Life
1896-1941 [Frederick Robert Higgins; fam. Fred]; b. 24 April, nr. Foxford,
Co. Mayo, son of Protestant raliway engineer and strict Unionist; spent
much of his childhood at Ballivor, Co. Meath, with relatives of his father;
became office-boy (or clerk) in Brooks Thomas, contractor, Dublin; fnd.
Irish Clerical Workers’ Union, 1913, and instantly dismissed from
employment; ed. trade-union journals and Ireland’s first women’s
magazine, lasting a year only [q.d.]; befriended by Yeats, who enjoyed
his Rabelesian conversation; contrib. reviews to Irish Statesman from
1927; contrib. poetry to The Dial, Spectator, Atlantic
Monthly and Dublin Mazagine; spoke up for Jim Gralton, the
Roscommon socialist deported to America by the Fianna Fáil govt.,
in Rotunda Meeting, 1932; co-opted as Abbey Director 1935, later business
manager; proved unable to account for Yeats’s meaning in Purgatory
during press meeting at Gresham Hotel, 1938; appointed Managing Director,
1935, and ousted Frank O’Connor from the Abbey; assisted Yeats with
Cuala Press Broadsides, 1935, singing those with accompaniments;
founding mbr. and secretary of Irish Academy of Letters; friendship with
Austin Clarke affirmed interest in Gaelic tradition; wrote an elegy, ‘Padraic
Ó Conaire, Gaelic Storyteller’ for his close friend; later
employed at BBC, London; he is eulogised as Reilly in MacNeice’s
‘Autumn Sequel’; Higgins is a character in the London BBC in
Anthony Cronin’s Life of Riley (1964); called ‘Falstaffian’
by Frank O’Connor. d. 8 Jan. Dublin, and bur. Laracor; papers held
in National Library of Ireland. DIB DIW DIH DIL HAM OCIL FDA
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Works
Poetry Island Blood (London: John Lane 1925); The Dark
Breed: A Book of Poems (London: Macmillan 1927), viii, 69pp.; Arable
Holdings (Dublin: Cuala Press 1933), and The Gap of Brightness
(London: Macmillan 1940) [45 poems].
Drama, A Deuce of Jacks (Abbey 1935).
Miscellaneous, foreword for Maeve Cavanagh, Soul and Clay (1917); ‘An Irish Poet’, in The Arrow (Summer 1939) [memoir and appreciation of W. B. Yeats]; ‘Yeats and Poetic Drama in Ireland’, in Lennox Robinson, ed., The Irish Theatre: Lectures Delivered during the Abbey Theatre Festival Held in Dublin in August 1938 (London: Macmillan 1939), pp.65-88; Introduction to C. Breathnac, trans. Padraic Ó Conaire, Fair and Field: Travels with a Donkey (Talbot Press 1929).
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Criticism
M. J. MacManus, ‘A Bibliography of F. R. Higgins; Dublin Magazine,
n.s., 12 (1937), pp.61-67.
Patrick Kavanagh, ‘The Gallivanting Poet’, Irish Writing 3 (Nov. 1947), pp.63-70.
Robert Farren, The Course of Irish Verse (London. 1948), pp.128-50.
Richard J, Loftus, ‘F. R. Higgins: The Gold and Honey Land’, in Nationalism in Modern Anglo-Irish Poetry (Wisconsin UP 1964) [chap.].
Austin Clarke, ‘Early Memories of F. R. Higgins’, in Dublin Magazine (Summer 1967), pp.68-73.
R. F. Garratt, Modern Irish Poetry: Tradition and Continuity from Yeats to Heaney (Berkeley: Cal. UP 1986), pp.66-70.
Monk Gibbon, Yeats As I Knew Him (1959), p.169.
Austin Clarke, ‘Early Memories of F. R. Higgins’, in Dublin Magazine (Summer 1967), pp.68-73.
Neil Corcoran , ‘Keeping the Colours New: Louis MacNeice in the Contemporary Poetry of Northern Ireland', in Kathleen Devine & Alan Peacock, eds., Louis MacNeice and His Influence, Gerrards Cross: Colin Smythe 1997, pp.114-32; p.122.)
Terence Brown, Northern Voices, 1975, p.103.
David Cairns & Shaun Richards, Writing Ireland, colonialism, nationalism and culture (Manchester 1988).
Brian Fallon, The Irish Times, ‘Reassessment’ ([q.d.] 1991).
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Notes
Seamus Deane, gen. ed., Field Day Anthology of Irish Writing (Derry: Field Day Co. 1991), Vol. 2, selects The Dark Breed, ‘The Dark Breed’ [775-76], ‘Heresy’ [776], ‘The Fair of Maam’ [776-77], ‘The Little Clan’, ‘Rain’ [777], ‘A Sheiling of the Music’ [777]; The Gap of Brightness, ‘Song for the Clatter-Bones’, Chinese Winter’, Father and Son’ [778]. ‘O You Among Women’ [778-79]; 722, 7223, 738, BIOG, 782 [see Life, supra].
Belfast Public Library holds Arable Holding, poems (1933); Island Blood (1925); Progress in Irish Printing (1936).
Peter Ellis Books (Cat. 2004) lists The Gap of Brightness (London: Macmillan 1940), 45 poems. 1st edn., copy presented by author to ‘My friends Dick & Hilda Hayes - with affection - From F. R. Higgins - 16:4:’40’.
W. B. Yeats: ‘[I]n Dublin [Yeats] saw more of Higgins, whose
Rabelasian conversation he enjoyed.’ (A. N. Jeffares, W B Yeats: A New
Biography, 1988, p.323.) Further, ‘Yeats gave an account of Higgins
opinions of the Church of Ireland, under the alias of “an Irish poet” who talks with him on a country walk, expressing his “preferences”,
in the Preface to The King of the Great Clock Tower’ (A.
N. Jeffares, A New Commentary to the Poems of W. B. Yeats, 1984,
p.350.)
W. B. Yeats: ‘The great man had never consumed a pint of stout or even half a pint. And so he asked his friend and fellow poet, F. R. Higgins, to help him repair the flaw. Higgins toohim into Mulligan’s in Dublin’s Poolbeg Street about six o’clock on a Friday evening. / It was pay day and the dockers were building up a head of steam. “Higgins,” said Yeats, “please take me out.”’ (Incidental narrative in Con Houlihan, ‘The Clashing of Ash’, in Magill, June 2003, p.44-45.)
Irish Protest: Higgins joined in protest against O’Casey’s The Plough and the Stars with a letter to the Irish Statesman: ‘[it is] quite evident that the main questions at issue are merely based upon a revival ofthat arrogance of the Gall, recently dormant towards the Gael.’ (Cited by Terence Brown, ‘After the Revival: The Problem of Adequacy and Genre’, in Ronald Schleifer, ed., The Genres of Irish Literary Revival (Oklahoma: Pilgrim; Dublin: Wolfhound 1980), pp.153-78, p.155.)
Portrait: See Hilary Pyle, Estelle Solomons, Patriot Portraits (1966). See also details in A. N. Jeffares, W B Yeats, A New Biography (1988). See also remarks in Samuel Beckett, ‘Recent Irish Poetry’, Bookman 77 (Aug 1934).
Reprint: Works of F. R. Higgins have been reissued by R. Dardis Clarke (a son of Austin Clarke) of Bridge House Press, Dublin (1991).
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Princess Grace Irish Library (Monaco)