The Irish, Sigmund Freud is said to have said, are the only people impervious to psychoanalysis. I’d love to read his files on Roddy Doyle and J.P. Donleavy.
Since his first novel, The Commitments (1987), Roddy Doyle has become to Ireland what Dickens was to England, a chronicler of the crudeness and vitality of the working class. As Robert Christgau wrote in Spin in a review of Doyle’s great novel The Woman Who Walked Into Doors, “Doyle’s genius is to construct a vernacular that does justice to the humor, empathy, resilience, savor, curiosity, and moral discrimination of his characters’ unexpectedly rich lives.”
If I may interrupt myself for a moment, why isn’t Roddy Doyle taken more seriously as a candidate for the Nobel Prize? Because he is hugely popular, with several films made from his best books? Perhaps because he’s hugely prolific, having written 19 novels and more than a dozen volumes of nonfiction (including a lovely homage to his parents, Rory & Ita), plays (plus a translation of Gogol’s apocalyptic farce The Government Inspector), and numerous books for children in which, miraculously, he manages to convey the same life-affirming vulgarity of his adult fiction without the use of obscenities.
Doyle’s first three novels were joyously lighthearted romps about Irish kids trying to pull themselves into the middle class through their love of American pop music. In Paddy Clarke Ha Ha Ha (1993) he added a layer of seriousness, following an Irish boy in Barrytown from knee pants to young adulthood when he assumes the responsibility for his family after his father abandons them—a theme which touched a nerve in Irish society.
With The Woman Who Walked Into Doors (1996), he went where even the legion of tough Irish female writers had not yet gone: the helplessness of wives in the face of their husbands’ savagery, the rage and impotence felt by women to whom society was largely indifferent.
The novels of “The Last Roundup” trilogy—A Star Called Henry, Oh, Play That Thing!, and The Dead Republic—are an epic tale begging for a Jane Campion mini-series. His protagonist, Henry Smart, escapes a British firing squad after the 1916 Easter Uprising by diving into the sewer, resurfacing at odd times as if to check the pulse of his country, giving us, literally, notes from the underground. Henry escapes to America to become a soldier for gangsters and bootleggers, meets Al Capone, and, for a while, is a chauffeur and companion to the most influential American musician of the 20th century, Louis Armstrong.
He journeys west and stumbles onto the great Irish American mythmaker John Ford and eventually travels back with him to Ireland, where he watches his life story transformed into the sentimental fairy tale of The Quiet Man.
Damn—what a set of novels.
Compared to some of his early works, the 10 stories in Doyle’s new book, Life Without Children seem slight, almost afterthoughts. On reflection, though, they are snapshots from the pandemic, showing us how middle-aged Irish men and women, whose children have all left the nest, reacted to the lockdown.
The couple in “Boxed Sets” live a life drained of all pleasure but TV bingeing—House of Cards, Breaking Bad, Mad Men, and the great Danish series The Killing. (They actually own the boxed sets but never watched them before.) “Thirty years of boxed sets. They were living in a golden age of television drama. He’d read that somewhere. And he believed it.”
In “The Charger,” Mick finds that life in a lockdown “was bad, but—fuck it—he would go for a pint.” In “The Five Lamps,” perhaps the greatest story Doyle has written, a father wanders through what seems to be a post-apocalyptic Dublin searching for a son he hasn’t seen in years. In the end, the bleakest reality morphs into the miraculous.
You have to sift through the stories to find it, but Doyle’s people, deprived of the company of kith and kin, find small epiphanies. Life Without Children, as befits a book about a pandemic, lacks the ebullience and humor long associated with Roddy Doyle, but, as he said in a 2020 interview, “Ireland is a small island, but there’s more than one way to tell an Irish story.”
Another way to tell an Irish story is from the perspective of an American enamored with the charm of faux Irish gentility.
The Ginger Man, written by an Irish American, has the distinction of being banned by both the Irish and Americans. The official language used by the courts condemned J.P. Donleavy’s work “by reason of obscenity,” and one must at least commend the judges of both countries for accuracy. If The Ginger Man isn’t obscene—and I’m happy to go with the Cambridge English Dictionary definition: offensive, rude, or shocking, usually because of being too obviously related to sex—then nothing is.
So much for the dirty part. For funny, it has few peers in recent English— maybe Kingsley’s Amis’ Lucky Jim, Evelyn Waugh’s Decline and Fall and The Loved One, Charles Portis’ Dog of the South, Douglas Adams’ Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, John Kennedy Toole’s A Confederacy of Dunces, Cormac McCarthy’s The Road, Iris Murdoch’s Under the Net, and, of course, everything by Flann O’Brien—but there are no superiors.
The Ginger Man has never been out of print since its publication in 1955, which is fortunate since the degree of lusty, audacious, and salacious humor in English language literature would drop alarmingly in its absence. Donleavy’s first and most enduring fiction has sold close to 50 million copies and been translated into more than two dozen languages. Amazing, considering that it very nearly did not get published at all. With Brendan Behan’s help, after multiple rejections Donleavy went to the Olympia Press, a Paris-based English-language publisher. They accepted the manuscript but released the novel under their pornography imprint. According to legend—a legend, it must be admitted, circulated by the author—when Donleavy heard about the imprint, he slammed his fist on a table and declared, “I will avenge this book!” And avenge he did. Decades of legal battles culminated in Donleavy owning the Olympia Press.
The publicity and word of mouth it inspired helped The Ginger Man acquire such diverse fans as Norman Mailer, V.S. Naipaul, and Dorothy Parker. Naipaul described it as “comic, dirty, and delightful.” Parker said: “It will be many a day before I come upon a book anywhere near as brilliant as The Ginger Man. And when I do, I think it will be written by Mr. Donleavy."
James Patrick Donleavy—“Mike” or “Paddy” to his friends—was born in Brooklyn in 1926 to Irish immigrant parents and raised in the Bronx. He lived in Ireland from 1946 until his death in 2017. In America, he was expelled from Fordham Prep (for holding a fraternity meeting in a saloon— it was their first and last meeting), cut grass at Woodlawn Cemetery near Herman Melville’s grave, boxed former middleweight champion Jake “Raging Bull” LaMotta at the New York Athletic Club, and served a stint in the Navy before moving to Dublin to attend Trinity College Dublin on the GI Bill. He took up painting, but inspired by the antics of fellow American student Gainor Crist, he turned to fiction. The title of his first book, though uncredited, is most certainly taken from a letter written by Jack Yeats in 1906—“I believe that all fine pictures, and fine literature too, to be fine must have some of the living ginger of Life in them.”
The Ginger Man is ginger from cover to cover. Parker wrote in Esquire, that the novel was “Lusty, violent, wildly funny... a rigadoon of rascality.” Correctly dismissing an oft-made comparison between Donleavy and Henry Miller, she suggested two intriguing stepfathers for The Ginger Man: Beckett's Murphy (or at least what that novel “might have been if Mr. Beckett hadn’t gone and got himself all snagged up in convoluted writing”) and Joyce Cary's wonderful novel The Horse's Mouth, “though Mr. Donleavy’s Sebastian Dangerfield makes Joyce Cary’s scoundrel”—Gulley Jimson—“look like the teacher’s pet.”
Gulley Jimson, though, is a painter, like Donleavy, while Sebastian Dangerfield aspires to nothing more than a cushy job with Lloyd’s of London that would set him up in upper-middle-class comfort—a country house, perhaps with a nice stable—without requiring much effort or initiative.
Life imitated art when the success of his novel about Sebastian enabled Donleavy to live in Lady Gregory-type Anglo-Irish comfort at Levington Park, a country manor in County Westmeath built by Sir Richard Leving in 1740. (James Joyce once spent the night.) It should not surprise that Donleavy adorned the walls with his own paintings.
How good a painter was Donleavy? Well, Enrique Juncosa, director of the Irish Museum of Modern Art, judged his canvases to be “wildly funny, being sometimes dirty, violent, satirical, charming or even lyrical, characteristics that have been given to his literary style. His works are a very energetic celebrating of humor and life, and manage to create some analysis of the human condition.” Eat it, John Ruskin.
His paintings may well an analysis of the human condition, but the phrase seems a tad lofty to be applied to a novel whose main character drives his wife to the verge of breakdown and spends his days and nights in the back streets of Dublin—generally in the company of characters with names such as Tune Mularchy—in pursuit of, in no particular order, money, booze, and sex. That Sebastian isn’t a poet or painter makes him even more contemptible as his selfishness and carelessness aren’t mitigated by the production of art. To Dangerfield’s credit, he never tries to justify his behavior with the self-serving doubletalk of the kind offered by Henry Miller’s protagonists.
Many fans can quote the book’s opening lines. “Today a rare sun of spring. And horse carts clanging to the quays down Tara Street and the shoeless white faced kids screaming.” Perfection. Hemingway meets Joyce—the latter might approve of Donleavy’s constant shifts in tense and person and repeated use of interior monologue while blushing at some of the content: “Mary sits on the edge of the bed. I lean back here watching. You’ve got big ones. Use them as a pillow. I am the hot ticket to eternity riding the melted rails in all directions.”
I cannot believe that Donleavy didn’t meet Parker's expectations in nearly twenty subsequent volumes of fiction (particularly A Singular Man and The Beastly Beatitudes of Balthazar B), nonfiction (including The History of The Ginger Man), and plays (Richard Harris played Sebastian in a 1959 stage adaptation of The Ginger Man in London that was closed by the theater owner after only three performances when Donleavy refused to make cuts demanded by the Archbishop of Dublin).
The Ginger Man is the Donleavy you will want to read first, soon followed by The Unexpurgated Code: A Complete Manual of Survival & Manners, a guide to his characters' mind-set. Sample: Upon being exorcised, “Do not allow yourself to be approached by quacks or charlatans. Wear a clean change of undergarments and have a suitable outfit ready to sport as a certified angelic being.” On the proper suicide note: “Final letters should be brief, unapologetic and neither sad nor glad... ‘No comment’ is proper.”
Funny as The Ginger Man is, it partakes of an ineffable sadness. The humor isn’t intended to blot out the knowledge that the protagonist has left his wife helpless and his baby starving. While he seems the greatest companion in the world to be raising the wrists with at your local pub (probably reciting one of the snatches of verse from the close of several chapters), you can't shake the feeling of wanton waste—a waste of talent, intelligence, energy, and charm.
There is a sadness, too, in Sebastian’s environment, a softer, simpler Dublin now vanished, a city of rough grace embraced by an American who, despite his misgivings, loved it as only an American could. The Ginger Man is a rowdy, rousing ballad for the Sebastian Dangerfield that everyone of us has known, loved, and lost. To quote the famous last line of Donleavy’s novel, “God’s mercy, on the wild, Ginger Man.”
Donleavy’s and Roddy Doyle’s characters could go lifetimes without running into each other, so different are their sensibilities and milieux. Taken together, they reflect two wildly divergent ways of telling an Irish story.
