The stuffy, stagnant world of mid-20th century Ireland took a long timeto realise the raw, primitive genius of John B. Keane and the uniquequalities of the world he commemorated in his plays, stories and novels,writes Patsy McGarry. "I am a fulfilled man; I suppose that's a thing called peace of mind."
The playwright, author, and poet John B. Keane (73) has died at his home in Listowel, Co Kerry. First diagnosed with prostate cancer eight years ago, he had gone into sharp decline over recent days. He is survived by his wife Mary, sons John, Conor and Billy, and his daughter Joanna.
The king of the Kingdom is dead. Long live John B. And live on he shall - as will the mountainy people he loved - through such great plays such as Sive, Big Maggie, The Field.
He recalled how they would come into the bar he and Mary ran in Listowel. "I discovered that my material was in these people. They came into the pub, particularly on Friday, which was pension day, old women with pipes and old men with stories to tell. I talked to them, argued with them, got drunk with them."
They were the doughty people of remoter places near Listowel like Lyrecrompane, the Ivy Bridge, Renagown, Dirha West and Bóithrín Dubh. They were proud of their music, their turf, their cattle, even their cabbage. "And the saddest thing of all is that so many passed on without leaving anything behind them; people with marvellous stores of stories and songs and anecdotes . . . It all went down with them . . . It was the reason I became a playwright. I don't have any doubt about it," he said.
And as with another great Irish playwright, John M Synge, he was besotted with the way they spoke. "It was a beautiful, unique language, neither English nor Irish. It was never less than poetic," he said. But his "taste" in humanity and language was not shared in the would-be stately, stuffy, stagnant world of mid-20th century Ireland, any more than was Synge's over 50 years earlier.
"Whoever the man was who invented the word 'culchie', I was pitted against him. Even certain drawing room elements in my own locality would not accept these people were valid. They were there to be scoffed at. But they're the most dignified people of all, because they're closer to the earth," he said. Low and of the soil. Closer to the truth.
He told their story.
In the early years he too was scoffed at, and all his works. Not least by Ernest Blythe, artistic director at the Abbey Theatre for an eternity. "My early dealings with the Abbey were not at all happy, but I held my own and they discovered I wouldn't go away," John B. recalled. That was in 1999, 40 years later, when he was presented with a Gradam medal, the Abbey's highest award. As he said himself on that occasion "if Terry Rogers had been standing in the Abbey foyer at the old Queen's Theatre in 1959, he would have given 500 to 1 against my getting any kind of award". But by 1999 he was already festooned with recognition from universities, fellow writers, the world of theatre.
No such recognition was greater perhaps than the unwitting observation of five-year-old J.J. O'Connor who compared John B. to John the Baptist last year. With his father in the Keanes' pub during Listowel Races, he was introduced to John B. as "006¾" (to his father's 007). John B. took exception to this and baptised J.J. with a "real name", "Black Arrow". Some time later the Pope visited a mosque in Damascus where it is said the head of John the Baptist is preserved. J.J. saw a news report on TV and announced "I know John the Baptist, he's a great Irish poet."
Never sentimental where his material was concerned, John B. was very much so with children. And indeed his raw, "primitive" style, dealing with raw, primitive emotions, had much in common with that other John.
John B. Keane was born in Kerry in 1928, the fourth child of his national school teacher father, William, and mother, Hannah. The 10 Keane children lived on Church Street in Listowel where their father's brother and sister also lived. These were days of card games played for ha'pennies and nights spent poring over a dining room full of books. His father regularly exhorted his expanding brood to "read, read, read".
John B. (for Bernard) went to secondary school at the local St Michael's College where he received the beating of his life one day for reciting a poem about Church Street. Those were not happy days in an otherwise happy childhood, and he was expelled more times that he could or cared to remember. After school he worked in a local pharmacy for a while, and also plucked chickens, before he emigrated to England in 1950. He returned a few years later to marry Mary O'Connor, his childhood sweetheart. They bought the pub which at first doubled as a grocery shop. He began to write.
The Abbey, famously, did not recognise the raw power of his play, Sive, initially rejecting it in 1959. It was about a young girl in a "made marriage". The Listowel drama group performed it on what one observer said was "a magic night" at Walsh's Ballroom in the town. It went on to win the All-Ireland Amateur Drama Festival. In June that year it was performed at the Abbey, as was the practice for winners of the All-Ireland Amateur Drama Festival. It played to packed houses. But Dublin continued to resist.
In those early years his champions were producer Phyllis Ryan of Gemini productions and director Barry Cassin, who recognised the greatness in his raw talent. But it wasn't until 1978 that his plays were regularly produced in the capital.
In 1985 Joe Dowling, artistic director of the Abbey, commissioned Ben Barnes, current artistic director at the Abbey, to direct an Abbey production of Sive. "My choice of Ben Barnes as director was a fortuitous one," Joe Dowling wrote in 1992. "The young director formed an immediate bond with the older writer which has continued since then with great success outside the National Theatre." Ben Barnes and Arthur Lappin produced many of John B.'s works subsequently with their Groundwork Theatre Company.
What flowed from John B.'s pen during the later decades of the last century was once described by RTÉ producer Seamus Hosey as rooted in his gift for "turning the parochial and the particular into the universal world of art". Among the results were plays such as Sharon's Grave, Many Young Men of Twenty, The Field, The Year of the Hiker, Big Maggie, Moll, The Man From Clare, his hugely popular Letters series, his novels, his short stories. The Field was turned into a successful film, produced by Noel Pearson, directed by Jim Sheridan, starring Richard Harris, Brenda Fricker and Sean Bean.
With all this prolific success it was hardly surprising that in 1990 there was talk of John B. contesting the presidential election as a Fine Gael candidate. He declined with usual wit. "I looked at myself in the mirror this morning when I was shaving and I didn't see a president," he said.
But he was not averse to political activity and played a major role in the Language Freedom Movement in the 1960s, which campaigned against compulsory Irish in schools. He did so as a lover of the language, and was vilified.
Kerry, and particularly Listowel, was second only to his family as a passion of his life. When writing he would wander the streets of Listowel in the early hours down by the Feale river. He never stayed away from the Kingdom for too long. One of his longest holidays was when he went to New York for 10 days in the early 1980s.
Unswerving faith was a given throughout his life. "I am so thankful for the fact that I'm not cynical about prayer. And I do believe there is something in the afterlife. I never had any doubts," he said.
"I am a fulfilled man; I suppose that's a thing called peace of mind - which is just another name for the grace of God." May he rest in peace.