I HAD NOW THEATRICALLY DRAMATIZED The Ginger Man. And a gentleman, John Gibson, a BBC producer, was interested to stage it. Gibson was a romantic enthusiast, wanting to see alive these new and brave words that might be spoken and performed on stage as had been John Osborne’s. And I now heard more of a real and living Samuel Beckett, who was visiting London. The man with the world’s most kindly eye and of whose existence I first became aware down in the Dublin Catacombs. Gibson and Beckett had become great friends, and Gibson spoke in glowing terms of this Irish person from Paris as a man who was honest and true. And Gibson, enamored of matters Irish, led to our occasionally celebrating together in the various pubs located around Broadcasting House. One afternoon of which was to lead to an evening both of us would regret.
It was upon a night following closing time in a pub, the George, near the BBC, and we were on our way home down Great Portland Street. Singing my latest lyrics as we went. Gibson, passing a doorway, accidentally tripped over some milk bottles and in so kicking one, it was sent breaking into the roadway. There were a group of good British citizens on the opposite pavement who remonstrated with the pair of us, and Gibson, who in effect was innocent of any vandalism, took exception with words quickly becoming heated and the group crossed the street. More angry words ensued. We of course, equally inspired as good citizens, suddenly found we were having to fend off these gentlemen also inspired to doing their duty as responsible Londoners, who had, following our exchange of rude words, rightly accosted us to press their objections.
When a fight began, a car-starting handle from some other pedestrian landed across the back of Gibson’s head, who indeed was not to be trifled with in this way. As the fists flew, my own were extremely busy as I found myself confronting two and three faces at a time. Our opponents indeed were formidable enough. One gentleman with whom I was exchanging blows seemed to be made of steel. Then I saw Gibson’s fist pass over my shoulder, which ended the affray and the group were dispersed. But the police, summoned, had already arrived. As Gibson and I appeared unscathed, we were arrested and charged with actual bodily harm. Taken to Savile Row police station, up at the less exalted end of that famous tailoring street, one was sat at a desk, and particulars were taken, including the fact that John Gibson was a BBC producer.
There was indeed a note of strange grimness felt as a cell door clanked after me and I found I was back again in prison for the first time since naval days. The hospitable police brought one a cup of tea. Then checking on the address I had given, I was released with the undertaking to appear that very next morning at Bow Street magistrates court. I had a guest staying in Fulham. None other than the indomitable Arthur Kenneth Donoghue, who had nearly fainted in his tracks in Boston the three years previously when I said I was going to abandon The Ginger Man. And here he was now close at hand, suffering new and different panics in his own life and viewing my suspicious behavior with suspicion as I gulped back coffee and disappeared out my door and up Broughton Road that early morn.
I could sense John Gibson, as we met in Bow Street, was an extremely worried man. Married to an elegant and beautiful French wife of a prominent family and not a reviled banned author like myself, he was put in the most invidious position. I said that I would do and plead anything that he wished in order to soften this matter in any way I could, since publicity of this nature I knew would damage him in bringing ridicule and contempt down upon the good name of the BBC. For he had rushed to my rescue when I might have needed it. He was too, like his good friend Samuel Beckett, full of a strange love and glorious devotion to the theater. Advised to plead guilty by detectives, as this would lead to a small fine and an undertaking to keep the peace, we appeared before a Judge Robey, whose father had been famed in English theater as a distinguished music hall artist. It was in fact duly the case. We were let off as lightly as possible. Gibson and I had each to forfeit ten pounds. But of course news of our affray was promptly plastered over the newspapers and we were sued for damages by our adversaries.
And now, along with the unpleasant wagging finger of the more smug English raised against us, I was to find in this enormous city of London, that it was a small world indeed. Gibson’s wife, a lady of considerable influence, had to find a lawyer to represent him in his defense in the matter of being sued for damages. And as momentous coincidence would have it, who do you think would be recommended and chosen. None other than the highly regarded and good solicitors of Rubinstein and Nash. And so came the fateful month of June in this year of 1957, and the specter loomed again of that arch-enemy, Monsieur Maurice Girodias. A letter clanking in through the letter slot at Broughton Road.
GERALD SAMUELS & SHINE
40 GOODGE STREET
LONDON WI
18th June 1957
J. P. Donleavy Esq.,
40A Broughton Road,
London, SW6.
Dear Sir,
Re: The Ginger Man
The solicitors for Girodias have issued a Writ in connection with the above and wish to know whether we have instructions to accept service thereon.
Kindly let us hear from you within the next day or so.
Yours faithfully,
Gerald Samuels and Shine
It was to be from this day forward that one would quietly shrink back from all bonhomie but the most heartfelt and needworthy. To be ever ready and cautious. To write no word that might upon being sent out from one’s pen, come back to bite one. And Neville Armstrong now voiced an opinion of Girodias: “Mike, he’s tough.”
The first formal draft page of THE GINGER MAN with my earliest struggles to also find a title. Having written the first one hundred and forty pages, this and the earlier pages were returned to and over the months were systematically cut down to the starker words which were finally chosen to begin THE GINGER MAN.
And I was now finding that such as Neville Armstrong as a fighter was even tougher. We would need our resilience. As Girodias was to discover more than any of us that he was going to need his. However, in my foreboding, now I found my resistance hardening. Monies for the first time were forthcoming for litigation. It was too, now that the fame of The Ginger Man had spread to other climes and countries. Publishers in America were presently making louder and bigger offers for The Ginger Man. But sad tidings too were arriving. My father’s life in the Bronx was coming to a close. I was so informed by my mother by telephone, where I received the prearranged call at Murray Sayle’s flat at 44 Palace Gardens Terrace. Following which, on this warm, beamingly sunny day, I walked in some despair to Holland Park, where Philip, Karen and Valerie were parked on the grass. And I realized that at least I had a little surviving family left.
My father died the end of September. But not without holding and reading a copy of the English edition of The Ginger Man in his hands. Then, as it had done during those grim days in America, my heart cried out for the landscape of Ireland. To free oneself to its soft, moist cleanliness and not always balmy breezes. I spotted an ad in a Sunday paper for a house to rent in the west. And the four of us packed up the end of October and crossing by boat, landed in Dublin to take the train through Mullingar to Galway. Met by our kindly landlord, who seemed inordinately solicitous, we were entertained to a meal at the Great Southern Hotel before heading in darkness farther west in his car over the bleak landscape through a gale and driving rain. Past the miles of black shiny lakes and heathery deserted hills. It seemed like we were going to the very end of the earth. And we were. To a large isolated Georgian mansion sitting on its lonely hillside. A storm blowing in from the Atlantic, shutters rattling and rain splattering the windowpanes. Philip and Karen put to bed in the great dark, cold rooms. As one lay attempting to sleep, I had to wonder had I now done the worst thing in all my life. Stranded from everywhere in the all-pervading damp chill I had first known at Trinity College. But morning came. Along with some sun streaming in the windows. Philip and Karen jumping from bed to bed in their room, with their noise and laughter of life rescuing me with hope, which flooded back into one’s soul.
It was out in this vast isolation that George Smith of A Singular Man was born. In being able to see the postman on a distant hillside and still two hours away, I was also able to gather my reserves of resistance to the unpleasant if such was to be found in an envelope. And I was already among friends. Mr. and Mrs. Kelly, the kindly landlords, turned out to have both read The Ginger Man. At the foot of these windswept, heathery hills, the Atlantic Ocean separated by an isthmus, came with high tide to nearly join in the distance in front of the house and make where it stood, an island. One could walk on the stony meandering paths to the lonely beaches, where shell fragments had turned them gold. And near where a hermit lived, reading last year’s newspapers. For there was no other news of the outside world. But such as Murray Sayle, long now become a trusted partisan back in London, was variously watching out for my interests and keeping me informed. From the distanced lawyers, as affidavits were sworn, I would learn of the term, further and better particulars. And leave to apply for this or for that. And learning too that judges are always looking for excuses to be fair. But I was finding too, in the words of George Smith, my own reply. Dear sir, only for the moment am I saying nothing.
And one day dawned cold and misty. I was sitting at my makeshift desk over my typewriter and surveying the distant windswept landscape from the sunroom over the front door. Suddenly a man came jumping over the hedge and running across the lawn, wildly gesticulating with his arms. He was shouting and pointing up into the sky.
“There’s a dog up there.”
I called to Valerie down in the kitchen to get the children in from what might be a dangerous local, already gone or rapidly going insane. But after sixteen billion years out in this primitive landscape, the Space Age had begun. Even while on the rising moors of heather, sheep grazed like tiny white maggots on the far mountainside. And across the dark hills, the rains still fell washing brighter the brightness of the dirt lanes. On which the postman would come. To reach one’s door. Taking two hours with bad news and usually three for better tidings.
I was not to know that this was merely the very beginning of this battle over The Ginger Man. And that before I reached the end of such saga, it would endure for nearly half my life. Nor could I have ever imagined then that I was to end up as the actual owner of this now most fabled publishing company of all time. Which even as it languishes seems to grow ever greater in fame. My second wife, Mary Wilson Price, and my secretary at the time, Phyllis MacArdle, both stunningly beautiful women, flying to Paris with enormous drafts drawn on the Chase Manhattan Bank of New York. And as they charmed and cajoled the civil authorities over two days as foreigners to be allowed against all the reigning rules, to bid, presented themselves in this commercial tribunal’s surprisingly jammed chamber. Where, with the auctioneer’s customary three candles guttering out between bids, and in the presence of Maurice Girodias himself, trench coat debonairly draped over his shoulders, was secretly bidding through a nominee. At first laughing and enjoying himself as he planned to surreptitiously buy back his bankrupt firm for a minuscule sum, he slowly and painfully grew hysterical as Mary Price’s own attorney methodically again and again upped every Girodias bid by one hundred francs, and finally after nearly half an hour of a cliff-hanging suspense, the Olympia Press was purchased in what was reputed to have been the most dramatic auction in Paris commercial history.
Girodias in this battle having lost the war, barged his way, knocking over chairs and with trench coat flying from his shoulders, swept in a rage from the auction room. And totally unaware there was news even worse to come. That instead of a beautiful pair of exotic ladies, he was to discover weeks later that his most terrible and most dreaded nemesis of all had ignominiously taken his beloved Olympia Press from under his nose. And so, with my enemy finally becoming mine, I ended up in the Paris courts actually in litigation with myself. Which I soon and wisely decided to settle. This bizarre event and turning of the tables on Girodias, perhaps redressing a little and atoning for some of my own long-suffered life-and-death struggle in litigation and at last avenging a young author’s dream for his work, into which he had put his heart and soul seventeen years ago. But at least I had over all that intervening time, amid the hoot and holler, and the coming and going baying of the wolves, accomplished one thing. My fist had steadily grown strong to raise against sneaks and bullies. Shaking my knuckles in the mealymouthed faces brought silence to the slurs and sneers. I had surest control of and had saved my book, which would not ever again leave my care. And as the good ship Franconia had, when all but Gainor Stephen Crist were prostrate below, I faced my prow to cut apart the oncoming buffeting waves. Resolved to keep battle pennants flying, and my sail raised to catch the breeze and cruise safely to port.
But come here till I tell you. Of a further word I have to say. Out here in the windy, wet remoteness of the west. Where the dead are left to be under their anonymous stones. So quiet in their unmarked graves. The grass growing long above their tombs in the salty Atlantic air. They who were once animated on this speck, whirling through the universe. And who would no longer have to wonder about the stars. Or who would know or care. That I had set out one June near the sea in County Wicklow, Ireland. To write a splendid book no one would ever forget. I knew then that the years would come and go and the book would live. But it has taken more years than I ever could have imagined and more battles than I ever felt I’d have to fight. But the fist I shook and the rage I spent has at last blossomed. And before it should fade, I’d like to say that I am glad. That there is. And has been.
God’s mercy
On the wild
Ginger Man