The History of the Ginger Man

by J. P. Donleavy

  But these were very early days in Dublin before I had myself to retreat to battle my own survival on the land. My financial circumstances, with the G.I. Bill of Rights from Uncle Sam and a flow of funds from my mother, allowed me to live with a certain profligacy. And being all found within the precincts of the college, my life during early university years had been considerably affluent. One too was without the financial responsibilities of a wife and a child and was able to repair to the monastic sanctum of Trinity and there, as the need often required, escape Dublin to recover and rest from the protracted hooleys. But with Crist having the prospect of a legacy from his reasonable rich doctor father in poor health in Ohio, there was no point in his not borrowing against this contingency to keep up appearances and maintain faith in the future. In any event, despite the jaws of debt closing and chewing around him, Crist, provided we were comfortably ensconced in a pub, never allowed to exhibit his cares or concern and seemingly remained indifferent to his own troubles, while at the same time able to console and patiently and sympathetically listen to someone else’s difficulties. With a pat on the arm, he would with a fervent assurance say not to worry, that everything was going to be all right.

  Behan continued to talk of writing and Dangerfield and Crist as we drove through the seaside town of Bray, a familiar and, to me, always a slightly dour place, where the likes of James Joyce’s family had once briefly resided and where one often came to buy one’s more serious ironmongery, such as the panes of glass to roof the conservatory under which I first sat to write The Ginger Man.

  “But, Mike, now I’d agree to another similarity of Crist to Dangerfield in that Gainor did like a gargle and has often enough said within my hearing that a pint of plain is your only man. And that while saying that he also said he never had any intention of ever working again, as satisfied enough he would be just to go live on tinned salmon down in the Catacombs over there in Fitzwilliam Place among the damned and doomed and listen to madrigals on the gramophone and just do nothing. But for Jesus’ sake, what poor innocent gramophone could ever survive for long enough to hear a madrigal in that place.”

  One had noticed here and there on the manuscript of The Ginger Man, Behan’s word count tabulations, and how the logistics of authorship and producing ‘literae scriptae,’ as he referred to it, seemed to concern him. He mentioned that he liked to include as many songs and poems as possible in his own work, which requiring fewer written words, could, with their indentations, use up more space on the pages. Behan at the time was writing a column for the Irish Press, a national newspaper published in Dublin, which seemed to make him much conscious of the identity and relative rank and status that a writer might enjoy once having demonstrated this as one’s vocation. Which in my case and to my surprise, he seemed to think included violence.

  “Now, Mike, it’s as well that I think you’re a writer and that you’ve written a great book, as you’ve got an awful reputation in Dublin as being quick to take offense that no one will go near you. And that upon a dirty look you’d be hammering a man to the ground before he even had a decent chance to get a gun out of his pocket. And I’d be the last one to suggest that this on your part wasn’t on many an occasion more than justified. But it would give people the impression that they couldn’t utter a word of criticism in your presence. I myself now seeing you in action would think twice before I’d pass remarks to you that might incite your aggrievement. But now coming to more peaceful pursuits, I’m three years older than yourself and it would give me pause to think and make me that little bit envious that your accomplishment as a writer is every bit as advanced as my own. And I’ll repeat what I said before. That book you’ve written contains some of the finest writing I’ve ever read and when it’s published is going to reverberate around the world. Now I calculated you’ve written so far forty-five thousand words and I put the number, so as not to be conspicuous, on the top of the second page of your manuscript.”

  There was an apologetic sorrowful and lonely aspect to Behan’s sincerity when he was attempting to let you know he was being sincere. As if he would with impunity tell lies publicly but never privately utter a falsehood. Although I was always ready to believe his words, one had due reason to be cautious of Behan’s praise. I had now recently learned that my now deceased father-in-law, who had to his wife mentioned I would go far, had also later said to Valerie, who no doubt at the time was requesting the help of money,

  “You as my daughter have not been raised in order to go live a peasant life raising pigs and chickens with an American tramp in an Irish hovel.”

  And true enough. Our primitive life, with its crisis-filled days on my small holding had progressively been closing in on one as one strove to find the doorway through which one stepped to fame and fortune while continuing to search hedgerows for scraps of wood to burn and took showers at night outside under a watering can. But uncompromising I remained. And my desperation and my ability to wildly dramatize it never seemed to get less than desperate, as I, hands blistering, wielded shovel, paintbrush and hayfork in survival. One would also unhesitatingly become one’s own worst enemy kicking, or belting with a sledgehammer contraptions to pieces that refused to work. And I was frequently enough reminded of the truth, that in farming even my small patch of ground, no amount of good advice is ever taken and one learns only by committing the disaster, you were, by wiser and older minds warned against. But my deliverance and ace in the hole was now this book and what one ambitiously imagined were its earthshaking words. And even though I found Behan’s remarks overly optimistic and that he should sound so presumptuously certain of himself, they were also words that in one’s many bleaker and blacker moments reassured. I also sensed that Behan wanted to let me know that I was, in his eyes, doing the right thing in my now more reclusive existence, holding out in the Irish countryside.

  “Now, Mike, you’ve done what a lot of them in Dublin talk of doing. But it remains only a dream held dearly in reserve. And the books they’re writing, not a comma of them ever gets down on paper. But at least it keeps them members in good standing of the Society of Uncreative Literary Men, like Crist himself, who also wants a farm.”

  Anything more unlikely for this gentleman Gainor Stephen Crist I could not imagine, since I knew of Crist’s interest in the concept of immaterialism and the theory he’d formulated concerning the true nature of being. His notion was based on the possibility of energy emanating from the inertia of absolute nothingness. And such energy being applied to providing a daily existence immune from labor of any kind and where as he would say, while the mind raced, eyeballs froze in stillness and stomachs rested in peace. As Crist would chip away at this monolithic philosophical structure of life lived in suspended animation as it were, I would throw in my two cents. Mostly based on the behavior of subatomic particles, and perhaps the existence of life on other planets, but wasting little time in analysis of Crist’s theory, since I regarded being alive, in the better sense of the word, as the condition of one’s pleasant anticipations remaining greater than one’s sad regrets. And that the meaning of life only raises its question when one is sheltered, secure and sleeping and eating well.

  However, one thing that I did know about Crist for certain was that he was, as a foot-washer and a sandal-wearer, different from any of us. And would, in this latter item of chaussure, following a summer day out in Dublin, return to number 1 Newtown Avenue, Blackrock, and there place his feet to leisurely cleanse in a pan of water. I as a sock-and-shoe-wearing native of New York City, and accustomed to its skyscrapers, baths, saunas and showers, and where a summer-hot pavement could sear the sole of a bare foot, would be mesmerized witnessing Crist engaging in this Christ-like and to me biblical ritual. But along with Crist’s Old Testament behavior I was ready to concede there was no doubt that as exiled Americans cut off from plumbing and, often enough, hungry, a plot of land now represented a basic solution to all our problems. But even Behan had his doubts of seeing Crist in the countryside.

>   Sporting a bow tie and entirely clothed in his own garments and lawyer-looking shoes, a most respectably attired Gainor Crist in the first and last photograph I ever took of him in Trinity College. For he was on his way out the North Gate to the pawn shop with his electric fire in order that he might have money for a few balls of malt in the pub which he maintained would keep him as comfortably warm as any electric fire and the steam from his piss could prove it.

  “Mike, you’d wonder, though, even when the hunger pangs were tolling, if old Gainor would deign lift a potato or two out of the muck or would for the boiling pot be cutting a squealing pig’s throat or wringing a chicken’s neck if it stopped dropping eggs.”

  We were now driving through the purlieu of Foxrock, an area rumored affluent. And turning right, we descended the road to Dun Laoghaire, which led on to Blackrock and Crist country, where Gainor always drew attention to the stone cross marking the pale just outside of which he lived only a step or so from his front door. And past which daily went the roaring trams and the horse-drawn hearses. In the tiny front sitting room of this house, I had on a couple of occasions slept on the small couch when the last tram had already left for Dublin and it was too far to walk back to my rooms in Trinity. And, discussions finished for the night, Crist would sit in an armchair reading by the window and be there at dawn the next morning when I woke and would find him still reading. The subject taking his intense all-night interest was Spain. And perhaps in this same way he applied himself to the study of agriculture and dreamt of having a farm.

  “Mike, I suspect that somewhere back in my lineage there was, like there has been for every Irishman, some fucker tilling the land but thanks be to Jesus it’s somewhere way back in my lineage.”

  I suspected that even Behan knew that in such idyllic country living, needy things like eggs out of hens or apples out of the trees did not come free of charge from the land. But on a barstool in Dublin and nuzzling your nose in the creamy foam of your fifth pint of stout, the imagination ignored the work of digging, dilapidations, broken tools, slates flying off in storms, automobiles not starting and, if starting, exploding, and livestock getting sick and dying. Or indeed, as I found, if everything else in one’s country pursuits was going fine, a nearby farmer’s cows would invariably trespass through the fence and trample one’s vegetables. And if this weren’t enough, there always remained, as you attempted to take a moment’s leisure resting one’s bones by the fireside, the growing and haunting threat of communism from behind the Iron Curtain, which, by those in the know, was rumored to soon come sweeping west out of Russia to overwhelm Europe and the rest of the world and to make everybody equal, and worse, to confiscate and collectivize every freeholder’s little bit of land. Thereby snatching away from yours truly, that for which one so incessantly fought, a yet-to-be-achieved fame and fortune. And I found that Behan and I held on this subject, at least, similar sentiments.

  “Mike, I wouldn’t want you to breathe a word of this to anyone, especially to those IRA zealots who think they’re to be the new commissars when Marxism comes, but between me and you, fuck communism. My political principles are based on the generosity of the spirit. That you taketh from those who haveth because you are the one who needeth and deserveth.”

  As we drove now through the leafy suburban quiet streets of Donnybrook and past the pebbled drives and walled gardens of the gable-roofed houses, not a communist nor a commissar was to be seen. And one could at least take comfort that one had become a peasant and perhaps had less to fear in submitting to Marxist doctrine and classlessness. Although I did have one advantage, in that I had a more than passing resemblance to Joseph Stalin, then in power in Russia. In any event, I was already acting in the interests of the common benefit and would on most trips to Dublin bring vegetables to distribute. And Behan told me of an incident with Tony McInerney one morning down in the Catacombs as he saw the sacks of cabbages and potatoes I had left in the big kitchen.

  “Now, Mike, this doesn’t show me in a great light, but I’ll tell you of a time when I commented to Tony McInerney on the fact you’d brought him some dirty old sacks of vegetables and I said you were a harder man when it came to buying a drink in a pub. He was vituperative and nearly bit the head off me, saying it was more than I or anybody else had ever fucking well done to help feed his children.”

  We were now crossing the Grand Canal into Lower Leeson Street, a soft mist descending on Dublin and the night grown chilly and the pavements glistening and damp. It was also coming near pub closing time and I parked on the east side of a deserted St. Stephen’s Green. Behan, requesting to make a quick call at a nearby public house where he might still find his erstwhile companion and poet of the people, the towering and glowering seventeen-stone Lead Pipe Daniel the Dangerous.

  “Now, Mike, although he worships the Blessed Virgin and would be that bit occasionally religious, he’d nevertheless steal the shoes off a monster in a nightmare.”

  Although one heard bizarre stories of Lead Pipe Daniel the Dangerous’s violent exploits, he was always the most benignly charming of persons in one’s company. Anxious to recite his poetry and to be in every way pleasing. But it was generally agreed that when Lead Pipe Daniel and Behan were seen together in each other’s company and despite their both being of a poetic and literary disposition, that these two as a pair presented a never forgotten sight that would make monsters in nightmares look like archangels and that you would not want to confront down a dark alley. Or indeed even meet in a bright and a populated place. And Behan once took my notebook and wrote in it a poem Lead Pipe Daniel had composed called “Me.”

  There is a gladness in my gladness

  When I’m glad.

  There is a sadness in my sadness

  When I’m sad.

  There is a madness in my madness

  When I’m mad.

  But the gladness in my gladness

  And the sadness in my sadness

  And the madness in my madness

  Are fuck-all to my badness

  When I’m bad.

  One recalled an elegant in mufti Dublin dinner party at which Lead Pipe Daniel was present and who always, in case anyone should doubt his financial status, allowed to have showing from his jacket breast pocket the corner of an Irish five-pound note. Also present at table, and across from Lead Pipe, sat a Trinity undergraduate who read Mental and Moral Science, a triple-barreled named gentleman who, cravated and monocled, and who, when at large in a college square, always sported an ebony silver-topped walking stick and who was now during the serving of the savory, enumerating the stimulating charms of the Anglo-Irish and in so doing referred to the Irish themselves as natives. Like a coiled spring, Lead Pipe Daniel, his long apelike arms outstretched across the table, sprang from the seat of his Chippendale dining room chair, overturning the wine glasses, and grabbed the monocled gentleman with one hand around the throat and proceeded to strangle him while punching him with his other free hand in the face.

  “Don’t you ever refer to the fucking Irish as fucking natives in my fucking presence, you fucking Brit.”

  The incident from which the monocled gentleman was saved by my nearby intervention had later prompted me to ask Behan why Lead Pipe was always so charming and lamblike in my presence and who in the case of his attack upon the monocled Trinity gent, so readily acquiesced to my restraint.

  “Jesus, Mike, he’s let it be known to me, that unlike the Assassin, whose looks are the only dangerous thing about him, that you are unpremeditatedly violent and he’s terrified to offend you.”

  At this remark one did feel a bit like a gentleman to whom Behan referred as the Assassin, who, despite his name, was the most benign and harmless of men and gentle in his every way. However, he was handicapped by an insatiable curiosity and cursed with a permanent murderous expression on his face, which not only made him look as if he would kill you but was just about to do so. This impression was increased by his savagely fierce glare, which because of his
uncontrollable inquisitiveness the Assassin often leveled at strange newcomers in a pub and which more than once resulted in a dangerous situation. For just after the war, and among the many ex-service personnel, there were odd members of elite parachute and commando regiments lurking about, not to mention IRA gunmen. And these folk did not welcome the Assassin’s glowering attention. It was upon one such occasion that one of these former special troops was having a quiet drink when he looked up to see the Assassin glaring directly at him. And as Behan would recall,

  “Ah, Mike, it shouldn’t have happened to a dog. Sure the Assassin would kindly kiss the hand of anyone who came near enough to be kindly kissed. And if you weren’t near enough for that, he’d declaim in your direction a love sonnet.”

  But this stranger, a veteran of guerilla combat having survived the war intact, upon asking who it was daring to stare at him and being told it was the Assassin, wasn’t about to be now liquidated by someone in a Dublin pub. As the Assassin continued to glare and stare, the commando got up from his seat, walked over to the Assassin and, ignorant of the fact that this poor man would not hurt a flea, unleashed without preamble a right to his jaw. As the Assassin fell toward the pub floor and was being hit from every direction, it was clear he was having the living bejesus beaten out of him. Until Tony McInerney, aware that the Assassin was unable to show a friendly look upon his face, or to defend himself, leaped to his feet. McInerney, sprinting champion of Ireland, also had one of the country’s fastest pairs of fists and was in principle politically opposed to your man the commando, who continued to belabor the poor Assassin. As the pub erupted in general uproar, McInerney waded in to hit your man the commando a clout that sent him ceilingward over the bar, behind which he rested stretched unconscious, a knocked-over bottle of Power’s Gold Label whiskey emptying down on his head.