The History of the Ginger Man: An Autobiography

by J. P. Donleavy

  But it was a distinctly chirpier and well-heeled Donoghue arriving to stay in Woodlawn. And he was the next, following Behan, to read the manuscript of The Ginger Man. Donoghue, a mocker of pretensions, had always imagined that like him I grew up with a dozen pairs of hands grabbing at a bowl of boiled spuds, and while shamrocks were sprouting from my ears, Bridget would be bringing a pail of milk warm from the cow across the emerald fields of the Bronx. Nothing would dissuade him from thinking that I had, like himself, been dominated by a Boston Brahmin society keeping the Irish in their servile place. For the couple of welcome days he stayed, Valerie, he and I chewed over old times in the old sod. It being a relief to hear again the iconoclast’s voice braying who’d imported blunt honesty into Ireland with the recommendation that Irishmen perform cunnilingus upon their long-suffering wives and girlfriends to ease the burdensome life of Irish womenfolk. Donoghue, whose convictions in carnal matters were supremely heartfelt and exhaustively philosophically researched, had of course in the days of uttering such tenets, yet to achieve all his goals in such matters.

  However, in those days back in Ireland when conversation was just about the only entertainment indulged in and in some cases to be had, Donoghue’s company was usually eagerly awaited by most of those whom Donoghue, upon meeting, did not rub the wrong way. Announcing as he would entering a room the state of his hunger both for food and a sex life. He was one of the few people to whom Brendan Behan would ever defer. Donoghue in return stating that he could not stand the sight nor the sound of Behan. Asked what he was having at Dublin’s bars, it was Donoghue who, when it was someone else’s round, was the first ever to order a sandwich instead of an alcoholic drink. He found himself as a result getting neither. But his principled, matter-of-fact approach to life defied rejections. And many beautiful women, who often caused his most grievous attacks of anxiety, found him unforgettably endearing.

  Although he would obey some of the social rules if it opened the doors to solving some of his long-sought satisfactions, Donoghue could always be relied upon to quickly revert to his old bluntly rude ways when finding nothing was to be gained. And one could understand his reluctance to be otherwise from just one event of awareness which was to involve the health of the whole world. It was Donoghue who forthwith in that snowbound winter of 1947 must have been among the first to throw away his cigarettes when he had read in a British medical journal that cigarette smoking was a contributing cause to lung cancer. Donoghue, at the time armed with this knowledge and having taken the Irish mail boat en route to London and while waiting in a railway carriage in the Welsh train station of Holyhead, beneficially announced this news to the first smoker he met and who had, sitting across from him, just lit up a cigarette. The gentleman so informed promptly jumped up out of his seat, rushed at Donoghue, put his two hands around his neck and tried to choke him to death. Donoghue, stronger than he looked, fended him off and, standing up at the train window to attract attention and seek help, waved to the first passing guard on the train platform, who, taking one look at Donoghue, shouted back up at him,

  “Shut up and sit down, you fucking ignorant Irish ape.”

  In the ensuing thirty or more years it took before the public was made conscious that smoking was lethal to your health, Donoghue, on the premise that his own health and longevity came first, rarely ever again breathed such word of warning to those he encountered puffing at large. And now, while visiting in Woodlawn, Donoghue, having seen my watercolors and paintings and read the existing manuscript of The Ginger Man, let it be known that he was moderately impressed. He had been one of my earlier disbelievers at Trinity, where, when tramping into my rooms and helping himself to food, he would stand munching away while surveying a story stuck in my typewriter and when asked to pronounce as to its quality would announce,

  “It stinks.”

  Until one day I inserted a translated text from Horace. And when I again asked Donoghue’s opinion, I heard the same refrain. It was a more cautious gentleman now who in his recent years had returned to America to become a textbook salesman representing a prestigious Boston publisher. Having studied and practiced phonetics, he had also perfected an English accent. While selling his school textbooks, he found it helped to hire a chauffeured limousine to take him to schools, where he would indulge the nun teachers in shopping trips. He took up horseback riding and became an accomplished equestrian, visiting stables and riding wherever he went. And doing so on the premise that being booted and elevated on the height of a horse, one exerted a ruling authority on those unbooted and unhorsed. His outward behavior, at least to the unpracticed eye, becoming nothing less than aristocratic in an otherwise unappreciative United States. When later he became employed at the Russian Center at Harvard, trying to eavesdrop on the matters going on behind the Iron Curtain, and when asked what had been discovered, he said,

  “From all the information we get, the only two things we have found out so far is that it’s gray and drab. And the only thing I’ve learned listening on the earphones is that I shouldn’t have been doing it, as it has ruined my hearing.”

  The visit of a spiritually unchanged Donoghue, at least for the moment, gave some hope and a morsel of encouragement against the censorship, paranoia, and fear of the witch-hunters howling for blood across America against the original, the rebel, the bearded, the long-haired and the nonconforming. We had now agreed with Jane Pratt to come for six weeks of the summer to Connecticut, having met her and her husband and visited their secluded paradise. However, as one was learning in an America that never stopped moving or changing, the unpredictable was ready and waiting to happen around every corner. Donoghue, heading back to Boston and halfway there, the bus went on fire. As the passengers escaped and the bus burned, Donoghue sitting on the roadside was next to a lady who had lugged with her off the bus her heavy suitcase. Donoghue asked her why she had risked her life and being burnt alive just to save her old battered baggage. She simply answered that in her suitcase were all the belongings she owned in this world and if they got left behind and burned then she didn’t want to live.

  But worse was to face Donoghue at the end of his journey to Boston, where arriving down Lakeview Avenue in Cambridge and up a flight of stairs a letter now awaited him from Mount Ararat and from the one and only Gainor Stephen Crist. Donoghue, sitting in his mother’s kitchen, read the dreaded words announcing that Crist was about to set sail from Southampton, England, for the New World and that with his passage paid and sufficient money for on board ship, he was requesting material aid in the way of a loan of twenty-five dollars to assist him upon his penniless arrival and also asking if Donoghue could also suggest some way to find a cheap room. Donoghue, who had already spent eons of time in Crist’s company, as sometimes days vanished away and having already lent Crist money, which had never been repaid, the threat of Crist’s descent disrupting his regulated life utterly terrified him out of his wits. Especially as Crist was one of the very few immune to Donoghue’s ability to put people on the defensive. For as brutally blunt and honest as Donoghue could be with his opinions, and one who had long perfected a talent unequaled in seeking out people’s weak points, Donoghue was now himself the embattled put in total and abject fear.

  Of course, it was me who sent Crist Donoghue’s address and suggested Crist write to Donoghue. This done perhaps not so innocently, liking as I did to keep friends in touch with each other, and to then learn from one of them how the other might be faring, and also as it was in this case to keep one’s distance from Crist and avoid the calamitous events which could so easily lead to being killed in his company. And I had already written less than gently to Mount Ararat not to place hope in my aid or largess.

  Dear Gainor,

  It’s like this. Unfortunately I will not be in New York when you expect to arrive and will be leaving about June 1st for about six weeks. Then I move to Boston. If you had me with you while looking for a job or getting a place to live people would slam doors in your face due to
the fact that I have hair growing on my jaw and they would think I was a Communist Party Member. The best I can do for you if you come will be to sit in some park or better still, cemetery, and talk about Ireland or England and soothe you. There are many places for rent. You can get a room for eight dollars a week, I see them advertised in the paper. Also there are thousands of jobs but not too much salary unless you become a salesman. Spanish Harlem would be a good place to live although it’s a little dangerous. As far as I know, George Roy Hill lives here. Get in touch with him, he may be able to arrange things for you. As far as I am concerned I am a little more than a bit pessimistic. Sebastian Dangerfield if it gets published at all will not make money, that’s a certainty. The publishing game here is also a little rough. There will be no sky-pie as expected. Any money I make will be on painting. There is a saying, “It’s hard but it’s fair.” Economically this place is much tougher than over there and I don’t see how a man of your sensibilities and sensitivity will make money in this clime. If you are coming here for escape you will have to do so again. However, strangely enough your accent will be of help and may, suitably employed in the proper setting, make you money. Get in touch with the Travelers Aid bureau when you arrive, they will assist you in finding a place to live. A very pukka organization run by betrothed debutante socialites who will welcome meeting you and who may need and savor a salubrious root and ball injection. Sorry to be, if I am, so disheartening.

  Guts

  Although in my present circumstances, I was acutely aware that I could not afford to entertain the unpredictable Crist, whose affairs could always be trusted to be in one woeful mess, I was not to then know that Donoghue’s attacks of anxiety concerning this otherwise charming man could be catastrophic. Especially as he read and reread Crist’s so reasonably put words of a monetary emolument to be sent care of the American Express office, New York City. Donoghue, possessed of an insatiable childlike curiosity and naivete which allowed his imagination to conjure up awful images, now sat for days immobile with dread as he imagined a starving Crist hitchhiking from New York to Boston, and with his birdlike gait hurrying along Brattle Street in Cambridge, would turn down Lakeview Avenue, mount the porch, open the screen door and climb the stairs to beard him in his lair. And here he was, Arthur Kenneth Donoghue, an upwardly mobile American with his phonetics taped and assuming and fostering an image of the fox-hunting Anglo-Irish squire, now forced to shrink back into his chambers in Cambridge, Massachusetts. And wanting to neither see nor hear anything further whatever from the handsome, socially correct and charmingly polite man from Ohio.

  The astonishing thing was that Crist was always the first to understand someone’s dread and fear of him. And in such dilemma he responded with compassionate sympathy, which often made matters even more terrifying, as it meant the victim having to cling to Gainor’s company. But that Donoghue could be so petrified perhaps was attributable to the young use of his imagination in thinking he was living in Ireland while early growing up in Boston. In any event, this same imagination was responsible for Donoghue becoming an astonishing scholar whose brain was able to store a good bit of the world’s knowledge without of course ensuring that his opinions expressed from such erudition were always correct. But he had mastered seven languages and was an authority on human frailty, anatomy, the history of medicine, the circulation of the blood, pathology, and last but not least, knew how to light a match on the sole of his shoe. Crist loved his company, thoroughly enjoying Donoghue’s display of supposed aristocratic behavior and manners and taking further delight in the slipups revealing the same old rude, crude Donoghue he knew of old who would not wait to be asked to help himself at table, but would, in a thoroughly American way, grab wine and food from under his host or hostess’s nose.

  European elegance unquestionably affected all of us Americans now back in our native land. Although it helped make friends and to some degree influenced people to resent you, there were no outstanding prizes for its use. But Donoghue could turn his accent on and off and did so to many a person’s amazement and shock. He also took on pupils, especially Koreans, Chinese and Japanese, who although mastering English were made incomprehensible by their accents. Donoghue would socially sequester them for three months under his tutelage and then reintroduce them proudly at a party to stun their old friends with their impeccable, mellifluous Oxford accents. Donoghue at the same time would question the origin of my own vowels, many of which had come with me to Europe from the Bronx. And at least from the reactions of my classmates at Fordham Prep, public speaking seemed to be for me one of the few academic endeavors at which I wasn’t abysmally inept.

  But now, as the S.S. Ryndam plowed at a steady twenty knots toward New York City across the Atlantic with Gainor Stephen Crist on board, I found that both Donoghue and myself were attempting to compose letters to await his arrival, and largely conveying the message that he was on his own and not to depend upon help from either of us. For in addition to one’s Connecticut plans, one was planning then of moving to Boston, where Donoghue told of an immensely cheap place to live in the West End, with its narrow streets and European ghetto atmosphere, where with many deserted and abandoned apartments, rents were as little and in some cases less than twenty dollars a month. And now one was about to enter another and entirely different realm amid the sylvan stretches of rural Connecticut.

  But before Crist’s arrival, and Valerie, Philip and my departure north to an isolated cabin on a forested hillside above the banks of the Housatonic River, there already had been the beginning of one literary encouragement, which came indirectly via a unique establishment run by the U.S. Navy called the Naval Academy Preparatory School. This scholastic institution was intended for those with an appointment to the Naval Academy who over an academic year could prepare for their entrance examination to the Naval Academy proper at Annapolis. During the month of April, I had read James Jones’s novel From Here to Eternity and saw a reference to the name John Hall Wheelock, who had backed the book’s publication and whose name I thought the same as an instructor in English in whose class I was a pupil at this naval school. I wrote to John Hall Wheelock at Scribner’s, inquiring if he were my former instructor at the Naval Academy Prep whose criticism I had found to be both helpful and kind. Toward the end of April, I received a reply that although he was not the same Wheelock from my naval days and had never taught nor indeed even been to Maryland, he suggested I send the manuscript to Scribner’s anyway. And so for the first time in the nearly fifty occasions it was done, The Ginger Man was sent to a publisher.

  However, it was in the classroom confines of this strange school overlooking the banks of the Susquehanna River in Maryland that my first serious awareness of being a writer came. The buildings and grounds were originally those of the Tome School for Boys, founded by a rich merchant gentleman of this name, who was concerned over the lack of local opportunity for the formal education of young people of modest means. Set on a sylvan height above the small hamlet of Port Deposit, where the school’s founder had lived, one could see south across the Susquehanna River the rolling hills of Maryland. Now in the hands of the navy and known as officer country, the campus had a rural splendor with its gray Georgian-style buildings arranged around a grass quadrangle upon which faced the largest of these edifices, the school proper. A mansion across the green space, once the headmaster’s residence, was now occupied by the commander of the naval training base, from which latter the school was separated by a golf course. There was access down a steep set of steps to the tiny town of Port Deposit. With its main street running closely parallel to the Susquehanna River and its handful of ancient frame buildings with their porches up a few steps, it was as if this tiny settlement was lost in time with no one knowing of its existence outside of the people who lived there. And in the precious few brief moments I found to just walk its one long street, I longed to, but never succeeded in, having a pineapple soda in its small-town drugstore.

  In what turned out to be
the last year of the war, it was as if the Naval Academy Preparatory School was a prelude to civilian life. Except that as students we resided in two large barracks on the edge of the golf course, which we were strictly forbidden to cut across to school under pain of serious disciplinary action. Instead we marched in platoons the half mile to and from classes, three and sometimes four round trips a day. Tunes booming and blaring out from the prep’s own band and with “Marching through Georgia” played at least once a day. This melody heard loud and clear by the Southerners whom one suspects were making angry fists on behalf of the Confederacy as they marched. Students were comprised of those who had won appointments to the Naval Academy by exam from the fleet and civilian life and the remainder by political influence, which presented an astonishing mixture of superintelligence combined with political power and an unbelievable array of guile. With chewing gum strictly forbidden, school regulations incorporated such slogans as “Shoulder your share of the job. Do not be a slacker.” However, in microseconds, the brains put together in this curious academy would invent ways of defeating all and any unwanted naval interference in our lives. The warning word “Dumbo” formulated to be whispered whenever one should be on guard at the approach of authority. And thus, with its strange collection of pupils and faculty, this school must have been and may remain one of the most curious educational institutions of all time.