The History of the Ginger Man

by J. P. Donleavy

  But now on my return after five years of not having paid dues to keep up my membership of the club, there was no Harry Manning to alert. And boarding this ship this windswept day, something alien and yet familiar was already dawning. In the bustle of the main deck, as passengers were directed toward their cabins, the efficient indifference of the American way of life was already evident where one’s vowels and demeanor were less an advantage than one’s money. One could not say this trip on the liner America was the most pleasant of all voyages, especially as I was now encountering the American ethic of making sure selfless service was only a thing encountered during the last hours of the voyage when attendance was danced upon one and an expectant hand would then come reaching out for a tip.

  In the ensuing years I would make this ocean voyage many times, always it seemed while standing chill and windswept on the deck and always feeling the drama of seeing ahead that unforgettable sight on the last day, of those faint, thin stalks of buildings arise on the skyline, and glinting out of a gray wintry ocean. As the tugboats maneuvered the mass of this great liner into its Hudson River dock, I saw down on the quayside my mother looking up, Valerie remarking with surprise that she had no idea that my mother could appear so good-looking. Philip and Valerie were taken to my father’s car while I oversaw the first of one’s American problems, which could have, with just a nuance, turned into something violent and ominous. My father had sent an immensely big and strong friend from the fire department to get my luggage, and not being an accredited stevedore we came close to an altercation on the dock, especially as the man my father sent to help seemed to be the only one strong enough to shift my large crate of paintings. It was my first experience of my anglicized accent and the reasonableness one attempted to exude with such vowels, helping me to delicately navigate through the blunt rudeness of New York City. Which after Ireland and the Isle of Man suddenly seemed a place of violent chaotic mayhem, the desperate purpose of which was to make someone’s next dime or dollar. And to direct such attempt toward yours truly.

  The house in Woodlawn where I lived from an early age. Behind the three front second-floor windows, I wrote many pages of the manuscript of THE GINGER MAN and where Crist would come with a dram of whiskey to hand to read my notes over my shoulder to him when I’d become mute.

  At the side of the house in Woodlawn, my sister, Rita, employed at the time by the United States Steel Corporation. She was later to become a distinguished professor in the field of education.

  My parents lived in a small, mostly white Protestant enclave called Woodlawn, described again in the New York City Guide of 1939 as “a middle class community on the far northern marches, where New York City cedes to Yonkers and Mount Vernon.” The area consisted of a triangular tract of hardly more than a couple of hundred acres cross-sectioned by nine streets north and south and seven streets east and west. Cut off from the rest of New York City by Van Cortlandt Park, a thousand acres to the west, which had been a former hunting ground of the Mohican Indians, Woodlawn possessed a degree of isolation, for, to the east flowed the Bronx River through its linear park, and to the south lay the sylvan acres of Woodlawn Cemetery dotted with its graves, exotic statuary, and grandiose mausoleums. This burial ground, already famed as the final resting place of some of America’s robber barons as well as their socially registered descendants, was not only a splendid sanctuary for them but also for many birds and small mammals.

  With its main street of Katonah Avenue, its two schools and five churches, its four or five bars and two sweetshops, where the kids congregated for their pineapple sodas, the community of Woodlawn resembled a small midwestern town and certainly would join any list of favored places to spend a childhood on the continent of North America. And typical of such places, among the first things I learned taking up residence in this white house on top of the hill on East 238th Street and where I mostly grew up, was that my father thought that instead of exhibiting and selling paintings or writing a novel, I should take the city’s civil service exams and see if I could become a fireman. Later I also heard that he felt the Union Jack should be raised to fly above the house as not only my accent but my behavior was now distinctly British. But my intrepid mother was of a tolerantly different mind and had confidence in my intentions and let it be known that she would back whatever I wanted to do. With some surprise, I learned that she had kept up my membership to the New York Athletic Club all these years, just as she had my government life insurance, which one held in the navy. Her principle in all things seemed to be consistent persistence in whatever endeavor one undertook and never to waver or give up.

  But I was soon to find that outside my mother and Valerie, there were to be few believers, supporters or benefactors. And as the cars endlessly traveled the highways, dawning was the quick realization that the odds were mountainously stacked against me and that my naivete had overwhelmed reality. I had already tasted fame and publication of a sort in the small art world of Dublin, but it was now eminently clear that nowhere or anywhere was there anyone waiting across this massive nation to put a laurel wreath on the head of any would-be genius full of heartfelt intentions to have his voice at least heard if not to be rich and famous. And failure could mean only two things, death or escape. For one thing was absolutely certain, that even in the unlikely event that I would be offered a job, I was not about to conform to the American mealymouthed ethic of corporate employment in any shape, manner or form. Or to tolerate, even for an instant, opposition to the work I wrote. And as I sat down now once more to again peck away at the pages, I felt that each snapping down of a typewriter key landed like a hammered nail, sealing a coffin in which was my past life of having been born and raised an American.

  For having grown up in this country’s culture, success always seemed to be some sudden thing that happened and all one had to do was push a certain combination of buttons that set you on your way to permanent glory. And with the right smile, the right clothes, the right friends, you just waited. But it was understood that you never made any conscious effort to succeed. That one would finally be apprised of a door through which you stepped into that place of heaven, where, as your face was lit by flashbulbs, one-hundred-dollar bills endlessly floated down on your head to pile embarrassingly up around you. And that you had to kick your claustrophobic way out of the heap.

  But as an old prep school friend, Tom Gill, with whom I frequented this room, would say to me when, during the enjoyment of some exotic New York City delight, and when he felt a sobering moment or two of profundity was called for, “Pat, we live under the rich man’s yoke.”

  But I might have been suffering even more culture shock than Valerie who at least had had the previous confrontation of having been evacuated to Canada during the Second World War where she had tasted a near version of middle-class American life. I wrote back to Europe letters to such as Crist with reports he found frightening, which described what seemed then a changing society. The once thought humane fairness of American life was undergoing an insidious corruption. Leaving the intelligent and sensitive isolated and counted fewer and fewer in number. Random violence, of gang warfare and zip guns, which was once confined to known dangerous parts of the city, was spreading. My father, watching television evenings, spoke of killing time. My brother Thomas, whom we called T.J., and who had not yet come to Ireland, I now met after many years, seemed grossly unhappy. He had taken temporarily to being a salesman of cemetery plots under the guidance of a senior, but through his lack of conviction that a pre-need grave was a priority in life, he miserably failed to make a sale. And upon the one occasion that he might have done, he was ruthlessly usurped by his senior. A demonstration of our growing-up trusting backgrounds of fair play making us vulnerable to the unscrupulous. And meanwhile a man called Senator McCarthy, with accusations of communism, was seeking out and terrorizing liberals throughout the land.

  In this old white house, I stationed myself upstairs in the shadowy middle bedroom, where I occupied a smal
l desk. Following breakfast each morning I would start to write at around ten and continue until about one o’clock. Dressing then in one of my Manx tweed suits, I would take the bus, which ran along the main street of Katonah Avenue at the bottom of the hill. The bus then went past the high black railings of the Woodlawn Cemetery, a fence that took four years to paint, and when finished it was time to start again. Turning left, the bus continued along a road over which trolley tracks once ran. For nearly a mile or two in every direction with no habitation of any sort, this area was one of the loneliest and most bereft areas in the Bronx. It was along the cemetery railings that a meeting took place which involved the Lindbergh baby, one of America’s most famed kidnappings. And alighting at the main gates of the cemetery, across the street was the terminus of the Lexington Avenue elevated train. Which last stop was to provide its own historically sad setting for Gainor Stephen Crist.

  With no one with a beard in the entire United States except the naval Captain Sheridan in the boxing room of the New York Athletic Club, and perhaps an odd religious sect here and there, I was now constantly made aware by stares and looks of the hair on my face. My beard had become my blazing badge of defiance wherever I went, setting me immediately apart and alerting those on all sides that I was a highly suspicious character, and more than likely one of the insidious enemy spreading the creed of communism across the nation. And while this phobia besieged the United States, mercifully for my paranoia, I did deeply believe that, although at times critical, there was nothing I had ever done or would ever do that would make me disloyal to the nation.

  One had already many times, on the occasion of being asked why I was growing that beard, answered that I was doing nothing but that everybody else was shaving his off. One day I even ventured forth down into the city in a red shirt and tie, albeit muted by a tweed waistcoat and jacket. Although it was wonderful for one’s privacy, nothing anywhere could have set me more apart than my whiskers and made most of whom I met or encountered eager to disappear as soon as they could from one’s presence. A chap even walking face-first into a closed glass door. And I suppose, all such folk in the final analysis, would be one’s potential enemy ready to betray one at the merest clank and tinkle of a hammer and sickle. However, I did not seem to give way to any delusions of persecution, and there did occur one single exception to all this surrounding hostility. At exactly five minutes to three, one breezy cool day, I was taking a left turn rounding the northeast corner of Fifty-second Street and Madison Avenue. When, on this otherwise empty street and coming in the opposite direction around the same corner, I was confronted by a cheerful, smiling gentleman who dressed in a great bundle of tweed, uttering loud and clear these words, as if they were a cry of victory,

  “Ah, magnifique barbu.”

  To hear the words “bearded man” sung out with such joy by this obviously Gallic gentleman, and as if his soul had been saved, lifted my spirits no end. We both waved back at each other full of smiles. Brief as it was, it was a relief from having to employ an implacably fearless look backed by a pair of ready fists wherever I might go. Alas this was the only single time in my entire stay of twelve months in the United States when I was met with any sign of unrestrained heartfelt enthusiasm. But considerable exception to this air of hostility occurred in that aforementioned strange outpost, the boxing room of the New York Athletic Club, a venue tucked away in a southwest corner of that twenty-story version of an Italian Renaissance palace overlooking Central Park. Founded over a hundred years ago and dedicated by its originators to the pursuit of manly sports, the club was a princely redoubt for those seeking comfortable escape from the spiritually corrosive shoving and pushing of America’s largest city and the hustle and bustle of its swarming masses seeking fortune, as I was, in this municipal bourse. Along with its country clubhouse, this urban, gray stone edifice housed all manner of equipment and chambers to accommodate not only an endless number of athletic activities from rowing, shooting and yachting, to squash, handball and fencing but also numerous means of restorative cures for body and mind. Based on the theory to treat the body well and the mind will take care of itself.

  In the city clubhouse, one thing all sports and their venues had in common was that, except to be invited to matches or to the special cocktail lounge to drink or to the dining room to dine, women were banned. And the sweaty, noisy irreverent confines of the boxing room was the most banned place of all. Several sports were small clubs within themselves, and the boxing room was certainly one of the clubbiest, attracting as it did the more extreme of the dissident eccentric who comfortably circulated around New York on their private incomes. Among these were another assorted folk, maritime and naval types who commanded vessels at sea and who were the stalwart everyday regulars. But also could be found one or two like oneself, still looking for a private income. However, all had in common a readiness to pop a punch on anybody’s nose who gave them any unwanted lip of which there could be found plenty around every streetcorner in New York. And especially encountered by these eccentric, who by their nonconformist appearance, behavior and opinions and blatantly possessed of the self-esteem of the warrior, provoked it. Of course all this sportsmanly behavior in the use of fisticuffs was before drugs, handguns, and knives, when bullets and stab wounds came into vogue.

  It was my fellow classmate Thomas M. Gill at Fordham Preparatory School who had first invited me to the New York Athletic Club because he said I seemed to manage well in the prep’s boxing ring and gave the impression of fearing no one. I certainly had my fears, but there was no doubt that along with a willingness to fight anyone, I also must have demonstrated rebel and dissident signs at the prep because I was finally expelled. In any event, Gill at least thought I would be an interesting specimen to see flailing about with other eccentrics in the athletic club’s boxing ring. In the school’s intramural contests, I had a first-round knockout or two and was now being pressed above my lightweight division by the coach to take on even bigger and better opponents. Gill, himself a light heavyweight, was no slouch in the ring, and of those he hadn’t pounded to the canvas in short order, he sent flying through the ropes. And it wasn’t long before the two of us were putting on boxing exhibitions of murderous intent, which had folk at the athletic club gathered to witness flying bicuspids as the blood and gore spattered the ring.

  Gill and I, as well as slamming resounding punches into each other’s faces and ribs, also had our intellectual contests. These especially provoked by Gill’s blunt, matter-of-fact way of putting things, which were opposed to my usually erroneous romantic exaggerations, and some of our discussions were just as brutal as our battles conducted within the crimson ropes. But there were moderating arbiters in the persons of two gentlemen, both former boxing champions and highly respected referees, who, overseeing the boxing room, saw to fair play. Both were also advisers and scholars in the world of boxing. One Frank Fulham and the other Arthur Donovan, the latter being at the time world-famed as the doyen of referees and referee of the Joe Louis fights. And especially a most-famed fight of all, when Louis, previously knocked out by Schmeling, knocked out Schmeling in their return match. With the room’s two boxing rings, collection of punching bags, skipping ropes and weight-lifting apparatus and the mementoes of fighters and even framed letters from a president or two, there was no question that the boxing room was a revered sanctum dedicated to the manly art of self-defense, where those of gentler dispositions feared to tread. And where Arthur Donovan and Frank Fulham always attempted to keep the maim and gore to a minimum.

  Ah, but there were exceptions to the gentlemanly peacekeeping, and no hindrance was put in the way of formulating any well-deserved war between members who detested the thought of each other. And such battles were viewed silently out of the corner of each eye. But mostly the boxing room was a center of information about the boxing world, the source of which was found historically represented around the walls and in the encyclopedic knowledge both Donovan and Fulham had of the fight game.
Donovan once telling me about a boxer no one at the time had ever heard of but, according to Donovan and those who’d seen him fight, was one of the most devastating ever seen in the ring. Donovan, whose eyes would light up talking about this mystery pugilist who the public were only beginning to know of, said that because of the destructive force of this fighter’s victories, no manager with any kind of decent boxer with any prospects would give this man a fight because no fighter once battered to the canvas by him was ever the same afterward. And I asked the name of the fighter. Donovan answered with a whisper and chuckled as if I were being let into a well-kept conspiracy.

  “His name, Pat, is Sugar Ray Robinson.”

  Of course this prizefighter was well heard of years later as a world champion in more than one weight division and is thought of as one of the ring’s greatest ever middleweights. However, lucky for most inmates of the boxing room, the repartee and sardonic burlesque were as blisteringly wielded as were the flying fists, which latter mercifully were encased in sixteen-ounce sparring gloves. But when the likes of Frank Fulham was asked to spar a friendly round or two with a gent called Steve Brody, a socialite sportsman around town and of formidable heavyweight size and an equally brilliant boxer, some of the most devastating fights I’ve ever seen in the ring took place. Thunderous punches landing, with beads of sweat sprinkling the air and mouthpieces flying. Total awed silence would reign in the boxing room as the inmates waited for one or the other of these gentlemen to lay stretched unconscious on the canvas. Frank Fulham always ending up having landed the most lethal punches.