At 762 pages in the Methuen edition, the weight and the heft of The Collected Stories of Benedict Kiely virtually guarantee that Kiely will be best remembered as a writer of short fiction. Moreover, that gathering ensures that he will be remembered as a writer deeply and affectionately invested in what he has referred to as 'that first, best country that ever is at home': (1) in his case, 'Omagh in the County Tyrone, and ... the verdant land around that Town and ... the people, therein and thereon, living and dead, that I knew'. (2) Indeed, with only a few exceptions, story after story in that great volume resonates with the author's own version of the obsessive spirit of the narrator's father in 'A Journey to the Seven Streams', the title story of Kiely's first collection, published in 1963: 'My father, the heavens be his bed, was a terrible man for telling you about the places he had been and for bringing you there if he could and displaying them to you with a mild and gentle air of proprietorship'. (3) This proprietary perspective takes on its greatest import, of course, in Proxopera, the concluding narrative in The Collected Stories, in which the protagonist Mr Binchey clearly speaks for the author in staking his personal claim on the politically contested territory of Northern Ireland. Resenting and resisting the demands made by the nationalist paramilitaries holding his family hostage until he delivers to the nearby town (ostensibly Omagh) a creamery can filled with explosives, Mr Binchey declares his independence from wantonly destructive political ideology: 'The world is in wreckage and these madmen would force me to extend that wreckage to my town below, half-asleep in the valley, my town, asleep like a loved woman on a morning pillow, my town, my town, my town'. (4) But such literary affection for Omagh and environs on Kiely's part either implied or stated--was not always the case. In fact, Kiely's first two novels, both published in the 1940s in the wake of his relocation to Dublin (permanently, as it turns out), express an overt antipathy toward 'that first, best country' that actually illuminates the nature of his far more equable engagement with the same place and time in his short stories beginning little more than a decade later. As early as 1950, in his chapter on 'Exiles' in his book Modern Irish Fiction, Kiely claimed that 'The Irish expatriate writer cannot ... consistently abuse his country from a distance'. Elaborating, he asserted:
