The fearless literary man in full who conjures creative rebellion from the art of darkness
Fergal Keane
MY Aunt Peg, God rest her soul, used to tell a story about Brendan. She asked him once if it was difficult to fail a student. The professor responded by describing the ordeal of being confined in an exam hall for five hours in summer weather. The students were prisoners of those slow hours, confronted with perplexing questions and empty sheets of foolscap. He winked and whispered: “Sure any fellah that could hold his water for that long you’d have to give him a pass.” It was a story that spoke to the humour and humanity of the man.
My future wife, the journalist Anne Flaherty, was a student of his. She recalls Professor Kennelly’s address at the start of her freshman year. The people who loved English were the ones who had to read, he said, even if it was the writing on a cornflake box. “He got it right,” she remembers, “because that was me. I couldn’t be without something to read.” This was a professor who occasionally took his students to the pub to discuss the finer points of poetry.
At my parents’ wedding Brendan gave a gift of a fine china plate on which had been painted the great scenes of Napoleon’s military career. It was a rendering of the epic, from Austerlitz to Moscow, from victory to defeat. The path of the doomed emperor seized the imagination of a poet who understood well the fragile nature of man’s triumphs.
My mother was at Brendan’s wedding to Peggy O’Brien and sat at the table with the poet’s old English teacher, a woman who instilled a love of literature that flowered into some of the finest poetry in any language. They were speaking of favourite lines from poems and plays. The teacher recalled Shakespeare’s Macbeth and those haunting words when Macduff learns his family has been murdered. “Give sorrow words,” he is urged, for “the grief that does not speak knits up the o-er wrought heart and bids it break.”
Brendan Kennelly gave words to grief in the finest poem ever written about the Famine. My Dark Fathers is one of the truly great poems to emerge from the fractured history of our island, along with Louis MacNeice’s Autumn Journal, John Hewitt’s Neither an Elegy nor a Manifesto, WB Yeats’s Easter 1916 and Michael Longley’s All of These People.
Skeletoned in darkness, my dark fathers lay
Unknown, and could not understand
The giant grief that trampled night and day,
The awful absence moping through the land.
Upon the headland, the encroaching sea
Left sand that hardened after tides of Spring,
No dancing feet disturbed its symmetry
And those who loved good music ceased to sing.
The poem is an evocation of the darkness bequeathed by shame. The shame of starvation, landlessness, failure, powerlessness. The genius of Kennelly’s use of imagery, the care with which each word is chosen, raises the poem far above the arid tropes of traditional Famine verse. Some years back I asked him where the poem had come from. He described being at a wedding in North Kerry as a young man and seeing a boy with a famously good voice being asked to sing. “He got up and sang and he sang beautifully, but he could not face the audience. The young fellah turned and faced the wall while he sang.” In this gesture the poet saw the stifled shame of generations. A masterpiece was born.
Anybody who has travelled the road from Listowel to the coast through Lisselton on a winter’s day will recognise the “swelling gloom of Munster fields where the Atlantic night/fettered the child within the pit of doom. And everywhere a going down of light.” The poet understood well that the lyric genius of the North Kerry literary tradition sprang as much from darkness as from light, that memory was a penance which the freeborn soul of the writer must confront and understand. The legacy of history’s ‘dark fathers’ stalked the childhoods of Brendan and his friends John B Keane, my uncle, and Eamon Keane, my father. They grew up in the shadow of a Civil War that poisoned politics, and amid a suffocating clericalism. It was the making of them as creative spirits. My father and Brendan went to Dublin, John B waged his revolution at home in Kerry.
But their rebellion was creative not nihilistic. In their different ways the three friends resurrected older traditions of artistic dissidence to meet the challenge of blind conformism.
I recall Brendan’s intense grief when my uncle passed away. John B and Brendan were particularly close. They shared a love of words, a common rural hinterland and a passion for Gaelic football. Both were ‘men in full’, living without fearful glances over their shoulders, unafraid of disputation but moved, above all else, by love.
They detested any writerly posturing. When they met the air was full of mischief. I think of Louis MacNeice’s prescription for the poetic life: “I would have a poet able-bodied, fond of talking, a reader of the newspapers, capable of pity and laughter, informed in economics, appreciative of women, involved in personal relationships, actively interested in politics, susceptible to physical impressions.”
Brendan Kennelly has outlived Eamon and John B. He was younger than them both but has known his own share of poor health. As poet, teacher, lover, father, grandfather he is cherished. He is here now because life, in its infinite wisdom, will not let him go.
‘He gave words to grief in the finest poem written about the Famine’