The History of the Ginger Man: An Autobiography Read online

  Stumbling forward, I had now reached and grasped the chain encircling the flat green velvet grass of the quad. As my knees buckled, I made an extreme effort to sound my last gasp loud enough so that it could convincingly be heard. My portrayal of imminent collapse must have finally persuaded them of my plight, and the two quickened their pace to my aid.

  “Thank you, thank you, I do believe I may be having a heart attack.”

  Now there were frowns rather than smiles on their faces as rain began to fall and they supported me under the arms out of New Square and across the cobbles of Front Square to the porter’s lodge at the front gates. Dying students were not a too common occurrence as were drunken ones, but both could be treated in the same fashion, and a taxi to take me away was called. Of the two assisting gentlemen, one hailed from the north of Ireland and played college rugby and in his later professional life became a member of the British parliament. It was many years afterward when I again heard his chuckling voice just behind me as I climbed the steps of Sotheby’s auction house in London’s Bond Street.

  “I say there, Donleavy, do you need any help.”

  But back upon this night and dispatched in a taxi to a Trinity College-affiliated hospital, I collected Valerie from the bed-sitter so that she could at least hear of my last wishes and the psalms to be selected sung at my obsequies. I was received staggering into the accident room, empty at the time, where the young interning doctor from Trinity’s medical school and whose face I knew by sight, placed a stethoscope all over my chest. He tapped and listened and listened again. He even made me open my mouth and go “ahhha.” His exhaustive examination concluded, he frowned and pronounced, “Quite frankly, there may be something wrong, but I can’t find it. All I find is that you may be the best physical specimen I have ever examined. Your heart, as far as I am concerned, is in splendid condition.”

  Of course I had been on occasion able to run a timed practice mile in four minutes and twenty seconds. However, upon this eventful night, I still wasn’t entirely convinced that I was in monumentally splendid health, but certainly I was now able to put one foot in front of the other and cautiously make my way out into the world again with the thought that my heart would hold out that little bit longer. With a bemused Valerie, I returned to the bed-sitter, and from this constricted lodgings was ready to do untold battle in the momentous struggle I envisioned was ahead that would ensure I would escape such rooms forever. Meanwhile, news of my collapse and impending death was already all over the college and a concerned solicitous get-well-soon letter was awaiting me as I arrived back at my rooms which had been sent by my tutor, the eminent Greek scholar William Bedell Stanford, whom I’m sure could have encapsulated my plight in an appropriate Hellenic homily. For he, years later upon being interviewed, contradicted nearly all opinions about me. And was quoted as saying, “I know he may have had a reputation of some obstreperous nature.

  “However,

  I found him

  The most quietly polite

  And retiring

  Of young

  Gentlemen”

  6

  HAVING NOW REARED UP in angered horror that the fate of a claustrophobic bed-sitting-room might ever be mine, I informed Valerie of our plight and that we must immediately garner and gather together all our assets, consisting mostly of the wedding present checks and including the modest money of hers still held in the National Provincial Bank of Ilkley, and with such funds quickly acquire land and a roof we owned over our heads. This plan did not go down well, and on this now sunny, breezy day, as we crossed Butt Bridge over the Liffey River and walked along the quay, Valerie said she wanted to keep her independence. I thought, Holy cow, what the hell is this. Am I to take all the fighting risks in life while the woman I’m married to sits on a small but reassuring amount of security.

  The raging silence this produced in me over a period of the next three hours moving around Dublin was total. I was astonished at this lack of confidence in me, although one had to admit it was reasonable enough considering that only the night before I was reeling to doom as one of the world’s vanquished. But as my silence continued and I let it be known her independence from now on was hers to pursue, Valerie relented and said she would throw her financial lot in with mine.

  Although I could through impatience be incautious with money, I was not a squanderer or a spendthrift, having long regarded money as a daily instrument to be used rather than something to remain as security to be relied upon for the future. And one used this tool unhesitatingly if it meant providing some basic practical need to accomplish an immediate goal. And that is how I came to occupy a tiny bit of ground near Kilcoole which dotted that isolated, strange, bereft twelve-square-mile stretch of bottomland along the Wicklow coast of Ireland.

  A college pal who’d also sent me the money totally unexpectedly with which I’d bought Valerie’s wedding ring, had, with his inheritance, been looking at farming properties to buy, and before I went to Ilkley I accompanied him one day when he went to view a small holding near Kilcoole of just under four acres and selling for about three hundred and fifty pounds. Upon seeing the property, the friend seemed to disdain it. Certainly it was nothing resembling or anywhere near as grand as his own family farm where he had been raised. It is possible too that my pal, who could be suicidally generous, had become short of money, having already spent much entertaining friends in wining, dining and drinking, which he did with some lavishness. And on one occasion taking an entire party, including Brendan Behan, Michael Heron and Gainor Crist to Paris. The last gentleman in very typical fashion taking pleasure in introducing his host to a blind man he had in tow atop the Eiffel Tower.

  Valerie seated outside my studio with one of her favorite cats. Never having had a tool other than a golf club or squash racket to hand before, the window above Valerie was my first ever effort to be an architect and builder.

  At the time of his affluence, I said to my friend not to expect me to drink or contribute to his spending his legacy, which I thought ought solely to go to buy himself and his then young family somewhere to live. However, while the money lasted, my friend in the aristocratically abandoned way of an Irish chieftain, spent on. And it was I who bought this small parcel of land not too far from the sea, where at least its couple of sheds and tumbledown cottage could become somewhere under which one’s head might shelter and somewhere where one could place one’s feet on soil to call one’s own.

  The purchase at Kilcoole was my first major transaction in life, and was in itself a financial battle. I made an offer of half the asking price and was surprised not to be turned away. Unbeknownst to me, there had been a deposit paid on a previous uncompleted sale, which would be forfeited by the original attempted purchaser when the property was finally sold. As I clung to my offer and the vendor refused to sell, the small local estate agent in the nearby town of Greystones seemed quite astonished at my refusing to even meet the vendor halfway and, as they did in Ireland, split the difference. Finally, as I stood talking to the agent over the telephone from the Grand Hotel in Greystones, in a last effort, that gentleman said with a quality of sincerity I recognized as used only when truth was being told,

  “Mr. Donleavy, in splitting the difference at this stage and at this price, please believe me when I say you’re getting a genuine bargain.”

  The estate agent’s voice was so plaintive that in turn in finally agreeing to the price and purchase, I tried to sound like a normal, reasonable human being. Which clearly I no longer was and never would be again. But I had at least taken my first little step toward squiredom. By entering into a caretaker’s agreement, I took immediate possession the moment the contract was signed and the check paid. And would soon acquire the wisdom that you can still stay damn poor owning your own land.

  Having purchased an axe and bucket, Valerie and I attending upon my rooms at Trinity collected some college chattels and, with my disconcerted college servant, Noctor, carrying a tin trunk and a mattress and some cr
ockery, and on this thankfully unrainy day, we exited the north side gate of Trinity where the bus to Kilcoole stopped just a few yards away. Noctor, who had been a corporal in the British Army, clicked his heels and gave a smart salute as I departed. And if I didn’t at that time salute back, I do now with a little of the same sadness I felt then to know that he would no longer be available to rouse me awake in the mornings or lay out a spot of breakfast or administer in his white coat at teatime.

  The village of Kilcoole near the cottage and piece of land I’d bought in order to begin my struggle in the world of art and to which I came with my mattress from my college rooms, together with a saucepan, pail and axe, and was transported from the bus stop by the local butcher’s mule and cart the mile or so to my new country abode.

  The bus route to Kilcoole went past Foxrock, a community of your bigger suburban homes, and on through the main streets of the seaside town of Bray and the smaller once fishing village of Greystones. With its large leafy gardens surrounding houses of the Burnaby Estate, Greystones was a most refined Protestant enclave on this polite bit of rocky coast. In comparison, the village of Kilcoole, four miles farther on, Valerie thought ugly and unfriendly. As we arrived, little life was evident, reminding one of a midwestern American town deserted by the populace before a gunfight. Upon inquiry at the tiny post office, the postmistress referred us to her son, who ran a small butcher shop just up the hill. Who agreed to transport our luggage and belongings in his van along the narrow, rutted dirt road which led past a cemetery where a vampire was said to be buried. Then, in an abrupt turn toward the sea and a half mile along an overgrown lane, one finally came to this isolated small holding, where, to keep surviving, I intended to put brush to canvas and occasionally typewriter keys to paper.

  Although under gray skies this area could be melancholic, it also had a strange romantic beauty, which, in contemplating, made the hours just vanish away. Inland to the west, and seen starkly with each day’s setting sun, rose the peaks of the greater and lesser Sugarloaf Mountains. Along the “breeches,” as part of this marshy lowland bordering the Irish Sea was known, birds from all over Europe came to stop and forage. And as one cast an eye across the vast bleakness, it could shrivel the heart with loneliness. Even the buildings stood somewhat haunted, and bereft, and you’d feel abandoned and much lost as the sound of the long-beaked curlew bird’s whistle would pass overhead in the evening grayness.

  Out of two small rooms I soon bare-handedly made one by tearing down a partition. We spent the first few nights sleeping with the mattress on the floor. Until unhinging a door, I propped it on bricks and made a bed. With a broken edge of a knife, I cut and carved an ash sapling to use as a handle in an old rusted shovel found in a hedgerow. And dug a pool in the tiny nearby stream from which to fetch buckets of water. As I woke by dawn and had to get four miles to Greystones to catch a train to Dublin, one raged at the rain and beat the fists on the hood of the small van I’d bought which became progressively more difficult to start. And having to wait till the mailman came to help give me a push. Till finally it led to my missing more and more of my classes at Trinity. As I now seriously was faced with the idea of becoming a full-time painter and hoping somehow to make a living.

  Valerie, whose habit it was to be scrupulously clean, cleaned everywhere. But for a while, itching up the legs, we thought we had fleas and perhaps we did. I’d even consulted with my zoology professor, the eminent J. Bronte Gatenby, and learned that although we could indeed be infested with Aphaniptera, we at least had not to worry about bedbugs, as it was too damp for them to survive in Ireland. However, there were other more hypochondriacal desperations to worry about. Except briefly during a school vacation, I had never worked with my hands before. And now with a slight insanity, I was throughout the day attacking hedgerows, digging a garden and risking my neck to put fallen slates back on the roof. I’d even tackled mending the rutted lane, ordering a load of gravel, which, when dumped, ended up blocking my van. And left me furiously trying to shift it into potholes. I was no longer having heart attacks but was instead now having strokes. One of which seemed to strike me like a lightning bolt and retired me to bed. The doctor summoned, reassured me my brain was not yet rupturing its blood vessels. And again I was pronounced a superfit specimen and in no time I was bouncing out of bed and spreading gravel on the lane again.

  Cowering nights in front of a sparse fire, we worried about the rumors of Russian communist hordes sweeping across Europe to enslave us. And we were bound to be among the first victims, surrounded as we were by the silent fields and bogs. But I had more immediate worries and my most furious battle then was just beginning. Although still at Trinity and receiving letters of complaint from the junior dean for parking my red van outside my rooms, I had now given at the Dublin Painters Gallery on St. Stephen’s Green three exhibitions. These had sold well enough to make me at least hope of making ends meet. And the exhibitions had also allowed me an early taste of fame if not fortune. My first fan letter came from the local Protestant vicar in the nearby hamlet of Delgany who extended words of encouragement and had objected to a harsh review of my pictures in the Irish Times. Also, Ireland’s then most esteemed philosopher Arland Ussher wrote to the same newspaper to defend me. And although further kind encouraging words were to be found here and there, it was quickly dawning on me that Ireland, with its small inbred population of highly active begrudgers, was no place to expect to survive long enough to become rich and celebrated, as I innocently enough planned to do. Although I was not yet in an unmitigated hurry, there was no doubt about the realization clearly essential to my longevity, that it was to larger fields abroad that one must go.

  With Valerie I expectantly set off on a trip to London, lugging my watercolors in a loose folder. On my very first call, I went to one of the best-known galleries, the Redfern in Cork Street. I was courteously invited down into the basement part of the gallery to lay my pictures out on the floor. The man, a few years older than myself, who agreed to look at my pictures, was perfectly polite and, as he leisurely contemplated some of them, actually asked me to slow down, as I was paging through my watercolors and drawings too fast. He said he regarded them as original, colorful and decorative and that I was obviously a painter of verve and talent, but that he could do nothing for me. But could do something if I were as famous as that gentleman, a novelist H. E. Bates, who was at that moment then looking at pictures in the gallery. Having my talents, albeit only relatively recently awakened as they were in the painting field, recognized and so confidently pronounced upon, and then to be told that without being famous, nothing could be done, enraged me.

  In my studio at Kilcoole, a commendable painting I’d done of Notre Dame, Paris, hanging on the wall. I sit at the makeshift desk and stool I’d built in order to write THE GINGER MAN, the manuscript pages of which are by the typewriter, and where I also found lying the manuscript copy of BORSTAL BOY, which Behan was writing at the time he came as an uninvited guest.

  Already having discovered that authorship could find you incarcerated indoors in the same place for unconscionable lengths of time, this was my first effort to attempt to combine some pleasure with the pain of writing as I took to my newly created front lawn at Kilcoole.

  Valerie, my compliant and so far patient and tolerant wife, whose heart must have mostly been sinking at my efforts to smash upward in the world, was waiting above in the gallery and was, I think, surprised at my white-faced anger. But I knew what fame was, having at least recently tasted it, albeit in the small confines of Dublin city. To me it simply consisted of three people, all of whom had heard of your name and were distracted enough by the knowledge to listen to what you were saying for two and sometimes even three minutes. As we left the gallery and reached the southwest corner of Cork Street and Burlington Gardens, I stopped in my tracks. Shaking my fist, I announced to the street that, goddamnit, seeing as I was contemplating it anyway, I would write a book that no one could stop and would make my name
known in every nook and cranny all over the world. Quite a lot to declare on one of London’s better streetcorners, where your more dignified and prosperous Londoner is wont to pass, and whose practiced indifference was supreme. And which of course could tend to leave you even angrier than you were in the first place.

  We left London and took that long train and bumpy boat ride back to our small holding, where I had now seemed to have settled. And as spring approached summer in this year of 1951, I went to sit for ten stubborn days at the northern end of the sun porch I’d built on the southwest side of the cottage, and there on a makeshift stool and rickety makeshift table, I began to write The Ginger Man. This work long cogitating and now provoked into sooner existence by the rejection of my watercolors in what seemed that more sophisticated world out beyond Ireland but for which one now held only supreme contempt. From the reasty smell arising from next to where I now wrote, I had also ample time to contemplate the attempt I’d made at installing a drain in the concrete sun porch floor which emptied nowhere. Resolutely and stubbornly forcing word after word out of my brain, I slowly touch-typed out nearly illegible phrases from a faint typewriter ribbon. Opening words which have till now never seen the light of print and words which, certainly seem to indicate the author’s rage was still simmering.

  Several things mattered being alive in the agricultural, paupered, myth drugged greenery that is Ireland. These things are not love, faith or joy. These things are fire, food and booze. It is a land which best demonstrates the ingredients upon which the world fosters itself and the world fosters itself on manure. It is not a country where the stranger is killed, but where fathers, mothers, sisters, brothers and neighbours, live from day to wet day in fear of poison, the gun or the hook. Friendship is on the lips but not in the heart. Death is a visitant greeted with a shrewd glee, for another greedy mouth is dead and a fiddle plays a tune across the fairy rings and mushrooms fatten in the warm September rain.