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That time, that place, was it all your own invention, that you shared with me? And I too perhaps was your invention.
-Aidan Higgins, Helsingor Station and Other Departures
More than thirty years ago Aidan Higgins indicated that all of his work followed his life, "like slug trails ... all the fiction happened" (Higgins, "Writer in Profile" 13), a comment that implies much more than autobiographical admission. In his earliest fictions, Felo de Se and Langrishe, Go Down, his birthplace, Springfield House, Celbridge, is a recurring setting, and Higgins was also to later acknowledge in his trio of autobiographies that the sisters in Langrishe were actually he and his brothers in fictional drag. Balcony of Europe is largely based in Andalucian Spain, where Higgins lived in the 1970s. Scenes from a Receding Past's fictionalized setting of Sligo seems suspiciously like the Celbridge of his youth, and Bornholm Night-Ferry and Lions of the Grunewald revisit the northern European landscapes where Higgins lived during the early 1980s, partly under the benefice of Deutsch Akademischer Austauschdienst (Berlin). The fascination with autobiographical detail is obviously more overt in his travel writing and autobiographies as well as in the numerous short autobiographical sketches that he has penned throughout his career. The travel book Images of Africa recounts his journeys in South Africa with a marionette theater company, while the twin texts Helsingor Station and Other Departures and Rhonda Gorge and Other Precipices gather together many short fictions and straight autobiographical pieces. More recently, the author, still "consumed by memories" (Higgins, Donkey's Years 3), embarked on a trilogy of autobiographies: Donkey's Years: Memories of a Life as Story Told, Dog Days, and The Whole Hog. Everywhere in the work Higgins's life finds expression, but in such a way that the distinction between autobiography and fiction gradually grows to mean less and less, and in some respects the final part of the autobiographical trilogy, The Whole Hog, reads like a fiction. This is because the traditional demarcations between fiction and reality are constantly confronted in Higgins's work, and much of the significance of his writing finally rests on his deeply troubled response to the means with which we grapple with a life that so often refuses to be named, either in writing...