The History of the Ginger Man

by J. P. Donleavy

  Summer at its height and with the approaching end to our time in Connecticut coming near, one made plans through Donoghue to move to Boston and take over a cheap apartment in the West End, which lay at the foot of Beacon Hill and extended to the Charles River. A couple, who much resembled their names, called Melvin and Deedi, who had lived there and were selling up and moving to better things. Meanwhile I was endeavoring to see as much as I could of these environs of Connecticut and the town of New Milford, which was not without its glamour and where one could occasionally come across a famed Broadway and Hollywood movie actor going into a shop with the same meaningful determination on his face with which he played his roles. And as always seemed the case in America, I could never find enough time nor the opportunity to wander and loiter along these wonderful small-town streets and see the clapboard houses rearing up from their clean, neat lawns to stand in silent peace beneath their big shady trees.

  One declined an invitation to go cruise around Nova Scotia with Pratt on a more than modest-sized yacht he sheepishly revealed owning. But one was delighted to attend a farewell picnic planned by the Pratts for us, as the sojourn in Connecticut was drawing to a close. Surrounded by stony outcroppings the fête champêtre was held in a glade on a distant part of the Pratt estate amid a forbidding wilderness which was out on a promontory of land into a lake. And all was a marvel of delight. On a large charcoal grate, succulently tender filet mignon were grilled. Packed in ice were the best of beers and wines. Salads, fruits and cheeses in plenty. And to whet appetites were your usual canapés, bearing the better brands of caviar, ready to set sail into the mouth. From guests assembled in a great circle came music and singing. A nearby voice commented on the beautiful firelight sight of Philip playing on the lap of his mother. And no longer being the stuffed shirt I had been, Pratt in the company of an overly ingratiating lady, chose to leave what he said was the stuffy other side of the fire, to come across and sit next to me. Saying, as he departed the lady’s proximity, that he was seeking the company of a kindred spirit.

  Night descending now and departing the picnic, Pratt and I were both loading up the back seat of one of his new Chevrolet cars. With the interior stuffed to capacity, as it was attempted to close the door, the contents were already spilling out. And with the door bursting open again and again, Pratt began slamming it harder and harder. Finally exasperated and with a foot trying to shove back in the carload, he then attempted to kick the door shut, a big dent appearing in the shiny new steel. As I saw Pratt’s indifference to this foot imprint in the car’s door and then as the stacked, stuffed contents fell out all over again, and he imprinted yet another large dent, I burst out laughing, a mischievous smile then appearing on Pratt’s face. Incited by my amusement and Pratt now laughing heartily himself, more kicks were rained and even deeper dents were wrought in the car doors to get them closed. Pratt, at long last relenting and acquiescing in the admission that he had more than a modicum of the world’s riches and that a few deep dents in this new car merely meant he would, if he liked, just choose another out of his garage. And if that in turn was kicked out of shape he had yet another to replace it. Holding my stomach with laughter, this scene and realization leaving me unable to stand up even with the fear that I’d be bitten in the arse by a snake as I fell and rolled in the deep grass.

  But car door kicks were nothing compared to what happened when the two of us finally got in the car to motor away. Pratt pressing the accelerator to the floor and with tires smoking, the car sped, propelled forward like a tank through the ever-thickening brush to plow into the surrounding growth of saplings and trees. Careering over the former and crashing into the latter. Pratt much amused as I ducked and shielded myself. Both of us now convulsed with laughter as we went bumping over the stony outcroppings. The exhaust was ripped off, the bumpers dented and twisted, fenders torn, and sundry other metal automotive fixtures disappeared as gouges rent the front, sides and bottom of the vehicle. Until at last we finally reached the safety of the dirt road which had peacefully got us to the glade in the first place. With so many citizens washing, cleaning, polishing and pampering their cars across these United States, it was a relief to have enjoyed this charming but expensively indulgent incident. And I regretted not having been more friendly with this man who was, at least to some small degree, a kindred spirit.

  But I was never left far from the growing awareness, reflected by my reaction to Pratt and the knowledge that books by Mark Twain were being censored and removed from educational institutions because the work contained subversive matter, that The Ginger Man and all that this novel stood for would upon publication be excoriated by such as the American Legion and the Catholic Church. Not to mention all those red-blooded and upstanding in the American corporate body who sided with McCarthyism. Such coupled with the vulgarity and obscenity of their money seemed all-powerful and the influence they wielded, overwhelming. Courageous voices were alone and shunned. And a paranoia had silenced many the American citizen who had once stood up and said “I’m going to break your ass, you mealymouthed sons of bitches.”

  Of such dire matters, I was now glad that I had warned Crist in my letters and even suggested that if he did come westward, he bring with him the books of Franz Kafka and read them in America. But along with such advice, I did try to be helpful in other but rather dismal ways. Aware now that one was in for the long haul and that there was no pie in the sky, I noted to Crist that as he and I had in common being sailors and that tight quarters would present no problem, I repeated to him that rooms were available for eight dollars a week and that the newspaper was filled with them. But I would always try to end on a positive note, pointing out that the cemeteries still seemed peaceful enough places where we could meet and talk. And I did think that George Roy Hill, whose name was in the phone book, could be a godsend to Gainor. Hill was then directing plays in New York and seemed at least by his address in the East Sixties to have set up more than respectably in a decent part of town.

  However, with the prospect of now leaving Connecticut and one’s isolation out in the woods, I realized that I had at least enjoyed a sense of escape. Even from my surrounding family in Woodlawn, aware as I was, that through no fault of their own, they had been sentenced to the American way of life, which had to be abided by for survival’s sake. But too, one was growing increasingly certain that even if The Ginger Man was to find a publisher, that upon its being published that one’s passport might be revoked by the State Department and that I’d be trapped in America and that with the little money one had left, be forever doomed to stay there. With such imaginings, I was already trying to figure a way to get out and opening the atlas to look at places in Ireland to return to, my eye settling on Mizen Head, a southwest promontory on a peninsula, where the small village of Skull was located. Somehow one envisioned this a wild and deserted rugged clime, where one could do as I did at Kilcoole, cherish and put my hands down into Irish soil again and feel its loam fall through my fingers. These thoughts now, albeit belatedly, were surely heeding voices which had already warned me. Voices which were older and wiser, such as that of Ernest Gebler. Which made me acknowledge now that coming to America had been the biggest mistake of my life.

  During one of the last sultry days in Connecticut, and as I lay reading on a bunk in a modicum of shady coolness by the side of the tall boulder-built fireplace, the trees were turning up the under white of their leaves through the thick forest as a storm came sweeping over the Housatonic valley. Lightning striking out of the heavens and the thunder cracking so loud it trembled the ground as it rained a deluge. I had come to the last page of a biography I was reading of Herman Melville. His was a voice, which like Edgar Allan Poe’s and Stephen Foster’s, had always awakened for me the sad, forlorn story which seemed to overhang so many of America’s most illustrious writers, poets and composers. These three as they seemed to be, unsung, abandoned and forgotten in the last years and days of their lives. But I found it comforting that Melville h
ad paid a passing visit with Nathaniel Hawthorne, who was the American consul in the city of Liverpool. And to be reminded of the Isle of Man only sixty or seventy miles across the water. The thought somehow haunting me out in these wilds of Connecticut as more lightning lit the room and flashed on the words I read. That Melville’s latter years of life were so quiet that even his own generation thought him long dead. Then as I came to the last paragraphs of this biography, I learned that upon a gloomy, rainy day, Melville was laid to rest in the Bronx in Woodlawn Cemetery. His grave being but a stone’s throw from where I had cut grass during a school vacation one summer while holding the only full-time employment I have ever had. I took some comfort that this voice which had dwelled long in obscurity but which had awakened itself again in American literature had occupied a body whose bones had lain so near where I grew up.

  And when one finally left Connecticut, the unexpectedly strange thing happened that one sometimes ideally conjures up as a redress for one’s self-esteem, having been slighted as it were that one evening with Gid Pratt. Sometime after we had moved to Boston, Valerie again saw Jane Pratt in New York and was told that both she and Gid were one evening at a dinner downtown in Manhattan at which the guests included none other than John Hall Wheelock. This gentleman must have confirmed to the Pratts that he had actually read my work and that I was a genuine writer of at least some modest ability. And Mrs. Pratt relating this story to Valerie, ended it saying,

  It was

  You know

  Nice

  To hear it

  From somebody else

  19

  IN THE MIDDLE OF JULY one moved to Boston’s West End, where I had already made a reconnoitering trip and now awaited Valerie and Philip’s arrival. I had slowly and pleasantly strolled through the worn wonderment of this city, so much more like the Europe I had left. Pacing over its red-brick pavements, which lay through the elegant solitude of its areas of Back Bay and Beacon Hill, the latter with its gleamingly polished windows that balefully told the passerby that we be Brahmin who live within these houses of Louisburg Square. Wandering as I would, I would also proceed through the dingy darknesses of North Station, where the trains headed toward Maine and Montreal. And where one would see derelict men shuffling by in their broken shoes and begrimed white socks.

  The West End housed cramped apartments in small buildings, many of which were unoccupied and empty. Beacon Hill rose to the south along with the structures which made up the complex of Massachusetts General Hospital. Westward, with its crisscrossing sailboats and rowing sculls, was the basin of the Charles River. The West End was full of many ethnic varieties. And catering to the close-knit life of these small confines were grocery stores, butcher shops, funeral parlors, family bakeries and bars. The bustling activity in its slum streets was as close as one could get to that of a European city. And always pervading the air in the summer heat was a sour-sweet smell of life’s refuse and rubbish.

  One took up residence behind a curtained storefront which once sold vegetables, its entrance up a step from the street. The apartment consisted of a kitchen and tiny bedroom and a cramped water closet. The kitchen, also serving as a sitting room, housed a makeshift shower and an old gas stove. The rent was eighteen dollars a month. I sung as best as I optimistically could the praises to Valerie that at the bottom of Spring Street in the park adjoining the Charles River Basin was a swimming pool. And to this latter, admission was one penny. A coin now being counted carefully. And one of which, during these hot summer days, I soon put in the turnstile to sample this recreational facility.

  My study was established with a stool and dictionary in the shady coolness of the storefront. I sat at my typewriter placed on an old counter, my nostrils never without the reasty, fermenting smell of wine coming up through the floorboards, which was once made leavening in the cellar below. Melvin and Deedi, the previous occupiers, had made efforts to cheer the kitchen walls with red paint, but even this helped little to dispel the gloom as the windows opening on a narrow courtyard allowed the sun to shine for only the briefest of moments into the kitchen and then only when it was at its summer apogee. And in this womblike interior, darkness mostly reigned.

  Toward the end of July, among the first letters to get shoved under the front door and to lie waiting in the shadows on the dusty, grimy floor in Spring Street was one from Gainor Stephen Crist. He had traversed the Atlantic and was now in New York living at 178 Fifth Avenue across from the Flatiron building near Twenty-third Street. He announced he was working nine to five, five days a week, at American Express, 65 Broadway. Although this company assured Gainor of a future, he said he found it very dull, his summing-up words being, “On this August 1st, 1952, I am thirty years old and homesick for all the British Isles, excluding Wales. I should like to see you when you come out of hiding and hope your situation has improved and you are less depressed.”

  Letters from Gainor, writing from Europe, no longer said he wanted to go live in Spanish Harlem. And I sensed he had already thought better of the idea. In any event, he was forever a one to seek and mostly find habitation on the right side of the tracks but always avoiding anything too prosaic in his residences. And now in the New World, chased by debt from the Old, it was clear that at least he had once again somehow landed on his feet. His penchant for befriending those he casually met, especially womenfolk, resulting as it often did in his being saved, not to mention being comforted and cosseted. The first hint of the latter coming in his next letter when he referred to his weekend visits in the country. Once heading out to the rurality of New Jersey in the company of a girl he met on the big ship. Her father was an abstract artist, and her mother, according to Crist, was a blunt, forthright progressive liberal who thought Gainor had strong fascist leanings because of his contention that in a so-called democracy too many disinterested people got out to vote.

  Gainor’s next described visit being to Sag Harbor on the end of Long Island, where another lady, a Mrs. Spenser, to whom he referred as his friend and benefactor, had a cottage. Crist finding this small once fishing village a revelation, having no idea, as he said, that such magnificent places existed. And where he was talked to, as he described, by seemingly successful artists, although rather drunken ones. Here he ate like a pig and without a driving license drove his benefactors’ and hostesses’ car around the countryside. I knew vividly of where he spoke. For several of my growing-up summers had been spent in a house amid the potato fields not far from the village of Bridgehampton. I played each afternoon in the sand dunes and watched the surf breaking along the miles of deserted beach. At the age of five, I had learned to swim in Sagaponack Pond. And our evening excursions for ice creams took us to Sag Harbor across the island. And it was strange now to hear Gainor refer to one’s childhood haunts.

  I was to hear more of Crist’s first few days on the July-hot New York pavements. With little or no carfare and searching for a job and with massive holes in the soles of his shoes, Crist had to pad these with folded wads of newspaper to prevent the bottom of his feet from being scorched. He did too straight off follow my advice to ring George Roy Hill. Getting no reply, he proceeded to see if he might, by calling at Hill’s address in the East Sixties, find Hill home. Hill, like Crist, rich or poor, always lived with an aura of elegance, which Gainor found, finally reaching this town house of some grandeur. Mounting the brownstone steps, he pressed the bell. And waited and waited. All was silence within. But Crist, knowing well that George would, unlike many others, be overjoyed to see him, rang again and waited further. With still no answer, he finally bent down and peered in through the letter hole. And what he saw was the very last that he would ever see again of a dear and close friend, George Roy Hill. For George had, just the day previously, boarded an aircraft to fly first-class from Idlewild Airport westward. And leaving there behind him, waiting in the hall, a large steamer trunk, packed ready to be shipped by train. And emblazoned with a prophetic address.

  George Roy Hill

&n
bsp; Pan Arts

  Hollywood

  California

  Gainor, crestfallen and overhot in his gentlemanly attire of tweed jacket and gray flannels, and without bus or subway fare, lonely proceeded on his threadbare footwear to tramp the long way back to 178 Fifth Avenue. Years later saying he knew what it was like to walk the last mile to execution in the electric chair.

  Meanwhile, August had come to Boston. In leisure moments away from my typewriter, I had taken to stepping out to sit in my khaki wear on my front stoop, which enabled me to watch a group of kids spinning their tops and especially a little black boy who could, by lying in the gutter, get his top to go spinning up the side of his nose. And one day, as I was watching this amateur circus specialist performing in the street, directly across on an opposite stoop, I heard a voice utter to me.

  “Hey, do you know what you are. You’re a bum.”

  There was no doubt in my mind as to what was going to happen to this significantly repulsive creature, so confidently perched on his stoop issuing insults. But for a moment, and judging by the similar use of words, I thought perhaps Gid Pratt might have visited the district to keep tabs on me and to keep me in my place. And my reaction was similar to the one that I’d had in Connecticut. Less ashen-faced, perhaps, but twice as angry and beaming back such burning violence smoldering in my eyes that this bugger across this narrow street assumed by my utter stillness that I was ready to rise as they did in Westerns and, with my hands lowered to my six-shooters, would at his first muscle moving fill him full of lead. But having no guns, I fully intended to get up and slowly cross the street, where, should I find him still sitting or standing, I would with both legs deeply flexed and from the level of one’s kneecaps, launch a single blow, which, sailing slightly upward, would connect with his throat and drive him aloft into the darkness of the open hall doorway just behind him. But as my eyes continued in silence to bore into his and signal this very definite intention, this guy in his off-white socks and no longer disagreeably sneering, was distinctly and increasingly getting nervous. Until he finally said,