Langrishe Go Down Read online

  PRAISE FOR AIDAN HIGGINS

  “The ferocious and dazzling prose of Aidan Higgins, the pure architecture of his sentences, takes the breath out of you. He is one of our great writers.”

  —Annie Proulx

  “Langrishe, Go Down is a wonderful piece of writing … Faulkner never listened more carefully to every creak of a decaying mansion than Higgins does to Springfield House.”

  —SNew York Times

  “There is a shimmering mixture of the poetic and the precise … 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.”

  —Colm Tóibín

  Other Books by Aidan Higgins

  Images of Africa

  Balcony of Europe

  Scenes from a Receding Past

  Asylum and Other Stories

  Bornholm Night-Ferry

  Helsingor Station & Other Departures: Fictions and Autobiographies 1956–1989

  Ronda Gorge & Other Precipices: Travel Writings 1959–1989

  Lions of the Grunewald

  Donkey’s Years: Memories of a Life as Story Told

  Flotsam & Jetsam

  Dog Days: A Sequel to Donkey’s Years

  The Whole Hog: A Sequel to Donkey’s Years and Dog Days

  As I was Riding Down Duval Boulevard

  A Bestiary

  Windy Arbours

  Darkling Plains: Texts for the Air

  March Hares

  Originally published In Calder and Boyars, Ltd., 1966

  Copyright © 1966 by Aidan Higgins

  Introduction © Colm Tóibín, 2022

  First Dalkey Archive edition, 2004

  Second edition, 2022

  All rights reserved

  Library of Congress Catalog-in-Publication Data: Available.

  PB ISBN: 978-1-62897-392-1

  Ebook ISBN: 978-1-62897-425-6

  Dalkey Archive Press

  Dallas/Dublin

  Printed on permanent/durable acid-free paper and bound in the United States of America.

  To Jill Damans

  Contents

  Introduction

  I - 1937

  I. The lights in the bus burned dim

  2. Helen awoke in sour white daylight

  3. Taking her time, Helen cycled slowly

  4. Helen stood in the nave of the old church

  5. Imogen closed the door behind her

  6. The Angelus bell began ringing from the village

  7. In Helen’s room the Venetian blinds

  8. I hear the wind in the high beech tree

  9.The rockery and main garden grow wild

  II - 1932

  10. Otto Beck lay in the meadow

  11. One sunny, cloudless day

  12. Late one night Imogen awoke

  13. Why did I?

  14. As the lights were out in Agnew’s

  15. Oh but it’s true, Barry

  16. When Imogen opened her eyes

  17. Tollis peccata

  18. About the same time that Imogen was boarding

  19. He asked me would I go to the theatre with him

  20. And you, he wanted to know, you are well off?

  21. He led her along a ferny bridle path

  22. She came again to the cottage

  23. They followed the sheep path

  24. Gin days; greenery everywhere

  25. Imogen said with her teeth, her jaw

  26. The autumn came and went

  27. Dum bibitur … Otto said

  28. Naked in the small cottage bedroom

  29. He had been talking about his early student days

  30. ‘Dear Otto’

  31. An uncanny dusk. End of an uncanny day

  32. Can I help it if I’m feeling sick?

  33. Time passed. The pale white privet flowers

  34. The child is dead

  III - 1938

  35. The hearse stood at the gate

  36. ‘ANSCHLUSS!’

  37. Imogen awoke early

  Introduction

  The house lodged in his memory and, over time, became part of his imagination. “My first novel,” Aidan Higgins wrote in The Whole Hog (2000), his final volume of his memoir, “was about the death of a house and the break-up of a family.” In this novel Langrishe, Go Down, published in 1966, Higgins used the real name of the house in Co. Kildare where he was brought up—Springfield—as though to create a fictional name for it would be to lessen its powerful presence in the book.

  In an earlier volume of memoir, Donkey’s Years (1995), Higgins wrote that in 1801 a family called Langrishe had leased the house and land at Springfield until Maria Langrishe, widow of John J. Langrishe, “died in 1898, the last of the family to live at Springfield as the contents of her house were sold by public auction in October 1898.”

  Subsequent owners included Mr. Bart (Batty) Higgins, father of the author, who bought the house and the same 72 acres that are mentioned in the novel at the end of the First World War. He sold them in 1940 when Aidan Higgins, one of four brothers, was thirteen. The property, Higgins remembered, included gate lodges, one of which “was occupied since time immemorial by a genteel single Protestant lady,” the others “by poor tenants who paid a nominal rent when they could, or no rent at all when they couldn’t.”

  Higgins remembered a playmate called Molly Cushen, who would appear as Imogen’s rival in Langrishe, Go Down. The names of places, so carefully listed in the novel, appear also in the memoir: Hazelhatch, Celbridge, Castletown, Donycomper, Clane, Lucan, Straffan. Even the name of the Dublin café Otto and Imogen visit—”Under the Ocean”—is in the memoir, the name having been made up by the author’s mother.

  In Donkey’s Years, Higgins invokes the allure of a lone woman travelling by bus to and from Dublin. “I had felt embarrassed when sitting next to her in an untoward intimacy of odours and intake and exhalation of breath, and imagined that a sort of counterfeit intimacy had sprung up between us and been wordlessly shared, even if I could not bring myself to speak to her.”

  This figure on the bus would make it way into the powerful opening sequence of Langrishe, Go Down, as Helen Langrishe travels alone from Dublin back to Springfield.

  The image of a family in a big house running out of money also appears in Donkey’s Years. One “terrible” night Higgins’s father wakes his mother “to announce that all their money was gone.” That is when they moved to Co. Wicklow, offering their young son, soon to be a novelist, a great gift: a house that would lodge in his memory all the more graphically because it had been lost. His novel would deal with loss and decay, the changing seasons, and the encroachments of age. It would dramatize the house and the sisters, but its real subject would be time itself. The poetics of time became Aidan Higgins’s great obsession.

  At the end of Donkey’s Years, he writes: “The sullen art of fiction-writing can be a harrowing procedure; an inspired form of pillaging.” He explains then what he pillaged to make Langrishe, Go Down: “It must be admitted that the four apathetic spinsters of Langrishe, Go Down were my brothers and myself in drag, subjected to a sea-change and all the names altered except the dog’s. The real (once living) Langrishe sisters were a pair of prim spinsters who occupied Springfield.’ Rumor, he adds, ‘had it that they were partial to a drop and had to be helped up the front steps and possibly tucked into bed by the yardmen.’

  ‘All my life,’ Higgins wrote in 1995, ‘have I had vivid and disturbing dreams of Springfield; dreams as disturbing as nightmares pulling me down.’ He first wrote about the house in a story “Killachter Meadow,” published in 1960 in
his first collection of stories. It begins with a death: “The remains of Miss Emily Norton Kervick were committed to the grave one cold day in March of 1927.” Emily was one of “four unprepossessing and unmarriageable daughters” living in a house called Springfield “on a seventy-two-acre estate so fallen into neglect that it had to be parcelled out as grazing land.” The vegetable garden and rockery and orchard were all wild. The four sisters were called Emily, Tess, Helen and Imogen.

  Imogen, in the story, has an affair with a German called Otto who is writing a thesis and living in rudimentary accommodation close to Springfield. In the story, the affair lasts a short time: “For one short summer only, Otto tolerated her ardours. For one season only were they treated to the unedifying spectacle of a spinster-virgin in rut, their shameless sister.” Some of the details in the story spill over into the novel. For example, in the story “Poultry abounded in the back yard,” as in the novel hens are everywhere. In the story, one of the sisters, who cannot swim, goes naked into the river, as Imogen will in the novel. In the story, Helen plays the gramophone in her room, as she will in the novel.

  The accounts of Springfield in “Killachter Meadow” and Donkey’s Years are useful as a way of appreciating how much the lost house and its atmosphere fascinated Higgins. However, in his first book of stories and in his three volumes of autobiography, Higgins often makes brisk judgements about characters and scenes; he wields a tone which can be close to flippant, funny, or throwaway.

  In Langrishe, Go Down, on the other hand, the tone is quieter, more elegiac. He allows images to speak for themselves, withholding judgement or easy assessment. He shifts perspective and point of view with skill and subtlety. He describes landscape, vistas, and turns in the road using precise detail, as though he has studied these places carefully. The area around the river Liffey in Kildare and its weather become vividly present.

  Higgins is careful and delicate as he deals with Imogen’s motives and thoughts, and indeed those of Otto. He is content to inform us what they do, how they seem to each other. He is happy to allow them a sort of privacy, even a mystery. The emotion comes by implication.

  Thus, to describe the sisters in Langrishe, Go Down as Higgins and his brothers in drag must have fulfilled one of the author’s deep self-deprecating urges, but this does not help us to read the novel or get any sense of its achievement.

  Neither does it help us much to see Higgins’s novel in the context of other work by Irish writers. But it is nonetheless remarkable that three Irish male writers—Brian Moore, born in 1921, Aidan Higgins, born in 1927, and John McGahern, born in 1934—each wrote first novels about the isolation and suffering of a middle-aged childless Irish woman. (Moore’s The Lonely Passion of Judith Hearne was published in 1955; McGahern’s The Barracks in 1963.)

  “Women,” Brian Moore told an interviewer, “live in a personal world, a very, very personal world. Men, I find, are always, as they say in America ‘rolling their credits’ at each other. They come on telling you what they’ve done, and who they are, and all the rest of it. Quite often, women don’t do that.” The women in these three novels are often silent and solitary. They keep the world at a distance. They are at a loss. It is what they don’t say that makes a difference.

  The Langrishe women are even more isolated that Judith Hearne or Elizabeth Reegan in McGahern’s novel. Even though they are Catholics—their mother converted to the Catholic church—they live at a remove from those around them, like members of the old Ascendancy, out of place in the new Irish state. It puzzles Otto Beck, the German scholar who becomes Imogen’s lover, that they cannot make a living from the seventy-two acres, but they have not been raised to run a farm. In fact, they have not been raised for anything much. Their name makes sense; they linger and they languish.

  Imogen and Helen live fearfully, uneasily. They are not merely uncertain of the future, but unsure even of their own perceptions of the present. They watch the world helplessly. The smallest gesture, even entertaining a memory, opening a door, meeting each other on a corridor, takes all their energy.

  Helen, in the opening section, has no idea how to speak to the bus conductor, nor to any of the locals. (“She had little contact with the common people and felt uneasy in their presence.”) She sees the other passengers on the bus as “natives of Kildare” and notes their speech, “the grudging inflections and flattened vowels … I fukken well did did, I fukken well did that … I fukken well niver.”

  Sometimes, the writing is plain and direct, the sentences informative and declarative. At other time, Higgins’ prose takes its bearing from the clipped sound that Joyce uses in Ulysses, especially when he is registering what happens in Leopold Bloom’s consciousness. “Slag pits; good trains in a siding. The stench of sulphur, shadows of carriage windows sliding alongside dust-grimed walls, drawing in towards Kingsbridge Station.”

  There are moments too when the writing has echoes of Beckett: “I am cold. So cold. Here I languish under blankets and eiderdown. Nothing stirs. Sounds die out. I have grown accustomed to the cistern. It’s in my head. I am freezing. I am dead with cold.”

  It is 1937 when the novel opens, and the house and land will have to be sold. “The old impossible life was ending.” All around the sisters are stray figures even poorer than they are. Helen notices “an old ragged woman … bent double under the weight of firewood she bore, escorted by children and a dog.”

  Against the aura of poverty and scarcity is the prose itself, with the astonishing variations in its rhythms, with its use of painterly detail: “Partly submerged branches floated aimlessly by, going under only to rise again, covered in slime, twisting and turning in the pull of the current.” Or the smells on a summer night: “In hot clinging waves the sickly yellow smell of some flowering shrub came to him—not magnolia, not rhododendron, but another, oversweet and overpowering. Above the meadow flew the bats.”

  The novel shifts its tone as it moves from the unstable present to an even more unstable past, from 1937 to five years earlier when Imogen begins her affair with the German visitor. In this evocation of time past, there is a narrator in command: “Otto Beck lay in the meadow, his back against the paling, enjoying his pipe, the last of the day, letting his thoughts wander.”

  In the background of the novel is not only the lassitude of the Irish Free State, but the rumblings in Europe that will lead to war. Otto had studied at Freiburg where “his professors were Edmund Husserl, lecturing on philosophy, phenomenological investigations, and Martin Heidegger, lecturing on philosophy.”

  Higgins is the author of Scenes from a Receding Past (1977). Langrishe, Go Down is peppered with images from the past, some vague, others vivid. Otto does not remember that he first met Imogen at a tennis match, but she remembers until the memory becomes more exact: “A stout gentleman in braces, white shirt, no flannels, but dark trousers and canvas shoes, with a flaming red face covered in perspiration, ran with contorted features below the high volleyed ball, his tennis racquet held purposefully.”

  The affair between Imogen and Otto, even as it begins, is doomed. Chapter 31 will conclude: “Two springs, two summers, three autumns, and two winters. That was all; and now all over.” And just as time puts a limit on love, it also puts an end to life. As Helen Langrishe is to be buried, her sister ponders on how little her life has meant: “And is it not strange, most strange, that a life which can be so positive, so placed, going on for years, seemingly endless, can one day go; and, which is strangest of all, leave little or no trace?”

  It is part of the achievement of Langrishe, Go Down that it faces the fact of death and decay not only unflinchingly but with a sour lyrical grace. It allows phrases and sentences to register the visible world and also offer clues to a universe of feeling that lingers beneath or comes only in images or memories or half-said things. Over “two springs, two summers, three autumns and two winters,” Aidan Higgins re-creates a world, brings it close and then allows us to see it through a veil of language, something utte
rly transformed.

  Colm Tóibín

  2022

  I

  1937

  ‘If I fhould set downe the fluttifh and uncleanly obfervations of the Irifh, as well as of the men, as the Women, but efpecially of thofe manners & Conditions whereunto they invre themfelves in the remote Places of the Countrey, I might fet downe fuch unreverent & loathfome Matter, as were unfit for every queafie stomacke to understand of.’

  Bamaby Rich

  A New Description of Ireland

  1610.

  1

  The lights in the bus burned dim, orange-hued behind opaque bevelled glass; ranged below the luggage racks they lit up the advertisement panels with repeated circles of bilious light. A white face that never seemed to turn away was watching her in the glass. She sat by the window midway down the bus, feeling her stomach beginning to turn over already. The hot engine fumes mingled with the smell of strong shag tobacco, with the cigarette smoke which she detested most of all, and with other poisons breathed out by two-score labouring lungs. In a great stench of perspiring and unwashed bodies, they were there, all about her. In the stuffy, smoke-laden atmosphere others more robust than she experienced no discomfort, giving off their warm bands of heat and well-being. Then the glass blurred once more; drops of moisture began to condense, wet lanes of it trickled down; the face broke up and vanished.

  Her hands were open on her lap, one upon the other in buttoned kid grey gloves that spoke of better times, the return half ticket issued by the Irish Omnibus Company tucked in the vee of her left glove. The windows were shut fast and the passengers, saying little, well contented, smoking, sat shoulder to shoulder, exhaling carbon dioxide fumes. The temperature within the bus, toiling and moiling along, was of a stifling collective human warmth that she found distasteful, and in that malodorous place she sat alone. Crowded places did not suit her, did not agree with her claustrophobia; bus-travel in particular made her ill.