Remembering Ireland's Forgotten great novelist
Aidan Higgins, now in his 80s, is one of our most overlooked literary geniuses. Recently he was honoured at an evening in Trinity College where three books by and about him were launched
It is now half a century since Aidan Higgins's first book, Felo de Se (a wondrous collection of six stories) was first published. Not since the publication of early Joyce and early Beckett had a talent so accomplished, so erudite and unblinking, at home in so many realities, appeared in Irish writing. Higgins was the real thing and his stories were evidence and confirmation.
It came as no surprise at all to anyone that "the difficult second book" (so called) arrived six years later in the form of Langrishe, Go Down. That book offered us -- amongst many other pleasures -- Higgins's take on "the big house novel" (presented on this occasion from the perspective of the queasy and tawdry parlour rather than that of the obsequious and conniving kitchen). At the centre of the novel is Imogen Langrishe's unappeasable longing for a larger life than that available to her in the decaying dampness of Celbridge, for something more sustaining and liberating than Otto Beck's predatory masculinity, for horizons wider than those of de Valera's Free State.
Another six years elapsed before Higgins's next novel, the large and challenging Balcony of Europe, which was published (1972) on both sides of the Atlantic. It met with a mixed reception, ranging from positive endorsement to deep perplexity. To some it was an undisciplined "loose, baggy monster" (in Henry James's phrase), to others it was a compendium of much that was or is possible in narrative prose. The book was, apparently, some eight years in the making and took Higgins and his British publisher, John Calder, months to edit to a condition rendering the typescript ready for publication.
Since it first appeared, Higgins has been unhappy with the book, so much so that he would not permit it to be re-issued. Until now, that is.
A new edition of the novel is one of three books published by Dalkey Archive Press and launched recently at a special evening in Trinity College to celebrate Higgins, who was born in 1927. The novel has been revised by the author for this new edition and edited (with an afterword) by Neil Murphy.
The main editorial operation has been to cut out a kind of framing narrative set partly in Dublin and later in the west of Ireland. Some other dream sequences have also been deleted so that the main action is released, so to speak, from surrounding and occluding detail.
In its new form the novel has an epistolary overture singing the praises and cheapness of Nerja in Spain (this in the early 1960s before the arrival of the St Bernard brand and its retail outlet) and its suitability as a bohemian retreat for writers, scholars and other artistic types. Dan Ruttle (an Irish painter in his mid-forties and narrator of the novel) and his wife Olivia move there and join a mixed, expatriate community. In short order, Dan begins an affair with Charlotte Bayless, the young, Jewish wife of an American literary scholar who is working on a book about Byron, Shelley and their amatory high jinks in various European locations.
Higgins does not press the parallells between the book being written by Charlotte's husband, Bob, and Dan Ruttle's account of the bohemian grouping in Nerja. Such matters Higgins leaves to his readers; in fact throughout almost the entire novel the reader is confined exclusively to Ruttle's version of events, his understanding of others and their motives.
Omniscience is a luxury -- or a literary trick -- which Higgins abjures, recognising that we are all stuck within our own consciousness and that the only access we have to another's is an imagined one.
So it is that the novel is composed of a rich, sometimes clotted impasto of detail, of persons, of landscape, of the whole sensory panoply. Ruttle is a painter and his sensibility is finely tuned to his surroundings and firmly fixed on his inamorata. Her hair, her skin, the sounds of her voice, her gestures, the way she moves, her personal history -- all of these are obsessively recorded and hoarded against the time of inevitable parting, of forgetfulness, of dissolution. The banal details of mere carnality are omitted because these are common to all physical encounters whereas Ruttle's Charlotte is wholly unique to him.
And yet Higgins contrives to locate Ruttle and his obsessions in a wider world. The insulated expats live in the Generalissimo's Spain with the parades of the deplorable Falangists goose-stepping in the plazas and the "disappeared" have all been surgically disappeared. Overhead is the 24/7 patrolling of the B-52s of the Strategic Air Command keeping the world safe from red, yellow and other coloured perils. Even the shooting in Dallas leaves an imprint on Ruttle's narrative.
Higgins closes this edition of the novel with another flurry of letters. This time the tonality is diminuendo, lapsing into what the awful Sartre called (and he was a specialist in the area) bad faith. To be born, to be human, to be Dan or Charlotte, is to be contaminated with guilt.
Readers of Higgins have even more cause for celebration now because Dalkey Archive Press has simultaneously published a collection -- Darkling Plain: Texts for the Air, edited by Daniel Jernigan -- of his plays and other writings for radio. In these Higgins cuts loose with all kinds of raucous satire, heady fun and plaintive lyricism. And then there is a highly appreciative volume of essays on his work -- Aidan Higgins: The Fragility of Form, edited by Neil Murphy -- featuring some very distinguished writers and critics.
Gerry Dukes is a writer and critic
Irish Independent
