Poetry Magazines - The best collection of poetry magazines online - Simon Armitage

Both book and writing are unusual. This is a Continental-style paperback. The spine of my copy has torn already, but the lively jacket is laminated and stays clean and shiny. By doing this, John Calder has reduced the price by several shillings. He introduces a young Irish writer of uncommon talent, joined in these six stories to a hopeless Weltanschauung. (German words abound.) Devotees of Beckett may find the combination fruitful rather than frightful. The similarity is inescapable and it is hard to see where Mr Higgins will proceed, unless he follows the master and deprives his characters of arms, legs, hearing and sight. Already they are sadly afflicted. Baldness before thirty (in a lady), a stench of decay, a part-paralysed face, discoloured veins, rheumy eyes, a snout, a fractured spine, deafness, blindness, a discolouration under the right eye and hypertrophy of the prostate are a few of their difficulties.

     A lifetime, we gather, is simply the process of corruption, physical and moray; and these stories are about people who undergo this process more rapidly than most. Ireland is the favoured spot, both inland and by the sea. Dublin Bay is calling again; though Mr Higgins’s strands are further south than the Sandymount and Dollymount of Joyce and Beckett. I believe I recognize Killiney and Greystones. However, his characters also listen to the waves in the North of England, Germany and South Africa. The sound of the sea obliterates, and these people are bent on obliteration.

     ‘Killachter Meadow’ records the end — a practical one, suicide — of the eldest of four spinster sisters in an Irish decaying Big House. Such sisters, in such houses, are peculiarly Irish. One has met them and they are notably cheerful, busy and courageous and the last people in the world to drown themselves. One of these four is nearly like that, but we are told, significantly, that ‘she is not in this story’. The three sisters concerned are grotesquely ugly, despairing, idle and half-mad. ‘Helen Kervick was a collector of dead things, right from the start. She discarded dolls (capable of modestly lowering their eyes) in favour of rabbits strangled in the snares and overrun with lice and fleas, and these she disentangled and buried with her own hands.’ Emily-May was ‘a person who had run out of enthusiasms early on in life, and in the halls of her spirit, so to speak, toadstools grew’. Imogen has ‘the morals of a rhesus monkey’. It is a long road from Somerville and Ross to Beckett and Higgins.

     ‘Lebensraum’ concerns Fräulein Sevi Klein who leaves Germany for London and has hips and spine resembling ‘the down-turned head of a dumb creature with muzzle lowered as though drinking’ — a picture I cannot conjure up at all — and while she is ‘a lady down to the cockpit’ below that she is ‘a snake chitterling or a chitterling snake’. (I have looked up ‘chitterling’ and it says: The smaller intestines of a pig.) Mr Michael Alpin, who comes from Dublin and suffers from self disgust, becomes her lover and takes her back to the Irish seaside. There are fine pages about the town folk ‘enjoying’ the beach: ‘A company coming down resigned, without too much enthusiasm and without too much style, into the Promised Land.’ Their complacency is shaken by the appearance of a hideous and symbolic tramp, and Mr Higgins becomes as extreme as this: ‘Thrown out of order and at a loss the herd was in full retreat, their dreadful faces turned about, their mouths wailing soundlessly.’ Mr Alpin loses Sevi’s love, and himself. He, too, prepares for drowning, ‘his lust or love in the end reduced to this’.

     Uncertainty about the two ‘Ls’ prevails throughout. But one thing is sure: these people come nowhere near each other. ‘Asylum’ presents perhaps the most real relationship, and it may be no surprise to learn that it is Master and Servant. The one is rich, fat, deaf, drunk and dotty. The other is thin, shambling and penniless. The source of union is surprising: they play golf. This story is impressive and long. It could have been longer. Eddie Brazill’s life jumps through three stages too rapidly for us to believe it happens to the same person. First he appears as the son of an Irish chief steward, flogged inexplicably at school and grieving over his mother’s death. Very Joycean. Then he turns up enduring the horrors of English factory life. From this he entirely retreats, to our surprise since his character is quite unknown to us, and next appears shabby, threadbare, sniggering and shaking, and surely the first Irish factory worker to end up as sycophant to a lunatic golfer at a Northern English seaside resort. There has been almost no dialogue. It is all told by statements. When one says it could be longer this is only assuming that the author will allow his characters to speak and live. But it is always Mr Higgins who does the talking and he has clearly come to bury them fast.

     Herr Bausch in ‘Winter Offensive’ has ‘only one preoccupation, and that preoccupation venery’. This limits him, and this is the least unusual of the stories, although the closest to being witty. The author lets off Herr Bausch lightest of all. He is destroyed not by himself but by post-war German economics.

     ‘Tower and Angels’ is much stranger. Indeed, what it is about would be hard to say. A painter living in a tower in Heidelberg is visited by two women. It may be that the first represents lust and the second love, But, if so, the second is inexplicably valueless. We leave the painter out on his tower — and I need hardly tell you that there is a long drop — ‘a ludicrous figure staring wild-eyed out over the void, hair on end, capillaries erupting on his florid cheeks’.

     There is more lust in ‘Nightfall on Cape Piscator’, which is about Mr Vaschel — there are hardly any christian names in this book — who has sleepless nights by the sea. They seem to be solved by the coloured maid. But no. He ‘feels nothing’ afterwards, and the story ends: ‘As he came through the door the jackasses let loose their atrocious bray, derisive as though prearranged. The sea was pounding on the rocks. The sun was up.’

     Although their monstrous features are deliniated at uncommon length, these remain half-people who have no christian names and are hardly ever heard to speak, conscripted with considerable art to establish the thesis that life is loathsome. Of course, if the thesis is true, individual character is as superfluous as Mr Amis tells us it must be in science fiction. But in these first stories Mr Higgins seems to think this of life, rather than to feel it. If these cripples represent human-kind — or even if they are introduced merely as rare cases, which seems unlikely — why does it cause no apparent distress? While Mr Beckett suffers, Mr Higgins enters vigorously with a new list of skin diseases and announces his characters’ end, jackasses and all, with something very close to relish.