• Felo de Se (London: John Calder 1960) [“Killachter Meadow”; “Lebensraum”; “Asylum”; “Winter Offensive”; “Tower and Angels”; “Nightfall on Cape Piscator”]; Do., in America as Killachter Meadow (NY: Grove 1961); Do., reissued as Asylum and Other Stories [rev. edn.] (London: Calder & Boyars 1978), 191pp., and Do . (Dallas: Riverrun Press 1978).
• Langrishe, Go Down (London: Calder & Boyars 1966, 1968), 272pp.; Do ., [pbk. rep. edn.] (London: Minerva 1993), 272pp.; Do. (London: Vintage 2000), and Do . (Dublin: New Island Books 2007), 261pp.; Do., in French as Naufrage, trans. by Edith Fournier (Paris: Éditions de Minuit, 1968), 372pp.[ltd. edn. of 117].
• Images of Africa: A Diary 1956-60 [Signatures Ser., 11] (London: Calder & Boyars 1971), 71pp.; Do., reissued as Ronda Gorge and Other Precipices: Travel Writing 1956-1989 (London: Secker & Warburg 1989), 229pp.
• Balcony of Europe (London: Calder & Boyars 1972), 463pp. [with 2pp. epigraphs; & 4pp. “Rejected Epigraphs”]; Do. [rev. edn.], ed. Neil Murphy (Dalkey Archive Press 2010).
• Scenes from a Receding Past (London: John Calder 1977), 204pp.; Do . (London: Dalkey Archive Press, 2005), 204pp.
• Bornholm Night Ferry (London: Allison & Busby 1983), 175pp.; Do . [another edn.] (London: Abacus 1985), 175pp.
• Helsingor Station & Other Departures (London: Secker & Warburg 1987), 240pp.
• Weaver’s Women (London: Secker & Warburg 1993), 224pp.
• Lions of the Grunewald (London: Secker & Warburg 1993; London: Minerva 1995), xi, 301pp.
• Flotsam and Jetsam (London: Minerva 1997), 470pp., pb.; Do. [rep. edn.] (Chicago: Dalkey Archive Press 2002), 470pp. [incl. “Berlin After Dark”; “North Salt Holdings” - formerly “Killachter Meadow”; “Asylum”, “Helsingör Station”, “Black September”, et al.].

• Donkey’s Years: Memories of a Life as Story Told [by Aidan Higgins] (London: Secker & Warburg 1995; Minerva 1996), 366pp.
• Dog Days: A Sequel to Donkey Years (London: Secker & Warburg 1998; Vintage 1999), 286pp.
• The Whole Hog: A Sequel to Donkey’s Years and Dog Days (London: Secker & Warburg 2000), xiv, 400pp. [var. 2001].
• As I was Riding Down Duval Boulevard with Pete La Salle (Kinsale: Anam Press 2002), 25pp. [on his time at Univ. of Texas; adapted from the earplay Boomtown ; ltd. edn. of 400].
• A Bestiary: An Autobiograpy (Dalkey Archive Press 2004), 742pp. [comprising autobiographical volumes of 1995, 1998 & 2000; for contents table, see Amazon Books - online]

• Windy Arbours: Collected Criticism [Irish Literature Ser.] (Normal [Ill.]; London: Dalkey Archive Press 2005), 308pp. [incls. essays on William Faulkner, Djuna Barnes, and Jorge Luis Borges, Ralph Cusack, and Dorothy Nelson].
• March Hares (Columbia UP 2015; rep. Dalkey Archive Press 2017), 286pp. [essays and introductions incl. writings on Melville, Flaubert, Joyce, Beckett - in an essay on John Minahan's portraits - Flann O’Brien, John McGahern, and Charles Olson.

• “Sign and Ground”, in Evergreen Review, 30 [NY] (May-June 1963), 127pp., ill. [with “Cascando”, by Samuel Beckett]
  
• Extract from Langrishe Go Down, in Dolmen Miscellany of Irish Writing, eds., J. Montague & T. Kinsella (Dolmen Press 1962), pp.12-26.
• “Sign and Ground” [story], in Evergreen Review, 30 (May-June 1963) [also incls. "Cascando" by Samuel Beckett].
  Ed. & intro., A Century of Short Stories (London: Jonathan Cape 1977), 414pp. [also publ. by  London : Book Club Associates].
• Ed. & Intro., Carl, Julien & Elwin Higgins, Colossal Congorr & the Turkes of Mars: A Century of Short Stories (London: Jonathan Cape 1979), 96pp., ill. [‘written ... by my three sons at ages varying from five to fifteen, covering a period of perhaps ten years’; ills. by the authors.]
• contrib. ‘Paddy’ [an appreciation], to Frances Ruane, Patrick Collins, with a foreword by James White (Dublin: Arts Council/An Chomairle Ealaion 1982), 118pp.
• ‘Paradiddle and Paradigm’ [review of works by Bernard MacLaverty and John Montague], in Irish Review (Autumn 1988), pp.116-18.
• Introduction to John Minihan, Samuel Beckett (London: Secker & Warburg 1995), 92pp. [photo-tribute]; Do. ([Paris]: Le Petit Libraire] Anatolia 1995), 49pp. [51 ills.].and Do. ([NY: George Braziller 1996), 4, 92pp., ills.
• ‘The Faceless Creator’, in Ireland of the Welcomes: ‘New Irish Writing’ [Special Issue], ed. Derek Mahon (Sept.-Oct. 1996), pp.16-19.
• Blind Man’s Bluff (NY: Columbia UP 2012), 88pp.

• Harold Pinter, The French Lieutenant’s Woman and Other Screenplays (London: London : Methuen, 1982; Faber & Faber 1991), 277pp. [incls. The French Lieutenant’s Woman of John Fowles; Langrishe, Go Down by Higgins; The Last Tycoon by F. Scott Fitzgerald.]s

• [For BBC] Assassination in Sarajevo; Imperfect Sympathies; Discords of Good Humour; Vanishing Heroes [BBC entry for Prix Futura, 1885]; Texts for the Air; An Elegy for England; Winter is Coming; Zoo Station, Boomtown, Texas US (1987). For RTÉ1: The Tomb of Dreams.

• Balcony of Europe [rev. edn.], ed. Neil Murphy (Dalkey Archive Press 2010), 425pp.
• Darkling Plain: Texts for the Air, ed. by Daniel Jernigan (Dalkey Archive Press 2010), 509pp.
• Neil Murphy, ed., Aidan Higgins: The Fragility of Form (Dalkey Archive Press 2010), 300pp. [Festschrift].

• Neil Murphy, ed., Aidan Higgins: The Fragility of Form [Dalkey Archive Scholarly Ser.] ( Champaign, Ill.; London: Dalkey Archive Press 2010), 358pp.; contribs. by writers Annie Proulx, John Banville, Derek Mahon & Dermot Healy; scholars Keith Hopper, Peter van de Kamp, George O'Brien, and Gerry Dukes.]
• Alannah Hopkin, A Very Strange Man: A Memoir of Aidan Higgins (Dublin: New Island Press 2021),
368pp.

• Morris Beja, ‘Felons of Our Selves: The Fiction of Aidan Higgins,’ in Irish University Review, 3, 2 (Autumn 1973), pp.163-78
• John Hall, interview with Higgins in Manchester Guardian (11 Oct. 1971), p.8
• Roger Garfitt, ‘Constants in Contemporary Irish Fiction’, in Douglas Dunn, ed., Two Decades of Irish Writing (Cheadle: Carcanet; Chester Springs: Dufour 1975).
• Robin Skelton, ‘Aidan Higgins and the Total Book’, in Mosaic, 19 (1976), pp.27-37 [rep. as Chap. 13 of Celtic Contraries (NY: Syracuse UP 1990), pp.211-23]

Review of Contemporary Fiction, 3, 1. (Spring 1983)

• Rüdiger Imhof & Jürgen Kamm, ‘Coming to Grips with Aidan Higgins’ Killachter Meadow: An Analysis’, in Études Irlandaises (Lillie 1984), pp.145-60 [available online].
• Rüdiger Imhof, ‘Bornholm Night-Ferry and Journal to Stella: Aidan Higgins’s Indebtedness to Jonathan Swift’, in The Canadian Journal of Irish Studies, X, 2 (Dec. 1984), pp.5-13.
• Vera Kreilkamp, ‘Reinventing a Form: The Big House in Aidan Higgins’ Langrishe Go Down ’, in The Canadian Journal of Irish Studies, 11, 2 (1985), pp.27-38 [rep. in Kreilkamp, The Anglo-Irish Novel and the Big House (NY: Syracuse University Press 1998), pp.234-60].
• Otto Rachbauer, ‘Aidan Higgins, “Killachter medow” und Langrishe Go Down sowie Harold Pinters Fernsenfilm Langrishe, Go Down: Variationen eines Motivs’, in Rauschbauer, ed., A Yearbook of Studies in English and Language and Literature, Vol. 3 (Vienna 1986), pp.135-46.
• Rüdiger Imhof, ‘German Influences on John Banville and Aidan Higgins’, in Wolfgang Zach & Heinz Kosok, eds., Literary Interrelations: Ireland, England and the World, Vol. 2 (Tübingen: Gunter Narr 1987), pp.335-47.
• Klaus Lubbers, ‘“Balcony of Europe”’: The Trend towards Internationalisation in Recent Irish Fiction’, in Zach & Kosok, eds., op. cit. (Tübingen: Gunter Narr 1987), pp.235-47.
• George O’Brien, ‘Goodbye to All That,’ in The Irish Review, 7 (Autumn 1989), pp.89-92.
• Patrick O’Neill, ‘Aidan Higgins’ in Rüdiger Imhof, ed., Contemporary Irish Novelists [Studies in English and Comparative Literature, ed. Michael Kenneally & Wolfgang Zach] (Tübingen: Gunter Narr Verlag 1990), pp.93-107.
• Neil Murphy, ‘Dreams, Departures, Destinations: A Reassessment of the Work of Aidan Higgins’, in Graph: A Journal of Literature & Ideas (Cork: Summer 1995), pp.64-71.
• Eamonn Wall, ‘Aidan Higgins’s Balcony of Europe: Stephen Dedalus Hits the Road’, in Colby Quarterly(Winter 1995), pp.81-87.
• Neil Murphy, ‘Aidan Higgins’, in The Review of Contemporary Fiction [Dalkey Archive Press, Illinois] (Fall 2003), pp.49-83.
• Neil Murphy, ‘Dreams, Departures, Destinations: A Reassessment of the Work of Aidan Higgins.’, in Graph: A Journal of Literature & Ideas, 1 (1995), pp.64-71.
• George O’Brien, ‘On the Pig’s Back’: Review of The Whole Hog (2000), in The Irish Times (7 Oct. 2000), p.67.
• Neil Murphy, ‘Aidan Higgins,’ in The Review of Contemporary Fiction, 23, 3 (2003), pp.49-83.
• Neil Murphy, ‘Aidan Higgins - The Fragility of Form’, in Irish Fiction and Postmodern Doubt: An Analysis of the Epistemological Crisis in Modern Irish Fiction [Studies in Irish Literature Number, 12] (Edwin Mellen Press 2004), 286pp. [Chap. 2].
• John Banville, review of Langrishe Go Down, A Bestiary, and Flotsam and Jetsam (all published in US by Dalkey Archive), in The New York Review of Books, 51, 19 (2 December 2004) [‘Although Higgins went on to produce further novels [...] Langrishe is without doubt his masterpiece’].
• Kevin O’Farrell, ‘Phenomenological fiction: Aidan Higgins via Edmund Husserl’, in Irish University Review (2013) [available online]
• Kevin O’Farrell, ‘In search of lost selves: Aidan Higgins’ Scenes from a Receding Past’, in Irish Studies Review (Oct. 2013), pp.461-69 [see abstract].
• Brian Lynch, Obituary, Irish Independent (3 Jan. 2016) [see extract]

See also Ruth Frehner, The Colonizers’ Daughters: Gender in The Anglo-Irish Big House Novel (Tubingen: Franacke 1999), 256pp.

• Bruce Arnold, review of Aidan Higgins, Langrishe, Go Down, in Dublin Magazine (Spring 1966) [see extract].
• Gerry Dukes, ‘Recycled living, required reading’, review of Flotsam and Jetsam, in The Irish Times (22 Feb. 1997), with photo-port of Higgins with a young neighbour, by Ted McCarthy [extract].
• C. L. Dallat, review of Flotsam and Jetsam, in Times Lit. Supplement (21 March 1997), p.23.
• Caroline Walsh, interview with Higgins in The Irish Times (15 Oct. 1977), p.12.
• Robert Buckeye, ‘Form as the Extension of Content: “their existence in my eyes”’ [review], in Contemporary Fiction, 3.1 (1983), pp.192-95.
• Rüdiger Imhof, review of Lions of the Grunewald, in Linenhall Review, 10, 3 (Winter 1993) [see extract].
• Neil Murphy, ‘Review of Lions of the Grunewald’, in Irish University Review, 25.1 (Spring/Summer 1995), pp.188-190.
• Dermot Healy, ‘Donkey’s Years: A Review,’ in Asylum Arts Review, 1, 1 (Autumn 1995), pp.45-46 [‘At last Higgins has succeeded in giving himself the fictional life he was always seeking’].
• George O’Brien, ‘Consumed by Memories’ review of Donkey’s Years, in The Irish Times (10 June 1995), Weekend, p.9. [see extract].
• Derek Mahon, ‘An Anatomy of Melancholy’, review of Dog Days, in The Irish Times (7 March 1998), Weekend [p.6-7]].
  
• George O’Brien, ‘On the Pig’s Back’, review of The Whole Hog, in The Irish Times (7 Oct. 2000), Weekend, [p.6-7].
• Annie Proulx, ‘Drift and Mastery’, review of Flotsam & Jetsam, in The Washington Post (16 June 2002), Sunday [sect., T07].
• Keith Hopper, review of sundry works by Higgins, in Times Literary Supplement (2 April 2010), pp.3-4 [see extract].
• Emily Hourican, ‘Novelist Alannah Hopkin: “It was so good when it was good”’ [interview-article] in Irish Independent, 12 June 2017) [see extract].
• Rosita Sweetman, ’Aidan Higgins: caught on camera in Where Would You Like the Bullet?’, in The Irish Times (10 May 2019) [see extract].

Obituaries & memoirs incl.

• Brian Lynch, Obituary for Aidan Higgins, in Irish Independent (3 Jan. 2016) - as attached.
• Obituary, in The Irish Times (16 Jan. 2016) - available online.
• Rosita Sweetman, ’Aidan Higgins: caught on camera in Where Would You Like the Bullet?’, in The Irish Times (10 May 2019) - see infra.
• Kate Webb, review of Aidan Higgins, Langrishe, Go Down and March Hares, in Times Literary Supplement (31 March 2018), rep. at Nothing is Lost (31.03.2018) - as infra.

‘Higgins’s relationship with Joyce’s chief disciple, Samuel Beckett, is revealing. Beckett not only persuaded John Calder to publish Felo de Sé, as collection of Higgins’s short stories, in 1956, he also helped the impoverished young writer with gifts of money. And even earlier he gave him advice - it was an unheard-of thing for the future Nobel Prizewinner to do. The advice, which came in handwriting so cramped and spiky Higgins’s mother had to decipher the letter for her son, was typical Beckett: “Despair young and never look back.”’ Lynch ends: ‘Aidan Higgins was a fierce man entirely’

[...]
 Aidan was in with the big shooters from the get go. Samuel Beckett, later a friend, said in praise of Felo de Se, Aidan’s first collection of short stories, “in you together with the beginner we see the old hand”, the Spectator praising his “bitter, poetic intensity”, his Nabokovian writing to achieve “aesthetic bliss”, Frank O’Connor pronouncing him “in love with language, and what language can do”.
 Fame arrived early for Higgins with the James Tait Black Memorial Prize for his first novel Langrishe Go Down, where he turned his “brothers into sisters”, situating them in a decaying Springfield, one sister braving a love affair with odious know-it-all lodger Otto Beck (“You are an imbecile”).
 Beckett, his hero, famously disliked Langrishe, dubbing it “literary shit”. From then on the books left the relatively calm pastures of “literary novels”, heading into the rough, uncharted and less controllable waters of autobiographical fiction, a genre he perfected. A way, believes Prof Neil Murphy, “of letting the chaos in” so that “everything feels just out of our control, feels ‘fluid’.” Just like life.
 The critics were not so happy.
 In Balcony of Europe, his sprawling masterpiece following on from Langrishe, Aidan said he wanted to write a book in which “nothing was made up”. The story of a passionate love affair between an Irish artist (Higgins thinly disguised) and the beautiful blonde wife of an American visiting Andalucía where Jill and Higgins now lived with their three sons, Balcony was so not made up it must have been hell for Jill - to live through, and to type up. No! Yup, he had Jill type the manuscript; that she regularly threw typewriter and manuscript out the window is no surprise.
 [...]
 His much-loved friend of Berlin days, Martin Kluger, believes Aidan showed a certain “flaw of character” in “relishing the enslavement of the erotic”. Hmmm.
 “There’s something missing in Irish literature if I may say so,” Aidan believed, “it’s Adam and Eve - they have been forgotten.”
 Certainly the next two books after Balcony, Lions of the Grunewald and Bornholm Night Ferry, got their juice from liaisons amoureuses. Lara O Muirithe of Trinity College, a passionate devotee, believes in Lions of the Grunewald Higgins perfected the “omnisensual, omnitextual” techniques begun in Balcony. Bornholm Night Ferry, based on letters between Higgins and another, this time Danish, inamorata - the letters “titivated up” by the author - is a “masterpiece”, believes Neil Murphy; a love affair recalled with, says Prof Keith Hopper of Oxford, a “beautiful Beckettian sense of failure”.
 Ironically when Jill finally kicked him out in the late Seventies the liaisons stopped; had they worked only so long as he had safe harbour, Jill and “the lads” to sail home to?
  Dog Days, the second of the autobiographical trilogy, written when he was living alone in Wicklow, is described as one of his more accessible books. It’s also the driest. Apart from an astonishing portrait of his younger brother Colman, “the Dote”, and wife Stella, this was Aidan without amor, without wife, without “the lads”, barely Aidan at all.
 Then he met Alannah. “I very much liked the way he listened to me,” Alannah says simply. “He took me seriously - this doesn’t often happen particularly with older men of distinguished literary pedigree.” And so the second marriage began. And continued, for many happy years.
 More books appeared: The Whole Hog, Flotsam and Jetsam, Windy Arbour, Blind Man’s Bluff, March Hares.
 Sadly, the recognition every artist craves stubbornly refused a return appearance. The early fame had cooled to near zero. The Irish reading public whom Beckett once said “couldn’t give a fart in their corduroys about art” looked resolutely the other way. Higgins was a “difficult” writer. No, he was an impossible writer! HE DID NOT REVERE JOHN MC GAHERN. WHAT WAS THE BLOODY MATTER WTH HIM?
 There were academics, friends, who remained faithful - Prof Neil Murphy in Singapore, Gerry Dukes in Limerick, Keith Hopper at Oxford, the English literature department at Trinity, the University of Texas at Austin which bought his papers, writers Brian Lynch, John Banville, Adrian Kenny all cared, and still care, as well of course as the uniquely wonderful Dalkey Archive Press with imprints old and new.[...]

Aidan Higgins’s debut novel, Langrishe, Go Down (1966), [is] reputedly the greatest Irish novel serious readers may never have heard of. Writing in the Irish Times, Derek Mahon confirmed not just the novel’s reputation, but the author’s, as “fugitive . . . a thing of hearsay among initiates”. Langrishe concerns four sisters (one already dead) marooned outside Dublin in Springfield, one of Ireland’s decaying Big Houses. The novel is set in the 1930s as fascism creeps across Europe; the Langrishe women are creatures living at the edge of the continent and the end of their wits: ignorant, impoverished and condemned to the loneliest of spinsterhoods, which has turned them in on themselves and set them against one another. The two sisters who narrate the novel fret continually about their fall from respectability, wondering how they have arrived at a place so far beyond the pale.

[...]

Part of the problem for Higgins was the way critics placed his novel. Because of its Big House subject, historical references (James Connolly, Éamon De Valera, Constance Markiewicz, etc) and melancholy lyricism, many thought of it primarily in a national context - another brick in the wall of “old Irish miserabilism”, as Eimear McBride described the tradition recently on Radio 4 - as existing, therefore, in a space disconnected from these continental debates about literature and politics. But this is perhaps a category error: Langrishe is not an example of the isolation of Irish culture, but rather a work that critically dissects it. Disputing the novel’s reading by many reviewers, Higgins underscores this point in another piece included in March Hares. In it, he asserts, “on the subject of misunderstandings and cognate matters, may I be here permitted to state categorically that Langrishe, Go Down is not a Big House novel, nor ever was intended as such”.

John Calder, thinking back over some of the writers he championed during his (heroic) career, singled Higgins out as “greatly under appreciated”. “He is a very strange man”, Calder told an interviewer in 2013, “A great writer, though.” No doubt lack of appreciation played its part in that strangeness, leading to some of the bristliness on display in March Hares, where he returns repeatedly to the matter of Ireland’s “deeply conservative reading public”, the fantastic sales of the “sobsisters” (Nuala O’Faolain, Frank McCourt), the ever-present faces of the fashionable literati (Colm Tóibín, Roddy Doyle), his own remaindering (out of print again), and the all-too-brief mentions of his work in anthologies of Irish literature. Yet he is astute enough to understand that, for an artist, there is existential validation in being excluded: “To feel out of place is, to be sure, quite a salubrious state for a writer to find himself in”. No doubt this is why writers at the edge so often become experts in reinvention. Higgins’s own talent for redeployment and recycling - characters reappear, later memoirs replay passages from earlier fictions - is at odds with the complete lack of wherewithal demonstrated by the Langrishe sisters. He has said the women were based on himself and his brothers, who had grown up in the house that Springfield is modelled on: the sisters, he writes, were characters “in drag”. Presumably one of the reasons for changing their sex is that women more plausibly embody the “weakness” and redundancy that he was intent on exposing.

Langrishe contains some of the most poignant and beautiful writing to be found anywhere on the evanescence of time and the cycles of nature. Inlaid against this lyricism, though - as is often the case in studies of lateness - there are moments when people start to regard themselves anthropologically, and odd notes of the parodic edge into view: “Pray sir, did you ever meet a lady who is a sort of specimen of a bygone world?” Carter’s critique of Britain as a country past its sell-by date still manages to find a way forward for her characters: in the new Sixties culture of camp and cut-up, they recycle and sell off busts of Queen Victoria, clown noses and soldiers’ uniforms. But at Springfield, though the Langrishe women, cloistered in their only heated room, are also surrounded by detritus from the past - pictures of sabre-waving soldiers, a “blackamoor” statue, a sarcophagus vase-stand - these symbols remain oppressive because the stay-at-home sisters have no countering point of view, no way of learning how to flount authority or play in the ruins of their history.

The only outside voice in Langrishe comes from a German doctoral student, Otto, who takes up residence in the gatehouse, lives off the land and pays no rent - a situation the sisters, in their “stifling stasis”, are incapable of doing anything about despite a desperate need for funds. With his masterful manner and apparent knowledge of all things, Otto quickly seduces Imogen, the youngest and prettiest of the sisters, the family’s “one hope”. But because of the novel’s a-chronology, the reader knows from the outset that the hope of this affair, begun in the summer of 1933, is doomed: Langrishe opens in the winter in 1937, with the once lovely Imogen now surrounded by stout bottles, her hair and teeth falling out; it closes after two deaths and a funeral in 1939, “squashing” all hope for the Big House inhabitants and, following the Anschluss, for Europe as a whole.

“Mother Eire was never young”, Higgins writes in March Hares, chastizing Joyce for his mythologizing, and in Langrishe she is a brute, an old hag who squashes the lives of the Langrishe girls like insects. The novel ends with Imogen back in the deserted gatehouse, hiding away among “rotting wainscots” and “mildewed walls”, “spiderwebs” and “dead flies”. In another passage from March Hares, entitled “Ancestral Voices”, Higgins says (playfully, camply) of his own upbringing: “In those stagnant times how we fairly trembled before Authority!” His novel Langrishe, Go Down deserves to be more widely known, not only for its extraordinary mournful beauty, but also for its apocalyptic vision of a culture’s squandering and rottenness, for its thoroughgoing dismantling of the Irish house of fiction, and as one of the great works of European anti-authority. [...]

[...]
 ”He came to visit a friend, I was asked to help to entertain him, and so I did,” Alannah says. “I liked his voice on the phone before I even met him, then I found him very attractive in person, and that was that. We got talking and suddenly we seemed to have many things in common. I liked his gentleness, his hazel eyes - same as mine - his loyalty to his friends and his enigmatic smile.” It was, she says, “a coup de foudre”.
 It was, she says, “a bit dramatic. And terrifying. It’s quite scary. It really was like a thunderbolt. I was 36, and I had never considered it a possibility. I had no idea how old Aidan was at the time, and he looked a lot younger, but we just clicked”. Aidan was 59 at the time; “I thought he was pulling my leg when he told me. I thought he meant to say 49, and even that would have been old. But it didn’t seem to matter.”
 They moved in together “straight away”, although they wouldn’t marry for 11 years. “After about six months, Aidan started talking about buying a house, and I had to say ’stop, stop, you mean you really want to buy a house with me? Are you sure?’ He said ’Yes of course, why not?’ It was all easy. He was very decisive.”
 They would work separately all day - “I got the room with the door that closes, Aidan worked in the big open-plan sitting room with kitchen” - then meet in the evenings. “At half five or six we’d have a drink together, play Scrabble, maybe go out. We didn’t really talk about the working day. He might if it was going really well, and I might if I had a gripe. But we would never read each other’s stuff.”
 It was, Alannah says, “so good when it was good”. And for many years, it was good. But then Aidan began to behave in ways that were strange.
 ”He had vascular dementia, but it went undiagnosed for a long time, because he had other mental health problems. He had a kind of breakdown, a psychotic episode” - this was around 2002, and was, Alannah says, “accelerated by taking steroids for his eye condition, and seemed related to two of his friends committing suicide”.
 It wasn’t the first such episode - “he had had one or two before, and they never really got to the bottom of those. They thought he was mildly bi-polar, so this dragged on for years”.
 Finally, in his early 80s, Aidan saw a geriatrician and was diagnosed.
 ”At least we knew then what was going on,” Alannah says, adding “it’s really terrible when the GP has to explain to you that he’s not going to get better, he’s only going to get worse. And it’s so difficult for him, because he can’t understand what’s going on - although I think he knew more than he let on.”
 By then, Aidan’s eyesight was failing and he couldn’t read. “He became very reclusive and silent and no longer wanted to see his friends nor go out. [...]

—Balcony of Europe (1972), p.216; posted by Philip Casey on Facebook following Higgins’s death [31.12.2016]