The History of the Ginger Man: An Autobiography

by J. P. Donleavy

  Photographed in my field at Kilcoole, Patricia and John Ryan, whose lavish wedding at the time was the sensation of Dublin, and to attend which Gainor Crist had summoned his morning suit from Ohio.

  “That goddamn dog, I’ll kill. It not only is eating me out of house and home but it is making sure I’ll have no living goddamn future either.”

  Crist did instead find an old pair of tennis shoes. An attempt at upgrading these was quickly abandoned as efforts to remove some of the black scuffings left worse smears. But in such canvas footwear and striped trousers suspended across his shoulders by bright crimson braces, Crist now stood with desperate impatience, watching over the makeshift ironing board, where the collar of his shirt was now laid out for its final impeccable smoothing to rid of ruckles and wrinkles. But his dutiful wife suddenly had to attend to a brief call of nature. I of course stood helplessly looking on, unable to do a damn thing. But at last to Gainor’s urgent insistence she returned ready to execute the final hot flattening out of his dress shirt collar. I thought I smelled the scorched smell of paint. But thought the better of alarming on the matter with time so urgently of the essence. Constance too thought she smelled burning paint. But Gainor now stood with his fists and teeth clenched hissing out the words,

  “In the name of God’s sacred teeth, will you iron the bloody shirt. There’s no time left to worry about arson.”

  The iron was duly grabbed up from the surface of the green door and came down upon the shirt collar which lay there somewhat whiter than the brown it had been the evening before. But it now received from the hot electric instrument a great green oily, gaudy streak, the hues of which were more olive than emerald and more greenish blue than blue-green. And which extended collar tip to collar tip. Crist recoiling in shock backed onto a chair upon which had been placed his recently brushed silk top hat. His weight promptly reducing this silky gray elegant elevation to a squashed insignificance. As tragic as the scene had become, I could not suppress my laughter and indeed was helplessly convulsed. Crist, meanwhile, hat in his hand, brought me to task. “You think it’s damn funny, don’t you.”

  His evenly spoken words were said with such vehemence that I shamefacedly took a grip of myself and clamped my mouth tightly shut. By the reading on the mantel alarm clock, the time of the ceremony was well now nigh. Ryan himself in his own nonrented morning suit, would be already at the church and surely his about-to-be bride must soon be on her way in her Daimler chauffeured limousine. Discreetly I tried to recover my composure, as Crist, with splendid naval discipline exercised at times of crisis, picked himself up off his crushed top hat now in the shape of a saucer and giving it a few internal punches knocked it back into approximate shape. Then without a further murmur, he snatched the shirt from the green door and put it on. His tie too, which had unfortunately been tucked into one of his dress shoes, had also been chewed nearly beyond recognition. But rather than wear a piece of old rope he’d taken from a broken window sash cord, he smoothed away the tie’s canine teeth puncture marks and tied it in a larger than usual Windsor knot. And at last, and if late, at least he was dressed. But I fear at the final sight I could not further control myself and doubled over with renewed laughter, I lurched helplessly out the front door.

  Now, if John Ryan was always able to provide the suitable setting, Crist was always able to provide the suitable faux pas. I stood in my own morning suit and top hat just up the street in a doorway, waiting to join and apologize to Crist. Flat-footed in his sneakers, tailcoat flying, he rushed out on the street sporting this variation on a semiformal theme of deviant morning dress. No trams were passing nor were there taxis to be had. And in his desperate rush now to get to the church on time, Crist stepped directly into the very mound of merde his Great Dane puppy had that very morning laid in the gutter and concerning the insanitary nature of which Crist had already complained to me. There was something about the inevitability of this disaster which now threw me into another paroxysm and which threw Crist into a shouting frenzy,

  “Goddamn this fucking country. A snake can’t live here.”

  Of course, Crist was zoologically correct about his reptile reference, it being too cold and damp. And I now watched him raise his footwear for cleansing on the fender of the nearest parked car. And wouldn’t the owner have just emerged from the apothecary shop directly across the street and from above which the two silent spinsters would view Behan’s antics. Incensed at having his automobile used in this manner, he upbraided Crist and also laid hand to Crist’s shoulder to delay him as he attempted to depart. A fatal error. For Crist spun around and with a straight left like a lightning bolt put your man flat on his back on the deck. And then Crist rushing out into the middle of the road, flagged down and abruptly stopped the first car going in the direction of his intended destination. And of course wouldn’t it be the car carrying the bride. I stood there too dumbfounded to rush from my hiding place and also pile aboard. But how Crist smelled at this time inside the vehicle and later as head usher in the church is unrecorded. I meanwhile as it began to rain proceeded on foot and arrived at the church drenched.

  Now attending at this ceremony were not a few of Europe’s aristocrats and even a couple of once-crowned heads. As well as John’s eccentric acquaintances there also came film star sister Kathleen’s friends flown in from London, New York and Hollywood. Present too were the back-slapping higher-ups in the government, John’s deceased father having been a senator. Plus every national newspaper had its photographer at the church door. And there through the massive crowds came arriving, guided now by the Garda Siochana, the bride’s car. From which emerged none other than Gainor Stephen Crist, usher extraordinaire, under his crushed top hat and sporting his green-streaked collar, his chewed tie and his merde-besmirched plimsolled feet. But with the tails of his swallow coat flying as with his splendid aplomb and immaculate manners did this saintly man imperceptibly bow to the applause and then help this radiantly beautiful to-be bride to dismount from her carriage and be escorted into the blazing brightness as every flashbulb in Ireland popped. And although Crist was disguised as a vagrant, don’t anybody ever dare suggest that he still didn’t look every inch a fashion plate. But of course wouldn’t your chap, who objected to dog shit being applied on his car and whom Crist popped one on the old schnozzola, have enough presence of mind as his head bounced off the pavement to read the conspicuously important license plate of the bride’s limousine and didn’t the newly wed John Ryan back from his honeymoon with the exquisite Mrs. Ryan get bombarded with writs for assault, battery and causing actual bodily harm.

  But upon that happy day and at the time, finally minus the wonderfully correct diplomatic attentions of Gainor Stephen Crist, John with his new bride did contentedly sail away to his honeymoon on his yacht dressed overall and his crew saluting from the fore deck as it left Dun Laoghaire harbor, and leaving behind in Dublin, noted for its bashes and clashes, one of the most momentous bashes and clashes ever recorded or left unrecorded. For a couple of the most beautiful bisexual American ladies had arrived out of Hollywood to the wedding wearing stunning form-clinging purple dresses, their cleavage revealing their bosomy curvatures and with arses to match. These ladies would conspicuously sit on the floors of the rooms they frequented in such a manner that it was no problem to see up under their skirts, where no undergarments were worn. Such sight was to play havoc among the available men and women. And all were available. Every man’s trousers out like a tent. Every woman if she hadn’t already tasted the pleasures of another woman was deeply contemplating it.

  But in this Sodom and Gomorrah on river Liffey, cunnilingus and horn blowing were to be the least of the sexual antics. As the cry took up that fucking was now laid on in Dublin like the hot water in the pipes of the Shelbourne Hotel. Where indeed much dress lifting and trouser dropping took place and where “Let’s have a sandwich,” meant a woman in between two men. However, of course Crist and I, faithful to our wives, knew better than to so engage in
the carnal goings-on, I more demurring than Crist as reading bacteriology at the time and knowing the carelessness of where and into what various organs other organs were put and received, that the microbe situation could be positively catastrophic. And it wouldn’t be long before disagreeably purulent exudates were manifest and haunting the psyche, there being in the Ireland of the time bacilli of a most insidious virulence.

  But microorganisms apart, it was because of this innocent constellating of diverse folk of diverse inclinations that made Ryan one of the strangest characters that Dublin city has ever had in its bosom. No one understood the repression of his fellow Dubliner better, nor applauded more when it was breached. And over the years having bought the Bailey Restaurant and Bar, Ryan remained both host and acquaintance to that astonishing array and cross section of folk arriving in the Irish capital which included princes, criminals, revolutionaries, impostors and movie stars. And just as he sailed the most treacherous of these Bohemian seas, he could be a friend and comforter to both sides in libel actions, these so often erupting from the endlessly circulating gossipy letters and slanderous mouth-to-mouth reporting of the greatest series of soap operas ever to run concurrently in the history of mankind. And I suppose the Irish being a naturally playful race, such is a monument to the crut and repression perpetrated by religion on a population that frankly was in need of even more religion.

  With the Irish, imagined insults are everywhere. But with a difference. Being that if you were imagining them, you could be sure they were real. And in the maelstrom of the life lived at that time, and as a diplomat in Dublin, where undiplomatic behavior was invented, Ryan had no peer. The fact that he was able to keep as lifelong friends many of those who detested even hearing another’s name mentioned in the far faint distance is proof. But he was not to be, in the literal sense, pushed too far. He could and did, as Crist did when required, mete out plenty of unpoetic justice, especially when it came to aid a friend in battle. And in spite of his well-behaved retiring nature, he was one of the world’s all-time best light heavyweights. And even now, these considerable years later, I can still feel the wind over my shoulder as the whoosh of his straight right fist rent the air like a thundering freight train to put manners upon some nearby vulgarian. Loutish artistic behavior could also produce a few well-deserved cuffs in and about the earlobes. Or in extreme cases, and in the manner of Crist, a wooling.

  Somehow now when they ask what made that city of Dublin then so mesmerizing and bewitching, it would be that you were in a city as upon a stage, where you would appear to perform with an eager audience like your man and any man like John Ryan, ready to watch your every nuance. And of course the effort would be to make a fool of yourself and be like all the city’s talented sons who one after another were driven out. But then John Ryan never played the fool and always held the fort. And then did even more in providing the ground and settings, the pub, the restaurant, the country house for those, tails up once more, who dared briefly to return, to perform yet again on Dublin’s stage. And Ryan could, with his spoken words always dressed in their wonderful finery of irony, make these returnees larger than life. As if at this moment they would appear, feel and especially smell as they were back in the Dublin of that day. He would know the exact spot upon which they stood, drawn from Ryan’s encyclopedic knowledge of the streets he loved and daily lived in. And here Crist, eternally delighted by this Dublin circus, played a major role amid all these walk-on parts.

  Different as they were in other respects, both Crist and Ryan possessed a similar charm. Their erudition was always used to entertain but never to impress. Both savored language, rolled about on the tongue, tasted for its vintage and measuredly rationed it out to the waiting ears. Their words sounding with the same deft, intimate solemnity which they both used when, with their gently perceptible signals, they ordered drinks at a bar. Among the begrudgers, both were the least begrudging of men. And both were oft accused of lacking malice in a city so noted for such. Indeed it was unknown for either to take a friend’s name in vain in a Dublin where no man’s name is or was sacred. But there were differences. To the deserving, Crist would mete out justice without warning or mercy. But with Ryan, there would be a little nod of the head and his dry chuckle, which would tell you as much as any oath of condemnation shouted from the rooftops. And if Ryan did topple over into hyperbole and tell a tall tale, detouring more than a bit from credibility, you’d hear the voice of Brendan Behan announce,

  “Ah but what matter. There’s plenty of time later of disputing facts if a little bit of fiction has you enthralled with the truth of entertainment, said for the time being for your listening pleasure.”

  It was the redoubtable Brendan Behan, who first ever read manuscript pages of The Ginger Man. And under whose laughing vaudevillian behavior lurked much hidden haunted suffering and whose nightmarish soul blazed its brief blasphemy across Dublin, Ireland, and then the rest of the world. And who strode unkempt in his cockeyed shoes, and gave to the time an example of comportment both dreadful and profane. Which on more than one occasion was also highly insalubrious. Although he loudly proclaimed that he knew his redeemer liveth, Behan could never be thought to be a founding member of the Society for the Prevention of Sexual Desire. All and anyone were grist to his matter-of-fact cravings. He and John Ryan made wonderful opposites. Ryan on one end of the socioeconomic scale and Behan on the other, would let you share in their respective wisdom. And both who never left this capital city and were, it must be said, your true Dubliners. Of the sort who would remain attentive to your sorrows long after they are spoken. And where the graves of the departed dead are never visited because they still live alive on your lips.

  And so it was that always in Dublin the ghosts abound. Sorrow and sadness pervading with its timeless profundity. It was where you could, before your own time comes, pick over dead men’s bones with your own silver-plated utensils and sentimentally relive the harshest and most desperate of moments. Ryan would sometimes start the tales he told with the words “It was a bleak February in a bad year.” But bleak February or bad years, there was always the nonsense spouting and the great bards thundering their daily complaint when their fancied horse lost a race. While all present and accounted for in the pub were existentially hoping there would be no delay in the buying of the next round. But there did come a bleak and silent day. When Behan finally lay in a Dublin hospital in a coma dying. And Ryan visiting looked upon that ravaged Romanesque emperor’s face, and Ryan said to me, “You know, Mike, Behan despite his unkemptness and other physical frailties, always had that great luxurious head of raven black hair that would always make you want to run your fingers through it. And there lay Brendan breathing his last with that hair still luxurious and black. And it was something I’d always wanted to do and now it was a way of saying goodbye. And I reached over and just ran my fingers through Behan’s hair, and his eyelids at once flickered and not that many moments later he was dead.”

  If the city of Dublin were ever thought to have had a king, he is and was John Ryan. Who was always one of its princes. And in the years ahead, he, who has for so many others provided memorials, is one of the very few who deserves one himself. And with the epitaph I once heard said of him. By Behan himself. Of the black luxurious hair.

  Ah, you’d always

  Feel kind of safe

  In his presence

  5

  AH, BUT YOU DON’T KNOW DUBLIN. Where battles and surprises never end. And if they seemingly do, beware of enjoying victory. Friendship is on the lips but not in the heart. And just as one has completed heaping an unrelenting stream of praise upon John Ryan, I have occasion to look through some ancient files and letters. And there, by God, in handwritten black and white are statements reported to me from the Dublin of the period. These being scurrilous anecdotes and gossipy ridicule heaped upon me by the princeling John Ryan himself. And why not. It would make people listen to what you were saying. And it may be why in the Dublin of the time that m
ost stories began with a reference to male weakness and ended with an old Gaelic refrain: “Wasn’t your impotent man stark naked at the time, and in an equal state of undress was your woman feverish with desire, and alas the poor lady lingers not knowing the Gael fucks only with his fingers.”

  But it was not only John Ryan who was my first so-called contact with the literary world. There was briefly one other, and a Gael about whom the above refrain could never refer. I’d submitted a poem to the literary magazine called The Bell, for whom worked an editor called Harry Craig. Like my paintings, the poem was vaguely promising and began with the line “Soon and off the earth” and ended four or five verses later with “where the weary wind bewilders me.” Craig, a man of immense charm and gentility, walked into Davy Byrnes pub and upon being introduced, mentioned that he remembered the poem and intended to publish it, and hoped that I had kept a copy because Brendan Behan, sheltering overnight in the Bell office, used a sheaf of manuscripts which included my poem to burn in the fireplace in order to cook his sausages for breakfast.

  This pub became the first of the many one was to frequent, and I found myself within its precincts within an hour on my first social foray out in the city as a Trinity student. Fifty or so yards away eastward down the street at the top of a Georgian house was another venue to which carefully selected customers repaired to dine and party away the rest of the night when this pub closed.

  Now it was no revelation to me that Dublin was full of people trying to teach you a once-and-for-all lesson not to try to be a novelist, but they would always indulge you a bit while longer if you wanted to be a poet. However, Harry Craig was in Ireland my very first kindly admirer of one’s writing. A Protestant clergyman’s son and product of Trinity College, he was a gracious and compassionate man. And as he now lies peacefully dead, I’m sure he won’t mind my saying just this little bit about him. He was referred to as having the looks of a Greek god. This description more likely came from and was circulated among the many homosexuals who at the time flocked to Dublin from every corner of the globe. But none of these gentlemen got a chance to get near Harry as he was besieged by women of all ages and description. And one of them, a very attractive and socially prominent English lady who favored to have love made to her while standing on her head, monopolized Harry’s time. Being that Harry, of splendid physique and an outstanding athlete, was able to accomplish this while himself quaffing back a pint of stout. But for other more conservative ladies, Harry did have a handicap which hung at great length between his legs. Which observation, the English lady, who indulged her nymphomania, spread all over Dublin, with the result that Harry Craig’s literary opinions were avidly listened to. And why not, for on this isle of saints and scholars, with the people so devout, this overadequacy of a monstrously big prick would be thought nobody’s fault but God’s.