Benedict Kiely:Novelist, short-story writer, critic, journalist, broadcaster, seanchaí - Benedict Kiely who died yesterday aged 87 was a dominant presence on the Irish scene for many decades. His personality, his voice and his writing were seamless - behind every sentence he wrote his rich Tyrone voice could be heard sampling and savouring every word.
It would be wrong to regard him as an instinctive writer - there was a great deal of art and craft in his most apparently effortless phrases - but he was perhaps the last major Irish writer in a certain oral story-telling tradition which could validly be seen as going all the way back to an early love of his, William Carleton.
He was born on August 15th, 1919, the youngest in a family of six, outside Dromore in Co Tyrone, but the family moved to Omagh when he was a year old. His father, Thomas, was a former British soldier who had served with the Leinster Regiment in the Boer War. By the time of Kiely's childhood, he worked as a "chain man" - a survey measurer - for the Ordnance Survey.
His mother, Sara Alice Gormley, shared the same surname as that of Flann O'Brien's mother, also from the Dromore area, and they were distantly related.
He was educated by the Christian Brothers in Omagh, of whom he seemed to have had nothing but good memories, and after a brief spell as a post office employee entered the Jesuit novitiate in Emo, Co Laois, in 1938.
His time there did not last long: a recurrent back injury brought him for all of 18 months to Cappagh Orthopaedic Hospital where, he later humorously remarked, the effect on him of the proximity of a large number of nurses put paid to what was already a shaky vocation.
He entered University College Dublin, emerging with a BA degree in 1943. He had borrowed the money from his brother to finance his studies. Almost immediately, writing became Kiely's obsession and livelihood, first as journalist and soon after as critic, novelist and short-story writer.
He soon became absorbed by journalism, working first as a freelance writer, then joining the staff of the Irish Independent and in 1951 becoming literary editor of the Irish Press.
His first prose works appeared in the mid-1940s - his first novel being Land Without Stars (1946). Its subject was Irish religious and political divisions, an issue he had also dealt with in more polemical mode in his first published book, Counties of Contention (1946).
In 1944 he married Maureen O'Connell and they had four children, Mary, Anne, John and Emer. In 1947 he published his finest non-fiction work, Poor Scholar, his biography of his fellow Tyrone man, William Carleton.
His output throughout the 1950s and 1960s was prolific, including the novels Call for a Miracle (1950), Honey Seems Bitter (1952), The Cards of the Gambler (1953), There Was an Ancient House (1955); the short-story collection A Journey to the Seven Streams (1963); and the critical study Modern Irish Fiction (1950).
Naturally, and ludicrously, he suffered the common fate of Irish writers of his time, that of having his novels banned. Three, In a Harbour Green, Honey Seems Bitter and There Was an Ancient House, earned the disapproval of the censorship board. It was characteristic of Kiely that he was completely undeterred by this experience.
Indeed, while understandably annoyed, he was not even bitter.
Moreover, contrary to the experience of some writers, his journalistic career did not really suffer - a tribute, perhaps, to the climate of journalism at the time.
Kiely continued as a full-time journalist until 1964. In addition to his work as Irish Press literary editor, he wrote an innovative column with the late Seán White under the joint pseudonym of Patrick Lagan, which involved roving reports from throughout the island, usually based on the discovery of colourful local characters.
In 1964, Kiely took a step which only a couple of Irish writers before him - O'Connor and Ó Faoláin - but many who succeeded him also embarked on: he became writer in residence and visiting lecturer in colleges in the United States.
This entailed a break with journalism as a full-time career, but it brought Kiely to the attention of a wider audience.
He remained in the US for four years and apparently enjoyed his time there, relishing the attention and distinctiveness that his particular brand of Irishness brought him.
On his return to Ireland in 1968, Kiely settled down in Donnybrook to becoming a full-time writer, lecturer and broadcaster. He lectured at UCD for a time, but did not allow that or anything else to distract him from his main activity of creative writing. The novels kept coming, Dogs Enjoy the Morning appearing in 1968.
The development of the Northern Ireland Troubles had a particular poignancy for Kiely. While his view of his native the North was never idyllic, he was neither temperamentally nor intellectually attuned to the passions and savagery that had surfaced.
The mild nationalism that had characterised his first book was absolutely as far as he would go down the republican road - and even that he was later partially to disown.
Kiely's refusal to allow his origins and experience to lead him down the path of bigotry and hatred was one of the brighter illuminations of a dark time. In many ways it paralleled his response to his banning.
His response to what happened was a novelist's one, focusing on the effects of external events on individual lives. These issues are explored in two novels, Proxopera (1976) and Nothing Happens in Carmincross (1985).
The first concerns the trauma of a man who has to drive a "proxy bomb" for the IRA. A highly effective novel, the attempt to adapt it as a stage play proved unfortunate.
The second, one of Kiely's finest works, juxtaposes highly effectively the Ireland that Kiely loved, the Ireland of folklore, storytelling, gossip and rambling, with the inexplicable Ireland of death and destruction to which it had been reduced.
While continuing to write, Kiely had become known to an even wider public through his contributions to the long-running Sunday Miscellany radio programme, where his gentle, humorous style was given full scope. He was much honoured in his later years: perhaps the distinction that mattered most to him was being made a saoí of Aosdána in 1996. He received an honorary doctorate from the National University of Ireland in 1982. He wrote several volumes of memoirs which dealt principally with the Dublin of the late 1940s and the 1950s.
Naturally his contemporaries, Patrick Kavanagh, Brian O'Nolan and the somewhat younger Brendan Behan featured heavily.
But Kiely himself was a very different figure from these brilliant writers. He completely lacked their self-destructive urge; similarly, as a writer, he was highly traditional, not at all given to literary and linguistic pyrotechnics. So far was he from embracing new technology, he did not even type: all his works were written in flowing longhand.
It may well be that some of his early work, such as The Cards of the Gambler, a highly original and memorable blend of contemporary fiction and timeless folk tale, There Was an Ancient House, about his time in the Jesuit novitiate, and the eerie short-story, Dogs in the Great Glen, will be seen as his most lasting achievement.
There can be no doubt that some of the later work was marred by a tendency to ramble and digress. His well-known remark, "Everything in Ireland reminds me of something else," has its dangers as well as its benefits.
As well as his substantial achievement as a writer, there will remain for a very large number of people the memory of a gentle, unhating person whose integrity and honesty shone like a good deed in a naughty world.
He is survived by his second wife, Frances.
Benedict Kiely: born August 15th, 1919; died February 9th, 2007