The History of the Ginger Man

by J. P. Donleavy

  I was fervently conscious of the importance of my mission, as I now walked this sunny morning from the carrefour de Buci toward the Seine, down rue Dauphine and at the second turning on the left, found the rue de Nesle. And there it was, number 8, hidden away in this quiet side street on the Left Bank. A stone archway within which seemed to be the source of all my troubles, and where now one might hopefully find a solution. With my meager French, I inquired of a passing lady in the courtyard for the Olympia Press and was pointed to an open entrance and up some steps. In the shadowy gloom of the stairwell, one was feeling more and more wondering what to expect to find upon this, my unannounced, visit. On the first floor, I knocked and entered through a great gray door and into a large room. The premises, with elegant carpets and glass doors, seemed attractively businesslike enough. At the immediate desk inside, there appeared sitting a very serious and academic-looking gentleman, whom I expected might be Girodias but whose identity I was later to learn was that of Jean-Jacques Pauvert, who, among other distinguished books, had published the works of the Marquis de Sade. I was referred to a further inner room. And in I stepped. As I declared my identity, there was no question but that there was considerable nervous surprise at my sudden unexpected morning presence. Girodias was slowly up out of his seat and from behind his desk proffering an apologetically limp hand, with what I am also sure was a fleeting trace of fear.

  “Ah, you are in Paris.”

  “Yes.”

  “Ah. I trust your trip was comfortable.”

  “Yes.”

  “Ah, please, sit down.”

  “Thank you.”

  At last one finally had a look at this man who was behind the flamboyant signature and seemed to be, at this time, doing a lot of coughing and moving of chairs and whose handshake was far less than vigorous. With a slight French accent, he spoke English fluently. In his sober gray double-breasted suit, white shirt and gray tie, one could use the words “casually debonair” to describe his appearance. Conversation, slow to get started, was improved on by Girodias’s inquiry as to where I was staying and until when. Displaying a politely cautious affability, along with his clear relief that he was not about to be punched or shot, he shortly suggested repairing for coffee at a cafe, the Old Navy on the boulevard St.-Germain, which he said served the best coffee in Paris. I was fast realizing that till now I actually thought there was some doubt as to the existence of a Maurice Girodias at all, and I took some slight comfort from what seemed a modestly busy office and from the first indication of his being a bon vivant.

  Outside in front of 8 rue de Nesle, there sat, like a squat big black bug, a gleamingly new Citroën. Girodias pulling on his driving gloves, we made for the Old Navy, parking on the boulevard near one of the splendid metal-paneled pissoirs, where the urinator’s lower legs were on view and which absolutely convenient convenience alone made Paris, Paris. As Girodias became more at ease, his bilingual ability seemed to involve more facile use of British and American slang. I was relieved but nevertheless wary at his steadily growing friendliness, and I early let it be gently known that the thrust of my visit was to organize a future for The Ginger Man. Although he pretended to appear to be listening with interest, I noted his basic reaction was somewhat evasive. It was quickly made evident that to him the publishing of The Ginger Man was a matter past and water under the bridge. And although it may have been secretly otherwise, he continued to give the impression that he was utterly indifferent to the book’s future, and indeed to the fact that it could even have one.

  Following a bland enough conversation at the Old Navy, which was clearly an exercise of disposing of my inquiries and any problem his publication of The Ginger Man might have presented, Girodias with great apology excused himself to return to his office. In parting, he asked if I would like to join him for lunch, to which I agreed. Although I sensed that he regarded I clearly served no further use to him in an author-publisher relationship, he seemed anxious not to behave inhospitably. I then went walking in and about my old haunts around the rue de Buci, past the markets where little had changed. And, indeed, where much new matters could unfold with the likes of Murray Sayle, who had departed working for The People newspaper and was now also in Paris and had in fact booked my ultracheap room at the Hôtel Square.

  Girodias was already at the table as we met again at a restaurant in the carrefour de l’Odéon. And he was exhibiting a distinct degree of affluence. An elaborate enough menu consisted of pheasant, which was ordered and was now accompanied by wines appearing at the table and shown Girodias, which were kept for him reserved in the restaurant’s cellars. And this became my first sample of signally stylish largess in the world of book publishing. Reminding of my own golden days at Trinity College and on the Isle of Man prior to my return to America. As the splendid wines flowed, Girodias now spoke more openly about including The Ginger Man in his pornographic Traveller’s Companion Series.

  “That was a mistake. But I had to do it to make money. And of course, like anybody, I like being rich. The book does a brisk trade in the Arab quarter of Jerusalem. My biggest customer is a provincial bookseller near an American army establishment in Germany who specializes in religious books and sells this English line on the side and is not, evidently, aware of what they are. The American sailors aboard ship in the Mediterranean are also good customers. Of course, my biggest ambition is to flood Ireland and Russia with pornography. And then I should like to manufacture dutch caps in France to sell in these territories, as that would be the natural sequence to commercially follow for a publisher of dirty books. Ireland especially, I would like to visit one day. The Miss Frost scene in your book made me weep.”

  We had now been joined at lunch by an attractive young American lady, Muffle Wainhouse, who seemed to be involved with the Olympia Press but who had to prompt Girodias to tell me so. Girodias, although sniffing, sampling and tasting and drinking the wines, disclosed that the next day he was to commence self-denial and would no longer be drinking, having been instructed by his doctor to abstain for two weeks. I continued to enjoy the wine with Mrs. Wainhouse, married to a gentleman called Austryn. And Paris suddenly seemed to behold pleasures. Girodias, over his pheasant, was deliberating on the mystery of conception, which, from my zoological studies, I was able to explain came about through an anima humana, which could be thought divine or chemical but which provided sperm with a homing instinct for the ovum. I went on to reasonably explain that all was not yet fully understood by science but such phenomenon was as close as any living thing could get to thinking it was God. It was the only time in Paris that Girodias seemed to be taken slightly aback by my company and he turned to Mrs. Wainhouse.

  “This man knows a lot.”

  I was still uncertain as to when to raise the subject of an English edition, but as I left lunch at now past four P.M. in the carrefour de l’Odéon I recalled how in the years following the war that this city of Paris seemed to have had a way of constellating people. Who gravitated there from all parts of the world, and in staying, however briefly, seemed to meet most unexpectedly others they knew doing exactly the same. For only a few steps away, I was on the corner of this boulevard and rue de 1’Ancienne-Comédie, where I sat one summer with Valerie in a cafe, when I spotted a familiar face from the Bronx across the street and shouted out the name Walter Silbernagel. The man I saw was a childhood acquaintance who lived in a house diagonally behind ours in Woodlawn. He stumbled forward as if shot with shock to hear his name called out aloud in this foreign place and of course did not recognize me because of my beard. Frowningly pointing to himself as he faced me across the boulevard and calling out, “Who, me.”

  Yes, I meant him. Because he lived down the street from John Duffy with whom I’d often discussed the two dogs his family always kept. One a St. Bernard, called Putsie, who was so massive it could hardly walk, and another, a tiny dachshund, or frankfurter dog, named Esmé, who was so small its belly scraped the slate pavement as it maneuvered forward on it
s four short legs. Silbernagel’s family business of making optical lenses took him on trips to the various cities of Europe. And Walter was then staying in a large respectably bourgeois flat in Paris. To which we were invited that very night to dine with him. And thereafter, I never met again anyone from Woodlawn in Europe but found that whenever there appeared dogs in my novels, they were always named either Esmé or Putsie.

  And in terms of constellation, on this October visit to Paris, Murray Sayle, who’d now become a friend, and taking a sabbatical from London since leaving The People newspaper, had become director of publicity for the Fédération Mondiale des Anciens Combattants and was for the time being living in this fabled city. He had also become an expert on the cafe pinball machine and vastly knew of the ins and outs of Paris life. I was finding pleasant enough the room he had booked for me in the Hôtel Square, from whence one could see across the river to the cathedral of Notre-Dame. I was taking morning constitutionals in the small park just outside and enjoying walks with Sayle, who knew the Paris streets well. And it seemed as if it were a constant round of celebration as he held court and constellated an astonishing assortment of people. There were pleasantly aimless afternoons in the cafes and less aimless evenings of delight in friends’ apartments or in Russian and Greek restaurants. In the company of Betty Dalgarno, a generously sympathetic Australian lady, and Bob Marx, an American of singular sensibilities with whom Sayle waged devastatingly traumatic chess contests and equally furious pinball games, there would then be the spiritual examination of existence, always summed up by Sayle, who, with the music throbbing and at the magic height of such evenings, would announce, “The party’s over, men. The decline of our lives has begun.”

  We traveled in the direction of Montparnasse to dine with Sylvia Sayers, a painter and whose husband, Michael Sayers, a writer, wrote short stories and for television and who was away in London. They lived behind a strange high wall in which there was a door on the street which, when entered, then led across a garden under fruit trees to a house in which a sumptuous meal was taken and which house would, on another return to Paris, play a curious role. For on a crucial day in the beginning of the battle of The Ginger Man, I would visit this city on a last-ditch desperate mission to hope to avoid an impending injunction to stop The Ginger Man’s publication in England. And in dire straits, I sought the company of someone who might temporarily distract me out of my anxiety.

  But the present excitement in Paris at this time was continuing wine, women and song and a marauding, massive American who fought all other Americans and expatriates from any land who thought they were in any way intellectually impressive, and who was terrorizing nightclubs and cafes, where people sat in trepidation at his appearance, which included the police but excepted Sayle. Meanwhile in the intervening week, a party was arranged by Girodias to which Muffie Wainhouse said she would escort me and that I should meet her in the La Boucherie alongside the quai de Montebello for a drink. That afternoon at the Hôtel Square a telegram arrived. Sent from Newhaven harbor and by its cryptic and sparsely blunt instruction could be from the one and only Gainor Stephen Crist:

  DONLEAVY OR SAYLE

  SQUARE HOTEL

  ARRIVING ST.-LAZARE, 6 P.M., TUESDAY

  GAINOR

  Gainor, who was on a mission from Spain to England, had been stopped at the port of Newhaven by the Home Office, his arrival there being alerted to immigration by a lady who did not wish to have him loose in England. Refused entry to the United Kingdom, Gainor was temporarily kept under mild arrest aboard ship until he could be sent back across the channel the next day. Ah, but true to his charm, it was not long before he had befriended a member or two of the immigration authority, who, in joining him that evening in his cabin, had a little party and polished off a bottle or two of duty-free spirits. Then these kindly, understanding gentlemen stamped his passport and saw to it he was served a sumptuous breakfast prior to releasing him to land. Whatever embroilments then ensued on terra firma, it was only a day or two later that Crist decided to flee to Paris.

  Although I was finding it not unusual for Gainor to show up out of the blue at a critical time in one’s life, for he was rarely not enduring one similar in his own, I did not relish all the chaotic complications that I foresaw coming with him. But as always, it was usually another’s dilemma that took priority over his own. And such was the case when I duly arrived at Gare St.-Lazare at the appropriate time. I waited at six P.M. at the end of the platform for the Calais train to come in and for the passengers to get off. But ten minutes later, with the platform emptying, there seemed no sign of Crist. Then with the train doors being banged shut again, and at what seemed the very last moment at which I was deciding to go, there he was. Approaching down the platform with his Pan American Airways bag and a dog in his arms. Alongside him walked another gentleman with whom it seemed, by nods of the head, he was talking in sign language. Without preamble or explanation an introduction was about to be attempted.

  “Mike, I’d like to introduce this gentleman I’ve met on the train who needs to get to Gare d’Austerlitz and who we shall for the time being designate as Mr. XYZ. Mr. XYZ, this is Mr. Mike Donleavy. And this is Mr. XYZ’s bow-wow, who is called Kuninganna.”

  The man gave a slight bow, and I thought, in the still noisy station, I detected a click of heels. But I had never before in all my life seen such an expression of resignation on any human face as was on this strange gentleman’s carrying a frayed green canvas valise in either hand. Although it appeared that Gainor seemed able to converse with this man in nods of the head and grunts and signs, neither was doing so in anything resembling a language I had ever heard before. It reminded me of a previous incident of Gainor’s in Paris when, on top of the Eiffel Tower, he had appeared with another stranger in tow, a blind man to whom he was describing the sights of the city far below.

  “Mike, come with us while we find on the station someone to assist this man and his blind dog, who sadly has cataracts in both eyes and whom I must carry because she is blind. But she is an entirely friendly little mutt. Mike, come, bear with us.”

  All three of us and the blind dog, licking Gainor’s face, shuffling down the platform. It was thought best by Gainor to escort his extremely foreign friend and dog to the information booth in the station where there might be found persons who could translate. Inside at the counter of this tourist helping office, the first pair of translators said they could not interpret or even tell what language the man was speaking but that they had a gentleman whom they could get who was regarded as a world authority and who had a working knowledge of eleven languages. Gainor, of course, as he had done for Pan American Airways, very conspicuously orchestrated VIP treatment for his friend. With a steadily larger and larger crowd collecting to hopelessly assist. Meanwhile it took twenty minutes to find this additional linguist, who, upon his carefully listening to Gainor’s friend, finally shrugged his shoulders and professed total ignorance of your man’s tongue or any tongue remotely resembling. But now the crowd, some of whom were exchanging views on semantics with Crist, had grown so large that the stationmaster, who had been summoned, insisted we all move onto the open space of the station. Gainor meanwhile calling for water for the dog, whom he was now petting and comforting with words in Spanish.

  “Mike, you must bear with me. We must see that this man gets proper directions to get him to Gare d’Austerlitz.”

  “But, Gainor, this is causing an actual brouhaha. We’re disrupting the station.”

  “Mike, everything is going to be all right.”

  The stationmaster, suspicious that Gainor and I were conducting an elaborate hoax, was now, along with two members of the Paris gendarmerie, sizing us up. The stationmaster now somewhat heatedly saying he had never heard such a language or words ever spoken before. But Gainor, with the blind dog happily lapping up its water at his feet, seemed to have collected an even larger group behind him, who were regarding him with much sympathy, especially as Gainor bro
ught attention to the dog’s cataracts. Indeed, if the stationmaster didn’t soon shut his mouth, he could be in danger of being attacked by the crowd of dog lovers. While Gainor still remained the only one who could make any sense with the dog’s owner, I was already well past showing more than some signs of impatience and was harboring an increased distinct fear of being arrested.

  “Gainor, for God’s sake, this is going to turn into a debacle if it isn’t one already. I’ve booked you a room at the Hôtel Normandie, rue de l’Ancienne-Comédie in the sixth district. Just make sure you don’t mention the name Behan, who’s stayed there and still owes the bill.”

  “Mike, we’ve got to get this man and his dog to Gare d’Austerlitz. He needs to get there.”

  “Gainor, that’s miles all the way across Paris. Plus they probably don’t let mutts on the Métro.”

  “That’s the very reason, Mike, that we must help him get there. If not for his sake, then for the dog’s. We could take him with us. It must be on the way.”

  Clearly there was nothing for it. Any second further of delay now would get us arrested. I knew no obstacle could deter Crist in seeing to it that this unintelligible man, intelligible only to Gainor, got to Gare d’Austerlitz. And although I never inquired, I knew this must be a gentleman whom Gainor had never met before and would consider it his solemn duty to interpret his language, which all the linguists in the station had never heard before. I was sorely tempted to bring to Gainor’s attention the fact that he had not hesitated an instant in sending numerous hapless air passengers who were innocently on their way to San Juan, Puerto Rico, off to Helsinki, Peking and Spitzbergen. And here he was now, hardly arrived in Paris and already totally dedicated to seeing that this absolute stranger catch a train at some other station miles away. Gainor could be all things to mankind just as all mankind were all things to him. Except that I knew that this was now a life-and-death commitment to get this man and his blind dog to Gare d’Austerlitz. As I had planned to meet Sayle shortly at a cafe near the Opera and near his office in rue de la Michodière and which one reached on the Métro in the direction of Porte des Lilas, I now dragged Gainor to the Métro map to try to talk sense into him, Gainor standing with the mutt back in his arms as I pointed out the route to Austerlitz.