In 2008 I was sent to Glenties, in Co Donegal, to report on that year’s MacGill Summer School. Its theme is usually something to do with politics, but that year was an exception. The school’s subject was “A Feast of Friel: The Life and Work of Brian Friel”.
Friel was being honoured in his own place, in the town that many who know his plays believe to be Ballybeg. He was to turn 80 the following year, and the summer school was one of many events to celebrate his contribution to Irish literature.
Glenties is a very small town, with one street and one hotel, the Highlands, which was the hub of the week’s events. As I walked along the hotel’s upstairs corridor after checking in I ran into the man himself, who was coming out of his room.
Before leaving Dublin I had been told by several editors to do my best to obtain an interview with Friel. We all knew this was more or less the equivalent of asking me to saddle up a unicorn, or find a crock of gold at the end of a rainbow, or buy a winning Lotto ticket, because Friel had not given an in-depth interview to a journalist for many years.
I introduced myself, and tried not to mind that the great man flinched when I told him I was a journalist. He was very polite but clearly desperate to escape downstairs. Then I asked if he would consider talking to me at some point over the next few days. I had my battered Faber copy of his Selected Plays in my bag, which I produced like a rabbit from a hat, a clumsy but sincere signal to indicate I really was familiar with his work.
That was only the first time Brian Friel said no to an interview during my time in Glenties. In the days that followed I reported on the many exhibitions, talks, lectures and readings . I was there when Seamus Heaney read his beautiful Catechism of Friel in tribute to his old friend, spelling out the letters of his name.
B was for Ballybeg, “a place where the soul had no hiding place”.
R was for the risk he had taken in first deciding to write full time.
I was for integrity.
A was for Anne, his beloved wife of more than half a century.
And N, Heaney told the packed hotel ballroom, was for “a very important word in the Friel vocabulary: No. No to the cult of self-promotion” – a reference to the fact that Friel did not give interviews.
On the fourth and final day I was in Glenties, Friel unexpectedly approached me in the dining room of the Highlands Hotel, silver-topped cane in hand. He leaned over my breakfast coffee and said some nice things about the daily reports that I had been writing.
I was speechless for a second, then recovered enough to abandon my manners, so instead of thanking him for the compliment I asked once more if he might consider an interview. This time he said nothing. He just smiled and walked away.
That afternoon I was sitting in a cafe on the main street, writing up the day’s report, when my phone rang. It was Joe Mulholland, the summer school’s director. If I was in the hotel lobby in five minutes, he told me, Brian Friel would be there to answer three questions from me, but no more than that.
I ran down the street, frantically composing and discarding questions in my head. Friel was already waiting for me when I rushed through the door. These are the questions I asked him, and his answers.
What did the Glenties summer school in his honour mean to him?
“I have a sense of some kind of line being drawn, a kind of resolution. It’s very gratifying, but I have a sense of nostalgia about it too – all these reminiscences that people are having about my life.”
As he was so private an individual, had it been difficult for him to agree to be the subject of such a public event?
“Yes. Yes, it was. But you acquire the ability to detach yourself, and then it becomes almost impersonal. In a way, going in to hear those lectures, it’s almost like hearing people talk about someone else.”
Why did he not give interviews?
“The whole act of writing is intensely private, and it can’t be accompanied by self-promotion. I think interviews contaminate the necessary privacy a writer needs. That sounds almost priggish, but for me it’s the truth.”
He meant every word of it, this rarity of modern times, a famous writer who simply wanted to write, and be allowed to remain private.
He signed my Selected Plays and shook my hand. I left Glenties feeling that something magical had happened: a unicorn not saddled but glimpsed.
