My father died the end of September. But not without holding and reading a copy of the English edition of The Ginger Man in his hands. Then, as it had done during those grim days in America, my heart cried out for the landscape of Ireland. To free oneself to its soft, moist cleanliness and not always balmy breezes. I spotted an ad in a Sunday paper for a house to rent in the west. And the four of us packed up the end of October and crossing by boat, landed in Dublin to take the train through Mullingar to Galway. Met by our kindly landlord, who seemed inordinately solicitous, we were entertained to a meal at the Great Southern Hotel before heading in darkness farther west in his car over the bleak landscape through a gale and driving rain. Past the miles of black shiny lakes and heathery deserted hills. It seemed like we were going to the very end of the earth. And we were. To a large isolated Georgian mansion sitting on its lonely hillside. A storm blowing in from the Atlantic, shutters rattling and rain splattering the windowpanes. Philip and Karen put to bed in the great dark, cold rooms. As one lay attempting to sleep, I had to wonder had I now done the worst thing in all my life. Stranded from everywhere in the all-pervading damp chill I had first known at Trinity College. But morning came. Along with some sun streaming in the windows. Philip and Karen jumping from bed to bed in their room, with their noise and laughter of life rescuing me with hope, which flooded back into one’s soul.
It was out in this vast isolation that George Smith of A Singular Man was born. In being able to see the postman on a distant hillside and still two hours away, I was also able to gather my reserves of resistance to the unpleasant if such was to be found in an envelope. And I was already among friends. Mr. and Mrs. Kelly, the kindly landlords, turned out to have both read The Ginger Man. At the foot of these windswept, heathery hills, the Atlantic Ocean separated by an isthmus, came with high tide to nearly join in the distance in front of the house and make where it stood, an island. One could walk on the stony meandering paths to the lonely beaches, where shell fragments had turned them gold. And near where a hermit lived, reading last year’s newspapers. For there was no other news of the outside world. But such as Murray Sayle, long now become a trusted partisan back in London, was variously watching out for my interests and keeping me informed. From the distanced lawyers, as affidavits were sworn, I would learn of the term, further and better particulars. And leave to apply for this or for that. And learning too that judges are always looking for excuses to be fair. But I was finding too, in the words of George Smith, my own reply. Dear sir, only for the moment am I saying nothing.
And one day dawned cold and misty. I was sitting at my makeshift desk over my typewriter and surveying the distant windswept landscape from the sunroom over the front door. Suddenly a man came jumping over the hedge and running across the lawn, wildly gesticulating with his arms. He was shouting and pointing up into the sky.
“There’s a dog up there.”
I called to Valerie down in the kitchen to get the children in from what might be a dangerous local, already gone or rapidly going insane. But after sixteen billion years out in this primitive landscape, the Space Age had begun. Even while on the rising moors of heather, sheep grazed like tiny white maggots on the far mountainside. And across the dark hills, the rains still fell washing brighter the brightness of the dirt lanes. On which the postman would come. To reach one’s door. Taking two hours with bad news and usually three for better tidings.
I was not to know that this was merely the very beginning of this battle over The Ginger Man. And that before I reached the end of such saga, it would endure for nearly half my life. Nor could I have ever imagined then that I was to end up as the actual owner of this now most fabled publishing company of all time. Which even as it languishes seems to grow ever greater in fame. My second wife, Mary Wilson Price, and my secretary at the time, Phyllis MacArdle, both stunningly beautiful women, flying to Paris with enormous drafts drawn on the Chase Manhattan Bank of New York. And as they charmed and cajoled the civil authorities over two days as foreigners to be allowed against all the reigning rules, to bid, presented themselves in this commercial tribunal’s surprisingly jammed chamber. Where, with the auctioneer’s customary three candles guttering out between bids, and in the presence of Maurice Girodias himself, trench coat debonairly draped over his shoulders, was secretly bidding through a nominee. At first laughing and enjoying himself as he planned to surreptitiously buy back his bankrupt firm for a minuscule sum, he slowly and painfully grew hysterical as Mary Price’s own attorney methodically again and again upped every Girodias bid by one hundred francs, and finally after nearly half an hour of a cliff-hanging suspense, the Olympia Press was purchased in what was reputed to have been the most dramatic auction in Paris commercial history.
Girodias in this battle having lost the war, barged his way, knocking over chairs and with trench coat flying from his shoulders, swept in a rage from the auction room. And totally unaware there was news even worse to come. That instead of a beautiful pair of exotic ladies, he was to discover weeks later that his most terrible and most dreaded nemesis of all had ignominiously taken his beloved Olympia Press from under his nose. And so, with my enemy finally becoming mine, I ended up in the Paris courts actually in litigation with myself. Which I soon and wisely decided to settle. This bizarre event and turning of the tables on Girodias, perhaps redressing a little and atoning for some of my own long-suffered life-and-death struggle in litigation and at last avenging a young author’s dream for his work, into which he had put his heart and soul seventeen years ago. But at least I had over all that intervening time, amid the hoot and holler, and the coming and going baying of the wolves, accomplished one thing. My fist had steadily grown strong to raise against sneaks and bullies. Shaking my knuckles in the mealymouthed faces brought silence to the slurs and sneers. I had surest control of and had saved my book, which would not ever again leave my care. And as the good ship Franconia had, when all but Gainor Stephen Crist were prostrate below, I faced my prow to cut apart the oncoming buffeting waves. Resolved to keep battle pennants flying, and my sail raised to catch the breeze and cruise safely to port.
But come here till I tell you. Of a further word I have to say. Out here in the windy, wet remoteness of the west. Where the dead are left to be under their anonymous stones. So quiet in their unmarked graves. The grass growing long above their tombs in the salty Atlantic air. They who were once animated on this speck, whirling through the universe. And who would no longer have to wonder about the stars. Or who would know or care. That I had set out one June near the sea in County Wicklow, Ireland. To write a splendid book no one would ever forget. I knew then that the years would come and go and the book would live. But it has taken more years than I ever could have imagined and more battles than I ever felt I’d have to fight. But the fist I shook and the rage I spent has at last blossomed. And before it should fade, I’d like to say that I am glad. That there is. And has been.
God’s mercy
On the wild
Ginger Man
Publisher’s Note
Forty years after publication in Paris by the Olympia Press in its pornographic Traveller’s Companion Series The Ginger Man has achieved the status of a world classic. Royalties flow in from various sources: theatrical rights, motion picture rights, foreign language editions (published in fifteen countries), and from its continued success as a bestseller with more than five million copies sold throughout the world. A celebrated restaurant in New York City was called The Ginger Man. In 1965 The Complete and Unexpurgated Edition of The Ginger Man launched the distinguished literary imprint of Seymour Lawrence. The Ginger Man has never been out of print.
BY THE SAME AUTHOR
Novels
The Ginger Man
A Singular Man
The Saddest Summer of Samuel S
The Beastly Beatitudes of Balthazar B
The Onion Eaters
A Fairy Tale of New York
The Destinies of Darcy Dancer, Gentleman
Schultz
Leila
Are You Listening Rabbi Löw
That Darcy, That Dancer, That Gentleman
Non-fiction
The Unexpurgated Code: A Complete
Manual of Survival & Manners
De Alphonse Tennis: The Superlative
Game of Eccentric Champions
J. P. Donleavy’s Ireland: In All Her Sins
and Some of Her Graces
A Singular Country
Plays
The Ginger Man
Fairy Tales of New York
A Singular Man
The Saddest Summer of Samuel S
The Beasly Beatitudes of Balthazar B
Stories
Meet My Maker the Mad Molecule
Copyright
First e-book digital edition
published 2011 by
THE LILLIPUT PRESS
62–63 Sitric Road, Arbour Hill Dublin 7, Ireland
www.lilliputpress.ie
Copyright © J.P. Donleavy, 2011
ISBN 978 1 84351 209 7
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced in any form or by any means without the prior permission of the publisher.
The Lilliput Press receives financial assistance from An Chomhairle Ealaíon / The Arts Council of Ireland.
The History of the Ginger Man: An Autobiography Page 61