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Born March 3, 1927, Aidan Higgins was the third of four sons of "Batty" Higgins and Lilly Boyd. The father had money inherited from the grandfather's shares of a copper mine in Bisbee, Arizona. "Batty" Higgins, "quiff parted in the middle like Mandrake the Magician," bought "Springfield House" in Celbridge after the First World War. The family lived high on the hog until the money ran out, and Aidan Higgins's childhood on the 75-acre estate marked him for life.1

Higgins tells us again and again that all his fictions derive from his personal past, from memory, from the history of the Higgins family. Underneath the surfaces of Langrishe, Go Down and Higgins's tripartite autobiography, A Bestiary, there seems to lie a simmering rage at "Batty" Higgins who used up all the money and lost the house.2 After the money was gone the parents lived out their lives in increasingly squalid digs while the four sons, like characters in a fairy tale, went into the world to seek their fortunes.


One of the puzzles of Aidan Higgins is why, after the great critical success of his first novel, the classic Langrishe, Go Down, this prince of stylists has remained relatively obscure. Some reasons are discussed in Neil Murphy’s essay "Dreams, Departures, Destinations."3


Higgins wrote Langrishe, Murphy said, at a time when “he had not yet fully dispensed with the formal devices of plot and characterisation in the traditional sense.” The fact that it was a big house novel and apparently told a love story as well as the collapse of the landed Langrishe family “deceives its readers” into taking it for a novel in traditional form. But it was more than that according to Murphy; it was “a profound meditation on the meaning of the past and how memory invents its own past.” And after Langrishe, Murphy continued, Higgins forever rejected formal literary structures.4


But in fact he had already spurned the templates of traditional literature with the short “story” collection Felo de Se before he wrote Langrishe, Go Down. (Higgins, like Robbe-Grillet, called the pieces “fictions.”) Five of those early stories are included in Flotsam & Jetsam and they are idiosyncratic, original and still fresh.5 They contain some of the richest sentences and paragraphs to come from a writer’s pen in the 20th century, and show Higgins’s fascination with the deceitful shapes of the past.6

In the Flotsam & Jetsam collection—the fictions were written over a 30-year period, some of them belonging originally to larger works—Higgins is concerned with human perceptions of others, personal and historical events, memory and its distortions. The pieces are usually focused around love, erotic bonds and physical sensations, heightened by his frequent address, especially in sexual or love passages, to “You” which intimately pulls the reader into the fiction. He gives us worlds that seem to quiver with impermanence and fragmentation, that indicate subterranean rifts like those invisibly tearing continents apart deep below. His work implies that certain massive, unseen and shifting forces support human experience—Piscean astrology? Memory is the ill-made key that allows access to whatever is there.

One can make a stab at classifying Higgins’s work, but perhaps “experimental” (as Beckett and Joyce were experimental) comes close. Higgins himself sees his work as modern.7 Although Beckett and Joyce are often named as great influences on Higgins, they are perhaps more accurately seen as fellow travelers in modernist literature than Virgil’s. Other streams feed into the river of Higgins’s work. But the great thing was probably his privileged boyhood in a grand house with stables, horses, servants and exclusive schools, a halcyon time followed by the short, sharp shock of poverty.

There are in Higgins’s work Dadaist and Surrealist moments, both painterly and intellectual. The many discursive passages that veer away from apparent storylines were likely meant to unsettle the reader. Higgins’s knowledge of (European) painting lets him use art in the same way he uses lists, billboards and graffiti, as temporal referents, as evocations of particular times and places, colors and poses, expressions. And in the years when he was moving around Europe there was still some vigor in the realist art of the New Objectivity of the 1920s and early 1930s (many of these artists were featured in the infamous Nazi 1937 exhibition of “degenerate art”) and Higgins, swimming in a sea of influential and experimental ideas, may have felt some comradeship with the geist.8

Higgins began to write seriously in the 1950s. Although we now think of the 1950s (at least in the United States, Australia and New Zealand) as a period of stasis and creeping suburban conformism, in Europe, especially in France, a rebellious impetus for change erupted here and there, some of it metamorphosed from the Neue Sachlichkeit of the 1920s.9 Anglo-Irish Beckett’s En attendant Godot opened in Paris in 1953. Robbe-Grillet’s Les Gommes appeared, apparently shorn of plot and most adjectives, limiting itself to realist presence and opening the literary door to the “new novel” and the “new objectivity” which rejected the psychological analysis of the traditional novel form. When Robbe-Grillet’s masterpiece, Jalousie, arrived in 1957 the critics, who simply did not get it, had a hey-day making fun of it, calling the then-infamous passage “counting the banana trees” the “cadastre style” for its presumed resemblance to surveyors’ plotted lines. Higgins’s lists are not Robbe-Grillet’s banana trees, but hyper-rich series of varied yet connected images. This stylistic device works brilliantly when the passages are read aloud as in “Lengthening Shadows,” one of Higgins’s pieces for the BBC 4’s “Texts of the Air.”10

Higgins, comfortable with languages, with a massive body of literature, art, mythology and various sciences, traveled far and intimately knew many places. He moved himself out of the “Irish writer” slot into that of an apparent chronicler of slippery, amorphous love in awkward places—South Africa, Germany, Scandinavia. He seemed something of a wandering literary man who defied the oppressions of regional literature, yet the Ireland he knew as a child is never out of sight.


In terms of reader popularity, his erudition worked against him. Readers (especially ill-educated Americans) may be dazzled by the beauty of his prose, the breath-catching similes, but are confounded by references to Zöllner’s Patterns, Pistrucci and Briot, the wizard of Ferney, Lippershay, lammergieres, lesser-known artists and literary characters, his handiness with Latin and German. His fictions, with their abrupt partitions, layers of collage and interlocked allusions make it likely that some duller readers put aside his books as they would a maddeningly incomprehensible codex from an ancient civilization.

The self and, by extension, the family, is Higgins’s tool to open up a time and place both beloved and hateful, the same tool Giuseppe Lampedusa used to pry the Prince of Salinas and his time from the foxed pages of history. There is nothing simple about this; readers may mistake the tool for the whole (as in Langrishe, Go Down) but such a use of the family is as if one pulled up a single clump of grass and discovered the subterranean network of roots, the web of life below—vast and intricate, nodes and hairs, rootlets branching endlessly, connected to the far past, some broken in the uprooting, and, though unseen, the pale snouts of new growth aggressively thrusting into the future.

The maverick American anthropologist, Loren Eiseley (1907–1977), wrote: “Everything in the mind is in rat’s country. . . . Nothing is lost, but it can never be again as it was. You will only find the bits and cry out because they were yourself. Nothing can begin again and go right, but it still is you, your mind, picking endlessly over the splintered glass of a mirror dropped and broken long ago.”11

In Flotsam & Jetsam some particulars of Higgins’s style show themselves. In these fictions one butts up against disconcertingly abrupt shifts.12 The fictions are not linear, but like blocks of events arranged provocatively on the page. New characters and places leap from the page, yet only slowly reveal a relationship to the whole. Mistaken identities and look-alike characters (usually men), including William Trevor, Charlie Chaplin, Von Stroheim, James Joyce, impart a wavering, illusory texture to the fictions. Characters’ motives and salient behaviors often do not enter until late in the piece, and then through a side door. A caustic humour and a taste for juxtaposing the ineffable and repulsive add alkaline sharpness. A cascade of events and periods may be telescoped into a few sentences, often partitioned and framed by plangent titles.13 There are many full-throated and gorgeous sentences like rivers gathering the most remote tributaries from vast watersheds. Some of the fiction is addressed to the intimate, yet unknowable and mysterious “You.” A rancorous dislike of homosexuals, transvestites and lesbians runs throughout—“Last up the fire escape is a lesbian!” a child cries. The weather is almost always freezing cold. And Higgins favors brief, powerful but enigmatic final sentences like tough punches.


There are recurring themes. His great theme is love—love’s beginning, love broken, betrayed, separation of the lovers, love degraded, unrequited, lost, regained, and, above all, made real because it is remembered. Then there is “the continuing event,” an unpleasant situation that seems to have no exit and that often afflicts the protagonist with aecidia and self-doubt. Privation, hunger and cold give the fictions the undercurrent of a struggle to live. The fall from ease to the discomforts of poverty shapes several of the stories. The Catholic Church and its ceremonies run as a thready stream throughout his writing.

The title story, “Flotsam & Jetsam,” (originally “Nightfall on Cape Piscator”) is set in a seaside resort in South Africa during the Apartheid period. It is a story of racist sexual aggression by a mild-mannered antique dealer, Mr. Vaschel, on his mother-in-law’s black servant, Amalinda. Throughout, the sexual imagery is of red-eyed donkeys with monstrous erections. The last sentence, “The sun was up,” dashes a shot glass of irony over all that has preceded it. The fiction is an example of the “continuing event,” for the reader knows the emboldened Mr. Vaschel will again indulge in the custom of the country.

“In Old Heidelberg” (originally “Tower and Angels”) is set in that romantic city in December 1949. It is bone-chillingly cold outside, but in the hot cafés American tourists mingle with ex-Luftwaffe officers. A woman, Ellen Rossa-Stowe, enters a narrow door and climbs steep stairs to a tower for an assignation with Irwin Pastern, a modernist painter who favors the deceitful converging lines of Zöllner’s optical illusions. They often walk through sharp cold “into the municipal wilderness” illuminated by bonfires of burning rags. Abruptly Ellen Rossa-Stowe is gone. Another woman appears, Annelise von Fromar, with her “sad and elongated face” and her skin texture recalling “canopic jars.” Together they take a train to Mossback, make love, depart. Alone and in his tower Irwin notices the shadows of the rearing walls. They seem like gigantic hawsers and “parted already by the prodigious strain exerted against them they had begun to fall away in terrific slow motion . . . watched by a person who had become paralyzed, incapable of lifting a hand.”14 Again it is the continuous event; again the protagonist falls back weakly. “Berlin After Dark” (originally “Winter Offensive”) features the bulky, bullet-headed Herr Bausch, a cement entrepreneur who expresses a “rufous virility” and walks as though “adjusting his stride to the inconveniences of a cavalry sabre.” Bausch might have stepped out of the studios of George Grosz, Otto Dix or photographer August Sander, whose full-length portrait subject, “The Pastry Cook,” lacks only the cement block and prone position.