Kiely's Carleton and the Making of a Writer (Benedict Kiely, William Carleton) (Critical Essay‪)‬

As a novelist, short story writer, critic, biographer, and journalist, Ben Kiely's career spanned sixty years; he was a man-of-letters who was renowned as a raconteur, a social skill that found its professional expression in his many radio broadcasts, in particular his talks on RTE's Sunday Miscellany. These short pieces, which commanded devoted Sunday morning audiences from the 1970s, afforded him the opportunity to entertain with anecdotes that revealed his fascination with the lives of ordinary people who, in Kiely's telling, were always extraordinary. The talks grew often from his extensive knowledge of the Irish countryside, its topography, its characters, its history and lore, interests that were fostered in the mid-1960s when, with Sean White, he wrote a column for the Irish Press under the joint pseudonym of Patrick Lagan based on colourful characters encountered the length and breadth of Ireland. (1) Although these talks had the feel of casual reminiscences, delivered spontaneously in his 'mournful, Scots-Irish voice', (2) they were skilful narratives that sometimes achieved the status of art. He was a natural for oral performance, possessing, amongst other gifts, the ability to recall apposite quotations from 'ballad and story, rann and song'. Thomas Flanagan remarked that 'of all my friends, he has I think, the most copious and variously equipped memory--stored with Balzac, Chekov, Shelley, Carl Jung, Hilaire Belloc, Plato, the verses of obscure or anonymous local bards.' (3) This storehouse of allusion was not a mere stock of narrative decorations or elaborations; it was rather a framework for thinking and feeling that helped shape his ways of seeing, understanding, and portraying the world. The storyteller as oral narrator that is so much associated with Kiely the journalist, broadcaster, and novelist is a persona that he constructed carefully and skilfully in his earliest work and sustained into his later writings where, as a septuagenarian recalling his childhood in Omagh, he confessed that the 'meticulous reader will herein find repetitions' because he is following the practice of the storyteller sitting 'in the corner between the fire and the wall'. (4) When he was writing Land Without Stars (1946) in which he dealt with aspects of the political and social life of his youth in Omagh during the war, he was reading and thinking about the most significant figure in the creation of a vernacular voice in Irish fiction, William Carleton (17941869), the writer who first negotiated the transition from the orality of his native, Gaelic culture to the conventions and demands of an English print industry. Kiely's Poor Scholar (1947) is a seminal work, not only in the study of Carleton, 'the greatest novelist that Ireland in the nineteenth century gave to the English language', (5) but in the formation of its author's ambitions as a writer and his sense of the place of his craft in the life of his community.