Irish University Review Special Issue: Benedict Kiely Edited by Anne Fogarty and Derek Hand Spring/Summer 2008. Vol 38, No 1 178pp. €12ON THE COVER of this special issue of the Irish University Review, deicated to Benedict Kiely and ably edited by Anne Fogarty and Derek Hand, is a picture of the man himself - the silvering auburn hair, hooded blue eyes - smiling his "ben"evolent smile.
But is it benevolence, or someone used to concealing his thoughts behind a mask of good will, the direct opposite of his cantankerous mentor, William Carleton? After all, not only did Kiely live behind what I call the Green Curtain, a land where censorship silenced the arts, he himself was censored, and more than once. How could he not rage, behind his famous avuncular demeanour?
The essays here will help us towards an answer, or at least start the argument. Gerald Dawe, for instance, analyses, movingly if perhaps too briefly, the connection between Kiely's Counties of Contention (1945), a study of Partition, and his vision of violence in Proxopera (1977), a 20th-century Wild Goose Lodge. Dawe admires the "spite-less realism (of) Kiely's political vision" and describes Counties of Contention as "one of the most articulate, honest, clear-headed, and poignant explorations by an Irish writer of an inclusive cultural nationalism".
Whereas, in his essay 'Ben Kiely's Criticism in the Nineteen Forties', Eamonn Hughes sees the author of Counties of Contention as "an old-fashioned, even an unsophisticated nationalist". He also describes Kiely's critical technique as "criticism as ventriloquism" since his "allusive style borrows and paraphrases". But he does acknowledge how Kiely strategically links the banned writers of Ireland with famous foreign ones, and praises the "irrepressible joviality of his writing".
In a lengthier essay, John Wilson Foster also discusses Modern Irish Fiction (1950), that generous little survey which has never been reprinted. In his own quiet way, Ben did not wish to give offence, which makes his chronicle more descriptive than critical. Sean O'Faolain was exasperated by Kiely's generosity, saying in a testy review that surely some writers were better than others. But Ben was bringing attention to work that had been either out of print or banned for years: in a censor-ridden country, where books were almost anathema, he did not wish to let the side down. In his general tendency, Ben was determined to be decent.
Thomas O'Grady writes on 'The Early Novels of Benedict Kiely', including In a Harbour Green, his first novel to be clouted by the censor's hammer. He deploys an engaging triplet of terms to discuss Kiely's vivid sense of place: Gaston Bachelard's notion of "topophilia", Pat Sheeran's reference to "topomania" and John Wilson Foster's "topophobia". How Ben would have enjoyed learning that he was a topophiliac, instead of a pornographer!
However, O'Grady feels "At 762 pages . . . the weight and the heft of The Collected Stories of Benedict Kiely virtually guarantee that Kiely will be best remembered as a writer of short fiction". As does Brian Donnelly, who speaks of Kiely's "fascination with the lives of ordinary people who, in Kiely's telling, were always extraordinary . . . His instinct is for comedy and his mode is typically lyric and celebratory", perhaps a more positive view of the Irish character than Joyce's? And indeed, in the introduction to his Penguin Book of Irish Short Stories, Kiely refers to "the longer Irish tale tradition" in which he seems to inscribe himself as a seanchaí.
Elke D'Hocker disapproves of all of this verbal charm, declaring in her essay on 'Narrative Strategies in Benedict Kiely's Short Stories' that his "monologues tend to break up the flow of the story and they are too contrived to be really convincing". Elsewhere she spanks Ben's ghost for authorial intrusion at the end of Bluebell Meadow, finding "this moralizing ending entirely unnecessary". And wonders "whether, in the final short story of his Collected Stories, Kiely is not also questioning his own writing and narrative methods". If her assertion that Kiely was experiencing an increasing "disenchantment with the kind of short story he has been practising in the past", no better example of a new, more experimental approach to fiction could be found than Nothing Happens in Carmincross, his last novel.
Nothing Happens in Carmincross (1985) is an extraordinary book, unclassifiable, a kind of rural Finnegans Wake, full of quotations and songs. Ben, with his fidus achates Sean White, had travelled the length and breadth of Ireland as Patrick Lagan. And now, through the monologue of a mellow, meandering Irish historian, Kiely delivers a diatribe against violence: " . . . you move among monsters. You love meditating on them . . . Is history nothing but horror?"
In the opening chapter, the historian flies home across the Atlantic beside a man with no legs, an extraordinary scene combining the grotesque with the growing ordinariness of such disabilities. And by the time the novel ends, quite a few people, including the historian's favourite, about-to-be-married niece, have lost their legs and often their heads as well. For Elmer Kennedy-Andrews, Nothing Happens is "a poetic achievement that takes [Kiely] far beyond the idea of modern Irish fiction . . ." which should be seen in terms of the post-modern, since "it is no longer possible to speak innocently".
Éilís Ní Dhuibhne, a writer herself, deals with the Kiely papers in the National Library, in an essay wittily entitled 'A Journey to the Seven Boxes' (how pleasant it is to learn of Irish archives housed in Ireland, instead of North America). She makes a fascinating comparison between the manuscript of a short story, swiftly written and revised, and the gargantuan effort put into Nothing Happens for well over a decade, as Ben sought to reconstruct both himself and Ireland.
A younger novelist, Colum McCann, believes that "Kiely was one of the very few prose writers to go to the actual pulse of the wound in relation to the Troubles" and praises the "resonant, hypnotic chant" of his prose. And another writer, Val Mulkerns, makes a pilgrimage to the Omagh scene of Proxopera, and to where Ben now lies, in a cemetery along the Dublin Road, ironically the lifeline of his career. It is a cemetery open to both communities, which Ben wanted. She gets the date of the Omagh bomb wrong by a year, though it was indeed August 15th, which, astonishingly, is Ben's birthday. It is also the Feast of the Assumption, and used to be a favourite Marching Day of the Ancient Order of Hibernians, those now nearly forgotten, old-fashioned Ulster Catholic Nationalists. What would Carl Jung (who believed in synchronicity) or James Joyce (who believed in coincidence) have made of that?
• John Montague is a poet. His most recent book is the memoir The Pear is Ripe. A Ball of Fire, his collected short stories, is due soon from Liberties Press