"Mellow Moods of Mullingar Mike"

by Ciara Fergus

WINTER has dressed the land around Levington House in tweeds to match its owner. "So you came here by train in the footsteps of James Joyce," says JP Donleavy, the famed author of The Ginger Man, appearing smaller than expected, well dressed, the beard white, and bearing that curious distracted air of the true eccentric. "It's all described by Joyce - the station, the gates, the long driveway, the house, the orchard," he tells me as I follow him outside over piles of damp fallen leaves to that same orchard. Nice and gingerly does it. Plucking a perfect red apple from the gnarled tree he hands it to me and I readily bite. It's not often one gets to follow in Joyce's footsteps. Or indeed Donleavy's. Not to mention Eve's.

The Garden of Eden, Co Westmeath, is located on the shores of Lough Owel. It has oak trees dating from 1740 when the house was built, and 170 acres of solitude, only an hour from the metropolis. It is only once we are inside the large, empty house that I begin to regret biting the apple. Paradise is a bit dilapidated and decidedly chilly.

Burst pipes mean that only half the house is heated, he tells me, though I'm not sure why we are in the cold half. I take off my coat. Stupid. The fire is lit but it doesn't do much to warm this great big lived-in room with its peeling wallpaper, and old piano, paintings by him on the wall, a bookcase of first editions of his books, old black-and-white photographs and a squashy well-used couch fit for a smarty pants. He writes here with trusty pen and paper. JP bought this house in 1972 and has lived here ever since, albeit with an assortment of lady friends (but we'll come to that).

Despite the dubious trappings of that endangered species, the Anglo-Irish gent - large damp houses, draughts, lady friends, children you need a family tree to keep track of, general muddle - James Patrick Donleavy was born in Brooklyn in 1926, the son of Irish immigrants, father from Longford and mother from Galway. It is as if he has been affecting the demeanour for so long that he's even better than the real thing. He says gosh rather a lot. But, at 80, apparently fit and healthy, JP Donleavy (Mike to his friends) is unfailingly courteous and as candid and articulate as you could wish. He is quite at home here in this graceful, impractical, worn old house, fading into the Celtic twilight like a character out of time or hiding perhaps in one of his books. Still, sounds like fun there. Why would you bother venturing out? Now he lives alone, seemingly content, in his own private playground with space to paint and write. Doing it, as always, his way.

At Pisa airport, from where I have come, The Ginger Man features prominently in the window of the bookshop. Although it has never been out of print and has been translated into two dozen languages it is on the bestseller list in Italy, having just been republished in Italian as one of the 100 classics of the 20th century. Fifty years and 45 million copies later, antihero Sebastian Dangerfield, the brawling, boozing, wife-abusing misfit, is still putting it about. JP was invited to the launch in Rome a few weeks ago but had to turn the invitation down because he couldn't find anyone to mind his 45 cows. Holy cow, as they used to say back in Brooklyn.

In 1946, JP entered Trinity College, Dublin, on the GI Bill of Rights. Microbiology was his subject, and while he didn't graduate you could say he's been looking at life through a microscope ever since. "You see, my writing has made me such a scandalous figure and this can mean that I'm also a very isolated figure," he says. He became friends with Gainor Crist, the inspiration for Sebastian Dangerfield, and Arthur Kenneth Donoghue, who resembled Kenneth O'Keefe in the book. And he and Brendan Behan happily whiled away the hours boozing and brawling. "It was the beard, I think. It was always getting me into fights. People appeared to take offence. One day outside McDaid's Behan said, 'If no one is even bothering to come out to watch, why are we fighting?' So we didn't bother after that." They were friends for 10 years.

In 1948, JP married Englishwoman Valerie Heron and went to live in Wicklow. The author Colin Wilson once wrote of Valerie: "I came into the room and saw sitting there, the most beautiful woman I'd ever seen." She and Donleavy had two children, Karen and Philip.

He also had his first art exhibition, at No 7 St Stephen's Green, to which Jack Yeats came. He has always painted alongside his writing, and last February he had a sellout exhibition in the Molesworth Gallery. He left Trinity without a degree, and in 1951 started writing The Ginger Man. Brendan Behan was the first to read the manuscript and said, "This book is going to go around the world and beat the bejasus out of the Bible."

Actually Behan had a slight hand in editing The Ginger Man when he broke into JP's Wicklow cottage and, finding the manuscript, made some annotations - much to JP's fury. It was Behan who suggested contacting Maurice Girodias of the Olympia Press in Paris. Girodias did indeed publish the book - as number seven in its pornographic Traveller's Companion series. He hoped to confuse the authorities that he wasn't publishing dirty books. Having expected publication in the Olympia Press, which published Henry Miller and Samuel Beckett, JP was stunned, and began seeking a mainstream publisher. A bidding war began, and the longest legal battle in publishing. It lasted 21 years, made JP something of a legal expert and fond of the words "Gentlemen, only for the moment am I saying nothing." At one point Girodias accused him of "being nothing but an international litigator bringing innocent corporations to their knees". The battle reached a dramatic climax when JP secretly bought the Olympia Press at its bankruptcy auction in 1970; he still owns it. It seems that he has always been the unwitting centre of controversy. In 1959, The Ginger Man went on stage in London, with Richard Harris starring as Sebastian Dangerfield, and received rave reviews.He remembers, "Harris really wanted that part. When I went to see him he was living with his wife in a small flat on Earls Court Road. He showed me his fridge and pointed to the imprint of his fist embedded there. He held up the book and said, 'Look here, this book is my life.'"

In Dublin, however, the play didn't go down quite so well.The audience was up in arms and Archbishop McQuaid intervened to have it stopped after only three performances. "That was a very important historic moment, because up to that Dublin had a reputation for having the most tolerant audiences. Anything theatrical had a licence to be controversial," he explains.

Off Broadway four years later, The Ginger Man played 10 previews to a standing-room-only theatre and opened, unfortunately, the night before John F Kennedy was shot. The city went into mourning and the show was forced to close after 52 performances.

If ever a book took on a life of its own, The Ginger Man has. It even touched politics by way of the Kennedy family. "They were aware that a lot of young people were reading it and they wanted to analyse that. A prominent lawyer by the name of Barrett Prettyman contacted me because John F Kennedy wanted to meet me. Unfortunately, he was assassinated before we had the chance. Then the same thing happened with Bobby. He had written and said the only day I'm not free is inauguration day. Finally, I did meet Teddy Kennedy. He asked me my opinion on dealing with college campus students. I said, 'Don't patronise them.' And to give him an example, I said, 'Imagine yourself addressing a college audience and opening with this: I wonder how many of you sitting out there in this glorious university, your futures bright, dwell on the fact that your father had to do so many dirty deals to pay for your tuition?' Teddy threw his hands in the air laughing, and said, 'Holy shit, what about my father?'"

He has a handwritten fan letter from Jackie Kennedy addressed from Hyannis Port. And The Ginger Man even touched the psyche of Marilyn Monroe. "A friend wrote to me that he was in Sardi's, the famous New York restaurant, and, passing Marilyn Monroe's table, overheard her saying The Ginger Man was the only book she read that year."He has kept everything, all the jigsaw pieces of a rich life. Last year, archivist and author Bill Dunn spent a year here meticulously sorting through everything. A quick glance around the archive room reveals a cornucopia of a rich life. There are boxes of manuscripts, a poster of a very handsome Donleavy in tweed plus-fours advertising De Alfonce indoor tennis, a game in which he is proficient (having invented it), and for which he wrote the illustrated manual. In 1988, he accepted a challenge to play a De Alfonce tennis match at the Pentagon, and lost to John Lehman, the then US secretary of the navy.

There is the original poster of Richard Harris for the ill-fated Ginger Man play in Dublin (it returned to the stage without controversy, and with sets designed by John Ryan, in 1971). And a photo of JP with boxer Joe Frazier which appears to inspire him to punch the air. What on earth is he doing? "That was my right hook. And you didn't even see it, did you?" he says, much satisfied.

There is an interesting sketch by JP of the late British poet laureate Ted Hughes, who was a friend. "You know, in his later years he finally found true happiness with a woman. They used to go fishing together . . . It was the Queen Mother."

On a bookshelf are first editions. JP Donleavy has had an incredible number of books published since that inauspicious start - 11 novels, two novellas, four on fiction, six plays, two story collections, an autobiography and two works in progress. His better-known books include The Beastly Beatitudes of Balthazar B, The Onion Eaters and A Fairy Tale of New York. Also on the shelf is another rare thing, a photograph of an enigmatic JP with a stunning young girl. "That photograph, taken at an opening and published in a newspaper, caused quite a stir," he tells me. He thinks he was 65 then, and she was about 22. Her name is Rachel Murray, a designer and a lady friend who lived here for some time in the Nineties. Later, in the kitchen I notice on top of the dresser a bunch of empty wine bottles. A bottle of Chateau Mouton Rothschild '63 stands out. "Ah yes, I drank that a few years ago with Rachel. At the time a bottle was selling at Sotheby's for £70,000. Rachel, I said, with this we must be careless."

Ah, the lady friends. We are sitting in front of the fire again and he is looking thoughtfully at a photograph on the mantelpiece. "That was the happiest time of my life," he says, staring at the photograph as if it has just occurred to him now. Her name was Tessa Sayle. She was a literary agent who died in her 50s. That photograph is her obituary photograph. They lived together for about five years in the Sixties on the 15th floor of a high-rise in London which he nicknamed Tax Dodgers' Towers.

"I can't really understand my own position in relation to women," continues JP, apparently genuinely perplexed on the subject. "I suppose it would be like most men's lives, where the women behaved as they liked. Whether they wanted to stay or leave I was always very accepting and understanding of the female position. All my relationships were based on concern but Tessa was different. She wasn't a great beauty, you see, so that would have changed my relationship with her." At the time he had several homes - in Notting Hill, Fulham, the Isle of Man, New York, Switzerland. "Which meant that no one knew where I was at any given time." Divorced from Valerie by now, and living with Tessa, he met Mary Wilson Price, who was to become his second wife. "I went to New York, because we were looking for someone to play Sally in A Singular Man. Mary was very sought after there. Norman Mailer was quite taken with her, and I once saw her on television leaving [the music club] Max's Kansas City with Andy Warhol. Men would take one look at her and pursue her. We all went out to dinner and as we were driving back she asked me what I was doing the next day and I said I would go walking in the afternoon as usual. She asked me would I like some company, and I said fine." And that, as they say, was that.

"Mary flew to Europe as a surprise and of course she didn't know I had someone else. But it became clear I couldn't have all these people at the same time. There was Tessa, Mary and a woman I met on an ocean liner. It's not that I was a figure that these women would be attracted to. I think they thought I was lonely. It's hard to know what they saw in me really. Maybe some of them read the books. So these were the dilemmas that being a recluse presented." Quite.

He came to Ireland to escape that situation, and then the tax exemption for artists was introduced. So he left Tessa, the love of his life, and married the celebrated Mary. Mary liked a good party.

"My wife would organise these parties down by the lake with bonfires, dancing, music and a pig roasting on a spit. I would isolate myself in one of the wings and life was led here although I didn't have a great deal to do with it. I would meet people who'd say I was at a wonderful party in your house. Sometimes I would watch from the hill with the children but I never went down near the big fires.

The children? There's Karen and Philip, of course, to whom he is close although both live in America. "Apart from my own, there were always other children living here who weren't mine. Lady friends, you see, would come to stay and bring their children." I think I'm beginning to see, sort of.

"One of my pals used to call, knowing he'd find beautiful and interesting lady friends here. Sometimes he would whisk them off to Mullingar in his little red Honda like an imitation Ferrari. Basically I would wait and see who came back. I don't really know how to look at such things now," he says bemusedly. "I miss women. They are very good at the practical things."

After 15 years of married life, Mary and JP divorced. She subsequently met and married Finn Guinness. In the divorce proceedings there was a bit of a legal battle over ownership of Levington House. Mary Robinson represented JP. He got to keep the house. "I wanted to be civilised about it," he says. Afterwards, even counsel for the other side called him a gentleman.

"They live in England and we all seem to be on good terms now. She shows up the odd time. There was a rumour going round that I'd inherited a lot of money. She was sitting there in front of the fire and said, 'What's this I hear about you inheriting all these millions?' Occasionally, not often in one's life, the right words just come," he says chuckling. "'Not millions,' I said, and waited a few seconds. 'Billions.'" This gets the best laugh of the afternoon. As for the rumour, he is still looking into it.

"My work has always been my sole source of income. One is always battling, of course. But I am taking the internet situation on board. There is a man who lives in California and he has created a compendium about me. He knows more about me than I do myself. But the incredible thing is that in the five years since its launch five million people have visited. That's a whole new life to my books. My readers have always been very important to me. I might have someone come up and try to punch me, because sometimes I have that effect, but they are life and death sort of books.

"My mother used to say that it's no fun growing old, but she lived to be 96. I am aware of time diminishing but I'm an athlete and physically, I'm in good health. I can still kick over my head and throw five punches a second." Er, gosh.

To purchase books by J.P. Donleavy, go to the Buyers' Guide.