Context
Reading Aidan Higgins
Devin Johnston
The writing of Aidan Higgins roams over continents, subjects, and
genres, making it difficult to shelve or classify. In addition to
various novels and short stories, one finds memoirs of a Sligo
childhood in Scenes from a Receding Past; travel literature in Images of Africa (recounting the author’s stint with a touring company of puppeteers);
or the knotty reportage of "Black September," on the 1972 Olympics in
Munich. Despite such variety, genre is itself never at issue: Higgins
has little self-consciousness about literary convention, and rarely
gestures toward the boundaries of a form. His overlapping memoirs,
fictions, and travelogues form a single, singular, wayward prose.
Opening anywhere, one finds an imagist aesthetic of minute attention
and crystalline condensation at work.
Many writers carefully hold the distinct strands of their
stories—beginnings and endings, this and that—a span apart, as one
would the clamps of jumper cables. Higgins’s prose is more often
sparked by the vertiginous collapse of time and space within a single
paragraph. For instance, take this passage from "The Other Day I Was
Thinking of You" in Flotsam and Jetsam, a collection of writings drawn from Higgins’s entire career:
- An autumn of acorns in Highgate Wood and Queens Wood, where
the mass graves for the Plague dead were dug; archaeologists unearth
pottery made by Roman slaves. An autumn of conkers and red berries and
an oldish man saying to his wheezing, waddling old dog: ‘You’re only a
big overgrown puppy, that’s all you are.’
Several millennia of history, along with natural facts and
social observations, are telescoped to a few lines of text. Such
paragraphs are rarely structured around a linear narrative of context,
action, and consequence. Rather, they bring together a constellation of
brilliant particulars, with close attention to the persistence of
sensory experience in memory. As often as not, details are juxtaposed
without transition or exposition: each sentence bristles in a different
direction.
The workings of memory are often themselves Higgins’s implicit subject.
Like Joyce, he is a Homeric cataloguer of quotidian experience: zoos,
the beastiaries and royalties of pubs, newspaper stories, and the
ironies of graffiti are his particular pleasures. In "Lengthening
Shadows (An Elegy for England)," he observes "THUG RULES" and "IMMANUEL
KANT RULES!" and "HOYLE RULES OKAY!" on London walls. Higgins documents
sensory data with an acuity rarely matched, attentive to smell, taste,
and touch as well as sight and sound:
- The chemical composition of skatal, the colatile aromatic
portion of human faeces, is very close to jasmine. These two odors have
a common root. The smell of the lawnmower’s catch at Howth Castle. The
smell of Malaga after rain. A brown ligneous aroma. Like brown
standing-water in the boles of partly rotted trees. Maja-odour, scent
of leaves. Maja-scented evenings, Andalusian summer night, dry earth,
magnolia, vapoury sky. Ambergris. Thermal evenings. (Balcony of Europe)
Through such careful comparisons of odors, we arrive at new
and surprising structures of relation. This is a modernist, empirical
approach to the observed world. Science reduces smells to five
elements—carbon, hydrogen, sulphur, oxygen, and nitrogen; convention
groups them according to use and aesthetics. In distrust of both, a
modernist such as Higgins examines samples of his experience under the
glass slide of attentive prose. He retains some of the procedures and
language of scientific materialism—part chemist, part detective, and in
turn partly parodic—but improvises his own taxonomies of the senses.
The point, in this case, is simply to get at the sensory data of
shit—what a dog might learn—apart from our shame or revulsion.
In thinking through Higgins’s aesthetics, I am reminded of the poetic
value expressed in the second section of Basil Bunting’s "Briggflatts."
He devotes a stanza each to embodiments of taste, sound, and touch,
including for the latter:
- It feels soft, weed thick in the cave
- and the smooth wet riddance of
- Antonietta’s bathing suit, mouth ajar for
submarine Amalfitan kisses.
Yet the act of writing introduces a gap of self-consciousness that can never be mended:
- It looks well on the page, but never
well enough. Something is lost
when wind, sun, sea upbraid
justly an unconvinced deserter.
Aesthetic failure may be, in this sense, necessary to any
literary endeavor. To paraphrase Emerson, Higgins repeatedly
acknowledges the evanescence and lubricity of fact and memory, which
escape our grasp when we clutch the hardest.
The foggy corridors of time can quickly become occasion for
sentimentality—what I once was I am no more; "that which is wished for
may not (cannot) come again" (BE). It is worth remembering that enthusiasts of Joyce include Thomas Wolfe, whose autobiographical epics of lost time such as Of Time and the River and You Can’t Go Home Again are all appetite; such works are sentimental in their very capaciousness. Higgins skirts such a danger in Balcony of Europe,
which his editor John Calder edited to 463 pages from a manuscript of
twice that size (much as Maxwell Perkins edited Thomas Wolfe’s Of Time and the River). In the new selection Flotsam and Jetsam, Higgins retains only fifty pages of the original novel, declaring that he has "withdrawn it from circulation as a failure."
Admittedly, the marshaling of characters and strands of plot over vast
tracts of prose has never been Higgins’s primary concern. Yet stepping
into the gulf between was and is,
the author does not so much evade sentimentality as flirt with it. As
he concludes in "The Bird I Fancied," "The past itself is probably the
most potent and enduring of all known aphrodisiacs." The past is not
simply subject to heroic recovery: Higgins is attuned to its perverse
and melancholic uses. In this sense, nostalgia resolves into irony; the
faded photograph of a childhood home becomes "Only a fadograph of a
yestern scene" (BE). In its rich mixture of irony and melancholy, Higgins’s tone may recall the ending to Flaubert’s Sentimental Education,
in which Frédéric and Deslauriers exhume their youth. The scene is both
profoundly moving and banal, as they repeat after each remembrance, "Do
you remember?" But the comparison is misleading in some respects:
Higgins is neither patient nor elusive, but irascible and extravagant.
His descriptive passages are often a rhapsodic rush to the edge of
sentimentality, only undercut in the final moment by a shift in tone. A
paragraph may begin with a desperate assignation along the Spanish
coast, light-headed and hopeless desire, and then suddenly pull up
short: "Presently the ground began to level off" (BE).
For Higgins, memory leaves signatures in space; individuals are
inseparable from circumstance. In "Helsingør Station," "We walked hand
in hand down the promenade, which was the length of your own
childhood." However known, his characters are always captured in the
middle ground between phenomenal surface and psychological depth.
Higgins rarely introduces them by describing their physical attributes,
nor does he quite occupy minds other than his own. Instead, characters
register through behavior, as habits of drink or dress or speech. In Balcony of Europe,
for instance, we are given a little word-hoard for each character,
including the mother’s "Lug, sloshy, ructions, bibbable, barging,
farfetched, never-rains-but-it-pours, once-in-a-blue-moon, as bold as
brass, as broad as it’s long, as good as gold." As a literary portrait,
this linguistic cloud serves as well as any summary of face and
disposition. Elsewhere, the strands of identity cannot be disentangled
from a mass of related memories:
- The other day I was thinking of you. Or, rather, of Nullgrab,
that quartered city you love so much. It amounts to the same thing.
When I recall Berlin I remember you, or vice versa. (Flotsam and Jetsam)
We "recall" one thing and "remember" another: thinking of
"you," we arrive at a city amounting to the same thing. It is part of
the author’s erotics, as well as his aesthetics, that "you" infects
everything with which it comes in contact.
The direct address appears with unusual frequency in Higgins’s writing.
In fiction as well as memoirs, the author suddenly turns to speak to an
intimate other of whose presence we were previously unaware. Scenes from a Receding Past begins with a first-person narrative of childhood and adolescence in County Sligo; but on page 148 "Olivia" is introduced:
- You, nameless as yet, walked into St. Stephen’s Green under the
columns of the Grafton Street gate. HARTSHILL on the one side,
LADYSMITH on the other, TALANA COLLENTO, what did it mean? And now you
were walking in dim retreating afternoon light under a thundery sky
threatening rain. You crossed the little humpback bridge. I walked
beside you, I didn’t know you.
Such strange insistence on "you" overwhelms the direction of
the narrative. Indeed, the narrator’s relationship with Olivia is
presented as an intersection of memories: the next four chapters
recount Olivia’s past, with the justification that it has become "more
real than my own." Such confusions are, of course, the great subject of
lyric poetry. Higgins might say with Sir Philip Sidney, "Thus may I not
be from you: / Thus be my senses on you: / Thus what I thinke is of
you: / Thus what I seeke is in you: / All what I am, it is you."
Samuel Beckett, who admired Higgins’s early writing, advised the author
to "despair young, and never look back." Higgins is not, like Beckett,
a writer of the absurd. Yet his characters live in a state of desire
just beyond hope. They have generally ceased work, and are caught in
the final phases of love or a collapsing marriage. They often live at
the end of land, in a landscape that contrasts sharply with their
emotional condition: their meadows and beaches might be Edens but for
the oppressive misery of those who wander there. So many of his
characters are "free yet constrained, like a castaway" (F&J); Crusoes shipwrecked in random, paradisical places.
The persistent subject of travel in Higgins’s writing is not simply a
circumstance of autobiography. The narrator in "Lebensraum" directs us
to its larger implications: "If sleep and death, as we are told, bestow
on us a ‘guilty immunity,’ then travel does too, for the traveler is
perpetually in the wrong context" (F&J).
Higgins’s characters are perpetually "in the wrong context"—but not, as
in so much postmodern literature, through a deconstructive manipulation
of readerly expectations. Rather, Higgins pursues "the wrong context"
as lived experience. The oxymoronic irony of the phrase "guilty
immunity" applies not only to travelers and sleepers and corpses, but
authors as well. In this sense, the phrase might be placed beside
Stephen Dedalus’s formulation of Flaubertian impersonality: "The
artist, like the God of the creation, remains within or behind or above
his handiwork, invisible, refined out of existence, indifferent, paring
his fingernails." By contrast, Higgins is a palpable presence in his
own texts—not a god of creation, but a brilliant and ambivalent fellow
traveler.
Selected Works by Aidan Higgins
Asylum and Other Stories. Out of Print.
Balcony of Europe. Out of Print.
Bornholm Night-Ferry. Dalkey Archive press, $12.95.
Flotsam and Jetsam. Dalkey Archive Press, $15.95.
Helsingør Station and Other Departures. Out of Print.
Images of Africa. Out of Print.
Lions of the Grunewald. Out of Print.
Langrishe, Go Down. Dalkey Archive Press, $12.95.
Ronda Gorge and Other Precipices: Travel Writings 1956-86. Out of Print.
Scenes from a Receding Past. Dalkey Archive press, $12.95.
