Letters mingle souls

A tale of two souls liberated but tormented by their brief affair, Aidan Higgins' classic Bornholm Night Ferry has just been reprinted. Review by Rosita Sweetman

Bornholm Night Ferry. By Aidan Higgins. Published by Dalkey Archive Press, €12.95

This is one of the great love stories – the most beautiful, tragic, sensual and comic exchange of letters between lovers you will probably ever be privy to. And since its initial publication 23 years ago, it has been the favourite of his 17 books among fellow writers and publishers. Now, in re-publishing Bornholm Night Ferry, Dalkey Archive Press has done us all a unique favour.

The dramatis personae consist of Fitzy, a 48-year-old Irish writer married with three young boys to the beautiful Coppera, and Elin, a 33-year-old Danish woman with a five-year-old daughter. Through the agonies and ecstacies of their affair Elin becomes a poet.

The lovers meet in Atepmoc (Competa spelt backwards) in Spain.

"'Do you find me masculine?' you asked as if it were a code. And I answered, 'Do you find me feminine?' There it began. You had to sit for the shaking. It was the beginning."

From the 16 April until the 4 May, the lovers plunge together into the Third River. Into the bath. Into the grassy place. They are so happy, "They are shaking like mads." Making love down by the river, walking in the blazing sun, drinking gin in the almost empty bar, fighting, making up from fighting, and talking, talking, talking.

And then, suddenly, their 19 days are over. Apart from a week in London the following January and a few days in Copenhagen a year later, the "initiation" is over.

Now this is when the letters come in.

"Out of the middle of your pages images strike at me it's your feelings striking at me there are no other feelings for me they were hitting at me.

"I am tired, no worn out from the suffering of the miss of you... I'm exhausted of this longing for living together with you."

Elin's wonderful broken English – "the want for you went as a cut through me"; "indeed you get me naked"; "I catch a sweetness so unbearable that I disappear to myself... laughing against the roof, and with my face wet by tears" – and her love for her man, blaze through every page. Fitzy is charmed to pieces like Swift to his Stella and Joyce to his Nora. But trouble looms. While Elin is dreaming their relationship into existence, Fitzy has a sort of breakdown – "all the ideas in my head rushing into me" – and tells his wife of the affair. This isn't his first affair. It is the beginning of the end for both relationships. His marriage splinters while his beautiful mistress goes half mad with mourning for a lover who won't come to her and "dream their dream" but, in the terrible four-year process, she liberates herself, to a point where she can still love him, but she can live without him. His anguished letter when he finally realises he has lost her, is heart-stopping.

"You weren't there at Kastrup Airport. Of course you weren't, I'd come four years, six days and then 24 hours too late."

"I like your anger voice in a way," writes his liberated mistress crisply. "It stops your self-complaints for a while."

And then, like the best stories, just when you think it's all over, the lovers meet again. "I phoned your number and your voice answered 'Fitz' at once. And then you are on my lap and saying 'bed'." Next thing, they are planning and plotting all over again. She will come to Aptemoc. He will visit Copenhagen. They will have dinner in Buswell's Hotel in Dublin. But – and we are not given the details – the dream, as all dreams must, ends. Only the letters, the terrible, wonderful letters, remain.

Apart from the pulsating erotic charge in these billets-doux, countless other concerns – people, children, wives, ex-husbands and new lovers – appear and disappear. The lovers, particularly the men, are so selfish you want to scream. What about the poor children? What about your wife?

It's a wonderful testimony of course to Aidan Higgins's work that Dalkey Archive Press have now re-published five of his titles; only the very top writers in the world are so honoured. More honour next year, when he turns 80 and will be fêted in his hometown of Celbridge. If you've never read a Higgins before, treat yourself to Bornholm. If you've ever loved, been loved, not been loved – particularly if you've not been loved – read Bornholm. It's simply the best. p