The New Language of Endings

...And it is as much a substance as what it refers to...

...The processes of Higgins' language surely point to physical processes in the world—in the changing physical needs of Otto, the unstable charms and health of Imogen, the "immutable order of events" in the land of the Langrishes and in Ireland, but an order ultimately as far from the poignantly anthropoeic as to be equational, biophysical...

...The river was coming down in spate...

...How strange it seemed...

...And despite the conscious linguistic variety, the sections of hard-aged fragment paragraphs trickily scattered and juxtaposed, the "eldritch" fade-outs that recall, of all people, Henry Green, Higgins has nothing of the exhibitionist self-indulgence to be seen occasionally in Nabokov or Grass...

...There draws together in her a wish to give that grows into a wish to give all, and is fed by near-masochism as well as a half-roused hope of recouping old losses by receiving this red-haired, marauding Siegfried who urinates in the doorway, understands the calls of birds, and has her father's eyes—eyes which once when she was young shocked her naked in the bathroom...

...German, English, or South African landscapes as in the process of their fates...

...Higgins dissects Otto, too: lying in bed with Imogen, staring at the ceiling, coughing behind his hand...

...And there is a lot of "this" in the book...

...smells decaying paper and an unaired room, recalls her mother, "That upright...

...The point here is that the affair seems at first merely a long flashback, rather arbitrary in its link with the introductory part and a sort of memorial escape from the funeral of Helen in the third part...

...Though the suicide of fat Emily-May Kervick in "Killachter Meadow" is matched in the novel only, in a later view of Imogen bathing, by delicate suggestions of Ophelia...

...But despite the entropic mono-focus of Langrishe, Go Down, Higgins is much less mannered than Beckett...

...But these are easy consistencies...

...These people are fixed not so much in their ominous Irish...

...But through most of the book that huge natural process, precisely in its aspects of loss or decline—or "entropy," the word Julian Moyna-han has suggested—is so harshly, purely convincing that Higgins, always invisible and neutral, appears to have discovered something new...

...So, rest all the time...

...some of them'll be down' "; Helen sees "submerged branches [float] by, going under only to rise again...

...Yet the Germanic pedant-predator is lucid and intelligent, and his various lore is lovingly possessed...

...The time is 1937...

...I am thinking of the young Irishman Aidan Higgins...

...He is full of significant syllables, gnomic, witty, musical...

...In his style, phenomena are held as if between the subject's response and some existence independent of an observer—perhaps in that perceptual silence Beckett says it is the function of objects to restore...

...shooting accurately when his prey moves...

...The sterner secret of Higgins' language is the ruthless way he adjusts it exactly to his needs...

...Reviewed by Joseph Mcelroy Author, "A Smuggler's Bible" At this point in the history of fiction, the major moves tend toward a sequence and language truer to the wildwood congestions of the inner life than the chronic stereotypes of story-telling...

...Let me describe Langrishe, Go Down first as if it were like lots of other good books—exquisite mood piece, private tragedy, family elegy, regional nostalgia (entitled, say, The Last of the Langrishes...

...Imogen recalls a dreadful flood of water overflowing a weir, but in her fancy it is the engulfing rush of quickening male sex coming into her...

...The Jews in Germany,' Otto said, 'you know they've taken the names of trees and mountains...

...But if she is "swallowing" his words like a credulous woman eager to be had, the words are, in the novel's inexorable development, soon to be translated into literal phenomena or love which she will physically swallow...

...In old age the senses fail, the appetite goes, one loses all interest in things that formerly engrossed one...

...I'm forty...

...If Higgins' austere phenomenology cuts the book away from themes the reader at first thought would be developed, the natural, neutral process Higgins focuses upon in Langrishe, Go Down lures one to some quasi-systematic interpretation of his works...

...One's life is nothing in comparison.' "Imogen had nothing to say to this...

...On the other hand, these radical fictions are so inventively self-conscious that less aggressive kinds of originality may go unnoticed...

...One remembers them almost as impersonations of non-personal lines of force...

...Boucher who was not a believer and knelt again, clasping his hands as his late employer had done not so long before and tried to pray...

...so many cubic feet of scented Miss Imogen Langrishe going riss-riss...

...This central love affair, taking the reader back five years to 1932, absorbs more than half the book...

...But Higgins' rather heavy craft and erratic tones indicate that at that stage he had yet to accommodate various techniques he wanted to use...

...What do the hungry...

...Is it a psychological inquiry...

...However, psychology is no more the heart of the book than the vividly sensed countryside of Ireland or, more to the point, the atmospheric contrast between the Irish backwater and the rising, agitated energies of the fatherland from which Otto is calmly detached but which, despite his professed dislike of National Socialism, he (like the pathetically brutal Willie Bausch in the story "Winter Offensive") now and again betrays in his behavior...

...Their father, before he died, was a sort of polished, unlucky Prospero, leaving his estate decay while pursuing meditation and study "in the summer house . . . with the scent of honeysuckle and rambling roses coming in the windows...

...In pitch darkness, no lights permitted, and not to be disturbed...

...The bell tolls at Donycomper church, The down, down variants echo everywhere: Otto invites Imogen to a cheap place in Dublin called Under the Ocean...

...What is left...

...cold woman [who] never showed her feelings to her children...

...Miss Imagine' " (as the old man in the cemetery asks after her) notes that "Otto" is the same forward and backward...

...Otto, surely one of the most detached human beings in fiction, recalls "sitting on a bench watching traffic passing over a canal bridge...

...What do the aged listen to...

...Tumescence and waking and growth are used in Langrishe, Go Down solely to define decay...

...As memory goes one loses one's teeth, hair, track of time, wanting darkness to go on forever, as Kant did...

...The Beckett influence is strong...

...The few novelists who seem to me to matter are striving openly to spurn old schemes of chronicle or serial anec-dotage, which the establishments defend as "natural" but which, as Joyce saw, have always been convenient abstractions no more natural (indeed less so) than his own reconstituted day and night...

...It is a peculiar idyl in which a woman in her late 30s responds stiffly, tremulously, then abjectly to the efficient advances of a detached, interesting, self-devoted man who fives rent-free on the estate while ostensibly finishing a rather esoteric scholarly thesis...

...It is possible to infer that since in Langrishe, Go Down Higgins embodies seminal as well as subtrac-tive process, growth as well as decay, his final focus is both, and the total effect thus a continuity...

...The art here is not magic...

...In the story "Asylum," a rich, generous toper engages an old acquaintance, a down-and-out laborer, to play golf with him every day while he is taking the cure at a sanitorium...

...It is no accident that Otto sides with Husserl and disparages Heidegger...

...Wan good wind...

...Higgins' language is no more self-sufficient or self-certifying than it is a mere means of guaranteeing an outer world of objects—it is always both...

...In Higgins' novel, Langrishe, Go Down, that promise is patiently fulfilled...

...Otto leaves Imogen and goes off to a riper woman, but he leaves Imogen pregnant...

...Time will tell whether the comparison that makes most sense is with James Joyce...

...And later on terrified of that darkness...

...Then check stubs, a yellow cutting from the Leinster Leader, an ordinance survey map of the area "folded and refolded so many times that it had torn along the folds...

...faced by an interloper's crude ways, she faces in herself Langrishe pride and delicate prudery, a new hungry passivity, a gathering desire to make heTself Otto's pleasure...

...rank bodies in a dim-lit, rocky bus, and the (to her) nauseating horny "right ram" talk of two men close to her ear...

...Except for the long story "Asylum" (refuge, tomb), with its uncanny coupling of diurnal document and a Dinesen-like sub-patterning of occult vectors, Killachter Meadow is most promising in the melancholically sluggish, doom-dark pieces that grope for an indefinite ground between mood and action...

...Otto Beck is no more a Mellors than Higgins' view of love is mystical...

...or a bike ride through "raw air" to her sister Emily's plot in Donycomper cemetery where, to cling to her privacy, she pretends to a gabby old laborer that she has come to look at ruins...

...breathing erratically while studying...

...Langrishe, Go Down also has something to do with Irish history, with a fixed and final distance of time, an antiquarian pause, a sinking into a perpetual past...

...Meanwhile, back in the creaking house Imogen idles through a desk —through the almost irrelevant Rent Book, Front lodge, Upper lodge, "rent in arrears" (years ago): "Do not look back, she counseled herself, her eyes on the entries" (for she has come across "Back lodge...

...Self-chastising Imogen feels herself "empty of feeling...

...They want to hide themselves, the Rosenblums and Lowenthals.'" Otto discourses upon the trout larvae twitching in his hand, and Imogen thinks him a "mine of information": She can't see ahead to her stillborn child, but the reader can see back into that dusty desk to the worthless shares of "Langrishe Consolidated Mining Stock, Arizona...

...Imogen feels in Otto's love-words an actual solidity...

...But again Higgins refuses to make the main sense of the book anything so usual as some irony of decrepit Ireland being instructed about itself by alien vitality, or (this comes closer) a schematic contrast between phlegmatic, palindromic Otto's attachment to phenomenal fact and imaginative Imogen's messy, tender attachment to Otto...

...Imogen now lives a life like a long trailing sentence that long ago began with a simple independent clause...

...Yet here again is the main point...

...Otto, lecturing Imogen on place names and customs, wars and weddings, tells her of her own past: " 'County Kil-dare, the old Geraldine county, with its towers, its obelisks and follies, its evidence of forgotten life . . . the shock of contact with one's own past—an unimaginable one, yet familiar...

...Nor is Higgins, for their own impressionistic sake, pairing Past and Present, though the Otto-Imogen section is a long valley of the past through which one passes from one point in the present to another...

...all he could say in wonder was, He has gone to the madhouse, I have come from the poor home, over and over again...

...Langrishes languish, but language languishing or stone-hard will not save Imogen's imagination from its dark December...

...If in 10 years this book is seen to have been a genuinely new work, perhaps the reason will be that by subtle differences in seemingly stock materials and an economy of balances Higgins makes a whole mysteriously unlike its parts...

...the old man in the graveyard thinks the trees endanger the headstones...

...In a weird, complex train of events the rich man sinks into insanity and the laborer wins a woman he has fallen in love with...

...Had she any feelings to show...

...I want my sleep, Otto...

...The sisters Helen, Imogen and Lily, now the genteelly impoverished, anxious, bored inhabitants of a legacy of recollection, are the last of a once important landed family in Kildare...

...Otto brings Imogen out of a petrified April of sub-life...

...In those dark stories lone individuals, often bizarre or grotesque or gigantic, are seen at large in settings cramped or limitless, working out dooms whose causes Higgins all but ignores...

...Herr Beck...

...Imogen is beset by old repression, erotic starvation, loneliness...

...Just to be warm.' " Early in the affair the almost supernatural turf carts go "grinding by, coming from the Bog of Allen and bound for Dublin, or coming from Dublin, bound for the Bog of Allen . . . night after night, in winter in driving rain," back and forth, back and forth—and these are felt in Imogen's imagination not as a rhythm she is part of but as something that "in Otto's arms" she is safe from...

...Easy does it...

...But he could find no words of prayer...

...Down, down, go down to Killa-doon...

...Perhaps in the most terrible of the book's human endings there is one weakness in Higgins' conception: The hideously shown end of the foetal child seems inevitable by the laws of Higgins' implied symbolism rather than the natural process his artistic scheme is embodying?i.e., Higgins is forced to kill the child...

...Lyrical it can be, but "lyrical" in the reviewer's vague sense of sweepingly melodic or emotional it is not: It is by turns glintingly brilliant, precisely broken, nearly sung, or dure almost to the point of being indigestible...

...For Helen (as for Helen Kervick in the title story of the earlier book, who on an uncomfortable seat sits "lost" in The Anatomy of Melancholy) there is fear and regret and animus: "sour white daylight" and the cats' afflicted eyes [whose] pupils, reduced to slits, bored into hers...

...Take it easy, brother...

...A pattern of inevitable, though strange disintegration and growth is formally fixed in a closing passage: "He lit a candle for Mr...

...To say that language is at the center of Higgins' purpose needs some defining...

...But it was not always this way, as Helen well knows, lying in bed at night, hearing a hoarse fox, sensing in her nose and mouth her "blameless [hence] useless . . . life," and wakefully and bitterly blaming the German, Otto Beck, who desired Imogen, got her, left her...

...The power of the past, historic tradition—impossible to overlook this...

...Summer nightfall lets loose a swarming life of natural noises...

...Just to sleep...

...Again and again the book stops short of being any one of the several things it seems to be...

...I'm tired...

...As Agreement...

...There were outcrops of huge talent in his first book, Killachter Meadow (Grove Press, 1960...

...Granted Otto's science or scien-tism—a characteristic or an idiosyncrasy—it is more importantly Higgins' central purposes that speaks in Otto's seemingly funny but in fact detached perception of Imogen: "Her dress made a caressing sound, riss-riss, as she passed, and her scent, her displacement, followed...

...But what seemed a flashback comes to be so bewilderingly full an image of Higgins' meaning that it opens up a new view of his intricately homogeneous, "natural" design...

...In books like Beckett's Molloy, Nabokov's Pale Fire, Grass' Dog Years, or William Gass' Omensetter's Luck, form is extravagantly on display, language turns "into" itself, and surface disjunctions advertise more interesting harmonies that the reader is sometimes asked to compose himself...

...enjoying his own pedantry, his inventive sexuality, his fishing, his chickens, his sordid hygiene, and his solitudes...

...They are listening to themselves weakened with hunger—systems that are going out...

...Nor, like "Killachter Meadow," is Langrishe, Go Down an exercise in funeral cadence, though the first and third parts do seem an aged graveyard plotted out in stone slabs and dank shivers...