The History of the Ginger Man: An Autobiography

by J. P. Donleavy

  My painting career and my cocking a snook at the art world of Dublin and whistling a fist or two in search of a begrudger’s jaw had given me a certain vantage point to add to the confidence steeled by the resolve of my anger. But as one wrote farther on the page and with a hint of flourish, I appear to become a slightly more objective man of letters, carefully setting the scene and giving an indication of the bitter poverty pervading the Dublin of the day. And the words begin to come closer to those which finally appeared in The Ginger Man.

  Today there was a rare sun of spring after a winter of dark skies, the depressant of rain and Ireland’s funereal cold. Ragged white fleshed children, their faces covered in a light green phlegm, raised a din through the Georgian streets. But winter remained in the pub as it does in Ireland. O’Keefe spoke of the difficulties of being poor, the bovine shrewdness of the Irish and the need for social reform.

  As I wrote further, a more formal description of the character Dangerfield, in the third dimension as it were, was given. And the first-person interior monologue of Dangerfield combined with third person, that much of The Ginger Man was finally written in, must have still been lying in wait to be formulated.

  Kenneth O’Keefe was speaking to a tall, most respectable man, who was precise, spare and red, who wore a pair of borrowed grey flannels, an ill fitting woman’s raincoat, bowler hat and had not bathed for two months. This man had attended Dartmouth College. He was drinking a bottle of Guinness having just pawned an electric fire. He was interested in the plays of Ibsen, the writings of Rousseau and Jonathan Swift and was disarmingly erudite. He had one consummate occupation which was with drink. He was married and had a year old daughter.

  His name

  Was

  Sebastian Dangerfield

  7

  THE VILLAGE OF KILCOOLE was half a mile away as the crow flies and a mile’s walk or drive by way of the narrow rutted lane, dusty and overgrown by summer and mud deep in winter. Walking, I occasionally stopped to visit a small church ruin and graveyard, where rumor had it that a stake had been driven through a vampire’s heart buried there and over which no grass ever grew. This spookiness seemed to extend to the settlement of Kilcoole on its hill of small houses and cottages, which always seemed the last forsaken tip of civilization before one went farther south.

  The clouds coming from the west more than often emptied their rain on the Wicklow Mountains leaving the sun to shine along this stretch of coast. But clement as it could be, no one seemed to stick it out in this sea-level area of land for long. It seemed at times a graveyard of dreams from which one would rage in battle to escape from this remote coast, where a brooding atmosphere seemed to forever lurk. And perhaps not surprising as there were rumors of wartime quislings, traitors and double agents from continental Europe, who, following hostilities had gravitated to this neutral country’s anonymous landscape to elude the wrath of those whom they’d deceived. Such folk remained quiet outsiders, which now included me as a not so quiet pagan iconoclast.

  There was still evidence of a once squirearchy in the surrounding countryside, where the several ruins of great mansions rose from their coverings of ivy. But one or two substantial houses remained still standing with a roof. One on the village’s northern outskirts, surrounded in its small parkland and which housed a convent of nuns. By summer their black shapes were sometimes seen in the distance making their way to the deserted beach to swim. And haunting the landscape just to the south of my cottage, and the nearest large building, was a mansion just as gloomy as its name, Grey Fort. Although abandoned and empty many years, it still stood reasonably dry and sound. And one day I found the front door open and walked through its barren and dusty, echoing rooms. In its musty basement were strewn stacks of anti-Catholic pamphlets containing highly unfriendly words concerning the Pope, and vividly derogatory descriptions of Catholics in general. Suitably enough, it was rumored, as was nearly everything in Ireland, that Guglielmo Marconi, the inventor of a practical system of communicating intelligence without the use of connecting wires, had once occupied this house. And some truth might have attached to this, as according to the encyclopedia he had married an Irish woman.

  Stories had it that the big rock jutting out from the landscape at the top of Kilcoole village marked a small common and was over the centuries a traditional meeting place of Gypsies and tinkers. And along the verges of the adjoining byways, one always saw encampments of a family or two of these traveling people crouched around their fire embers drinking tea, or by night tucked away, disappeared within their tiny canvas shells under which they slept. Their horses roamed loose down the narrow lanes grazing the “long acre,” as the grass on the roadside was called. Often these piebald quadrupeds, when they panicked in the headlights of my approaching car, would then in darkness gallop before me, hoofs pounding and sparks flying. And sometimes terrifying, as trapped by my gate at the end of the long lane they would come charging back out of the blackness.

  The tinkers themselves would betimes come and call to see if any tinkering could be done or a tool be indefinitely borrowed or a pony remain in a field eating one’s meadow. Word soon got out and was spread about the village that nothing, not even a rusty nail, could be had out of the American. But because I had saved from drowning a tinker child fallen into a stream, word of this seemed to spread far and wide, and as I was one of the few men, if not the only man, in Ireland at the time with a beard, wherever I went for years afterward, traveling people, upon seeing me, saluted and offered me blessing as I went by.

  There was a train stop on the shoreline, a full mile away along a straight road from the village. This was nothing but a bit of raised ground on this deserted stretch of sea, and one of the loneliest train stops in the world. To alight there, one had to get a message to the train driver before leaving Dublin’s Harcourt Street terminus, which I had to do in my first few weeks without a car. Valerie, in meeting the train, never believed it would stop or if it did that anyone would ever get off. We then both had to wear boots in order to shortcut home across the boggy meadows, which stayed underwater through the winter. Halfway across this stretch of land between myself and the sea were my nearest neighbors, the Smiths, in their tiny cottage. And I suppose if one could have inspiration for a quiet, peaceful later life, the Smiths provided it.

  A white-haired kindly, cheerful and charming retired couple in their middle eighties, they had moved out from Dublin. And now squeezed in by their large Victorian furniture lived in their three tiny rooms. And it was across their bit of meadow and past their cottage that one went to get to the sea and the station. Bowered and buried in a tangle of shrubs and trees, their tiny abode could hardly be seen. They kept chickens and had a very big gray neutered cat called Snooky, who was a good ratter. We were given eggs, and were invited for tea with homemade fruit cake. As I threw heart attacks and had strokes and was hors de combat at the tender age of twenty-five, and recuperating stretched out under rugs on my chaise longue brought from my rooms at Trinity, old Mr. Smith, who was eighty-six, would do odd chores for me, such as expertly installing a lock on our front cottage door. In a scrapbook, they kept photographs and newspaper cuttings they encountered of my public activities. To fetch their simple groceries, they often walked along the railway line the four miles to Greystones and back. And never uttered an unkind or discouraging word. Except to occasionally say that a loutish element were emerging across Ireland. As the turf smoke rose from their chimney and was a fainter gray against the cold winter background of the sea, I took comfort from their lonely presence.

  This distinguished-looking gentleman, with his equally distinguished and attractive wife, was my nearest neighbor at Kilcoole. As his appearance might tell, both Mr. Smith and his wife would seek instant shelter at the sound of an approaching Brendan Behan cursing his way across the fields. But one always felt one could view life with some sanguinity if one lived one’s own life as they had done theirs.

  Inland from the cottage, lived a young, f
riendly farming family called Farrell. They had bought the large house and farmed the land where once a British major lived who committed suicide. The Farrells grazed cattle, cows and kept a bull. And it was from them we got our daily milk. It was from old Mr. Farrell that I was given the encouragement and lessons on how to make hay. Putting it into weatherproof cocks, raked down and tied against the wind so that it would impress another farmer and fetch a good price in an auction sale. These now, my side battles in life, fought every bit as bitterly as were the struggles to write words on a page. And I could romanticize enough to imagine that I had to put the begrudgers and philistines to rout who would dare to stifle my voice. Of course one could really be so bloody-minded and determined that one wasn’t that desperately concerned with these obstacle makers. But I already knew from my brief brushes with the literary world that they lurked and abounded in every publishing enterprise round the globe. And nothing but the unstoppable would succeed in avoiding the sabotage. Which alas was to be ceaseless.

  Across the lane from the Farrells’ big house, subsisted a wiry, small-statured Mr. Allen on his acre plot of land. He hailed from Leicestershire and had erected a series of adjoining shacks. Flat-roofed and tar-papered, they were neat and respectable enough, and these he rented while he industriously tilled his patch of ground. At five A.M. on summer mornings he dug up his carrots, parsnips, and cabbages, cleaned them and then with a bag strung over his bicycle would pedal twenty-five miles to Dublin to sell them in the market. Returning in the afternoon he would in short trousers pass by my studio on his sinewy, skinny legs, chewing one of his carrots, to go for a swim in the ice-cold sea. He’d been an agitator for socialism in Leicester and, having met much opposition, had come to Ireland to soothe his nerves. Although I wasn’t a convert to his way of thinking I always listened patiently to his words. One day, hearing my typewriter pecking away, he inquired about what I was doing. When I told him I was writing a book he made me a present of a big, old, battered dictionary in which there was the word “papaphobia,” which I was delighted to learn the meaning of as being morbid fear and dread of the Pope and Popery. With all the nearby antipapist pamphlets in the mansion Grey Fort, I thought it appropriate to promptly enter this word into the manuscript of The Ginger Man, where it seems solitary to exist, as I haven’t seen or heard of the word since.

  Back in the world of Dangerfield, I moved across a new lawn from my sun porch into an ancient stone shed, having with a sledgehammer wrought an entrance door through the back wall and installed in the south and east walls large studio windows. A smaller window faced west through which many an hour was spent watching the farmer Farrell’s cattle grazing. My desk was an old door propped up by former roof joists, where I sat at my typewriter facing a few ragged reference tomes and a couple of my sculptures. Above, on the wall, was one of my earliest and quite creditable paintings of Notre Dame Cathedral in Paris. Now with my many attempted pages accumulated and drafts repeated many times, I finally had taken the bull by the horns or the bull had taken me and I proceeded nonstop into the novel. Six weeks elapsed, there was at last represented a considerable sheaf of foolscap paper, and took on the shape and weight of a manuscript with now copious notes appearing in the margin and on the backs of pages. A true sign the work had taken on a momentum.

  Old man Heron had died. And at the point where the manuscript was one hundred and twenty pages long, I had gone to the Isle of Man just following his funeral. As death approached, he had decamped from Ilkley to the island, where there were no death duties. And this may have been a selfless act to preserve assets for his heirs. But it was to the island he had come on many of his wartime holidays, taking the four-hour journey alone on a Manx steamer from Liverpool, and he held this ancient small world of glens and moors emerging out of the Irish Sea, in sentimental affection. Regarding him as a fair if pragmatic man, I was left with a sense of sorrow at old man Heron’s passing. But upon stepping off the bus from the airport at Douglas I was greeted by Valerie’s and her brother Michael’s smiling, cheerful faces. And as we repaired to Yates Wine Bar, with its cautionary signs against alcoholic overindulgence, I thought, Why not drink an ale to his memory.

  In old man Heron decamping to the Isle of Man, there had to be an urgent search to find a house and for him to establish his domicile of intention. And somehow after all these years, I still remember the price of five thousand pounds, which then was considerable but in view of the house’s comparatively exotic splendor, reasonable enough. Stone-built on a rock outcropping with walls three feet thick and adjoining a stream and waterfall flowing into the sea, the waves broke against the garden ramparts above which, in the island’s subtropical climate, palm trees grew on the terrace.

  I was not to know then that this fairly sumptuous house hovering over the sea, that old man Heron had bought before he died, was to play a significant part in the history of The Ginger Man. While Valerie stayed on a few more days on the Isle of Man, I returned to Kilcoole. Arriving late in the afternoon at the cottage, I found a window broken open and the sitting-room-kitchen in total disarray. Towels dirtied and clothes and food strewn everywhere. Every cooking pot blackened with soot. Nothing seemed to have been taken. Except in the small bedroom, all my shoes of which I had twenty-two pairs, were mysteriously missing.

  In a panic, I went out to my studio to see if my manuscript was safe. After a few anxious moments, I finally found it lying next to and just beneath an unrecognized thumbed and ragged thick sheaf of papers. Turning the torn and stained pages, I did not have to read many words to conclude that it could not have been written by anyone else but Brendan Behan, giving as it did an account of a young Republican of heartfelt Feinian sentiments, venturing abroad with gelignite and detonators into deepest enemy territory, which happened to be Liverpool. And there, in a boardinghouse with ready-made plans to plant a bomb and prior to any such explosion, the author describing the incident was arrested, tried and sentenced and imprisoned. And these pages I read lying open next to my own manuscript pages of The Ginger Man were those of Behan’s Borstal Boy.

  One of the first formal draft pages of THE GINGER MAN, already alluding to the censorship and bigotry then sweeping the United States. In the left bottom of the page occurs an editorial suggestion by Brendan Behan where he writes “leave back,” referring to the phrase I was cutting, “A salmon leaped in joy.” Having at the time thought the phrase too flowery, I was surprised later to find myself following Behan’s advice, and a salmon did leap in joy in THE GINGER MAN.

  My first ever meeting with Behan was in the Davy Byrnes pub, among a late-morning group of would-be Bohemians who were otherwise revolutionaries, horse trainers, gas meter readers, con men, ballroom dancers and professional black sheep. But all of whom had in common that they indefinitely existed upon invisible means of support. We were gathered under the most rearward of the paradisiacal murals painted by Cecil French Salkeld, whose daughter years later Behan was to marry. At the time, Behan, just released from prison for attempting to shoot a policeman, was the center of attention, which he invariably was anyway. But dressed raggedly, shirt open to his belly, and the tongues of his down-at-the-heel shoes wagging free, one would not immediately have assumed he was a man of letters. Indeed any claim by any man present of that nature would get you ridiculed to within an inch of your permanent well-being. For me, an American, the unkempt Behan was indistinguishable from the corner boys who nightly populated the streets selling their newspapers. But in Dublin, with all equally welcomed and just as equally spurned, you had to be ready to meet anyone and be ready to drink his health and to religiously pretend that you actually listened to and admired deeply something original he had to say.

  It occurred to those gathered upon this particular morning that it would be a great joke to introduce Behan and I to each other as writers. This done, Behan hearing I was an American immediately called me a narrowback. A word I had never heard before but which having the connotation of weakness was immediately taken by me
as disparaging. And of course Behan was merely being academic. For at the time I did not know the word was used by the Irish immigrant who grew up in the old country to describe those of first-generation Irish born in America whose backs would not have been broadened by hard labor as were their own backs. Upon being challenged to withdraw the remark, Behan naturally repeated it. And now I was sure it was uncomplimentary. If I wasn’t standing already, I stood up. And informed Behan that he could choose to have his jaw broken, his nose smashed and his head beaten off there on the spot or could elect to have it done outside in the fresh air. Behan, choosing the al fresco arrangement, followed me out through the pub’s swing doors and stepping between the parked bicycles we squared off in the middle of Duke Street, which was much without automobile traffic in those days. Fists knotted at my sides like a gun cocked, I was about to make my first feinting move before unleashing a looping right to Behan’s already scarred nose when Behan offered his hand to shake.

  “Ah, now why should the intelligent likes of us belt each other and fight just to please the bunch of them eegits back inside the pub who wouldn’t have the guts to do it themselves.”

  I did not yet know that Behan had just been released from prison for attempting to murder a policeman. And clearly he felt no need to demonstrate he was a dangerous man. In any event, I shook his hand but was now finding one fight becoming the same as another in Dublin. Following the first insult, there was always a great bluster and spouting of belligerent words, which were usually expected to be exchanged at length. However, coming from the highly perilous folkways society of New York, where insult could a second later be followed by a bullet or knife fatally entering your heart, one’s eye watched for the first flicker of movement for such a weapon, and one did not then wait upon ceremony for it to be drawn before unleashing from the hip one’s own hardest, fastest right or left cross to the jaw to produce prolonged unconsciousness in one’s opponent. Having already done this several times in Dublin on the occasion of a belligerent remark, there became a distinct slowing up in the number of incidents in which unfriendly comments were made to me or about my beard. And it may have been the reason why on the occasion of the threatened battle with Behan, not one of the pub inmates bothered, as they would have done in America, to come out and watch the fight but more likely they stayed inside not wanting to abandon their drink. Thereafter, upon Behan seeing me, I would hear his shout which turned all heads up and down the elegance of Grafton Street.