Madam, - Readers of the undersigned might be interested to know that all but two of the Higgins oeuvre have now gone into remaindership and the two laggards are likely to soon follow suit, to set at nought a lifetime's work.
The oft-praised Langrishe Go Down and Dog Days, the middle book of the trilogy, went out in tandem from paperback imprints. All seven titles brought out by Secker and Warburg (Slicker and Windbag) since the 1989 collection of stories, Helsingor Station and Other Departures, have died the death, HS&OD helped on its way by your acid resident American critic who scornfully dismissed it as a load of old codswallop, doing me the further disfavour of abbreviating the title to read Helsingor Station.
But can one take seriously a critic who thinks so highly of John Updike, the panty-sniffer and Rabbit Run man, or our very own John Banville? Both are better critics than novelists but neither can hold a candle to John Cheever of Ossining, who wrote less but better, wrote as if he meant it. Both share a penchant for futile gesticulating, the flaccid Updike and the placid Banville. Astute Irish booksellers would be well advised to hoard their meagre stock of Higgins titles, still available to your casual browser or serious perusers of texts, as a future investment in first editions of rare books. Fourteen years of shelf life seems short.
Meanwhile, over in gay Paree, that tricky twosome of Editions Anatolia/Rocher published the first two of the trilogy, but balked at bringing out the third because the first two hadn't sold. Where's the ethics here? This, mark you, despite an outstandingly good translation and glowing reviews in Figaro and Le Monde. A translating subsidy was available from Dublin, but not taken advantage of.
My late amigo, Tony Kerrigan, the poet, used to say, "Never forget that publishers are our deadly enemies." I thought this rather severe at the time, but now see he was right.
Young and ambitious Irish penpushers embarking on this perilous profession should be discouraged from doing so. But do the Irish read? I mean beyond McGill, McGolly and McGann? Gore Vidal and Paul Bowles believed that serious fiction was on the way out and that nobody would be reading books within 50 years, and they may very well have been right. Soldier on, ambitious scribblers, your time is running out.
The playful roguery that characterises the best fiction is sadly absent in Banville, though I cannot claim to have read all of it. The huge themes and enterprises of great pith and moment, allegedly tackled by this intrepid pair, is nowhere evident to the naked eye. All one sees are will of the wisps or a subject matter pickled and embalmed in perfect prose, that flowery dell. Mind you, I detest Henry James; the constant clearing of the throat can only get on your nerves. A distinction must be made between twiddling the thumbs and getting down to brass tacks.
I remain, mouldering on the thorn, skewered on "the remaindering process" (semi-illiteracy creeping into the very terminology of copy editors). - Yours, etc.,
AIDAN HIGGINS, Doctor of Letters, National University of Ireland, and member of Aosdána, Kinsale, Co Cork.