The History of the Ginger Man: An Autobiography

by J. P. Donleavy

  THE SUNDAY TIMES

  FICTION OF THE WEEK

  BY JOHN METCALF

  “The Ginger man, whose Sebastian Dangerfield is as central a version of the new Byronic hero as anyone could ask for.”

  “A fine and genuine verbal talent.”

  “He has fire enough for a dozen books, dexterity and liveliness to spare.”

  EVENING STANDARD

  FICTION SHELF

  BY PHILIP OAKES

  “Plotless, picaresque story. Originally published in Paris, and lightly censored for the English edition, it displays a raging, randy talent.”

  “Brilliantly comic writing, but decidedly too gamy for gentle tastes.”

  MANCHESTER GUARDIAN

  BY ANNE DUCHENE

  “The total impact of the book seems incontestably one of outrageous and fantastic comedy.”

  “It is the comedy of enjoyment, with nothing destructive about it.”

  “Full of love and preposterous energy and laughter.”

  “People who don’t think randiness and riotous good company are subjects for comedy will not be amused, of course: but they would not have been asked to the party anyway. And that is all one needs to know, morally, about this book.”

  “An ultimate comic triumph.”

  Here seated in this small office in London’s Fitzroy Street, this was my mini victory, lightening my weight of concern, that might have happened three years previously in its major way in America. And as I sat reading these paeans of praise, Armstrong’s phone kept ringing as book orders were pouring in. Harrods’s large department had already reordered twice. Neville’s grin each time he put down the phone was on the verge of laughter and his bow tie seemed to be spinning like an airplane propeller. It was truly, for the time being at least, To hell with Girodias. As Brendan Behan had predicted,

  The Ginger Man

  Was at last

  On its way

  Chasing the Bible

  As a repressed botanist, one always felt reassured by an ecclesiastic-looking gentleman pausing in his religious fervor to admire an instance of beauty in nature.

  45

  AND MORE REVIEWS FOLLOWED. At the end of January in the periodical Truth, Peter Shaffer wrote.

  The Ginger Man does not sell out. He lives defiantly without compromise — and without proceeding virtue either. Mr. Donleavy in his invigorating book displays the vices of indelicacy, formlessness and no sense of selectivity whatever. His Sebastian Dangerfield, young, American, married with a brat, comes to Dublin to read law at Trinity: but his feeling for law is not that of the Scarsdale (and Sunningdale) bourgeois. In its context, Mr. Donleavy’s world is a blasphemy, and his Dangerfield is anti saint. Life, says he, is for living: not necessarily for solving. And live he does. The Ginger Man is the saga of his lunatic unplanned existence on the fringe of starvation, most often drunk, most often quarrelling, never working though dreaming continually of his future wealth as a lawyer, moving moodily through the pub and alley world of an amiable nightmare (the contradiction is not impossible at all in Dublin) sustained by an ever richening private mythology. It gets better as it goes on; his wife, quite properly, leaves him, and he himself embarks for England — though not before holed up in a house to dodge his villainous landlord Egbert Skully. He has an affair with his tenant, the spinsterish but complaisant Miss Frost, which is surely one of the funniest incidents in modern fiction. Thereafter the atmosphere (because it is portable) haunts London too, to produce the magnificent MacDoon for the mythology, and provide a suitable background for the final appearance of dewy, innocent insatiable Mary, a worthy love for the anti saint whose hagiography Mr. Donleavy tells so well.

  From Ireland there came a different message and my first ever fan mail concerning The Ginger Man.

  Dublin City

  6/1/57

  Dear Mr. Donleavy,

  Your book The Ginger Man was given to me by accident. I write myself and know how tiring it is to write and cross out the words to put in their place the correct words.

  I wonder did you think of what effect your book would undoubtedly have on your readers? Human passions are very strong and at times it’s an effort to subdue them. Why then try to make life harder for men? You would be sad if your children were poisoned by some heartless wretch? Or your wife led away from you? Or their names dragged in the gutter by people who knew you? You seem to be doing these things to others. Married life is difficult oftentimes, why make it worse? Passions are strong, why make men worse than brutes? The Holy Name of Jesus belongs to a Person who will judge you soon. Why drag your Saviour’s name in the mud? I hope your next book will lift people up a little. Oscar Wilde had a beautiful style and was clever. Try to do something constructive.

  There’s no use giving you my name.

  AE

  With John Osborne’s Look Back in Anger, the so-called “angry young man” had come on the scene in London. But there now descended an ominous silence from Paris, where apparently the French government had imposed a ban on the Traveller’s Companion Series, which was being appealed by the Olympia Press. As the prospect of litigation continued to haunt me, my resolve to continue writing A Fairy Tale of New York was weakening. I was languishing. All was not well. Although there was the victory of publication, still stifling my spirit was the stigma of litigation clinging to The Ginger Man. Any moment, any day, I was expecting a writ to arrive. I now had to finally abandon the writing of A Fairy Tale of New York. As I forced myself to run back and forth along the Putney embankment of the Thames just beyond the boathouses, I could sense that my reserves had, during these past racking weeks, been diminished. With no such bacterium ever having taken up residence within me before, I discovered now I had an abscess.

  Dr. Rosemont, the pleasant Jewish doctor, with his small neat surgery across from Eel Brook Common on King’s Road, referred me to St. Stephen’s Hospital. I was shot with penicillin. And advised to return in a day or two when the abscess had localized and could be drained. Hovered over by doctors and nurses, they said the pain would be alleviated by taking gas. However, as they insisted, I declined. Physical pain could be nothing to me but immense relief. But I was told the agony I would be subjected to would make it difficult to operate and I did finally relent. To have a dark mask come over my face. And the bother and peeve of the world to be briefly taken away. I was to find out what it was like to die. In the wind and growing darkness of an autumnal afternoon beseated on that evening bench on Eel Brook Common, you arise. Death was coming. With the life of others leaving. As you began to flee, running. Chasing along under the clumps of branches of the plane trees of Wandsworth Bridge Road. And all those nearest and dearest that you loved were blown away by the wind. You shouted out. Calling after their names. Come back. Stay. Be with you. With you.

  I was at my lowest ebb. But as The Ginger Man was to do so many times in the future, it did now for the first time come to my aid. The morning following my attendance at hospital as I lay convalescing on the daybed of this tiny Fulham sitting room, Philip brought up to me from the front hall an envelope forwarded to me by Neville Spearman Ltd. And upon such letter’s heading were the much familiar words “Ealing Films” in red.

  EALING FILMS

  EALING FILMS LTD., M.G.M. BRITISH STUDIOS

  BOREHAM WOOD

  HERTS

  3rd January 1957

  J. P. Donleavy Esq.,

  c/o Neville Spearman Ltd.,

  10 Fitzroy Street,

  London, W1.

  Dear Mr. Donleavy,

  That’s a marvellous book. Do you really hate films as much as the Mary-Dangerfield stuff at the end suggests? If not, do you think we could meet some day and see if you have any ideas that might be put on celluloid? Dialogue like yours would be something of a godsend to British films.

  Ring me any afternoon at Elstree 2000 or any morning at GRO 4934.

  Yours sincerely,

  Kenneth Tynan

  Script Editor

 
; Kenneth Tynan was an Oxonian and already legendary as a theatrical critic and enfant terrible of the show business world. As I gathered my more positive wits about me, I arose from my bed and found a telephone kiosk and gave Tynan a tinkle, delighted as I was to be so casually invited to put one’s words on the silver screen. I was immediately bid come to 120 Mount Street in Mayfair, with its calm red brick elevations. Ascending in a small lift, I was greeted and shown in by a butler, with a pretty little smiling girl called Tracy charmingly introducing herself. I was put waiting briefly in one of this flat’s two grand reception rooms as suddenly entered this tall, slender, satin-adorned gentleman who offered me a drink and said,

  “Mr. Donleavy, assuming that your characters will be human beings and not locusts or something and you have the beginning of an idea and if you can tell me verbally or in a letter or on a match book cover, we can give you a contract and pay you money to write your conceptualization into a screenplay at your leisure and convenience. How does that sound to you.”

  “Awfully nice.”

  “And I’d like you to meet with Seth Holt. Who’s been involved in the making of a few such little films as The Lavender Hill Mob and other films too fabled and numerous to mention. And should you not both detest each other, it’s possible he’ll direct the film you will write. By the way, let me fill up your drink.”

  Kenneth Tynan, if occasionally stammering, turned out to be every bit as good as his glibly spoken word. I wrote an idea on a sheet of paper and I signed a contract. We met Seth Holt at Ealing. We had a conference. Interspersed with some laughter. The name of my film would be The Rich Goat. About an American who comes to track down money left in a will out in the west of Ireland. Seth Holt was as quiet and introspective as Tynan was hyper and pleasantly talkative. With the latter I rode in a taxi back into London, as he was remembering words from a song and humming a piece of music. His fingers clicking and the palms of his hands alternately beating his knees. He seemed to lightly pirouette and dance his way across the cultural froth of London, upon which I had just become a rising bubble.

  It was my first sense of largess since moving to my outpost in London SW6 near the gasworks and north of the power station. From oblivion, overnight I had been transported from the social untouchability and unrecommended wilds of Fulham into the sumptuously enveloping pastures of Mayfair. As only a matter of a week or two later, Peter Brook, the distinguished theatrical director, came on the scene. To take me to lunch at an elegant restaurant in Dover Street. He proposed that I should write yet another film and this he would direct. Beforehand, we took drinks with Tynan in his palatial flat in Mount Street, where all was deft with diplomacy. With the pinging and zinging of the ricochets of intellectual delight, there was not a murmur nor sign of a begrudger anywhere. The tiny first trickle of gold had begun. And with my disposable income now exceeding 420 pounds a year, I was turned down for legal aid, for which Norman Shine had applied on my behalf. But I was to beware of the flashy moments of blithesomeness.

  For most

  Of life’s blows

  Fall then

  46

  I HAD NOW THEATRICALLY DRAMATIZED The Ginger Man. And a gentleman, John Gibson, a BBC producer, was interested to stage it. Gibson was a romantic enthusiast, wanting to see alive these new and brave words that might be spoken and performed on stage as had been John Osborne’s. And I now heard more of a real and living Samuel Beckett, who was visiting London. The man with the world’s most kindly eye and of whose existence I first became aware down in the Dublin Catacombs. Gibson and Beckett had become great friends, and Gibson spoke in glowing terms of this Irish person from Paris as a man who was honest and true. And Gibson, enamored of matters Irish, led to our occasionally celebrating together in the various pubs located around Broadcasting House. One afternoon of which was to lead to an evening both of us would regret.

  It was upon a night following closing time in a pub, the George, near the BBC, and we were on our way home down Great Portland Street. Singing my latest lyrics as we went. Gibson, passing a doorway, accidentally tripped over some milk bottles and in so kicking one, it was sent breaking into the roadway. There were a group of good British citizens on the opposite pavement who remonstrated with the pair of us, and Gibson, who in effect was innocent of any vandalism, took exception with words quickly becoming heated and the group crossed the street. More angry words ensued. We of course, equally inspired as good citizens, suddenly found we were having to fend off these gentlemen also inspired to doing their duty as responsible Londoners, who had, following our exchange of rude words, rightly accosted us to press their objections.

  When a fight began, a car-starting handle from some other pedestrian landed across the back of Gibson’s head, who indeed was not to be trifled with in this way. As the fists flew, my own were extremely busy as I found myself confronting two and three faces at a time. Our opponents indeed were formidable enough. One gentleman with whom I was exchanging blows seemed to be made of steel. Then I saw Gibson’s fist pass over my shoulder, which ended the affray and the group were dispersed. But the police, summoned, had already arrived. As Gibson and I appeared unscathed, we were arrested and charged with actual bodily harm. Taken to Savile Row police station, up at the less exalted end of that famous tailoring street, one was sat at a desk, and particulars were taken, including the fact that John Gibson was a BBC producer.

  There was indeed a note of strange grimness felt as a cell door clanked after me and I found I was back again in prison for the first time since naval days. The hospitable police brought one a cup of tea. Then checking on the address I had given, I was released with the undertaking to appear that very next morning at Bow Street magistrates court. I had a guest staying in Fulham. None other than the indomitable Arthur Kenneth Donoghue, who had nearly fainted in his tracks in Boston the three years previously when I said I was going to abandon The Ginger Man. And here he was now close at hand, suffering new and different panics in his own life and viewing my suspicious behavior with suspicion as I gulped back coffee and disappeared out my door and up Broughton Road that early morn.

  I could sense John Gibson, as we met in Bow Street, was an extremely worried man. Married to an elegant and beautiful French wife of a prominent family and not a reviled banned author like myself, he was put in the most invidious position. I said that I would do and plead anything that he wished in order to soften this matter in any way I could, since publicity of this nature I knew would damage him in bringing ridicule and contempt down upon the good name of the BBC. For he had rushed to my rescue when I might have needed it. He was too, like his good friend Samuel Beckett, full of a strange love and glorious devotion to the theater. Advised to plead guilty by detectives, as this would lead to a small fine and an undertaking to keep the peace, we appeared before a Judge Robey, whose father had been famed in English theater as a distinguished music hall artist. It was in fact duly the case. We were let off as lightly as possible. Gibson and I had each to forfeit ten pounds. But of course news of our affray was promptly plastered over the newspapers and we were sued for damages by our adversaries.

  And now, along with the unpleasant wagging finger of the more smug English raised against us, I was to find in this enormous city of London, that it was a small world indeed. Gibson’s wife, a lady of considerable influence, had to find a lawyer to represent him in his defense in the matter of being sued for damages. And as momentous coincidence would have it, who do you think would be recommended and chosen. None other than the highly regarded and good solicitors of Rubinstein and Nash. And so came the fateful month of June in this year of 1957, and the specter loomed again of that arch-enemy, Monsieur Maurice Girodias. A letter clanking in through the letter slot at Broughton Road.

  GERALD SAMUELS & SHINE

  40 GOODGE STREET

  LONDON WI

  18th June 1957

  J. P. Donleavy Esq.,

  40A Broughton Road,

  London, SW6.

  Dear Sir,<
br />
  Re: The Ginger Man

  The solicitors for Girodias have issued a Writ in connection with the above and wish to know whether we have instructions to accept service thereon.

  Kindly let us hear from you within the next day or so.

  Yours faithfully,

  Gerald Samuels and Shine

  It was to be from this day forward that one would quietly shrink back from all bonhomie but the most heartfelt and needworthy. To be ever ready and cautious. To write no word that might upon being sent out from one’s pen, come back to bite one. And Neville Armstrong now voiced an opinion of Girodias: “Mike, he’s tough.”

  The first formal draft page of THE GINGER MAN with my earliest struggles to also find a title. Having written the first one hundred and forty pages, this and the earlier pages were returned to and over the months were systematically cut down to the starker words which were finally chosen to begin THE GINGER MAN.

  And I was now finding that such as Neville Armstrong as a fighter was even tougher. We would need our resilience. As Girodias was to discover more than any of us that he was going to need his. However, in my foreboding, now I found my resistance hardening. Monies for the first time were forthcoming for litigation. It was too, now that the fame of The Ginger Man had spread to other climes and countries. Publishers in America were presently making louder and bigger offers for The Ginger Man. But sad tidings too were arriving. My father’s life in the Bronx was coming to a close. I was so informed by my mother by telephone, where I received the prearranged call at Murray Sayle’s flat at 44 Palace Gardens Terrace. Following which, on this warm, beamingly sunny day, I walked in some despair to Holland Park, where Philip, Karen and Valerie were parked on the grass. And I realized that at least I had a little surviving family left.