A little under 60 years ago, the playwright John B. Keane commenced writing a weekly column for the Limerick Leader that would run across the following four decades. This is the story of their canny genius and resurrection as told by and to Arthur James O'Dea.
John B. Keane’s weekly column in the Limerick Leader was conceived as a means of satisfying this regional paper's expansionist owners.
Approached a few years after writing Sive in the late 1950s, but before “The Bull” McCabe made his first appearance in The Field, the exciting young playwright was already leaving his mark on Irish literature from the small town of Listowel.
To harness what one lifelong friend described as his “approachable genius” and transmit it across a weekly newspaper column, that would be the test of Keane’s suitability for the task at hand, however.
“The idea behind approaching him was to drive the paper into that west Limerick and north Kerry area,” explains Alan English, formerly a reporter and the editor of the Limerick Leader. “So, the Buckley family who owned the paper then saw him as a good signing, but it turned out to be an inspired signing, really.”
Over the following 30 years or so, John B. Keane proceeded to write at least one new column every week; only occasionally resorting to a ‘best of’ when his complete attention was required for the pressing matter of a new play.
Eugene Phelan (Editor, Limerick Leader): “He could write 2,000 words about a snail, a person’s nose or farting.”
Conor Keane (John B. Keane’s son): “All in an afternoon’s work.”
Eugene: “He had such a huge fan base too at a time when communication wasn’t always easy. The number of letters we received for him!”
Alan English (Editor (2007-16), Limerick Leader): “It was quite remarkable really that a local newspaper would have a columnist of such stature for such a sustained period of time.”
Eugene: “When I actually first joined the Limerick Leader in 1975 it would be one of my jobs to head down to Colbert station to the collect the John B. Keane column as it came up by bus from Listowel.”
Alan: “I still look back with great pleasure at the idea that I was sometimes dispatched to the station to pick up this man’s copy. It was just such high-class writing.”
Eugene: “An utter genius.”
Alan: “A genius plain and simple, and I don’t use that word lightly.”
Conor: “It is lovely to hear those things said. I suppose he has to sit somewhere in the literary landscape and if that is as one of Ireland’s best writers, well, that is fantastic.”
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On the premise that his writing could expand the paper’s appeal, the recruitment of John B. Keane’s services proved a sound piece of business.
“The columns were incredibly popular at the time,” recalls Keane’s son Conor, a former journalist with the Limerick Leader and creator of the incredibly powerful “In Shame, Love, In Shame”, “it really helped the paper to gain a foothold in our area where it would have been up against The Kerryman.”
As a prolific writer and a publican, John B. Keane was quick to address the service owed to that latter role in terms of how it enabled the former.
“On these premises of mine throughout the days and nights of wintertime the conversation takes strange turns,” he wrote in his first column of 1983, “and it’s just as well that it does for if it didn’t I would be left high and dry without a tale to tell or a comment to make.”
To the uninitiated, Keane’s columns found their force of life in the same strands of ordinary rural life that drove his widely celebrated plays. In keeping the most dramatic scenes for the stage, however, it was in these weekly dispatches that he found ways of celebrating ordinariness for its sake alone.
The more flippant or inconsequential a topic might appear, Keane's ability to identify what was wondrous within the everyday was unerring.
“This evening I would like to say a few words on the subject of mooching,” he wrote in early 1977. “In the city they call it mitching. I remember when I was 10 there was an inquisition in our class into the reasons behind the absence of a boy we shall call Paddy. He only came to school on wet days.
“Other days he would spend sauntering through the woods and grooves of the outlying countryside or sitting in a pensive move by the banks of the rivers and streams. The teacher became suspicious but Paddy had an airtight alibi.
“His mother, as he explained was recuperating from a severe illness and when the weather was fine it was Paddy’s job to escort her during her long recuperative walks. The teacher, whose own mother happened to be ailing at the time commended Paddy and told him there was no employment so spiritually gainful as the devotion to one’s mother. A Godsend.”
Under the roof of the Keane household in Listowel, the author's son Conor understood what his father did to be no greater or lesser than any other working person in the community. It was a job, like any other.
A difficult proposition for the outsider to grasp, perhaps, such an outlook carried Keane's genius on the page. Yes, he could find the wondrous within the everyday. More important, however, was his knack for elevating the distinctly everyday into something wonderful.
And who for a few minutes every week, as the work stopped and they sat down to read John B's column, could resist the temptation to recognise their own role in this world he wrote of.
The banner for John B. Keane's 'Out in the Open' series across the decades in the Limerick Leader.Alan: “He would have been given free rein really. The idea that he would have been on the phone telling the editor what he was going to write about would have been totally foreign.”
Eugene: “He loved writing about matchmakers and the most of them all, Dan Paddy Andy, he wrote about him regularly.”
Conor: “There is just something attached to north Kerry which makes us slightly loquacious when it comes to the use of words. We like to play with them.”
Alan: “When I came in then as editor of the paper in 2007, it took me about five minutes to realise that his columns were an amazing asset and that they should be put to use.”
Conor: “It is great that a new generation of readers have been able to get a look at them. We thought that it might be for a six or seven-month period, but they’ve been going again now for years.”
Alan: “One of things I’m proudest of from my time as editor is recognising those treasures from the paper’s past.”
Eugene: “Before this current situation we find ourselves in with layoffs or people working from home, I still enjoyed going through the old files and retyping some of the old John B copy.”
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Born only a few years apart in a similar stretch of north Kerry, what drew the writing of Keane and Con Houlihan together remains more compelling then the differences which existed.
A close friend of the Keane family, Houlihan, tempted though he was by high literary reference points in his sporting columns, shared Keane’s ability of identifying a basic emotion and running with it to devastating effect.
Whereas Houlihan's vehicle for this elemental writing was often sport, John B. Keane could take a reader through the ringer on a topic as routine as the rearing and killing of a pig.
“Does nobody ever spare a thought for the mud-loving monarch himself,” he asked in one of his first columns of the 1960s. “I do not ask that we should mourn when he dies, but we should pay tribute, we should acknowledge the role of the common pig and not regard him as an intolerable swine.
“There have been monuments to greyhounds and racehorses but over the centuries the overall contribution of the pig is the greatest. It is true to say that if you back horses and dogs all your life you’ll end up in the poorhouse but if you back the pig you’ll never be without a bit of bacon.”
An animal familiar to many of his Limerick Leader readers no doubt, Keane eloquently delivers the killer punch.
“Some years ago I bought two bonhams and fattened them,” he recalled. “One I sold to a pig-buyer and the other I killed for my own use and benefit. I wasn’t present on the day of the execution because I couldn’t bear it and my loneliness after both creatures were gone made me resolve that I would never rear a pig again.
“I will buy my bacon whenever I get the notion, but I’m not so cold as to be unmoved when a familiar face vanishes from the scene.”
Were it not for Alan English's editorial decision to begin republishing John B. Keane's articles in the Limerick Leader in 2007, they may well have drifted into relative anonymity.
From the promising young playwright who was approached in the early '60s, to a figure now regarded one of the best to have ever done it on this island, he has always remained 'Dad' to Conor Keane, first and foremost.
"At one stage when we were growing up," he explains, "Mercier Press, who would have published Dad, reckoned that every house in Ireland had a copy of the bible and at least one John B. Keane book.
"But look, it is extremely hard to explain how ordinary all of this was for us."
As it should be, perhaps. After all, it was in the world of ordinary topics and conversations that John B. Keane afforded his readers glimpses of the sublime.
Someday, hopefully, a hefty collection of John B. Keane's Limerick Leader columns will be gathered together for our convenience. For now, if you are keen to find out more it is possible to access the newspaper's archive and a host of Keane's articles for a laughably reasonable price right here.
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