Like Joyce, he felt no love for the place, and his experiences there are alluded to in
Scenes From A Receding Past (1977). Leaving school, he worked as a copywriter in the Domas Advertising Agency in Dublin. During a two-week hospital stay due to scarlet fever he began his first serious writing, although he did not have anything published at that time.
The early influences on Higgins's literary career were from the triumvirate of Irish modernist novelists: Joyce, Brian O'Nolan (known also by his pen names, Myles na Gopaleen and Flann O'Brien), and Samuel Beckett. A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man was read at Clongowes, O'Nolan's At Swim-Two-Birds came from the local library and circulated in the family, and Beckett's More Pricks Than Kicks, encountered in the early 1950s, came together to provide much of the shape for Higgins's subsequent work.
In 1955, having moved to London and worked in several laboring jobs, Higgins married a South African, Jill Damaris Anders. They had three sons--Carl in 1958, Julien in 1961, and Elwin in 1965. In 1956 he joined John Wright's Marionette Company as a puppet operator and toured Europe and Southern Africa for two years, after which he settled in Johannesburg as a scriptwriter for Filmlets, an advertising company.
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