The History of the Ginger Man: An Autobiography

by J. P. Donleavy

  “Hey, what’s a matter, you going to kill me.”

  As I slowly rose from my sitting position and took the first step toward him, there was no doubt that the guy did not intend to wait around to see if his question might be answered in the negative. He started to get up, at first pretending nonchalance. But as I reached midstreet, his movements hurried up more than somewhat and he was now standing on the sidewalk. I continued to slowly advance, as he with quickening steps proceeded toward the nearby streetcorner. Taking a look backward over his shoulder and seeing me follow him, he broke into a run. As he turned the corner, with one last look behind, he crashed into a vegetable display of watermelons, sending them over the sidewalk, and then squashing the pink exposed flesh of one underfoot, tripped and knocked over a full trash can. The big-bellied proprietor, who made it a habit to always cheat me two cents in my change, came running out, screaming, and continued the chase for me. And luckily for this bugger on the stoop, I never saw him back there again. For there was no question whatever that not only did I totally and absolutely intend to kill him but to do it by slow punishment, leaving his jaw and teeth intact, but delivering continuous left and right hooking blows to his midsection in order not to injure my knuckles.

  However, with the gleaming golden dome of the State House presiding over Boston, there was a quality of peaceful pedestrian certitude in this city. And I roamed these streets free for the most part of belligerent stares or growled insult. On our budget of fifteen dollars a week, we lived on eggplant and lamb’s kidneys fried in olive oil. With liver considered offal, it was, along with kidneys, merely twenty cents a pound, and with grapes at ten cents, living was somewhat sumptuous. My daily extravagance being the five cents spent on a copy of the New York Times bought at a drugstore just past the gray, forbidding edifice of the Charles Street Jail. I would, in the cool of midmorning, stroll each day, passing the back of Massachusetts General Hospital, this reminding one of one’s mortality. For above the large black morgue doors were the windows of the pathology lab, where one could see steeping in formaldehyde the specimens of brains, liver, lungs and kidneys in their glass jars.

  Walking the length of Charles Street, which bisects the environs of Beacon Hill, one would reach the sylvan acres of the Public Garden. Here I would find a bench to read my newspaper. Which helped me in other ways, as when I had lost sleep at night, either through shoes banging the floor above or the Italian woman’s last screams at night at her husband, or after midnight when the prostitute was coming and going noisily past one’s window with her clients. I would on such occasions next day desperately need a nap. So following reading a few lines, I would then put the newspaper up over my face and, with the swan boats paddling back and forth on the lake nearby, be lulled to sleep. It said a lot for these better-bred Bostonians, who did not take it amiss seeing me vagrantly reclining, albeit under that day’s edition of a respectable newspaper. And I was not to know then that the many years hence, my publisher Seymour Lawrence, who was to publish the first unexpurgated hardcover edition of The Ginger Man, would have his elegant paneled office, where from his window on Beacon Street he looked out on these very selfsame trees and benches where I snoozed in order to write this book.

  Spring Street was not without its cultural surprises. One day in late afternoon at teatime, the top of the kitchen window open into the tiny courtyard through which the occupants of the building came and went, I heard the sad music of the ancient Gaelic song “She Moved through the Fair,” and followed then by the melody “The Lark in the Clear Air.” This latter a ballad often played for me on the piano by John Ryan in the palatial peace of the music room of Burton Hall, the sumptuous mansion where he lived and where the song had been composed one afternoon by the composer, following a walk he had taken out along the leafy lanes surrounding Burton Hall’s parklands, and where he heard the larks singing as they rose high in the sky from the fields. For some moments, in my dark redoubt I thought I was beginning to hear things and that America had finally got the best of me. But the music, I was to learn, came from a secluded confine called Elm Court, only a door or two away. And I had noticed that just up Spring Street, there was an entrance to a quiet little cloister between the buildings where a tree grew, and I was told by Donoghue that it was a Harvard outpost, where the odd oddball professor came to hole up away from Harvard at a cheap rent down this tiny, cozy cul-de-sac, where Elm Court was a peaceful exception to the noisy life of this ghetto. And where some eccentric aficionado of things Irish and beautiful must now have lived.

  Having put the fear of God into a local or two who dared give me more than one dirty look, and through the neighborhood hullabaloo raised by the fat grocer over his squashed and bruised watermelons, I was able to take up my peaceful, usual late-afternoon reverie sitting on my stoop. It was an ever-changing carnival to watch the traffic of life go by and listen to the eruption of fights and arguments coming out of open windows up and down the street. And each day, there would at least once and sometimes twice come by an elderly man pushing a wheelcart. In rabbinical clothes under his black homburg hat, this gentleman collected discarded clothes, junk and other sundry paraphernalia. While commandeering his load to the safety of the confines of his apartment just behind mine, he would, looking suspiciously to either side of him, speak to no one. Then one day, having deposited his daily junk collection, he emerged from the courtyard alleyway entrance to stop in front of me where I sat.

  “Hey, what do you do here. In there, I hear tap, tap, tap.”

  To my silence, he looked suspiciously around him and up and down the street and then continued his interrogation with a conspirational smile.

  “Hey, is it legal. Hey, you a bookie. I don’t tell anybody. Hey, I hear you talk. The way you speak. You are an aristocrat. What do you do, you come live around here with all these bums and no-good people. Who is the woman, is she your wife. She is more beautiful than a beautiful queen. Hey, you a Jew. Hey, you can tell me. I won’t tell nobody. What do you do. Tap, tap, tap, I hear all day. You are a yid. Hey, you can tell me. Hey, you shake your head no. Hey, I know. You are. You are a yid. Such a beautiful yid like you I have never seen before. Believe me, I don’t tell nobody. My son. He is a big-time lawyer. Busy, busy all the time. He lives in nice big house. Nice big lawn all around him. He try to make me move. Come live with him. I say no. Hey, don’t worry, I don’t tell anyone you are a yid. You can tell me you are a yid. See, I pinch you on the cheek. I know. I can tell. I can feel such a fine yid. Good-bye. I pray. I go to the synagogue now.”

  Crisis struck. Philip, having lost a soft piece of cloth he used to caress against his cheek, got an inguinal hernia from crying. Having to be operated upon, we now became customers of the nearby Massachusetts General Hospital. And as the cliff-hanging days went by, even the cost of the thermometer to take his temperature was a worry. However, Philip’s medical care was excellent and all was finally well. But the more I wrote, the more despairing I was becoming over The Ginger Man. Somehow sensing in Wheelock’s pleasant replies from New York to my letters that there was little hope ever to be found at Scribner’s. And the whole ethic of America seeming more and more averse to me and my song. And I was also to discover the kind of attention given to America’s departed great writers. Before moving to Boston, the first thing I did returning from Connecticut to New York was to visit Melville’s grave. Proceeding to Woodlawn Cemetery’s main office at the northeast corner of the cemetery where I had worked. Inside these somber rooms, I asked for directions, imagining that I would be immediately told just to follow a way taken by hundreds of others to this revered shrine. But the helpful lady had to go to a card index file and take some time to look up the name. Finally finding the reference, she gave me a cemetery map upon which she marked the way to the plot. And I realized that not a single solitary person must have ever bothered over the recent years to come visit this burial site, where one of America’s most illustrious writers had been laid to rest and where there was a quill pe
n carved in relief on the stone and a poem of remembrance written for a departed son.

  Writing is a singularly lonely task. And, as no one wants to let you alone to do this, the writer must buy his time and his place to sit and unless he loves noise and interruption and if he can ever afford the extravagant price, the most difficult thing for him to find is surrounding silence. All these conditions added together can sometimes, especially in a city, demand a vast price. Luckily I had in the peace of Kilcoole and the Isle of Man already assimilated some of the disciplines of writing and, like a mariner at the tiller of a ship in a storm, I could keep the bow of page progress facing into the waves to plunge continually on. But sometimes in Boston in my struggle to write, the interruptive noises would be so great that I would, midmorn, sooner than usual, go out and walk. Taking the route up Spring Street which terminated into a cross street. Here I would be early reminded to get back to my makeshift desk of a shelf and typewriter. For in front of me was a small building housing the local funeral director and his parlor, with its small sedate reception room behind its ground-floor curtained windows. But above, on the next floor, as one approached from a short distance, could always be seen peeking over the top of his open window the busy, bald, sweating pate of the undertaker as he bent over a corpse. And this reminder of imminent death would soon send me back to the typewriter in the hope of avoiding it.

  Having now developed a routine, I was more and more determined it shouldn’t be broken. But working the cooler mornings till just past noon, noise now was a matter to be desperately contended with. In the shabby storefront room, it was harder to hear the building inhabitants’ raised voices, especially that of the Italian lady on the floor above, who would, starting at dawn and continuing like a ceaseless Gatling gun, nag and berate in both Italian and English all day long and into the night. Her husband and son resigned and submissive under the barrage. The son, a well-meaning and always trying to be helpful local delivery boy, who would bring home his accumulated dime tips and in proffering the amount and being told that he shouldn’t spend a nickel to buy himself ice cream, he would sometimes wearily answer her stream of fulminations in plaintive and begging tones not to get so upset. But all one still heard from the husband were his two shoes dropping nightly with a thump on the floor above.

  With Philip too now crying, and as there were no nights off for the prostitute who lived three floors higher up in the building and who through the night continued to pass back and forth outside in the alley courtyard with her customers, it was a nightmare. For a few of her disgruntled patrons already noisily drunk would now get obstreperous. And along with an explosion of screaming voices in the courtyard, there would come shoving and pushing matches. At this three A.M. I announced out from behind my darkened kitchen window that I would come out and kill the next son of a bitch who made a sound. This was a mistake. The prostitute abandoned the customer shoving her around the courtyard and made it over to my window to call me a Jew Shylock who was running a numbers racket on the horses and that I should be arrested. It was now, following this diatribe, a quarter past three A.M., and it seemed a long way away from the past elegances of one’s life. But whatever I did, and it was, I fear, violent and horrendous and noisy as well, you could, without any shadow of doubt forever afterward at night in that courtyard, hear the proverbial flea fart.

  Meanwhile I was learning by letter reporting on the Dublin grapevine that Gainor had left in his wake in Europe much domestic turmoil. His two marvelously beautiful and captivating little daughters were now without their father. And his astonishing rapport with Constance, his first wife, to the degree of their being able to communicate by a clicking of the teeth transmitting Morse code, had now been replaced by seemingly irreconcilable differences, this forbearing spouse having long lost her sympathy for his erratic behavior. However, Gainor had now the caring and exclusive attention of Pamela, who then began doing all any woman could to ease the problems of Crist’s life. But it did not take long before such efforts were upset by the accumulated previous chaos Gainor had fomented, not to mention the new pitfalls coming down the pike. These latter invariably descending as the aftermath of previous debacle. Which then resulted in Crist having to have more than a drink or two to calm his nerves in order, as he said, to mend his fences, or be able to reflect upon how to avoid having to fix them. However, I may have been the only man on earth to know that he meant no harm to those close to him, and indeed I was myself more than once brought to tears by his heartfelt concern. And I have never found anyone before or since in my life, more compassionate, more consoling or more benignant to those he loved who were in pain. And to me, Gainor from New York communicated.

  “I shall be grateful to hear how Sebastian Dangerfield is faring. I wish you all success with it. It is already, I think, a success but I was speaking more prosaically and referring to the mundane financial aspect.”

  A. K. Donoghue, who found the Spring Street flat for us and who lived in Cambridge, across the Charles River in the eastern environs of Harvard, was a frequent visitor and continued to read the manuscript. He suggested having one of his closest childhood Boston friends, an instructor in English at Harvard, also read the manuscript. The consensus being that I should submit the work to Little Brown and Company, whose office was just up the hill from Charles Street and overlooking the Common. The unlikelihood of a Boston publisher taking on the book still did not overcome the usual fantasies besieging one of one’s massive half-yearly royalties arriving by check in an embossed vellum envelope at one’s Louisburg Square residence, the private messenger respectfully saluting as one’s secretary acknowledged receipt.

  I now dressed in khaki shirt and chino trousers à la Gid Pratt, and not in the white-shirted manner sported by Harvard undergraduates as was decreed I should emulate by Donoghue so as to avoid being taken for a manual worker. The manuscript, which had now become a quite thick and heavy document on foolscap paper, was duly left off at Little Brown and Company, in the entrance hall of this old Boston former town house. This publisher’s sedate address was situated on a corner, the one side of which was a narrow brick paved street further ascending Beacon Hill. It was also near one of Boston’s most socially exclusive clubs, the Somerset, to which Donoghue referred as a place into which no Boston Irish would ever be admitted unless as servants. Being Irish and knowing a bit about this race, having lived in their country, I was glad enough to hear all this colorful news, but also having been raised in New York City I had no idea this nationality had been singled out for such rejection. Which I must confess, I did not at the time think was the most inappropriate policy in the world. In any event, this would be the second time one had deposited this manuscript in its brown paper wrapping at a publisher’s reception desk to await a verdict.

  I had now become quite familiar with the West End’s narrow ghetto streets. And the one or two of which had literary overtones, being named as they were after authors, two of which were the essayist Emerson and the poet Whittier. But it was Blossom Street upon which I would most often walk and which would take me past the sweating, balding pate of the undertaker at work. And it was as if the same contrast and signal difference existed between the funeral parlor’s front office and the embalmer above that was evident in the elegance of the front part of the Massachusetts General Hospital, where limousines often arrived to deposit their hospital patients at its imposing entrance and which contrasted with the hospital’s black morgue back doors, out of which exited the funeral director’s van loaded with the deceased. A scene I would often pause to watch, however, my consciousness of life and death now needing no reminders.

  But there was no route away from Spring Street which was not to lead me to melancholy contemplation or to startling revelations of one sort or another. And coming out one day to the busy main thoroughfare of Cambridge Street, there unexpectedly, under front garden trees and behind an iron fence reminiscent of Dublin, was a library. I joined, and occasionally within its architectural elegance and
under its rather splendid dome, I would go to randomly read anything at all that struck my interest among the newspapers and magazines. Then upon one hot afternoon, looking through the recently returned books, I came upon a volume written about America’s sixty families, who, by virtue of their vast wealth, could be thought to own the United States. And as I was then subsisting on my few paltry dollars a week, I thumbed through this book’s pages, recognizing some of these fabled names, and taking solace that at least there were a handful of folk about somewhere in this land who did not have to overly worry where next month’s rent was coming from. Then suddenly, I came across a name described among others as one few Americans had ever heard of, but was capable of being able to buy and sell Indian maharajas. And as I eagerly read further, there it was, a name I knew. None other than my old friendly adversary and former host in Connecticut, Gid Pratt. And although I had already said it to Valerie that the Pratts could be nothing else but very rich,

  It was

  You know

  Nice

  To hear it

  From somebody else

  20

  ON AUGUST 12, 1952, at 12:52 P.M., a Western Union Cablegram from New York City was received in Boston and was duly delivered early afternoon to 51A Poplar Street. Pasted to the top of the telegram was a legend:

  FOR DISTINCTIVE, SOCIALLY CORRECT