The quiet passing of Aidan Higgins in the closing days of 2015 brought to a close the life of one of Ireland’s finest writers and the question of his legacy has inevitably shaped the ensuing commentary.
In recent decades Higgins remained something of a peripheral figure in the literary world, in part because critics and readers seemed to not quite know how to categorise him. As Annie Proulx has observed, “Some pair him gingerly with Joyce and Beckett, some accuse him of not having yet written the Total Book, or of untidy endings, of density and melancholy, of abrupt stops and over-portrayal of frustration and accidie”.
Many commentators repeatedly return to the first novel, Langrishe, Go Down (1960), with John Banville emphatic in his praise of Higgins’ “masterpiece” and Derek Mahon referring to it as “an outstanding work of the time and a modern classic”. And Langrishe, winner of the Jame Tait Black Memorial Prize, was indeed a major success when first published. Morris Beja, in 1973, described Higgins as “one of the most important Irish novelists writing today”, which reminds one of the esteem in which his work was held at the time, largely because of Langrishe Go Down, later adapted for the screen by Harold Pinter.
Nowadays, Langrishe is often viewed as the early masterpiece while Balcony of Europe (1972) offers evidence of dissipating creative energy and an experiment gone badly wrong, and other such vague generalities. Much of the muffled criticism of Balcony over the years is fixed on the rather tired cliche of highly-promising artist turned profligate. The 10 or so books that followed Balcony of Europe gradually found their place in this lazy logic and each new novel rapidly slipped out of view.
But Higgins himself, perhaps a little harshly, had long considered Langrishe to be quite constrained and static. This is not least because the form that the novel takes, a variation on the big house genre, has natural associations with a specific, linear (Irish and European) historical focus. Compared with the ruminating, adventurous consciousnesses that emerged in the subsequent novels, Langrishe does appear more ordered and tame, perhaps closer to the realist Irish tradition. Its Irish setting, unlike most of his fiction thereafter, also ensured a recognisable critical and readerly context. Even the grand master, James Joyce, planted his experiments in an Irish landscape, after all.
The consequence of lazy assessment (a professor of Irish literature once suggested to me that Higgins stopped writing after Balcony of Europe) is that most of the extraordinary work, after Langrishe, remains largely critically invisible, despite the fact that almost everything remains in print – primarily due to the efforts of the American publisher, Dalkey Archive Press, which will also reissue his 1983 novel Lions of the Grunewald this year. Several of these works merit special attention: Balcony of Europe was a deeply ambitious novel that attempted to record Dan Ruttle’s experiences without freezing them in a confined, fixed order. The human reception of experience is an intensely complex process, the novel suggests, via its “instant fictionalisation” technique – essentially Higgins wrote out his daily life as it happened, over a period of years, but from a series of oblique angles, repeatedly testing the limits of what close fictive observation can achieve.
The two novels that Higgins published between 1983 and 1993, Bornholm Night-Ferry and Lions of the Grunewald, extended the formal range of his innovative work even more. The deeply autobiographical Bornholm Night-Ferry, perhaps one of the most extraordinary epistolary novels of the 20th century, is composed of a sequence of love letters shared by Elin and Fitzy, Danish poet and Irish novelist, respectively. The sense of a self-contained textual universe is beautifully rendered by the separated lovers as they poetically seek to recover each other in print or, as Fitzy writes, “If I cannot have you all in one piece, mail me bits of you. Du.” In terms of its technical achievement, almost scandalous insights into the two characters’ private thoughts, and the blending of life, text and longing, the novel is an astonishing achievement, unlike anything written by an Irish writer post-Beckett.
Lions of the Grunewald, a “missionary stew” in narrator Weaver’s words, is an elaborate collage of straight plot, historical gossip, anecdotes, memories, dreams, lists, selections of his children’s writing (and a child’s sketch), and a continuous spinning-top of circularity, return and echo, all of which rotates around the central pull of love and its loss. The primary plot eventually disintegrates into a series of imagistic moments and everything radiates from the memory of love: “The other day I was thinking of you; or rather of Nullgrab, that quartered city you love so much, which amounts to the same thing.”
Higgins’ life had long been used as material for his art but with Balcony of Europe, Bornholm Night-Ferry, and Lions of the Grunewald his life was no longer simply plundered as material, it was itself conceived of as fiction – life itself became comprehensible only as a form of fiction or, as the late Dermot Healy once observed about Higgins’ later work, “At last Higgins has succeeded in giving himself the fictional life he was always seeking.”
In each of the post-Langrishe, Go Down novels, having tired of the vanity of mere invention, the main characters are barely fictionalised versions of Higgins himself and there is a continual sense that reality is already an elaborate fiction.
Higgins’ trilogy of autobiographies, published between 1995 and 2000, and in one volume – A Bestiary – in 2004, confirms the aesthetic logic of the late novels. In the opening lines to part 1 of the trilogy, Donkey’s Years, for example, he explicitly declares his position: “I am consumed by memories and they form the life of me; stories that make up my life and lend it whatever veracity and purpose it may have.” Higgins’ autobiographies deserve far more attention as innovative classics of the autobiography genre. The infusing of the fluidity of memory and the strangeness of lived experience into (ostensibly) the telling of a life-story has a dizzying effect on the tale-telling – it is very clear that the distinctions between fiction and autobiography had long since ceased to be stark for Higgins.
Aidan Higgins continually confounded readerly expectations by refusing to meet them. The assumption that he wrote his best book first is fused to the idea that what followed was somehow diffuse, incoherent – but such observations are only valid when measured against the kind of achievement that Langrishe represented, and derived from essentially conservative aesthetic tastes. Higgins knew this and sought, like the predecessors beside whom he should be properly considered, Joyce and Samuel Beckett, to continually expand his aesthetic range.
He wrote several fictional masterpieces after Langrishe and a trilogy of autobiographies that too are extraordinary, innovative achievements. One can only hope that these major works eventually attract appropriate levels of attention and will, in turn, extend the range of our understanding of what Irish literature is. Higgins was a citizen of the world long before our current battalions of émigré writers and his works reflected this in ways that even Joyce’s did not. He repeatedly reminds us of the essentially cosmopolitan DNA that features so heavily in the Irish genetic-imaginative code and, more importantly perhaps, that the connection between our lives and the way we talk of them is an endlessly fascinating, mutable process. Where the writing goes we must travel beyond ourselves in order to follow it and Higgins’ work has always asked that of his readers – and it is for precisely that reason we should read and treasure him.
Neil Murphy is the editor of Aidan Higgins: The Fragility of Form (2010) and of the revised edition of Higgins’s Balcony of Europe (2010). More recently he has co-edited (with Keith Hopper) Dermot Healy: The Collected Short Fiction and a new scholarly edition of Healy’s first novel, Fighting with Shadows (both Dalkey Archive Press, 2015). He is professor of Irish and English literature at NTU Singapore
