A Final Fling: Conversations between Men and Women by Bryan MacMahon Poolbeg 306pp, £7.99
It was a Kerryman by the name of Senan Moynihan who introduced me to a Kilkenny man by the name of Francis MacManus. And it was Francis MacManus who, one day in Dublin town, introduced me to another Kerryman by the name of Bryan MacMahon.
In awe, or something, I stood between the two of them. They were taller than I was, and better built. They first saw the world, or the bit of the world we call Ireland, in 1909. That was ten years ahead of me.
And less than ten years ago Bryan wrote in The Master, a notable attempt at self-assessment, that whatever way he turned he seemed always to have been in school. That could well have been. But we all knew that, through teaching and writing and just talking, and even singing, he had learned and taught a lot. And his schoolhouse was not only the old one in Listowel nor the new one which he had built, but all Ireland and the sky over it, and large portions of the United States and, in fact, everywhere his books were read in the original or in translation.
Mostly in the book The Master he wrote about teaching. Fair enough. But, as Socrates and a few others were aware, teaching can send out messages to the end of the earth and for all time. He told us that three of his mother's sisters, and his mother, had been teachers. And his brother Jack. And two of Brian's own sons followed the profession.
Then he mentioned Seamus Wilmot, "a teacher of infectious enthusiasm who fired in me the passion of writing". Wilmot was an amazing pedant and whirlwind talker I had the honour of encountering in Clontarf sometime in the 1940s. His manifest destiny must have been to set Bryan to the writing. For which we have good reason to be grateful.
Perhaps at times, Bryan thought, the writer in him was more diligent than the teacher. He was remembering when a deputation of good women came to him to ask him to stop the schoolboys from watching the stallions who did their duty behind the pub every Friday. Was it fast or abstinence? It was Saturday in the Market Yard in Omagh, where I had been a schoolboy. Bryan was embarrassed by the request because, when a boy, he had given those fine gentlemen some observation. And the echoes of that deputation and interview were to be heard in a story called: "Chestnut and Jet". And he said:
I do not think that it is part of the teacher's duty to convey to the children the false notion that life is devoid of malice, injury, ill-fortune, treachery, or injustice. rather should he somehow convey the manner in which these traitors should be downfaced, dodged or overcome. But, somehow or other, he should never cease to promote in children the determination to say Yes to life, to the dark as well as to the bright of it, to its beauty and glory, to its lapses from grace into degradation, and its eventual restoration to serenity. Thus it is that, as a person, the teacher needs to be carefully selected, not for false piety or similar inferior motive, but above all for an infectious enthusiasm allied to knowledge in its widest sense.
To put it mildly, that is a statement worth remembering, not only for teachers but for those of us who never had the courage or the ability to work in that upper air.
So he was a Kerryman, a teacher, a novelist, a poet, a master of the short story. He did not, as far as I ever heard, have an All-Ireland medal but he was always there to advise the men who got them.
This Final Fling, which he performed with style before he left us and Kerry for another land, is, and will be forever, in nineteen steps, or short stories, a priceless possession. He had a theory. What great teacher did not go in for theories? Sean O Faolain had already said that Bryan had created an extra art dimension: "short stories based on the common life of a prose poet." The foreword to this book says:
With utter economy in the telling and the exclusion of all unnecessary "props" his subject matter in the pieces in this collection is the intensity of emotion often found in conversations between members of the opposite sex .. .
He goes so far as to declare that this is the road the Irish short story must take in the new millennium. Otherwise, lacking the nervous urgency of the future, it is doomed to extinction. . .
One could, perhaps, argue about that theory, as about all theories. The impressive truth is that these nineteen examples are jewels of achievement. My favourite is the one in which a young fellow called Adam walks and talks in a garden with a young lady called Eve. Somewhere in the background is the owner of the gardens. Jahweh? Or is it Bryan Himself?
Benedict Kiely is a novelist and short story writer; his second collection of memoirs, The Waves Behind US, will be published next year