THIS is the eleventh title for Aidan Higgins since he opened his account in 1960 with Felo de Se, a collection of six short stories reissued as Asylum and Other Stories in 1972. He subsequently worked up one of the stories from that collection, "Killachter Meadow", into the novel Langrishe, Go Dawn (1966 reissued 1993). The story reappeared in Helsinger Station and Other Departures (1989) and now reappears again as "North Salt Holdings" in the present volume. While this looks like extraordinary economy, it is in fact something else entirely. Some authors (too few) revise - as does Higgins - but he also recycles, re constellates.
All his writing life Higgins has worked at the ragged, jagged interface where fiction and autobiography jostle. During the publicity campaign preceding the publication of Donkey's Years: Memories of a life as story told (1995) Higgins revealed that the story of the Langrishe family in his 1966 novel was a heavily disguised or displaced version of his own family's story.
If we turn to the short story from which the whole enterprise has been "grown" then we notice that the opening event of the narrative, the burial of Emily Langrishe, takes place on March 3rd, 1927. Donkey's Years confirms that day as Higgins' birthday; and the curious reader who pores over the endpapers of that rich and fascinating book will quickly discover why "Killachter Meadow" now appears as "North Salt Holdings". What Higgins is "at", so to speak, is disclosing developments, connections or mutations in his work which his readers - have so far failed to notice.
Higgins, then, has produced "a body of work" the coherence of which shifts or is in flux. Some of this flux is self induced in that Higgins has withdrawn his big brute of a novel, Balcony of Europe (1972) - shortlisted for the Booker in that year - but a thoroughly reworked and wonderfully crafted segment titled "Catchpole" appears in the present volume. Additionally, some of his earlier work such as Images of Africa, Scenes from a Receding Past and Bornholm Night Ferry, is currently unobtainable except in truncated form in other gatherings.
The fate of Higgins's work mirrors, in some respects, that of Joyce and Beckett. Joyce's had to wait for the sanction of the American academic establishment and Beckett's for the endorsement of the Nobel committee before the reading public heard the penny drop. Donkey's Years redefined the genre of autobiography but those of McCourt and O'Faolain, which read like mere effusions beside Higgins's, command the public's attention. So it goes.
THE title story in the new volume used to be a story titled "Nightfall on Cape Piscator", but for this appearance Higgins has added a new predatory and framing first person narrative, thus pushing what was originally a stand alone fiction in the direction of autobiography.
The new title, also given to the collection, is fraught with self deprecating ironies. Jetsam is that which is thrown overboard to lighten the load and so stay afloat: flotsam is the casual wreckage gathered by beachcombers at the tide's edge. These stories are nothing of the kind - they are unflinching presentations of the chaos and mess we call life.
Beckett once dismissed the majority of the legion of novelists when he called them "chartered recountants", the tatters of simple sums, the balancers of books the eager army ever ready to apply the redundant poultice of "literature to the suffering of being. Beckett was never one of those; nor is Higgins. Higgins writes and what he writes is required reading.