Madam, - Despite Benedict Kiely's long and productive life, I was saddened to hear of his passing. It is hard to believe that his uniquely resonant voice, by which complete strangers instantly recognised him as he travelled the length and breadth of Ireland, has been stopped. It is consoling that the marvellous stories, novels, memoirs and criticism will live on, but it is the sheer physical presence, of body, mind and memory, that will be missed by those who knew him. The anecdotes, recitations, aphorisms and, always at the heels of the hunt, the songs! "Did you ever hear. . .? "
In life there are only a few people whose company makes you sure that you are in an important place in the world at that moment, and Ben Kiely was one such.
As a student from Belfast I met Ben in then remote Oregon, knowing little of Irish literature and, I soon found out, of Irish life. When he read aloud or recited Irish writers entirely unknown to me, or known but only on the page, like his beloved Yeats, I felt like one of Cortez's men in Keats's sonnet when a whole world opened up before them. I have been writing about Irish writing in my own modest way ever since. Ben travelled widely, like the sonneteer, in realms of gold - that is, he seemed to have read everything that was good and was full, as it were, of travellers' tales. From every meeting, I took away names and references and leads and I suspect a grateful host of others could say the same.
Soon after I met him, the Troubles began, paining him for 30 years as he watched his belief in an Ireland of shared vitality of spirit being challenged by conspiring and vicious men. Extraordinarily, he grew more tolerant as the nightmare went on, as if in his own small way to be violence's counterweight, holding humanity's fort. He was one of the least sectarian Irish people I ever met, and he held animus only against the vicious men and, no doubt, the odd begrudger.
I have his books before me, with their generous inscriptions. Ben Kiely believed that literature and literary enthusiasms, like his cherished walking sticks, should be passed on. But behind the enthusiasms was the professionalism. After the evening bonhomie, every next morning, atrociously early, wherever he was, I believe he was standing at a tallboy writing in an inimitable longhand, for as a veteran journalist he was used to writing directly for the printer, not for a typist and editor. He was the complete man of letters, for whom literature was living and breathing, and we'll hardly see his like again. - Yours, etc,
JOHN WILSON FOSTER, University of British Columbia, Vancouver, Canada.