Reviewed in June 2014I’ve been familiar with the title of this book for years but never made an attempt to read it till now. I can’t help wondering what a younger me would have thought of it. Something tells me that Sebastian Dangerfield, the ginger man of the title, would have driven me to some extreme act, like burying the book in a deep hole after the first twenty pages. But if I had done that, I’d have thrown away a collection of curious artefacts. Donleavy's book is like an archeological site of literary Dublin and this review is an attempt at an excavation of the site. You won’t discover much about the plot or the characters here, just a comment on each find I unearthed, at least the ones I was able to identify. So, this way the museyroom, and don’t forget to clean your boots goan out!*Although the terrain of The Ginger Man is strewn with appropriations from other works, their titles are never mentioned and the reader has to do quite a bit of digging to assemble them in a recognisable form. Fortunately, this reader has been getting lots of practice at that activity while tagging similar unattributed artefacts in Joyce’s Finnegans Wake so scraping through the clay of Donleavy's book was easier and more rewarding than it might otherwise have been. The practice of not citing his references is but one of the parallels with Joyce’s work; fragments from all of Joyce’s writing are generously strewn about Donleavy’s worksite. Sebastian Dangerfield not only shares Stephen Daedalus’ initials but he also shares the surname Dangerfield, along with some other unsavory attributes, with the scurrilous villain of Sheridan Le Fanu’s The House by the Churchyard, a nineteenth century tale set in the Chapleizod area of Dublin and which Joyce built into the foundations of Finnegans Wake, also set in Chapleizod. However, the Hill of Howth in the north of the city, is even more central to the historical themes in Finnegans Wake. And where does Donleavy begin his tale? On the Hill of Howth, a great place for the history, as Dangerfield bluntly puts it. He also meditates on the coincidence of contraries, a pet theory of sixteenth century philosopher, Giordano Bruno, which along with his writings on metempsychosis, greatly influenced Joyce in both Ulysses and Finnegans Wake. The Ginger Man opens with talk of tubs, and it’s difficult not to be reminded of Jonathan Swift’s A Tale of a Tub, which Joyce refers to frequently in Finnegans Wake. The Ginger Man ends with Dangerfield eating a mutton kidney exactly as Leopold Bloom is doing on the 16th of June, 1904, when we first meet him in Ulysses. In between there are many other allusions to literary Ireland, almost as if the Irish Tourist Board had commissioned the book as an advertising gimmick. Or not. The narrative is set in the late 1940s, a time when Dublin was home to an entire pub full of literary men, more than one of whom had drinking talents to rival the Ginger Man, men such as Brendan Behan, Flann O'Brien, Patrick Kavanagh and Anthony Cronin. The group used to meet in a pub called McDaid's in the city centre and when they were particularly short of funds, some of them lodged in an infamous basement called the Catacombs. Both places feature in The Ginger Man along with practically every other pub in the Dublin of the period; Guinness and Gold Label whiskey have starring roles too: When I die I want to decompose in a barrel of porter, Dangerfield intones from the bottom of his whiskey glass.There is a semi-biographical feel to this novel which is confirmed by Anthony Cronin in his memoir, Dead As Doornails: A Chronicle Of Life: There were some Americans, ex-service men who had come to Ireland originally to be Trinity students under the G.I. Bill and remained on when its bounty was exhausted, among them J. P. Donleavy, then supposed to be a painter but meditating a big book about Ireland to be called, I seem to remember, ‘Under The Stone'; and Gainor Crist, who was to provide the original for that book, subsequently called The Ginger Man (a curiously transformed and lessened portrait)... Most of this company assembled in McDaid’s every day...and almost every night the entire assemblage moved on to the Catacombs. These and what went on there have been described so often now, in works of apparent fiction like The Ginger Man, or alleged fact such as Ulick O'Connor’s Biography of Brendan Behan. The whole place smelt of damp, decaying plaster and brickwork, that smell of money gone which was once so prevalent in Ireland. Off the corridor leading out of the kitchen were various dark little rooms. Mine had, I think once been a wine-cellar. There was hardly space for a bed in it, and none for anything else except a few bottles and books.Sebastian Dangerfield is a student in Trinity College when we first meet him, busily drinking up his G.I. money; he describes the Catacombs in similar terms to Cronin’s: A smell of damp walls and cavities. A feeling of long corridors and hidden rooms, tunnels in the earth, black pits and wine cellars filled with mouldy mattresses. In these corridors he meets a character called Barney Berry, a thinly disguised but hilarious double for Brendan Behan. Other characters may be based on real life people too but if so the portraits are better disguised. I wondered if Dangerfield’s sidekick Kenneth O’Keefe, another Irish American G.I., was a portrait of Donleavy himself.Among the other curious items found while excavating the site of The Ginger Man were some odd narrative strategies. Who is the narrator? we wonder in the early pages and then it slowly dawns on us that the narrator is in fact the main character; Dangerfield sometimes speaks in the first person and sometimes in the third so that the reader gets nicely confused. The strategy is a little like the spider walk described on page 209 : I've been trying to perfect it for some time. You see, every two steps you bring the right foot across from behind and skip. Enables one to turn around without stopping and go in the opposite direction.Songs and rhymes are threaded through the narrative as in Finnegans Wake, and Donleavy often concludes a chapter with a haiku-type verse, sometimes shaped like its subject:In AlgeriaThere is a townCalled TitThere are lots of religious references and an odd preoccupation with the days of the week: Come down God and settle on my heart on this triangular FridayAnd I’ve known Mondays come on a FridayMuch of the narrative is written in a kind of telegraphic style almost like stage directions but there are more eloquent lines too: Where is the sea high and the wind soft and moist and warm?Or: clusters of men hunched in black overcoats sucking cigarettes, spitting and mean. With tongues of shoes hanging out like dogs' hungry mouths.And this: Wednesday, a grey dreariness general over the city, reminding us of the last lines of Joyce’s The Dead, snow was general all over Ireland..If it sounds like I’m complaining about such appropriation, I’m not. When you’ve read a book without echoes, a book of bare space and rough hewn furniture as I did recently, finding one which is full of rich furnishings from its author’s reading life, is very welcome. Any writer who sets his novel in Dublin city must find it exceedingly difficult to avoid the shadow of the great authors who’ve gone before. Perhaps Donleavy is simply offering homage, not only to Joyce and the others he alludes to, but to the very practice of appropriation.* Finnegans Wake, page 10
In a moment of what I took to be lucidity, I realised that the so-called 'Irish branch' of modernism, based in large part on the interior monologue, is very similar in form to being regaled at the bar by a brilliant and vociferous drunk. Self-deprecating, stubborn, scatalogical, obtuse, perverse and grandstanding. Beckett in spades. The narrative turns in on itself, runs out of steam, picks up again, perhaps when the next round of drinks gets in. It plays hard-and-fast with its own conventions and yours, revelling in its carefree lack of what we might term grounding. It is a flight of fancy, intellectual and earthy, gallows humour to the fore.The Ginger Man makes liberal use of it, while flitting between 1st and 3rd person. We watch Sebastian Dangerfield, then we get to "be" him for a while, then we watch him again in the aftermath of whatever transgression came last. This promiscuous narration, maddening for some, allows Donleavy to watch his character, based on a fellow student from Trinity, while also letting his imagination come to us "first-hand". The effect is to give poetry to thuggery, to be intimate and also shine a queasy light on the dirty doings of a cad.Many people comment on the fact they hate Dangerfield and go so far as to question the need for a character to be "likeable". But in fact, the beauty of The Ginger Man is that this split perspective allows Donleavy to revel and judge at once. Sebastian Dangerfield is thus both appealing and repellent. We can imagine how he might be great company and how we might shake our heads at his exploits. In truth, Dangerfield is all about fear: he's frightened of the war, of his family, of the university and the other students, of responsibility, of his own wife, of the need to be a father, indeed of the need to meet any expectations at all. He thus resorts to drink and dropping out, chasing working-class girls with the last vestiges of his supposedly well-heeled future. Donleavy knows what he is doing: he even dresses Dangerfield in a girl's blouse.I started reading The Ginger Man when I was at school, but fitfully, distractedly, unable to "get" the flow. Some parts I remember indelibly. Others I know I never got to, whatever I might have thought. It makes sense now, coming back to it all these years later, to draw something of a line from Henry Miller, passing through Beckett to Donleavy to Hunter S. Thompson. Irish-American lineage indeed. The wild abandon of language married to wild abandon, full stop. The Ginger Man does occasionally drag, it's true, but then comes a zinger of a piece of a dialogue or a brilliant description to slap you across the face and force you back in. As a first novel it is indeed extraordinarily sure-handed, and its estimated 45 million sales (and counting) are testimony to the ability of this wilfully self-obsessed navel-gazing to reach into a million hearts and ears.Donleavy, still alive as I write and nearing 90, living 'like a pauper' (says a piece in the Independent from 2010) in a picturesque but shambolic pile in Ireland, wrote other successful novels and would dearly love to see The Ginger Man made into a film. Indeed, Johnny Depp has been circling around it fruitlessly for a decade. Whether it happens or not, I have a feeling that in the same way that Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas couldn't translate its manic charms successfully to celluloid, The Ginger Man, in which the poetry is as vital as, indeed more vital than, the hi-jinks, would have a similar problem. Because while Donleavy gets to have his cake and eat it too, giving his fearful drunk context and flights of rhapsody, the film would just give us a drunk, hectoring and sweet talking by turns, prowling like a pussycat with pretensions around the lower reaches of the Dublin night.The ending of the novel is truly haunting. Sebastian Dangerfield's self-loathing has reached its zenith, externalised into a beating of the good-heartedly sensual girl who loves him because she has found work as a model/actress. He is wandering across a London bridge, probably the Albert Bridge, remembering the pounding of hooves in his head made by "horses on a country road...running out to death" with their "eyes... mad and teeth out". Plenty could draw further conclusions than the paralysis of fear, heading on into schizophrenia and the like. Or simply alcoholism. Either way, rather than simply recoil at the doings of a cad, we are given a brief sober moment of personal pain, such as early morning walks across London bridges when the city feels empty are wont to give. It's a stark note that places the "wild / Ginger Man" in a perspective that recolours the whole novel and its flights of double-edged poetic glee.
Do You like book The Ginger Man (2001)?
Reading others reviews of this book that I first found 20 years ago and have read many times since I am amazed at the disgust people have for the main character. He is a character, a fictional character, a vehicle for some fine writing and wonderful senseless fun by a very young author who had just been in a war. When I first read this book I was delighted by the writing, the way it bounces along regardless of proper writing style of the time. Donleavy is writing melodies here; guttural, colloquial and then rising to the high minded, poetry on top of prose. It was dazzling at the time I first read it and I suspect it still would be for me. I've read many if not all of his books but none ever matched the sort of careful anarchy of this thing. I also recognize what it is and take it for that, Donleavy wasn't trying to be profound or serious here, he was letting off steam and letting his fingers do the dance that was playing in his head. I wouldn't try and compare him to any other writers because, in this book he was a complete individual. The conflicted reviews, the complete disgust and utter contempt that Dangerfield is creating in so many readers here, this many years after he was created attests to the power of the writers words.
—J. McMahon
I became aware of this book after recently reading a Hunter S. Thompson biography, wherein it describes how Hunter discovered the book in New York, and did his best to imitate Dangerfield's lifestyle. After reading the Ginger Man it became apparent that Hunter had at last found a hard act to follow in terms of womanising, alcohol abuse and empty promises. Apparently the Ginger Man was turned down by something like 40 publishers before finding it's way to the mainly pornographic publishers Olympia Press in Paris. Despite turning out mostly smut, Olympia owner Maurice Girodias also published some early works by the likes of Samuel Beckett, William Burroughs, Henry Miller and Jean Genet amongst other rising literary talents of the time. I mention the publication as it's interesting to note that Donleavy entered into 20 plus years of litigation with the publishing house. He eventually won the case and subsequently owns Olympia Press. But anyway, the book. It is, for better or worse, very real. The "hero" Sebastian Dangerfield is a reluctant family man and a reluctant student of law. He just doesn't care about the things which we assume he should care about. He is constantly in a state of scheming his way into the next free drink, or getting into the knickers of an easily led girl. He has no morals, nor does he feel that he should have. He is banking on an inherited wealth which will be his once his sick father dies. The style of the book is modern for the time of it's writing. Donleavy uses both the first person narrative and the third person narrative to illustrate his main character. This can be confusing at first, but I found that after a few chapters, it adds to the urgency/pace (first person) and the backgrounds (third person) as he switches between the two different types of narration. This could not be achieved by sticking to either one of the disciplines. The plot is quite simple, as a character novel should be. The backdrop is Dublin and then later London. Both are described well. The dialogue is at times simply brilliant. One of the few books where you find yourself laughing aloud, and re-reading passages in an attempt to recall lines and slip them into a conversation at some point in the future. It is so easy to see why this book has since been turned into a stage production. I would imagine that the theater would be in fits of giggles. I would recommend this book to anyone who is interested in the development of modern literature. And for that matter anyone with an open mind and a good sense of humour. It is in many ways one of the best novels of the 20th century
—James Newman
“She went down the steps. Paused, turned, smiled. Key. Green door. Few seconds. A light goes on. Shadow moves across the window. Hers. What sweet stuff, sweeter than all the roses. Come down God and settle in my heart on this triangular Friday.”While reading Ginger Man I was literally mesmerised by its magically artistic language – it has never occurred to me that the words could be so kinematic. And also it was my first black humour trip. And it was the book that made me fall in love with postmodernism for good.“Someday you’ll show up when I’m back where I belong in this world. When I have what I ought to have. My due. And when you do. My gamekeepers will drive you out and away for good. Out. Away. Out.” A life of every incorrigible dreamer is a riot – he never ceases to revolt against reality.
—Vit Babenco
