Benedict Kiely (Ben to his friends and the public) is now Ireland's leading man of letters and is eighty years old this summer. "Man of letters" may have an ambiguous sound - it suggests the all-rounder who is fluent in many literary genres but outstanding in none of them. This would be rank injustice in his case, since he is a considerable novelist, quite apart from the impressive list of his non-fiction books. But then, the term was also applied to Sean O'Faolain, and quite reasonably, too, though O'Faolain was primarily a short-story writer. I sometimes suspect that a certain type of purist critic distrusts versatility in a writer - it appears to lack the essential Higher Seriousness. It would be much more accurate to say that it denotes the professional writer par excellence, uninhibited by narrow concepts of literary form and in love with the art of writing for its own sake.
An artfully relaxed, offbeat style has brought Kiely the occasional charge of garrulity. This is another tactical misjudgment, as is shown by the present book, which is cast in his usual conversational and almost casual tone, yet evokes an entire epoch in fewer than 200 pages. That tone is familiar to radio listeners from his many radio talks, which use the same artful indirectness yet convey, not only "mood" and personal reminiscence, but often a quite surprising amount of fact and information.
His milieu, of course, was essentially the Ireland of the Forties and Fifties, and literary Dublin in particular. The lad from Omagh, and former Jesuit novice, seemed quite at home there as Northern-born writers not always are. For most of the Forties I was a junior schoolboy, but I remember the Fifties reasonably well and knew - though slightly, for the most part - many of the personalities whom Kiely recalls. R.M. (Bertie) Smyllie was an inescapable figure then, especially if you worked under him in The Irish Times, which I did as a 19-year-old. The literary pubs were cultural centres and meeting places in Dublin, fulfilling many of the functions which in London are reserved for the clubs. Contrary to what is often said or suggested today, they were not places of orgiastic drunkenness. Most of the writers and journalists then drank only beer; whiskey-drinking was not uncommon, but it was not the average tipple. The habitual drunk soon found himself shunned, because he interfered with good conversation, which is what most writers went to pubs for. Kiely chronicles the select taverns: the Palace Bar (still there, mercifully), the vanished Pearl Bar (long closed and recently demolished), the White Horse on the quays, McDaids.
The White Horse, of course, was the Irish Press pub, just as the Pearl and the Palace were Irish Times ones, and one of its key figures was M.J. MacManus, an excellent literary editor and man of letters but now, quite unfairly, almost forgotten. Kiely, in turn, was to distinguish himself in MacManus's old post as literary editor on Burgh Quay. However, the book is not about pubs, even if they are unavoidable in any literary chronicle of the period. Often, indeed, it is a summoning up of ghosts, whom he makes talk as Ulysses did in his descent into the underworld. Kiely's back-and-forth, deliberately episodic, impressionistic style is against any linear kind of narrative - he may start with C or D and leap back to A, or even leave you guessing about the link-bits. That, in essence, is his modus operandi. Though the book is relatively short, it has no fewer than 25 chapters - which are really self-sufficient vignettes, evocations of a world which is both recent and remote.
The personalities crowd in: Patrick Kavanagh, Brendan Behan, Donagh MacDonagh, Flann O'Brien, Francis MacManus, Father Senan of the Capuchin Annual, sculptor and author Seamus Murphy, etc. There are also actors, singers, balladeers, broadcasters, folk fiddlers (Kiely has a lifelong involvement in folk music and folklore), eminent literary journalists such as the late Sean White and John Ryan, and simply "characters" of an epoch which was almost too rich in them. The milieu of the great literary magazines is described, and so is the milieu of Radio Eireann in its old Henry Street days. Kiely tells good (and unfamiliar) anecdotes about Behan, of whom he seems consistently to have seen the good side - Behan the brawler was better avoided. He recalls his early days in UCD when it was still entrenched in Earlsfort Terrace, with Alexandra College directly opposite (the massive Belfield campus of later years would have seemed a futurist fantasy). Celebrities of an older generation also appear, centre- or backstage, including the great tenor John McCormack, who was probably the most famous Irishman living, not excepting de Valera.
BEN was at home from the start, not only in literary journalism - which was then at a high level - but in journalism per se. In those days, most Irish writers were journalists either part-time or full-time, both by inclination and financial necessity - the era of the writer-academic had not arrived. Just how Kiely got his novels and short stories written in the midst of all this is not stated, or even hinted at, though his professional discipline is famous among his friends and fellow-writers.
There is, in fact, remarkably little about his literary aims and projects, or even his personal life; for the most part he is writing about his friends and colleagues and re-creating the talk, stir, spirit and ambience of an era which from many aspects has been both underrated and over-mythologised. The touch is light, the scene-painting is unobtrusive but sure-handed, and the tone affectionate but not schmaltzy.
This book is not only vintage Kiely, it should quickly prove itself to be an indispensable depiction of a literary and cultural epoch which we are now beginning to rediscover and reassess. The Sixties - a radically different interlude with radically different values and attitudes - have tended to come between us and it.
Brian Fallon is an author and critic