Benedict Kiely, from “Proxopera”

Benedict Kiely (1919-2007)

From his obituary at The Guardian:

The Irish writer Benedict Kiely, who has died aged 87, overcame the banning of three early novels to enjoy a long and successful literary career. Under Ireland’s censorship laws (since relaxed), the books were deemed to be “in general tendency indecent or obscene”.

Kiely’s first book, Counties of Contention: a Study of the Origins and Implications of the Partition of Ireland (1945), reflected the moderate nationalism that he adhered to all his life. His Poor Scholar (1947) is a critical biography of William Carleton, a pioneer of the modern Irish short story and a major influence on Kiely himself. Modern Irish Fiction (1950) is a work of assured literary criticism.

…  Kiely’s narrative style owes much to the tradition of country storytelling and shares some characteristics with Joyce and Flann O’Brien. He drew on his abandoned religious vocation and the experience of illness in such novels as Honey Seems Bitter (1952), There Was an Ancient House (1955) and Dogs Enjoy the Morning (1968). The Cards of the Gambler (1953) is regarded as one of his best, and others combine elements of fantasy and reality.

His forte, however, was the short story. An early story, King’s Shilling, was published in the Irish Bookman, and later stories appeared in the New Yorker, the Kenyon Review and other American magazines. At his best, Kiely came close to matching Frank O’Connor, who championed his work, and Sean O’Faolain.

His work is informed by a deep affection for and exasperation with Ireland, and by an inclusive sense of history and tradition. This is underscored by the anger evident in his last two novels, Proxopera (1977) and Nothing Happens in Carmincross (1985), which deal with political violence. In all, he published 10 novels and four volumes of stories, as well as travel books and anthologies. Two volumes of memoirs deal mainly with the Dublin of the 1940s and 1950s. A renowned raconteur, he was also a popular broadcaster.

From the Benedict Kiely website:

Benedict Kiely was born near Dromore, County Tyrone on 15th August 1919. He was the sixth child of Thomas and Sara Alice Kiely. His family moved to Omagh, County Tyrone, when he was only one. This is where he spent his formative years. Benedict was educated at Mount St. Columba’s by the Christian Brothers. His father was a Boer War veteran, who later worked as a survey measurer for the Ordnance Survey. Although the town was largely free of the sectarianism associated with Northern Ireland, intolerance did occasionally rear its head.

…As a schoolboy, he dutifully read the prescribed essays of Addison, Belloc, Chesterton, Hazlitt and Lamb; for pleasure, he read Zane Gray and Edgar Wallace. He was once impressed by a teacher who interrupted a trigonometry lesson to make an impassioned defence of James Joyce – a remarkable introduction to the great writer from an Irish Christian Brother who, as Benedict later remarked, “…made us realise that there was a world where books mattered”.

A post on Proxopera, the novel from which our excerpt is taken:

Proxopera is subtitled A Tale of Modern Ireland (and dedicated ‘to the memory of the Innocent Dead’), and was first published in 1977, at the height of Northern Ireland’s ‘Troubles’ (an elastic term: pretty much any year from the 1970s and 80s has been described as ‘at the height of the Troubles’). Anthony Burgess called it “nearly flawless as a piece of literature” and William J Kennedy “a small masterpiece.” Surprisingly, Proxopera does not disappoint.

The book has the connection to the land and tradition of storytelling which we might expect in an Irish tale. The central character, Binchy, has retired to his homeland of County Tyrone, where he remembers from his childhood “the spring that came on an iron spout out of the naked rock.”

…The subject and plot loosely recalls Brian Moore’s Booker-shortlisted novel Lies of Silence, though Proxopera predates that book by 13 years. Kiely’s story is more lyrical than Moore’s, the setting rural rather than urban, and its proximity to the outset of the Troubles gives it a hard edge which the beauty of the writing does not soften. It is tense and thrilling, but rich and complex in its understanding of a man’s relationship with his landscape, and of men’s relationship with their homeland. It is a book which fills me with pleasure at the potential riches in Kiely’s books I’ve yet to read, and despair that such a fine literary creation is out of print (though it is available in Kiely’s Collected Stories. Which is also out of print).