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The Whole Hog. Aidan Higgins. Secker & Warburg.
Pat Boran
(Sunday Business Post, October 2000)
For readers who have followed his exploits
through Donkey's Years and Dog Days, this third instalment of
the memoirs of Rory of the Hills, AKA Aidan Higgins, constitutes
not so much a thickening as a further fragmenting of the plot
of the life to now. From a lesser hand, the hop-skip-and-jumping
between incidents and the almost obstinate focus on detail of
all three books might well prove intolerable, but with Higgins
in control the heady mixture of foreign travel and sexual desire
may leave many readers with what can only be called wanderlust.
Travelling under the motto of better to journey than to arrive,
Higgins for instance begins a litany on houses lived in to find
himself exploring a memory of nest-building birds ('avian architects')
in the Khalahari. Hippies defacing his brother's place in London
manage to remind him of Wordsworth and, in turn, of an illegal
abortionist in Berlin during 'the Wall' years. The thing is this
man has been around, puppeting, teaching, loving, and if sometimes,
like the frog jumping half the table, he appears to be left with
half of the distance still to go, it's hard to worry too much
when the diversions are as good as most of these.
It would be unforgivable not to point out the fact, yet again,
that Higgins can write superbly. But not superbly as in big and
flowery and flashy. More like superbly in the sense of getting
to the one thing, the one telling or telling-off detail (even
if he sometimes stays with it too long) that makes the thing
real. Consider the second page description of 'Mumu and Dado'
who 'arrived home next day in a not too sober state and went
to bed early,' the lives that one incident conjures up. Or the
fact that they 'quit Greystones' in what he calls 'ostentatious
poverty'.
These early years are here revisited in some depth, with some
repetition, images of his younger brother Colman ('The Dote')
as 'set in his ways as an Amish quilter' gently prefiguring a
later split between them, still unhealed. Less gentle are references
to 'the great Mexican gasbag Carlos Fuentes, tireless in his
pursuit of important connections' and others, including Noel
Purcell, given fairly short shrift for his screen career. Everyone
is part of the family here, and gets the close-in treatment.
Then again Higgins, or Rory, take your pick, has had a rough
time himself with critics. Samuel Beckett describing your first
novel as 'literary shit' counts as a fairly severe birth by fire,
I would have said. And no doubt there are those who will be hard
on this new book, if not for its relentless and explicit revisiting
of loves won and lost, then for a selection of correspondence
that seems to go on forever.
But the Whole Hog will be, and ought to be, read for the hilarious
account of a night spent (in the temporal sense only) in the
company of a German porn translator, one sentence of whose latest
masterpiece glares at the terrified lover from a sheet of paper
protruding from her typewriter; for wonderful descriptions of
Dado's mastications, drawn out almost unbearably; or for the
occasional off-hand stinger such as the remark following the
information that unfavourite acquaintances have opened a pub
called Dirty Dicks: 'No apostrophe where none intended.'
Asked in February 1983 on a BBC television programme if he had
any regrets, the 77-year old John Betjamen replied: 'Yes, I haven't
had enough sex.' With Higgins/Rory now either 71 or 73, depending
on whose chronology you believe, it seems unlikely his answer
would be even vaguely similar. For if the numbers have not been
extraordinary, the level of interest and commitment certainly
has been.
The plain fact is that sexual conquests,
loves and fantasies make up the vast bulk of this volume, though
more than once the entertaining hi-jinx and low capers serve
to set off Higgins's other less tricksy, less pyrotechnic fare,
and to great effect. A report of the funeral of a young child
in Andalucia is extremely moving, and acute references to the
gap between the haves and have nots in apartheid South Africa,
which left so much space for quackery of all sorts, show that
the heart of this wandering minstrel was kept far from hidden
when he played.
But play he does. In the ridiculously thin disguise of Rory of
the Hills, like something from a comic book, Higgins goes back
down the main streets and by-ways of a life spent, not so much
in pursuit of women - though women there were and are - but in
possession of words. Full of the spirit of telling, part trickster,
part lover, and only in very small part fool, he (they?) the
impression of one who has not so much wrapped words around his
life as, like a migrating and returning bird, built a series
of homes in them.
© Copyright, Pat Boran
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