A friendly smile for The Ginger Man
ASMALL but significant piece of old Ireland faded away last week when JP Donleavy, author of ‘The Ginger Man’, passed on to his final reward. He met me less than a year ago, dressed in Harris tweed jacket, cavalry twill pants and highly polished brogues – complete with ramrod straight back and hearty handshake. Having written one of the world’s most acclaimed novels rested easy on his shoulders. However, he was far more enthusiastic talking about life on the 200 acres of farmland which surrounds his 16th-century home, Levington Hall, on the outskirts of Mullingar. “It was the land that brought me here 40 years ago, and so it is the land and its bounty that’s kept me all these years.” That morning he’d been replacing six-foot fencing posts along his boundary – not bad for 90, I thought. When Donleavy took time out from his Trinity College lectures in the 1950s to pen a debut novel, the transplanted New Yorker had little idea just how much this literary flight of fancy would change his life. Over its 60-year journey, the exploits of its outrageous anti-hero, Sebastian Dangerfield, have prompted gasps of horror and hilarity in equal measure across the world, selling 45 million copies in 20 languages.
“One is pleased that the book has remained popular for so long, and that it continues to be spoken about,” he said in his trademark soft voice. Indeed, the literary birth of that seminal text demanded more than one midwife. “I had almost finished the book when Brendan Behan came unannounced to stay at my flat in Dublin, an individual whose chaotic personal life was so outweighed by his charm it was impossible to refuse him.”
While Donleavy attended lectures, the ‘Quare Fella’ proceeded to read that earliest draft of ‘The Ginger Man’. “Brendan rather cheekily made a good number of editorial suggestions of his own on the margins. Infuriatingly, all of them made perfect sense, and I ended up using every one.”
In a Dublin where barefoot street urchins begged pennies amid a grey all-pervasive poverty, Donleavy’s existence as a monied Yank inspired many of those halcyon episodes from whence the iconic Dangerfield would eventually emerge. “In those days poor souls would walk many miles in the vain hope of receiving a few sausages that someone might give them,” he recalled. “Whereas my life was extraordinarily affluent on a GI Bill allowance.”
Behind the walls of Trinity, a world of gracious ease unfolded for the chosen few at £18 for an entire quarter term, including a full-time college servant, daily dinner in the Commons, plus all utilities. “We lived in an extraordinary world. The Dublin of those days never leaves my mind.”
Donleavy still travelled to Trinity and the streets of his youth right to the end. “Much has changed, of course, but happily, much remains the same,” he smiled. “I’ll generally know when someone who’s read ‘The Ginger Man’ recognises me, they always break into a smile as they walk past.” A fitting epitaph for a special man.