Even to list the titles of the collections brings the flavour of Benedict Kiely's work to mind: A Journey to the Seven Streams (1963), A Ball of Malt and Madame Butterfly (1973), A Cow in the House (1978), and A Letter to Peachtree (1987), almost fifty stories, rounded off in this Collected Edition with the novella Proxopera (1977).
The hallmark of Kiely's stories is a copiousness of language, a variety of incident and an inclusive vision of humanity. In 'The White Wild Bronco' the cowboy, Carson, fills his life and regales his acquaintances with stories of exploits in the wild west. The story is almost about nothing, except that what we imagine, the fictions we create, may be the best reality. Kiely's stories have the freedom of folk tales. In 'The White Wild Bronco' characters float free of social reality, airborne, wordborne, taking us with them for the vivid period of the telling.
Kiely's characters often travel back in time. In 'The Dogs in the Great Glen' an American seeks his roots. All he has to go on is the name of a glen, somewhere in Kerry, and his grandfather's stories that may or may not be true. He retells them as he and the narrator climb the mountain and descend towards the glen. Such a journey could end in disappointment but in a marvellously celebratory conclusion he discovers his grandfather's brother.
The narrating father in 'A Journey to the Seven Streams' loves places and the stories that live in places. It is typical of one kind of Kiely story, a spate of description, conversation, one-liners, memories, characterisation, a variety of voices and perceptions all held together by the central motif of the return.
But as Thomas Wolfe reminded us You Can't Go Home Again. 'A Room in Linden' tells of death in the midst of life. The eye that Kiely turns on Robert St. Blaise Macmahon in 'Maiden's Leap' is critical. 'Wild Rover No More' may be packed with memorable figures, each forming a background to the central theme of eccentricity - misfits, half wits, half-saints - all rubbing shoulders, but behind Hannah the Saint's ravings is the memory of a wild rover who won her heart and left her with a simple child.
Kiely's loveable rogues have a metaphorical purpose. These middle-aged men who left home and wandered, drunkards, singers, raconteurs, embody his sense of humanity. This, he says, is the way we are - confused, comical, complicated, sometimes happy, often sad, aware of failings, seeking forgetfulness in drink and song, in love and romance, and most of all in the stories we hear and tell.
Life itself, he tells us, "is one long process of loss and attrition until life itself is also lost or worn away". Stories hold off that process of erosion; the bustle of life disguises the imminence of death. Songs, recitations, drink, laughter, talk, hide loneliness.
The issue pours out clearly in 'Near Banbridge Town' and is at the heart of Proxopera in which a man is compelled to drive with a bomb to the town he loves so well.
Maurice Harmon is a poet and academic