The History of the Ginger Man: An Autobiography

by J. P. Donleavy

  There seemed to be a preponderance of Southerners in the prep, especially from the states of Mississippi and Louisiana and all with resoundingly Anglo-Saxon names. And a more romantically sentimental lot, you could never hope to meet, as they recalled in their wistful manner their idyllic existences back in the shade of their magnolia trees. Reminiscing about their high school and college proms, one could smell the perfume and sense the presence of crinoline and lace of their lady loves, with whom they yearned to be back with again. Of course, I lapped it up, even the stories of their college fraternity pranks over which they nostalgically enthused. There were some too who spent hours recalling similar hours in the blissful care and company of their black nannies and who would remind Northerners of General Sherman’s troops burning house to house throughout the South and destroying Atlanta. And any slight made by any resident above the Mason-Dixon line concerning the good name of the Confederacy would provoke a challenge, with a Southerner jumping up in front of the class and, fists raised, inviting any goddamn Yankee to get up and fight. Amazingly, one or two did and quickly made the Second World War seem a very minor matter very far away.

  Of course the only proper future for a southern gentleman to contemplate was the whoop whoop whoop whistling of his escort destroyers sounding fore and aft and to port and starboard, as he, an admiral on the bridge of his command battleship, sailed his fleet into combat. But there was, like me, another less sentimental contingent from the Middle Atlantic states, with ethnically ghetto names. One a naturalist vegetarian whose Bohemian parents admonished him to never brush his teeth. And he would, without encouragement, show you his perfect yellow-brown tusks in what he professed to be a genuinely healthy smile. Along with this pleasantly eccentric chap, with his natural dentition, there were geniuses in nearly every academic category who could embarrassingly upstage the most erudite of professors from the navy at large who had been recruited to teach. With the wizards in action from the back seats of the class making such instructors’ life a nightmare. Answers were shouted out to complicated algebraic equations, which the instructor lengthily wrote out on the blackboard and which were expected to take at least twenty minutes to solve, and just as the last numeral of the problem appeared, a mastermind from a back row of the class would have figured it out. With one young, exasperated officer-teacher, his patience exhausted, finally threatening,

  “The next answer yelled out in this class will get the perpetrator put on a summary charge.”

  But what this innocent young officer instructor did not realize was that such an attempt at discipline could, through the school’s political appointees, provoke the power of the United States Congress against him. In any event, for those like myself who did not want to have to bother solving questions, exams were a farce. Wizards in another class would select the correct multiple-choice answer and these would be semaphored beforehand up the stairwells and along the corridors. Or if a more serious situation demanded, report cards would be altered or even rifled from the faculty room in the dead of the night by a commando force delegated to raid across the golf course. Cheating got so cavalier that it became more a case of getting something deliberately wrong so as to allay suspicion of knowing the answers beforehand. Although nothing was new to me in this naval behavior, one had sympathy for those many who already observed the Annapolis honor system and were serious intending naval careerists who would not cheat and took more than a poor view of these old salts from the fleet who did. And one was admiring of such gentlemen who would, like their fathers and grandfathers before them, make splendid, upright, permanent naval persons. As for my own principles, the one I most strongly clung to was my objection to forfeiting my life as an ordinary seaman swabbing decks. But did not mind being killed in the service of my country as an admiral.

  There were too, others skilled in the exotic. And one subtle and benign northern gentleman from an old naval family who was able to identify by smell all the available ladies’ scents, enabling him to pick up limitless numbers of willing girls on trains, planes and buses upon his asking if the name he mentioned was the perfume she was wearing. But there were too those still deadly serious about the navy to whom ladies and their perfumes mattered not a damn. Above me on a two-tier bunk in the barracks slept the son of one of the navy’s highest ranking admirals, who justifiably complained of the resounding bouts of laughter and the noise made in my conversations after lights-out with my nostalgically reminiscing southern friends. Further, my friend in the upper bunk let it be known that he was distracted from studying by the nautically indifferent likes of me whose constant subject of conversation was wine, women and atheism. Then following an outburst clearly provoked by my naval irreverence, and another day later following his complaint, an army of engineers, the Seabees, descended upon the barracks, and disemboweling the place in its entirety, separated bunks and converted half the place for study. Then from another student quarter, there came a complaint over the food these privileged prepsters had to eat and which was served to the large adjoining naval base. A day or two later, buses with half of Congress aboard arrived upon the training station, depositing senators and congressmen who each took a place standing between every two pupils in the long chow line and sat to dine with the Naval Academy prepsters sampling the food. Forthwith upgraded.

  The school was run by a young commander with long sea duty who had been given this post as a reward for outstanding service. Early on in his administration, he called the school on parade one Wednesday to give a pep talk only to find it being greeted with student catcalls. Unable to pick out perpetrators from the mass of black sailor uniforms, and in a rightful fury and in the interests of immediate discipline, the school’s weekend liberty was canceled. Dismissing the assembly, the school now confined to base and with Saturday three days away and as the political appointees alerted their congressmen and senators, there came within the hour telephone calls and cables from Washington followed by telegrams from the governors of most states in the Union. And before long the weekend liberty was reinstated, by what one must assume was a congressional decree. One imagined that this naval commander, a no-nonsense naval officer for whom this must have been an embittering experience of frustration, was justifiably ready to strangle one of these lowly ranked landlocked students who had direct access to power in Washington. And he, once having one of these recalcitrant types waiting outside his office, at least managed to trip over his chair and with an appropriate apology made to the influential student ending up on the floor on his arse.

  Meanwhile, I enjoyed listening as the Southerners reminisced about their fraternities and the grand southern balls they had attended on such magical college evenings. Walking in the spice-scented air with their dates, who, for that night at least, they loved and who loved them, as the band music drifted across the campus lawns, the crickets chirping and the phosphorescent lightning bugs flying by, blinking green. I would be shown photographs they always carried of their black nannies and of whom they spoke with awed love and affection. But when I applied to a black southern college on behalf of one of the most southern of these southern gentlemen and the application arrived and he opened it with anticipation, which then turning to astonishment, fast changed into a boiling rage. As he, still in his underwear, rose, red-faced, fuming from the edge of his bunk and waving the application over his head, tramped barefoot up and down the barracks aisle shouting,

  “I’ll kill the fucker who did this, I’ll kill him.”

  For weeks afterward, this aggrieved southern gent continued to roam the barracks looking to discover and throttle with his bare hands the perpetrator. And even as I reveal this these many years later, I do hope it does not incite him to come in search of me now. However, I managed at least to get him off his angry feet when I offered to assist him in training for the arrival of the Annapolis football coach and assistants who were on their way up to conduct tryouts to see if there were any football talent at the prep who could then be persuaded to make a special effort to p
ass their exams and come to play on the Naval Academy team. And plus, should they be outstanding players, their entrance to the academy, as we all believed, would be a foregone conclusion. My southern friend, in knowing that I was much inclined to general athletics and was possessed with a prowess at a few sports, readily agreed when I offered to put him through his paces. And so, much to my immediate relief, I was at last presented with an opportunity to divert this Southerner’s sworn quest to discover and kill me.

  On the evening before the tryouts, I began my friend’s training, putting him through my suggested concentrated regimen and playing upon his desperation not so much to be an admiral but a football star. By one ruse or another I was able to get him to do the first one hundred deep knee bends, push-ups and sit-ups. Then I absolutely insisted he repeat them in order to at least knock off ofteen pounds of the soft weight I said he was carrying and which flab was bound to slow down his speed. Then there were the neck exercises, the jaw, the fingers, the toes. And only when I mentioned the ears did I get a look of skepticism. Quickly explaining that it would help him get the signals correct from the quarterback in a huddle. My handiwork done, which continued till lights-out at taps, showed its results next morning when my southern friend lay inert in a long silence. Especially to my exhortation to rise and shine and hit the deck for a quick limbering-up session. His voice finally coming groaning out between his tired lips.

  “You fucker, Donleavy, can’t you see I can’t move a muscle or get out of this bunk, never mind to stand up.”

  Indeed, my southern friend lay that way moaning for some days afterward and had to be supported to and from the latrine by two of his fraternity brothers. But instead of giving me dirty, unappreciative looks to my sympathetic apologies for perhaps having overworked him a little too much, he responded in the true nature of a gentlemanly Southerner, heaping all blame upon himself. There were other charming variations of these Southerners. One very pleasantly sensitive from the state of Louisiana who was a talented musician. Eschewing the philistines, he would invite me as his most appreciative one-man audience to repair to the school auditorium, which housed an organ of some splendor on which this gentleman would play Sibelius’s Finlandia and follow with Mahler and Schubert. One day peeking in the door, we were joined by an athletic, good-looking Jewish gentleman, who, from a different rather than the wrong side of the tracks of an eastern seaboard city, was, along with appreciating music, a brilliant mimic and an antidote to all these southern gentlemen.

  “Holy Jesus Christ, I don’t believe it, two cultured guys in this school.”

  Izzy, as he was called, said he always kept his eye on the main chance in life. Which in his case turned out to be strange women in threesomes, there being a man shortage caused by the war. Returning from his weekend liberty with his Adonis good looks glowing, he would collect about him a circle of listeners whose faces he would watch change expression as he would relate his adventures, mostly of meeting up with female naval personnel in Baltimore. With three of whom he repaired to a hotel. As the shock increased on the faces around him, Izzy, the class genius at logarithms, would describe breaking the bed with the first two ladies while the third temporarily absented herself in the bathroom. Izzy, a former boatswain mate from the amphibious corps, waiting as the southern gentlemen’s faces flushed red at what was considered a grossly irreverent attitude toward women, then warming to his subject and to the mostly shocked ears of his listeners, further recounted in naval parlance and in graphic detail.

  “There I was, naked as the day I was born a baby in Newark, New Jersey. Now in my heroic, patriotic war effort to continue to make up for the man shortage, I fucked the first two ladies silly while the third had gone to the bathroom for a crap. And not wanting to be remiss in my patriotic duty, I knew I had to screw the third. So I left the two first ladies to each other back on the broken bed, who were raging lesbians anyway. I drunkenly crawled across the bedroom floor, crashing headfirst into the bathroom door before realizing it was closed. In the rug’s dust, I went down sneezing. But patriotism again overcoming me, I came up breathing and proceeded on all fours again across the tiles of the lavatory. And nothing dismayed me, navigating toward this remaining naked objective sitting on the toilet seat. Between the port and starboard parted white thighs, I saw something dark looming ahead. I called for full engines astern. I knew I had to make soundings in order to ascertain the depth of the channel I was about to enter. I signaled slow ahead. Then I felt a hand on the back of my cranium pull me closer. It was like the great gates of the Panama Canal opening. Into the void before my eyes, I shouted “Ahoy there.” I waited. Listening for the echo to come back. Then. And at long last the fading echo came back. Ahoy there. I signaled full ahead to the engine room. Then with my nose breaking a bow wave and eating my way forward hungry for this deliciousness, I had lunch, dinner and breakfast combined.”

  Izzy roared laughter at the gathering of shocked faces, but these weekly liberty stories he told were soon features of Sunday evening entertainment. Each story more bizarre than the last. Izzy waiting in the middle, an assemblage formed at one end of the barracks. A wicked smile creasing his face as the Southerners feigned indifference but made sure they remained within hearing distance. And one afternoon, Izzy came cornering me near my bunk. A most serious and concerned look upon his rugged face.

  “Hey, Donleavy, don’t think I don’t know more about you than you think. We’re both out of the amphibious corps and saving our lives. And I want to tell you something. You know how I like outraging these southern prima donnas. But I see you. You’re always just listening. You don’t smile, you don’t laugh. Maybe you smile just a little. But you don’t object to my filthy, disgusting descriptions. You just listen. And you know what.”

  Just like

  The English teacher

  Says

  You’re going to be

  A writer

  17

  IT WAS TRUE, as Izzy said, that out of the amphibious corps our lives were saved. One had been assigned as a radar man to one of the amphibious landing ships medium, which had been converted to a rocket ship. Such vessels were stationed off a beach, having for three hours the firepower of a battleship, and were, with their hundred tons of rockets, chosen as a priority target to be blown out of the water by kamikaze suicide pilots during the amphibious landings. And the English teacher to whom Izzy alluded was one of the few exceptions to all the Naval Academy Prep’s insubordination on the part of some of its students, and the man whose name accidentally led to my first submission as the novelist author of The Ginger Man, when on May 1, 1952, I first sent the manuscript to Charles Scribner’s Sons, established in their Edwardian building on Fifth Avenue. And just prior to my leaving for Connecticut came the first ever publisher’s reaction.

  CHARLES SCRIBNER’S SONS

  PUBLISHERS

  597 FIFTH AVENUE, NEW YORK 17, N.Y.

  June 5th, 1952

  Mr. James P. Donleavy,

  233 East 238th Street,

  New York City.

  Dear Mr. Donleavy,

  We have now completed our reading of the manuscript of your S.D., and I am writing you at once to give you very briefly our impressions, for whatever they may be worth.

  Well, first of all, as I am sure you yourself must know, you have an extremely vigorous and fresh writing talent, with a gift for characterization which is, I suppose, the novelist’s prime requisite. Secondly, this novel of yours S.D. (we realize that there are still a hundred pages to come), presents the reader with a concentration upon certain aspects of life, unrelieved by contrast. Such a book, for all its talent, would not be publishable. In the case of a novel such as From Here to Eternity, for instance, the frank depiction of certain episodes and the very heavy use of four letter words, etc., is incidental to the course of a story which does not dwell solely on these aspects.

  But it’s difficult to put these things into words in a letter. I note that you would like to come in and pick up
the manuscript. If you will let me know in advance when you plan to come in for it, I should like to have the pleasure of meeting you, and perhaps at that time I could more adequately express our sense of your talent and the difficulties involved.

  Yours sincerely,

  John Hall Wheelock

  I phoned to say I would collect the manuscript and on this warm sunny June day and, as I had a habit of doing approaching any new address, I reconnoitered down Fifth Avenue past the gleamingly inviting shop fronts located along part of this famed boulevard, which forms the spine from which radiates this city’s geographical center of wealth. If books have splendor stacked and displayed in their shiny colorful covers, there was such in the storefront windows of Scribner’s. At an entrance adjoining the bookshop, I entered an office door and, ascending a few floors in an antique elevator, I duly arrived at the Scribner’s offices. Led by a receptionist to a little fenced enclosure, I soon sat with this polite, wryly smiling and kindly man, John Hall Wheelock. Who now told me that four at Scribner’s had read the manuscript, and it was the opinion of three of them that S.D. was one of the best manuscripts ever to come to Scribner’s and that the fourth person was of the opinion it was the best manuscript she had ever read. However, in Wheelock’s sympathetic smile I was warned not to expect a contract to be proffered. Wheelock going on to apologetically say that because of the editorial changes in their publishing hierarchy and the climate of publishing at the time and especially in the light of the difficulties which arose from the publication of From Here to Eternity, he did not see how they could publish the manuscript as it stood.