Unblushing Bloom

THE GINGER MAN (327 pp.)--

J. P. Donleavy -- McDowell, Obolensky ($3.95).

The Blooms that flower in the spring publishing season have everything to do with this case. The first of the species, planted by James Joyce, was Leopold Bloom, the Dublin space salesman who flourished in Ulysses. Because of the things that went on inside Bloom's head, writing has not been quite the same again; since he had his big, long, exhausting day, something called the interior monologue has rattled around inside many an emptier head. The latest victim of the idea that anything and everything goes, especially on paper, is an American named James Patrick Donleavy, whose cross-pollination with Bloom has produced a rank Jimson weed. Its name: Sebastian Dangerfield, chief character of a mad, and--by British critics--madly praised novel called The Ginger Man.

Cheat. Dangerfield, like his creator Donleavy, gets to Dublin's Trinity College as a student on the G.I. Bill of Rights. Unlike Brooklyn-born Writer Donleavy, a Navy vet who studied natural science at Trinity, Dangerfield is a spiv student of law who cheats at his exams, cheats on his wife Marion (whom he calls "a scheming slut"), cheats a succession of easy conquests, from barmaids to old maids. When one of them laments "It's adultery," Dangerfield comforts her: "One mortal sin is the same as another." He is the pest of the Coombe, Dublin's slum area, among whose tolerant denizens it is very hard indeed to become a pest.

In a world of saloons Dangerfield is a born chuckee-out. He is very strong. He is able to tear the legs off a chair one by one, and threaten and bully women, one by one. Like Dostoevsky's Shigalov, the inventor of "Shigalovism," he is a nihilist in action. His other activities include getting thrown out of the ladies' room of the U.S. embassy in a wild chase that bears a slight resemblance to poor Bloom's expulsion, "like a shot off a shovel" from Barney Kiernan's pub.

While Novelist Donleavy owes his Blooming manner to Joyce (and some of his fertilizer to Spillane), his hero's bad manners borrow something from the Angry Young Men, those moral slummers who came to scoff and remained to stay. Like the suffering wife of the slob-hero of John Osborne's eponymous Look Back in Anger, Dangerfield's masochistically martyred Marion is from the top people, and like that hero, Dangerfield snarls and yaps like a dog in a bear pit.

Surfeit. In a sparkling introduction, full of the kind of critical prodigality of ideas rare in the U.S., Ireland's Arland Ussher sees in Dangerfield a dangerous symptom. Says Ussher: "[Donleavy's] Fool-Rogue represents, fairly enough, the present mood of the world . . . The World after the Great Flood, a world to which the Great Peace and the two Wars, Christianity and Diabolism, have done their blessedest and damndest.

Thus God and Hitler link'd the gen'ral frame,

And bade the Self and Nothing be the same."

Novelist Donleavy himself seems to have some such intention for his picaresque ranting hero and leaves him with a vision of the world running to nothing, like horses on a wintry road at night, and a prayer: "God's mercy/On the wild/ Ginger Man." But before this end is reached, the reader, surfeited on Joyce and ginger ale, may well want to conclude on a new version of Mrs. Bloom's last word to the reader of Ulysses: "No and I said to him no no no."

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