Brian Friel’s mother, Chris, was a great woman for the Feis, dragging him around the northwest in the 1930s to perform on stage.
She was not the family’s only enthusiast of cultural competitions. His father, Paddy, a schoolmaster, won prizes for solo and choral singing and directed award-winning school choirs. And a formidable aunt, Kate MacLoone, a graduate of the Abbey School of Acting, was long the only woman on the committee of Feis Thír Chonaill. After retiring from teaching in 1943, she involved herself in producing children’s plays.
But it was Chris who was Friel’s first great promoter. He made mention of her efforts on his behalf in a playful column that he wrote for The Irish Times from 1957 to 1962: “I entered for whistling competitions on Narin beach, mouth-organ competitions in Ardara, violin and singing competitions in Letterkenny, Lifford and Derry. Until I was ten years of age, she exhibited her protege in every hut and hall in Donegal, Derry and Tyrone.”
That piece appeared in December 1959, by which stage Friel, a 30-year-old teacher who was married with two daughters, had already two stories published by the New Yorker and two plays broadcast by the BBC. The following December, he left the classroom to pursue a literary career. The Irish Times column and a “first reading agreement” with the New Yorker –$100 a year for first sight of new work – had made that leave-taking possible.
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It was a go-big-or-go-home move. And it proved stunningly successful, first with high-earning stories in the New Yorker and a successful play, The Enemy Within, at the Abbey in 1962. And then, after Friel had spent some months “hanging around” the Guthrie Theatre in Minneapolis, his Philadelphia, Here I Come! was such a hit at the Dublin Theatre Festival in 1964 that it was revived the following year at the Gate. In 1966 Philadelphia opened on Broadway; it ran for 324 performances. Friel, Variety announced, had “struck gold”.
It is those years, when the promising amateur turned professional, that are the focus of Kelly Matthews’s absorbing Brian Friel: Beginnings. Specifically, it deftly reconstructs Friel’s relationships with agents and editors, producers and directors, who gave him advice and opportunities. Chief among them were BBC producer Ronald Mason; Roger Angell, his editor at the New Yorker; and director Tyrone Guthrie in Minneapolis. Friel emerges as witty and self-deprecating, with that eagerness to improve that is the mark of an inveterate competitor.
Not everything is illuminated. The northwest, the place that made Friel before he made it, is not brought into clear view. One gets little sense of the formation of the schoolmaster in the small middle class of a deeply disadvantaged nationalist community enduring unionist discrimination and Southern disinterest. His political involvements, not least in the Derry Catholic (Voter) Registration Association, pass unnoticed. And obscure too is the contribution of his wife, Anne, who, as Matthews acknowledges, was his “first reader”. What was her feedback on his early work?
There are challenges to recovering Friel’s youth. Notably, he never spoke about his decision to leave the seminary at Maynooth; the subject was “closed”
There is no shortage of sources for a portrait of the playwright as a young man. Many of Friel’s recollections of his first appearances on stage can be corroborated. A fine singer, he competed in feiseanna into the 1950s: press reports remark on his voice and his choice of song. The competition on Narin strand that he recalled in 1959 was most probably an Aeraíocht, open-air festival, organised by Fianna Fáil, the party of his Aunt Kate, in August 1937: eight-year-old Brian contributed to the formal musical programme, as did his older sisters, Mary and Nanette. And then there was the Omagh Parochial Sports, organised by his father in 1938, when he won the Boys’ Fancy Dress attired as a “Shoneen”; his sisters placed in the Girls’ Egg and Spoon Race.
If performance, particularly singing, was important to the Friels, so too was writing. In 1937, the year of the Aeraíocht, Mary won a prize for a humorous essay published in the Irish Press. It detailed a row in Glenties between her “small brother” Brian and a local boy when playing Lexicon, a fashionable word game. In 1939, Aunt Kate took Mary and Nanette to a friend’s retirement dinner in the Portnoo Hotel (established by her uncle), where they met the northern literary lights Seumas MacManus, Alice Milligan, and Paddy the Cope. And in later years, Mary published a short story and Paddy Friel is said to have had one broadcast on radio.
Still, there are challenges to recovering Friel’s youth. Notably, as Anne Friel mentioned in a remarkable recent interview, he never spoke about his decision to leave the seminary at Maynooth; the subject was “closed”.
Closed for him, perhaps not to history. Do neither Maynooth nor the Diocese of Derry retain records?
A full literary biography of Friel, from long before Dancing at Lughnasa (1990), his most successful play, to long after, might answer that question and illuminate that departure.
Beginnings makes no claim to be that biography. But it is a well-crafted, impressive book about a young wordsmith on the road to Broadway and those who helped him along the way.
