The Dreamy Life of George Smith
HYMAN, STANLEY EDGAR
WRITERS & WRITING The Dreamy Life of George Smith By Stanley Edgar Hyman Unlike almost everyone I know, I did not think much of J. P. Donleavy's The Ginger Man. I could see what they liked...
...There is one exception to this endless dream of bliss—Sally's aloofness and death...
...One character, Sally Tomson—the beautiful blonde secretary—is wholly successful, a wonderful comic creation...
...It is formless in the extreme, and Donleavy seems to lose interest in devices he has created, at which point he drops them...
...Donleavy switches, apparently at random, between first and third person, between past and present tense...
...His great wealth (he carries around paper bags full of large bills) is another...
...A Singular Man is not the total failure that I seem so far to have suggested...
...His publishers have not rescued him from these errors, apparently taking them to be avant-garde experiments...
...After George has seduced Miss Martin, he insists that as an inferior she continue to call him "Mr...
...his gigantic Negro housekeeper Matilda drives off other contenders when she can and goes to bed with him...
...By the end he is heroic, the lover of multitudes, a man able to fight off a savage gang of young hoodlums in the park by quick thinking and iron nerve...
...a deadbeat old friend, named Cedric Calvin Bonniface Clementine, doing a monologue in Injun talk...
...George also has available sports of the rich...
...even Her Majesty whips off her sari at his approach...
...Driving with Sally, he thinks: "My heart is not all cold and black...
...Miss Martin's breasts get big in her pregnancy...
...Donleavy's books shout their indebtedness to Joyce's Ulysses, but where Joyce was a true revolutionizer of the language, reshaping it into something fresh, powerful and beautiful, Donleavy merely misuses it...
...Apart from Sally and some comic bits, though, A Singular Man has little to commend it...
...Questions do not end with question marks, and commas and verbs are often left out...
...I could see what they liked about it, but 1 could not share their liking, and scenes that had my friends rolling with laughter seemed to me, at best, droll...
...the lovely Sally goes to bed with him praising the beauty and size of his member...
...Next to the little pantry full of dishes, and tin cans of food...
...Here is an example of A Singular Man's style: "In the log cabin...
...First, there is Smith's tremendous potency...
...He uses "lay" for "lie," misspells a number of words ("limousine," for example, becomes "limozine"), thinks that "manse" is the diminutive of "mansion," and so on...
...in this book a child is not "weaned," he is "smashed off the tit at ten...
...Shirl defending the detective she has put on Smith's trail with "And happens to be a college graduate, something you're not...
...Bonniface's story of picking up an unfortunate woman...
...Either Donleavy writes very carelessly or he is not fully literate...
...the loaded automatic he carries is yet another...
...It is the appeal of fantasy gratification, and George Smith is just as satisfactory a wish-fulfillment as Sebastian Dangerfield in the earlier novel...
...18 floors above the street, then empties his sack of large bills into the street to pay for his fun...
...He deserted his wife and children when they became oppressive, but at the end of the book Shirl adores and forgives him...
...Where it does not simply fall flat, A Singular Man is often actively irritating...
...Smith stays at The Goose Goes Inn...
...In fact, no woman in the novel resists George for a moment (except Sally, who periodically deserts him...
...Smith renewing...
...In place of the stage Oirishry of The Ginger Man we have...
...J. J." Then it is suggested that the anonymous threatener may be an eccentric rich man named John Jiffy, Jr...
...Sally appears to George in a dream, offering her large ripe breasts as peaches...
...Her Majesty (a refugee queen of Smith's acquaintance) in a python stole...
...Smith's power over women and his formidable virility are only two aspects of his general omnipotence...
...Nothing in the action transforms him...
...Smith tricks an antique dealer into giving him a bargain on a brass pig that Smith's plain secretary has mentioned...
...In its vision of enjoyment without responsibility, indulgence without constraint, it perfectly expresses our childish wish...
...The savagery of these acts is accompanied by a language often as savage and brutal as Lenny Bruce's...
...He does not slap and punch as many women as Sebastian Dangerfield, but he used to beat up Shirl when he lived with her, and he now threatens to clout her across the face...
...He hopes that Miss Martin will come to his funeral: "And when they say wretched things about me, how I was fake, liar, and grew up out of all proportion to my prospects, shout back, say I was good-o humble and gentle...
...Brutalizing women is the sport of the poor...
...Accosted by a former schoolfellow, he answers nothing but "Beep...
...That conviction of being a better person than his deeds suggest gives the show away, and we know George Smith for what he is...
...in the city he dictates his "last will and testicle...
...when she tells him that she is pregnant, he ignores her...
...Set in a slightly Dublinized New York, A Singular Man tells the adventures, mainly amorous, of a rich businessman named George Smith...
...A consequence of Smith's power is his freedom to release id impulses...
...It resembles its predecessor in so many respects, however, that I do not doubt its comparable popularity and success...
...he simply reveals his hidden powers, like Superman shedding his identity as Clark Kent...
...Smith goes him one better and satisfies five women almost simultaneously (he goes to bed with both secretaries in the course of one day), and all five continue to love him...
...This mammary obsession is the child's vision of the nourishing breast...
...he travels around in a bulletproof "limozine," communicating with the chauffeur electronically...
...With George's power and freedom goes a dreamlike irresponsibility...
...At first the plot centers around mysterious threatening letters that Smith receives from someone signing himself "J...
...when her mother reproaches him, he walks out...
...He urinates off Her Majesty's balcony...
...Sally wins the reader's heart, or kidney, and her death at the end is pathetic and moving...
...The characters are Humours, the incidents trivial japes...
...even George's wealth is imagined by Bonniface as "you've found the mammoth nipple...
...Now we have Donleavy's second novel, A Singular Man (Atlantic-Little, Brown, 402 pp., $6.00...
...Donleavy's dreams have written a book that is hardly controlled or ordered by art...
...He is a naughty child...
...In a quarrel between George and his wife Shirl, from whom he is separated, she jeers: "Everybody knows how you make your money...
...a few pages later it is forgotten...
...For all this violence, George is oddly passive and protected...
...His separated wife Shirl visits him and pops into his bed...
...On the brown mat on the entrance...
...Matilda has vast breasts...
...It turns out to be a gift to nobody and to have no significance...
...Sebastian satisfies four women—his wife Marion, his mistress Chris, his spinster roomer Miss Frost, and his love Mary—more or less consecutively, although he has fantasies of living with all of them at once...
...Early in the book...
...As a novel, A Singular Man is nothing much...
...Lay a white envelope...
...That "everybody" does not include the reader, who never does learn Smith's business...
...after a while the letters stop without further explanation...
...She is foul-talking, warm-hearted, and ruthlessly honest (the course of their love affair is a progress from her calling him "frondlike" to her marvelous declaration, "I want to hand you one of my kidneys...
...I believe that its great appeal, like that of The Ginger Man, is non-literary or, more properly, sub-literary...
...and such...
...he is having an enormous mausoleum built to encase his body after death...
...But then Sally is the work of a writer, the writer Donleavy may someday become if he wakes...
...Along with the lack of continuity in the action, there is great inconsistency in Smith's character...
...In trouble, George imagines: "Go through the rest of my life now by mute card or beep...
...Women take excellent care of him, and often the same employee satisfies a variety of needs: housekeeper-mistress or secretary-mistress...
...Its hero is rich instead of desperately poor, its end is unhappy rather than happy, and it lacks a lot of The Ginger Man's gusto and eloquence...
...He ends some chapters (as he did in The Ginger Man) with horrid little free verses, or his characters speak in rhyme, or the narrator rhymes ("She sat chewing...
...Why then do I expect it to be popular...
...A Singular Man includes a great deal of unsuccessful humor...
...Similarly, George stepping into dog manure, resting his elbows in seagull droppings, being the target of all the birds when he wears a white suit, is the infant soiling himself and playing happily with the result...
...his virginal secretary Miss Martin goes to bed with him and turns out to be attractive...
...At the start he is a poor boob, timid and shy with women, terrified of children...
...The reader thinks that it is to be a gift to the plain secretary, whom George will eventually seduce, or to his beautiful blonde secretary, whom he is currently pursuing...
...As a fantasy gratification, however, it is almost perfect...
...If much of it is unfunny, a few things are terribly funny: a cheery letter of condolence from a village postmistress...
...More revealing than anything is George's constant sense that essence is something different than, and superior to, existence: that he is a good man although his acts are bad...
...In the country...
...Omnipotent and allbeloved, never smashed off the mammoth nipple, urinating 18 stories or beeping like a silly, George Smith is a small boy living a small boy's fantasy life...
...When George, drunk and driving without a license, veers onto the wrong side of the road and hits another car, he deals with the other driver by handing him a card saying that George is a deaf mute, then springing at him like an animal and driving off in the confusion...
...I must confess that I find the breaking of this sentence into four non-sentences by using periods for commas entirely pointless...
...Smith doing Katzenjammer Kids German...
...Aspects of George's life are uterine: his apartment door is thick surgical steel...
Vol. 46 • November 1963 • No. 24
