SOURCE: Murphy, Neil. “Aidan Higgins.” Review of Contemporary Fiction 23, no. 3 (fall 2003): 49-84.

In the following excerpt, Murphy demonstrates how Higgins’s use of realism in the short story collection Felo de Se is secondary in relevance to his several artistic intents.

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...