Ben Kiely died yesterday and with him, goes a wealth of anecdotes and tales.
He is also the last of a particular group of Irish writers who look to Seán Ó Faoláin, Michael McLaverty and Frank O'Connor who once advised Kiely to head for the US where he would be paid for his talk. And talk he could.
Kiely, the youngest of six, had moved with his family to Omagh, Co Tyrone, shortly after his first birthday.
Another major move was his decision to settle in Dublin in his early 20s.
The accent remained strongly Tyrone, but he considered himself a Dublin literary man. Poetry had interested him as a schoolboy, yet his instincts were sufficiently sharp to direct him to prose - journalism, reviewing, fiction was his path.
He was never to forget the relevance his soldier father, himself a good storyteller, placed on a remark made by Henry James - "never spoil a good story for the sake of the truth".
Of many fascinating things to be said about Kiely, that although most of his stories were based around other people, he rarely said a harsh word about anyone. Just as he could see the twist that would make a story, he tended to see the better side of an individual.
It is true that as a writer he would be overshadowed by the international stature and thematic range of William Trevor, and the dark, melancholic mood pieces of John McGahern, yet at his best, Kiely, an Irish Anthony Burgess of sorts, possessed a flair for colloquial, conversational autobiographical narratives that are direct and attractively candid. Above all, there is a confidence about Kiely's fiction.
I interviewed him twice, on his 70th birthday, and again, 10 years later. Aware that he had been criticised for not having written political novels, he simply said he considered himself as an Irish writer rather than an Ulster one.
"I've never been a regional writer" Kiely paused, more thoughtful than actorly; "I see all that Northern thing as a little bit inbred."
Even so, Proxopera(1977) and Nothing Happens in Carmincross(1985) both gave the Northern conflict centre stage. Although, as he said himself, he was more interested in how the Troubles affected the lives of ordinary, innocent people.
For all the chat and digressions, Kiely was an astute literary journalist and knew how to write textually-based criticism.
During my brief career as a literary editor, he reviewed for me and his copy arrived in an elegant longhand. He was a reader and his period in the States, during which he held a number of teaching posts, alerted him to writers such as Cheever, Updike and Eudora Welty. He always loved Dickens and wrote, fittingly, at an old Dickensian roll-top desk. Brendan Behan had been a friend and Kiely enjoyed recalling how he had warned the Dublin man to "cut down on the drink" or he wouldn't last another 10 years. "He lasted 11."
Kiely may not have been a sensationalist, and he was not interested in myth making. Still, he had three books banned, because of sexual episodes such as the description of a woman swimming naked in a lake. Unlike most writers, Kiely had no difficulty in nominating his personal favourite among his books - it was The Captain with the Whiskers(1960), a study of a psychopathic old soldier who bullied his children and ran his oppressed household as if it were a military academy.
There is a sad irony in that news of his death will draw many new readers to his work, while others will return to it. He never saw his work as art.
Writing for him was as natural as breathing: "It's the thing I do." And he did it well.
