The Irish Novel 1960 - 2010

1966: Aidan Higgins, Langrishe, Go Down

1966 Aidan Higgins, Langrishe, Go Down Higgins (b. 1927) is the author of five novels, including Balcony of Europe (1972; revised edition, 2010), Scenes from a Receding Past (1977), Bornholm Night-Ferry (1983) and Lions of the Grünewald (1993). In these, interactions between love, time and memory are explored with an artistic sensibility which recalls such modernist predecessors as Marcel Proust and Samuel Beckett. Much of Higgins’s work has an autobiographical dimension – Springfield House in Langrishe, Go Down has the same name and location as the house near Celbridge, County Kildare, in which the author was born and raised – and he has written three admired volumes of autobiography, Donkey’s Years (1995), Dog Days (1998) and The Whole Hog (2000). These appeared in a one-volume American edition entitled A Bestiary (2004). His other works include a volume of short stories, two books containing his travel writing, journalism and uncollected short fiction, and collections of both his book reviews and radio plays. The novel opens in 1937, and ‘The world was in a bad way’ (10). In Spain, the Civil War is going poorly for the Republican side. That much is public knowledge. Helen Langrishe learns it in the evening paper as, feeling almost suffocated and beset by the grinding noise of the bus’s wheels, she travels home to Springfield House from Dublin. But Helen also has news of her own, the personal and imponderable nature of which adds to her claustrophobia, social alienation and feeling of being ground down. The news from Spain is of military positions falling, and Helen’s news is also of a fall – ‘the old impossible life was ending’ (18). The family home can no longer be maintained, and the future of Helen and her two sisters, Lily and Imogen (another, Emily, has already died), seems inevitably set to follow the descent into deterioration and decay already evident in their birthplace. With this opening, not only the discursive but the aesthetic terms of Langrishe, Go Down are set. There is obviously no direct connection between Springfield and Spain, or between a bleak outlook and a crowded bus. But all these phenomena, carefully delineated and differentiated though they are, exist in the same plane, their condition one of contiguity without entailment. Later, when the affair between Imogen and her lover, Otto Beck, is disintegrating, the thought occurs to Imogen that ‘We are like figures come loose out of a frieze’ (239). And that artistic form is one way of thinking about how this novel depicts 1966: AIDAN HIGGINS, LANGRISHE, GO DOWN 21 the human condition, its characters confined to limited postures. At another level, though, the characters cannot be motionless; their actions continually slide into one another, as in a modern painting in which perspectives and tonal values interact to articulate restlessness and to blur boundaries. The narrative’s pervasive sense of slippage and helplessness, illustrated all too plainly by Springfield’s slovenliness and dereliction, is also borne out by Helen’s failure to convey adequately her news from the family’s Dublin lawyers. Perhaps there seems little point in her trying, given her sisters’ indifference and remoteness. Yet, although Helen is the only member of the ‘rank sisterhood’ (79) to grasp their present circumstances , she turns aside from current concerns to visit her parents’ grave. This interlude is notable for its integration of memory and loss, for its juxtaposition of personal, local and national history – all distinct from each other and all united in their common moribund state – and for leaving Helen with the feeling that ‘History begins and ends in me. In me, now, today’ (76). Back in Springfield, Helen also revisits the past in its documentary form, foraging among Imogen’s letters to Otto, the emotions of which she regards with distaste, as she does the reprehensible Otto himself. Imogen too has been reading through her past life, though to her the affair comprised ‘the two happiest years of my long and insignificant existence’ (67). Helen concedes that she has ‘never known the love of the body or of the heart’ (79). It is just such knowledge that Imogen received from Otto, with his fox’s face and poacher’s disposition. The affair between the thirty-nine-year-old Imogen and the German ‘poor scholar’ (217) four years her junior, which comprises the body of the novel, has taken place five years earlier, in 1932 (a year remembered in Ireland as that of the Eucharistic Congress, though obviously memorable here...