Peter Costello
Brian Friel: Beginnings, by Kelly Matthews (Four Courts Press, €29.95 / €24.95)
A problem with many modern literary biographies is that their authors hurry over the subject’s earliest years in their haste to get to the years of success and fame, as if failure and obscurity were not a possibility. By contrast this book especially explores those years of insecurity and the possibility of failure in the life of Brian Friel.
Dr Kelly Matthews is professor of English at Framingham State University in Massachusetts. She is also the author of an earlier book, The Bell Magazine and the representation of Irish identity. So, she is alert to the various nuances of Irish life, urban and rural, North and South.
She is an ideal person then to investigate the formative years of Brian Friel, which she suggests the writer himself never really wished to discuss in later years, even refusing to be interviewed. This meant that many facts about him were vague: even his name and date of birth were uncertain, she reveals.
Enriched
This book is enriched in point of fine detail by two important and previously unused archives: the letters Friel exchanged with his editor at the New Yorker magazine, and those with a producer at BBC radio drama in Belfast. These reveal the financial details of trying to survive as a professional writer in Ireland in those days.
Back in the 1960s Friel’s success in placing short stories in the New Yorker (then a most admired magazine in literate middle-class Dublin) ensured a transatlantic reception. His collection, The Saucer of Larks, was published by Doubleday in New York and by Gollancz in London in 1962, followed by The Gold in the Sea in 1966 from the same publishers.
The short story was a distinctive Irish literary form, going back to The Untilled Field by George Moore and Dubliners by Joyce, well sustained by younger writers such as Frank O’Connor and Sean O’Faolain.
He simply could not invest the time required for the creation of a novel, with its complicated social, historical and political nuances. He had to earn by writing”
There were those at that time who felt that Friel’s next step would be to write a novel of Irish life; that is to say a continuation of the nineteenth century great tradition of fiction about great public issues and the private problems of the age.
But as is so vividly described in this book, his literary life took another course, away from the solitary toil involved over say two years in writing a novel, to something more immediate and collective in the form of dramas for radio and then the stage.
These were originally for the BBC Northern Ireland. Friel had left his job as teacher to become a professional writer: a play for the BBC earned him £78. 15s. Also, a retainer of $100 from the New Yorker came to £35, which could support Friel and his family for two months. Dr Mathews details other earnings of a similar kind. He simply could not invest the time required for the creation of a novel, with its complicated social, historical and political nuances. He had to earn by writing.
However, the plays merging from the BBC and the support of people such Tyrone Guthrie, around his dramas of his imaginary town of Ballybeg were in effect the world of a novel transferred to the fragmentary presentation on stage.
Success
The book ends with Friel’s great success with Philadelphia, Here I Come, where several problems relating to fantasy and inner thoughts and outward speech were solved. From there, whatever difficulties remained for him, he never looked back.
Dr Matthews has provided us with an exemplary piece of research which, aside from its critical insights, reveals intriguing details of the struggles of a professional writer in the Ireland in the 1950s and 60s. For anyone interested in the processes involved in the creation of Irish writing this book will be essential reading.