SHORT STORIES: Selected StoriesBy Benedict Kiely, edited by Ben Forkner Liberties Press, 328pp. €19.99
BEN FORKNER has written a warm, personal afterword to these 15 stories. He also offers a theory about the typical Kiely style of storytelling, countertelling, “creating a narrative capable of shifting from one voice, one story, to another, from the present to the past, and back again, all meeting to flow towards a single revelation of the human condition”.
It is true that the Kiely storytelling voice is heavy with digressions, asides, quotations from poems and songs, old sayings and assorted verbal bric-a-brac. This is the filter through which we hear the stories themselves, and it gives them their characteristic weight. It’s as if we are listening to the voice of a whole culture, the stories being mined in front of us out of a rich lode.
The two layered stories that Forkner mentions are Down Then By Derryand A Letter to Peachtree. There's no argument about the quality of the first, which is a masterly example of Kiely's art. It operates on at least three levels. An author, no longer young, is visiting his aged mother in his native town with his children. As he does so he travels back in memory to scenes from his youth. And he is haunted by the letters of a woman in the US who grew up in the same town. He hardly knows this woman, but she is a reader of his work, that strange, incomplete relationship experienced by writers. What holds these layers together is the genial, expansive mind behind the story. Like all of Kiely's work it brims with life but it also has its shadows, a story, finally, about growing up, growing old, growing older and facing death.
I've always had a problem with A Letter to Peachtree, precisely because I feel it is one story where the quotations are top-heavy (in this case mostly from Sir Samuel Ferguson). The intention is clear enough, to give the group of male pals in the story a mock-heroic status, but the effect is both confusing and overweight. There is also an awkwardness of tone. The principal voice in the story is that of a young American academic who finds himself caught up in the kind of Irish skite that used to engage Dublin's literati, a literary excuse to traipse around the pubs of rural Ireland. This voice, however, is not credibly American, and for once Kiely's brilliant ear for speech lets him down.
My own favourite of the Kiely jaunting stories is the wonderful, timeless A Journey to the Seven Streams.
Those were the days, and not so long ago, when cars were rare and every car, not just every make of car, had a personality of its own. In our own town, with a population of 5,000, not counting the soldiers in the barracks, there were only three cars for hire and one of them was the love child of the pioneer passion of Hookey Baxter.
Hookey ("two thirds of him made up of legs"), with his sidekick, Peter the messenger boy and engine greaser, is like something out of Toad of Toad Hall. These two are mythical guides to a land of happiness, which is to say a land of remembered childhood. Like many such journeys it is cut short because of the frailties of the motor car, in this case Hookey's backfiring contraption. This doesn't matter in the slightest, however, because the journey that is completed is both magical and perfect.
This is a family story of a mother and father and five children, including the author’s young alter ego, all bundled up on Hookey’s magic carpet. It is clear from the loving portrait of the father where the son has got his own love of music and storytelling. The place names of the journey cascade around the head of the child like the casting of a magic spell as the father weaves their way across the countryside and into a land that is both ordinary and fabulous. Ben Kiely once wrote about the way Michael McLaverty animates landscape in his short stories, “in intimate moments when the person and the landscape melt into one”. He could have been writing of any one of a number of his own stories but particularly of this one.
One of the values of a selection like this is that you’re reminded that Kiely wrote more than hilarious, rollicking tales. There is also such a benevolence about the Kiely personality that you forget the levels of grief and loss in the stories. This is particularly true of those stories that he wrote about the lonely genteel figures who live in but apart from the main community.
Old Arthur Broderick is a custodian of local folklore in the "ancient, tapestried room" of a former rectory. Robert St Blaise Macmahon is a pompous writer in his mansion with an unwanted corpse in a bed and a visiting garda straight out of Flann O'Brien. Pike Hunter is "a shy bachelor, reared, nourished and guarded all his life by a trinity of upper-middle-class aunts", who achieves, perhaps, half a life in his encounter with Madame Butterfly.
These are bookish gents whose lives are stunted, and, significantly, the stories in which they appear are tightly constructed. It simply shows that Ben Kiely could create the classic shape of the short story of a single effect when he needed to do so.
Thomas Kilroy is a playwright and novelist; he is currently writing a memoir
