Aiden Higgins: Who Knew?

You will no doubt have concluded by now that I have more than a passing preference for Irish literature, and I was recently both embarrassed and delighted to discover the existence of Aiden Higgins—embarrassed because I had never heard of him before; delighted because in Higgins I have discovered a writer who nudges up comfortably alongside John Banville and James Joyce.

Langrishe Go Down was published in 1966, and subsequently reprinted (see discussion below). It earned Higgins the James Tait Black Memorial Prize, and it was then filmed for television with a screenplay by Harold Pinter. But the author has remained in sufficient obscurity to merit the label “writer’s writer” [TLS].

The novel is unabashedly modernist, so not straightforward in terms of perspective or narrative technique. There are frequent dreamy spans of stream of consciousness in which various impressions are combined to create what are generally bleak mental pictures. Some of the renderings of the local populace— travellers on a bus, a cemetery worker— are reminiscent of James Joyce in The Dubliners. Also, Higgins’ attention to geographical detail—specifics of streets, buildings, rivers, etc. in Celbridge and in Dublin—also resemble vintage Joyce. Unfortunately, at times the scattered impressions create some uncertainty as to what actually happens. It seems that Higgins wants the reader to witness events through the emotionally charged filters of the characters— misconceptions and all.

The story, such as it is, concerns a family in decline. Three “spinster” Langrishe sisters—helen, Imogen, and Lily— preside over a decaying mansion in Celbridge/donycomper, aka Domhnach Compair, in county Kildare, just west of Dublin. The mansion’s barn, outbuildings, and lodges were all worked in the past by servants or tenants. But the patriarch, Robert Langrishe, through arbitrariness, idleness, and impracticality ran the place into the ground before his death ten years previously. The sisters are now reduced to selling the old trees from the estate for lumber. Through flashbacks and other contextual information we learn that a succession of notable families have occupied the grand house since the early eighteenth century. As things progress it is evident that the wheel of fortune has turned and the family’s tenure in the manor is coming to an end.

It is 1937 and one of the sisters— Helen—is returning to the family mansion from Dublin. We see her on a bus, surrounded by a smoking, seething, sweating, vulgar humanity. She fairly quails before the onslaught. We soon discover that her sisters are also illequipped for their fall from gentility. Helen is later bemused by the fragmented and obscured gravestones and monuments in the cemetery. It seems that Higgins is in some way querying the Irish notion of history —its validity, accuracy, its value.

You won’t want to blink while you are reading. The narrative focus on Helen abruptly shifts to the younger sister Imogen, and the story subsequently unfolds from her perspective. The time shifts to five years previously when she allows herself to be seduced by a young German scholar, Otto Beck, whose selfish affection she finds irresistible. It is as if one of Jane Austen’s staid Bennett sisters suddenly transforms into Lady Chatterley; Imogen casts aside her Catholic reserve and utterly surrenders her sensual side to Otto (trigger warning—some adult content!).

The German scholar is an odd character. He is an expert hunter, ferreter, womanizer and a veteran of WW I (on the German side, as one might expect). He has been allowed by Langrishe patriarch to stay in the manor lodge, free of charge. Curiously, the title of his thesis is [translated from the German] “The Ossianic Problem and the Actual Folk Sagas and Customs of 17th-century Ireland, with special reference to the work of Goethe and the Brothers Grimm: A Sociological-philological-critical Study”!!! Otto is a hyper-intellectual; Imogen is quite innocent and simple in nature. It seems that Otto Beck has become a master of Irish history and consciousness while the Irish characters—who are actually living and breathing the history— have no idea of their history or their destiny. Re the relationship, the reader is almost conditioned to expect a dire outcome (especially given the three spinster daughters introduced before the flashback!) So the entire affair has profoundly desperate undertones.

Some curiosities….the novel was published in 1966, then reprinted subsequently in a different font. Higgins took advantage of the change to add additional material to some chapters. Thus we sometimes see a line of narrative presented one way, and then re-presented with the same information but different wording. It is like watching a movie in which out-takes are thrown in with the final sequences. Modernist experimentation or editing error? Inquiring minds wonder.

Also noteworthy is Higgins’ clever and ironic evocation of images. For example, in one scene Otto and Imogen consummate a sexual encounter in a decaying room of the lodge as the trunk of an old elm tree is being dragged off to the lumberyard. Clearly, the old order is changing and yielding place to…well, Who knows?

Overall, Higgins provides a poignant sequence of settings and images—the Church in Donycomper, the desolate village, the overgrown churchyard and cemetery, the somewhat over-lush surroundings, which collectively emphasize the almost preordained destruction of the Irish land-owning upper class. Higgins also alludes through newspaper headlines to foreign events—the bombardment of Madrid (Spanish Civil War), the arming of Italy, the construction of airbases in Sardinia. These, in tandem with the references to the rise of Nazism in Germany, evoke an Ireland that is soft and vulnerable to outside influence. This vulnerability is subtly reinforced in the exchanges between Otto and Imogen: “You’re so soft … Some soft spineless insect that’s been trodden on. I can feel you beginning to curl up at the sides.”

Alas, copies of Langrishe Go Down are hard to come by! Inquire at your local library.