Special Issue: Brian Friel || "Meet Brian Friel": The "Irish Press" Columns

"Meet Brian Friel": The "Irish Press" ColumnsAuthor(s): George O'BrienSource: Irish University Review, Vol. 29, No. 1, Special Issue: Brian Friel (Spring - Summer,1999), pp. 30-41Published by: Edinburgh University PressStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/25511526 .

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George O'Brien

"Meet Brian Friel": The Irish Press

Columns

Between 29 April 1962 and 10 August 1963, a column by Brian Friel

regularly appeared in Saturday editions of The Irish Press. These articles were initially published under the general heading of "The Lighter Side",

though this was quickly dropped, perhaps at Friel's request (because it

wasn't quite accurate), perhaps by sub-editors. In all, the series ran to

sixty columns.

The period in question saw a number of important developments in

Friel's career. National exposure as a playwright came in August 1962 in

the form of his first Dublin premiere ? The Enemy Within at the Abbey.

Six months later, The Blind Mice was produced at the Eblana Theatre,

Dublin, suggesting that his name was in the process of becoming familiar, at least. In addition, 1962 saw the publication in American and English editions of Friel's first collection of short stories, The Saucer of Larks. And

in 1963 what is arguably the most decisive event in Friel's career took

place; a sojourn as "an observer"1 at the Tyrone Guthrie Theatre, Min

neapolis (the final Irish Press contribution is entitled "The Returned Yank"

and is preceded by a ten-part "American Diary"). Moreover, Friel already had something of a reputation as a dramatist

and short-story writer prior to the busy period in which "The Lighter Side" columns were written. Since 1959, short stories of his had been

appearing regularly in The New Yorker ? "the best magazine in the

world", as he called it later.2 His stage play, A Doubtful Paradise, was

produced by the Group Theatre, Belfast in 1960 and by the Home Service

of BBC Northern Ireland radio in 1962, where in 1958 A Sort of Freedom

and To This Hard House, Friel's first plays to be performed, had both

been broadcast. If not exactly a household name in 1962, Friel had more

than consolidated a career whose initial works had begun regularly to

reach the public just four years earlier and to which he had devoted

himself full-time only since 1960, when he resigned from teaching

secondary school.

In a sense, then, these columns for The Irish Press sit uneasily alongside Friel's early artistic attainments, and appear to be an unusual departure

1. Friel's term, used in "Self-Portrait", Aquarius 3 (1972), p. 20.

2. Desmond Rushe, "Kathleen Mavourneen, Here Comes Brian Friel", The Word

(February 1970), p. 14. Friel's first story to appear in The New Yorker was "The

Skelper", The New Yorker 35, xxiv (August 15,1959), pp. 20-23.

30



"MEET BRIAN FRIEL": THE IRISH PRESS COLUMNS

from them. Even the timing of their appearance, regardless of biblio

graphical or canonical considerations, complicates the seemingly linear

trajectory of his career's development that may be inferred from the more

substantial works already mentioned. Such a trajectory charts radio plays

leading to stage plays, Belfast productions followed by Dublin produc tions, individual short stories appearing in highly regarded magazines

culminating in a short story collection published by houses such as

Doubleday and Gollancz. And the Minneapolis trip acts as a strong curtain to this opening phase and sets the stage nicely for the triumphant initiation of phase two by the success of Philadelphia, Here I Come!

It may be argued that The Irish Press columns do not significantly alter

the overall sense of how Friel's early career evolved, and that, at most,

they merely underline the fact of his becoming somewhat more visible

nationally. Indeed, their interest may seem more cultural than

biographical in that they reflect an assumption on the part of The Irish

Press that its readers would be drawn to that rare creature, a Catholic

Nationalist writer living in the Six Counties (a part of the world not

generally associated with "the lighter side") "who has undertaken to

entertain you here every Saturday",3 as a sub-heading to the first column

in the series put it. Friel himself has barely given the articles a passing

glance, referring in the most general terms merely to the fact that, in

addition to the "pale success" of his stories and plays, "by doing some

journalism as well I was making just about enough money to keep

going."4

Nevertheless, minor and ephemeral as they may seem, these articles

reveal a different Friel from the dispassionate, unobtrusive narrator of

the short stories and the invisible orchestrator ? everywhere present

and nowhere seen ? of the plays. This Friel is typically at the centre

of whatever event a particular column depicts, a Friel of outspoken

opinions, a Friel who readily divulges biographical information, and

who almost invariably writes in the first person. By these and other

means, the author offers a persona which is painfully, almost shamelessly available to the reader. And in doing so, he also offers glimpses of a

3. This statement is the third of three editorial contributions to the opening piece.

Reading down from the top of the piece, there's "The Lighter Side of Life", followed

by "Meet Brian Friel", the actual title of the piece. As is often the case subsequently, the column is accompanied by a photograph of Friel. Hereafter, the articles are

referred to by their titles. A chronological list of Friel's Irish Press columns appears at the end of this article,

4. Friel, "Self-Portrait", p. 19. Friel's journalism includes twenty book reviews for The

Irish Press, most of which appeared while the column was running, and a small

number of items for The New Yorker, The Atlantic Monthly, Holiday and Commonweal.

Most of these were published after The Irish Press series terminated. Friel's journalistic work effectively concludes with "Sex in Ireland (Republic of)", The Critic 30, iv

(March-April 1972), pp. 20-1.

31



IRISH UNIVERSITY REVIEW

writer testing his alertness to tone, his stylistic flexibility and powers of

mimicry, his sense of form and his control of characterisation. By no

means experimental, these columns are perhaps best regarded as trial

pieces, disposable in the light of the masterpieces which came later but

by no means trivial in the evidence they provide of the author's efforts

to improve his command of his methods and his material. Arguably, these articles are all the more revealing since the efforts in question culminated in his recognition and acceptance of the theatre as the form

most suited to his expressive needs, a form as far removed from these

T'-driven articles as possible. The literary mode to which the articles belong may also be noted.

Exactly how Friel came to write such material is difficult to determine.

But their genesis, at least in part, would appear to owe something to The

New Yorker. It was here that Friel's first attempt in this, for him, new and

unfamiliar kind of writing appeared.5 And the mention in "When the

Bomb Fell on Derry" of James Thurber's "The Day the Dam Broke" (in his My Life and Hard Times) hints at another possible, and related, source.

The title of another Thurber volume, Men, Women and Dogs acts as a

signpost of sorts to the kind of material typical of Friel's articles?though

adding "children" to the title would make the signpost more accurate.

And the Friel we meet shows unmistakable, if intermittent, flashes of

Walter Mitty in his makeup. The stylistic finesse, tonal sensitivity, whimsical perspective and keen

eye for foible and frailty which Thurber's name brings to mind should

not, however, be thought to constitute a yardstick with which to measure

Friel's articles. Rather, these attributes are a reminder that what nowadays

might be considered a rather discredited kind of professional writing has its own expressive challenges, interests and rewards.6 Thurber's

contributions to The New Yorker were hardly diminished by either that

magazine's high visibility in the literary marketplace or by the consumer

culture of its advertising pages. Similarly, the cumulative effect of Friel's

tableaux of himself as Vhomme moyen sensuel coming through the wry in

the roles of hapless householder, spouse, father, son and citizen ?

Thurberesque in their combination of the caricaturing outlines of a

cartoon and the private detail of a diary ? is to show that levity is not a

synonym for 'lite'.

The columns cover the whole range of Friel's experience to date.

His early childhood in Culmore, Co. Tyrone, where Friel's father was a

primary school teacher and where Friel spent his first ten years, is the

5. Brian Friel, "Nato at Night", The New Yorker 37, vii (1 April 1961), pp. 105-09.

6. The publication of Joseph Mitchell's Up in the Old Hotel (New York: Vintage, 1993) and Maeve Brennan's The hong-Winded Lady (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1998) has

renewed interest in the kind of writing from which Friel's Irish Press columns derive.

32




basis of "Music Hath Charms, or, Why My Mother Breeds Greyhounds", "The Afternoon of a Fawn Pup" and "The Days of My Glory? NO!".

Childhood holidays in Donegal are the background for "The Long Road to Glenties" and "Queen of the Smugglers", in both of which the border is effectively non-existent (an attitude also implicit in "It's a Long Way to Dublin"). Student days at St. Joseph's Teacher-Training College, Belfast, are the context for "Taught by the Maestro" and "Social Climbing Via

the Post", though in the former, tuition comes from a ferret-fancying voice teacher whose weekly half-hour lessons consist of leaving Friel

alone in a room to practice his breathing.

Occasionally, a column will deal with a more general topic, such as a

sarcastic commentary on an Intercontinental Hotels brochure ("Haven for the Harassed"), a futuristic skit set in west Donegal depicting how

the author would behave in the aftermath of "the Russian invasion of

Ireland" ("After the Catastrophe"), a burlesque of Shane ("The

Importance of Being Frank") or a parody of popular American social

thought ("Marching with the Nation. By Howard B. Hedges, Junior"). Friel refers at will and as a matter of course to earning his living by his

pen throughout the columns, but only in "The Play that Never Was" (on the changing of the title of The Francophile to This Doubtful Paradise) does

this subject take up an entire column. Some connections between the

columns and Friel's short stories may be noted. "Afternoon of a Fawn

Pup" revisits "The Fawn Pup" from The Saucer of Larks, and there are

vague family resemblances between "To the Wee Lake Beyond" and "A

Bird in the Bog" and "The Wee Lake Beyond" and "Ginger Hero",

respectively, both from Friel's second collection of stories, The Gold in the

Sea. By far the majority of the columns, however, are devoted to Friel's

life and times at home in Derry. Home in the domestic and familial sense

of the word is given much greater prominence than the urban, public or

citizenship sense, though the latter is by no means neglected. The range of home's private connotations is far from limited. It embraces sketches

of boyhood (in "Old Memories" and "When the Bomb Fell on Derry");

snapshots of what the author and his family did on their summer

holidays in Donegal (in "The Wild Life" ? set in the Friels' Donegal

holiday home and bringing to mind The Communication Cord; "Donegal

Diary", "Seagull in Distress", and "Terror on the Rooftop"); dealings between Friel and his wife, Anne ("The Gathering Storm", "My Friend

and Loyal Love"), and between him and his children ("Waiting in the

Rain", "And Then What Did She Say?", "The Letter Writers", "A Retreat

from the Brink" and "Doing Down Daddy"). Other pieces portray the author in various embarrassing situations

arising out of his being the head of a household. These articles ? "Hotel

Decorum", "Disposing of the Body", "A Rat in the House", "A Thief in

the Coal House", as well as some of the holiday and children items

33




already mentioned ? show private behaviour and public expectations at a cross roads which typically threatens to become an impasse. In

"Disposing of the Body", for instance, Friel is commanded by his wife to

find a resting place for the body of the family bull terrier after he expired "on the sittingroom table". After being prevented by the refuse man from

disposing of the remains in the weekly collection, the piece goes on to

depict Friel carrying around the corpse on his motorbike in search of a

likely spot (the motorbike itself is the subject of a wry adieu in "The Life

of An Ageing Cyclist"). All the obvious places prove unavailable, how

ever, until at length:

... a brainwave struck me. The Guildhall itself! The ground-floor corridor was empty except for a few clerks rushing to their offices

and they did not even glance in my direction. I chose my hiding place carefully, almost fastidiously. Behind the marble bust of Queen Victoria I laid the bull terrier to rest.

References to Derry's history and landmarks are few and far between.

Little indication of community or neighbourhood is given, though "When

the Bomb Fell on Derry" is an exception. But basically "our neighbours

keep to themselves" ("Meet Brian Friel"). A lexicon of words missing from the series as a whole would include 'priest', 'sodality', 'parish', 'club', 'pub', and 'team'. Acknowledgement of common ground,

belonging, feeling at one with are all comically problematic in "At the

Annual PPU Meeting". Fellow-citizens make intermittent cameo

appearances, but seldom remain the focus throughout an article ?

exceptions proving the rule are, "In the Waiting Room"; "The Ladies

and the Tramp", in which Friel takes the side of a promiscuous tomcat

instead of that of his highly-respectable and highly judgemental owners; the visit to the local jail recounted in "A Warm Afternoon in the Cooler"; and "Waiting in the Rain" where the author is one of "a sorry bunch" of

fathers collecting their raincoatless children from school on wet days, and in which the father who is a competitive academic snob gets his

comeuppance.

The effect of the exigencies of domestic and familial life ? and indeed

of life in general ? is to present Friel as a figure by turn irascible and

abject, naive and vulnerable, hypersensitive to the nuances of "the urban

social code" ("A Rat in the House") and to his capacity for not being

entirely able to live up to them (children, in "Hotel Decorum", for

example, and animals in "Now About These Rats", particularly, are useful

aids to seeing through the coercive cliches of convention). Situations

and behaviour that is either 'manly' or 'unmanly' recur throughout, as

does the word "shabby" to describe physical aspects of the scene. Friel's own physical attributes and appearance are shown in the same

unflattering light. In all, the columns constitute a little world in which

34




things fall apart, largely due to an assumption that they are securely tied down in the first place. In situations whose absurdity is their most

salient characteristic, saving face and mamtaining self-respect become

the stuff of uneasy knockabout, self-mocking laughter and farcical

underminings of such notions as integrity and good order.

Views of Friel's broader social context are also provided occasionally,

although ultimately they too reflect the kind of existential slapstick typical of the columns' overall outlook. Thus, "Bringing in the Voters", for

example, despite its election-day setting, deals not with Nationalist

politics or the platform of local Nationalist candidate, Eddie McAteer.

Instead it shows the runaround Friel lets himself in for by volunteering to chauffeur voters to the polls. Among the resolutions mentioned in

"New Year Diary" are ones "to speak tolerantly of the Unionists ... to

desist from growling like a dog when I pass a policeman in the street", and to answer when the call comes (as Friel is convinced it will) to be

Senator Lennon's right-hand man in the forthcoming Orange and Green

talks.7 "Charity of tongue, especially towards the Unionists", is one

resolution in "Lenten Diary". The elaborately satirical "Now About These

Rats" addresses "Dear Lord Brookeborough" regarding Friel's dealings with "the notorious Unionist-controlled Derry Corporation" on the

rodent question, and inviting his lordship "to become my Pied Piper". And "Stalked by the Police" projects the author's fears of the "Kafka

esque" (sic) powers of the local police. Yet, even if "you know your number will come up some time",

"Stalked by the Police" can hardly be read as a clear, combative,

ideologically self-conscious polemic. On the other hand, it seems pretty obvious that Friel is not wearing a straight face when he subscribes

himself "Yours respectfully" in his open letter to Lord Brookeborough,

though at the same time, the metaphorical potential of the letter's title, "Now About These Rats", is let He. An undercurrent of metaphor is

similarly available in "Bringing in the Voters", to the effect that as a

Nationalist Friel finds himself on the road to nowhere. Here too the

implications remain dormant. Yet most readers will presumably be taken

aback when Friel is too explicit and refers to his own and others' children as "savages" in "Waiting in the Rain" or discovers from "a little booklet

entitled The Successful Wife's Pocketbook" that "I am married to an incom

petent, unco-operative, selfish woman who is out to ruin my digestion and my career" ("My Friend and Loyal Love"). These instances of Friel's

7. The talks in question were held in 1962 and 1963 between the Nationalist leader in

the Northern Ireland senate, Gerry Lennon (1907-1976) and fellow senator and Grand

Master of the Orange Lodge, Sir George Clark (1914-1991) with a view to doing

something about religious discrimination in Northern Ireland. The talks were

inconclusive.

35




rhetorical manoeuvring confirm the columns' intention to challenge the

reader's apperceptions. Here are the opening words of Friel's first column:

"Something important happens before a publication is read," says

the advertisement for the Saturday Evening Post. "It is a psychological fact of life called apperception. It is the state of mind a reader brings to the publication before he reads

? the expectation that influences,

colours and intensifies his reaction to both the editorial pages and the advertisements."

But although Friel goes on to say that he intends to provide some

background information "so that you can adjust your apperception and

approach this page with at least accurate prescience", what follows is

not merely information, or rather is so thoroughly informative that the

reader may not quite know what adjustment to make. In other words, whatever interest the columns may have as data is far outweighed by

their interest as exercises in voice, tone, nuance, and the other demanding technical skills associated with the projection of a persona.

Thus, the information contained in "Meet Brian Friel" deals not only with his date and place of birth, the fact that "I was baptised Bernard

Patrick" and that "at my confirmation I was instructed to take the name

Casimir, after an aunt who was a nun in England". In addition, the

amounts of his various insurance policies and payments are provided, as is the amount of the mortgage payments on his "large, dry-rotting terrace house in Marlborough Street, Derry".8 It is probably safe to say that most readers in Ireland or elsewhere would not find this type of

information to be normal newspaper fare. In terms of content, there seems

to be nothing Friel will not say. In terms of tone, he acts as though unaware of the public nature of print. The result is a peculiar and vaguely

unnerving compound of embarrassing detail, undue candour and acute

self-consciousness. This blend of ingredients produces an unstable,

oxymoronic form ? the confidential expose, the public intimation.

Examples include the following: "In almost all the memories I have of

my father as he was twenty years ago, he is washing his feet in a zinc

bucket before the kitchen fire" ("Old Memories"9); "The bane of my youth was hanging combinations and scourged knees" ("The Days of My

Glory? NO!"). It is in the context of such formal and tonal play that paranoia about

rats and about the RUC, the "frantic effort at social climbing" ("Social

Climbing Via the Post"), the fear of being "exposed... as a rat-harbourer!"

8. The house is identified as No. 13 in "Nato at Night". 9. A reworked version of some of the material in this column appeared as "Downstairs

No Upstairs", The New Yorker 39, xxvii (24 August 1963), pp. 82,84-5.

36




("A Rat in the House"), and all the other unnatural shocks that male

flesh is evidently heir to should be seen. The columns are carefully calculated exaggerations of the intractable and unstable properties of

the daily round and of the inadequacy of our command of it, a command

which inevitably but laughably relies on language. The quotidian's

tendency to unravel, to betray the trust reposed in it, to thwart our designs on it, to 'unman' us when we attempt to control it, proves time and again to be a fundamental and inescapable constituent of its reality.

Aggravated versions of this tendency become the norm in the New

York and Minneapolis of "American Diary". Here, Friel finds himself

bereft of the familiar props and amenities of home, such as they are.

Now he has nothing to go on but language, with the result that a

heightened sensitivity is felt to the primacy of language ? rather than,

as at home, of action ? as a means of revealing the unnerving gap between apperception and reality. From the mispronunciations of his

name, to the strangely tolerant tone in which his hotel manager entertains

Friel's notions of flight on his first night in Manhattan, to the elevator

operator who discourses with conviction on Irish history ('"And so the

Orangemen and the Catholics, they ree-belled against the English and

drove them out'"; "A Moving Lecture"), to the babel encountered in a

visit to the United Nations, the fabric of experience is woven from the

limitations of language. Desperate to make himself intelligible, "the

brilliant idea of speaking broken English struck me" ("The Philosopher and I"). Not surprisingly, perhaps, the final article, "The Returned Yank", is a dialogue in which Friel's interlocutor continues to misperceive both

America and Friel's connection with it, regardless of attempts to correct

him.

Amusing, revealing and well-crafted as Friel's Irish Press columns are,

they are obviously not to be regarded as a missing link, a lost chord or a

key to all mythologies. Apart from the minor instances mentioned, there are no direct links between them and Friel's better-known works. Clearly, the ways in which the columns address issues in language and perception can be used as a means of focusing how Friel handles them later on. But as the subtleties of tone and perspective in The Saucer of Larks?or simply the existence of a play entitled The Francophile

? indicate, the author's

interest in such issues did not originate in these articles. And to suggest that the motif of umravelling which plays such a central structuring role

in the articles prefigures the tendency in Friel's plays towards breakdown

and terminus places a burden of significance on them that they are too

slight to support. Nevertheless, whatever the articles' influence and import, they do

shed some light on Friel's artistic evolution by giving an inkling of the

place in his thinking in the early nineteen sixties of the playful, the

theatrical and the dramatic. The articles convey his thinking along such

37




lines in a number of ways. Terms like "stagey" and "play acting" occur

frequently, and there is the general alertness to performative demands one would expect from a persona preoccupied by saving face, keeping up appearances, maintaining a presence and otherwise preserving the

necessary (though continually discredited) fiction of its integrity. This sense is highlighted by columns which recount a history of failure as a

performing artist, a history which includes not only the childhood

humiliations ("Music Hath Charms, or Why My Mother Breeds

Greyhounds") but adult ambition: when inspired by a Gigli concert he

takes singing lessons from somebody whose "actor's eyes [are] fluttering with pale amusement" at him ("Taught by the Maestro").

The articles are also verbally performative. Several of them rely

exclusively on Friel's power of mimicry. Obviously, mimicry is to the

fore in the "American Diary" sequence. In addition, however, both

"Marching with the Nation by Howard B. Hedges, Junior" and "The

Importance of Being Frank" are carried by an American accent (the latter comes with the sub-heading, "Brian Friel Writes from America"). And

"My Friend and Loyal Love" mimics, in part, advice from Women's Journal on how to be a wife. Many of the articles feature dialogue as a staple,

while "Doing Down Daddy" consists almost entirely of dialogue, "And

Then What Did She Say?" is subtitled "A Tragic Dialogue", and the last

of the "American Diary" series, "The Phone Call" is "A Tragi-Comedy in One Act" and printed in the form of a playscript. In general, speech, accent, idiom and tone seem to have a more prominent and dynamic

part to play in the columns than they do in Friel's stories.

It is in the Brian Friel persona itself, however, that the most sustained

and varied interest in the performative is revealed. If, as Seamus Deane

has remarked regarding Friel's short stories, "the workaday words ...

manage to be so informative, so quickly and easily blended into a

narrative medium that we are at first aware only of the story, not the

teller",10 the opposite is the case in the articles. The reversal is not simply a matter of narrative technique. Brian Friel is front and centre not only because of his status as narrator, but because one of his primary narrative

activities is to project himself as a protagonist. As a result, he speaks of himself most frequently in terms of how he

appears to an audience. In "Seagull in Distress", for instance, he pictures himself "looking, as I hoped, like Jack Hawkins standing on the bridge and knowing that there are U-boats in the vicinity". Preparing to act the

chimney sweep in "Terror on the Rooftop", he sees himself through the

approving eyes of a distant figure in the landscape who isn't looking at

him. In "After the Catastrophe", he is court jester to the invading

10. Seamus Deane, "Introduction" to Brian Friel, Selected Stories (Dublin: Gallery Press,

1979), p. 9.

38




Russians. And fantasies of performance are also the stuff of "Lost: A

Good Biographer": "Was my musical, The Swim Suit, breaking all records

in the West End? Had my recital in the Wigmore Hall caused Casals in

the far-off Pyrenees to break his cello over his head with sheer envy?" Of course, these and the various other articles in which the persona is

articulated through role playing and acting out conclude with the bluff

of such strategies being called. And even if it weren't, the unsystematic nature of the columns ensures that the thoughts conveyed are to be

regarded as little more than sketches of prototypes. Yet, it is difficult not to think of these columns as representing a

beginning of sorts. One kind of beginning they represent, perhaps, is

the beginning of the end of Friel the short-story writer. Although he was

still to publish a second collection of stories, and even after that said "I

hope I haven't left short story writing",11 clearly his commitment to the

theatre began to come first. The diffuse and disparate nature of the

columns also draws attention to some of the features of beginning identified by Edward Said: "a beginning intends meaning, but the

continuities and methods developing from it are generally orders of

dispersion, of adjacency, and of complementarity".12 Such methods and

continuities may be seen in various stages of fluctuating potentiality

throughout Friel's work, where making a beginning (generally under

the auspices of an ending) is a powerful imaginative necessity. And there

is also the question of what animates the columns' quietly antic

disposition. Is what we have here a battle of wits between the "bleak"

and the "volatile" Friel?13 Or the embryo of the sense of "exile" which

Friel later acknowledged?14 What pressures of anxiety, frustration,

claustrophobia, stalemate, existed such as to require the revealing but

controlling mask of a persona whereby they could be turned to comic

account?

"We must synthesise in ourselves all those uneasy elements ? father,

lover, bread-winner, public man, private man ? so that they constitute

the determining action."15 At the very least, Brian Friel's columns for

The Irish Press show how he reacted to his initial negotiations with the

demanding constituent elements of the sought-after synthesis. And

beneath the mask, the clowning, the self-mockery of image and ambition, there is a certain unassuming integrity, a certain stubborn courage.

11. Rushe, ibid., p. 14. Friel goes on, "It is a form I like very well. It's not as vulgar a

form as the theatre, which is really a vulgar form of communication."

12. Edward Said, Beginnings (New York: Basic Books, 1975), p. 373.

13. The characterisations occur in the Rushe interview.

14. See Fintan O'Toole, "The Man from God Knows Where", In Dublin (28 October 1982),

p. 20.

15. Brian Friel, "Extracts from a Sporadic Diary", in Andrew Carpenter and Peter Fallon

(editors), The Writers: A Sense of Ireland (Dublin: O'Brien Press, 1980), p. 39.

39




Checklist of Brian Friel's columns in The Irish Press

1. "Meet Brian Friel", 28 April 1962, p. 10

2. "Hotel Decorum", 5 May 1962, p. 10

3. "Old Memories", 12 May 1962, p. 10 4. "The Life of an Ageing Cyclist", 19 May 1962, p. 10

5. "Cunningly Candid", 26 May 1962, p. 10

6. "When the Bomb Fell on Derry", 2 June 1962, p. 10

7. "Bringing in the Voters", 9 June 1962, p. 11

8. "Music Hath Charms, or Why My Mother Breeds Greyhounds", 16

June 1962, p. 13

9. "Disposing of the Body", 23 June 1962, p. 10

10. "Waiting in the Rain", 30 June 1962, p. 10

11. "The Afternoon of a Fawn Pup", 7 July 1962, p. 10

12. "The Wild Life", 14 July 1962, p. 10

13. "Donegal Diary", 21 July 1962, p. 10

14. "Seagull in Distress", 28 July 1962, p. 10

15. "To the Wee Lake Beyond", 4 August 1962, p. 8

16. "A Rat in the House", 11 August 1962, p. 8

17. "A Bird in the Bog", 18 August 1962, p. 8

18. "It's a Long Way to Dublin", 25 August 1962, p. 10

19. "Terror on the Rooftop", 1 September 1962, p. 8 20. "Taught by the Maestro", 8 September 1962, p. 10

21. "Lost: A Good Biographer", 15 September 1962, p. 8 22. "After the Catastrophe", 22 September 1962, p. 8

23. "The Gathering Storm", 29 September 1962, p. 8

24. "The Play that Never Was", 6 October 1962, p. 8 25. "Derry Diary", 13 October 1962, p. 13

26. "The Demon Fisherman", 20 October 1962, p. 10 27. "A Thief in the Coal House", 27 October 1962, p. 8

28. "Stalked by the Police", 3 November 1962, p. 8

29. "The Ladies and the Tramp", 10 November 1962, p. 8

30. "And Then What Did She Say?" 17 November 1962, p. 8

31. "A Retreat from the Brink", 24 November 1962, p. 8

32. "At the Annual FPU. Meeting", 1 December 1962, p. 8

33. "Social Climbing Via the Post", 8 December 1962, p. 8

34. "The Letter Writers", 15 December 1962, p. 8

35. "My Friend and Loyal Love", 22 December 1962, p. 8

36. "Haven for the Harassed", 29 December 1962, p. 6

37. "A New Year's Diary", 5 January 1963, p. 6

38. "Now About These Rats", 12 January 1963, p. 6

39. "Marching with the Nation", 19 January 1963, p. 8

40. "A Warm Afternoon in the Cooler", 26 January 1963, p. 10

41. "The Shameful Road to Glenties", 2 February 1963, p. 8

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42. "In the Waiting Room", 9 February 1963, p. 8

43. "Doing Down Daddy", 16 February 1963, p. 8

44. "The Days of My Glory? NO!", 23 February 1963, p. 8

45. "An Affair of the Heart", 2 March 1963, p. 8

46. "Lenten Diary", 9 March 1963, p. 8

47. "Queen of the Smugglers", 16 March, p. 8

48. "The Importance of Being Frank!', 23 March 1963, p. 10

49. "American Diary 1: Arrival in New York", 20 April 1963, p. 8

50. "American Diary 2: Sight-seeing", 27 April 1963, p. 10

51. "American Diary 3: A Moving Lecture", 4 May 1963, p. 8

53. "American Diary 4: The News from Home", 11 May 1963, p. 8

55. "American Diary 5: At the United Nations", 18 May 1963, p. 8

56. "American Diary 6: The Philosopher and I", 25 May 1963, p. 8

57. "American Diary 7: "The Checking Account", 1 June 1963, p. 10

58. "American Diary 8: Living a Dog's Life", 8 June 1963, p. 8

59. "American Diary 9: Wings on his Heart", 15 June 1963, p. 8

60. "American Diary 10: 'The Phone Call': A Tragi-comedy in One Act", 29 June 1963, p. 10

60. "The Returned Yank", 10 August 1963, p. 8

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