This aptly named mélange of fiction and nonfiction covers thirty years of Aidan Higgins’s literary career, beginning with his first book of stories, Felo de Se, in 1960. Because Higgins so often recycles and republishes his work under different titles, it is necessary to identify the previous publication of the pieces included here. One of Higgins’s most famous stories, “North Salt Holdings,” has the following history. It was first published as “Killachter Meadow” in the collection Felo de Se, which in turn was republished in 1972 as Asylum, and Other Stories. Moreover, the story was worked up and expanded into the novel Langrishe, Go Down in 1966 and appeared again in the collection Helsingør Station and Other Departures in 1989. Other stories included here that originally appeared in the Felo de Se collection under different names are “In Old Heidelberg” (originally “Tower and Angels) and “Berlin After Dark” (originally “Winter Offense”). The excerpt “Catchpole” is a reworked section of Higgins’s novel Balcony of Europe (1972), which was short-listed for the British Booker Prize that year. The title story of the collection originally appeared as “Nightfall on Cape Piscator”; it is republished here with the addition of a first-person opening that situates it in the period when Higgins traveled with his first wife in South Africa.
Another aspect of Higgins’s writing practice—his blurring of the line between autobiography and fiction—needs to be recognized in order to understand this book. Many of his fictions are derived from, or reflected, in his three-volume autobiography: Donkey’s Years (1995), Dog Days (1998), and The Whole Hog (2000). For example, when the first volume of the autobiography appeared, Higgins made public the fact that the “fictional” story of the Langrishe family, featured in “Killachter Meadow,” Langrishe, Go Down, and “North Salt Holdings” was really the story of his own family revealed in Donkey’s Years. The sisters of the story and the subsequent novel, he said, were really his brothers and himself “in drag.”
Still a third element of Higgins’s work reflected in this hefty volume is that he frequently merges fiction and autobiography with his travel writing. For example “Ronda Gorge” (originally entitled Sommerspiele) and “Black September” (originally entitled “The Opposite”) were first published in 1989 in Ronda Gorge and Other Precipices, which was subtitled Travel Writing: 1956-1989. The pieces “Helsingør Station,” “Sodden Fields,” “The Bird I Fancied,” “Frere Jacques, Brüder Hans,” “The Other Day I Was Thinking of You,” and “Under the Ice Shelf” were all published in 1989 in the collection Helsingør Station and Other Departures, which was subtitled Fictions and Autobiographies, 1956-1989.
The problem for readers approaching Higgins’s writing is that he never really distinguishes which of his works are fictions, which are autobiography, and which are nonfiction travel pieces. The fact that Higgins subtitled the first volume of his autobiography Memories of a Life as Story Told suggests that for him the past is not only grist for the fictional mill, but that there is no way to recount the past without making use of the conventions of fiction. He once said that Donkey’s Years, which he described in the appendix of that book as a “bogus autobiography,” was actually closer to a novel because all honest autobiographies must inevitably be bogus. Similarly, when Higgins writes travel pieces, there is no such thing as a simple description of an exotic place; he almost always grounds the locale in a narrative with a human perspective.
Although it is probably a truism that many writers use experience from their own lives as the basis for their fictions, the reader usually expects some measure of concealment and control of such personal material. Higgins, however, makes little effort to conceal the personal source of his fiction and little effort to exert a tight formal control to give them the sense of structured short fiction. As a landlady says of Higgins’s writing in the second volume of his autobiography, Dog Days, it has no beginning, no middle, and no end. Indeed, one of the frustrating things about reading Higgins is his constant shifting about from event to event, seemingly as memories occur to him. As he said in the opening of Donkey’s Years, “I am consumed by memories and they form the life of me.” However, a loose rendering of such memories seems too often self-indulgent in Higgins’s writing. Lacking an overall sense of significance and form, the work must depend almost solely on the reader’s appreciation of the writer’s individual perceptions and the purity of his prose. Indeed, it is the rhythm of the prose that engages the reader. Higgins is a modern literary example of the classic Irish oral tradition of presenting the sound of a voice talking.
In its emphasis on the sound of a human voice rather than a tightly structured aesthetic form, Higgins’s stories will never be mistaken for the work of a painstaking creator of aesthetic form such as William Trevor. Although it could never be said that Aidan Higgins writes conventional short fiction, the three pieces that seem closest to what a reader expects of a short story are the title piece and his two most famous short fictions, “North Salt Holdings” (that is, “Killachter Meadow”) and “Asylum.”
“Flotsam and Jetsam” focuses on a man on holiday with his unresponsive and overweight wife and her elderly father and bedridden mother. Tormented with regret at being saddled with this “veritable mountain of flesh” who has been disgusted by sex since her wedding night, the man is tortured by dreams of orgies and bestialities. The story moves toward its inevitable conclusion when his dreams begin to feature their black servant, Amalinda Pandova, who walks the Earth as though her clothes were a burden to her. Finally, on a night without dreams, he knows what must happen and goes to her hut and attacks her unresisting, naked body. Although the plot of the story is a conventional one about a man whose life has always been “a marvel of prudence and restraint,” but who is increasingly drawn into a primitive heart of darkness, no one is apt to mistake Higgins’s story for one by Somerset Maugham (1874- 1965), or by Joseph Conrad (1857-1924), for that matter. In its dreamlike rhythms and its sexual suggestiveness, it is more akin to the fiction of Samuel Beckett (1906-1989), although less complex, or J. P. Donleavy (born 1926), albeit more reserved.
Higgins’s most famous story, “North Salt Holdings,” begins with the funeral of Emily Norton Kervick in March, 1927. When the piece was used in his best-known novel Langrishe, Go Down, the dead woman’s name was Emily Langrishe and her burial took place on March 3, 1927, which the first volume of Higgins’s autobiography Donkey’s Years indicates is Higgins’s birthday. The story focuses primarily on the oldest of four sisters: Emily, Tess, Helen, and Imogen. Emily, who is overweight, goes swimming naked every day in the summer while her activities are recorded by her sister Helen, a potential writer, in a daybook. The serpent in this grotesque garden of spinsters is Joseph the gardener, a man with the stench of advanced decay. The story of these sequestered women, stifled in their own repressed and forestalled desires, ends on a summer day when Emily, on one of her daily bathing rituals, unable to swim, loses footing (whether purposely or accidentally is not clear) and is carried downstream. Her movement in space toward death becomes a movement in time, as she seems to see her sisters as children again. Her last sight is her amanuensis, Helen, whose child’s face is overlaid with her adult face in a perverted mask. The story is a haunting, dreamlike portrait of seclusion, repression, and frustration.
The longest fiction in the book, “Asylum,” is about the relationship between Eddy Brazill, an Irish working man who goes from unsatisfactory job to unsatisfactory job until he meets Ben Boucher, the alcoholic son of a wealthy landowner, who has been left a large estate on the condition that he stays sober for a year. Boucher hires Brazill as a golfing companion while he tries to “dry out” in a sanatorium. Broken up into chapterlike sections in novelistic fashion, the story focuses primarily on Brazill’s courtship of a pantomime performer named Elizabeth Demeter Sted and the gradual mental deterioration of Boucher. The story explores a favorite Higgins’s theme—the tension between the dangerous desires of the body and the equally risky obsessions of the mind. As Boucher becomes more and more preoccupied with Christlike parables, trying to make some kind of contact with Brazill, the other man is impervious to the intellectual, maintaining “an almost total blankness” to Boucher’s suffering, “such being the birthright of the poor in heart.” With Brazill interested only in his sexual relation with Elizabeth Sted, Boucher despairs completely, finally committing suicide by setting fire to his room. The story ends with Brazill, unable to find words to pray, simply repeating over and over that while Boucher has gone to the madhouse, he has come from the poor house, thus indicating the basic tension between the duality the two men represent.
The long selection entitled “Catchpole” is an excerpt from Higgins’s novel Balcony of Europe, which, during what Higgins calls the “eight constipated years” when it was being written, gave him so much trouble that he withdrew it from publication as a failure. The excerpt here focuses on still another wandering, desire-ridden man on holiday with wife and child. Although Catchpole is physically present with his family, his mind is elsewhere, either in the past, recounting his many homosexual encounters, or else drawn to the young men he sees around him in Spain.
The second half of Flotsam and Jetsam is made up primarily of fictionalized nonfiction pieces from Higgins’s travel book Ronda Gorge and Other Precipices and fictionalized autobiography pieces from his collection Helsingør Station and Other Departures. The piece “Helsingør Station,” which could be subtitled “Down and Out in Copenhagen,” is a romance filled with love and squalor, and with the local color of Tivoli Gardens and the Little Mermaid statue. “Black September” takes place in Munich in 1972 at the time that terrorists killed a number of Israeli athletes competing in the Olympics. The longest autobiographical piece in the collection is “Sodden Fields,” which begins in Joycean fashion, as Higgins says he was conceived at the “tail-end” of June in 1926 and then “expelled” the following March “puffing and choking” and wishing to sink back into the warm “uterine depths with a bubbling groan.”
Higgins’s writing has received a mixed reception from Irish and British critics (he is not well known in the United States), who welcome, on the one hand, his comic ribaldry and rhythmic prose style but are, on the other hand, less than enthusiastic about his indulgent parade of the self. British critics have suggested that often there is no sense of form in his work, in spite of the fact that there is much substance, and some Irish critics have noted that Higgins is an “odd man out,” going his own way, more interested in writing books than making up stories. They say he is more concerned with presenting the formlessness of experience than trying to create order and more interested in “tonal values than in compositional development.” Indeed, the reader must come to the writing of Higgins in this collection of miscellaneous flotsam and jetsam willing to get lost in the formless song of self that he sings.