Benedict Kiely: A great Irish writer remembered

Readers of a certain generation will well remember, as I do, the voice of Benedict Kiely from his many talks on Sunday Miscellany on RTÉ radio. The pain of entering the world of a Sunday morning was eased and enabled by the mellifluous northern tones of Ben Kiely as he unfolded a rambling tale with wit and charm –a welcome temporary relief from the news and brutal headlines about the North that started every other day of the week.

What always amazed me was how, despite the fact that Kiely’s stories never went in a straight line but meandered into numerous literary and historical byways, they always came to a strong and satisfying conclusion that made sense of everything that had gone before. (His present-day successor, I would say, is Michael Harding.)

The man and the voice are no longer with us. But Ben Kiely’s centenary in 2019 gives us the opportunity to hear that distinctive voice again in these two publications of his best short stories and a volume of commemorative essays, edited by George O’Brien. O’Brien’s name as editor on the volume is a guarantee that the essays will all be distinctive, interesting and well-written. And so it proves.

I have long felt that Kiely’s greatest achievement is in the area of the short story, where it seemed to me the pressure of the form encouraged the writer (in the words of his beloved Keats) to curb his natural magnanimity and load every rift with ore.

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Patricia Craig puts it very well in her essay: Kiely’s method “enables him to wander freely and embellish extensively. At the same time, a high degree of control and high pressure are maintained throughout his narratives.” Kiely’s stories need their fluidity; his natural model is the many rivers and streams that flow through his work. Time, in particular, is fluid, moving back and forth between the present and the past.

Kiely’s stories are never mere exercises in nostalgia; when he says late in the story, Down Then by Derry, that the past was like Eden, the narrator rejects it as “too maudlin”, recognising that it has been fuelled by the drink and a visit to his father’s grave. The natural landscape which is lovingly evoked cannot long escape the inevitable imprint of Irish history.

The narrator of A Journey to the Seven Streams passes by the Glen of Aherlow, where he recalls working for “His Majesty’s Ordnance Survey” in an attempt to “chain” the glen, and Cratlow Wood, “where the fourth Earl of Leitrim was assassinated”.

The place that the returned Irish-American sets out to find in The Dogs in the Great Glen is not recorded on any map: “All I remember is a name out of my dead father’s memories: the great glen of Kanareen.” The process of finding it, needless to say, is anything but straightforward; but when the goal is reached it seems inevitable.

Tyrone home

Most of the stories are set in Omagh, Co Tyrone, his home place, where Kiely was born and reared. Martina Devlin shares a great deal with him; both come from Omagh, both novelists and short-story writers with careers as journalists in Dublin newspapers.

In her fine essay, Devlin recalls her father and Kiely passing each other in the town, nodding and speaking each other’s first name before passing on; the encounter, she says, was “as courteous and stately as a gavotte”. But Devlin was younger and a woman.

She approached him primarily as a writer and gives a wonderful account of how she took down one of his books from the shelves at home: “I consulted one of Kiely’s books and proceeded to write [in her notebook] Chapter One, Chapter Two and so on, adding The End with a flourish on the final page. This, before a word of the story was composed.”

The example of Kiely points Devlin to her own future as a writer and shows how the present generation will engage with his work, not as the genial man of letters on Sunday Miscellany but as the exemplary, inspiring writer. On more than one occasion in reading these stories and essays, I thought of Anna Burns and her extraordinary Booker-winning novel, Milkman, particularly when Derek Hand points out that, in Kiely’s novel The Cards of the Gambler, “the author deliberately refuses to name the city of Dublin at the outset, preferring instead to render the urban and suburban streets anonymously”.

International acclaim

Another of that younger generation of writers, Colum McCann, has helped to keep Ben Kiely’s name in the public eye. McCann, appropriately, supplies the last word. He shows how the public perception of Kiely as a traditional, reassuring presence does no favours to a writer who was genuinely international. Several of the essayists point to the writer’s darker side, very much at variance with the public persona.

None does it with more precision and insight than Thomas Kilroy in his essay, A Dark Writer: The Other Side of Benedict Kiely. Late in his career, as the Troubles exploded in his beloved North, Kiely returned to the longer forms of fiction, first with the novella Proxopera in 1977 and then the novel, Nothing Happens in Carmincross, in 1985. His northern pastoral had been poisoned at the source; and Ben Kiely responded with fury.

George O’Brien points in his introduction to “the mixture of courage and rage that fuels” these works and Thomas Kilroy amplifies this in his essay: “Both are about the moral responsibility of the bomb and the point at which political activism passes from personal control into a mindless atrocity.”

My own memory of the man and writer is when he came to read to myself and fellow students of English in Trinity in 1973. The story he read that night, A Room in Linden, was one of his best (it is included in Anthony Glavin’s selection) and had just appeared in the New Yorker (as did all but one of the 12 Glavin selects). Ben pointed this out in his opening comments; but went on to remark that the New Yorker’s editors had taken out any words in a Northern Irish idiom he had included in the tale. This, he rumbled, as he started to read, is the authentic version.

As I reread A Room in Linden after all these years, I looked out for the dialect words. Always the fastidious writer, Ben Kiely was sparing in their use; but they were there, studded like gems through the prose: “from whichever airt the wind does blow it always blows cold”; “a little nose like a beak peeking out from under the nun’s pucog”; “he’s a carnaptious old bastard”. These very welcome reissues of the short stories and volume of essays enable us to remember a great Irish writer in his centenary year in the best possible way: by (re)reading him.

The Best of Benedict Kiely: A Selection of Stories, with an Afterword by Anthony Glavin

New Island Books, 263pp., €14.95/£12.99 (hardback)

In A Harbour Green: Celebrating Benedict Kiely, edited by George O’Brien

Irish Academic Press, 187pp., €19.95/£18.99 (hardback)

Benedict Kiely, Down Then by Derry

Turnpike Books, 120 pp (paperback)