The Ginger Man

The Ginger Man is a novel, first published in Paris in 1955, by J. P. Donleavy. The story is set in Dublin, Ireland, in post-war 1947. Upon its publication, it was banned both in Ireland and the United States of America by reason of obscenity.

Donleavy’s friend and fellow writer Brendan Behan was the first person to read the completed manuscript.[1][2] The book was rejected by numerous publishers, but The Manchester Guardian published some extracts from it, calling the book a “comic triumph”.[3] Subsequently, Behan told Donleavy about Olympia Press, a Paris-based English-language publisher that had produced works by Samuel Beckett,[3] and Donleavy succeeded in getting the book published by them, but was angered when he discovered that it had done so under its pornography imprint.[4]

In his 1994 autobiography The History of The Ginger Man, Donleavy wrote, “I smashed my fist upon its green cover format, published as it was in the pseudonymous and pornographic Traveller’s Companion Series, and I declared aloud, ‘If it’s the last thing I ever do, I will avenge this book.'”[3] Donleavy and the owner of Olympia Press, Maurice Girodias, became embroiled in decades of legal cases, The Guardian noting: “Twenty years later, the two parties were still suing each other, under the guise of phantom companies – Donleavy was ‘The Little Someone Corporation’ – with no end in sight. Girodias had declared himself bankrupt, and was preparing to buy back the title of his beloved Olympia Press at an auction in Paris. Donleavy learned of the sale and sent his wife to France with a large sum in cash. When bidding went over $8,000, Girodias ran out of money. The mysterious woman (as Girodias saw her) made a final bid, and the Olympia Press belonged to Donleavy.”[2]

The Ginger Man has sold 45 million copies worldwide and has never been out of print.[5] It was named one of the 100 Best Novels of the 20th Century by the Modern Library in 1998.[6] The book was reprinted in 2001, and republished on 29 July 2010 by Grove Press.[7]

In 1958, Norman Podhoretz, the editor of Commentary, noted in The New York Times that, “In recent months a large number of remarkably accomplished first novels by Americans have appeared, all of them bearing the usual exclamations of enthusiasm from the publishers on their dust jackets. What is most surprising, some of them – notably William Humphrey’s Home From the Hill and J. P. Donleavy’s The Ginger Man – justify the excitement. […] What really makes The Ginger Man a vital work is the fact that it both reflects and comments dramatically on the absurdities of an age clinging to values in which it simply cannot believe and unable to summon up the courage to find out what its moral convictions really are”.[8]

Writing in The Guardian in 2004, James Campbell judged that, “The Ginger Man still reads well today, once one becomes accustomed to its headlong rush of style, its frequent verbless sentences, the switch of tenses and the manic swing between first and third persons as it lunges to catch the protagonist’s babbling thoughts […] In other places, the prose hops along alliteratively, with hints of Joyce and Dylan Thomas. Many chapters end with a snatch of verse, a habit that began in Donleavy’s first book and became his signature tune”.[2]

In the 2010 reissue of The Ginger Man, Jay McInerney noted in the introduction that the book “has undoubtedly launched thousands of benders, but it has also inspired scores of writers with its vivid and visceral narrative voice and the sheer poetry of its prose”.[4]