99: The Ginger Man--JP Donleavy

Year of Publication: 1954
Author’s Nationality: U.S.
General Themes: Debauchery, Dishonesty, Alcoholism, Lust, Identity
Is The Protagonist a Self-Destructive Young Man? Yes
Style: “Withnail & I,” as conceived by Flann O’Brien
Short Form Synopsis: Sebastian Dangerfield, an adulterous, drunken, lying, cheating wastrel, is a young American living with his English wife in Dublin, where he is purportedly studying law at Trinity College. Most of his time, however, is spent drinking, pontificating, screwing the local girls and avoiding his numerous creditors.

Let’s be clear, here. Sebastian Davenport, protagonist of J.P Donleavy’s The Ginger Man is not a good friend, a good husband, a good father, a good tenant, a good borrower, a good son, a good American or a good houseguest. He’s not much of a student and probably not nearly as good in bed as he is at getting girls in bed. You don’t want him as a boyfriend or a neighbor or a friend. A compulsive liar, an insatiable drunk, an unapologetic womanizer, an adulterous lout, a spendthrift, a pompous ass, an pompous ass, a terrible snob, Davenport is the kind of guy that would seduce your sister, bleed your bank account dry, insult your mother, kick your dog and piss all over your rug before you had time to revoke his invitation. And once you did, you’d probably miss hanging out with him, because seriously? Who gets away with that kind of shit?

Sebastian Davenport would probably tell you the correct answer to that answer is Sebastian Davenport. His author, however, seems to indicate that the answer is “no one.” Donleavy isn’t a moralist and “The Ginger Man” isn’t exactly a cautionary tale. Nor is it, pure picaresque. Davenport is not fully farce, and despite his enormous appetites, I wouldn’t exactly call him Falstaffian. For all its humor and prodigal excess, The Ginger Man contains a seed of melancholy that sets in peripherally even in the most absurd scenes. Part of this may derive from the mind of the man himself. Through the public Davenport is smug, reckless and opportunistic, his interior monologues show a man out of control, skirting the narrow margin between libertinism and desperation. Part of this comes from the scenery. Dublin in 1948 wasn’t yet thirty years out from England’s shadow. Much of the country was impoverished, a backwater on the margins of a Europe racked by war. In the opening chapters of “The Ginger Man,” Davenport and his long-suffering English wife reside in a cottage clinging tenuously to the edge of a cliff, eroding more and more every day, as little pieces of their domestic life literally crumble into the sea below. Donleavy’s Ireland is cold, rainy and poor. It’s the end of the line. If you can’t make it there, you’re probably not going to make it at all.

Donleavy further complicates matters with his narrative point-of-view. Reasonably straightforward dialogues delivered in third person often digress into elaborate stream of consciousness. This is an odd, if telling authorial choice to make. The “I” of the story (Davenport) is also the Davenport (he) of the story. It’s as if he recognizes the is turning into caricature and the only way to separate that out from the man he is is to conceive of himself in the third person. In order to continue living his life at the expense (both financial and otherwise) of all around him, Davenport must continue to play a part. This part naturally changes depending on whom he’s trying to con and what precisely he’s trying to get out of them. To Kenneth O’Keefe, his fellow American lout with literary pretensions, Davenport acts the fraternal mentor. To his wife, he acts the beleaguered, overworked husband who will one day come into a fortune. To his mistresses, he acts as sexual liberator and savior, promising to lead them out of their dull lives in Ireland, if they’ll only lend him a few bucks and take him to bed (not necessarily in that order) first. To himself, however, Davenport is a muddle of desires best left unspoken and anxieties. To wit:

And tomorrow Marion comes back. And the two of us sit here wagging our America legs. Marion, stay away a little longer, please. Don’t want the pincers on me just yet. Greasy dishes and baby’s dirty bottom. I just want to watch them sailing. We need a nurse for baby to wheel her around some public park where I can’t hear the squeals. Or maybe the two of you will get killed in a train wreck and your father will foot the bill for the burial. Well-bred people never fight over the price of death. And it’s not cheap these days. Just look a bit glassy eyed for a month and take off for Paris. Some nice quite hotel in Rue de Seine and float fresh fruit on a basin of cool water. Your long winter body lying naked on the slate and what would I be thinking if I touched your dead breast. Must get a half crown out of O’Keefe before he goes (21).

These forays into Davenport’s mind provide readers with the closest thing to truth within the book. Davenport knows he’s a bastard and vacillates between entitlement and fear of found out. His remorse is not so much at what he does to others but where he has gotten himself.

This last bit becomes more of an issue as the novel progresses and Davenport’s already tenuous purchase starts to give way beneath him. He wife leaves him; his clothes literally fall apart on his body (leading to a graphic and unintentional exposure on the train home). Kenneth debarks for France (where he tries very hard to become a homosexual). Davenport proposes various cons to the women in his life—offering massive rewards (usually a new life in England or America) in exchange for cash up front. In what small way Davenport is able to justify this as all, he does so hope of vaguely promised wealth from his American family (a hope dashed about three quarters of the way through the novel).

Throughout most (if not all of the novel), Davenport steadfastly insists that he is better than and more superior to those around him. He derides the Irish for their filth and depravity, the hypocrisy of their faith and their unsophisticated desires. This transparent self-delusion provides fodder for great comedy as well as what may be a not-so-subtle commentary on Post-War American swagger. The U.S. had crowned itself defender of freedom, saviors of the world, and found itself in possession of great wealth and influence while the majority of its first-world brethren were still rebuilding a fragile framework of national identity from beneath the rubble. In this sense, Sebastian Davenport and The Ginger Man belong to the same peculiar generation as the damaged Bohemians of Styron’s Set This House On Fire. Young Americans abroad, fearful of rejoining the status quo back home, yet kept afloat by the tenuous illusion that they are impervious to the sort of failure that surrounds them.

By choosing Ireland, one of the lone neutral nations in the European landscape, Donleavy can play comedian without being explicitly (or even implicitly) political, but sixty years out from the time-frame of this book, it’s hard not to read between the lines. Harder still, when you finish the novel on the day the U.S. inaugurates a president many of us hope will help us to revise America’s international reputation as a nation of ugly, entitled bullies. Sebastian Davenport may be a lying, cheating lout, but at least he can be charming. And I think it’ safe to say, we stopped being charming a long time ago.

100: The Magnificent Ambersons--Booth Tarkington

Year Of Publication: 1918
Author's Nationality: U.S.
General Themes: Class, Industry, Urban Decay, The Passage of Time, Enitlement, Rich White People
Is its protagonist a self-destructive young man? Yes.
Style: Didactic pre-modernist Gothic with confusing politics and industrial overtones
Short form synopsis: George Amberson Minaver, scion of the wealthiest old family in a barely fictionalized version of fin-de-siecle Indianapolis (bet you never thought you’d see those words together), acts like a pompous, ignorant bully from infancy, abuses everyone around him, including his absurd wilting beauty mother.

Starting at 100, still reeling from the conclusion of Wings of the Dove¹, I entered into Booth Tarkington’s 1918 novel with no expectations. I missed this title in my casual survey of Orson Welles and only knew the author’s name thanks to a novelty seating arrangement at my hometown Pizzeria Uno (the “Booth Tarkington Booth”). Blame this, if you like, on a missing chapter in my formal study of literature. (As an undergrad English major, I assiduously avoided any class that would force me to read any American novel published between 1860 and 1920 for fear that I might have to reacquaint myself with the protracted misery that is reading either Theodore Dreiser or Upton Sinclair. That I missed the chance to discuss the James brothers² whilst residing in the ivory tower is certainly a regret, but I think I did okay with Portrait of a Lady and The Varieties of Religious Experience on my own, so there you are).

When Booth Tarkington wrote The Magnificent Ambersons the Depression was still almost twenty years away. The half-century following the Civil War had created a lot of new money in almost every part of the United States( save the scrambling clusterfuck that was the not-yet New South). The same spirit of Manifest Destiny that sent scores of young men and women to seek their fortune in the wild west initiated a parallel impulse for those that chose to stay behind in entrenched metropolitan areas. These folks utilized the resources unearthed (in some cases, literally) by their more adventurous brethren and the manpower of relatively unchecked immigration to fuel the creation of empires out of lumber, coal, railroads, oil and by Tarkington’s time, automobiles. By the early 20^th century, the robber barons of the Gilded Age had assumed a baronial lifestyle and anointed themselves aristocrats in all but title. Despite a rising tide of unionization and regulation—in part spurned by whistleblowers who had trained an eye on certain goings on across the pond—the Zeitgeist was fueled by opulent wealth. The roots of Modernism grew in this rich soil, long before fertilization in European trenches.

Tarkington wasn’t a modernist. His increasingly seedy snapshot of his own fictionalized Indianapolis collapsing under the weight of its own growth owed more to the realists of the previous century than the dreamers of the new. And his titular family, the often grotesque and old-monied Ambersons, wouldn’t have been able to follow a conversation with a Wharton or James protagonist even if an Archer (be it Newland or Isabel) had been charitable enough to offer a dinner party invitation. I’m inclined to think this a strength of the novel, a sort of ironic aside: that the self-aggrandizing Ambersons, fading Titans in their soon-to-be Rust Belt metropolis, are irrelevant even to the class they presume to be.

Consider the case of George Amberson Minaver. An entitled bully who controls his family through an iron grip on his wilting doormat of a mother, he spends much of the book behaving like a sullen lout. He shows not the slightest shadow of depth, tends toward the monosyllabic and shows no wit or humor. It’s hard to revel in the downfall of such a dunderheaded villain, who knows no better way to deride his competitors than casting them as “riffraff.” In fact, from Day One, all but his most devoted family members wish that George will get his comeuppance, making readers realize the only thing more annoying than reading about George Amberson Minaver would be living with him.

Enabled by his family, George spends his young years flouting his wealth and abusing everyone he comes in contact with, from his nominal friends to his love interest Lucy Morgan, whom he meets at his post-collegiate coming-out at the Amberson manor. Lucy is painted as a pretty foil to our anti-hero. All common sense and folksy charm, she would rather see evidence of hard work than succumb to the charms of the easy life. She prefers modest white clapboard homes with green shutters to the Amberson's Italianate white elephant. She spurns George’s advances, yet continues to dote, quietly convinced he will become a better man. The daughter of a local inventor turned car manufacturer (himself the spurned, yet pined-over lover of George’s mother), Lucy’s fortune rises as precipitously as George’s falls. I don’t love allegory, and I’ve long since disliked the cliched-since-Spenser-if-not-Dante trope of letting the chaste, ingenue be the moral center of the piece. Lucy Morgan may not be the avatar of God’s grace, but her chripy industriousness and beatific patience certainly red-line the Pollyanna meter Are we really willing to believe that Minaver is worth saving? Or is it just that Lucy is a fool?

You can read it as a satire. In a satire, you can ask your readers to suspend their disbelief and follow the travails of impossible charicatures in order to arrive at the general critique (in this case that rich people are indolent, solipsistic fools, who only become more so with each successive generation removed from work³). But Tarkington’s argument has a much wider focus.

Some of the best sections of The Magnificent Ambersons deal with the city itself. The very same ingenuity and innovation that replaces the corrupt Ambersons with a new generation of inventors and industrialists, directly or indirectly, cause the city’s decay.

What they meant by Prosperity was credit at the bank, but in exchange for this credit that got nothing that wasn’t dirty, and, therefore, to a sane mind, valueless; since whatever was cleaned was dirty again before the cleaning was half done. For, as the town grew, it grew dirty with an incredible completeness. The idealists put up magnificent business buildings and boasted of them, but the buildings were begrimed before they were finished. They boasted of their libraries, of their schools, but the schools were dirty, like the children within them. This was not the fault of the idealists, who said: “The more dirt, the more prosperity.” They grew patriotic, optimistic breaths of the flying powdered filth of the streets, and took the foul and heavy smoke with gusto into the profundities of their lungs (204).

The absurd mansions of the old-monied elite fall into disrepair as tenements rise around them. Their gaudy statues corrode on boulevards blackened by factory soot. The new capitalist class moves further and further out of town, leaving suburb after suburb eroding in their wake. Tarkington would have likely been dismayed to learn just how prescient his ideas would seem to future generations. And it’s really had to read this in 2009, having watched many of the old Midwestern metropoli fall apart over the last half-century, due, in part, to the very factors Tarkington identified in 1918.

Even Lucy’s father, Eugene Morgan, the automotive pioneer cannot completely defend himself against claims that his industry will unsettle the landscape. In reply to George Minaver’s claim that cars should have never been invented, Morgan says: “I’m not sure he’s wrong about automobiles . . . With all their speed forward they may be a step backward in civilization(143).” And he goes on:

“It may be that they will not add to the beauty of the world, nor to the life of men’s souls. I am not sure. But automobiles have come and they bring a greater change in our life than most of us suspect. They are here, and almost all outward things are going to be different because of what they bring. They are going to alter war, and they are going to alter peace. I think men’s minds are going to be changed in subtle ways because of automobiles; just how, though, I could hardly guess. But you can’t have the immense outward changes that they will cause without some inward ones, and it may be that . . . Perhaps ten or twenty years from now, if we can see the inward change in men by that time, I shouldn’t be able to defend the gasoline engine, but would have to agree with him that automobiles ‘had no business to be invented” (143-44).

Minaver’s petty disgust at cars (owing largely, it seems, to his personal dislike of Morgan) and anger at the increasing dereliction of his neighborhood (if only because of what that suggests about the declining currency of his family name) lead him to stumble into what we 21^st century readers may believe to be a progressive argument against growth⁴. Change is the only constant in life and nothing can change faster than a city. But the very changes that offer us hope individually—to improve our immediate quality of life—may not improve the overall community. The children of our modern day Ambersons, who fled generations ago into the outermost suburbs, are now returning to reclaim the very same city centers their ancestors left, revitalizing and gentrifying the working class neighborhoods that once threatened their own entitled enclaves, while George Minaver’s “riff-raff” scramble for homes in the now unfashionable suburbs. This is the cycle. This is the story, and it’s much bigger and more compelling one than that of brat who is forced to get his hands dirty after a lifetime of white gloves

And as he recovers from an accident, in his newly minted position as a member of the working classe, George Minaver visits the ghost of his past life, and recognizes that he’s just part of that same cycle:

What a clean, pretty town it had been! And in his reverie he saw like a pageant before him the magnificence of the Ambersons—its passing and the passing of the Ambersons themselves. They had been slowly engulfed without knowing how to prevent it, and almost without knowing what was happening to them. The family lot, in the shabby older quarter out by the cemetery, held most of them now; and the name was swept altogether from the new city. But the new great people who had taken their places—the Morgans and Akerses and Sheridans—they would go too. George saw that. They would pass, as the Ambersons had passed . . . Nothing stays or holds or keeps where there is growth, he somehow perceived vaguely but truly . . . The Ambersons had passed and the new people that came after them and then the next ones and the next and the next—(259).

The Magnificent Ambersons is not one of my favorite novels, but it was a good book for easing into this fool's errand. The end of an epoch, the spectre of class, the promise and failure of the American Dream. These issues will certainly come up again as I work my way down the list.

Next up: drinking and whoring your way through Dublin . . . with someone other than Leopold Bloom. That’s right. Number 99: The Ginger Man by J.P Donleavy.

1 A vastly superior book, in my humble opinion, but also on the Modern Library list, so more on that later.

2 Henry and William, not Frank and Jesse . . . though I think that confusion would make for a great comedy of errors. Jesse James tries to lecture at Harvard, while Henry &Will try and pull a train job in Missouri.

3 And for the record, the Brits do this way better than we do. Maybe because they’ve had a century and a half to grapple with rigid class structures and are less inclined to put forward the naïve promises, based out of up-from his-own-bootstrap ideology. An English novelist may permit the pantry boy a roll in the hay with Earl’s daughter, but s/he’s unlikely to suggest that self-same pantry boy has a shot in hell of becoming the Earl.

4 Here’s your contemporary analogy: Garden Club dowagers and environmentalists often make strange bedfellows when urban developers threaten green space. The former may only be motivated by aesthetics and history, of course, but their desired immediate outcome is often the same.

The List: An Overview

With a global economic crisis hitting just at the very beginning of my martyr year (33), I have decided that there is no time like the present to tackle that most passive of labors—a full survey of the semi-flawed and still hotly-contested Modern Library Best 100 Novels list.

Call it masochism, if you will. I certainly will, knowing that The List features both the most staggeringly unreadable of authors (Theodore Dreiser) and a book so notoriously unreadable, even the most hyper-literate of English Professors tacitly believe it might be a joke (Finnegan’s Wake). But given the very real possibility that I might have more time on my hands in upcoming months, there seems no better time to tackle this project.

A few notes:

1. Clearly, I have read some of these titles before. This is hardly a boast. At least seven titles on this list show up on typical U.S. public school curricula and at least two or three of those I was taught while still in middle school. Additionally, I was an English major and took as many twentieth century novel classes, knocking out at least another twenty. All told between my unspectacular academic career and my own appetite for books, I’ve read a little more than half of these books before. The question of whether or not I read them again really comes down to how well I think I know them, how many times I’ve read them before and whether or not I feel like my life will be made any richer by doing a close reading “Animal Farm” again. In the event that I opt out of a title, I will provide a compelling reason I am not doing a thorough re-reading and try to instead focus on another book by the same author, or the event that I’ve comes to mind), read pretty much every published novel by said author, I’ll try to find an adequate substitute.

2. That said, it is my stated goal to complete every title on the list. Including the both the afore-mentioned Joyce’s folly as well as a fuckload of Anthony Powell. Clearly some books take longer than others, but I will attempt to keep you updated in a reasonable span of time. I am trying to read these in order, but library/bookstore availability might hamper that at times, so the best I can promise is that they will be posted in order.

3. As for the rest, Be Flat will continue to cover other literary, musical and cultural topics as I see fit. I anticipate List coverage might be suspended as 2009 nears lit-award season and the release date of the new Pynchon novel.

The O'Jays--"Ship Ahoy"

From Ship Ahoy (Philidelphia International: 1973/ Sony: 2003).

The O’Jays inhabit a privileged position in the Great Old Soul pantheon. They employed much of the same lush instrumentation and smooth production of the Philadelphia groove, but they didn’t shy away from introducing new sounds and Big Ideas. 1973’s “Ship Ahoy,” a sprawling nine-minute track from the album of the same name, is an equally hypnotic and challenging song that forms the thematic crux of a markedly direct and political record from a group who’d topped the charts a year before with “Love Train.”

“Ship Ahoy” emerges out of punishing tides and creaking timbers, the relentless crack of a whip punctuates a repetitive minor key vamp over a dirge-like beat. The idea, as expressed by songwriters Leon Huff and Kenny Gamble, is a musical nod to slave ship’s middle passage, builds through vocal harmonies, the introduction of a pealing psychedelic guitar, a chorus of strings and the shouting of horns. Eddie Levert’s vocals soar over the arrangement both beseeching and resigned. This isn’t a game. This is no sugar-sweet metaphor for a failed romance. This is soul taken to a place few soul singers had ever taken it before. And this, byt way, several years before “Roots” made talking about the slave trade safe for popular media

Ernesto Lechner of Rolling Stone probably summed it up best in his 2003 review of the reissue: “Ship Ahoy's main achievement was proving that it was indeed possible to be thoughtful and articulate without losing your funk.” If only that were always the case.


You can hear the song in entirety here, though the accompanying fan-made video is a bit rough.

Ray Price--"Nightlife"

From Night Life (Columbia: 1963/ Koch: 1996)

A haunting ballad pitting jazz chords against a Nashville guitar, the Willie Nelson-penned title track of Ray Price’s 1962 album is just the sort of tune you expect to hear playing (anachronistically, perhaps) on a jukebox in an Edward Hopper painting. Listen to Price’s soaring tenor as he resigns himself to the sins and frustrations of a troubled nocturnal existence and imagine the blue and red neon of seedy redneck bars reflected on the rainy sidewalks of some nameless southern city in the middle of the last century. “The night life ain’t no good life, but it’s my life.” Indeed. And I won’t even make a vampire jokes.

See here for a good 1981 live performance of the song, although I'm partial to the old one.

Aretha Franklin--"Drown in My Tears"

From I Never Loved A Man The Way I Love You (Atlantic: 1967/ Rhino: 1995).

Interesting that the second track on Aretha’s star-making Atlantic debut should be, essentially, a torch song, on an album largely considered to be ground zero for “don’t give me no lip” female empowerment anthems. Famously recorded by Ray Charles for the same label eleven years before, “Drown In My Own Tears” represents a meeting between the young Aretha, who had been signed to Columbia in the early sixties and groomed to be a new Dinah Washington, and the slightly older and wiser Queen of Soul, who’d been heartily encouraged to incorporate the soaring gospel of her youth into a pop template. It’s redundant, at this point, to say that Aretha has at her disposal one of the greatest instruments in the history of recorded music. This song, melodramatic as it may be, highlights some of the sparks in that magnificent voice. I daresay Puccini himself could hardly make tears more operatic.

Give it a listen.

Little Joy--"Evaporar"

From Little Joy (Rough Trade: 2008)

I should hate this on principle. A side project initiated by Strokes drummer and Drew Barrymore Dump-ee Fab Moretti, a sometime Devendra Banhart collaborator named Binki Shapiro and a peripatetic Brazillian musician named Rodrigo Amarante.

Though I admit to enjoying the Strokes first record in those lazy, hazy post 9/11 days of 2001, Moretti has done little to endear himself to me since then, discounting his participation in the two sub-par follow-ups to “Is This It?” and regular appearances in the “Stars—They’re Just Like Us!” section in US Weekly. And anyone associated with hirsute warbler Banhart is naturally suspect to me (that includes Natalie Portman, by the way).

But the album isn’t bad. An easily digestible mix of indie pop and Bossa Nova, about the worst thing you can say about it is that it tonally resembles much of M.O.R indie rock these days—a little too precious, a little too harmless, a little too willing to charm the pants off a sorority girl in a Shins T-shirt. All that said, the last track, “Evaporar” is a lovely four minute field-trip to Bahia that comes off like a forgotten acoustic Joao Gilberto demo to remind you resident of the chilly Northern Hemisphere that it’s spring in Salvador.

Here's a little taste.