Memories, legends & lies.

The Collected Stories of Benedict Kiely 

Benedict Kiely

David R. Godine, $24.95, 784 pp.

Benedict Kiely is a great Irish writer, though not one as well known in this country as he ought to be. He was born in Dromore, County Tyrone, and raised in nearby Omagh, in the north of Ireland, though he has lived and worked most of his adult life in and around Dublin, aside from a few brief stays in the United States. In addition to his short stories he is the author of nine novels, and also of travel books, memoirs, works on politics and literature, and even a story for children. A journalist and well-known broadcaster, he is obviously a quintessential man of letters, in a culture in which--distinctly opposite to our own--the gift of storytelling lends weight and dignity to a voice in public affairs. Though many of his stories were first published in the New Yorker and a selection from them appeared in 1980 under the title The State of Ireland, some of them are published for the first time in America in this present volume. The forty-eight stories represent four previously published Irish volumes, and the publisher has included the novella, "Proxopera."

In a publication whose contents were written over a period of about thirty-five years, it is hard not to talk about the youthful and the more mature work. Certainly, there is development, particularly in the ways in which the stories become less purely comic, gaining a darker side as their author grows older and wiser. It is also not difficult to see some experimentation with style, as in the very occasional and slightly peculiar efforts at a kind of rhyming prose poetry. But the reader will be hard pressed to find evidence of maturation in the capacity to tell a story. Kiely must have been born with that gift. Childhood, romance, nostalgia, death, the cruelty of politics, and the goodness of ordinary people, all mingle in his mind and memory, to be given back to the world through the power of a remarkable tragic-comic imagination, in words that warm the heart and with a voice so sure and insistent that you almost hear the stories read to you, or wish you could.

Some of the tales are exercises in a purely magical nostalgia, reminiscent of Gabriel Garcia Marquez, as the writer recalls the past as it cannot ever quite have been, while persuading us of the reality of it all. So, in "A View from the Treetop," Paddy escapes to the top of a tree in the middle of the village, and watches the world go by for a whole day. The Old Master goes up and down, and the mad major chases butterflies in his garden. Even as Kiely recalls this lost past of some imaginary childhood, Paddy carries us back a further step into the dream world, remembering that it was beneath this very tree, they said, that Johnny Patterson, the famous clown, had once pitched his tent and joked and danced and sang. Life in this most verbal of cultures is a fabric of stories upon stories. "The Shortest Way Home" gives us the delightful story of a young boy who falls out with the nuns in his elementary school, and, insisting on going to the big school with the older boys, finds himself in the "Wee Brother's" classroom, allowed to while away the day drawing and painting, and taking his daily nap in a cabinet where one drawer has been set up for him as a cot. Until the fateful day when the whole piece of furniture collapses. Stories and stories about stories, characters and the stories they tell, memories, legends, and lies, all are woven together into a fantastic quilt of the past that is brighter and more alive than the past could ever have been. And yet, of course, this is the way we all recall our childhoods, as vivid as the young imaginations we all once possessed.

In the earlier stories that make up the original first two volumes, Kiely recreates memory through desire. Later, he will become more obviously autobiographical, as in "The Fairy Women of Lisbellaw." While childhood and small-town life are prominent, the world intrudes a little, mostly in the form of American soldiers passing through the Northern Ireland town where he sets his tales, and with the Americans comes romance, fleeting in most cases. There's also the church, as in "A Great God's Angel Standing," which tells of the unlikely friendship between Fr. Paul and Pascal Stakelum, the "notorious rural rake." There's humor here, as when Pascal accompanies the good priest on his regular visit to shrive the residents of the local mental hospital, and finds himself hearing one of the confessions, almost but not quite by accident. More telling is the way in which the friendship survives the deep differences between the priest and the public sinner, itself an avenue into the later stories where the complex politics of Northern Ireland come more to the fore. Friendship, it seems, can also trump harsh political realities, and the hatreds inspired by old events and new foolishness are carried out among neighbors. Nowhere is this clearer than in "Proxopera," the story that ends the collection, where an old man is sent off to blow up a peaceful Irish town by thugs with hoods on their heads, whom he easily recognizes as his neighbors.

Above all else, Kiely begs to be heard, to be read aloud. The voice of the storyteller invites us into his world, as in the opening sentence of "The Jeweller's Boy": "The first day the boys from Gallows Hill paid any attention to Robbie, the barefooted son of Jamie the Jeweller, was the day Short Morgan's watch got broken in a wrestling match." Or the sublime first line of one of his best-known fables, "There was something different and a little disconcerting about Harry the Barber, possibly because he drank and had a red face and his hand shook and he kept a cow in the house." Who can resist reading on? Here is a world, and here is an imagination bigger than that world, that fashions and recreates it into more than it was and is. Kiely is a treasure, and we will all be better people for reading him.

Paul Lakeland is the Aloysius P. Kelley, SJ, Professor of Catholic Studies at Fairfield University.