Discovered in a book as I was moving other books. A relic.
I
was asked by Cornelius Anthony Murphy (Assoc Prof)--- as it is listed on his
e-mail---to write about Aidan Higgins as I had contributed to the Review of
Contemporary Fiction a piece entitled "51 Pauses After Reading Aidan
Higgins" now many years ago.
Cornelius Anthony Murphy (Assoc Prof)
decided it was not for his book of essays on Aidan Higgins.
Aidan
Higgins wrote two great books LANGRISHE, GO DOWN and BALCONY OF EUROPE. He also wrote some very good short descriptive
travel pieces and short pungent notices in Hibernia, a newspaper in Dublin… and
then he made the mistake of writing and writing and writing and writing.
NOW:
Actually READING a book (LIONS OF THE GRUNEWALD by Aidan Higgins.
Got
to find some therapy./This treatment is taking too long. "Twenty four Hours" ---Ian Curtis. JOY DIVISION
a-
Letters from Cornelius Anthony Murphy
(Assoc Prof): Any word on the Higgins
article? Sorry to be a pest but the
publisher is on my trail. I am hoping…
I really hope you can pull something
together, about LIONS, or something else even (Balcony?) as I really…
Just checking to see if you've been
able to muster any enthusiasm for the Higgins piece. I too re-read LIONS recently and am less taken
with it than previously--- bad time in the game for me to shift my point of
view! I hope you've found some way
through the thickets that appear to have sprouted around you…
Letter in
reply: You will have an essay… but
since you asked for something I will write and have I think a way into Higgins.
a-
I
must have bought LIONS OF THE GRUNEWALD by Aidan Higgins in January of 1994
because in those years I was going to London in that month for a few weeks
every year. As I open the paperback, as I
have been opening the paperback during the summer of 2008 and now it is the
autumn and I am still opening the book:
it is falling apart and the pages long ago began to brown and I am sure
it will not survive for many more years.
The
edition I have was published by Martin Secker and Warburg Ltd--- then part of
Reed Consumer Books --- as paper original
with what they fall French flaps. The name
of the author is printed in a golden box.
That year Secker books had a distinct look and that ended rather
quickly.
Currently
LIONS OF THE GRUNEWALD seems out of print both in the UK and in the US. It is available for 99p in the UK and for
eight dollars in the US.
As
many know Dalkey Archive has taken to reprinting many of Higgins' books and it
is a noble endeavor. From the very start
of that press the publication of Higgins' work was a priority.
I
do not know if Dalkey will be publishing for the first time LIONS OF THE
GRUNEWALD in the US… but I am pretty sure all the people who want a copy of
this Higgins title already have it and it is unlikely that many people would be
seeking it out.
Of course I could be wrong and hope I am
wrong as everything that Higgins writes is of interest as he and Desmond Hogan
and Dorothy Nelson are pretty much it when it comes to prose writing in Ireland
after James Joyce, Samuel Beckett, Flann O'Brien, Francis Stuart. Of course there are many many prose writers
in Ireland: almost as many as the standing army of Irish poets but but but…
a-
Berlin is a fascinating place,
maybe less so now that it has been reunited and become a sort of entertainment
zone for the privileged subsidized international artistic middle class. During the time of a divided Berlin Uwe
Johnson--- as readers may actually remember--- wonderfully perceptive hard
earned and authentic books were set in Berlin and in that moment of two Germanys… but now as the years have gone
by writers as good as Julian Rios and
Ceese Nooteboom have fallen under the sway of Berlin and come to a certain
defeat… and part of the reason is that they are not prepared to admit their
ignorance of the complexity of Berlin--- they have to use it as background,
mere background painted on…
a-
Higgins's
book is based on his own residence in Berlin--- just before the actual fall of
the Berlin Wall as a guest of one of those international sinecures that the
German government uses to get people to come to Berlin for a period of time…
Higgins
gives into the mostly deadly of all traps: the academic literary satire… and
crosses it with a sentimental entanglement of the central character Dallan
Weaver who is a guest of DILDO (Deutsche-Internationale Literatur-Diesnt
Organisation and it is probably right there in that footnote
attached to a listing of characters, just after the CONTENTS that the book
falls apart.
a-
---It
is understood that LIONS OF THE GRUNEWALD is Higgins's favorite book
a-
The trouble continues right in
the prologue with a slice of jazzed up or down -potted history: "Zukov's men, the advanced spearheads,
entered Berlin through the northern suburbs, screeching as they ran. The
infantry went in first over the mine fields and tank traps to be blown to
glory; others came on screeching wave after wave. Then the tanks went in."(P.1-2)
This
is immediately followed by, "The sneery sculptor who had fluent Spanish
asked Weaver what was his astrological sign." (p.2)
The
word sneery, astrology and the
previous ham fisted allusion to the Battle for Berlin got me to close the novel
right there the first time I tried to read the novel though I had noted that
Rudolf Hess is helpfully listed with the others characters in the book as
"the last Nazi in Spandau Prison." (P. x)
a.
So, one tries again in the
summer, so many years later, having remembered having defending Balcony of
Europe for an early issue of the Review of Contemporary Fiction-- when it was
neither profitable or even useful for a resume to echo Flann O'Brien.
a-
Well, the Weavers ( should we
really read Higgins, wife and child?) house hunt for a place during their
Berlin stay. There is party going. Mention of Rudolf Hess comes before two
mentions of the "bullet riddled Amerika Haus" (p33) and "Amerika
Haus was bullet riddled." (p46).
a-
"And where had the brainy
Prof read that all whales have syphilis?" (p.33) It is that word brainy coupled with Prof that makes the sentence read like a
bad translation…
a-
Early on and sadly dominating the
book THE AFFAIR complete with the wife Nancy, "the dispossessed and
disgruntled spouse." (p.97) There
will be the other woman, Lore, who will having been made pregnant: "Their child's life had been terminated in The Hague by the
sinister lady abortionist…"(p.267).
a-
Another un-necessary word:
"The right-hand window of Margot Schoeller's famous bookstore…" (P.71)
How could Higgins allow his man
Weaver to think that or he to write it?
But it sets up a moment of letting us know that Higgins, Weaver knows
Samuel Beckett who has just received the Nobel Prize. AS good anecdote is recorded, "Watt
(dismissed by its author into Weaver's ear as not so much shit as
dysentery." (P.73).
a-
But the book is not all
heterosexual. After all this is Berlin:
"Two sad sodomites frantic with
grief and betrayal were copulating in
the snow, lit by the headlights of a parked car… Weaver averted his eyes as he
would have looked away from a bloody
traffic accident. (p.56).
a-
12 pages are given over to
Weaver's child's writing. Enough
said. A sort of filler, I guess. Allows for a ink drawing by the
"brilliant son" (P.87) of the author.
a-
3
pages of dreams. No check attached for
listening. At the going rate today of
150$ per fifty minutes…how many sessions would they require?
a-
But followed up by more Dublin
gossip: well that old warhorse Brendan
Behan hungover demanding that his wife, "Come up here with you now,
Bethrice, an' thrim me toenails."
(p.135) and there is mention of
"wild Ralph Cusack" (P.134) and I would have liked to have had him
about for more than a name drop.
a-
And then the reader is off to
drunken Spain but we have been there and in far better verbal company in
BALCONY OF EUROPE but we are quickly--- since these pages are read quickly out
of embarrassment--- though it takes ages as is said but we are back in Berlin
right smartly: "The British Council always gave good
parties."(p202); "Lore(the
mistress, girlfriend whatever as the kids might say) had discovered a good
Japanese restaurant near Fat George's flat…" (P.211); "In the
summertime (when the living is easy) it was a very different
story."(p.216) The parenthetical
phrase is Higgins and he bears full responsibility for it, sadly.
a-
But off to Munich during Olympic
season. Israelis will be murdered ( it
is THAT Olympics) and now it gets cloudy.
Is the following the author, Weaver or who? "When a pure negroid
(small n) American could run faster, jump faster and fly first over hurdles
faster than any white man, that only
confirmed his own conviction abut racial degeneracy: those fellows had
just come down out of the trees. (p241)
a-
I
missed listing some more "famous" people who appear or are mentioned:
Per Olaf Enquist, Leni Riefenstahl, Volker Schlondorff, Margarethe von Trotta
who you might like to know, "spent some time under the table retrieving
poor shots, sulking 'shitshitshit!"(p243)
a-
And not to let a name go:
"Hess was still serving pit his life sentence in Spandau Prison, the
Russians would not him go. (P.252).
a-
Now that we are nearly at the end
of the book a selection of letters from Berlin to Weaver and one letter from
Lore that prepare us for the disappearance of the wife and how true something lives… some years after the
body of the book.
a-
And an epilog he (whether it is
Higgins or Weaver?) conflates a meeting between Gunter Grass and Max Frisch and
manages to drag in Uwe Johnson and an allusion to Ingeborg Bachmann which is
supposed to?... beats me, I have to point out that one of the he's or the
proofreader overlooks the misspelled Frishe (p299) while making some point
about the Gauloises smoked by Grass and the pipe tobacco stained fingers of
Frisch…
a-
I found a book marker reminder
(though I can't explain the dates because as we know LIONS OF THE GRUNEWALD was
published in 1993) of an earlier reading of LIONS OF THE GRUNEWALD in the form
of a newspaper clipping, now a darker brown than the pages of the book: from the December 25, 1978 THE VILLAGER ( a
local paper in Greenwich Village, NY:
DEATH ON 12TH
STREET: At 6 pm on December 12, a resident of 343 West 13th Street was found by
two friends hanging by the neck in his apartment. The 31 year-old resident, wearing a
leather-studded collar, a gas mask with the air vents closed and other assorted
sexual equipment, apparently choked to death.
The case while is may be an accidental death, is being investigated by
the First Homicide squad.
But this scrap can serve as a
telling commentary for we know that much of LIONS OF THE GRUNEWALD appeared in
previous books and while movie directors are endlessly providing new versions
(think of Oliver Stone's various Final cuts
of ALEXANDER) I would have had no problem---as is said--- with a book solely of
observation and quotation but the sheer dreariness of the love/sexual triangle:
why not just publish the divorce degree and parts of the hearing transcript if
such exists?
b-
I
would like to read a NEW book by Higgins of his life in Ireland.
c.
Aidan Higgins is still the best
English-language prose stylist in the country.
---Nuala
Ni. Dhomhnaill.
New York
-->
1 October
2008
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