"That singular saucy sagacity"

by Murray Waldren

Meet the maestro of macabre mirth, that wordsmith of whimsical wit and alliteration. James Patrick Donleavy is alive and well and still offending mightily. Still wordy and fragmented after all these years and all those books, the 64 and 14 of them. Free-flowing hysterias of poetry and sexual excess, social insight and uncommon frankness dancing their dalliance with disconnected ramblings. Amid funny punctuation. Like this. Like it. Or not..

And he's happy in the furore he has created in his adopted Ireland with his latest publication, the Joycean travel book/love-song Ireland - A Singular Country. It's a jocular, jugular look at the Irish and Ireland, an expletive, of English vicars' daughters and errant Irish husbands, of wealthy gentry the ignorant politicians, rustics, bigots and squalor, of marital rape and the new Irish women (Manfighter I and Manfighter II), of beauty and truth and much more...all coated with vigorous sexual metaphor.

"The book received ecstatic reviews from the more sophisticate intellectuals," the Brooklyn-born Donleavy says. "Conor Cruise O'Brien was especially laudatory." (That doyen of Irish literature called it "perhaps the most important book written about the Irish in the past 100 years".)

"It was attacked by some lesser lights with an axe to grind, mainly because I created new things like the Protestant Catholic. And they were really offended that I invented the patron saint of horny men. That a man would pray for a piece of arse was unthinkable."

He laughs with delight. It's a fine afternoon in Mullingar, 80km west of Dublin, where he lives in baronial splendour in his restored 1750 mansion. Donleavy's patents were Irish and both joined the exodus to the New World.

"It's one of life's ironies; my father was straight out of the bogs of Longford, and here I am back there."

Donleavy first met Ireland in 1946 when he read zoology at Trinity College, Dublin. It was the beginning of a hard-drinking, street-fighting, womanizing era he immortalized in the much-banned The Ginger Man of 1955.

Ireland's poverty appalled him as much its spirit attracted. For the next 14 years, he shuttled between London, New York and the Isle of Man, until he moved in for good in 1969, seduced by Ireland's "enlightened tax laws".

"Artists don't pay tax on their work - a very civilized approach. I have said I married Ireland for her money, but it's really a way of simplifying my life. Not having to pay tax on my artistic earnings meant I could concentrate on aesthetics creatively.

"I lead a very isolated life. Months can go by without leaving the estate. And that's only because I don't have to go out. Which for a writer, especially, can be a very bad thing. You need the stimulus of seeing and meeting people. I'm definitely not a hermit; four or five people work for me, and there's often one of my four children visiting. Or friends here to play De Alfonce Tennis."

This is his newest invention...

"the world's most astonishing game, faster than tennis. Absolutely obsessive, played by crazy people. Of which there are many."

Donleavy wears many hats; novelist and inventor are but two. He is also a painter. (I've sold close to 300 works - it was a discovery late in life"), a playwright, a farmer and litigant. When I put it that the four L's of lust, litigation, luxury and loneliness underwrite his tales, he doesn't demur.

"Unfortunately, for me, the litigation far outweighs the lust. Though I guess lust impels the litigation." He's a champion of the courts is Donleavy - "a professional defendant" he's quick to point out, not the "pernicious plaintiff" many claim he is.

Be that as it may, his The Ginger Man was rejected by 45 publishers (as "obscene and scatological") before it was published by the Olympia Press Paris, in Paris. They included it in their pornographic Travelers Companion series along with Lolita and Genet's works.

Indignant at being slotted as a smutmongerer, Donleavy sued. And here's a Donleavyian twist: the case was resolved only last year in his favour, but in the intervening years he had bought the press when it became bankrupt. Which meant he was suing himself.

"When Olympia published The Ginger Man, I remember receiving my copy and smashing my first into it. I tore it apart and I swore a solemn oath that I would revenge the book. When I won, the revenge was not sweet, not a joy, but it was heartening. I felt I'd struck a blow against the curs for all the ordinary people who are treated so badly.

"I have a great sympathy for the disaffected, the phenomenon of the rejected. It's fascinating in Ireland that if you're down, the Irish may well give you a kick in the guts to help you on your way but they'll make sure your landing is as soft as possible. I find that a reassuring quality.

"But I've always been prepared to stand up and fight for my beliefs, I'm prepared to die for them. Of course, the risk always is that someone will come along and kill you. But you must fight for what is right. That pugilistic spirit is something a writer, any artist, must have. Every time you sit down before a blank page or a blank canvas, it's always a life and death matter, always a struggle. It never gets easier. There are rare moments when it's suicidal."

It's hard to get the man to admit he loves his country, but there's no doubting his concern for its wellbeing, his pride in its growing sophistication.

"Ireland is a state of mind, but there's no denying the political troubles are a continuing tragedy - like that protracted tribal situation of the Jews and the Arabs. It's imponderable, yet funnily enough I'm quite optimistic. The chances of reconciliation are probably greater now than ever. Clearly, Ireland's increasingly International stature, the growing sense of national self-esteem, could lead to it being erased. Here you equate poverty with political. If you're rich, you're apolitical.

"On the other hand, it could easily degenerate. The antagonism is in the psyche. Still, no matter how bad it gets here it's considerably safer than anywhere in New York City.

"In my time, the greatest change in Ireland has been the decline in the hold of the Church. It was absolute, now it's absolutely lessened. The Church is still influential at a grassroots level, but it's lost political power. That's only for the good...and only because of the influence of television.

"TV has caused the greatest revolution here in attitudes and lifestyle the world has ever seen. When the English started beaming in their amoral, apolitical influence, it created the most profound change in the people."

And how do the people react to him?

"I get a double dose of resentment in some ways. I'm a naturalised Irishman, but to the Irish I'm still American. Always will be, I guess, an outsider. And I'm a writer, which is worse. When they're alive Irish authors are hated, reviled. The first good words said about them are when the first sods are dropped on their coffins.

"And I'm very honest, although I disguise my honesty in a way...I embellish it with fiction, which brings a special recognition. It comes alive.

"In A Singular Country, I (possibly presumptuously) never hesitated to take on the Irish vernacular...I've become the 'world's heavyweight stage Irishman', an Irishman talking as a stage Irishman talking about Ireland...facing an Irishman and the gigantic reservoir of what I know is his psychic condition, I still wouldn't be able to figure them out. They still amaze me."

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