The History of the Ginger Man

by J. P. Donleavy

  “Mike, I know who will publish your book for you in Paris, a nice bunch of Americans. Let me put it down in your notebook who to get in touch with. He’s the correspondent for the London Evening Standard. You should write to Sean White about getting published with the Olympia Press.”

  This information seemed like an afterthought after our long day together, and we left the pub with MacNamara and a couple of the other folk and started to walk westward up the slight incline of Fleet Street. I said to Behan that I had a ten-dollar bill in my wallet and that if it could be cashed we could buy further rounds of drink. This news instead of being welcomely received produced a vehement reaction in Behan, along with the accusation that I was withholding money in the pub which could have been spent on drinks. The fact that you could exchange dollars only at a bank did not lessen the offense that I had breached the sacred principle held by all Irishmen that you drink down every penny you have in your pocket to the last drop. As to Behan’s generosity, there was no doubt. But I was also someone who had over the years been one who could be counted on to dispense constant hospitality and had bought the likes of Behan many an unreciprocated drink. But it did not lessen Behan’s anger to explain that dollars were not legal tender, nor had it occurred to me in the pub to make a declaration of my assets, but here I was, now doing so. Nor did this placate Behan, as he continued his abusive diatribe. “I’ll fucking well kill you, hoarding money. Well, you fucking well know the pub’s shut. You’re a no-good, fucking, mean, miserly cunt.”

  On the pavement, as I stood slightly higher on the incline than Behan, he suddenly charged, his arms outstretched to grab my lapels and his head lowered to butt me in the face. Knowing that Behan was no respecter of the Marquess of Queensberry rules, I instantly assumed he was about to kick me in the balls. And so, while fending him off with my extended arms, I had raised up my knee over my privates. Behan shouting,

  “Don’t you try to kick me in the balls, you fucker.”

  “I’m not. My knee’s up to block you if you’re trying to kick me in the balls. But now let me tell you, you can forget your balls because I’m going to beat the absolute living shit out of you.”

  Behan, in an equally belligerent mood, accompanied me out into the middle of Fleet Street, where we squared off with room to punch. MacNamara, who preferred to preserve his habit of conducting his life in a civilized manner and who had fish to bring home to his cats, disassociated himself from the both of us. Especially as Behan, once in calling on him when he was briefly out, had promptly found the fish for the cats and had cooked and devoured the lot down to the very last fin. But now the fight that nearly happened years ago was about to unfold with me assuming the role of aggressor and loudly announcing,

  “I am for once and for all and at long last going to knock the living fucking shit out of you, Behan.”

  “That you’ve said twice now and it remains to be seen, you mean, miserly fucker.”

  Behan, when required, could always reply in his best Shakespearean English, just as he could mimic half a dozen European languages and twice as many accents. And as we stood facing each other, midthor-oughfare, the traffic now stopped and piling up behind both our backs, he let off a hail of linguistic curses, especially in French, German and Gaelic. An appalled MacNamara, although keeping his safe distance, did try to keep the fast accumulating denizens of Fleet Street from harm, announcing,

  “Would you ever now for safety’s and fuck’s sake keep well out of the way of these two highly ridiculous and mistaken adversaries, for soon the bicuspids will be flying.”

  With news breaking right on their doorstep, the sidewalk was collecting with printers and reporters delaying their return from their favorite pubs to their respective buildings to complete their night’s work and publish their papers in the morning. Horns were honking and faces appearing at the windows of these famed emporiums of the daily printed word. And clearly one shout must have come from one of the reporters on the Scotsman, a revered Scots newspaper.

  “Hit him in the haggis.”

  I feinted a fist and feigned a lunge at Behan and then skipped backward without striking a blow. As Behan came forward, I found myself aiming at a red mark in the middle of his nose. I feinted again with a left, but this time followed with an overhand right directly toward my target. My fist landed smack on the crest of Behan’s nasal bone. Even with the honking horns of piled-up traffic, there was a sound of contusing flesh. Behan went down falling on his back. As he slowly seemed to regain his senses, he got up, wiping the blood pouring out of his nose on the back of his fist. As deserving as I thought it might have been, I was horrified to have hit this friend. And one of the few who had unhesitatingly acknowledged me as writer merely upon the sight of my written word.

  “Are you all right, Brendan.”

  “I am but for my nose needing a new bridge to it and the taste of blood in my belly. That was one hell of a swipe you gave me.”

  And the fight just over, the police had already arrived to arrest us. Behan and I were brought up a side alley alongside the Cheshire Cheese public house. After a warning from the arresting constable not to fight again, to one’s surprise both Behan and I were suddenly released. And especially to Behan’s relief, as, having been deported, he was barred from entering Britain by the Home Office. I heard it later said that in it being the city part of London, the constabulary were not keen to have to be up early in the morning and travel to give evidence in Bow Street magistrates court. Meanwhile, abject apologies were exchanged between Behan and I and, arms around each other in renewed friendship, we forgave each other our trespass. I went off home back to Fulham. With Behan’s fatal instruction scribbled out by him in my notebook.

  Get in touch

  With Sean White in Paris

  About getting published

  With

  The Olympia Press

  34

  THE NEXT DAY in Fulham, I was out attempting to investigate what I could concerning the Olympia Press. Upon returning to 40A Broughton Road, Valerie said that Behan, with a big bump on his nose, had called, along with his equerry, Lead Pipe Daniel the Dangerous, in tow, but not it seemed to wreak revenge upon me for the previous night but to borrow my typewriter, as Behan claimed his own had broken down. And perhaps there might have been some truth in this, as I knew Behan was incapable of even changing his typewriter ribbon, having more than once carried his machine to a shop for this to be done. That is when he wasn’t hocking this same machine tucked under his arm as he sang his refrain, “Come meet me at the pawnshop and kiss me under the balls.’’

  Valerie gently but firmly refused Behan’s request, and said that Behan sheepishly laughed when reminded that he would be dispossessing me of the tool of my trade. Our fight was to be next to the very last time I would ever see Behan again. However, despite being socked on his arse in Fleet Street or having broken his typewriter, the momentum of his literary career was to accelerate and he was soon to become what is commonly referred to as a celebrity. And indeed an international one at that. But if anything, Behan was already a celebrity in the immediate area of wherever he went. And having been one in close quarters and now in the media at a longer distance, it was a role Behan, believing in his publicity, took on with deadly seriousness. Appearing where necessary and obeying his responsibilities to his growing fame, he also made sure his old friends got as little as none. And especially if they were in his company when he was quick to dismiss and shunt them away back into their obscurity. “Sorry, you’ll have to fuck off now because I’m busy with the BBC.”

  I was always surprised, however, by how I would retain a deep regard for this man. For Behan, as quick as he was to become a friend, was even quicker to become an enemy. And it might never be known if he might have played both roles in the future of The Ginger Man. However, I somehow think not, as he was never a sneaky man. But our day in London and night in Fleet Street was to be the last time I would ever talk with him on a friendly or intimate basis. And his
relationships were conducted with a vicarious haphazardry, much as they were in the early Dublin days of his more carnal associations, as he had once described to me.

  “Now as to my sexuality, Mike, about which you’d hear various circulating opinions, all of which I’d be the first to admit would contain a certain accuracy and grain of truth. Incarceration in a prison for long periods without too much distraction would cultivate the mind in that respect. But the simple matter of it is that I’d have a go at anything. Except maybe attracting too much attention might be a cardinal dressed in his full regalia and him up on an altar at St. Peter’s in Rome and saying mass to the devout. But many is the time I’d be somewhere like down in the Catacombs and come that inglorious time of morning with the first faint light filtering down through the dungeon windows, and you’d be yourself slowly coming back into your senses and you’d still be on top of what you’d been shagging through the night and it would, with nothing better to do with your curiosity, put you to wondering whom or what it was beneath you. And bejesus if their backs were to you and you couldn’t see the face, and if they weren’t bald, you’d be as gently as you could taking them by a tuft of hair to turn their heads over to see who it was, male or female, doctor or nurse, priest or nun, members in good standing of the purgatorial society or someone from the very top in government or in the meat or rag trade and you’d wonder how did you start the conversation about Ireland needing a labor leader, or about fabrics or the poor price of livestock. And bejesus it would be sometimes a shock to find somebody to my utter surprise if not horror that I’d been fucking or buggering through the night and I’d be wanting to disconnect the private parts of us both as soon as etiquette permitted and introduce myself in order that we might sensibly discuss if there were any better way to do what we were doing and arrange for a more decent place and a time convenient to do it again. But in all these encounters, Mike, I’d always give of my best and dispense to all an equal and deep amount of prodding, showing favoritism to none.”

  But like Behan himself on this day in London, I was out attending as best I could to my profession as a writer. In any event, I might have been in the vicinity of Tottenham Court Road, as this was an area of London with which I had long been familiar. Having as an undergraduate during my Trinity College days and on my unpremeditated mystery tour excursions of England, always finding myself when ending up in London, holed up in a hotel somewhere not far from Euston Station and in the neighborhood of Holborn and St. Pancras. From here, I would then wander on the periphery of Bloomsbury, west by southwest toward Soho and through streets where there were, following the war, still many a vacant bomb site or a temporary makeshift replacement building. And one particular pub, which, put back together with temporary partitions, gave its character such a curious ugliness that I could never pass by without finding myself drawn in and ending up drinking a pint or two of mild and bitter.

  As the drama of The Ginger Man would unfold, I was to get to know this area of London well. For it was not that far away from this war-wounded pub that I walked into Zwemmer’s, one of the many bookshops that lined Tottenham Court Road, and here found my first evidence of the existence of the Olympia Press, Paris. The name appeared on the cover of a literary magazine called Merlin. Nearby I came across a copy of the novel Watt by Samuel Beckett, printed in paperback with a mauve cover and published August 1953 by the Olympia Press in what was designated “Collection Merlin.” The mauve paper cover of Beckett’s book was edged by white asterisks and had the black imprint of the silhouette of a bird. I assumed the word Merlin was to mean as interpreted in the dictionary, both a small European falcon and the name of the soothsayer of Arthurian legend. Beckett’s work, as did Joyce’s before him, had on its last written page notice of where and when the novel had been completed.

  “Paris 1945.”

  There was a stirring of a certain romantic excitement in the whole idea of Paris, for generations long reputed as a friendly home away from home for artists and writers and a city where I had visited and a place where such as Henry Miller had roamed. Beckett too had previously been made known to me by an early girlfriend who mentioned More Pricks Than Kicks to me down in the Catacombs. I then quickly interpreted this title as meaning and being what many a lady got given her down in such infamous dungeons. Beckett himself, however, always seemed to safely stay away in Paris well out of the reach of Dublin’s resentment and begrudgers. And the occasional references to Beckett were always made with a feigned indifference, as if, having eliminated himself from Dublin’s bitterness and its smoldering envy, he was no longer deserving of its attention. And like Joyce before him he seemed also to be setting an example of exile and cunning. And too, we had something in common, both our mothers had houses and had lived in Greystones, County Wicklow.

  Conscious enough of having already found numerous interferences and delays in using intermediaries in dealing with the manuscript of The Ginger Man, and upon finding the address of the Olympia Press, I wrote directly off to 8 rue de Nesle. Which vaguely reminded me of the name of a chocolate bar one knew of growing up in America. But in the years to come, there was to be nothing sweet about this address. And my visits there would grow into a gargantuan nightmare to haunt me. Unlike Behan, who, now enjoying recognition and whose first radio play, “An Giall,” written in Irish and later translated into English as “The Hostage,” did not hesitate to sing the praises of this city of grandness called Paris.

  “Being a writer in that city, Mike, it wouldn’t strike you as strange to be walking into a cafe and have everyone jump to their feet to applaud you. They wouldn’t, of course, liking their food and drink too much and for fear of upsetting the glasses, cups and saucers. But they’d regard you with a bit of awe. Whereas in fucking Dublin, they’d be on their feet all right, next to you, trying to figure out how to cadge another drink or get a loan of a fiver out of you first before they’d be blackguarding you behind your back, hammering verbal galvanized nails deep as they could get them into your reputation. And if not doing that, then they’d be sidling up in order to appear like an intimate acquaintance, only on their mind would be thinking how they could give your balls a kick.”

  Paris was to play a significant role in both our lives. And I had myself hearing of the splendors of the spaciousness of the boulevard of the Champs-Elysées and the ambience of the cafes, set off there in 1947 to experience my first bedbugs. Surviving these bloody little creatures, I went again in 1948 with Valerie to spend the weeks of one summer in the top-floor room of a hotel in rue St.-André-des-Arts. There was no doubt that one found it easy to feel at home on the banks of the Seine with a bottle of wine, a baguette and saucisson. And Behan’s romantic visions of Paris were amazingly years hence to befall him and be exactly as he described. Applause greeting him not only in cafes but on the boulevards as he would, with his garrulousness and grand gestures and despite his atrocious Irish grammar, turn his fluent Irish into a form of French argot and mimic and repeat anything in this new personal language of his which struck his fancy. Behan anyway would have been the life of the party in any language and in any place, but the French especially seemed to take to his bonhomie. Although along with such adulation and with being many a time drunk and disorderly, he got the occasional attention of Paris’s gendarmerie, who would courteously remove him into custody to preserve the peace.

  “Jesus, Mike, if I wasn’t a fucking writer and them knowing it, the fucking police could be a fucking vicious lot.”

  For myself years hence, when seen in a Paris cafe, it was more likely to be an American who would glance my way. But if it were the odd habitué of that city, he would stare at me as if he had seen a ghost and then as quickly be back minding his own business as if I were a ghost. And I nearly became one. Saved only by having got up on my own two feet and shaken my lone fist against the enemy I was discovering inhabited the literary and art world. For I had got some very early and memorable lessons taught me of the cunning, intrigue and fervently friend
ly arse kissing that governed such domain. John Ryan, one of my earliest friends in Dublin, and I had decided to exhibit our pictures. We had previously been going to have a joint exhibition of paintings together until he had been advised by an American pal I’d introduced him to not to have such an association with me, as it could ruin his reputation. This of course I might have done, as I was already being accused of being all nerve and no talent. But all was solved by splitting the two weeks for which we had rented the gallery. And fooling critic and public alike, and even myself, I was then adjudged as being not much worse than anybody else in Dublin as a painter.

  But more intrigue and backbiting was to be forthcoming when Ryan decided to start a literary magazine, which he finally named Envoy. I got money from my mother to invest in this new excursion into this world of the written word. My enthusiasm being for the best work to see the light of day against Ireland’s bitter intolerance and repression. I extolled the names of two deserving, the poet Patrick Kavanagh and Behan, who in good Dublin fashion grew to detest each other. But it was only Kavanagh who early managed to enter the pages, with Behan following later. But as I saw the magazine, and not unreasonably and well meaning in Ryan’s case, take on what was to me the wrong bias and purpose, namely that of publishing writers and extolling painters already established and famed, I withdrew. As the magazine went on without me, Ryan brought about a communion of writers, artists, poets and composers which was to make for a literary period in Dublin. Meanwhile, I had, through my good-natured manner, introduced my own cultivatedly literate friends to Ryan, who helped foster artistic matters while I retreated alone to fight my own battles. And those who did not hinder me in this regard refused to resist against those who intended detriment and bane, isolating me yet further.