"The voice came out like a bell, defying and belying time" - The Weavers at the Mill
The summer when I was sixteen was a hot, involved confusion: the 1981 hunger-strikes, school exams, riots in Dublin, teenage longings, a blaze of internal and external noise. It was the sort of summer when anything could have happened, and I was at the sort of age when one hammers together the bits and pieces of a public and private self. In literary terms I was reading Kerouac, Ginsberg, Burroughs, Ferlinghetti, anybody at all who would get me away from Ireland. And then, towards the end of August, my father handed me a story called "A Ball of Malt and Madame Butterfly".
The idea that it was an Irish story written and set some time in the 1960s didn't exactly endear it to me. We were reading too many such stories in school - they seemed full of the sorrow of the other stories happening around me. To me they held themselves in a peculiar manner, saturated in tradition, held in a sort of historical aspic. Besides, I had no idea what a ball of malt was. And yet it was intriguing that there was a "Madame" in the title and, when I ventured along, the fact that she was a half-Japanese prostitute with a Dublin accent further enticed me. At the time I was fiercely protecting a narrow corner of my mind that housed the Welsh poet, Dylan Thomas. I knew, even then, that language, of all the mediums we use, is the most volatile and unyielding, and therefore the most difficult to make memorable. To me, Thomas caught and sang the sun in flight. But suddenly this Ben Kiely story - which I was reluctantly moving into - began to do the same thing. It jumped, it skipped, it sang. It read itself aloud to me. I developed an emotional attachment to the story, which has shifted and changed its nature over the years. There are things I increasingly recognise in the story - its series of allusions, its fractured digressive structure, the late appearance of the narrator, the weird angles at which the images chose to touch each other, the sheer depth and radical playfulness - and yet I cannot forget that first moment of thrill, recognition and silence which I recognise now as a form of grace.
And I have been aware since then that all the great writers create a sort of silence around themselves, a deep and necessary intimacy that's as close to love as we might get outside the art of love itself.
Four years later I visited Kiely at his home in Donnybrook, having read all his work. It was a pilgrimage. Late morning, he opened the door of his house in his pyjamas and dressing gown. His hair was askew. There was ink on his hands. He had been writing since dawn. He invited me in and we sat down together in his living room. I thought to myself: Come song, give me eloquence, this shall not last forever. He asked me if I would like a drink. I finally replied that I wouldn't mind a ball of malt.
"He could still sing. His voice never grew old." - A Ball of Malt and Madame Butterfly
A great story puts itself in a position of genuine risk. It must stand on its own and lay itself open. Praise or criticism often becomes just a rag of language dragging itself along behind. To try and loft oneself behind the lines of a work of literature is sometimes to be removed from the act, art and joy of having read it.
And so I am immediately envious of those who are coming to Kiely for the first time. The discovery of a master, of a writer of the first magnitude, is of extreme importance. For a reader of such extraordinary writing there is a sort of mitosis in operation - one finds one's voice through the voices of others. Sometimes the process of mitosis is so strong that the writer becomes a national voice and, on very rare occasions, an international one.
Ben Kiely is one such writer. And yet even a compliment can sometimes dig a man into a ditch.
There is a sense these days that Ben Kiely is the Grey Eminence of Irish literature. Even those people who don't read him are aware that they should, or at least they should have - some vague years ago, in the past, perhaps. But being a Grey Eminence surely isn't all it's cracked up to be. (Robert Frost, for one, didn't benefit entirely when the American academy temporarily labelled him such, becoming a certain grey writer, with a certain grey look, in a certain grey landscape).
The danger is that it can freeze a writer in the public imagination. He or she becomes a kindly parental figure, benevolent, cobwebbed, a writer who was old even when young, a creature of a less offensive era. The innovations are seen as quaint and in effect the writing is approached as a sort of housebroken fait accompli. Of course, in most cases (and certainly in Ben Kiely's) the desire behind the compliment is celebratory and truly genuine in its affection - in fact, it mistreats a writer in the nicest possible way. But it can also ghettoise him or her, so that even now, at the beginning of this new century, Kiely is considered by some to be the genial old man in Donnybrook who writes discursive stories about peasants, emigrants, farmboys and other sundry embarrassments. To some, there is a sense that Kiely's writing operates in an Ireland about which we have already developed a nostalgia, or even a shame - the country having undergone seismic shifts in substance and character over the last quarter of a century - and that he is simply an old-fashioned seancha∅ allowing notes to vibrate into a forgotten music.
This idea of Kiely as a writer who somehow belongs elsewhere in time and even in the literary canon, is of course, horseshit. But horseshit is sometimes fragrant and it helps to grow the roses. In turn the roses themselves are the ones who believe they grew the garden.
The truth is there is a whole generation of writers/readers/critics (not only in Ireland but internationally) who have not yet acknowledged the deep enduring debts they owe to Kiely. The manner in which Ben Kiely has been treated should be a point of anger to anyone concerned with contemporary Irish literature, since the truth is that as much as any other writer in the past 50 years he has made the past durable and the present possible.
Even with important recognition - bright flares have been sent up by Guy Davenport, William Kennedy, Tom Flanagan, Heinrich Boll and Anthony Burgess - a perverse monism sometimes remains, insisting that Kiely can be read if you're white, Irish and over 50. The truth is, of course, that Kiely should be read in Brixton, Mississippi, Neilstown, Johannesburg and points in between. By all and sundry. And by those who follow them.
"Your origins are all around you." - The Dogs in the Great Glen
Here are the facts, if there are such things: Ben Kiely was born in Dromore, near Omagh, Co Tyrone, in 1919. When he graduated from school he came face to face with the Great Depression. After entering the novitiate he was delivered, by a serious spinal ailment, out of the hands of the Jesuits and into Dublin and other derelict pleasures. He became a celebrated journalist with the Irish Press, all the while writing fiction and non-fiction. Three of his books were crippled for a while by the Irish Censorship Board. His broadcasting endeavours were much-loved, and his teaching and travels took him Stateside.
Ten novels, four volumes of stories, two memoirs and six volumes of criticism later he was awarded the position of Sao∅ in Aosdana, one of Ireland's highest literary honours. He is presently at work on a novel and further instalments of his memoirs.
But facts are mercenary bastards, and they can never quite fill the spaces between themselves. That, instead, is where the stories lie.
"Water may know more than we think. And grass. And old rocks." - Proxopera
While Kiely is of course an Irish writer (note for example that, unlike most Northern writers, he has not been appropriated by British critics) it is not necessary to limit his stories to specific borders.
His concerns are large, manifold, provocative - among his themes are the inability to return home, the place or non-place of the story-teller, the successes and failures of desire, and the quandaries of those who are cursed to wander. But perhaps more than anything Kiely's writing is about the sundry sorrows of violence.
Much has been written about Kiely's ability to salve the wounds - the sonorous notes, the hypnotic music, the colossal jokes that are laced through his texts, the sense of peace that comes with the landscape, the rivers, the held echoes from the valleys.
Indeed there is a gentleness to the stories, often aided by the remove of the narrator from the actual story, soothing it through a series of digressions and kinetic asides that spin away into other worlds.
But the ability of an artist to salve is nothing if he or she is not first prepared to wound. This, to many writers, is a moral predicament almost too difficult to bear the weight of, but there is a necessity within Kiely to point out the horrors in order to reclaim the beauties, a sort of literary Truth and Reconciliation Commission. More than any one thing, Ben Kiely has been sickened by the violence of Ireland, North and South, but he still recognises the emotions behind the sorrow as the disfigured force that has often driven the green fuse through the flower. He has had his hands in the dark pockets of a divided country since his earliest fiction. In the words of John Montague, the Northern poet, he has seen "substantial things hustled into oblivion".
Kiely's stories make no claim on what is right or wrong. He is indeed a political writer - it is, for him, an unavoidable result of having a voice - but he is never a polemicist. His politics are practical and human and hearbreaking. He recognises a country ripped apart by sectarian horrors.
In "The Night We Rode with Sarsfield" the links between the two communities are implied by two houses, divided by plaster and brickwork, yet arched together by a single roof of thatch. Flammable, of course. Kiely is there when the match is struck, contemplating its violence, accidental or not.
What consistently sets his outrage apart, and makes it real, is Kiely's deep, enduring and moving adoration for the landscape and the people of his country. They are good people. They are funny. They laugh. They tell stories. They joke. They fall in and out of love. And yet occasionally they are left at an age where they will never grow any older.
It is a terrible irony that life sometimes catches up with fiction. When on August 15th, 1998 - one of the saddest days in recent Irish history - a bomb ripped through his hometown of Omagh, claiming 29 lives, it just so happened that it was Kiely's 79th birthday. Amazingly, the acute pain had been circled and pierced by Kiely before. His novella, Proxopera, is undoubtedly one of the greatest anti-war books ever written - in it a retired schoolteacher, Binchey, is forced to run a proxy operation (with a bomb in the boot of his car) into his local town. The town is unnamed, but it is undoubtedly Omagh. The schoolteacher makes a heroic choice and the bomb doesn't claim any lives, although it claims innocence and instils a moral terror.
The author and critic, Anthony Burgess, wrote that Proxopera is "nearly flawless as a piece of literature". It is also flawless as a work of the heart. Kiely is unafraid of the big emotion and yet he stands light years away from any sense of sentimentality. In Proxopera-Kiely is talking way beyond geography when he says that "to have your own stream on your own lawn is the height of everything".
"You don't go to Lurgan, boy, you find yourself there when you lose the road going somewhere else." - There are Meadows in Lanark
Today Kiely's generosity, his humour, his presence, his escapades and his whole persona are all legendary in the circles in which he has moved. The stories about him are almost as numerous as the stories told by him. I doubt that there is anybody who has met him who has not emerged both charged and changed. Making my first foray into his fiction certainly changed my life and I am thankful for the grace of both the man and his fiction.
I hope and presume that his Collected Stories will have the same effect on countless others - that its innovation, its subversiveness, its goodness will live on for readers everywhere.
In many ways Kiely has helped to focus our eyes to the dark. He speaks to us as he has always spoken to us - with terrible significance and strength. And yet these are my words, not his, and, unfortunately, none like his. Let us hear him.
(Extracted and abridged from Colum McCann's introduction to Ben Kiely's Collected Stories which will be published on June 7th by Methuen, £19.99 in UK.)
Comum McCann's most recent book is Everything in this Country Must