The History of the Ginger Man: An Autobiography

by J.P. Donleavy

The History of the Ginger An Autobiography Donleavy, J. P.

Genres: Ireland, Nonfiction

528 pages, Paperback

First published September 1, 2011

About the author

James Patrick Donleavy was an Irish American author, born to Irish immigrants. He served in the U.S. Navy during World War II after which he moved to Ireland. In 1946 he began studies at Trinity College, Dublin, but left before taking a degree. He was first published in the Dublin literary periodical, Envoy.

See also http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/J.P._Don...

Reviews

[Moira McPartlin · Rating 4 out of 5]

Someone recommended the writer J.P. Donleavy to me. I searched the local library catalogue and chose this book because I vaguely remembered seeing something about The Ginger Man. What I didn't realise was that this is an autobiography about the writing and publication of Donleavy's first novel The Ginger Man. However I do enjoy a good autobiography especially if it is about a writer. This did not disappoint, although it was very much of it's time (1950s) and very masculine. I'm now away to read The Ginger Man.

[Gnarly Authenticity . · Rating 3 out of 5]

A memoir of poverty-stricken literary life in the 1950s written in the same Joycean style as Donleavy's most famous work. In which often to be found are inversions of syntax. And conjunctions frequently capitalized and used to begin sentences.

And every chapter concluding
With those annoying little
"Poems" which are
Actually
Just regular sentences.

Three stars for most of that stuff, but the book grew on me quite a bit towards the end, and deserves 3.5 star status at its strongest section.

Donleavy was a common novelist personality: inside, a raging wilful id which expresses itself mainly verbally through fabulation and exaggeration. On the surface, disciplined, hardworking, self-denying and focused.

He had a powerful attraction to charismatic sociopaths who seemed to be able to live their outward lives with the same chaos and rage that he could express only on the page. Two such were Brendan Behan and the pathetically alcoholic but always charming model for Sebastian Dangerfield, an eccentric sponger and remittance man named Gainor Crist. Hyperbolic accounts of the antics of these two swinish drunks, in mixed tones of admiration, awe and exasperation make up the finest parts of How I Wrote The Ginger Man.

Crist seems to have been nearly as bad as his fictional alter-ego, the vilest man in postwar fiction, and the only novelistic character I can recall in my wide reading whose humiliation and suffering I was rooting for on every page. Donleavy thought of him as some kind of anti-saint, martyred as a consequence of his refusal of everything decent, abstemious and Calvinistic about American society.

There's something absolutely enraging about Crist/Dangerfield's stubborn, dogged, insolent refusal to perform honest work, as he waits, and waits, and waits for his father to die and leave him an inheritance, living drink to drink, cadged dollar to cadged dollar, in a perpetual cycle of well-liquored optimism and alcohol-craving frustrated fury.

[Glen · Rating 3 out of 5]

This is the biography of a novel, the story by the author of how The Ginger Man was birthed, how it eventually came to be printed after years of failed attempts, albeit under a pornographic imprint by a French publisher, and how the author fought to regain control of the fate of his literary progeny and succeeded to the point of eventually winning ownership at auction of the offending French press. Much of the book is devoted to tales of Donleavy's friendship with Gainor Stephen Crist, ostensibly the model for Sebastian Dangerfield, aka The Ginger Man. Crist's capacity for saying, doing, and being the wrong thing at the wrong time is comical to the point of slapstick. Along with Crist are numerous other encounters with Donleavy's literary friends, most seemingly involving some kind of fistfight. The most entertaining tales are those of high times with Brendan Behan, who also contributed some of his own alcoholic pallor to the tones of Dangerfield, and of a most unlikely event that occurred on the Isle of Man when Donleavy and his wife were visited by Ernest Gebler and his young charge and soon to be wife, the then unknown Edna O'Brien. The book overall is a little long and slogs a bit in places, but it is a must read for fans of the novel it tells about and for fans of any or all of Donleavy's oeuvre.

[DAVID CRABTREE · Rating 5 out of 5]

after thirty years

After thirty years since I first read The Gingerman I have enjoyed how it was written and the tubule t process after its writing .

[Anup · Rating 5 out of 5]

My favorite author telling my favorite story of the long, strange struggle of realizing, writing and finding a legitamite publisher for one of my absolutely favorite novels. Donleavy gladly dangles his great, gleaming balls in the face of everything he deems to be unsavoringly American. Reading this, one soon learns that all this man cherishes is himself, his friends, his work and his gold. Everything else is meaningless and plum fucking wrong, a statement he bears no anxietes in making over and over again throughout this 800 page gem.

[T.B. · Rating 4 out of 5]

Wonderful story of Donleavy's writing The Ginger Man and his epic battle to get control of the book from the pornographic Olympia press. If you think the late 50s were an interesting time in Ireland, Britain, and New York, and I do, you will find this book fun.