The History of the Ginger Man: An Autobiography

by J. P. Donleavy

  The ancient Isle of Man, ninety or so miles northeast from Dublin, was reached in four and a half hours by “fast and luxurious turbine steamships,” as these Manx vessels were described when advertised in the 1920s. Or in just thirty minutes by fast propeller plane. The island, a 227-square-mile volcanic outcropping in the Irish Sea, stretched its elongated shape twenty miles north and south and east to west, was fifteen miles wide at its broadest point. Approached by sea or air, it was often wreathed in mist to the extent that one would not know it was there. As indeed many shipwrecked wayfarers over the centuries found. And if flying by plane, one tended to try to get aboard first to sit in the less vulnerable back seats, in case there was a crash. For with any sort of gale blowing, the crosswinds would buffet and rock an aircraft to such degree that flights were often enough aborted and would overfly to Liverpool. Thus giving one an extra sense of Manx homecoming upon finding one’s feet again safely on the ground.

  As the month of October approached on the island, it was becoming out of season for holiday-making visitors and sparse of its summer hordes. The great long crescent promenade of Douglas, with its emptied boardinghouses, was a ghostly vision facing out over the beach and bay to the open sea. The proprietors of the hotels had departed on their own holidays and were off to such exotic places as the south of France or to take sunny cruises to distant climes. And upon this blustery day, my plane buffeted by the crosswinds finally bounced down on the runway. And a romance of a sort began with this ancient island which would endure for many years.

  With what I had so far written of the manuscript The Ginger Man, and with Valerie and her mother and Madge, who looked after things in the house, I now took up residence in The Anchorage, Port-e-Vullin. And while we awaited the imminent birth of an heir, I was given a narrow bedroom in which to write in this elaborate stone house, a bastion of nearly fortified proportions, perched with its palm trees on a rugged rocky coast, its garden terraces shielding it from the sea. With whatever thoughts I must have had, I sat at a table at the window diagonally facing easterly across Ramsey Bay. From here, in the direction of Liverpool seventy-five miles away, I could stare out over the sea garden and the strand of beach. Looking up from one’s desk, there was always the constant back-and-forth stream of seagulls to be seen as they traveled to and from their nests tucked into the sheer cliffs of Maughold Head two miles farther east along this deserted coast. In immediate view was a promontory called Gro Ago, a heathery, windswept headland jutting into the sea with the ruins of an old mine shaft dug down through it to the shore. But for the great black-backed gulls slowly gliding by, there could be nothing lonelier to watch out upon.

  By evenings, with the tide out, I walked the stony seaweed-strewn beach, or with the tide in, would climb up the slipway at the side of the house to stroll by the high road out toward Maughold Head. And no matter how inclement or chill the night winds, my battle resolve was always burning to next day swell the words of The Ginger Man. I learned how to light a Manx fire out of little mushrooms of newspaper. Mrs. Heron, my mother-in-law, was a stylish and handsome lady and a star hostess, and one’s social life began to involve a plethora of planters, and settlers returned from Africa and the disappearing British colonies, and retired brigadiers and majors from the army. These, along with an odd rich doctor, dentist, wool or cotton merchant from the British Midlands, attended to teas and frequent cocktail parties. And one found oneself surrounded by those suspicious of my doubtful occupation of painter and would-be author and, indeed, that I might be a fortune hunter waiting for my rich mother-in-law to die. Ah, but what a prize bunch of pompous, smug and disagreeably fawning bastards some of them could be. However, my untiring willingness to listen to their quite marvelously snobbish and very English bullshit and to inquire of them to spout even more of it, plus my relentless Trinity anglicized politeness, seemed to allay their suspicions of my fraudulent intent, and it made me temporarily acceptable as I passed out the pink gins and sherries and malt whiskey. In fact, I was so generous in this that it could have been that I became to be begrudgingly tolerated if not a little bit liked.

  “Ah, brigadier, do, you absolutely must let me top you up. Jolly ruddy old cold gale blowing tonight, you know.’’

  “Well, why not, pop a driblet in.”

  The room in which I wrote had a musty smell, which was later discovered to be caused by dry rot in the floor. Not surprising, as in the heavier seas the waves crashed against the garden rampart, trembling the ground and sent the sea spray up against the walls and windows of the house. On a clear day, it was possible from a suitably high point to see eastward to the Cumbria coastline to where were situated the villages of Egremont, St. Bees and more ominously, Seascale, an atomic power station. But life-threatening nuclear matters were only just then beginning to creep up the world panic agenda. With this medley of sights out the window, and on bright white new sheets of paper, I was now rewriting the pages that Brendan Behan had read and upon which he made his editorial marks. And to my surprise and slightly begrudging respect, I was finding that I was in fact compelled to follow each one.

  Now modestly transfused by a windfall of money from the sale of the cottage at Kilcoole, my existence was accorded some of the affluence of my bachelor university days. But I was not to know that these few months passing were to be a rare period of reasonable contentment in my life. If my optimism at the time wasn’t overwhelming, it certainly was enough to keep alive my expectant vision that fortune and acclaim awaited me and The Ginger Man in the United States.

  But as a young man coming of age in America, to some considerable degree I had already tasted and experienced the conditions in which success was enjoyed. I was born in a Brooklyn hospital while my parents lived at 8 Willow Place in a period house in Brooklyn Heights. This once aristocratic area, whose residents, according to the 1939 New York City Guide “set the tone in manners and customs for the elite of the entire city.” However, from the hospital one was then taken to live on top of one of the highest hills in the Bronx in an area called Wakefield. But from here at the age of seven, my parents, concerned that our welfare might be improved, moved a mere mile away across the valley of the Bronx River to a small community called Woodlawn. I further grew up here, called Jim by my father, Junior by my mother, sister and brother and Pat by my friends. Having been born in New York and reached the age of eighteen in the King of Cities, my teenage years were spent in a curious fairyland of privilege. Some of it attributable to Woodlawn but most of it unique to a strange room five floors up on the northeast corner of Seventh Avenue and Fifty-eighth Street. And better known as the boxing room of the New York Athletic Club. This was a curious outpost of influence not to say glamour and the memory of it helped maintain my indifference to such lack in Europe, and now at the time of my return to America, one still imagined some of this privilege left.

  The title of my novel at this time of writing it on the Isle of Man was the enlarged initials of S.D. on a cardboard cover, to represent Sebastian Dangerfield. The many titles I’d thought of, such as The News of Death, His Hands Refuse to Labor, The Red Sin, seemed woefully inappropriate. And in my desperation, I was even trying one in Irish. Each morning I tapped away on my ancient steam typewriter, writing sometimes three and occasionally five pages a day as morning, afternoon and evening rolled pleasantly by, with the rest of the world elsewhere across the water, the island being altogether an idyllically isolated place to put typewriter key to paper. And that was my daily work.

  My leisure each day was a brisk walk taken on the heathery headlands. In the long drawing room in front of the log fire, Earl Grey tea served every day at four and sherry at seven before dinner. The savory delicacy of potted meat was to spread on toast for breakfast. And there was always my favorite and lonely act of car drives to deserted distant beaches of the island for solitary picnics by the gray waves. Upon the sand and pebbles of a shore, where perhaps no one had been for years, a little fire was made from driftwood upon which to cook sau
sages, sizzle bacon and toast rolls. It was almost as if one did this in defiance of the island’s utter desertedness where by winter the few pubs along lonely roads would blaze their every light outside without a single customer inside. But as darkness fell on these desolate beaches, there was a ghostly joy to sit in the warmth of the flames, the winds growing chillier and the Irish Sea washing up on the shore. And these moments were almost the last spell of complete peace and contentment I was ever to know in my life.

  In the front inland side of the Anchorage garden, palm trees grew, and equally pleasant, a rushing stream and waterfall went by the side of the house splashing into the sea, where swans in their lifelong companionships came to stand and forage in the fresh water. One would see these serene great birds in the distance come sailing around the headland from farther along the coast, where they might have been lurking in nearby Ramsey town’s harbor. This small port had an almost medieval air about it with its pubs along the quay, where crews of small fishing vessels drank a brew of fine ale from a local brewery in Castletown in the south of the island. With the pubs opening onto the mooring quay, one would see sailors reel out tipsy to board their vessels to sail on the high tide. Your local aristocracy confining themselves to the sedate Mitre Hotel on Main Street where sherry and pink gins were served through a hatch into its mahogany-paneled and refined sitting room. My favorite walk was along the piers to watch cargoes load and unload from the small coasters plying the port. And where one would watch navvies, whose faces had become familiar, down in the darkness of the ship’s hold, sweating as they would tirelessly shovel coal.

  In Ramsey by appointment, I would go up a narrow flight of stairs over a chemist’s shop to sit in a strange high chair in the center of a room, where my hair was cut by my first ever female barber. A young girl who alternatively would caress and then couldn’t help giggling as she managed to nip my ears as well as hair. Many of the shops could not sell you things you saw in the windows because they were there for decoration, and it would often be the only sample they had. But otherwise, the island, cut off from the world and surrounded by its high cliffs and the surf pounding upon its shores, was a magic little paradise. Its loneliness and isolation gave one an astonishing peace of mind. But even so, one day walking an empty mile-long strand, I saw a solitary man approaching from the other end of the beach. He was a gentleman called Cyril Ladyman, who, when he greeted me in the middle of this lonely foreshore, said that he had been unable to sleep the entire night before because he worried about the overpopulation of the world, and his voice was deeply concerned as he said,

  “We will soon be sitting on each other’s laps.”

  I made visits to the wool mills in a glen in the center of the island, where I bought bolts of Manx tweed. These I brought to Kaighen, a tailor who had a hut on the side of the road just outside a little village called Kirk Michael. Driving there, one would always admire the shadowy beauty of a canopy of trees which extended along this piece of road which went past the Palace of the Bishop of Sodor and Man. On these chillier autumn days, I’d find Kaighen busy in his small hut, a wood-burning stove keeping it snug and warm and a pair of irons always hot to put creases in the cloth. His assistant sat in a medieval manner, cross-legged up on a high bench in the corner, stitching in linings and sewing buttonholes. Kaighen, who permanently held his head cocked over to the side, was always delighted with his tailoring prospect.

  “It’s going to be very nice now, Mr. Donleavy, very nice. We’re going to make a good job of it. It’s going to fall very nicely now. A very nice job.”

  To avoid undue flapping about the lower leg, my instructions were to have the trouser narrow and no slit in the back of the jacket so that when out walking I avoided chill breezes from the rear. And Kaighen, not more than a year later when I had returned from the U.S. and gone to see him again, danced around with jollity and laughter, telling me that according to Tailor and Cutter, the journal to the trade, the very cut of my suits he’d made was exactly what was now a year later regarded as the height of London fashion. If it wasn’t the case that fashion was imitating me, I simply hadn’t the heart to tell Kaighen, so delighted was he far away from the big outside world in his small hut at the side of the road.

  But in this interlude before setting sail for New York, all was not idyllic on the island. And I’m sure my irrepressible ego, expressed enough in the certainty about the work I was writing, was occasionally too much for my mother-in-law, Nora Heron. And more than enough for some of her stuffier guests. And one night, following a meal preceded by three sherries and accompanied by a rare claret and completed with several brandies and coffee, something snapped. I obviously had too much to drink, but also I may have had some strange premonition that The Ginger Man would not achieve the prediction and hoped-for great things that my boasting announced. Or that the work did not live up to the confidence I proclaimed which could sometimes be heard through the three-foot-thick walls of the Anchorage and out over the waves. But as these were battling times, one already knew, as a painter artist in Dublin, how to wage a war of survival, and I was instantly intolerable of anyone’s doubt, and I also, unforgivably blunt to the skeptical, suggested to Mrs. Heron,

  “Madam, the only reason you, your name or your family or anything to do with you or them, will ever be remembered by the world is because of your association with me.”

  These awfully unnice words, as deserving as they may have been on the occasion, were in fact said to a very nice lady, whose guest I was and who in fact had helpfully bought a few of my paintings and remained, at least on the surface, tolerant of my being a painter and of my attempt to now be a writer. For she once proudly brought her own son Michael’s poetry to show her Yorkshire merchant husband. And he took one look at these accomplished lyrical efforts and loudly declared he wasn’t spending money to educate his son at the best schools to waste his time writing utter drivel and rubbish like poetry.

  But later in the evening of my drinking and holding an honesty night, Mrs. Heron fled to an outside social occasion, and, Valerie and I alone in the house, I suddenly rushed up the Anchorage stairs to my workroom, crashed open the door and grabbed the manuscript up from the desk. Coming out on the staircase landing, I cursed and tore at the pages, scattering them down the stairs and sinking my clawed hands into more and more of the manuscript as I ripped them out, dismembering and throwing the sheets down the stairs, followed by the manuscript itself. And as I descended the Wilton-carpeted steps, Valerie rushed to stop me, grabbing to save the pages. And being then my one and only manuscript, which I was starting to tear into tiny pieces, had it not been for this dear woman,

  I might

  Have scattered

  The Ginger Man

  Out over

  The Irish Sea

  12

  ON A COOL, CLOUDY OCTOBER DAY, with westerly winds blowing gently across the island, we were having a picnic on Niarbyl headland from which one could look westerly across to the Mourne Mountains of Ireland. Valerie, as we lunched on the grass, suddenly said, “I think we should get back to the Anchorage as soon as possible.” Guessing at what I thought was the shortest way, I drove at breakneck speed on the mostly deserted Manx roads, some of which I knew well enough, but now, in this emergency, had to chance my luck. Taking a route most famed for being part of the motorcycle tourist racecourse, known as the Mountain Road, which cut diagonally across the island and which, at least by direction, was the shortest route north back to Ramsey.

  Arriving with immense relief and only in the nick of time at Port-e-Vullin, I occasionally sat and variously paced the long L-shaped drawing room downstairs, Dr. Jones having arrived the two and a quarter miles from Ramsey. And just as it was growing dark out over the seascape, and not much more than an hour following our picnic, our heir, a son, Philip, was born October 20 in what was known as the Anchorage’s pink bedroom. Mrs. Heron placing news of Philip’s birth in the Times of London, as in those socially fastidious days one was not really bo
rn until that had been done. And which immediately elicited mail order brochures on contraception.

  The autumn weeks now went by watching the great yellow-headed gannets, their wings tipped with black, dive from the sky and go deep beneath the waves in a plume of spray. In westerly gales, the fishing boats would collect out in the shelter of Ramsey Bay, their lights at night gently bobbing up and down on the heavy swells. With mornings abed over breakfast of potted meat on toasted stone-ground whole-wheat bread and Kenya coffee, one optimistically read in copies of Country Life, with its pages of estates and country houses for sale, always imagining one might be looking for something suitable. Philip swaddled in thick wraps daily slept under a palm tree on the terrace overlooking the sea. And before one sailed to the U.S.A. out of Cobh on the good ship America, the only interruption of my stay on the island was making a trip to London on what seemed to be a grand celebratory mission, with my pockets filled with pound notes. Desmond MacNamara had made me a small replica of the blessed Oliver Plunket’s head, who in later becoming a saint, one always liked to feel came about through Dangerfield’s frequent intercessions for delivery from crises in The Ginger Man. Indeed, later some seafarers in a storm claimed that invoking Oliver Plunket’s intercession, as Dangerfield did, actually saved their lives. At any rate, it was in the contemplation of such things that one missed the chaotic companionship of Crist and the internecine perambulations of gossip, backbiting, and betrayal. All solved by the dawning of love again in the lives of those others who had escaped Dublin to see if the more civilized world of London could improve their prospects, especially financial and where new betrayals of their new love were ardently afoot.