Introduction: Benedict Kiely and the Persona of the Irish WriterAuthor(s): Derek HandSource: Irish University Review, Vol. 38, No. 1, Special Issue: Benedict Kiely (Spring -Summer, 2008), pp. vii-xPublished by: Edinburgh University PressStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/40344271 .

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Derek Hand

Introduction: Benedict Kiely and the Persona of the Irish Writer

The friends that have it I do wrong When ever I remake a song

Should know what issue is at stake, It is myself that I remake (W.B. Yeats).1

What is clear from even a cursory reading of the essays gathered together in this collection is how difficult it is to disentangle the man Benedict Kiely from Benedict Kiely the writer. Through all of his work - to a lesser or greater extent - the competing forces of personality and the act of writing remain thoroughly unresolved. Perhaps, though, an idea of competition as a debilitating opposition is misplaced in the Irish context. Certainly too much Irish literary criticism has, in the past, reductively focused almost exclusively on personalities to the detriment of a true engagement with art as art. But, from reading the critical work on display here, it becomes clear that in our involvement with Benedict Kiely, we can come to comprehend how necessary an understanding of the personality of the Irish writer - the public performance of the Irish writer as artist - actually is to our full appreciation of the work.

Kiely's literary journey was a lengthy and eventful one. During a long career in writing, spanning over fifty years, he produced ten novels, four collections of short stories, six works of non-fiction (some scholarly, as well as work for a wider audience), two works of memoir, and countless pieces broadcast on RTE radio and television. His is a remarkably diverse collection of work that manifests clearly a progression from his earliest forays in the novel form to his final fictions and short stories.

The force of the personality on the writing can be discerned in a number of ways. From the present perspective, looking back over his career, it is possible to see how his work charts the cultural and economic developments of Ireland from the mid- twentieth century on. The basic realism of his first novels In a Harbour Green (1949) and Land Without Stars (1946) shows Kiely's desire to present his world as it was and his flair for doing so. This need to shine a somewhat critical light, though not an overly harsh one, on Irish institutions is continued in

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IRISH UNIVERSITY REVIEW

There was an Ancient House (1955) which also conforms to a gentle, unforced realism, with its story based on Kiely's own experience of a year spent in the Jesuit novitiate in Emo House, County Laois. Without the weight of hindsight or prejudice he draws for his readers a world of colour, or rather, within the walls of the 'ancient house', a world where the absence of colour is what marks it off from the world outside the demesne walls. The divide between a world of throbbing life outside and the enervated life within the house is a marked one. It is rejected in the end and the world of vibrant colour is embraced: This world was a multi-coloured arc. It was black and white, grey and white, blue and red'.2

The Cards of the Gambler (1953), demonstrates a desire to break with the constraints of straightforward realism. Here Kiely juxtaposes a modern, contemporary narrative with that of a folk-tale: one becoming a comment on the other. This novel, too, highlights clearly how his thematic concerns are rooted in the urban middle-class world out of which he came, a world often shunned by Irish writers. Indeed, it is clear from Kiely's work how central class actually is to the rhythms of everyday life, its subtle presence far more powerful than religion or politics. In Dogs Enjoy the Morning (1968), Kiely captures the energies unleashed in the rapidly changing Ireland of the 1960s when, it seemed, anything might be possible. Realism is gleefully abandoned, with Ireland becoming the site of the fantastic, a place of mad freedom and escape. Myth and legend are easily interchangeable with the 'realities' of life in the invented midlands town of Cosmona. Such formal free reign reflects a new-found confidence in Irish culture caught between modernity and tradition, with the mood being one of definite celebration. In his final novel, however, Nothing Happens in Carmincross (1985), that moment of celebration has been forever altered and the experimental combination of poetry, prose, myth, and legend takes on a nightmarish quality in an Ireland dehumanized by bombs and bullets.3 Throughout this period, his short stories also bore the traces of this unique developing style: mingling anecdote, autobiography, myth, and history, and in the end offering the reader a layered narrative utterly alive to the textures of Irish life.

The weight of personality, too, is to be found in relation to Kiely's engagement with landscape and place. In all of Benedict Kiely's writing the reality of his homeplace, of Omagh and its environs, looms large. It is the place of his childhood and though he did leave, it was the place to which he returned imaginatively again and again in his fiction (and indeed in his other autobiographical and journalistic acts of writing). It is a developing relationship through his writing: in his early novels such as Land Without Stars he can expose its faults, though he would ultimately come to accept them so that Omagh and County

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INTRODUCTION

Tyrone would remain for him, That first, best country . . . that ever is at home'.4 Like the poet Patrick Kavanagh, a literary hero for Kiely, the very act of naming places 'is the love-act and its pledge',5 a use of language and narrative that will recreate the world in words and thereby allow the writer to come into imaginative possession of that landscape making it her/his own. His criticism on a more obvious level is a manifestation of personality: in works such as Modern Irish Fiction: A Critique (1950) and Counties of Contention: A Study of the Origins and Implications of the Partition of Ireland (1945), Kiely imaginatively takes ownership of his cultural and political heritage.

While the above brief outline of Kiely's writing career demonstrates how the life of the author can impinge on the work and how that work will necessarily reflect the events and the world out of which it is written, the peculiar aspects of the Irishness of that personality need further consideration. I would argue that the intertwining of personality and the act of writing is the quintessential trait of the Irish fiction writer who can never fully distance herself/himself from the world being contemplated, can never fully be the Joycean author-god who 'remains within or behind or beyond or above his handiwork, invisible, refined out of existence, indifferent, paring his fingernails'.6 The presence of the author - and the realities out of which the author writes - gives Irish prose fiction its peculiar qualities. As John McGahern concluded: 'fiction always has to be believable. Life does not have to suffer such constraint'.7 The balance, then, between story and reality, between created fiction and fictionalized life, is sometimes too delicate to withstand any pressure at all.

The move toward the oral world in Kiely's writing is a manifestation of this phenomenon. The force of personality, a force that possesses all the contradictions, ambiguities, and frailties of the human person, sustains his striving for the vitality, and the immediacy, of the folk-tale or ballad - at once fresh but imbued also with timelessness. Kiely wants to be a traditional storyteller, a seanchai, but knows that in the act of storytelling the individual person - the teller - can be lost as the story enters into the public realm. But he knows, too, that even at that moment of public loss, the self can be saved because in Ireland there is no story of true interest or worth other than the story of the self. Thus, Kiely in his writing searches for a vision of himself that matches his desire. His art becomes increasingly performative in that quest as he writes and rewrites, creates and recreates, his image of himself as an artist central to Irish life: not marginalized from it, but attached passionately to it. This conception of the Irish personality - constantly in motion, constantly performing - unites all the areas of interest and themes in Kiely's work. His allusive style knits his writing to place: landscape is about story rather than property; and his personality

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IRISH UNIVERSITY REVIEW

situates the self in that landscape as an element in Ireland's layered and layering narrative. In one of his best short stories, 'Down Then by Deny7, Kiely manages self-consciously to present an image of an artist (himself really) actually in the act of creatively imagining and thereby transforming this place called Omagh. It is a story that at once recognizes that memory can be faulty, that the real can be drab, but -

importantly - can be utterly refashioned when remade into art. It is a story which is a testament to that performative act of personality, that moment of creation, when all is united round the artist's imagination.

There is an image that Benedict Kiely had of William Carleton - that poor scholar from the nineteenth century for whom he had such affection:

And it is easy to see [him] ... walking these narrow roads, learning a little about books, learning a lot about men and woman, his own immortal, imperishable people - leaving us a lot to learn from the story of his days.8

It is a picture we can apply to Kiely himself. For contained in that image is Benedict Kiely's conception of the Irish writer as integral to Irish culture, confident enough to be aware that all one has to do is write out of what you know - out of the pressures and the pleasures of lived experience, out of the places where you live. In other words, whatever access to knowledge, truth, or wisdom that art may possess, it can only come from 'telling the story of your days'.

NOTES 1. Peter Allt and Russell K. Alspach (editors), The Variorum Edition of the Poems ofW. B.

Yeats (London: Macmillan, 1989), p.778. 2 Benedict Kiely, There Was an Ancient House (Dublin: Wolfhound Press, 1998) p.240. 3 See Derek Hand, 'Something Happened: Benedict's Kiely's Nothing Happens in

Carmincross and the Breakdown of the Irish Novel', in Representing the Troubles, edited by Eibhear Walshe (Dublin: Four Courts Press, 2004).

4 Benedict Kiely, 'A Sense of Place,' in The Pleasures of Gaelic Poetry, edited by Sean Mac Reamoinn (Harmondsworth: Allen Lane, (Penguin Books, 1982), pp. 96-7.

5 Patrick Kavanagh, 'The Hospital', The Complete Poems (Newbridge: The Goldsmith Press, 1992), p.279.

6 James Joyce, A Portrait of the Artist as Young Man, edited with an Introduction and Notes by Seamus Deane (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1992), p.233.

7 John McGahern, 'Preface', Creatures of the Earth: New and Selected Short Stories (London: Faber and Faber, 2006), p.vii.

8 Benedict Kiely, Poor Scholar: A Study of the Work and Days of William Carleton (1794- 1869) (Dublin: The Talbot Press, 1947), p.8.

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