Reflections of a Literary Rebel

Sixty years ago or thereabouts, the then-struggling young Irish-American writer JP Donleavy returned home to his isolated Kilcoole cottage after a trip away to discover that somebody had broken in and been living there during his absence.

“I had been away in Wicklow, and I came back and saw this whole mess, every dish had been used, the place was really appalling,” Donleavy recalls in his curiously hybrid Irish-English-American accent. “And I just thought, ‘My God!’ you know.”
When he ventured into his study and found the manuscript of Borstal Boy, he realised that the intruder was one of his wildest Dublin drinking buddies. “I came out to my studio and found this manuscript. I saw the mention of ‘Borstal’ or something on it, and I thought, ‘Oh – Behan!’”
During his uninvited stay, Brendan Behan had also chanced upon the manuscript of Donleavy’s novel-in-progress, Sebastian Dangerfield (he later changed the title to The Ginger Man). Perhaps to compensate for the fact that he was about to nick a suitcase containing all of Donleavy’s shoes, the famously alcoholic writer had scribbled editorial suggestions all over the pages.
“He even autographed the thing!” Donleavy laughs. “But his comments were good, and I wound up following every single suggestion. He left me a note that said, ‘This book is going to go around the world’. At the time, I thought, ‘Well, he’s exaggerating, he wants to cheer me up in some way’.
“But he was one of the first people to read the manuscript. You know, as translations began to appear – it’s now gone up to 25 or 26 languages, something incredible – and I often thought back to Behan who made all these predictions. But I guess this is where it’s got me, out to this house here and trying to struggle on.”

Now aged 83, the writer – who’s kindly eyed, but steely jawed – lives in splendid isolation in a charmingly crumbly old gray stone mansion on his 200 acre Mullingar estate, Levington Park.  Featuring 27 rooms, it’s quite some pad – the books, artworks, antiques, arched ceilings, marble fireplaces, weird furniture and stains all have stories to tell. The Rolling Stones have partied here. “My second wife was very involved in that world,” he says, “though I never had much interest.”
Donleavy doesn’t receive many visitors nowadays (there’s a large and imposing ‘No Trespassing’ sign at his locked front gate). “One evening I did hear someone trespassing at the back of this house, and I was standing there with a loaded shotgun, seeing these shadows. And I let off a couple of shells in the sky, and the man got the message. That wasn’t a problem again.”
Trim, white-haired and immaculately dressed, he looks good for his age – but the years have claimed their toll nonetheless. Nowadays, he often doesn’t leave the grounds of his estate for weeks at a time. However, he does occasionally venture out into the wider world. Sometimes he even meets famous politicians. As he scans through his back pages, searching for the remnants of a story he might once have told with fierce clarity and wit, you can see that his memory isn’t what it used to be…
“What’s the name of that man who was Taoiseach recently?” he asks.
Bertie Ahern?
“Bertie Ahern! Yes, I think I might have been with Bertie Ahern once, in the same group in a room, and the two of us had to stand together because we might have been giving some sort of talk, or we were being asked questions. And I was standing up there, and he was a respectful politician. I said, ‘God, Mr Ahern, this is going to give you a terribly bad reputation being photographed with me – the two of us together’. And he said, ‘Ah, I don’t know about that. I think that my being up here with you is going to give you a worse reputation!’” he laughs.
Probably true . . .
“And so there was no answer back to that.”
Had he ever met the late JD Salinger?
“No, never,” he replies, shaking his head. “My publisher in America did try to call on him, and the stories were legion about how you couldn’t get near Salinger, and so, this particular story often amused me.
“Salinger’s house, where he lived in the country – pretty isolated out in the woods and everything – went on fire, and his neighbour thought, ‘Well, my God, Salinger’s house is going to burn down’. And so he grabbed his garden hose, put lengths on to it, and rushed with his hose to put out the fire, and Salinger threw him off the place! ‘Get the hell off my property!’”
Despite his own aversion to visitors, Donleavy enjoys meeting journalists.   “I find interviews very valuable because I realise that anyone who wants to interview me at this stage has a genuine reason,” he says. 
One slight snag with the house: Donleavy’s 40,000 gallon indoor swimming pool is full of snot green weeds. He hasn’t used it in a couple of years. “One would easily bankrupt oneself heating that thing,” he laughs.  
Given that The Ginger Man, which remains his best-known work, has reportedly sold more than 45 million copies since its first publication in 1955, you’d imagine that Donleavy could easily afford to heat his pool if he wanted. But chasing around the fields after his herd of cattle keeps him trim and healthy – as do regular bouts of shadow-boxing. An amateur fighter in his youth, he’s still able to throw five or six punches in under a second.
“How many was that?” he asks, following a furious volley that stops just short of my nose. “I’m probably faster now than in my early days!”
By all accounts, Donleavy was quite the hot-headed pugilist in his youth – regularly getting into scraps in Dublin bars. Many of these altercations began over his then-unfashionable facial hair.
“I’ve always had a beard,” he explains, stoking his silver whiskers. “I was in the Navy, and in the U.S. you couldn’t grow a beard. And I remember when I left the Navy I thought, ‘My God, that’s the first thing I’m going to do’ – it takes up a half hour of your morning, you are cutting yourself with razors, and so I said, ‘I’m going to let my beard grow’.”
Which obviously didn’t go down so well in 1940’s Dublin.
“That’s right. Then my reputation began to grow because any of the fights that did occur never lasted more than fifty seconds maybe, if they were lucky. The only thing I had to be careful about was not to hurt my fists, because when you’re hitting a jaw you’re hitting a hard substance. And so I had to be very careful, because all these bones here are broken from punches.
“So I had to instruct myself how to hit the opponent in the mid-section. I was as worried hitting people there, because you can perforate an organ inside the body, you know, with the smallness of the fist. And so you were always in that terrible situation of being up for murder.
“I think my last big fight was with, probably, someone like Behan. Though neither of us threw a punch in the end. We had a row in Davey Byrne’s or somewhere and went out onto the street to sort it out. And Behan said to me, ‘No-one’s come out of the pub to watch us fight – so why the hell should we bother?’ So we didn’t! Behan was full of charm.”
Legend has it that there was once talk of a televised bout with Norman Mailer in New York sometime in the mid-1960s.
“That’s right!” he laughs, looking as though he’s only just remembered. “We were meant to have a big fight. Mailer was a really tough guy. It wasn’t just a pose. Someone told me that they’d gone up near his house, and in the garage were punching bags, and they could hear, at 6 am, these fists landing on the punching bags. Norman, he was a tough son of a bitch.
“So, I remember when finally we did meet, we shook hands and just laughed. But I met a lot of fighters in the end because I could throw five or six or seven punches in one second. And that’s a lot of punches. Not many of even the better fighters could do that.”

It’s not surprising that he’s so useful with his fists. Born to poor Irish immigrant parents in Woodlawn, New York City, in 1926, James Patrick Donleavy – ‘Mike’ to his friends – grew up on the mean streets of the Bronx. He first discovered his talent as a young teenager.
“I began to write, even as a schoolboy,” he says. “I went to a pretty good school called Fordham Preparatory School, which was part of Fordham University. And my work was recognised by a couple of the teachers, and when I was being kicked-out for being a bad influence on the student body that was what was said, pleading on my behalf. One of the teachers said, ‘You’re throwing a boy out of this school. He will, as an author, probably be one of the few pupils who will make this school famous’. And, of course, they didn’t pay any… sort of notion to that.”
Having served in the US Navy during WWII, he took advantage of the GI Bill and travelled to Ireland in 1946 to study science at Trinity. While still at university, he set himself up as a painter – though his debut exhibition wasn’t held until 1950.
“I had been a painter, you see, and that put me in a position where I had an audience of some sort. And my first writings were published as forewords to the catalogues and the exhibitions. So that was the beginning of my published career – self-publishing.”
Which discipline gives you most satisfaction?
“Oh, I think both have an equal position. I might find myself making notes all the time throughout the day – on various matters – and I might also be, at the same time, drawing something.”
He tells me that he wrote his first novel as a means of helping to sell his paintings.
“I had gone to London and I was trying to sell some pictures, and I remember the man saying to me, ‘Well look, your paintings, we are very impressed by them. They’re marvellous pictures – watercolours and all kinds of things – and we’d like to set up an exhibition or something, but you just aren’t famous enough yet’. And I just thought, ‘How does one ever get famous enough?’ It seemed impossible to do much about it. Then the idea of writing a book came up.”
Donleavy has previously stated that he’d already decided upon his main ambition in life while still in his teens: “To write a book that will make your mother and father drop dead with shame.” 
He almost succeeded with The Ginger Man (which was banned in Ireland for many years). Wild, lusty and bawdy, it follows the misadventures of Sebastian Balfe Dangerfield, a 27-year-old Irish-American ex-pat, with a weakness for women and booze, living in bohemian Dublin after the war. He began writing the picaresque novel while still at Trinity, basing the Sebastian character on his friend and fellow American student, Gainor Stephen Crist. However, it took several years to complete.
Even today the novel reads well, though Donleavy’s wildly erratic prose style takes a little getting used to. “My big advantage is being practically uneducated,” he laughs, “and my grammar being appalling.” Packed with verb-less sentences, the narrative frequently switches tenses and swings vertiginously between first and third persons. In the following passage, a hungover Dangerfield returns home to find his wife has left him:
“Sebastian went looking for aspirin. The house looks unusually empty. The closet. Marion’s clothes are gone. Just my broken rubbers on the floor. The nursery. Cleaned out. Bare. Take that white cold hand off my heart.”
The book was rejected by more than 30 publishers in the UK and US. Eventually, Brendan Behan advised him to submit it to Maurice Girodias of the Paris-based Olympia Press.  “I couldn’t get published because of the nature of the work,” he recalls. “Publishers thought it was obscene and that they’d be prosecuted for publication.” 
While it specialised in literary erotica, Olympia had (almost accidentally) published some of the most leftfield authors of the time – including Burroughs, Trocchi, Miller, Beckett and Nabokov. However, unbeknownst to Donleavy, they were about to move into more hardcore territory. Girodias happily accepted The Ginger Man, seemingly on its literary merits, but then published it as part of the pornographic Travellers Companion Series. Donleavy wasn’t even credited for the novel.
On receiving his first green-jacketed copies in the mail, the outraged author – who’d been paid £250 by a middleman in a Soho bookshop – swore: “If it were the last thing I ever did, I would redeem and avenge this work. The book was treated as a piece of pornography.  It wouldn’t get any reviews.  It was a total disaster. I never had what one would imagine would be the pleasure of becoming an author and getting an audience and all the rest of it.”
Initially it was Girodias who sued Donleavy, after the author re-sold the rights to publish the novel to a small, now defunct, London publishing house called Neville Spearman. Girodias argued that Donleavy had no such entitlement under their terms of agreement, and took him to court. “So the battle took up,” Donleavy sighs
A long, torturous and bitter legal dispute ensued.  It took more than 22 years of litigation, but, by the end of it, in a stunning coup de grace, Donleavy wound up owning Olympia. Having declared himself insolvent, Girodias was preparing to buy back the Olympia Press title at an auction in Paris. Donleavy heard of the sale and sent his new wife to France with a bagful of cash. Girodias ran out of funds at $8,000, Donleavy’s wife (or “the mysterious woman,” as the hapless French publisher saw her) made a final bid and – voila! – he was the new owner of Olympia.
Even today, Donleavy doesn’t have a good word to say about his arch nemesis. “Clearly we were bitter enemies,” he says.
For his part, in an interview shortly before his death in 1990, Girodias described the story of their battle for ownership of The Ginger Man as “fabulous. Much better than the book, actually.”
Over the course of his legal marathon, fought in various courtrooms in London, Paris and New York, Donleavy had by necessity become something of an expert on international copyright law.
“I learned so much about the law. There was a British writer named Ian Fleming – a very well-known writer who wrote these sort of detective novels [James Bond – OT] – and he got into a lot of difficulties and troubles, and his lawyers wrote to him in London: ‘We advise you, that with all your problems in this regard that you are presently having with piracy, and all sorts of things, that you write to Mr J.P. Donleavy, who we regard as being a great authority in this area, and may help you more than we can, because we haven’t the experience that he has’.”
And did you help him?
“A little. I got to know him briefly. He was great company, and fascinating to have around. He spent a lot of time on some island [Jamaica – OT], I believe.”

Although Donleavy has penned more than a dozen novels since The Ginger Man (including A Singular Man, The Onion Eaters, and A Fairy Tale of New York), he seems to be relatively at peace with the fact that he’ll be best remembered for his infamous debut.
He still writes every day, working laboriously in longhand in his study and getting his secretary, who works in a different wing of the house, to type the pages up (on some days they don’t even see each other). It is what you might call old school.
“Oh yes, my day is busy all the time,” he insists. “You know, from the moment I wake up, and even when I sleep – my thoughts and stuff – so I’m making notes and doing things all the time. Observations. And literally, every day I might, say, get down at least 100 words on various matters. But if I’m working on a manuscript I have to sit to it, doing the work, and go through it. And my re-writing is… considerable. I might have 12 versions that I end up going through. And every little word I kind of fit it exactly, so that everything is perfection, in terms of that it is right in its rhythm nearly.”
Nearly. But for all the drafting and re-drafting, he has never matched The Ginger Man, its impact stretching over the decades. The book was in the news again last year when it was reported that Johnny Depp wanted to make a movie version. The reason for his interest is obvious. A fellow Kentuckian, Depp was a very close friend of the late gonzo journalist Hunter S. Thompson. A big admirer of Donleavy’s writing, Thompson once declared that “without The Ginger Man, there would have been no Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas”.
Back in the 1970s, Thompson wrote Donleavy a letter to that effect. Does he remember receiving it?
“Vaguely,” he replies. “That was always pleasant to hear that someone liked one’s book. I think I might have sent back a kind of thing. I never seemed to have got into back-and-forth communications with people.”
He met Johnny Depp to discuss the potential movie project.
“Good God, that Mr Depp, he certainly attracts a lot of attention,” Donleavy chuckles. “We had a long talk together in New York, and he came around to where I was staying – I’m a member of this place, probably one of the only surviving ones over many years, called the New York Athletic Club – and he came up and we were talking in my room which overlooks Central Park, a very beautiful location, this place. And I remember when he saw a manuscript on the floor he said, ‘What’s that? That looks very curious. I can read some of the title’. ‘Yes,’ I said, ‘well, the full title is The Dog on the Seventeenth Floor’.”
It’s Donleavy’s current work in progress.
“I’ve been working at it every day now. But it’s a book about New York, and, I suppose, if one was summing it up, it’s about the problems that arise with a man and a girl, and she turns out to be one of the richest girls in the world. And suddenly it’s amazing the kind of things that crop up around this difficulty – a woman being so rich that it actually inhibits relationships. And the girl, who actually does exist, is very beautiful.”
Oh, she’s based on someone you know?
“Yes, this very charming and beautiful girl: she came on a couple of visits here. I remember we went down to the lake – we walked to the lake – and her boots, there was hole in one of her boots, and it was ice cold, the water. She never complained and I was very much taken by that. ‘My God, here is a woman who doesn’t complain about anything’.”
The expression that passes over his face suggests that maybe this is exactly what he needs in his life right now: a woman who doesn’t complain. The moment passes. Would you, I ask, welcome a film version of The Ginger Man?
“Yes I would, with someone like Depp, who controls so much, and likes the role, and I’ve seen him play it, and I realise he could do something pretty striking with it. But it’s a difficult role. I have watched it played by, well, Richard Harris being the first one to play it, and a few other people.”
Harris played it for three days on the Dublin stage…
“And the Church stepped in and banned it,” Donleavy says. “It was pretty scary because, you see, The Church could send out people – members of the religion – dressed in their gear, or not, and follow you all around town. We were followed everywhere we went. They closed down all access, the telephone company cut off lines …”
Are you religious at all?
“No, I sort of lost my religion at a pretty early age – from about13 or 14 I sort of felt unsympathetic. And I was actually at Catholic schools – Jesuit schools – they were the most liberal and intelligent of the people, so it was never pushed down my throat, Catholicism. But I did notice, though, that they regarded me as a real threat.
“But it gives people an imaginative situation, which encourages and restores their, sort of, welfare, in the sense that they can relax a little bit about their problems. So I regard religion as being very important and beneficial.”

A father of four adult children, Donleavy has been married and divorced twice – to Valerie Heron in 1946, and to Mary Wilson Price in 1970 (who later went on to marry a Guinness heir).  Although currently single, he still very much enjoys female company. In his 1997 collection of essays, An Author and his Image, he even placed a lonely hearts ad at the end of his book.
“Did I?” he says, looking intrigued. “Really? What did I say?”
I pull the book from my bag, flick to the end, and read: “Slightly reclusive, but anxious to get out more, gracefully older, fit man . . . still capable of eight-and-a-half successive deep knee-bends, nine sit-ups, and five-and-a-half push-ups, and with minor public status, requests pleasantly attractive younger lady of principle with a bent for flower arranging and entertaining…”
Donleavy laughs: “Let me see that book. That’s always the danger of meeting people like yourself, you go right in.”
He leafs excitedly through the book, as though seeing it for the first time. “Isn’t this astonishing! I don’t know if I can remember even seeing this cover, or anything to do with this. I don’t remember this.”
Well, there must be so many editions of your books out there at this point.
“Yeah, probably. God, if you could I’d love to be sent a copy of that, because I can’t remember even having this book.”
I tell him he can have my copy…
“Are you serious? Goodness. Well, maybe you could write something on the cover that you are giving this to me, because that’s very much appreciated.”
As I inscribe the message, it feels like our interview is coming to an end. He’s tired and I don’t want to push him, but a cheeky question seems in order: has he seen much sexual decadence over the years?
“Not a great deal,” he shrugs, with just a hint of disappointment. “You know, I regarded myself as just a professional gentleman, and one tried to keep relationships alive. I generally had a girlfriend around. And this is one of the times in one’s life which wouldn’t be unusual, in one’s age group, to not have that many ladies about – but I’m still in touch with various people that I have things in common with.”
When was the last time you had a lady friend visit the estate?
“Well, they come here as visitors,” he reflects.
“One, say, two or three weeks ago. But it’s tough at one’s age to begin to get any long-term arrangements made with women. They figure, ‘Well, how long are you going to hold out?’ And my problem is simple, that, even though, say, how many punches do I … [once again he throws a flurry of punches]. That’s how many punches? I don’t know, you can’t even see them!”
The old machismo, it seems, is still alive, even if his powers have been waning…
“But I can’t,” he says, “go up and demonstrate this to women, and say, ‘Hey look! I’m perfectly healthy’. You know, sometimes I used to scare the wits out of a couple of girlfriends because I would suddenly – knowing that they might see me walk down the hall there – I’d start to go like this down the hall [hunching, he walks like Quasimodo across the room]. Ha! And they’d see this scary old figure. But women are very conscious of: how long has he got left to live?”
Not meaning to be rude, but I would have thought that could present itself as quite an attractive proposition for certain women. . .
“Yes!” Donleavy laughs. “Well, now they could figure, ‘Will he leave any money?’”
He keeps the answer to himself.