The remains of Miss Emily Norton Kervick were committed to the grave one cold day in March of 1927. On that morning – the third – a Mass for the Dead had been offered for the repose of her soul, and she was buried without delay in Griffenwrath cemetery.” Thus did Aidan Higgins, in 1960, make his ceremonious debut with a fine short story entitled “Killachter Meadow”, about the decline of, yes, a Big House near Celbridge, County Kildare, a theme taken up at greater length and to memorable effect in his first novel Langrishe, Go Down (1966), an outstanding work of the time and a modern classic. It won the James Tait Black Memorial Prize, quite a thing then, and established its author as Ireland’s finest contemporary prose stylist. (It has now been reissued by New Island.) Traditionally, as with Elizabeth Bowen and J. G. Farrell, the Big House novel concerns an “Anglo-Irish” family, urgent political events bearing on the immediate situation, and preferably a good old blaze in the final pages. Langrishe, Go Down is at an angle to this. The family, once Protestant and now Catholic, have grand but distant connections, political events (the rise of fascism in Europe) seem far away, and instead of incendiarism there is entropy.
Set in the 1930s, in De Valera’s Ireland, the novel traces the last days of the once prosperous Langrishes of Springfield House, now reduced to a trio of shabby-genteel sisters. Helen, the eldest and least irresponsible, has consulted their Dublin solicitor about the financial situation and been advised that they will have to sell the house. The others, silly Lily and lazy Imogen, take the news glumly, without knowing what to do about it: Lily being preoccupied with the hens and Imogen, the youngest, with thoughts of a past fling. Bitter and desolate, Helen dies soon after and the book comes to an end; but, in a long flashback that forms its main substance, we hear the six-year-old story of Imogen and Otto Beck, a visiting German research student: “She had a little touch of colour on her cheeks. An old love had put it there. The memory of past obscenities gave her that rose glow on sallow cheeks when she was old”.
The lovers are beautifully realized. Imogen is a good-natured, ironical, sensual woman not in her first youth, imaginative and discontented. Otto, the same age, is a hard, cold, pedantic, domineering character, impressive, annoying and dangerous: “He runs his tongue over his dry lips like a fox licking its chops”. An outlandish, “legendary” figure (“that face among the leaves”) with green eyes and red hair, he wears corduroy and dirty tennis shoes without socks: “Vengeful manner, cruel lover; I wouldn’t mind being his trollop”. He lives rent-free in the back lodge, made available to him by Major Langrishe, the women’s father, since deceased. Perched in a tree-top, he observes Imogen at her flighty “air baths” in the woods. Together they spend “gin days” and summer nights till the rows begin. His manners are brusque, his views peremptory and severe; he speaks of “culturally inferior” nations: “Oh, he was hard on people”.
An important feature of the novel, and one largely responsible for the stately pace at which the narrative moves, is the leisurely and minute contemplation of the Kildare countryside where it takes place. Helen and Imogen, from snobbery and indolence, are not greatly interested in their surroundings, but “foxy” Otto, naturalist and opportunist, has made himself familiar with the fauna; he takes trout and rabbits and keeps a weather eye on the clouds. The sexton in the local graveyard discourses to morbid Helen on mortality and the swift passage of the centuries, recalling the grand folk thereabouts as far back as Bartholomew Vanhomrigh, “the Dutchman, Vanessy’s da”. The Celbridge of Higgins’s youth is vividly recalled in all its practical detail.
A graduate of Freiburg, Otto is writing a thesis on the eighteenth-century “Ossianic problem” in relation to Goethe. He can tell you about the night sky and the Munich whores with equal detachment; to his foxy eye, life is a hen-run. But for all his brisk information and quickness to learn, he is temperamentally incapable of sharing the organic character, lovingly described by Higgins, of the Springfield demesne and its surroundings. Were the sisters more closely identified with the landscape we might read Langrishe as a parable of sexual politics in the larger, ecological sense; but they too are parasites. The family money came not from the land but from the stock market (American mining shares); their father was no good at running the estate, and now the place is going to rack and ruin. “Such filth and disorder in the old rooms, a smell of poverty, disuse, rotting wainscoting and dirty beds. Wind echoing in the deserted cottage . . . . It looked as if someone had been living there.”
“Killachter Meadow” first appeared in book form in Felo de Se (1960) and reappears in Flotsam and Jetsam, a collection of shorter fiction, travel notes and miscellaneous pieces, as “North Salt Holdings” (the Barony of Salt is in Co Kildare). Another five of the original Felo de Se stories reappear there too, together with reworked material from Balcony of Europe (1972), Helsingor Station (1989) and Ronda Gorge (1989). “Lengthening Shadows”, a grim view of the present state of England, is adapted from a series of “Texts for the Air”, a BBC radio commission. Donkey’s Years (1995), Dog Days (1998) and The Whole Hog (2000), remarkable memoirs now available in one volume as A Bestiary (published, with Flotsam and Jetsam, by Dalkey Archive, distributed in the UK by Turnaround), received less attention than they deserved first time round, and in those reviews that did appear a hostile note was sometimes audible; for Higgins, who is eighty this year, is an austere and often difficult writer, more than a touch old-fashioned, with an astringency that can stir the bile of whippersnappers. He is known for an elaborate and exigent style derived from, among other sources, Elizabethan and Jacobean prose, Swift, Joyce, Djuna Barnes and Beckett. He can be expressionist and baroque, lyrical and grotesque, fastidious and colloquial by turns, and presumes a like-minded “browser” of comparable erudition and unsentimentality. His whole practice and attitude are about as far as one could get from current aesthetics, though it would be wrong to think of him as conservative. Not at all: he is, paradoxically, the most blithely subversive of writers, though grandly aphoristic on occasion: “Absence makes the heart less fond, au fond”; “Notions of vulgarity vary from vulgarian to vulgarian” – not that we bother much about such things now.
Two instances of his picturesque and comically vehement technique. “Asylum” is rife with startling similes: “She sat upright with knees drawn together, her spine curved back like a bow; from the waist up she was as unadorned as the town of Trim, not a stitch anywhere to spare her blushes”. (That Trim, Co Meath, is actually quite decorative need not detain us here.) “Berlin After Dark” has this:
As certain burrowing creatures, in order to gain their ends or to exist at all, are resolved down to one anxious or bitter form of themselves, so his features seemed to narrow down to one place and one gesture; his face was a falling back to function. As winds in their persistence stretch and sharpen boulders, and as these in turn indicate free access to territory beyond, so his features spoke of only one preoccupation, and that preoccupation, venery.
The mock-heroic simile, Homeric in origin, is associated with Pope and Fielding, and it is good to find it alive and kicking in modern Ireland. But what’s it all about?
“We shift about, all that great glory spent” (Yeats, “Coole Park and Ballylee, 1931”). Higgins’s principal theme is the decay of old decency, the atomization of life, personal and social; our decline is figured in sexual chaos, wickedness in these matters being a traditional sign of the end of civilizations. His settings, when not Irish, are typically peripheral London and rural Spain; seaside resorts out of season; winter golf-links, rentier havens and expatriate watering holes – wherever there is a last ditch for the singular, the marginal and the disregarded: for alternative lives. While business proceeds in the financial centres, somewhere an eccentric “spinster” slips Ophelia-like, for the last time, into a river, or a disconsolate exile studies cloud formations, adrift in gin and Unamuno’s “ether of pure speculative contemplation”. Wise to expatriate decadence, like Durrell, Bowles and the rest, Higgins is attentive too to the newer and even more pernicious decadence of universal package tourism: “We shift about”. There is an apocalyptic undertone in everything he writes, however circumstantial or debonair; ominous epiphanies are everywhere. He returns constantly to the same material; it’s all autobiography, “a life as story told”. A Bestiary is the summation of this project, a getting closer to the bone, the persona now that of a curmudgeonly if witty recluse. Despite a good start his reputation, until recently, was a fugitive one, a thing of hearsay among initiates, for he is unfashionably “literary” (his friend Samuel Beckett, alas, thought Langrishe “literary shit”) and detached from the more obvious contemporary fixations, which he views with horror – as he views the “loudly pictorial” future being prepared for us, when the writer’s trade will be “extinct as falconry”.
The Whole Hog is good on Kinsale, where Mountjoy scattered Hugh O’Neill’s Hispano-Gaelic confederacy on Christmas Eve, 1601, and where Higgins now lives. He reports the famous battle as an international rugby match. But the best of A Bestiary is in Donkey’s Years (the account of his mother’s death) and in Dog Days, where the author, in search of peace and quiet after a difficult divorce, returns to Greystones, Co Wicklow, where he spent part of his youth – a locale he re-creates here in the fine opening section, “First Love”. This thirty-four-page overture is a virtuoso short novel in itself, remarkable chiefly for its portrait of the severe though sensual Philippa. Some years her junior, randy “Rory”, as he calls himself, drags her off to sheds and dunes, “the pair of us naked as salmon on the sea-shore, panting, our unchained bikes propped up against the broken fence, one lying on top of the other as if engaged in rapt and silent copulation, the heavy Raleigh on top, the dainty female model underneath”.
Now he spends two years in a borrowed bungalow, his field-watching solitude oddly reminiscent of Otto Beck. He quotes Henry James: “Next to great joy, no state of mind is so frolicsome as great distress”; and there is much here that is frolicsome. Rory has an ear for pub talk; like Beckett he is good on the seasons (“the fields in frantic stir at lambing time, placentas blowing about like refuse . . . saw bullfinch in bush”) and times of day and night. He hears blackbirds, “music that would have delighted Messiaen; it delights me”; and there is life yet in the old art simile: “Combine harvesters working in the dark with powerful headlights; glow of stubble burning in the fields, smoke swirling up: a nocturnal Turner”. He is mostly alone, except when his teenage son comes to visit, or his friend Anastasia from Austin, Texas, where he once taught Creative Writing (“Don’t make me laugh”). Radio, not television, relieves the rural silence. Time for reappraisal, for close attention: “A wren on a fence in the rain; inky clouds at sunset; a white breast feather falls from the sky. Boom of rising wind in the chimney . . . saw sickle moon”. This is the higher vagrancy, in tune with an older reality. “Homeless”, he suggests, is one of the saddest words in the language; yet this is not a sad book but a waiting book, a book of “mysteries, revealed truths we cannot comprehend”.
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Derek Mahon's most recent collection of poems, Adaptations, was published last year.
