The History of the Ginger Man

by J. P. Donleavy

  Leaving the church, I stopped on the stone white steps to look out over the skyline of Paris in the fading gray light of its rooftops. From the Eiffel Tower to those of Notre-Dame. And beyond to the dome of the Pantheon. And farther to Gare d’Austerlitz. Below me, past Montmartre, were Paris’s rich, fashionable streets. The glowing gleam of luxury along rue St.-Honoré and rue de Rivoli. And the grandeur of the Palais-Royal. And across the Seine, this city stretching to its southern horizon was now forever the place in which I so ignominiously had begun my literary career. Leaving me now to go in a trance of gloomy concern. Slowly proceeding down the long series of steps of rue Chappe toward Pigalle. Remembering the cafe where Jim Walsh, the Trinity scholar, had sold a pair of shoes to an Oxford scholar and, both speaking such impeccable French, neither knew the other spoke perfect English. Until one of them saw the other’s old school tie reveal itself from beneath a covering sweater. But such memory leaving me walking now along rue de Steinkerque, an ever growing deeper disquiet overcoming me.

  I had now reached the busy boulevard de Rochechouart at the foot of this rising hill crowned by the Sacré-Coeur. And walking along past rue des Martyrs, as I waited for the signal light holding back the traffic to change, rain began to fall. Then as I looked at the first line of cars, there waiting was a black Citroën. And through the downpour, I could see Girodias himself crouching behind the windscreen. Seeming as if to want to avoid me, if indeed he saw me. I stood solitary and still and watched as his car passed and speeded away. I felt that the strange coincidence of seeing him was an ill omen. And then with a sense of haunting horror, I absolutely knew that doom was looming and that against one, one had an enemy. And who knows now that this man Girodias hadn’t in fact unbelievably been shadowing me. Which could be believable considering the events to follow. And especially from the description given many years later by Terry Southern of a scheme that was to be attempted to distract me, drunk, into an exotic whorehouse. For purposes ill-intentioned indeed. And if it were true that Girodias was keeping me under surveillance, he must have got a delightful confirmatory surprise thinking I was a meek and humble churchgoing worshipper of God. Over whom he might walk with impunity. And who wouldn’t hurt a fly.

  Or

  Kick the living

  Shit

  Out of

  A publisher

  39

  BUT BEFORE I LEFT PARIS there continued to be other positive and pleasant distraction back again in the company of Murray Sayle and Bob Marx. Spending one’s last evenings over aperitifs and the pinball machine or watching them play their soul-destroying games of chess. Although during their carefree playtime outside their office hours, there were times when both Marx and Sayle could be withdrawn and introspective, and paid heed to mapping out the future of their own lives. And as it happened, Marx to become rich and retire to his estate in Spain and Sayle himself back in Britain to become a distinguished, famed journalist and writer and to go reside in his oriental dwelling in Japan. But Gainor, on this fatal trip of mine to Paris, was not to be seen nor did he come to the Hôtel Square nor did I go to see him at the Hôtel Normandie to say good-bye. As far as I knew, he was still in Paris when I left to return to London. And I relied on his passwords he had always given me.

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

  But sadly, I never saw nor communicated with this strangely aristocratic midwesterner from Dayton, Ohio, U.S.A., again. And I always had my doubts about his passwords. Especially in the tough business of writing whereby every word the integrity of your life is at stake. However, over the passing years, a good bit was related back to me about Gainor. But little in reference to times past and commonly known as the good old days. He, instead, upon his return to Barcelona, had bitter words to say about me. And these would have been justified had I known of his state of health. For he was shortly thereafter diagnosed as having tuberculosis. Entering a sanatorium high on the side of a hill from which it was said he could see a jail, a lunatic asylum and a graveyard out his window. All three of which by a hairsbreadth he had so far in the past variously escaped. I heard also in the passing years that he was quoted as saying, “I taught Donleavy everything he knows.”

  And hearing these words pleased me, although I am certain they were not meant to. For they at least indicated that we had some purposeful bond and more than a little in common. But we did not fight the world in the same way. Unlike Crist, and with little of his philosophical patience, or his ability to run the passenger traffic of airports, I had no sense of the absurd to sustain me through my own struggles. Nor could I walk in his well-tailored way the Bohemian tightrope of caprice and chance, as he did. I may have been Bohemian in where I had to choose to live, but I never was one. In contests of knowing knowledge, I was frequently and carelessly wrong when Crist was frequently and exactingly right. My words always being fictionally grandiose, and his always factually down to earth. But there was certainly a thing or two I may have known as a New Yorker more than he did as a midwesterner, about staying alive. And needed now to know more than ever in the 8995 days ahead that I would be walking the tightrope of caprice and chance, trying not to fall, as Gainor did, into the subway tracks of fate.

  But one would envy his death. For he, Crist, would die just as bizarrely as he had lived. Again by amazing coincidence. Running into and recognizing a face he knew on a Madrid street from seventeen years previously in the latter days of the Second World War. An army major with whom he’d gone on a wild drinking spree in London, and Gainor being a yeoman, able to commandeer naval travel, their adventures took them wandering. Days later they ended up waking and coming back to their senses in the back of a large lorry full of broomsticks and stuck in the mud on the banks of the river Rhine in Germany with artillery shells flying overhead in the last months of the war. And it was this same man, the army major that Gainor now saw passing in this Madrid street. They repaired immediately to a bar to reminisce and Gainor to be invited to accompany this former military person on a ready-to-leave ship, sailing with its handful of teetotal tourists on its way to South America. And as Crist always did and was always ready to do, he packed his toothbrush. And always an intending teetotaler, he made doubly sure he did not go without calvados.

  With the other guests, Gainor and this gentleman continued their celebrations aboard the vessel as it left to cross the Atlantic. Gainor was on his last spree. For good luck he always carried with him in a match box Desmond MacNamara’s small replica of blessed Oliver’s head. But this former naval person was not now to be given safe conduct in his travels by this patron, who had by Gainor’s publicity, and aided and abetted by me, been elevated from being blessed to becoming canonized as a saint. Aboard ship, Gainor suddenly became deathly ill and was put ashore on the island of Tenerife. Here he died three days later, adored by all in the hospital who ministered to him. And Pamela, now his wife, to learn of his death in England by telegram when the bill arrived from the funeral director.

  And all so typical of Gainor’s life. Pamela had been in London visiting their old friend David O’Leary, one of the cultural stalwarts at Trinity College and legendary as one of its most handsome and socially elite of the university’s undergraduates, who at the time of Pamela’s visit was reminding her of an occasion when Gainor, in Limerick, holed up in the city’s best hotel in amorous pursuit of Pamela and in order to call on her at her home and not to appear disrespectably to the servants, had borrowed an appropriate pair of O’Leary’s gray flannel trousers. But upon making his appearance in Pamela’s boudoir, heard her parents returning, who disapproved of his attentions toward their elegant and well-brought-up daughter. Gainor promptly jumping out the window and plummeting twenty or so feet, landed bottom first into a just freshly manured rose bed. When returning to Cruise’s Hotel to O’Leary with his trousers deeply, brownly stained, Gainor announced,

  “My dear chap David, I do most humbly apologize. But, in confronting an unpremeditated spot of bother, I am most frightfu
lly sorry to have rather countrified your trousers for you.”

  And so it was with this Amish man from Ohio, who would extoll the taste of methylated spirits diluted with lemon or orange juice and drink it as he would the finest champagne. Who would cackle and further damn the deservedly accursed. And would happily in satire accept the most miserable of mankind’s unreasonable dogmas and beliefs. Who would always take his sustenance as if it were the last supper before the crucifixion. And proceeded through life as a pilgrim might to a shrine. A compassionate man to whom, if I had known I was, I could never be cruel.

  At Trinity College, Crist had once described me as the most silent man he had ever met. And if I did finally start to talk too much, Gainor was always a foe to my own humbug. And a foe to how one struggled to give a better impression of oneself until always deciding to give none. The man from Ohio was always a staunch companion in grief and despair, who, as I showed impatience to the unintelligible man at Gare St.-Lazare, had simply said,

  “Mike, help this weary pilgrim stranger on his way.”

  And both George Roy Hill and I, as we once were together out in the midlands of Ireland reminiscing about Crist and recalling some of Gainor’s communications, we, for nearly three days round the clock, were holding our stomachs in laughter. Till finally we concluded that the only thing Gainor could have been was a saint. To whom one might to the now Saint Oliver Plunket, pray to be saved from the unpredictable. And we both knew that Gainor, even as a devout agnostic, was directly heading for a Roman Catholic heaven and that he had earned in life his remission from purgatory.

  For left down here on earth, one is in envy of how finally and unpredictably and exotically Gainor came to be laid to rest in a grave on an island where banana trees grow. His tombstone bathed by balmy, moist Atlantic winds from an ocean we’d both crossed together on the good ship Franconia. To be back again where we first were. In Ireland. And where as an eternal tourist still he remains as a ghost never gone. See him in Blackrock, where he used to get off at the station. Scurrying in terror, having left his fly open on the train. Watch him hurry along the Monkstown Road. Or go as he did for his one and only picnic high on the hill above Dalkey. Where the larks are. Who rise now above him.

  Ascending

  Singing

  40

  DESPITE MY GLOOMY PREMONITIONS of my last days in Paris, I reasonably contentedly returned to London. To the whiffs of the gasworks coming in the window and the early clank of milk bottles and noisy garbagemen passing in the street. Working mornings writing A Fairy Tale of New York and taking my daily afternoon wanderings with Philip, pushing Karen in a pram to the park or across London. My first communication back to the Olympia Press contained with my letter a long list of names and addresses to whom review copies of The Ginger Man might be sent.

  Daughter Karen in the front garden of the Anchorage, Isle of Man, with her cat. When we moved to our cottage at Maughold and when darkness fell she loved to chase with her pet between the tombstones of the nearby graveyard.<

  November 5th 1955

  Dear Mr. Girodias,

  Your wines have ruined me and I find it hard to face the drab ones I can afford here. Paris is a relaxing city and I enjoyed the stay and meeting you. Give my regards to your brother, who for some reason I remember vividly. And must thank you again for a most pleasant meal with Mrs. Wainhouse. With best regards.

  Yours sincerely,

  J. P. Donleavy

  The immediate response which came from Girodias’s secretary was the first time that Girodias had delegated someone else to reply to me in correspondence. However, the secretary’s signature was illegible.

  THE OLYMPIA PRESS

  November 7th 1955

  Dear Mr. Donleavy,

  Please find enclosed a copy of the letter we received today from Messrs Hodges Figgis & Co, 6 Dawson Street, Dublin.

  We thank you for your list of reviewers which will be attended to immediately.

  Yours sincerely,

  [signature of a secretary]

  Enclosure letter from

  Hodges & Figgis Ltd.

  The Hodges Figgis and Company letter referred to was from this old established Dublin bookseller, to whom The Ginger Man had been sent, and who wrote that they had read it “with the greatest enjoyment and are filled with admiration for it.” However, they said that as booksellers they thought it “rash in the extreme” to import it into Ireland with its puritanical censorship laws. This letter became one of the first ever from Ireland to contain a positive reaction to at least the literary aspect of The Ginger Man, before this work endured a ban, which was to last for over twenty years. But the book, in true Irish fashion, would end up to be read by every cultured man, woman and literate child in the country.

  Being sent out along with The Ginger Man at this time, by the Olympia Press, were three other titles, which included Beckett’s Molloy, Jean Genet’s The Thief’s journal in their collection of Merlin editions, and Nabokov’s Lolita. However, this last work, when it arrived, came in Volume One and Volume Two and had been printed in France, August 1955. Lolita sported the same green format as that of the Traveller’s Companion Series, but with one significant difference. Unlike The Ginger Man, Lolita was not included in and contained no mention of this series. But it did strike me that Mr. Nabokov, whoever he was, would kick up a stink over having his novel chopped in half in two volumes, which one might have considered was further ample evidence that if this publisher knew what he was doing, his real expertise lay in publishing pornographic books.

  As I looked for evidence of the existence of this possibly pseudonymous writer Nabokov in the library, I was pleasantly surprised to find a previous book of his. In the margin of this work, a reader had noted in pencil, “Nabokov is drawing attention to a novelist he highly regards in Russia. The writer to whom the author alludes is Nabokov himself.” Back in those days, this was astonishing erudition on the part of a reader in Fulham. But at least one discovered that Vladimir Nabokov was a real name and real author who felt frustration at his own unsung merit but which through happenstance, and my association with Robert Pitman in Holland Park, was to bring about world recognition. And even Samuel Beckett at this time, with his play Waiting for Godot, was fast rising from his obscurity. A month now elapsed and I wrote to the Olympia Press.

  December 8th 1955

  Dear Mr. Girodias,

  Many thanks for letter from Hodges & Figgis. No doubt the result is the same in England. Molloy will, however, make your position here much easier since Godot success. What a fearful terrified bunch the British are. The Irish have excuses and I always feel it a privilege to be banned by them. Even Frank Harris met his match in West of Ireland — think it was only time he failed to seduce.

  And thanks for copies of Ginger Man and Lolita. I read something else here of Nabokov’s but not nearly so good as Lolita. A really dramatic moment when Humbert’s mixing a drink and Mrs. Haze is killed.

  Could you look up MS of Ginger Man and send it on. And I’d be grateful if you could send me six Ginger Man which I’m sending on to people here who do my work in hope that something can be done about reviewing. I hope your doctor’s orders are to drink fine wines again — I must admit that I arrived back in London suffering a painful liver.

  Would you check to see if books have gone to Arland Ussher? I sent his address c/o Irish Press because he moved — or rather Irish Times — and they will forward it on.

  And you might send copies to Nancy Spain, Daily Express, Fleet Street, London EC4, unless copies have already been sent.

  With best regards.

  Yours sincerely,

  J. P. Donleavy

  This letter of mine was not to be responded to. And a gap of communication of nearly nine months was to intervene until August 16, 1956. By the month of December 1955, I had published another two more sketches in the Manchester Guardian, which included “Dear Sylvia” and “You Murdered My Cat.” But I was also taking my first steps as a dra
matist in response to the BBC’s call for excellence in radio drama and had dramatized the opening chapters of A Fairy Tale of New York, as a radio play called Helen. It was submitted and shortlisted and finally chosen to be broadcast. And soon I was to find myself amid actors and listening carefully as my words ethereally floated out over loudspeakers to an English public still listening to the radio.

  But there was to be another blow and perhaps one of the most disappointing yet for a young writer. A sketch of mine, which had appeared in the Manchester Guardian, had been selected to be reprinted in the Bedside Guardian, an annual book published, containing pieces published in the newspaper during the previous year. In November 1956, I was paid one guinea but was soon devastated to find that the piece was then withdrawn. Although told it was due to lack of space, I couldn’t help believing those who suggested that it could also have to do with The Ginger Man’s growing circulation in the Traveller’s Companion Series and the fact that the Bedside Guardian was being published by a highly respectable firm, who also published a version of the Bible.

  Derek Stanford had now related to me that Spearman was indeed interested to see The Ginger Man. On January 7, 1956, I posted an Olympia Press copy of the book, with the offending pages referring to the Traveller’s Companion Series removed, to Neville Spearman Ltd. along with the following letter.

  40A Broughton Road,

  Fulham, London SW6

  January 7th 1956

  Neville Spearman Ltd.,

  10 Fitzroy Street, London, W1.

  Dear Sir,

  Herewith a copy of my novel, The Ginger Man.

  Mr. Derek Stanford said you might be interested in it as regards publication of a somewhat revised edition in England and said he would mention it to you. In case he hasn’t, I might explain that The Ginger Man was published last June in France. This because parts were objected to here by publishers. However, an extract has appeared in the Manchester Guardian and been reprinted in Trinity, an annual record published by Trinity College, Dublin.