Culture ShockFintan O'TooleAidan Higgins's first novel received huge acclaim in the 1960s, but his hunger for fame and fortune remained unsatisfied
In his autobiography, the publisher John Calder describes Aidan Higgins, whose masterly novel Langrishe, Go Down, he accepted on the recommendation of Samuel Beckett, as a young man "greedy for fame and the money he expected to go with it". Higgins would not have been unusual in that regard, and there was every reason, in the early 1960s, to believe he would get what he wanted. Calder describes the reaction to Langrishe, Go Down at the Frankfurt Book Fair in 1962. He found a note awaiting him from Giangiacomo Feltrinelli, who had turned Dr Zhivago and The Leopard into huge commercial, as well as literary, successes. It said "I sat up all night reading Aidan Higgins's marvellous novel. I am willing to make you an important offer for it right away." As he was reading it, Calder was tapped on the shoulder by a Swedish publisher: "I too would like to buy this wonderful novel." By the end of the day, Calder had sold the rights to the novel for virtually every major European country.
Aidan Higgins was the coming literary man, not just in Ireland, but throughout Europe.
Such sensations come and go, of course, but in Higgins's case there was substance behind the hype. Langrishe, Go Down still reads superbly. Higgins's story of four ageing sisters in an increasingly decrepit Big House in Celbridge, Co Kildare in the 1930s, is a genuine classic. It sustains with apparent ease the stylistic precision of its opening words: "The lights in the bus burned dim, orange-hued behind opaque bevelled glass . . ."
Those first pages, in which Helen Langrishe travels by bus from Dublin to Celbridge, could be given to any aspiring novelist as a lesson in economical exposition. A world is established in a few strokes: the context of the Spanish Civil War, the desultory conversations of the passengers, the geographic co-ordinates of the location, above all the personal displacement and social marginalisation of this woman. And the same sense of absolute control remains throughout the book, in its brilliant handling of time, its perfect balance of sharp detail and delicate, evanescent emotion. Reading it now, you can still understand why the novel was greeted so enthusiastically by publishers, and why a writer of Harold Pinter's stature was willing to adapt it for television.
Yet, as can be seen from the relatively muted marking of Higgins's 80th birthday this year, his hunger for fame and money remained unsatisfied. This weekend's celebratory symposium in Celbridge means, at least, that Higgins is being honoured while he is alive. He was given an honorary degree by UCC a few years back, and some of his books are being brought back into print by the adventurous Dalkey Archive imprint in the US and by New Island, which launches a new edition of Langrishe, Go Down this weekend. But this modest revival comes after long decades of a neglect that could scarcely have been imagined in the 1960s.
The most obvious reason for that neglect is Higgins's disinclination to repeat what he had achieved with Langrishe, Go Down. That novel has echoes of Joyce and Beckett (and also of Djuna Barnes and Paul Bowles) but it is both accessible and highly achieved. It is a perfect modern novel, so good that it left Higgins little left to do in the same form. It is also a kind of distanced autobiography. The house in the book, Springfield, is the house in which Higgins grew up as part of a family of wealthy Catholic upstarts who were well on the way to becoming downstarts as his father's money ran out. The Langrishes had lived there throughout the 19th century but were long gone, and the Langrishe sisters in the novel are, as Higgins later explained, "my brothers and myself in drag".
For his subsequent work, Higgins stepped out of drag, and created a series of works that hover self-consciously between fiction and autobiography. His subject was memory itself and the constant, almost obsessive, reinvention of his parents, his brothers and himself. As he explains in A Bestiary, a collection of his three volumes of imaginative memoir, he "found that he could bring dead people back to life. Even when treated in a fictional manner, they came back to life. He could bring them closer." This quest, though, made Higgins's work increasingly impossible to categorise and it fell between the cracks. Much of what makes him so interesting is the way he defies definition, but that is also what makes him harder for critics to grasp and publishers to sell. A memoir such as Donkey's Years reads like fiction and a novel such as Bornholm Night Ferry reads like autobiography. A Protestant Big House writer makes sense, but a Catholic Big House writer? We can understand restless wanderers or those who stick with familiar ground, but what of someone who writes always about his own family, while moving relentlessly through London and Berlin, Spain and Norway, South Africa and Celbridge? How can someone deal in intimacies while his work is also saturated with local, Irish and European history? Higgins's very style, memorably described by Derek Mahon as "a startling combination of elegant mandarin and brisk demotic", pushes against definition. Fame and money may elude those who practise such elusiveness, but energy and achievement do not.