Book Review : Irish Tales of the Legendary Present

A Letter to Peachtree and Nine Other Stories by Benedict Kiely (David R. Godine; $17.95; 209 pages)

Beneath the rant, comedy and jingle-jangle of Benedict Kiely’s characters there is a large stillness. It is the stillness of the legendary present.

That is a characteristically Irish tense, not simply in literature but in other parts of life governed by signs; politics, for instance.

Normally, the legendary goes with the past. It burnishes it to a splendid and heroic gloss; at the same time, it fixes it in its tracks. Alexander remains suspended on the edge of his conquered world; greatly. Socrates raises the hemlock to his lips; philosophically.

Pub at Closing Time

If you bring this legendary burnishing up into the present, you can make life’s dailiness very winning and grand. You can also keep it in a splendorous stagnation. The fiery palaver in a Dublin pub toward closing time contrasts, by tradition, with the fire that burns so low afterward on the hearth at home. The legends that fuel the fight in the North keep that fight in a seemingly perpetual deadlock.

In “Nothing Happens in Carmincross,” his most recent and powerful novel, Kiely bound the lilt of the Irish legends--the heroic, the raffish, the comical, the gloriously discursive--to the stagnant patterns of bloody reprisal. The voices that joke, recite, and emote as if the whole world could be explained and contained in the speaking, are prisoner voices. How can the spirit move in a world it has the illusion of containing?

The legendary present is voiced time and again, to less tragic effect, in the stories collected in “A Letter to Peachtree.” A narrator, allusive and elusive, repeatedly breaks off from his comical or mournful account of a love, a life or an opportunity lost through passiveness, by letting his words turn into the lines of a ballad or a sentimental song.

In “Eton Crop,” one of the best of the stories, the narrator recalls a girl he had met at a declamation contest 30 years earlier. There had been the beginnings of a romance but it had not worked out; perhaps through his awkwardness or inaction. He receives the declamation book she had used, and which she sends him before her death. Kiely frames the story beautifully; the narrator’s regretful account is intercut with his recitation of the grandiloquent poem, complete with gestures, contained in the book.

In “Your Left Foot Is Crazy,” a young man is approached at a dancing class by a beautiful red-haired young woman. They take to each other, but he spends a lot of time going out with another woman to oblige a friend. The redhead is killed in a bicycle accident, and whatever might have happened, will not.

Kiely casts some of his stories as puzzles, with odd incidents appearing at the start that only make sense when the story is over. Sometimes it is necessary to read through twice. The effect can be more irritating than intriguing--”The Python,” set in New York and involving the narrator’s relations with three young women, is particularly knotty and exasperating--but it can also work very well. A story about a journalist who takes his wife along to cover a mock battle re-creating the historic Battle of the Boyne, contains a series of oddly-off-center remarks by the wife. Eventually we realize--and it comes with a satisfyingly acrid effect--that she is referring obliquely to an affair she suspects him of having with a younger woman.

Longest and Liveliest Tale

The title story, the longest and liveliest in the collection, gives the best representation of Kiely’s use of the legendary present. An Irish-American on a visit--this is a frequent subject for the author--is caught up in a tumultuous expedition that could very well be a traditional Irish comic ballad of its own. In Dublin to write a dissertation on a local writer, he is introduced to some of the writer’s friends, and they immediately sweep him away on a three-day rampage through the countryside.

It is a traveling brawl. The ring leader is Conall Lagan, a photographer with an endless capacity to drink, raise hell and charm. The high point is the group’s well-oiled eruption into a small-town performance of “Tis Pity She’s a Whore,” with Conall injecting himself into the gory Jacobean dialogue.

The whole picaresque trip is a meander through fights and scrapes of all kinds, a river of whiskey, and a torrent of sparkling verbiage. Throughout the woozy adventures, one of the party recites from the old stories of Conall Cearnach, the present-day Conall’s legendary warrior forebear. The bash is elevated into a historic bash.

The story is vastly entertaining, yet a mournful stillness wafts around it. The narrator writes about it to his girlfriend in Georgia--hence the “Peachtree”--and he breaks into his own bout of elevated poem-spewing. But at the end, as he packs to go home, there is a kind of rueful stillness. The narrator has found his roots. And out of those roots, fed with all that human energy, spirit, warmth and gaiety, what has grown? More roots. No tree.