Des Kenny, a member of the Kenny bookselling family in Galway, is one of the four sons and two daughters of Des and Maureen Kenny, who opened their first bookshop in 1940. Educated in Coláiste Iognáid, Gaillimh, University College, Galway and the Sorbonne, Paris, he has been a bookseller, real and virtual, all his working life. He and his wife Anne have four grown-up children and live in Salthill, Galway.
Galway’s “Fleurs Du Mal”
By Des Kenny
Despite the fact that Fred Johnston does not come from Galway as the biographical note to his collection of short stories entitled “Dancing in the Asylum” wrongly asserts, he has been so long living in the city and has played so large a part in its recent cultural development as the founder of the Cúirt Festival and the director of the Western Writers’ Centre that he has become an integral part of its literary landscape, a fact that is forcibly demonstrated by this powerful collection of stories.
And again, despite the statement in the final sentence of the same blurb that this is Fred Johnston’s first collection of stories – there has been at least one previous one – the stories in “Dancing in the Asylum are by far his most accomplished and the work of a craftsman who has served a long and arduous apprenticeship. These stories are written with a literary power and confidence that is only achieved after many years of hard graft.
The stories are unremittingly dark as intimated by the dedicatory quote taken from Hervé Bazin’s “Vipere au poing”: L’Homme doit vivre tout seul. Aimer c’est abdiquer. Hair c’est s’affirmer. Je suis, je vis” (Man should live alone. To love is to abdicate. To hate is to affirm one self. I am I despise)
Beginning with Pritchard , an alcoholic and wife beater who has lost his job, whose wife has finally left him and who wakes up in an Asylum after a monumental bender not knowing where he is, we move through a wide series of characters who are either losers or are desperate living futile pathetic lives in an uncaring society .
The stories move from the macabre as in the title story through ironic humour to sordid decadence and hopeless gestures as each of the character fight their own demons and though there are occasional brae gestures of defiance, they are rarely successful in their struggle.
Throughout, Johnston shows a deep empathy for his characters. Even at their lowest, the characters show a human resilience as in the finale of “Vancansou” which injects a raw energy into the narration and allows occasional victories.
Overall a general malaise pervades the stories and the volume has strong claims to be for Galway what Charles Baudelaire’s “Les Fleurs du Mal” is for Paris except that it doesn’t quite reach the levels of despair the French classic does.
In “Dancing in the Asylum”, Fred Johnston explores a segment of Galway life that is too often ignored. He does this with wonderful literary skill, understanding, sensitivity and the deft touch of the poet always aware of his character’s humanity and dignity. It is an important, not to say natal, addition to Galway’s literary heritage.
The Galway Review 