Scandalous letters that became a classic tale
Wild tales of Behan, Susannah York, Richard Harris... and a writer’s bawdy times in Dublin
IF you pause to envision the quintessential ‘wild Irishman’, who springs most immediately to mind? Brendan Behan perhaps, at the height of his loquacious powers, eloquently expounding upon all things Celtic.
Or maybe you’ll conjure up Richard Harris and Peter O’Toole in their pomp, effortlessly commanding awestruck attention on stage and film set while simultaneously juggling personal lives as chaotic as they were boisterously hilarious. And yet, to the world at large, the individual most famously representing that legendary untamed and tempestuous Irish spirit was a work of fiction – The Ginger Man.
Published in June 1955, and written by JP Donleavy, a young American transferred to Trinity College on a US Army GI Bill grant to study Natural Sciences, the book went on to sell up to 60million copies and become what one reviewer described as ‘a classic impossible to categorise’.
Discovering a city where wealth and poverty co-existed in a peculiar Celtic bohemianism, Donleavy – known to his friends as Mike – found himself lured away from the college lecture halls and into the bars and illicit drinking dens where an entirely unexpected education unfolded.
Charting the extreme exploits of its protagonist, American law student Sebastian Balfe Dangerfield, The Ginger Man trawls a bawdy and ribald trail of spontaneous fornication and farcical circumstance set around deeper themes of melancholic human absurdity.
Dangerfield was based on Gainor Crist, a hard-drinking rogue of a man with an upper-crust accent perfect for establishing multiple lines of credit, especially in bars around Dublin.
‘But Jesus, when you don’t have any money, the problem is food,’ he declares at one point. “Then when you have money, it’s sex. When you have both it’s health, you worry about getting a rupture or something.’ Another character in the book, Kenneth O’Keefe, was also inspired by a Trinity colleague, AK Donoghue.
DONLEAVY, who died last September, aged 91, maintained an ongoing correspondence with both Crist and Donoghue amongst others – much of which will be published next month by Lilliput Press. The Ginger Man Letters showcases for the first time 250 of Donleavy’s most intimate letters, throwing light on the composition, publication and afterlife of the famous book. Spanning the late 1940s to the early 1980s, the letters chronicle the author’s often scandalous exchanges with Crist and Donoghue, while also venturing into a wider world of well-known personalities from that era.
‘The letters reveal Mike’s vulnerability, the careful carapace of his Irish-American personality,’ says Lilliput Press publisher Antony Farrell. ‘Personally I knew him as a neighbour in Westmeath when he moved there, and as a fledgling publisher. I was also a friend of his children, Karen and Philip – we are all now in our mid-60s.
‘I met Mike frequently over the years and liked him very much. For all his patent narcissism common to many artists – he was the embodiment of a “fear ann féin”, as they say in Irish – “a man himself”. He was stoical, observant, humorous and capable of self-deprecation – aslant of the universe.’
Bill Dunn, who edited The Ginger Man Letters, describes himself as ‘an ink-stained wretch in a previous life and a long-standing fan and collector of JP Donleavy, whom I always wanted to meet.’
He got the chance in 1990, when he was commissioned to interview the author for USA Today. ‘What was to have been a 45-minute interview wound up with my spending the entire day with him. We hit it off. Over time Mike Donleavy and I became good friends.’
Having written extensively about publishing, authors and book collecting, Dunn has authored six books and is the archivist of the Donleavy papers.
While universities and national libraries have long been interested in acquiring the Donleavy archive, in 2006 the author permitted Dunn to research and write a detailed inventory of his voluminous archive of manuscripts, scripts, notebooks, ephemera and letters.
‘In my research,’ he says, ‘I read his correspondence with Gainor Crist and AK Donoghue, who were the inspirations for the characters of Dangerfield and O’Keefe.
‘I realised that the letters combine to create a compelling true story, told in three distinct voices, that reads like Donleavy fiction – alternatively dramatic and hilarious, reflective then brawling, but always revealing of these colourful individuals, the special time and place they shared and what came after as they ventured into the wider world.’
Popping up in the letters are some of the biggest names of their time: Brendan Behan, who suggested refinements to the original Ginger Man script; James Hillman, a fellow Trinity student who became a world-famous psychoanalyst; satirist Willie Donaldson; publishers Maurice Girodias and Seymour Lawrence; actors Richard Harris, Susannah York and Susan Hampshire; and legendary Hollywood mogul, Sam Spiegel.
‘The letters also include communications with the rightful king of Wales and other titled folk, as well as the untitled and low-down. It’s an improbable cast of supporting players,’ Dunn adds.
The book is illustrated by a number of period photos, many of them never before published, particularly the cover image featuring a young and handsome Donleavy.
‘It captures Mike at the very beginning, at his cottage in Kilcoole, circa 1951, at the desk he made from scrap lumber, where he began writing the manuscript that would become The Ginger Man.
‘Note that the table is strewn with loose papers – I like to think they’re letters from Crist and Donoghue and maybe some early pages of the work in progress.’
IT is further complemented with a moving afterword by Gainor Crist’s daughter, Mariana, whose reminiscences include being babysat by Brendan Behan on a few occasions: ‘It made me the only threeyear-old permitted into the bars of Dublin.’
In a reminiscence that is insightful and funny as well as touching and emotional, she presents the real man behind the fictional character whose exploits sold 60million copies. ‘As a father, I think, Gainor was wonderful too, in his way. I always felt loved and taken notice of.’
Lilliput Press will publish Donleavy’s final novel, A Letter Marked Personal, in the spring of 2019. Set in New York, it relates the interior monologue of 49-yearold Nathan Langriesh Johnson, the founder of a successful lingerie company who ‘had reached an age when he could take solace from the fact that he no longer had the whole wilderness of his life ahead to worry about’.
For Bill Dunn, Donleavy’s literary impact will continue to be important: ‘He always did things his way, and the battles he fought and won have benefited not only his readers around the world, but also younger writers who don’t have to fight the battles he fought for freedom of expression and against censorship.’
The Ginger Man Letters, will be published next month by Lilliput Press