Literary Criticism: These critical pieces - from The Irish Times, Hibernia and the London Magazine for the most part - have an air not of commissioned work or arbitrary choice but of careful selectivity; they are literary journalism at its best. The author of Langrishe, Go Down isn't throwing his old book reviews together to make a book but picking from among them to make a point.
The point has to do with style, in both the literary and human meanings of the word; as ever, Joyce and Beckett, Kafka and Borges are his touchstones (OED, touchstone: "dark schist or jasper used for testing gold etc"). His own style, a startling combination of elegant mandarin and brisk demotic, "takes the breath out of you", says Annie Proulx, and he looks for something comparable in the work of others. Does he find it? Yes, in his old heroine Djuna Barnes; in Faulkner, Bellow, Pritchett, Cheever, Trevor and Joseph (not Philip) Roth. Djuna, indeed, appears on the Dalkey Archive list together with Henry Green, Céline and other singular or "experimental" authors like Ralph Cusack and Christine Brooke-Rose.
This unusual and commendable American publishing house, located at Illinois State University, its titles distributed over here by Turnaround (UK), has recently re-issued Higgins's A Bestiary (2004), Flotsam & Jetsam (2005) andBornholm Night-Ferry (2006), and clearly intends to keep his work in print. They might have checked the proofs with greater care - though the many misprints that give the volume its provisional and aleatoric character, like much of his other work, come to seem almost deliberate.
The quizzical asperity that features so often at satirical moments in his fiction takes the form here of sometimes withering scorn. Erica Jong writes like Helen Gurley Brown, somebody else like Vicki Baum (Grand Hotel, 1929), though Jong and Baum are better than that. Updike gets it in the neck, thrice, and even those of whom Higgins seems to approve (Donleavy, Ballard, Burgess) would need to look closely to be sure they are not deceived. Irony and arrière-pensée are everywhere; also a favourite Higgins device, the straight-faced delivery of gratuitous and barely relevant information: "Joyce and Moore maintained exaggeratedly courteous relations until Moore's death, when Joyce sent a wreath inscribed: 'To George Moore from James Joyce'". Inscrutable, he often simply "tells the story" in his own pithy words and, non-committal, leaves us "gentle skimmers" to deduce the verdict from the noise. The device is that of a novelist. Odd scraps, bits and pieces, flotsam and jetsam preserved by memory or annotation for their appropriate moment, these cryptic interpolations are more to the point than they seem; in a sense they are the point, for this is not so much a collection of criticism as a reader's diary, an author's notebook, a record of writerly thought, an exercise in attitude and tone.
These windy arbours (we know where it is but the title remains a mystery) are thus implicitly autobiographical, like all Higgins's work, and indeed are most fun when the author makes a personal appearance, as in 'The Faceless Creator' and 'Burgess at the Savoy'. The first of these, a paper read at the Glucksman Ireland House, New York University, is a brilliant tour de force, a comical exposition of the theory that the creative personality is necessarily obscure; there is no face. (Your correspondent was there and can testify to the hilarity of the occasion.) Higgins claims that as a young man he travelled free on Dublin buses by making himself invisible. VS Naipaul can do it too: "Out of the press of freeloaders, publishers' narks, nervous agents, bright publicity poppets, blurb writers and such riffraff, who materialized before me but . . . V.S. Naipaul! 'V.S. Naipaul!', I cried, both hands up as if beholding a vision. But V.S. was having none of this malarkey. He caused himself to vaporize before me. One minute he was there, a darkly grimacing presence, and the next he was gone, vanished into thin air." Everyone quoted him but "nobody knew" what Myles na gCopaleen looked like. (He had a round, pale kind of a non-face under the hat.) There were no photographs of Beckett in those days.
The philosopher and aphorist Arland Ussher, his Journal published by Raven Arts in 1981, had a self-effacing face, and a droll personality evoked by Higgins who sat at his feet, or at least at his table. (Beckett to Higgins: "Despair young and never look back; for wisdom see Arland Ussher".) The Berkeley of Blackrock "claimed to be distantly related to Nell Gwynn and thus in line to the throne of England. The railwaymen at Merrion Gates trembled for his safety: Ussher alone and plunged in thought on the tracks, and the Wexford train pounding in". The artist Patrick Collins had a face all right. When Higgins first knew him he lived at Howth Castle, smoked "Diskey Blew", liked spicy rashers which he cooked by dropping them into a wood fire: "He loved wild birds, first and last light, mystical nature who is commanded by obeying her". Higgins attaches great importance to children's literature, whether written for or by. His three sons, in their early years, compiled and illustrated a book of "yarns" entitled Colossal Gongorr and the Turkes of Mars (Cape, 1979), and their dad's introduction is a masterpiece of empathy and tact. If we didn't know it already from his autobiographical work, we would be surprised and impressed by his evident total recall of the childhood gestalt (one defination of genius): "The brink, the abyss itself, is very close in a child's early feelings, experienced as a condition of convalescence. The blue- shadowed wall towards the end of a long summer's day, the emptied city and the deserted home; the sense of dread, things in abeyance. In the silence that settles over nature, human cries go straight up like hair rising on a terrified scalp". His visual sense is strong; he likes Tintin: "Few comic strips were ever lit so well: the mysterious Egyptian twilight in Cigars of the Pharaoh, the sunset of clouds above a Scottish port in The Black Island. They fairly glow; long black Citroëns glide by in the rain".
The author's familiar enthusiasms (travel, cricket, gin) signal their presence. Quotations are generous and well chosen, epigrams frequent: "Notions of vulgarity vary from vulgarian to vulgarian". A story by Donald Barthelme is "calculated to make a griffin grin". The abrupt mode is catching. Barnes's birth at Cornwall-on-Hudson was never recorded. Burgess smoked Danish cigars, the same brand as Beckett. The author once missed Hergé in a London bookshop. Add this to your Higgins shelf; "for a full list of publications visit www.dalkeyarchive.com".
Derek Mahon's most recent book is Adaptations, a collection of translations, published by The Gallery Press last month
Windy Arbours: Collected Criticism By Aidan Higgins Dalkey Archive Press, 308pp. £15.99