The Ginger Man switches between straightforward third-per-
son narration and the disconnections of interior monologue,
sometimes without signalling. Even in the minds of publishers
who had rejected the work as unsaleable, there must have been
little doubt that The Ginger Ma,n was serious, a Joycean
picaresque There could be no mistaking the quality of the
writing. There certainly could be no mistaking it for a work of
pornography.
And yet, The Ginger Man, which Donleavy went on revis-
ing obsessively, was turned down by one American publisher
after another. ‘Sheer rejection,’ Donleavy called it. It led to his
quitting his native country for good“.
Donleavy was an American who had studied in Dublin and
now lived in London. Convinced of his literary destiny, he had
pledged never to distract himself with a job. He spent a lot of
his time, though, drinking in London pubs with the likes of
Brendan Behan, and it was from him that Donleavy first heard
about the Olympia Press. Behan recommended Girodias’s
firm as publishers for books that had proved unpublishable.
Donleavy had read Beckett, and he knew that Beckett, like
Joyce, had been published in Paris: Ioyce (in small amounts)
by Kahane, and Beckett by Kahane’s son. So when Girodias
accepted his novel, Donleavy was pleased to think that his
name would sit next to Beckett’s on the Collection Merlin list,
and perhaps in spirit beside ]oyce’s.
This was late in 1954, before Girodias had created the
Traveller’s Companion series, at a time when it could be seri-
ously argued that the good outweighed the bad in Olympia
production. Nabokov’s retrospective sneer at ‘the common
grave of Traveller's Favourites or whatever Olympia’s little
green books were called’ lacks his characteristic accuracy, for
in its first edition Lolita was not published in the Traveller’s
Companion series but under the plain imprint of the Olympia
Press, which at the time included Apollinaire, Bataille,
Beckett, Genet, Miller, Restif de la Bretonne and Sade. It was
only in their first or second reprints that Nabokov, Beckett,
Genet and all the rest were drafted into the Traveller’s
Companion series.
This may seem a fine point to some, but not to J. P.
Donleavy, for whom it became a structural beam of prolonged
legal argument.
There was no contract for The Ginger. Man. Nabokov. was
M; unusual among Olympia authors in having a proper Written
agreement with the publisher, as Girodias preferred to rely on
informal methods. His fullest explanation of this came in his
autobiography, published in Paris in 1990:
Dgnleavy would have wished to have had a classic contract, but .
_ _ _ sinee the beginning of Olympia, I had dealt directly with peo-
ple who had the same reservations as I did about contracts, and
who preferred to protect their anonymity in view of our irregular
‘ legal situation. Drawing up a contract seemed to me useful only in
special situations, such as that of the fifth volume of Frank Harrls
memoirs. For the rest, I managed with simP1° Pieces °f Papa’
and, more often, with verbal agreements. To those who were sur-
prised by this, I explained pompously that contracts, like virgins,
called irresistibly to be violated. The more clauses you strung
together, the more room for dispute you created; the agreements
became constraints, from which it became a matter of urgency to
free oneself. . . . The charm of my enterprise lay in its unsophisti-
’ catedness' when working with friends, a handshake would suffice.
I was persuaded that if Donleavy were to come to Paris, the ques-
tion of a contract could be cleared up.
/
On this last point, he was to be proved right — at first — and
then seriously wrong. ‘ _
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