John B's last interview

On the morning of Saturday, 1 June 1998, Vincent Browne interviewed playwright John B Keane in a room overlooking the square in his native Listowel for the radio programme Tonight with Vincent Browne. It was the last interview he gave before his death in 2002. This is an edited transcript of that interview

I was lucky as a town's boy. I was sent to the country to my father's people at around 1936 and I swear I would never have been a writer if I hadn't (gone there), if the two cultures hadn't fused (for me), that's the old mood culture of Listowel, which is a fairly sophisticated town and the rural culture of the Stack's mountain. The Irish language were still very evident there. They gave us a great racy language which was used by the North Kerry writers, Gabriel Fitzmaurice, Brian McMahon, Brendan Kennelly, myself and others.

Rural Ireland was very dark in the forties and fifties. The only dancehall around here, really only a shed, was owned and run by a man called Dan Paddy Andy O'Sullivan. He was regularly denounced from the altar for running a dancehall and he got his own back by opening the dancehall on Good Friday night, the only dancehall which opened on that day. He would open all through Lent as well.

There was a great darkness over the country, a genuine darkness. There was sort of a blight where even in this community of Listowel, with notion of liberality, they were quite simply afraid of the Clergy. They were misled by the Clergy, whereas the Clergy of today in the town are the exact opposite. They are men who are a part of it, they contribute to the town and they help us in every way but during that time, anything to do with literature or theatre was always frowned upon by the local clergy. For instance, when I wrote my play Sive, three quarters of the parish halls of Ireland would not open their doors to allow that play in and I think it was a totally harmless play.

They objected to the word "bastard" which wasn't in the play at all. They were out to maim Sive from the beginning both the authorities and the establishment. It showed rural Ireland for what it really was. A wonderful place in many ways but in many other ways, a rough tough station Poverty was paramount, where cruelty was part of everyday life, where people only barely survived. All life in rural Ireland, everything was geared to the rates, to the paying of the rates and money was assiduously spared over the whole year so that it would be ready in time for the rates.

Letters of a parish priest

I wrote a book one time, Letters of a Parish Priest, and afterwards I was walking in a town in West Clare and I was verbally assaulted by a priest, an elderly man, about what I wrote in that book. I wrote about runaway priests, priests who were overcome by sexual desires, who couldn't remain in the church, who were harassed by sexual fantasies to such a degree that they became mental. Like all of us. But you see the clergy presumed themselves that people would believe that they were immune. They were the least immune of all because they had no contact with women. I think myself that we own an immeasurable inestimable debt to the press, to the journalists who exposed everything, regardless of the effect on family or community, they went in there and they exposed them. I also think we owe the Late Late Show a great debt because the Late Late Show almost single-handedly took on the establishment and the Clergy.

If you mentioned sex to some woman coming out of mass on Sundays, she'd say oh no – they weren't aware of the possibilities of sex. I remember writing once the average Irish woman, like in the thirties and forties, reminded me of a sports car capable of doing a 150 miles an hour but was never driven at more than 40. Never got an opportunity to express herself, to truly express herself and the notion that sex is a private thing is not so. Sex is just another form of expression and the better you express yourself, the better chance you have of living a full life.

Nearly beaten to death

I opposed the GAA ban (on playing "foreign" games and attending them), very strongly and I was isolated for a period of my life, a couple of years. I also opposed compulsory Irish in schools, that is to say teaching of subjects through Irish where the home language was English. For this I was nearly beaten to death at the Mansion House in Dublin and but for the input of a Detective Sergeant I would have been badly beaten.

I had a great woman, a great wife and great friends, great backup. And then I got an opportunity on the Late Late Show to explain that we were totally on the side of the Irish language. This was totally misinterpreted by our opposition, you know and we got great support actually from the Gaelteacht areas, the Language Freedom Movement because they knew what we were trying to do. We won our case at the end of the day. I remember at the time Gay Byrne offered to chair a meeting at the Olympia Theatre and the meeting was held but none of them from the opposition turned up because of the fact that we had sixty young able stewards who would not be intimidated or bullied like we were in the Mansion House. So these people had, I would say, a cowardly spine whereas we were prepared to go up and face and take what was coming to us. It was a hard time.

Influences and teachers

Brian McMahon would be a Gael. We ploughed two different furrows, but we were good friends. There's a square right about there where we both walked. I said once, we walk in the same square but we move in different circles, which was true. He was my teacher and he was a good teacher. My father was also a teacher who I loved very dearly and was a great help to me. A man of great courage and a man who fell foul of the clergy on a few occasions. He was a man who was fond of a drink and he used to back horses and at that time I think a lot of people would disapprove of a schoolmaster who often went on a skite with my good self on many occasions and my brother Eamon and the others. I think they might have looked at him with disapproval, which he didn't mind. They did in fact look at him with disapproval.

Drink was one of the dominating features of our lives. I had two brothers who were alcoholics, Eamon, a hopeless alcoholic, who damaged himself more than anybody else because he was a fine actor and my father used to always say to Eamon that he used to go on monumental boozes and then go to bed for long periods so that he would accumulate enough health to go on another skite. My father's binges would last maybe four or five days. I was different. I always tried to keep it in its proper perspective. I drank enough but never too much. I wouldn't be alive today if that were the case. I wouldn't have been alive today if I had been smoking as well as drinking. I gave up cigarettes at the age of forty and got a new lease of life, physically and mentally. I can positively state that to you but drink had an effect on my family, there's no question about it. We were a very happy family, there was no poverty as such. There was always a scarcity of money but I suspect the same could be said of every family in Ireland at the time but there were signs of drink and I found, in my younger days, any trouble I got into, it was whiskey which got me into it. I had many rows, I was a bollox.

My wife and I were going to go to America and this was suggested to us by our family, that it would be a mistake. I was an apprentice to a pharmaceutical chemist at the time but I didn't care for it and we had, I think between us we had about a thousand pounds, my wife and I, we borrowed the rest and started the public house business where we are now. But the bank manager at the time was a man called Johnny Bailey from Tralee, who had played with Kerry and Johnny was very sympathetic to our plight and it was an immense help and in fact offered us more money than we needed. So it got us off to a good start because as I said earlier, I met a great woman…

I was 25, 26. But we never looked back. I can't lay enough stress and emphasis on the fact that the woman I had had great courage. She'd be always there, tremendous courage, always by my side when things were very black and I remember on one occasion, the Kerryman had two whole pages of letters, most of the letters addressing me as a traitor because of my attitude towards the GAA ban at the time and this must have been very intimidating for her because she came from the countryside of Knocknagoshel, which was very strong in GAA but which I discovered subsequently had a majority against that infamous ban and she was by my side through all that and I mean it was no fun.

Writing, religion and love

My plans had been to go to America, I had an aunt there and my wife had brothers there so I imagined we would have done reasonably well but I didn't go. My ambition always was to write and at the time I was writing regularly, I had several unfinished novels. In fact, I went to England to write the great Irish novel and I wrote a great Irish load of bunk but at least I had written out a lot of fat out of myself. All the blancmange was gone out of my writing and I was left with lean stuff and I kept at it.

I'd start at midnight when the pub was shut, I'd drink three or four pints of stout and start writing until the dawn. Sometimes during the night, I would go out and walk around the square, which we see outside the window here but I had to give it up because I saw so many chastening things that it became frightening. In this square and in the street. I saw men and women where they should not be. I met scared women at night, scared of their own homes. I met men who were afraid of their own women, really. I met all of these people, but yet they were there and it was so sad a sight that I often cried my eyes out when I went home at what I saw, the cruelty of people towards each other who had a tremendous capacity for love, which they never expressed.

I can't understand why this love was never allowed to flow at that time because there was also a great innocence abroad at the time which could have been exploited to solidify marriages which were being wrecked. At the time it was said that the mental institutions were filled with people who had disastrous sex lives, great sexual ambitions which were never fulfilled. It was a terrible time. That was the crucible in which I was forged and it was the crucible which made me tolerant because, when I was a young man in my teens, I was intolerant. This thing made me tolerant of people. It gave me a liberal outlook, a compassionate outlook which I still have.

The majority of husbands would have entrusted all their financial dealings to women. They trusted them in this respect completely. But there wasn't a corresponding trust with revelations of one's inner self, telling the truth to each other, telling his problems, but again the church had a hand here because a women's sex life at that time was restricted because very often she had to go into the confession box and tell her sins to a musty old man with a Roman collar, the good man, according to his lights but a man who was quite incapable of understanding the delicacy of a sexual relationship or a marriage which might have been toppling which could have been rescued with one great act of compassionate love. I think there was something abroad in the air at the time which militated against people being brought together or coming together. I saw this, I saw great possibilities.

Things have changed. There's absolutely no question about it. There is a much greater tolerance abroad and understanding of marital problems and this is marvellous. A woman is no longer a prisoner, she is no longer chained by husband and family and this is wonderful. We have, I think, at long last given women freedom, a certain amount of freedom but full freedom is coming and the more you free a woman, the better she becomes as a wife and as a friend. She desperately needs freedom, she needs it more than a man does because of her make-up and I quite honestly feel that the much-maligned clergy of today are the best clergy we have ever had. There are perverts and sinners in the ranks of modern day clergy but the vast majority, particularly the parishes around here, which I would know, these are great priests and they have come to the aid of those who are in distress, sexual distress, mental distress, financial, they're there now to the hilt to back you up. That has to be said because it is the truth. They have more than compensated for any acts they may have committed in the black thirties and forties.

I would have been a communicant all my life, all my life. I had some difficulties at times getting absolution but got it nevertheless. They'd ask you about how far you were proceeding in a fairly heavy courtship. What you did, where you placed your hand, where the lace and the... and so forth and so on. It mightn't seem like much now, a laughing stock really but at that time they were an embarrassment.

Not quite prurient but near enough to being prurient.

The imagination as far as love and sex is concerned should be left to run riot because after all it's only the imagination, it's only fantasising. But as you know, at the time, by thought, word or deed were the major sins. You couldn't think about sex, talk about it or do anything about it.

Cheek-to-cheek dancing

I was telling a story the other night about sex at the time. There was an outbreak in this parish, I suppose it was in the early forties, of cheek-to-cheek dancing which leads eventually to belly-to-belly dancing and to all sorts of physical and sexual contortions as a result of the initial cheek-to-cheek dancing but some priest came down from Limerick to give us a mission anyway and there was a night that time during missions called "dirt track night" when sex was discussed and anyway, my brother Eamon when he was coming around the square, having spent most of the mission in the public house after hearing the main sermon and he was stopped by the Parish priest who was a bit of a character and he said "Well Ned, what did you think of that tonight?" And the two missioners were with the priest, and Eamon said to him, "his ecclesiastical fulminations would have the same effect on the morale of the people of Listowel as the droppings of an underfed blackbird on the water levels of the Grand Cooley Dam. The priest gave a little clap, the two boys were mesmerised. Mesmerised.

But it would give you an indication of the liberality in the town at the time and the greater appreciation of a good phrase or a good linkage of words because the language we still speak here as you know, is a special language. I would have to deliberately slow myself down if I met people from abroad and when I went on radio and television first, people couldn't understand me because of the speed of my output, my delivery, you know. It was a marriage of old Irish and old English. The Elizabethans came here in the 1600s, sacked the castle and left us our language. The language of North Kerry was baldic Irish, a sort of Irish Mandarin, same as the Chinese, they were the scribes. I think these two languages fused here and there are eminent authorities who agree with me. That is why I feel that we have not many races here. I only discovered this in recent times, we write almost the same was as we speak.

God-given gifts

My father use to say to me "John, all the great plays and all the great poems, they've all been written, and all the great novels", and he'd quote Scott and Dickens and we had a little library next to the kitchen in our house where he'd have a couple of hundred books, maybe four hundred, all Dickens of course, Scott, almost any writers at the time, you could imagine we read all of those say at the age of fifteen, which was a great asset and my father was a great critic. He wasn't a severe critic but if you wrote a poem, he'd never scoff and these were childish attempts. But bit by bit we were starting to learn our trade, some of us. Eamon was a fine writer but he abandoned it for acting.

There was never a question of me abandoning everything for writing. The opposite, so maybe I'm not a true artist. The other things are more important to me certainly as a person because of my own make-up and the need I have for family contact and family love but on the other hand much would have been lost if the true artist hadn't made those terrible sacrifices to press on with their God-given gifts at the expense of families and friends.

Politics and politicians

James Dillon asked me one time if I would stand for Fine Gael in the constituency and I did seriously consider it for a while. But a close friend of mine, a member then, Gerard Lynch, decided that he wanted to go and he asked me to support him.

My mother was a member of Cumann na mBan during the War of Independence. When the Civil War began, her family both took the treaty side so I inherited my mother's policies. My father was not quite apolitical but he would probably have voted Fine Gael but quite capable of voting for somebody else just as I would be in a local election, capable of voting for a Fianna Fáil friend and I inherited that from my mother as well because I found that all those men I met on both sides of the divide in this Civil War retained a great friendship and a great love for each other. They would vote for each other occasionally, Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael, but it was a sort of brotherhood, despite the fact that brother fought brother.

I admired James Dillon. He was a fine orator. He made many memorable speeches here in Listowel and all over and he spent nearly an hour trying to convince me to stand for politics. Over the years I'd say certainly the Cosgraves, WT Cosgrave and his son, Liam Cosgrave, would have impressed me. I am very fond of Charles J Haughey, I have a great regard for him, I found him a good friend when friends were needed and were scarce. I'd be a friend, always will be. What he has done and is alleged to have done is none of my business. You don't take those things into account when you measure friendships and I would say that I'll always be a friend of Charlie's.

I'd have a lot of other friends in politics as well. I have great regard for Garret Fitzgerald. I am very fond of Tommy Mac's family, Tommy McEllistrum. Gerard Lynch (the former Fine Gael TD for Kerry North), of course, who's one of my best friends. Jack Lynch was a very good friend of mine. His wife Máirín was a particular friend of mine. She was a fan of mine, a lovely woman.

Pride in the work

I was very hurt at the time when the Abbey turned down Sive. I sent them a second play and my wife and I, we stuck two pages together and when we got back, both pages were still stuck together so it only had a cursory reading, you know. Whoever was reading it wasn't really paying attention.

The work I'm proudest of? Probably the play The Field. I put a lot into that, it wrecked me when I was writing it, we were threatened with a bomb. I thought that the greatest night for me in the theatre was when Ray McAnally played the part of the Bull in the first production of the play in the Olympic Theatre and I remember he came on the stage that night and in a beautiful gesture, he withdrew an imaginary sword from his belt and held it aloft and he said "Signore Keane, Bull is a for you". He was a brilliant, brilliant man. I found him a wonderful man – again with tremendous alcoholic problems.

Big Maggie, Year of the Hiker, Many Men of Twenty. I remember some Ministers walked out of that play when it was put on in Dublin, you know. One Minister and his entourage walked out.

Regrets and mortality

I have regrets that I couldn't do more for my father when he was alive. He did so much for me. I didn't have the finances at the time, although he was well off, he had a good pension. I did get a chance to do some things for him. I loved them both physically, both my parents. They were very attached to one another.

I've had cancer recently and that's about three years ago and then unfortunately it came back again and it spread to the bladder but I had radiotherapy and the radiotherapy was a success and disastrous side effects at times, such as diarrhoea and water and everything and I'd say the sorest, how will I described that, the sorest real aperture that any man in Ireland ever had. It was literally burned out of me but I went to my doctor again the other day now and the cancer count has gone up a little again but he's not alarmed. You live with it.

I was never scared by it, I'd be too close to my maker to be scared of something like that. I think I could accept that. I wouldn't like it to come for a while yet but I could fully accept it because I had a great relationship with my own ancestry, I pray regularly and pray for them, in fact, it would be unthinkable for me to pass a church. I call to the local convent church here a couple of times a day and say many prayers, so I have a close affinity, if you like, with my religious inheritance and despite having criticised the church so trenchantly over so many years, I still have a great regard for it.

The church is a survivor. It was built around the actions, the examples, the sinnings and the influences of the greatest man in my estimate who ever lived, Christ, and if you were to ask me this minute, what time would I have lived by a choice, I'd say I would love to have sat and heard the original sermon on the mount delivered by Christ because that is a great sermon and any man who tries to observe those wonderful recommendations in that has a great opportunity to live a full life. But, at the same time, there's a lot of mischief in me as well. I'm a bit of a lad, I'm not a saint by any manner of means, far from it. I am the opposite of a saint, maybe, in many ways but I do have a desire, although God isn't going to be taken in by the last minute repentance of a scoundrel, I have great hopes.p

Published with the kind permission of RTÉ