John Banville

Aidan Higgins was one of those writers of rare talent whose work remains – stubbornly, one wants to say – undervalued and neglected. He wrote an early masterpiece, Langrishe, Go Down, and perhaps it was that very earliness, that youthful peak of promise, that kept him from winning the kind of acknowledgement, the level of reputation, that he richly deserved.

Where reviewers and the public were concerned, he was his own worst enemy. Seeing himself as an heir of James Joyce and Samuel Beckett, he had something of the hauteur of one of the great ones, and did not care to hide it. The world had moved on, however, and the world’s taste and tolerance were not what they had been in the days when Modernism could still provoke awe and adulation even in those who had not read a line of The Waste Land or Finnegans Wake or Malone Dies.

And then there was Higgins’ cosmopolitanism; he was never “Irish”, in the sense in which even the self-exiled Joyce and Beckett, Oscar Wilde, George Bernard Shaw and Sean O’Casey, retained, at least in the popular imagination, an ineradicable Irishness. The names that Higgins so blithely dropped – Djuna Barnes, Emil Cioran, Maurice Blanchot – would not cut much ice, or blow off much froth, in the Dublin pubs.

Yet he was firmly one of the great line of Irish stylists that included Jonathan Swift, Oliver Goldsmith, Edmund Burke, Wilde, WB Yeats, Joyce, Beckett. His work, one suspects – one hopes – will be like an underground river, flowing on unnoticed for a long time and then suddenly bursting out and joining and mingling with the broad sea of a glorious tradition, where it firmly belongs.

John Banville’s latest book is The Blue Guitar

Colm Tóibín

There is a shimmering mixture of the poetic and the precise in Aidan Higgins’s novel, Langrishe Go Down, as though some of the scenes are observed through glass, or from a distance and then distilled. He works wonders with cadence, moving close to a character’s consciousness and then away from the character so the prose is distant, observing, painterly. I love the high ambition of Balcony of Europe. The slow death of the mother in the early pages of that book contains the best prose anyone wrote in those years.

Colm Tóibín’s latest book is On Elizabeth Bishop. The film adaptation of his novel, Brooklyn, has recently been released.

Éilís Ní Dhuibhne

Langrishe, Go Down made a strong impression on me when I was a student and apprentice writer in the early 1970s. It was highly regarded and much talked about by all of us. Later, I was attracted by Bornholm Night Ferry, mainly because it surprised and charmed me that an Irish writer would locate a novel on Bornholm – or on the ferry to this beautiful Danish island. There is little or nothing about Bornholm in the book, as far as I remember, but the title, like most of his titles, is rewarding in itself.

In a way, Aidan Higgins is one of the last of the Irish modernists – his literary forebears are James Joyce and Samuel Beckett, Kate O’Brien. Balcony of Europe, referring to the famous balcony at Nerja, says it all. He looked east, to the infinite variety and inexhaustible riches of Europe, rather than to America, for nurture and inspiration. For that, and for his artistic integrity and literary risk taking, I have always admired him.

Éilís Ní Dhuibhne’s latest book is Aisling nó Iníon A.

Rob Doyle

A few years ago, in a book shop in San Francisco, I happened upon Aidan Higgins’ Balcony of Europe, which had recently been republished by the Dalkey Archive. I took it home and gorged upon it. Sun-drenched, breezily cosmopolitan, and almost scandalously sensual, it seemed to me a missing link in the narrative of Irish literature as I knew it. Moreover, its author manifested the figure of the Irish writer in a form that attracted me: expansive, innovative, enamoured of sun and travel, and with a consciousness open to the mystique and eroticism of Europe, rather than hemmed in by the stifled perspectives of our rainy little rock.

Since then, there has been an upwelling of interest in this writer so admirably antipathetic to the parochial, who has left behind a rich, diverse banquet of work that readers will surely be feasting on for a long time to come.

Rob Doyle’s short story collection, This is the Ritual, is published later this month.

Rosita Sweetman

The first time we met was in Nuala and John Mulcahy’s beautiful drawing room in Ranelagh; John a fellow old boy from Clongowes, and Nuala, literary editor of Hibernia, for whom Aidan wrote (brilliantly), were throwing a party. Halfway through the evening, the guest of honour sidled up, employing his crab walk for when he was about to unleash a missile, and said, – You do realise you’re the worst dressed woman in Dublin.

What?!

I was suitably outraged, convinced I looked rather fetching in my dark blue Afghan dress and what an American friend charmingly called “home washed hair”.

The following morning our hosts noticed the window of the spare bedroom open, their guest flown; flown and landed on my doorstep, and very soon afterwards in my bed.

Glory be.

Several months later he was back in Dublin to accept a bursary from an Irish American literary fund. Serendipitously, I had been awarded a place on a writing course run by Anthony Cronin in Galway; literary adventurers that we were, we jumped into the ancient Mini writers Tom MacIntyre and poet Debbie Tall had left as a present as they departed Inishbofin for America, and headed west. I couldn’t drive but Aidan said it couldn’t be that difficult since every kind of idiot did it, every day. After 27 stalls between South Circular Road and Rathmines, we were off.

We rented a stone cottage at the end of a pier in the stony and beautiful heart of Connemara – lapus lazuli lakes ringed with rust-coloured rocks, big bruised clouds bumping off the tops of the cerulean blue mountains, and men so shy we nicknamed them the Singing Stones as they sat implacable, hour after hour at the bar, their huge paddle hands around a pint of cream and black, breaking into a capella haunting Gaelic songs as the vast Connemeara night whirled on.

My education, which I’d thought over, began.

He loved women, rivers, lakes, art, Marcel Marceau, walking, Connemara, Spain, puppets, Theatre, Myles na Gopaleen, Spain, Djuna Barnes, his sons Carl, Julian and Elwyn, his wife Jill, Samuel Beckett, Eudora Welty, a “good bottle of Rioja”, James Joyce, William Faulkner, the mysterious Hannalore, Robinson Crusoe. And talking. And drinking.

Above all else, writing.

Sloppy writing, ie writing cheesed with cliches was considered an abomination. As were hypocrisy and religiosity. Provincialism. He’d travelled in England, Spain, France, Germany, South Africa, Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe), and again Spain. A born iconoclast, sacred cows were prodded with intent to puncture. Why don’t people notice what’s around them? The self-satisfied, the well-upholstered, the inaccurate were not to be tolerated. Paul Henry, in whose landscape we were living, didn’t paint, said AH, but worked with “wooden knitting needles”. “Those absurd clouds and uninhabited cottages existed only in his head.” Oh dear.

Books of course were sacred. Book parcels from London, New York and Dublin, delivered by Postie in howling gales, were carried upstairs to his study, as carefully as newborns, to be mulled over for days. Every word in the subsequent reviews was a tiny chip hammered into a mosaic, essential and immovable.

Schooled in rough and ready journalism, where a book review involved reading the publisher’s blurb, glancing at the author’s notes on the flyleaf and whacking off 800 words of cheerful froth before lunchtime, I was astounded. When I questioned him he quoted Beckett on Joyce. One word to describe the great man? Probity. Or, “Ferocious attention to the task in hand”. If a task was worth doing/had to be done, ferocious attention was your only man.

“To learn,” he wrote later in Dog Days, the second book in The Bestiary, “is to submit to having something done to one.” I was a willing, if naïve, pupil.

Mostly I remember the talking. Talking before we got up, when we got up, as we made breakfast, as we both broke from our respective desks to have coffee, as we made lunch, as we walked to the post office, as we sat in the snug in the pub on the way home, as we made dinner, as we listened to the ghostly crackle of Radio 4 and the voices of the “Yew Kay”, as I sat in front of the turf fire drying my hair, as we headed back to the pub for a goodnight snifter, as we (bumbled) back in the dark to home, to bed.

Talk, talk, talk, talk, talk.

O yeah. Happiest of times.

I’m ashamed to say in my youth and in my happiness I seldom gave a thought to wife Jill and three children in London. Mi esposa. Mis hijos. After a year our own happiness was over, bursary spent, Aidan returned, me lamenting. Sitting in the airport bar, his briefcase on the seat beside me, the MS for Bornholm Night Ferry inside it, I remember wondering would I leg it, briefcase and MS in tow; that would get his attention alright. I sat on, miserable with myself for being so spectacularly uncourageous. Miserable that it was over.

Life brought me on to travel, marriage and babies, (babies!), followed by marriage breakdown (damn), parenting (good lord) and writing; life brought him back to marriage, writing, Muswell Hill and America, followed by marriage breakdown, Wicklow and finally Kinsale where he met the beautiful Alannah Hopkin and got married again. They had no children, but years and years of happiness, Alannah describing him thundering away on his Olivetti in the upstairs room of their beautiful eyrie in Kinsale, while she thumped away downstairs on hers.

He and I got properly in touch again about 12 years ago, just before he became blind. An operation botched, he was left barely sighted, in the blackest of black despairs. For this writer, who wanted above all to be a painter, it was the cruelest of blows. What do you do all day? I asked. Lie on my bed eating grapes and cursing my Maker, was his reply.

He came to visit the children (now teenagers) and me in Wicklow, wielding a white stick. He gave Luke a copy of Primo Levi’s If This is a Man (“the only book you need read about the Holocaust”), the water tank burst, spewing black water (“black!” he marvelled), and that night, arm up on the jamb of the door, he apologised for being a toad all those years ago; at supper we had a huge argument about Hitler.

But his health, mental and physical, so tied up with his work (the sacred task) for so long, deteriorated. Blind Man’s Bluff, his last book to be published in his life time (March Hare, a new MS is to be published by Dalkey Archive Press in 2016) took herculean effort and unstinting support from Alannah and poet, and friend, Mathew Gedden. A tiny 60 pages, it’s vintage Higgins: human love, joy and despair distilled down to pure gold between duck egg blue covers. “Of all the birds in the air I do despise the rat.”

His last years were not happy. He hated the care home – wouldn’t we all? – marooned in almost total blindness. He loved a visit, a daffodil plucked from the immaculate, unwalked-in garden, loved to be read to (from his own books – “I was there!”), and, right to the very end he was there. “Are you tired, Aidan?” I asked on my last visit. He did his usual careful pause before answering. “No”, his voice lifting slightly on the “o”.

Beckett’s advice to a young Aidan paraphrased by himself says a great deal:

- Stow your troubles early. Chin up. Anticipate squalls.

I’m ever so glad I knew him.

That we loved.

Rosita Sweetman’s novel, Fathers Come First, was republished last year.

John O’Brien

There is so much to say about Aidan Higgins. To my mind, he should have been recognised – and still should be – as Ireland’s great writer after James Joyce, Flann O’Brien and Samuel Beckett. There are passages in his work that no human could have written: a simple prose layered with several emotions, seeming effortless, and perhaps it was nearly so with Aidan.

I never asked him about the closing of my favourite novel of his, Scenes from a Receding Past, but I have always thought he had got tired of the book and decided it had to end. That ending contains some of the finest prose in the English language, packed with conflicting feelings, melancholic and beyond beautiful. When I saw him for the last time and his energy was waning in the late afternoon, I told him I was going to read to him some of my favourite passages, and this ending was one of them.

The taxi carried us on through the murk, the encircling gloom, the driver apparently lost. Somewhere a ship was waiting.

We were passing through broken-down Kentish Town. Hold onto nothing; nothing lasts.

Long ago I was this, was that, twisting and turning, incredulous, baffled, believing nothing, believing all. Now I am what? I feel frightened, sometimes, but may be just tired. I feel depressed quite often, but may be just hungry.

All but blind

In his chambered hole

Gropes for worms . . .

When I finished, I looked across at him, and there was a pleased smile on his face, and he nodded, saying without saying, “Damn good”. I though he was going to say that I was wrong, which he was rather fond of telling me I was.

Another passage is from Helsingør Station, the very opening. Again, it is a simple line, but it is prepared for with the six or seven sentences that come before it, and it explodes on the page with feeling, a perfect evocation of lost love and grief.

One night at Trinity College a few years ago, we were sitting next to each other in an anteroom waiting to enter the auditorium for an event arranged in Aidan’s honour. I told him that I had found him cheating, that a writer can use some lines only once and not again, but that he had used the same line in the same book as the title for another story. He asked what the line was and I told him. He said, “It’s a good line, why not use it more than once? A good line.” And he was right. Or at least he was one of those who could get away with it.

A final time with memorable lines from Aidan. It was a weekend spent in Celbridge celebrating his 80th birthday. Friends, critics, fellow writers, academics and fans came to listen to a series of panel discussions on Aidan’s work. Before one of the panels began, Aidan asked me to sit next to him in the first row. On this panel, John Banville occupied a prominent place and was both generous and brilliant in what he had to say. But a few times during the panelists’ presentations, Aidan stood up and began speaking to the gathering without any necessary reference to what was being said by the panelists. Apparently, he just had a few things to say.

He was amazing. He uttered three things in particular that I told myself I had to remember and would write down as soon as there was a coffee break. Once outside, I went into a corner away from where most were gathered and began writing. But when I came to the third one, I couldn’t remember it. Derek Mahon saw me hiding away while going back into the next panel, and somewhat shouted over to me, “What are you doing?” I said, “He said three incredible things but I can’t remember the third.” Derek said, “It was ‘Only the impossible is worth doing’.” He was right. But how did he know? Had Derek been counting them as well?

Aidan would have liked to have been better known, but I don’t think for the sake of being popular. He knew how good he was and must have been baffled by the fact that he was rarely let into the official Pantheon of Irish writers. And this meant that he wasn’t being widely read or appreciated, except by the inner circle, many of whom were at his 80th birthday weekend. Aidan wanted more readers, especially more in Ireland. It was John Banville that day, and then again later in a piece he wrote, who said: “It’s taken an American to bring Aidan Higgins back into print, not the Irish.”

Some people have said that Aidan’s work is too difficult. There is nothing difficult about it whatsoever. It’s a language as rich and precise as one hears in the pubs of Dublin, or that of a Dublin taxi driver. One needs only an ear for the beautiful, and an honest soul. If not yet, one day he will take his place as the direct descendant of Joyce, O’Brien and Beckett. His work will remain.

John O'Brien is the publisher of Dalkey Archive Press, which has in print the following works by Aidan Higgins: Balcony of Europe; A Bestiary (3-volume autobiography); A Blind Man's Bluff; Bornholm Night Ferry; Darkling Plane: Texts for the Air; Flotsam and Jetsom ; Langrishe, Go Down; Scenes for a Receding Past; and Windy Arbours. A final collection of criticism, March Hare, and a reissue of Helsingør Station are planned.

George O’Brien

Aidan Higgins may have been one of those writers whose names are known but whose works are less so. Which, if true, would be a great pity for all sorts of reasons, not least because his writings are very easy to appreciate. And the reason they are is that it’s hard to classify them. They occupy a different kind of place to the usual novel.

Their stories are simple but not what you would call tightly-knit, as a professional would make them. Their characters are memorable to a degree – the weird sisters in Langrishe, Go Down; Dan Ruttle on his various occasions – but even though they’re inclined to sally forth and take risks and meet the life they don’t know that they’re going to meet, not a lot comes of that. The same goes for places. In Scenes from a Receding Past, the author’s childhood is transposed from Celbridge to Sligo, but of course it’s the same childhood. Balcony of Europe is a bar, it’s a name for that part of the Andalusian coast that’s not the Costa del Sol, and it also applies to Connemara. The domicile changes, but they go under the one sign.

“On the last day of the century, the tides splash in and out twice a day in Copenhagen, Cork, Dublin, Cape Town and Amsterdam, going with the rollings of the earth ball and her moon through everchanging tracks of neverchanging space.”

The inevitability of movement, the restlessness of blood and brain, the always incongruent experiences of time and space, the treacherous currents of ourselves making our way, the getting through… That’s the basic repertoire; doing one’s best to acknowledge what cannot be denied. It’s hard to think of what’s ordinarily thought of as a story being able to get its arms around that.

Still, though a case might be made for thinking of Higgins’ writing, or any one volume of it, as a series of terrific canvases (and, to understate it, painters were important to him), there is a form that seems flexible enough to fit. Epic. Higgins’s fictions are epics of desire, of wishing for a world that is available, to be sure, but that eludes possession, slipping back to itself at the moment of apprehension or consummation.

This happens over and over. It’s a water world, thirst-inducing while at the same time registering its reality by running through the fingers. Uncertain. Tricky to navigate. But venture out on it a series of unheroic Odysseus must – is there anything better they might do? (The avatar that Higgins most often refers to, though, is Crusoe the castaway, the one who has voyaged.) And if the scenarios are episodes in navigation, so is the writing, treading water sometimes, but mostly moving with convincing uncertainty between the sharp moment and the loose context , between sensibility and sense, between what could well be autobiographical fact and imaginative rendering.

Two successive sentences from the first of the 11 rejected epigraphs (an intellectual autobiography in miniature; Higgins had no fear of ideas, or of anything, much) at the end of the original version of Balcony of Europe: “Nothing changes. Everything is transformed.”

Experience isn’t a closed book; handy chapters are not the best measures of it; there’s always the disruption, the absorption, of pleasure, as well – worth remembering, along with the rest.

Bartender of the Balcony of Europe, "No te olvidan."

George O’Brien’s latest book is The Irish Novel 1800-1910