When J.P. Donleavy stepped off the boat on to Irish soil in June 1946, he found himself entering a country that was still figuring out how to be itself. The Free State, not yet 25 years old, was unsteady in its footing in the wake of a bitter Civil War, leaving wounds yet to fully heal. To the dismay of many, the Catholic Church, without firing a shot, had been gifted the nation, and exerted a firm grip over the tempo and morals of daily life.
For Donleavy, a former US marine who had come via the GI Bill to study at Trinity College, it was a Dublin that by daylight must have seemed austere and tightly buttoned-up. But just around midnight, beneath its respectable and pious surface, another version came alive. One known only to those with a taste for forbidden fruits.
By the end of the 1930s, McDaid’s on Harry Street had become the gathering place where Civil War veterans, artists and mavericks forged friendships over pints. After closing time and a short walk away, a blossoming Bohemian Dublin sprang to life in the basement of 13 Fitzwilliam Place, soon to be named the Catacombs.
Entrance was down a narrow staircase where behind an unmarked door a hidden, nocturnal republic awaited those who dared knock. Inside a warren of smoke-filled rooms, morals were tossed aside as quickly as overcoats, and drink flowed as conversations wandered into territories forbidden in polite day-time bar talk. The city’s exiles, artists, and sexual nonconformists gathered to carve out a lifestyle denied them above ground.
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It was to be the most curious of Dublin’s tolerated secrets, and at the centre of it all stood another outsider, Dickie Whyman, a flamboyant English émigré whose taste for nightlife had been fashioned in the London club scene of the 1930s. There Whyman had managed one of Soho’s popular late-night haunts until tragedy upended his life in 1941, when his lover, a British army officer, was killed in France. Grief-stricken, Whyman fled to Dublin, and set out to remake himself. No one knows exactly how he made his way to McDaid’s, but it was inevitable that he would. After all, if you lived out of step with respectable society, Harry Street was where you made your way to. Soon Dickie was in the thick of it all and about to make things very interesting.
One night as closing time approached Whyman invited a group of fellow drinkers back to his flat to continue the revelry with brown paper bags crammed with bottles of stout by McDaid’s barman, Paddy O’Brien.
The following morning, surveying the wreckage, he found dozens of empties scattered. Glass bottles carried a deposit, so when he hauled them back to McDaid’s he found himself unexpectedly richer by a pound or two. Instantly recognising an opportunity, Whyman set out to transform his basement into a would-be Soho night club where the only price of admission was to leave your empty beer bottles behind.
By the time Donleavy found his way into Dublin’s inner bohemian circle, along with fellow US veteran Gainor Crist, the Catacombs was a subterranean kingdom of alcohol and lawless camaraderie, throbbing beneath the streets of a pious Dublin above. A yet to be famous Behan was a regular, as was Kavanagh; even Tony Cronin had managed to rent a room there. Almost everybody in the Catacombs, it seemed, was a writer or at least wanted to be.
It was there that Donleavy encountered the raw material for a book that he had in mind, The Ginger Man. And in Crist’s unruly charisma and personality he saw the makings of Sebastian Dangerfield, the dazzling, dissolute antihero of the book, who would become one of modern literature’s most loveable rogues.
By the time the ’50s came to an end, the Catacombs had closed its doors after Whyman left Dublin for America. By then Donleavy’s book had become an international bestseller, Behan was a spent force, Kavanagh had one more collection in him and Cronin would recall it all in his biting memoir, Dead As Doornails, published in 1976. Little else is known of Crist, except that he took ill on board a ship near the Canary Islands, died on the quayside and lies buried in Santa Cruz, Tenerife.
But to mark Donleavy’s 100th birthday this afternoon, Grogan’s will unveil a rare photograph of Gainor Crist. A tribute to the real ginger man, whose wild legend still lingers in the city’s literary imagination, a little like Grogan’s itself perhaps, part memory, part myth and best told with a drink in the hand.
