Although College is currently enjoying unprecedented literary attention – in novels such as Elske Rahill’s Between Dog and Wolf and Sally Rooney’s wildly successful Conversations with Friends – the Trinity novel is by no means a recent phenomenon. In the years between Beckett’s obscure short stories in More Pricks Than Kicks and the work of recent novelists, the most significant contribution to the micro-genre of Trinity literature was undoubtedly JP Donleavy’s The Ginger Man. Soon to be published by Lilliput Press, The Ginger Man Letters will bring renewed attention to this timeless and controversial novel.
Edited by author and all-round Donleavy enthusiast Bill Dunn, this volume is a collection of the correspondence between Donleavy and his friends Gainor Crist and AK Donoghue, who inspired two of the novel’s central characters. By turns earnest, ribald and confrontational, the letters paint the picture of a bohemian existence humorously at odds with the Catholic mores of the day. The collection also offers a wider view of Donleavy’s life and includes letters to Maurice Girodias, the publisher who sparked a notoriously drawn-out lawsuit with Donleavy when he released The Ginger Man in his pornographic The Traveller’s Companion Series.
Though the novel was never intended to be erotic, it did inevitably run afoul of Irish censors. Times change and so do taboos, but over the years the offensiveness of Donleavy’s novel has migrated rather than diminished. The grandchildren of the umbrageous Catholics who banned the allegedly indecent book are now likely to baulk at it for different reasons, including the protagonist’s callous treatment of women and his blithe, unselfconscious financial privilege.
The collection is being published to coincide with the first anniversary of the author’s death, and letters to fellow writers (including Brendan Behan and Patrick Kavanagh) help to put the novel in context. The Ginger Man, though original to its core, was not without precedent, hailing from a tradition set in motion by James Joyce. Virginia Woolf, in a comment as malicious as it was prescient, once characterised Joyce’s work as that of a “queasy undergraduate scratching his pimples”. This vein of witty, stout-soaked humour, equally at home among the erudite and the vulgar, found enthusiastic devotees in mid-century writers such as Patrick Kavanagh and Flann O’Brien – but it took Donleavy, an American import, to write The Ginger Man, the queasiest, funniest undergraduate book yet.
The Ginger Man Letters is being released in hardback, richly illustrated with over 60 period images, and is priced at €25. The launch will take place in Hodges Figgis at 6.30pm on September 11th.
