Brian Phelan died, at home, a few days ago on May 8th. His stepson, Josh, was kind enough to let me know almost straight away. I had seen quite a bit of Brian over the last few months.
We first met some twenty years ago. My wife, eldest and then only daughter and I went to visit him and his wife Dorothy, who also died very recently, in their cottage in Sherborne, Dorset, situated in beautiful surroundings on a large country estate. We were there to discuss his archive (literary archives being a speciality of ours) but not before he had allowed my daughter, then two years old, to drive his car around the place, seated on his lap of course. A few more visits followed until the time came for me to take his papers away for cataloguing and, we hoped, a sale. I drove down in a lorry. “How are you? Good to see you,” he said, “but why have you come in a lorry?” “To take the papers away.” “You’re taking them away?”
It’s a strange thing but I have always found it hard to get authors and their agents and publishers to understand what happens when an archive is sold and what acquiring institutions will be looking for when considering a purchase.
There was, he said, no correspondence – he wasn’t much one for it and in any case hadn’t retained it. No matter, we found a wonderful home for it at the University of Delaware and achieved a substantial sum for Brian.
We kept in touch, but more than that he introduced me to his friends Evan Jones, Sir Frank Kermode and Victoria Glendinning, all of whose archives we handled and sold. What they had in common was being delightful people, all three easy to deal with, with no overblown expectations of what we might be able to do for them, which we do sometimes encounter.
Brian and I always enjoyed each other’s company and there was usually a pub lunch involved, with plenty of stories of his encounters with denizens of the worlds of theatre , television and cinema – and a lot of laughter – I was always delighted to hear from him. A favourite anecdote was that of an awestruck Japanese student asking, on learning that he and Kermode were friends, “My goodness, what do you two talk about when you meet?” “I told him literary criticism and post-modernism mostly,” said Brian, “but actually, Julian, we’d go the pub, talk about football and spend the afternoon playing pool.”
That’s how I remember it but on Brian’s website there’s another similar story.
Brian Phelan – an Irish playwright & screenwriter
No doubt both are true:
Some years ago I mentioned to a young teacher friend of mine in Dorset that I had spent the previous day in London with Frank. He had read Frank’s work at university and had been greatly influenced by him. Eager for a glimpse of the great man he asked “What did you discuss with him?”
“Oh”, I said “We discussed pre-Revolutionary Russian writers in relation to the mysticism of Yeats over lunch and in the afternoon we dissected structuralism. We had a little time left over and we were going to discuss Pound and Joyce but we decided to have a sherry instead.”
He was so impressed I didn’t have the heart to disillusion him by telling him the truth. Frank and I still have our days in London. Frank comes down from Cambridge and I travel from Dorset. We meet at his club around twelve, have a drink in the bar and then lunch with a good bottle of wine. After lunch we go down to the basement and get on with the main business of the day. We play snooker, usually quite badly and sometimes very badly. Conversation does take place but not on the rarefied plain my young friend would like to have imagined.
Last year he was back in touch and several further visits were on the agenda. By now though, his health was failing. He had spent many years as sole carer for his wife after she became unwell and it had worn him out, although his spirit remained indomitable. Then came the news that he had been given not long to live. I saw him at a very low ebb physically, and it was distressing. I was hugely fond of him. Then on a subsequent visit he would seem to have rallied.
There was more archival material to be dealt with and I asked if he wouldn’t prefer his Estate to deal with it, but one day he rang and said he wanted it done right away. Down I drove again, a couple of times, to gather it all up. “I don’t suppose,” he said, “there’d be any interest in all these files.” In addition to the scripts and posters and awards, surrounding us in his office, as though hiding in plain sight, was a large quantity of his correspondence in lever arch files, going right back to the beginning of his career. Of one of the awards he said, “Ah yes, that was for, erm, oh I don’t know, fostering Anglo-Irish relations or something like that.” So we now have all that too and I am optimistic that Delaware will be keen to add to and complete what they already have. I like to think that he was happy to know that his archive would be in safe hands.
Brian was born in Dublin, a prolific writer for stage, screen and television. His most well-known play is The Signalman’s Apprentice which was produced many times in fourteen countries. It ran in Paris for a year under the title Les Aiguilleurs. He was also an actor, before that a carpenter, but early on turned his attention fully to the art of writing.
He was not someone you would ever forget once met. A big personality, someone it would probably be unwise to cross, but always kind, polite, thoughtful and … funny. During one of my recent visits as he made his way slowly, painfully back down the stairs, he said “Right. It’s five o’clock and I need a fucking gin and tonic. Do you want one?” He also asked me if I fancied some of the morphine medication he was on, just out of mischief. The nurses who were paying daily visits by that stage (I met several of them and they were wonderfully caring and kind) did not approve but I brought him a bottle (of gin, not morphine) the next time in case he ran out. He talked candidly about what was coming, about final farewells he had already been through. It was heartbreaking but I felt honoured to be taken into his confidence in that way.
The last story he told me was about a lunch with Tim Pat Coogan, the Irish writer, journalist and broadcaster. At the next table was a group from England. Brian ventured that he thought Tim Pat’s book about Michael Collins was the best he had ever read. Tim Pat exploded, Brian told me. At the top of his voice he raged “How fucking dare you? You of all people should know that it is absolutely not ok for one Dublin writer to praise another in front of others. Don’t ever do it again.” As soon as the diners at the next table had left, Tim Pat said, in a normal voice, “I only did that for the English. Very nice of you to say so, thank you very much.”
Brian ran out of time to finish his autobiography but we have various drafts of the first seventy or so pages – I can assure you it’s a cracking read.
On my final visit, we both knew that it would be the last time we saw each other. He inscribed, at my request, copies of two of his plays to me, with great warmth and generosity and, actually, love.
I had told him of my grandmother’s advice to me when she had become very ill – don’t get old. “Ah,” he said, “that’s good advice, but I am glad to have lived.”
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