The present 1997
The Old Manse, Ballybeg, County Donegal, Ireland
The living-room and the lawn/garden of an old and graceless nineteenth century house, now badly decayed. A French window connects the two areas. It is wide open and some of the glass panes are broken, a few missing. The living-room is two steps above the lawn. It is a comfortless and neglected room and furnished mostly with the left-over belongings of previous tenants. On the floor along the back wall we can see Tom’s papers very neatly laid out in a line.
The living room and lawn with deck chairs and seats. Also in a hospital bedroom in a basement.
MAGGIE: It would mean you could move house.
TOM: If we wanted to, I suppose.
MAGGIE: Perhaps somewhere less remote?
TOM: Perhaps
JACK: The view up that valley is breathtaking, Maggie.
JACK: We went for a gentle walk. You might have warned me you live on the edge of a quagmire. One foot off the avenue into a damned field – left foot soaked. Where the driveway turns right… I know what I hate most about the country-side – apart from county people – I hate the smell of it. Just down to the bridge. More than your mother was fit for. Is that Ballybeg river down there?
TOM: From the distance the house does look well, doesn’t it? Originally it was a shooting lodge – away back in the 1880’s; then it was a manse; then it was a youth hostel; and then we moved in.
DAISY: We’re broke, Tom. We have no money at all. Your royalties have dried up completely. The hospital eats up anything you make from journalism. You just can’t get on with that novel you’ve been working at for five years. It’s seven years since you published anything and —.
Brian Friel at home, Drumaweir House, Greencastle
17 April 1995
Dipping the toe into Wittgenstein. Especially his belief that the job of the philosopher is to represent the relationship between language and the world.
3rd July 1995
A very strange and very vivid dream last night. Have just bought a very large decayed house. The dream has echoes of another dream that recurs. A very large house on top of a hill, at the end of a long straight avenue.
28 July 1995
Persistent unease with having the writer/artist as the main character.
GARRET: Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent. Wittgenstein, the philosopher. Obsessed with him at the moment. Thinking of doing something on him – a fiction – a faction maybe – maybe a bloody play! Well — maybe – perhaps.
DAISY: You writer creatures…it struck me how wretched you are. You’re unhappy in the world you inhabit and you’re more unhappy with the fictional world you create; so you drift through life like exiles from both places.
BRIAN FRIEL: I used Mendelssohn’s ‘On Wings of a Song’ because my two sisters sang that duet when they were about nine or ten. And even though the piece is clichéd I suppose it evokes for me a time of simpler pleasures and imagined innocence. So that even now I hear their voices, wavering and uncertain, ‘On wings of a song I’ll wander/ With thee, my sister, I’ll glide’. And I tell myself fancifully it is their unease before their difficult years ahead, just like the difficulties that confront Daisy in the play. But maybe these linkings between fact and fiction are too fanciful.¹
MAGGIE: I heard the Mendelssohn earlier. You used to play that piece…you could play that whole song-cycle before you were nine. And beautifully, very beautifully.
STAGE DIRECTION: The stage is suddenly flooded with an opulent and somnolent August sunshine and with the sounds of Elizabeth Schwarzkopf singing ‘On Wings of Song’.
EXTRACT: O! ‘darkly, deeply, beautifully blue,’ As some one somewhere sings about the sky – Lord Byron, Don Juan, 4.110
TOM: Then, my silent love, my strange little offspring, then I would come straight back here and fold you in my arms; and you and I would climb into a golden balloon – just the two of us – only the two of us – and we would soar above this earth and float away forever across the face of the ‘darkly, deeply, beautifully blue sky’ –
Donal McCann line drawing of Brian Friel sitting on a chair, smoking, signed and dated ‘donal, 13.12.90’
14 April 1995
Panic sets in when nothing stirs, when even the wish to sit at the desk has gone. A conviction that it is finally over.
1 February 1996
‘He carried out the gestures and by doing this he found faith’ (Pascal). Sitting at the desk. Leafing through notes. Hoping to find faith.
2 July 1996
A signal – weak, distant, but with some assurance – from the play this a.m. that perhaps I should return to it… I took out the notes and notebooks and looked through them.
TOM: My new novel?… Took it out again yesterday morning. Went back over all the notes. Looked at all the bits I’d written and tossed aside over the past five years. Read very carefully the twenty-three pages I’d already written. And I can tell you, Madam, let me tell you there just may be something there. I don’t want to say any more at this stage. But I did get a little – a little quiver – a whiff – a stirring of a sense that perhaps – maybe –
EXTRACT: The Brian Friel papers in the National Library of Ireland (MS 37,041 – MS 37,806, Accession No.5612) comprise 130 boxes of material, dating from 1959 to 2001. They were presented to the National Library in December 2000 by Friel and his five children, under Section 1003 of the Taxes Consolidation Act, 1997.
Fourteen additional boxes of material, consisting of correspondence, contractual and financial records, dating from 1964 to the mid 1990s, were also deposited by Mr. Friel’s literary agent in London, Curtis Brown. Under the terms of the deposit agreement, subsequent additional material generated by Mr. Friel is to be presented to the National Library at a future date.
A series of diaries (MS 37,453) and papers relating to Friel’s property (MSS 37,454, 37,455 and 37,459/1 – 2) will not be available for consultation until 1st of January 2034.
TOM: The man who has been with us for the past five days, the agent from that university in Texas, the man who wants to buy up all my manuscripts – yes, David Knight!… David Knight is going to give me his answer. He’s going to take me aside and put his arm around my shoulder and he is going to say to me, ‘Your papers, Tom, are beyond price’.
✭ Give Me Your Answer, Do!, Book Jacket, courtesy of Penguin Books
✭ Poster and images of Performance courtesy of The Clarence Players and Belvoir Studio.
✭ National Library of Ireland Collection List No. 73 BRIAN FRIEL PAPERS:
✭ MS 37,048 /1 – 2, Holograph diary entry by Friel, beginning ‘This is nothing more than a revving up of the engine to prevent it from stalling completely, an antidote to total paralysis. Exactly 3 months since I wrote anything at all…’ (2 Aug 1964, 2pp)
✭ MS 37,475 Note to Friel from unidentified individual at RTE, enclosing three colour photographs: 2 of Friel at his dining room table and one of the exterior of Drumaweir House, Co. Donegal (3 items, 10 x 15cm each). ‘A little memento of a lovely day. With love from all of us’. n.d. (1980s). 4 items.
✭ MS 37,472 Black and white publicity photos. Various poses. Headshots only. Photographer: Fergus Bourke, 17 Strand Road, Dublin 14. n.d. (1970s/early 1980s). 23 items, c20 x 25.5cm each.
✭ Give Me Your Answer, Do! (1997) by Brian Friel (London: Penguin Books) 1997
✭ Brian Friel, Extracts from a Sporadic Diary: Give Me Your Answer, Do!
(1995 – 96), in Murray, Christopher (ed.) Brian Friel: Essays, Diaries, Interviews : 1964-1999. London: Faber& Faber, 1999, p.166 – 172
✭ ¹Brian Friel, Seven Notes for a Festival Programme (1999), in Murray, Christopher (ed.) Brian Friel: Essays, Diaries, Interviews : 1964-1999. London: Faber& Faber, 1999, p.176
✭ Courtesy of the National Library of Ireland
✭ National Library of Ireland Collection List No. 73 BRIAN FRIEL PAPERS, MS 37,048 /1 – 2, MS 37,475, MS 37,472
✭ Donal McCann, line drawing of Brian Friel sitting on a chair, smoking, signed and dated ‘donal, 13.12.90’ (MS L 17) (42 x 59cm).
An Action of the County Donegal Heritage Plan
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