Run, run as fast as you can
Patrick Skene Catling
LIONS OF THE GRUNEWALD by Aidan Higgins Secker, £8.99, pp. 301 by do so many of the most talented Irish writers leave Ireland? Why do children threaten to go to the bottom of the garden and eat worms? Even now that they are free from oppressive Church-ruled censorship, Irish writers go voluntarily into exile, hopefully remembering Joyce and Beckett.
Aidan Higgins lives at present in Kinsale but he has sent the protagonist of his fifth novel to the Continent. Weaver, an aptly named Trinity College Dublin academic, erratic rather than fabricative, acquires the honorary title 'professor' when he goes to West Germany in 1969 under the auspices of DILDO. The acronym stands for the Deutsche-Internationale Literatur-Dienst Organisation. He is a dildo of letters, not the real thing, though he knows a lot about many successful writers and has even met some.
This is mainly a novel about place, atmo- sphere and mood. There is only the slight- est of stories in the conventional sense of the development of a plot. Weaver's lusty escapist self-indulgence achieves simple pleasures and complicated pain. He finds himself precariously poised, not to say impaled, on the sharp apex of a tall isosce- les triangle with his wife and mistress at the extremities of the base. There is a child.
Higgins writes with genuine Irish bitter poetic intensity. He writes much better than the ersatz-Irish J. P. Donleavy, of course, and on a higher intellectual level. But Weaver is little more than the Ginger Man grown large and over-ripe, a portrait of the would-be artist as a pain in the arse. He is that familiar literary character, a dis- placed writer, alienated from marriage in an alien society. In those days, Berlin was the world capital of alienation.
Weaver and his creator, as they express themselves here, evidently care more about written words than about people. That's all right with me. As a reader sitting at a safe distance from the action, I cruelly enjoy witnessing destructive behaviour. I do not believe that fiction should be judged in accordance with the current standards of social correctness. When Weaver, inflamed by wine and schnapps, rants with the stri- dent eloquence of a spoiled genius against the very isolation he has chosen, I smile like someone in a Charles Addams car- toon. Perhaps one of the satisfying func- tions of fiction is to show readers unpleasantness that they themselves do not have to endure. Tough luck for Mrs Weaver; great fun for us outsiders.
Marital dissolution is expertly, merciless- ly portrayed. After 13 years of marriage, now that there is a 27-year-old Other Woman, Weaver in his wife's view is 'the living embodiment of duplicity, wayward- ness, lies.' And when he looks at her he sees: The face in the bed had grown middle-aged, then old; she seemed to be wearing a hair- net, was chap-fallen, the eyes rheumy, unfocused. The barely recognised features were crunched up, the mouth set and prim, old-maidish and virginal . . . thin wormy- veined claws held up a book on her jutted lap as defence (it was Middlemarch) . . .
He escapes from his Berlin escapism. With his young mistress in the sunshine of Mallorca, he readily adjusts from stube to cantina. There is an episode of harsh comic relief with an Irish drinking companion who leads them on a derisive visit to a Royal Navy nuclear submarine.
The texture of the prose is uneven. There are a list of the Berlin underground railway stations, a Rabelaisian catalogue of sexual slang, a diversion into Japanese farmyard pornography, and sudden redemptive passages close to poetry.
A seer tells Weaver he loves neither of his women. He shows wistful concern only for his small son. There is a whole chapter on the child's confused attempts to write phonetically. Some require footnotes to render them comprehensible. They vividly demonstrate his psychic bruises.
Aidan Higgins reminds me of novelists who used to write for the sake of writing, to achieve what Nabokov called 'aesthetic bliss'. There isn't very much of it about in the era of the machine-tooled blockbuster. Higgins helps to revive language.
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