FROM THE ARCHIVES:Brian Friel indulged in a popular writer's daydream in this column from 1960.
MY FIRST story to appear in an American magazine caused no literary sensation. I received a small cheque and spent it on doing up the bathroom.
Then weeks later came a fan letter of a sort. The writer congratulated me briskly on my work, informed me that he was a literary agent and placed himself at my disposal. He ended off by informing me that he is highly successful at his trade and numbers among his clients was the authoress of Peyton Place. Would I get in touch with him?
My first reaction was to read my simple little story again. I read it to my wife, I read it to my friends, I read it to my critical brothers-in-law. But try as they could, twist the honest phrases as tortuously and perversely as possible, they still could see no hint of salacity in the script. Yet that agent saw promise somewhere. He could smell, behind that uncomplicated tale of life in Donegal, a potential best-seller, the makings of a sexy writer, perhaps even the most successful pornographer of them all-Friel, the Philanderer.
I burned his letter in disgust . . . Time passed. Peyton Place was filmed and the authoress made countless millions. I was then working on a morality play about a distant uncle of my clan, Saint Columba.
I forgot the whole unpleasant incident until recently when Return to Peyton Place appeared and once more temptation assailed me. That agent, I thought, was no dozer; he was not going to try to sign up any old story writer unless he had something in him . . . And found myself coveting those countless millions and that international acclaim. I could hear the blurbs screaming: “The sizzliest of them all!”; “The book that made Bardot blush!”; Lolita and Forever Amber are for kids! Fabulous forbidden Friel is for adults!!!”
At the moment I have half a dozen provisional titles for my first novel but the likeliest three are Foyle Follies, Londonderry Love Nest or Marlborough Street Immoral. I have as yet no idea of plot or characterisation but I know that when I get started, I will lift the lid off this one-horse place and really go to town on local corrupt bourgeois society.
No one will be spared; depraved RUC men, trigger-happy B-men, pillars of the church, Unionist aldermen, vice kings, Buncrana turf men, trade union protection men, Nationalist political racketeers, big time border smugglers, dance hall dudes, un-Irish agitators, Communist-controlled IRA men, greyhound doping, bogus National Health doctors. Perhaps my central character will be a stipend collector and Gaelic League enthusiast who runs an undercover white slave traffic through Spanish potato boats, or I may expose a B-man who organises . . . a supply of heroin for Stormont Ministers.
Anyway . . . I intend cashing in on it. Perhaps when I have retired on my fortune to Hawaii, I may then get back to writing up my saintly relation.