The Captain with the Whiskers by Benedict Kiely

First published: 1960

Type of work: Romance

Time of work: Probably the late 1940’s to the early 1950’s

Locale: Northern Ireland and Dublin

Principal Characters:

• Owen Rodgers, the narrator and protagonist, a lover and hotelier
• Captain Conway Chesney, Owens baleful mentor
• Maeve Chesney, the captain’s daughter and Owen’s beloved
• Doctor Grierson, a local priest, scholar, and drunkard
• Lucy, Owen’s first girlfriend and eventual wife

The Novel

The Captain with the Whiskers recounts the experiences of loyal, trusting Owen Rodgers with the world, the flesh, and the devil. The author, however, has succeeded in preventing the work from being as excessively schematic as such a bald description of its contents might suggest. With exemplary skill, he has woven an inescapable net of interrelationships between those three fateful terms by giving them a single origin. This origin is the captain with the whiskers, Conway Chesney, and even though he dies unexpectedly quite early in the novel, it is his oppressive shadow which poisonously conditions all that follows.

Not only does the captain contaminate his own family, but also he finds innocent Owen irresistible, with the result that although he is, strictly speaking, an outsider, Owen is as seriously affected by the captain’s influence as are the captain’s children. Not for nothing is Owen frequently referred to by the various Chesney children as “one of us.” The bulk of the novel, in fact, is an account of Owen’s helpless involvement with his dissolute Chesney contemporaries.

The most serious of these entanglements is Owen’s heartbreaking affair with Maeve Chesney, the captain’s daughter. Forsaking the rather predictable Lucy, Owen conducts an impossibly idealistic romance with Maeve. The denial of the flesh, on Owen’s part, which is at the heart of the affair, denotes his unworldliness, both in principle and, with more painful relevance, in practice, since it does not correspond to Maeve’s own sexual ethics. Such a denial, however, is also a reminder of Owen’s desire to preserve something intact from the wreck of the Chesney family brought about by the captain’s death. This wreckage is evident in the various forms of promiscuity and suppression in which Maeve’s brothers and sister indulge.

His affair with Maeve is the centerpiece of Owen’s adult experience, and its inevitable anticlimax is both an embodiment of the captain’s legacy and a testament to the fate of devotion, self-sacrifice, and high-mindedness in a reality which is nothing if not squalid. Owen’s defeat by the flesh is a counterpart to his defeat by the world. Had he pursued his medical studies in Dublin, he would have created an alternative world to that bequeathed him by the captain. His medical studies repel him, however, and he retreats to what his experiences invite the reader to regard as the spoiled Eden of his native place—the serpent, and begetter of original sin, being Captain Chesney, whose appearance has a number of unobtrusive satanic features.

Eventually, Owen becomes the manager of a local hotel, an occupation containing appropriate resonances of shelter and privacy. Yet, as though to emphasize how firmly the protagonist is ensnared by the fate of the Chesneys, little in detail of Owen’s hotel work is provided. The world of practicalities which his professional duties inevitably entails is, by implication, a pretext for his more compelling personal commitments. Thus, by the end of the novel, although Owen is a successful Dublin hotel owner and has made what would appear to be an adequate transition to a productive adult life, the salient point remains that Owen’s earlier experiences have spiritually wounded him. This point is made by an unexpected encounter between Owen and a Maeve flawed by the years and is underlined by the information, conveyed in passing, that Owen’s wife, Lucy, counterpart throughout the novel to his own innocence and givingness, has died.

Such an ending emphasizes the cumulative presence of death and destruction which determined the development of The Captain with the Whiskers. Nothing works out for Owen. The apparent autonomy with which he explored the world and the flesh was, from the outset, undermined by the satanic influence of Captain Chesney.

The Characters

Despite the reader’s comparatively brief acquaintance with the captain, he overshadows all other characters in this novel. Unlike those other characters, his power derives from a concerted application of his will. His children—and Owen notes how deliberately the captain uses the possessive pronoun when speaking of Maeve and her siblings—are literally regimented into submissive obedience. The captain drills and disciplines them with a tyrannical style usually reserved for raw military recruits. His rather obsessive need to behave in this manner is only in part a result of his own military background. In addition, he espouses an unexamined admiration for German methods and attitudes. More important, perhaps, the remarkable consistency of his malevolence is an expression of a philosophical despair which deems moot the value of life itself.

At the other end of the novel’s moral spectrum is the whiskey priest, Doc tor Grierson. His intellectual sophistication and gentle ways have condemned him to the rural backwater of the novel’s principal action. Here he is unable and perhaps unwilling to assert himself. Such passivity, the result, it seems, of his being a victim of an oppressive system (namely, the hierarchy of the Irish Catholic Church), is not to be judged adversely in the context of this novel’s overall vision. It provides the doctor with a love of nature and of what is natural in man. It enables him to dabble in things of the mind, without developing a program of restrictive rules by which to live, ostensibly on behalf of those things. The reader is left in no doubt that the doctor’s avowed, though rather stereotyped, Francophilia is infinitely preferable to the captain’s Germanic severity. As though to confirm the essential benevolence of the good doctor’s powerlessness, he is a dear friend of Owen’s father, so much so that they seem to be brothers.

Owen has to deal with these various influences. While this is the case for all the young people in this populous novel, the protagonist seems to be the confluence and creation of these influences. Somewhat unnervingly, Owen seems less to have a personality of his own than he has an acute sensitivity to the moral polarities personified by the various father figures in his life. Thus, while all the other characters, be they ever so minor, go about their lives, however fated, Owen seems destined merely to observe his life as it continues to have its shape determined by the designs of others. His unnerving combination of passivity and duplicity has its most telling effect on his sexuality, though in ways which the novel declines to develop fully.

It is the play of forces which Owen embodies, rather than his own distinctive, individual force, which places him at the center of the novel. Trapped in the middle of the moral spectrum, Owen is obliged to experience life problematically. Although this imperative, which he involuntarily and unself-consciously accepts, has the result of breaking his heart, he conveys the condition of maturity, its manifold imperfections and responsibilities, in such a way as to make the power of the elders, for all of its unavoidability, ultimately hollow and totemic.

Critical Context

It is a commonplace of Irish literary history to note the lean and hungry years of the immediate postwar period. In particular, hardly anything of note is thought to have happened to the Irish novel in the 1950’s. Like all critical generalizations, this view of Irish fiction obscures much with its modicum of truth. Benedict Kiely, for one, is an exception to the rule, and the work which he produced during the dull decade (of which The Captain with the Whiskers, his seventh novel, is a fine example) helped to keep alive certain constants in the Irish novel, and in particular the Ulster novel, at a time when both were ailing.

The constants in question do not belong only to the Irish and Ulster novels: They are very much part of Kiely’s own artistic stock in trade. Among them might be noted, first, a devotion to the Bildungsroman, the novel of growth through experience which is Romanticism’s major contribution to the development of the novel form. It is difficult to think of a Kiely (or an Irish) novel which does not owe something to this important genre. Kiely gives the genre a characteristically personal twist in The Captain with the Whiskers by treating the theme of growth in the light of experience as a thoroughly problematic one.

The Captain with the Whiskers also expresses the love of place which is typical of Kiely’s work and which is also a staple of Ulster fiction. Not the least of Captain Chesney’s crimes against humanity is that his ruined heirs unwittingly despoil their native hearth and heath. As though to underline the precious quality of man’s relations with nature, the novel quotes liberally from the ballads and tales of folk memory, which is also typical of Kiely’s narrative strategy.

The political turmoil which has beset Kiely’s native province of Ulster since 1968 has had the effect of earning for his work a wider audience than it hitherto possessed. The Captain with the Whiskers, apart from its numerous incidental pleasures of pace, tone, and its rather broadly conceived theme, is a worthwhile introduction to the world and vision of one of contemporary Ireland’s most noted novelists.

Bibliography

Casey, Daniel J. Benedict Kiely, 1974.

Colum, Padraic. Review in Saturday Review. XLV (January 6, 1962), p. 67.

Eckley, Grace. Benedict Kiely, 1972.

Moran, J. F. Review in Library Journal. LXXXVI (December 15, 1961), p. 4308.

The New Yorker. Review. XXXI (June 9, 1962), p. 137.

Stern, James. Review in The New York Times Book Review. XLV (October 15, 1961), p. 5.