‘Singing of Human Unsuccess’: Brian Friel’s Portraits of the Artist

Csilla Bertha and Donald E. Morse

‘Sing of human unsuccess

In a rapture of distress.’

– W.H. Auden, ‘Elegy: In Memory of W.B. Yeats’

In the ancient Celtic world the druids had magical power through incantations to mediate between humans and gods. ‘In early Ireland, such special form of discourse was known simply as bélra na bhfiled (literally “the speech of the seer-poets”’ (Ó hÓgáin 13). The shaman-poets through such speech could sanctify the marriage of the king to the goddess or to the sovereignty of the land; that is, symbolically form a marriage with the land itself, or, conversely, they could annihilate a ruler by satirizing him. This long-lived Irish traditional concept continues in the figure of the artist as healer, petitioner, and mediator between the human and supernatural worlds. It survives as well in the unusually high esteem accorded to poets, in the great significance of the seanchaí – the storytellers in old communities – and in the idea of the responsibility of the poet/artist for the people/community, as well as in the notion of the magic power of the word:

The ‘extraordinary skill in speech should be understood to affect reality, not only to interpret it but also to the extent of altering it. And so it emerges clearly from the many descriptions and studies of shamanism … that the power of speech – in terms of its ability and effectiveness, its referential and imagery – is one of the special features of the person who has insight and supernatural power’ (Ó hÓgáin 12).

Brian Friel, in his short story ‘The Diviner’ (1962) creates a metaphor for the magic power of the artist. Using only a Y-shaped twig, the diviner proves the only person able to discover the body of a drowned man after all other attempts have failed including utilizing fishermen’s nets and the elaborate equipment brought in by the English military frogmen. Seamus Heaney emphasizes the mystery of miracle, and how it works exclusively for the dowser and not for others. In his poem, ‘The Diviner’, after the protagonist reveals where the underground spring is,

The bystanders would ask to have a try.

He handed them the rod without a word.

It lay dead in their grasp till nonchalantly

He gripped expectant wrists. The hazel stirred (9-12, 24).

Heaney, like Friel, relates the diviner’s mysterious gift to that of the artist since both are in touch with something hidden and both share ‘a gift for mediating between the latent resource and the community that wants it current and released’ (qtd. in Kiberd 109). The very name ‘diviner’ suggests that his extraordinary abilities relate to the divine, but as a human being, he can never quite account for or gain control over them.

Like the power of the diviner, the talent of the artist may be used to reveal truths, whether pleasant or not and these may, in turn, prove either healing or destructive and self-destructive. Friel’s plays dramatize in countless forms the artist’s healing and destructive powers, as well as the artist’s search for certainties, place, and function. Christopher Murray, for example, asserts that ‘[t]he characters in Molly Sweeney are … three aspects of the artist as divine and thus tragic seer in a form of hypostatic union …’ (88). Richard Pine enumerates the various shapes the writer takes in Friel’s plays; such as: ‘map-makers, translators, historians, do-it-yourself philosophers, priests, politicians, schoolteachers, charlatans – all those whose skill depends on the pre-existence of the word, those who live by the book and are lived by the book, all those who submit to the idea of myth, of language, which becomes fabular as soon as it is spoken’ (‘Love’ 183). Although many characters embody elements of the creative or destructive power of the artist, only a few struggle directly and explicitly with issues such as the nature of the gift, the function, and morale of the artist, and only Tom Connolly in Give Me Your Answer, Do! (1997) is a professional writer. The shaman artist as healer appeared in Faith Healer, while the more settled artist figures faced their failures in the later Wonderful Tennessee (1993). Tom Connolly’s artistic gifts and powers become more explicitly and more severely challenged – if not over-whelmed – by an unmerited Joban catastrophe.

Frank Hardy, the faith healer, becomes tormented with questions about the nature of, and his own relation to, his gift. He both epitomizes and articulates the unceasing uncertainties, the frequent failures, the many weaknesses he experiences together with the necessity of continuing; the Beckettian ‘I can’t go on, I must go on’ attitude of the twentieth-century artist. Similarly to the diviner in the short story, he also has ‘divine’ power to heal or to make sick, as he is able to conduct healing forces from the spiritual world towards the wretched people who seek recuperation at his sessions. But his control over those powers proves less than that of the diviner, as it becomes clear that his power to heal has nothing to do with his will or ambition. In fact, he does not even know how to make himself receptive to the gift. On the contrary, he is simply at the mercy of his exceptional talent – indeed, as much at its mercy as his clients are. Once he, somewhat bemusedly, reflects on his gift: ‘occasionally it worked – oh yes – occasionally it did work’ (Faith Healer 333). A seedy, alcoholic, impoverished descendant of shamanic druids, Frank Hardy cuts a ridiculous, pitiable figure, yet he proves able at times to work miracles. In one out of ten instances, he does make the hopelessly sick and deformed whole again.

Frank Hardy sacrifices to his talent not only his own life but, most selfishly and destructively, also those of his immediate associates, especially his wife and his manager-friend. Being most concerned about healing others and being ready for self-sacrifice – for people he has never seen before, will never see again, and about whom he knows only that they are in need of help and healing – he becomes most selfish in his private life and relations. He does serve a communal good but at the price of inflicting considerable suffering upon the individuals around him. This situation encapsulates the perennial ethical dilemma of whether such a choice serves a higher form of morality or simply exemplifies ordinary immorality. Hardy does not take into account any one else’s interests or sensitivities, nor does he consider any norms or rules of living together with other people. Yet, the service of others and the service of one’s own talent become paradoxically at one and the same time an example of utmost unselfishness as well as utmost selfishness. Frank Hardy admits that when he was able to cure seemingly incurable people, he felt ‘exultation, consummation’ not only from the joy and relief over his ability to help others, but also because in those moments, and only in those moments, the ‘questions that undermined my life … became meaningless … and I had become whole myself and perfect in myself’ (333). In this sense, he exemplifies the curious relationship of the artist to the community that lies in this very circularity, for the artist can achieve wholeness only through helping others towards wholeness. ‘His acts of transformation are acts of transference’ (McGuinness 62). Only through self-sacrifice can the artist arrive at self-fulfilment. Remaking the world into his ‘fiction’, ‘according to his own private standard of excellence’, can only appease his tormenting desire for excellence, for ‘perfection’ which, as the Faith Healer’s wife asserts, was always the ‘cause of his restlessness and the focus of it’ (346).

If Frank Hardy represents a failed artist, his failure nevertheless becomes a heroic one, for he becomes the prototype of the artist in the total sense as he lives only by and for his talent. ‘So, in his last days, as his con man’s courage dissolves, he lacerates himself with self-doubt and deliberately seeks out a spectacular failure that will kindly put an end to his own slender surviving hope’ (Kiberd 112). All his life he wrestles with his own uncertainties concerning his talent. When his questions and self-doubt appear to be killing that talent, then, rather than wait for its demise, Frank arranges for his own death. He decides, as José Lanters contends, ‘that the uncertainty of a life without verdicts is unbearable, and opts to end the questions by ending his life’ (174). Yet, Hardy’s death becomes more than just the end of his life, it is both his admission of failure and his supreme act of creation. Richard Pine eloquently states that ‘Frank Hardy continually hurls himself against the barbed wire of apprehension until, after he has torn himself to shreds, he succeeds in making himself whole for the first time’ (Friel 96). In his last performance, he ritualizes himself and his own death and through this ritual he achieves his status as a sacrificial offering. Friel’s play thus acquires ‘the radiance of myth, it carries its protagonist and its audience into a realm beyond expectation, and it carries the drama back to … the sacred, where sacrifice was witnessed and the world renewed by that sacrifice’ (Heaney, ‘Memory’ 237).

In other plays, Friel’s artist figures may appear in less mythical roles and in more mundane circumstances, where they have less divine power; still, there remains an absence of negative answers to questions posed about their role, function, or possible healing effect. In general, while Friel propounds such questions, he does not offer answers. However, in their very posing, he continually calls attention to the necessity of taking them seriously. The action of Faith Healer, Wonderful Tennessee, and Give Me Your Answer, Do! implies, if in varying degrees, the question of the right – even the duty – of the artist to subordinate himself and others to his own gift. The Romantics revived the ancient view that it is the responsibility of the artist to follow his divine inspiration wherever it might take him. In Friel’s work, this romantic notion of divine inspiration survives under the surface acquiring even stronger ironic overtones than were present in much of Romantic poetry, such as that of Byron and Shelley. In Crystal and Fox (1968), Fox embodied only the destructive and self-destructive instincts without the power of creativity or healing, but the Faith Healer follows the Romantic idea that everything revolves around his talent. Grace, his wife, willingly subjects all her interests to her husband’s art. Similarly, Angela, Frank’s wife in Wonderful Tennessee, makes sacrifices to sustain him, although she believes far less in his gifts. The uninspired, rational writer, Frank – whose contrast with the Faith Healer is emphasized by sharing his given name – admits, with some guilt feelings, that he has failed to support his family as a writer-husband. He has had to accept regular financial support from his brother-in-law as well as allow Angela to earn their living by teaching so that he can pursue his writing. Frank’s writing, however, does not even aim at bringing redemption to anyone – individual or community – nor does it provide any saving grace to the dried-out author himself. It comes as no surprise then that his rational, intellectual speculations, intended to demystify the world, cannot heal anyone.

The Faith Healer failed because of his self-consciousness and his analytical mind. His too heavy reliance on his intellect blocked his talent, as Teddy, his friend and manager, observes: ‘A bloody fantastic talent that hasn’t one ounce of ambition because his bloody brains has him bloody castrated!’ (357). The latter Frank, in Wonderful Tennessee, on the contrary, shows the most unartist-like attitude towards the phenomena of the world as he tries to explain away the mystery, rationalize the irrational, and so move even further away from grace. Yet, he has enough residual sensitivity to experience an epiphany when given one, to participate in the spontaneously arising rituals, and to be able to accept some kind of redemption.

George, the musician, the real artist in Wonderful Tennessee, represents the other extreme and probably the more common case of compromising one’s talent. He unselfishly sacrificed his talent for his wife and his love for her, with the result that he lost his artistic career. He obviously regrets that he gave up his life as a concert pianist, but now he has no way of amending his choice, since he is going to die soon. George echoes the frustration of other talented figures in Friel’s plays such as Claire in Aristocrats (1979), who also had dreams of becoming a concert pianist but was thwarted by circumstances. At the end of that play, she faces a situation as bad as George’s approaching death: marriage to an old, unattractive Ballybeg widower with four children. Her highest aspiration now can be to teach children to play the piano. In Give Me Your Answer, Do! Daisy, and before her, her father Jack, cherished hopes of a career in music, but each became reduced: Daisy to a housewife and Jack to a cocktail bar-pianist. George, in order to be able to marry and support himself and his wife, compromised his talent by spending his professional life playing in a pop group. He most explicitly expresses the end of his artistic career in his ‘story’ when he plays – somewhat improbably – a virtuoso version of a Beethoven sonata on his accordion, then stops in mid-phrase and formally bows to his audience on the pier rather than to one in a concert hall.

Friel once noted that contemporary Irish people, rather than becoming West Britons, were, instead, becoming East Americans (qtd. in Hickey and Smith 224), as George’s pop group, the ‘Dude Ranchers’ exemplifies. George, however, through his art and through his still-extant gift, retains strong affinities with his roots and old culture, and so, despite his failed career and terminal illness, he still can function as a healer. In his Dionysiac role – identified for him by Angela, who calls him ‘Dionysus’ and then wreathes him with dried seaweed (11) – he inspires the others to enjoy and express themselves. Through his music, he opens the way to the mysterious, while evoking in them warm feelings, love, caring, sympathy, and empathy. Preserving love and being loved, George is still able to offer healing to those around him. Both Frank Hardy and George lost themselves in order to save others, with the difference that Hardy did it most selfishly, sacrificing others and George most unselfishly, sacrificing himself.

Dying, George facilitates the spiritual healing of others. Frank Hardy at the moment of his death, similarly, reached fulfilment, ‘homecoming’, and became reconciled with his talent or the lack of it as well as with his inability to control his own capacity to heal. These instances raise the question of whether talent can be fulfilled only at the price of life – whether that of the artist or of others involved in his plight. That in turn raises the question of whether the centuries-old wisdom still holds that only pain and suffering can fuel art.

If it is true to some extent, as the Latin saying goes, that the palm-tree grows under weight, it is also true that too much weight may kill the palm tree, as apparently happened to Tom Connolly in Give Me Your Answer, Do! – Friel’s first play to address directly the moral, emotional, and psychological issues of a writer. The pain caused by his daughter’s autism and his inability to help her appears to have paralysed Tom as a writer by draining his creative force. In Give Me Your Answer, Do!, the dilemma whether to serve a talent or earn a living becomes all the more acute. Tom Connolly, although making ends meet through journalism, suffers from a severe writer’s block, having produced no new novel or published no new book in over seven years. He resembles Frank Hardy in his willing acceptance of Daisy, his wife’s self-sacrifice, without so much as thanking her. Yet, unlike the unruly, uncivilized Frank Hardy, Tom does at least try to fit in with his immediate society. He is friendly to his parents-in-law and other visitors, including his back-biting rival Garret Fitzmaurice – nevertheless, at some fundamental level of awareness, he remains as lonely, and, perhaps, as selfish as Frank in Faith Healer or that other Frank in Wonderful Tennessee. And, on balance, Tom fits in with his immediate society about as well as they do.

Although Give Me Your Answer, Do! is filled with frustrated artists, the primary figure remains Tom Connolly, the writer. A novelist, who precociously published his first novel when he was still an undergraduate, he now has some twelve or perhaps fifteen novels written and most of them published (16). By his middle-to-late fifties though, he is, like his clothes and briefcase, ‘casual-to-shabby’ and has an ‘abused’ appearance (11). He wrestles with serious questions about his vocation and his ability to keep practising it. He devotes most of his time and energy to writing the endless round of journalism that pays Bridget’s hospital bills and has no realistic prospect of any change. His experience parallels that of the Irish writer Brian O’Nolan, who had to sacrifice most of his writing career in order to support through journalism a family of twelve that he inherited the day his father died (see Cronin 88-90). Precious little time or energy remained after completing these urgent immediate tasks for either writer to do his more creative writing. In addition, Tom has lost his agent and quarrelled with his publisher.

Probably the most deeply failed artist among all of Friel’s artist-figures, Tom Connolly fails both in everyday life and in his art. He causes his family financial uncertainty, can afford only a cheap institution for his daughter, and deprives his wife of the possibility of pursuing her own talent as a pianist (which appears as an issue only in his fantasizing to Bridget). And yet he is the only one in the family who has the courage to face seeing his daughter, and who tries to bring some variety if not joy into her life. His deep caring sharply distinguishes him from Frank, the Faith Healer, who, instead of at least sharing the grief with his sorrow-smitten wife at the loss of their child, turns his back on her and pretends that he does not know and does not care. Nonetheless, from Frank’s obsessive repetition of the village’s name where the child was born and died, and from the cumulative effect of the differing yet complementary monologues that make up Faith Healer, it becomes abundantly clear that Frank suffers just as terribly as his wife. But Frank hides it in himself, never allowing his public face to show his private feelings. Tom, the more humane and perhaps less blindly dedicated artist, sacrifices his own creative energy when he undertakes the task of immersing himself regularly, again and again, in the pain of seeing his daughter.

In Give Me Your Answer, Do!, the writer’s response to the impossibility of expressing the depth of experience – here the depth of pain and suffering in particular – is a kind of desperate rebellion or revenge. Tom, in his helplessness at his daughter’s incurable illness, stops writing novels and the only thing he is able to write is hard core pornography. The hurt caused by this tragedy cannot find words in any ‘normal’ form, but neither can it allow for the continuation of a career as if that horror had not happened. Silence or irrational anger appears as the only way of coping with the loss. As Private Gar remained well hidden within Public Gar in Philadelphia, Here I Come!, so in Give Me Your Answer, Do!, the private Tom, deeply wounded and angry to the depths of his being at having to cope with the Joban affliction of an autistic daughter, has burrowed beneath the façade of the public Tom Connolly. Only once did the private Tom erupt to write in a furious white heat of inspiration those two mysterious novels both unpublished and, until the day of the play, unacknowledged and almost forgotten. It is Daisy who recalls their existence to Tom. Once she does, the ‘substantial archive’, visible throughout the play as a series of neatly arranged folders, becomes the incomplete archive with the two absent folders in the bedroom ‘on top of the wardrobe’ (24-25). These missing novels achieve importance because of an archive hunter’s possible interest in acquiring all of Tom’s manuscripts for a research library in Texas. Not only do they figure in an important way in Tom’s oeuvre, but they also prove important in the family’s history being so intimately linked to the autistic daughter and her institutionalization. When Bridget was committed to the hospital at age twelve, some ten or so years before the time of the play, Tom got down to work and in one highly concentrated year of intensive hard exertion produced both novels – a feat that amazes his writer-friend, Garret:

Daisy: He began the first the day Bridget was committed to the hospital. A glorious first of May, I remember. And he went at it with such a fury that he had it finished by Hallowe’en.

Garret: Wow! Six months?

Daisy: Then he went straight into the second without a break and he finished that in five months. I never ever saw him work with such concentration. For a whole twelve months! …

Tom: I called the first Bridget – a sort of working title. I never got around to naming the second. And for some reason I never showed them to anybody.

Garret: And your agent saw them – you had an agent then, hadn’t you? (57)

The power of these novels derives from Tom’s perceiving and communicating the deeply-felt obscene quality of the world. A world in which a young girl – through no fault of her own and through no one’s doing – becomes so severely autistic that she must be institutionalized to save whatever may be left of her parents’ life and their home. Thus far, the novels have had only one reader, Daisy, who describes them both off-handedly as ‘Hard-core porn – as they say’ (58). Tom, known as ‘a writer of integrity … Literary probity. High-minded’ (34), now faces the dilemma of whether to include or not these novels in his archive. Once he decides to let the archive hunter become the first public reader – in the interest of offering a ‘complete archive … [which is] always more valuable’ (24) – he then faces an additional decision about whether or not to sell his manuscripts as a complete collection including these novels.

This decision, to sell the manuscripts or not, is, in turn, intimately bound up with the question that he – and every creative artist – wrestles with: does ‘the work [have] value?’ (79). And, concomitantly, how does a writer know it has value? ‘The artist is like the Faith Healer, a man who never knows for certain whether he has been successful in bringing off an effect, a broker in risk who must stand before the audience nightly with no assurance that his magic will rub off on others yet again’ (Kiberd 108). Sales of books may be one yardstick but not a particularly pertinent one for Tom and his work. Does then the possible sale of his manuscripts to a Texas archive validate his worth as a writer? The archive in itself is a laying bare of his life as a writer, as an artist: ‘My entire goddamn life for Christ’s sake! … please tell me it’s not altogether worthless’, he pleads (23). Gráinne later taunts Garret that the sale price of his archive equals the full artistic worth of his work: ‘So now his [Garret’s] real worth is established’ (52). But Tom rightly objects ‘This isn’t about money at all’ (25). Is this offer to buy Tom’s archive ‘the substantial confirmation, the tangible evidence!’ that Tom at first believes it is? Can he now celebrate because ‘The work must be good! I’m not imprisoned in the dark any more! Now I can run again! Now I can dare again!’ (79). But his reaction to the offer, when it finally comes, is to feel ‘pleased – well, flattered, I suppose. No more than that. For some reason suddenly no more than a little bit flattered’ (78). Tom’s validation lies elsewhere.

Garret Fitzmaurice, in contrast to Tom, appears the popular but questionable artist, ‘his work is much more immediate, much more – of today than [Tom’s]’ (24). He does not have integrity, is not high-minded, but he is prolific and his books do sell (24). His public persona is that of the successful, moderately well-known novelist with an agent, one who publishes fairly popular fiction and leads a relatively independent life. But Garret also appears terribly insecure about his real value as an artist as well as about the actual value of his work. He takes every opportunity to remind Tom of Tom’s failures, not so much as a way of lowering Tom’s stock but as a means of boosting his own (46-47). He and his wife, Gráinne, are childless but come fitted out with a menagerie of various domestic animals – their surrogate children – who supply them with subjects for their endless small talk. Together, Gráinne and Garret also exemplify failed artists. Having created their roles as Ballybeg’s small-time version of George and Martha from Edward Albee’s Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, their goal becomes to humiliate one another in public (49) but to postpone delivering a mortal wound. Gráinne strikes the hardest when she hurts Garret not as a person but as an artist: ‘You aren’t at all the writer you might have been … Too anxious to please. Too fearful of offending. And that has made you very popular: people love your – amiability. But I thought once you were more than that. I think you did, too’ (49-50). The public Garret remains silent, but the wounded private Garret retorts ‘Jesus, Gráinne, you certainly can deliver that mortal wound’ (50). She succeeds in annihilating him just because she touches one of the artist’s most sensitive nerves by raising the question of whether Garret is an artist or a performer – or, as the Faith Healer says, a ‘con man’. ‘The artist’, maintains Declan Kiberd, ‘always keeps his eye remorselessly on his subject, whereas the performer is always watching his audience. The artist risks the displeasure of his audience as he maintains a congenial relationship with his subject, whereas the performer risks the betrayal of his subject as he seeks a congenial relationship with his audience’ (113).

The other performer, Jack Donovan, Daisy’s father, the cocktail lounge piano player, accepts his job as the best he can do, given circumstances and talent. He at least is honest about being an entertainer, although, as he remarks wryly, all such pianists had plans to become concert pianists (56). Like everyone else in the play, he believes he has failed in some significant way. His failure lies, however, not in his profession, but in his personal life plagued by kleptomania. Because of his petty thievery, he and his wife have had to change addresses often, to avoid humiliation and to escape the headlines, ‘Doctor’s Husband Charged with Pilfering’ (33). Jack tries to accept the disappointment life brings. ‘But’, as he says, ‘there’s always an expectation, isn’t there? And they don’t always work out, do they?’ (74)

In Give Me Your Answer, Do!, every character from David, the manuscript buyer, who worries that if he does not close this deal he may lose his job, through Daisy’s family, to her and Tom’s friends, all eventually reveal their failed expectations, their disappointments. Only Daisy herself appears immune to disappointment or perhaps her serenity is only a gin-sodden veneer with which she faces a hostile world. The considerable pile of bills is often for her but a momentary annoyance. ‘May the giving hand never fail’ to provide – an attitude often adopted by artists. In the closing moments of the play, she appears to be the person who understands Tom best as she soliloquizes about what he will do and why:

Oh, no, he mustn’t sell. … to sell for an affirmation, for an answer, to be free of that grinding uncertainty, that would be so wrong for him and so wrong for his work. Because that uncertainty is necessary. He must live with that uncertainty, that necessary uncertainty. Because there can be no verdicts, no answers. Indeed, there must be no verdicts. Because being alive is the postponement of verdicts, isn’t it? (79-80)

That uncertainty, that existential living on the edge, appears to her a necessary quality for Tom’s existence as a writer and a person. She understands the danger of, and encourages Tom to overcome, the ‘lust for certainty as the last infirmity of the bourgeois mind’ that Kiberd identifies as the Faith Healer’s tragic flaw (111). There is no evidence, however, that living on the edge leads Tom to create since he must expend almost all his energy on the journalism that brings the quick cash needed to pay that mountain of bills. Within this most Chekhovian play, we are told what Tom decides – he does not sell the archive – but neither the audience nor he can know if it is the best or the right decision. The audience is left with an ambiguous tableau of Tom and Daisy on either side of the record player with his question about the decision hanging in the air ‘on wings of song’ between them.

Tom: I hope it’s the right decision. Give me your answer, do, Daisy.

Daisy: I don’t know. Who’s to say? (81)

There is the necessary uncertainty. Whatever the answer given and whatever the subsequent course of action taken, it, perhaps in combination with the confession of the missing two novels, may enable Tom to make a real beginning on his ‘new novel’. That would be the first in seven years. Like so much else in the play, this possibility is neither affirmed nor denied. ‘Who’s to say?’ In the final scene with Bridget, Tom in his monologue describes how he has ‘[r]ead 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 –’ (83).

In contrast to the first scene with Bridget, where Tom fabricates in glowing detail the completion of his non-existent novel that brings to an end ‘five very difficult years … five years of – desperation’ (14), in this last scene he discusses actually extant pages. And these few pages could signal the beginning of a new creative period which, while it too may be difficult, could result not in flights of fancy but in new work. Like so much of Tom’s genuinely good work, however, those pages he refers to were written not yesterday or today but several years ago. Still, perhaps with these pages in hand he will at last be able to make a real beginning on a new novel, and that is more than he has been able to do in many years.

Tom, like every other character in the play, except Bridget and Daisy, is weighed down by his public image, his public face. Friel returns to this issue of the public face prepared ‘to meet the faces that you meet’ (Eliot 27) by way of each of the characters. In the course of the play, each confronts the fragility of his or her public image from Garret and Gráinne’s most raucous appearance to Daisy’s mother, Maggie’s steadfast refusal to use more than one cane, the ‘two sticks’ she knows she needs to walk. Daisy’s father, Jack, on the other hand, pays excessive attention to his dress and shoes to ward off public scrutiny of his failures, while David, the archive hunter’s workaholic approach to his job barely papers over his very real fear of losing it if he fails to produce. Only Daisy appears immune from this search for an acceptable public image as, gin glass in hand, she meets the world and their friends on her own terms. And, in the end, it is Daisy who encourages Tom not to sell the archive although this refusal brings with it the considerable cost of lost income that the family needs simply to meet current bills. Whether this act is a sacrificial one on her part or is in some way self-serving is never made clear.

All the action in Give Me Your Answer, Do! occurs bracketed by the two scenes between Tom and Bridget, his institutionalized daughter – ‘the powerful non-presence’, as Richard Pine perceptively describes her (‘Love’ 188). Tom’s stubborn efforts to reach Bridget prove hopeless. He cannot heal the one wound that he would most like to. Still, he uses his imagination to try and console and/or reach his daughter through using a more colourful language than he employs at any other time or with anyone else. But she – so deeply buried inside herself – probably does not hear him as he creates wildly fanciful stories about their immediate family to entertain her:

… your grandmother has decided that she has been small for far too long. So every Wednesday evening, when the clock strikes seven, she makes herself grow two inches taller, so that she is now about – what? – she must be eleven feet tall at least’ (12).

Through fantastic images, he evokes beauty and comedy as nowhere else in the play, using more of his creative energy than he has been able to put into writing for years.

Tom knows his stories are only stories, that his promises to Bridget to take her in the golden balloon are only fantasies; yet, they allow him to cope with seeing her in her miserable condition, which is more than Daisy is able to bring herself to do. As with everything else except brushing her hair, Bridget meets his stories with silence, making not the least sign in response. She is the most difficult because the most unresponsive of any of Tom’s ‘readers’. In his heroic yet failing attempts, Tom reflects his vocation as an artist, but, clearly, all he does is done in desperation. He does not have any illusion about the present or the future or about his own talent, nor does he cherish any nostalgia about the past. Instead, he escapes into fantasies and the fantastic to bring colour and light into the life of his daughter who does not seem to have any light around her. The figure of Tom, as father, persistently trying, against all odds, to awaken the human within his daughter, becomes one of Friel’s most arresting images of the true artist who must employ his talent even when he knows there is no rational possibility of change – that the situation is truly hopeless. As Hamm says in Endgame, ‘Use your head, can’t you, use your head, you’re on earth, there’s no cure for that!’ (Beckett 68) Or as Job discovered – and Tom verifies – being on earth guarantees encountering unmerited suffering – the subject of the book of Job, most of Beckett’s and several of Friel’s plays, including Give Me Your Answer, Do!, Faith Healer, and Wonderful Tennessee. Still, there remains the Beckettian obligation of the artist to attempt to give expression to the suffering of Job, the distress of Hamm, and the disappointment and frustration of Tom. ‘[T]o the destructive element submit yourself’, admonished Stein in Joseph Conrad’s Lord Jim (200). Nowhere in Friel’s plays is this romantic idea clearer than in Give Me Your Answer, Do! Tom, thrown into the destructive element by circumstances or fate, willingly immerses himself and accepts his role. Moreover, the true artist, according to Frank McGuinness, ‘must take upon himself the sickness of others’ (62). Tom does so, and the fruit of his transference of the sickness of his daughter into himself is the two pornographic novels, the shapes he gives to his emerging despair, frustration, fear, anguish, anger, and evil – his Jungian shadow. But whether renewal will occur after this immersion in evil, darkness, and sickness proves more problematic in this play than it does in Faith Healer where Frank was still able to heal people one out of ten times. The ambiguity increases in the final scene where Tom repeats most of what he said at the beginning to Bridget, adding a few words about his new novel moving along after all those years of lack of inspiration. Whether the full realization of the shadow, the evil, leads to death or the renewal of creative energy is left unclarified. So, while McGuinness convincingly asserts that ‘Friel’s dramatic vision is quintessentially Romantic’ (61) and ‘[h]e, not Yeats, is truly the last Romantic’ (62), what must be seen as part of that vision is Friel’s perspective of irony, doubt, and uncertainty.

Friel, himself a master of words, struggles in several of his plays with the problem of the inexpressible. Frank Hardy in Faith Healer only knows by intuition when he is going to possess the strength to heal, but cannot influence or explain it. Michael, the writer-narrator in Dancing at Lughnasa (1990), concludes the play by emphasizing the inadequacy of words alone to express experience, feelings, and atmosphere. ‘Dancing as if language had surrendered to movement – as if this ritual, this wordless ceremony, was now the way to speak …, to be in touch with some otherness … Dancing as if language no longer existed because words were no longer necessary’ (71). Frank in Tennessee finds ‘the book without words’ the emblem of perfection, which ironically also reflects on his own lack of devotion and creative power and/or on the writer’s impotence in general. That book, ‘the last book ever written – and the most wonderful!’ (41), would indeed contain all the mystery, but would share and communicate nothing.

Out of this world of tragedy and pain comes the stuff of art. Friel, commenting on the artist’s role in society, says, ‘perhaps this is an artist’s arrogance, but I feel that once the voice is found in literature then it can move out and become part of the common currency’ (qtd. in Pine, Friel 191). But there is little sign that Tom in Give Me Your Answer, Do! has found or will find his voice. Thus far his work illustrates ‘the lack of congruence between the word and the situation’ (Welch 240). Hanna Arendt captured the distinction between great and lesser art when she described great art as

Praise that pitches itself against all that is most unsatisfactory in man’s condition on this earth and sucks its strength out of the wound – somehow convinced, as the bards of ancient Greece were, that the gods spin unhappiness and evil things to mortals so that they may be able to tell the tales and sing the songs.

Tom has his subject; but, unlike Friel, all he appears to have done with it thus far is record its very obscenity in the most literal terms through his hard core pornographic novels. Will he now be able to ‘suck … strength out of the wound’ and transmute his and his family’s suffering into art? Will he have the ‘strength and courage’ to help bring ‘redemption of the human spirit’ out of ‘confusion and disillusion’ as Friel believes the modern dramatist does when disturbing audiences with ‘his terrible, haunting questions?’ (qtd. in Andrews 7). In the words of W.H. Auden, will Tom become able to ‘Sing of human unsuccess / In a rapture of distress?’ (143). Still, with this possible new beginning comes an additional disquieting note. Describing that ‘stirring’ he senses in those twenty-three pages, Tom repeats his promise to Bridget made in the first scene that if he successfully completes his new novel then he will return for her. He says that he will ‘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” –’ (84). The novel will thus become the means of escape for both of them from their impossible lives.

Unlike his first monologue with Bridget with which the play opens, here, in the last scene, Tom adds and emphasizes the phrases ‘just the two of us – only the two of us’ (84). Phrases, which by themselves might have no special significance were it not for Daisy’s antiphonal exclamation with which the play ends, ‘“Oh Tom! – Tom! – Tom, please? –” Pause. Quick black’ (84). Her interjection adds inevitable ambiguity to Tom’s speech. As the curtain falls, an audience is left with only questions, for there is no immediately obvious or coherent way of putting Tom’s and Daisy’s two phrases together. Tom’s vision of escaping from earth may simply be another expression of a father’s wish to take his daughter away from this cruel and unforgiving land. Bridget is in the midst of yet another series of shock treatments, which Daisy cannot bear to face and Tom finds very hard to deal with. Or Tom may be threatening suicide – thus becoming free of this earth. Pine believes that ‘Daisy realizes that from her recently rediscovered position of strength as helpmeet she has once more retreated to that of handmaiden … Daisy’s gesture of despair as she witnesses this next betrayal is the most frightening and disturbing moment in a [bleak] play’ (‘Love’ 188). Harry White, on the other hand, places the emphasis in this closing scene on the necessity of art for life. ‘Tom would rescue his daughter from her solitary incarceration were he able to write his novel, but not before. At the last, and in a play that dramatizes the ruinous consequences of artistic neglect, Friel proposes the necessarily redemptive condition of art as a precondition for life itself’ (15). But José Lanters cautions that

The apparently deliberate exclusion of Daisy is ominous … Paradoxically, even as, on the level of art, Tom is beginning again, on the level of life, tragedy is imminent … uncertainty has tragic consequences for the lives of people at the same time that it enables art. The possible end and the possible beginning coincide on stage in the final chaotic, mysterious moments of Give Me Your Answer, Do! (174)

Friel has brought to the stage in ‘this complex and moving play’ (Roche 205) a living portrait of a floundering artist in mid-life beset before and behind by troubles and tragedy, who ‘wants an overall assessment of what he has done – a judgement, a final verdict’ (Friel letter qtd. in Pine, ‘Love’ 308). Such a judgement, however, cannot be given until uncertainty ends either with death, as in the case of Frank Hardy in Faith Healer, or the cessation of writing, as in Wonderful Tennessee. So, like most of Friel’s characters and all of Samuel Beckett’s, Tom cannot go on but does go on as Friel ‘sing[s] of human unsuccess / In a rapture of distress’.

Works Cited

Andrews, Elmer. The Art of Brian Friel: Neither Reality nor Dreams. London: Macmillan, 1995.

Auden, W.H. ‘Elegy: In Memory of W. B. Yeats’. Collected Shorter Poems. London: Faber, 1966. 141-43.

Beckett, Samuel. Endgame. New York: Grove, 1958.

Conrad, Joseph. Lord Jim. London: Penguin, 1949.

Cronin, Anthony. No Laughing Matter: the Life and Times of Flann O’Brien. 1989. London: Paladin, 1990.

Eliot, T.S. ‘The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock’. The Collected Poems of T. S. Eliot. London: Faber, 1961. 11-16.

Friel, Brian. Aristocrats. Selected Plays. London: Faber, 1984. 247-326.

--- Crystal and Fox. Crystal and Fox and The Mundy Scheme: Two Plays by Brian Friel. New York: Farrar, 1970. 1-147.

--- Dancing at Lughnasa. London: Faber, 1990.

--- ‘The Diviner’. The Diviner: The Best Short Stories of Brian Friel. Dublin: O’Brien, 1983. 19-32.

--- Faith Healer. Selected Plays. London: Faber, 1984. 327-76.

--- Give Me Your Answer, Do! London: Penguin, 1997.

--- Molly Sweeney. Louchcrew, Oldcastle: Gallery, 1994.

--- Philadelphia, Here I Come!. Selected Plays. London: Faber, 1984. 23-99.

--- Selected Plays of Brian Friel. Introd. Seamus Deane. London: Faber, 1984.

--- Wonderful Tennessee. London: Faber, 1993.

Heaney, Seamus. ‘The Diviner’. Selected Poems 1965-1975. London: Faber, 1980. 24.

--- ‘For Liberation: Brian Friel and the Uses of Memory’. The Achievement of Brian Friel. Ed. Alan J. Peacock. Gerrards Cross: Smythe, 1993. 229-40.

Hickey, Des, and Gus Smith, eds. A Paler Shade of Green. London: Frewin, 1972.

Ó hÓgáin, Dáithí. ‘The Shamanic Image of the Irish Poet’. That Other World. Ed. Bruce Stewart. 2 vols. Gerrards Cross: Smythe, 1998. 1: 12-48.

Kiberd, Declan. ‘Brian Friel’s Faith Healer’. The Writer and Society at Large. Ed. Masaru Sekine. Gerrards Cross: Smythe, 1985. 106-21.

Lanters, José. ‘Brian Friel’s Uncertainty Principle’. Irish University Review 29.1 (1999): 162-75.

McGuinness, Frank. ‘Faith Healer: All the Dead Voices’. Irish University Review 29.1 (1999): 60-63.

Murray, Christopher. ‘Brian Friel’s Molly Sweeney and Its Sources: a Postmodern Case History’. Etudes Irlandaises 23.2 (1998): 81-98.

Pine, Richard. ‘Love: Brian Friel’s Give Me Your Answer, Do!’ Irish University Review 29.1 (1999): 176-88.

--- Brian Friel and Ireland’s Drama. London: Routledge, 1990.

Roche, Anthony. Rev. of The State of Play: Irish Theatre in the ‘Nineties. Ed. Eberhard Bort. Irish University Review 27.1 (1997): 205-08.

Welch, Robert. ‘Brian Friel: “Isn’t this your job to translate?”’ Changing States: Transformations in Modern Irish Writing. London: Routledge, 1993. 224-40.

White, Harry. ‘Brian Friel and the Condition of Music’. Irish University Review 29.1 (1999): 6-15.

Extract: Brian Friel’s Dramatic Artistry, ‘The Work has Value’, edited by Donald E. Morse, Csilla Bertha, and Mária Kurdi

Cross Reference: Marie Jones, Anne Devlin, Frank McGuinness

See Also: Brian Friel in relation to Field Day, Tom Murphy and Thomas Kilroy