viewpoint, we touch on the more sacred inhumanities of the Ulsterman, his intransigence, his silences, his taboos, his shibboleths and formulas—all indelibly preserved in mummifying juices; his mechanical ways of thinking, speaking, and acting; his aversion for talk or discussion of an open nature, his solemn taking of himself and his neighbor's rights and property for granted; his ipse dixit dogmatism; his constant fear in the silences that make ambushes for every conspirator; his dearth of spontaneity or modernity, committed as he is to ancient formulas of hate and intolerance.

But "Foundry House," in addition to its social and political implications, is an illustration of Brian Friel's preoccupation with the theme of life's disillusionments. Joe Brennan, like the hero of "Among the Ruins," has come home again only to find that his memories of childhood fall short of the reality. He is visibly frightened by the grandeur of the big house; he is even paralyzed into silence by the first visit of Her Eminence, Mrs. Hogan, to his humble gate-house abode, with its nine unruly children. Joe is still living in a past where Foundry House, inhabited by a Heathcliff of a master, accompanied by a fearsome Great Dane, had filled him with awe and dread. As he approaches the house on the day of the reunion, the knocker displays an evil, leering face, reminiscent of Marley's apparition to the unnerved Ebenezer Scrooge. His introduction to his boyhood acquaintance, Declan Hogan, now a Jesuit, is not impressive and becomes a presage of the disillusionments in store for him in the Great Hall itself.

The passage of time has produced a general ugliness, an atmosphere of decay, even a condition of penury in the once proud Foundry House of Joe Brennan's youthful memories. Mrs. Hogan is a pitiful semblance of what she once was; Declan is a nervous, ill-at-ease caricature of a Jesuit; Sister Claire, fat and unlovely in her childhood, is shrill and artificial in her taped message; and more startlingly, Mr. Hogan, the awesome figure of bygone days, is now a stroke victim, unkempt, powerless, and incapable of even the most basic kind of communication:

It took them five minutes to get from the door to the leather armchair beside the fire, and Joe was reminded of a baby being taught to walk. Father Declan came in first, backward, crouching slightly, his eyes on his father's feet, and his arms outstretched and beckoning 'Slow-ly Slow-ly, he said in a hypnotist's voice. 'Slow-ly, Slow-ly. Then his father appeared. First a stick, then a hand, an arm, the curve of his stomach, then the beard, yellow and untidy, then the whole man. Since his return to the gate lodge, Joe had not thought of Mr. Bernard beyond the fact that he was there. In his mind there was a twenty-year-old image that had never been adjusted, a picture which was so familiar to him that he had long ceased to look at it. But this was not the image, this giant who had grown in height and swollen in girth instead of shrinking, this huge, monolithic figure that inched its way across the faded carpet, one mechanical step after the other, in response to a word from the black, weaving figure before him. Joe looked at his face, fleshy, trembling, coloured in dead purple and grey-black, and at the eyes, wide and staring and quick with the terror of stumbling or of falling or even of missing a syllable of the instructions from the priest. 'Lift again. Lift it. Lift it. Good. Good. Now down, down. And the right, up and up and up—yes—and now down.' The old man wore an overcoat streaked down the front with food stains, and the hands, one clutching the head of the stick, the other limp and lifeless by his side, were so big they had no contour. His breathing was a succession of rapid sighs.

Joe Brennan bad not been to the Great House for two decades and was ill prepared for the startling transformation. Like Joe in "Among the Ruins," his homecoming has been fraught with disillusionment and the disquieting realization that in his childhood rivers and forests and mansions were oversize; now they appear undeniably undersize. There is a general ugliness that embraces not only the decaying grandeur of life associated with Foundry House, but also with the building itself. The furnishings now seem hard and decrepit: the ceilings are unwarrantably high, the marble forbiddingly black, the place itself cold and cheerless—a far cry from the crowded but cozy gatehouse with its noise of nine tumbling children and sense of life being lived. But what gives Joe some measure of assurance in his afternoon at Foundry House is his realization that, while time and events have passed the Hogans by, he, an electronic engineer, exercises a mastery in the house that once filled him with awe.

There is one sense in which the story may be viewed as a contrast between mechanism and humanism. The description of the characters deals almost solely with their physical, anatomical, and physiological qualities and motions; as moral beings they are not presented: whether they are human beings at all or the repositories of moral or religious beliefs, there is nothing. When she first induces her husband to write away to apply for the gatehouse, Rita insists on his mentioning their nine children, for 'Aren't they [the Hogans] supposed to be one of the best Catholic families in the North of Ireland?' But there is no indication of this fact in Joe's afternoon at Foundry House. Even Father Declan appears more in the guise of a male nurse going through his daily formalities than a religious priest and son possessed of spiritual consolation for his aged parents. Likewise, he is utterly oblivious to the true nature of his sister's missionary work among the African natives and the motives that inspired her to devote her life to such a cause. Joe Brennan himself finds it strange that both Hogan children have turned their backs on the potential wealth of Foundry House and left it as a mausoleum for their incompetent parents.

The Hogans, are, in fact, machines rather than living people. Sister Claire in her taped message notes that the "machines" are in need of parts: "… I hope you have found a good maid at last …" she says to her mother, and "… why don't you get yourself a third [dog] …?" she asks her father, a man unable to rise from his bed without assistance. Actually, the tape reveals that Sister Claire does not know a thing about her parents' condition and is not in communication with them or her brother regularly enough to find out. There is a "family reunion" on this bleak Sunday afternoon, mainly to hear Sister Claire's message and presumably digest it, but the discussion of the assembled characters is almost entirely limited to the mechanics of the whole venture. The fact that Sister Claire, instead of writing her parents in pen and ink, has used a taped recording, reduces communication to a problem in mechanics, finding a tape-recorder, locating an expert who can explain it—and even Declan has to turn mechanic and run the machine despite the expert's presence—learning to use the unfamiliar buttons and knobs, and trying to find an electric power plug in a house still dependent mainly on gas. As a communication the message itself becomes completely secondary to the opportunity for a display of a mechanical device; mechanism affords Sister Claire a chance to use her violin—not for the beauty of the music which is tinny and often out of tune—but to reveal her acquaintance with the latest instrument for communication. As it turns out, Sister Claire is largely forgotten in a "reunion" that deals unconscionably with knobs, volume, power plugs, electricity, and a toneless violin, as well as a quality of voice which Joe Brennan himself mentally likens to "a teacher reading a story to a class of infants, making her voice go up and down in pretended interest." Admittedly, in these times when more and more people are using tapes to transmit family messages, it may seem harsh to denigrate Sister Claire's use of a tape, but the circumstance does appear to indicate her lack of knowledge of her parents' physical condition and the unavailability of modern contrivances at Foundry House. Nevertheless, the use of the taped message does produce one very dramatic moment: it puts a sudden end to the family reunion. At the height of the violin concert, the partially paralyzed old man realizes that it is his daughter on the tape, something that a written letter could probably not have accomplished.

Then even as Joe watched, he suddenly levered himself upright in the chair, his face pulsating with uncontrollable emotion, the veins in his neck dilating, the mouth shaping in preparation for speech. He learned forward, half pointing toward the recorder with one huge hand.

'Claire!'

The terrible cry—hoarse, breathy, almost lost in his asthmatic snortings—released father Declan and Mrs Hogan from their concentration on the tape. They ran to him as he fell back into the chair.

An hour later, without seeing any of his hosts again, Joe Brennan switches off the machine and leaves Foundry House for the last time. His greatest disillusionment of the day has not been merely the onset of age and palsy, but the reduction of Foundry House itself as the grand old mansion of his childhood. It has been a shock to learn that the drawing room is used no longer—"too large and too expensive to heat"—that the parents occupy now only the breakfast room, that they subsist on snacks, like milk and bananas, that the house is too cold for human habitation, and that the grounds are shamefully neglected. Joe Brennan, too, has spent an afternoon "among the ruins" and returns home to his inquisitive, sharp tongued wife a soberer man. But Joe keeps his illusions to himself; he has been fortunate to have visited the past in solitary. During his wife's insistent questioning, he remains loyal to his childhood memories: the house inside is "very nice", Mr Bernard is "the same as ever. Older, of course, but the same Mr. Bernard", Father Declan is "a fine man. A fine priest. Yes, very fine", "The tape was lovely…. They loved it, loved it. It was a lovely recording", "The breakfast room? Oh, lovely, lovely…. Glass handle on the door and a beautiful carpet and beautiful pictures … everything. Just lovely:"

'So that's Foundry House,' said Rita, knowing that she was going to hear no gossipy details.

'That's Foundry House,' Joe echoed. 'The same as ever no different.'

She put out her cigarette and stuck the butt behind her ear.

They're a great family, Rita, 'he said. A great, grand family.'

And with unconscious irony Rita casually agrees with her husband's assessment.

In the stories of these two homecomings with their accompanying disillusionments—and note that neither character plans nor organizes his return: he is anything but an active agent—there is no doubt that the protagonist of "Among the Ruins" attains a deeper awareness and insight as the reward of his experience. At least his realization of each generation's variations on "donging the tower" presumably is going to have an appreciable effect upon his future relationships with his growing children. His discovery that the past does have meaning—"… simply continuance, life repeating itself and surviving"—is in stark contrast to Joe Brennan's disheartening but only partially perceived notions of the mortality of life and the ephemeral nature of bricks and mortar and even prestigious wealth. But the main difference between the two disillusioned individuals is that Joe Brennan, much more than his counterpart, must fight to retain his childhood illusions in order to sustain himself. Neither man, of course, has a sympathetic or understanding wife: their husbands' boyhoods, in the final analysis, provide both women with some measure of amused contempt. What Joe has learned at Corradinna he will probably one day share with his children; certainly, it is beyond Margo's comprehension. Joe Brennan is more fortunate, if his nine unruly children fail to share his boyish awe of the Hogans in Foundry House, at least he is astute enough to conceal his disillusionments from his shrewish wife and at the same time honor his family's half-century of loyalty to the Hogan clan. Perhaps the saddest disillusionmentand irony in both stories is Brian Friel's acute grasp of the gulf that exists between both pairs of husbands and wives and their inability to sit together at the close of the day to establish a bond of understanding of a pathetically shared experience that is common to so much of humanity.