The Man on the Tatty Banner

Brian Friel died this morning. I knew this was coming, of course, as we all did. The man was 86, and his public appearances had gone from rare to nonexistent in the last few years. Still, though, I imagined him as a constant presence, ensconced in a armchair in Donegal. Even if the work had dried up, it was enough to know that the great mind that produced it was out there somewhere. Perhaps it's enough that it ever was.

Self-important as I am, after a series of heartfelt tribute tweets, I thought I should write a post reflecting on Friel's achievements, on what he meant to me. I even made a point of looking up where in the university library his works were, for reference material and judicious quotation. It was only a few minutes ago that I realised how futile it would be to pour out words over a man who understood, better than anyone since Beckett, how slippery language is, how unreliable. Perhaps that's why he moved from writing short stories to writing for the stage, and why his voice truly came alive at that point: because the only way to free his stories and his ideas from the graveyard of language was to have them embodied.

But enough of that. Tributes continue to pour in from all quarters as I write this, literary, critical and political. Rather than contribute my own droplets to the flood, I think the most appropriate thing to do is to leave the final word to Friel himself, in one of my favourite passages in all of literature, as he, through his greatest creation Frank Hardy, confronts the final certainty of death.

And as I walked I became possessed of a strange and trembling intimation: that the whole corporeal world - the cobbles, the trees, the sky, those four malign implements - somehow they had shed their physical reality and had become mere imaginings, and that in all existence there was only myself and the wedding guests. And that intimation in turn gave way to a stronger sense: that even we had ceased to be physical and existed only in spirit, only in the need we had for each other.

(He takes off his hat as if he were entering a church and holds it at his chest. He is both awed and elated. As he speaks the remaining lines he moves very slowly down stage.)

And as I moved across that yard towards them and offered myself to them, then for the first time I had a simple and genuine sense of home-coming. Then for the first time there was no atrophying terror; and the maddening questions were silent.

At long last I was renouncing chance.