by Michael Wale

An interview with J.P. Donleavy, author of 'The Ginger Man', 'A Singular Man', 'Meet my maker the Mod [sic] Molecule', The Saddest Summer of Samuel S', The Beastly Beatitudes of Balthazar B' and, most recently, 'The Onion Eaters'.

ZZ: If I could begin with 'The Ginger Man'...it has always been said to me that this was based on life, on a Swede called Ganor Krist [sic] [Gainor Crist and Crist was an American].

JPD: Yes, I think this is certainly the belief of a lot of people. Over the years, I've heard many comments from people who either knew or had met Krist [Crist], and associated him with the book - including one or two people telling me that they were outraged by what I had written about this man. This prompted me to look into my correspondence to see what the truth was, and Krist [Crist] had indeed read and admired the book just as any reader might - so I was quite surprised; I mean, if at any time he thought that this was some kind of biography of him, he would either have protested in some way or objected to what was in the book. But Brendan Behan, who knew Krist [Crist] extremely well and who, purely by accident, was the first person ever to read the manuscript of 'The Ginger Man', never at any time thought it was a portrait of Gaynor Krist [Gainor Crist], and looked on Dangerfield as a fictional character. But it's true to say that a lot of things that happened in the life of Gaynor Krist [Gainor Crist], who was indeed quite a close friend of mine, were quite similar to my own experiences - and these were the sort of things which I wrote about in the book. He himself was an interesting man and someone who I was extremely fond of - possibly because he would listen to anything I ever had to say without ever questioning me.

ZZ: Also at one point, I thought that Behan was in 'The Ginger Man'.

JPD: Yes, this is true. His declaration was that he was proud to make his appearance in the book. He was Balmy Bower in the Catacombs scene, though in the original edition, I think there was a lot more of him...I had to refine the book down considerably from its full original manuscript, and he may not have played as big a part in the edited edition.

ZZ: You were at Trinity College at that time, so how did you come to meet Behan?

JPD: It was because Trinity is right in the centre of Dublin, where I happened to meet Behan, just locally at Davy Byrne's one day, where he was introduced to me as an author. Then I was introduced to him as an author and this, within a few minutes, produced a battle and confrontation between Behan and myself out on the street. This was a huge joke perpetrated on both of us by our friends, who thought it was quite funny that we should be introduced to each other as authors.

ZZ: Knowing the result?

JPD: Possibly, yes, and also because everybody in Ireland is a sort of author or writer of one kind or another. So Behan and I squared off outside this pub but, in fact, we didn't actually come to blows, which was quite interesting, for although he had this big kind of public reputation, he was in fact a very serious man and had a very deep abiding respect for being a writer. His public reputation overshadowed what Behan was really like...he was a very serious man.

ZZ: So, after that you got to know him quite well?

JPD: Yes. It was a case of his being the kind of person you'd meet around Dublin, which is in some ways like a great big country house; you open up a bedroom door, which could be a side road, and you meet your friends right there on Grafton Street. One's life and conversations took place within a few hundred square feet of Dublin City - so you would run into the same people constantly and each night it would reach a kind of peak of performance I suppose...when the pubs were about to close, at which point every one would have had enough to drink and would be confronting each other - trying to beat one another up, I suppose. So one knew everybody; it wasn't a question of saying so and so was a close friend of yours, it was simply a question of being in proximity, which everyone was.

ZZ: So 'The Ginger Man' was really about that time in Dublin?

JPD: Yes, very much so. I think it was partly the fact that after the war, Ireland was one of the few places in Europe to have retained the same sort of lifestyle that existed in other countries before the war; Dublin had enough to eat and somehow appeared to be a sort of Mecca to a lot of people. One could remember people who came from California or Mexico or Australia, and so on, most of them quite rich and so able to travel, and they appeared to collect in Dublin, each man having his own reason for being there.

ZZ: Was there anybody else in the book?

JPD: Well, I suppose all the people in the book were actual people and friends that I knew, with the exception, perhaps of Dangerfield - he being the most fictionalised character of all, with the other people, being so real, giving him a kind of reality. A lot of readers don't actually realise that Dangerfield is, in fact, very much established as a character because of what he doesn't say, but listens to other people saying. O'Keefe is, in some ways, a very important part of 'The Ginger Man' - he nearly establishes Dangerfield, as it were.

ZZ: And who was O'Keefe based upon?

JPD: He was another close friend of mine, a very curious man, and one of the few people I'm still in constant touch with...but he's a real strange one. He gets stranger every year that goes by. He's presently living in the salt flats of Utah - yes, Mormon country - out in a place on the Utah-Nevada border. I was under the impression that he was living in a kind of town, you know, but in fact he's living in a place with a population of just 13 people, and all it is is salt and sun.

ZZ: Was Flann O'Brien in the book - he had a reputation for warring with Behan?

JPD: No, he had nothing to do with me really. I think he was a bit older, and I was out of that kind of life in Dublin to a certain extent - the literary life. He was someone who lived his own life but obviously would have known Behan - in some ways he was of an older generation, and I didn't ever come into contact with him.

ZZ: Was Samuel Beckett teaching at Trinity at that time?

JPD: No. Samuel Beckett was someone else who, at that time, was, as far as I know, cut off from Dublin; I can only recall that after I'd left here, he might have come for visits. He was someone whose work was read and spoken about, but like most of the writers that Dublin produced, he disappeared from the city after his book had been published.

ZZ: How long did 'The Ginger Man' take to write, being your first book?

JPD: I suppose it probably existed over a period of three to four years; I must have started it in 1949, perhaps, and seriously and intensively begun working on in in maybe 1950 - then I worked on it right up to the latter part of 1954 up to when it was published in June 1955.

ZZ: There was an enormous reality in it, because I was living in Dublin at the time the play was on (it was taken off after 4 nights because of the intervention of the Catholic Church) but returned to England soon after - and I said that if anyone wanted to find you, you'd be in the back bar a Jury's, because that bar featured very much in the book.

JPD: Yes, that was one of my great favourite places in Dublin, Jury's. It must have had one of the most handsome interiors of any room in the world - I mean as far as I was concerned...its mahogany paneling and its marble. It was always empty, though it had its kind of curious customers from the country - a lot of cattle dealers and people of that sort used to have their big steak dinners at Jury's and drink their pints of Guinness...and they had these waitresses, in kind of very religious garb - like the waitresses at Bewley's Cafe. Yes, Dublin had marvelous places then...you could literally disappear inside them.

ZZ: When you write, do you work to a routine?

JPD: Yes - what happens is that, being older and more experienced as a writer I suppose, I tend to work harder and longer now. I'm more disciplined. I may work on a book in kind of very easy stages, over a period of two or three years, and then I generally stop at a certain point and start all over again...then I work at an enormously concentrated pitch until I finish it - and sometimes, it might take from 6 months to a year, and that generally is seven days a week. I usually finish around two or three in the afternoon, but there have been cases, like during 'The Beastly Beatitudes of Balthazar B', when I probably wouldn't even go out for three days at a time. That's a book I wrote in a very concentrated way.

ZZ: To me 'The Beastly Beatitude of Balthazar B' was your funniest book, and of course it ended up at Trinity again.

JPD: I always forget what is funny and what isn't funny in books, but certainly I often pick up a book and may suddenly find it very funny. The thing is that writing books can make you very pessimistic and even depressed, because it's a kind of technical thing you're doing, and also you're producing something at such a slow pace, just line after line, very methodically - so I look at my books in a different light from the reader, who may just flash over their pages. But I often read 'The Onion Eaters', which is a book that I quite enjoy myself, and that sometimes makes me laugh.

ZZ: Was 'The Onion Eaters' an allegory?

JPD: You mean as a book? Well, no, not really. I can remember getting a fan letter from America, where some girl had been reading it and she couldn't quite get the meaning because she couldn't find the allegory in it. No, 'The Onion Eaters' is, again, just a kind of documentary about Ireland, of Irish life in 1946.

ZZ: 'The Onion Eaters' seems to me to be what you've been aiming towards in other books.

JPD: Yes, this is possible. I enjoyed writing that a lot, because it was so full of this kind of insane life that Ireland had in those days; sometimes, years later, you couldn't believe that such things could happen. To me, 'The Onion Eaters' is like an Irish party itself. My work is a great deal different from Samuel Beckett's but it's often occurred to me, with things like 'Waiting For Godot' for instance, that Beckett's things are very documentary - far more so than people would ever imagine. You could literally come across scenes like that in Ireland every day; it has a quality that no other country in the world has - where certain things happen but are so commonplace that they are just accepted...like, say, violence has become accepted in New York.

ZZ: Can you give an example of what you mean?

JPD: The mere fact that a man in a pub in Ireland can suddenly begin to recite Shakespeare in a very loud voice; just sitting there talking away to himself...and no one will take any notice or think it at all strange. If anyone did that in London, they might call the police and have him locked up.

ZZ: You left Ireland for a long period...you're a New Yorker who came to Ireland and then left it?

JPD: Yes. After a while, I became aware that the people were too close to each other and that it was not an ideal country in which to work as a writer. I went back to America for a short period, and then came back to live on the Isle of Man. Then I lived in London for a while, and about 4 years ago, I went back to Ireland, where I've been living ever since.

ZZ: Early on, you were turning your work into plays, but you don't seem to do that anymore.

JPD: Well, it's possibly an economic thing - we couldn't seem to get very long runs with the plays and I tended not to write that form any longer, though the plays I did write still get a considerable number of productions, in various different languages too.

ZZ: I liked "Fairy Tales of New York', which I think would probably run much longer if it were staged today.

JPD: Yes, that's probably true. I think the theatre business is pretty tough, all the same...it's the economic problems. But I loved dramatising plays - much more interesting and involving that films, say.

ZZ: Have you been involved with films?

JPD: Yes; we hope to make 'The Ginger Man'. Over the years, I have had quite a number of approached to make my books into films, but I've never been able to come to agreement with the people. I did, however, manage to reach agreement over both 'The Ginger Man' and 'Balthazar B', both of which are to be filmed...so one is at the beginning of attempting that lark now.

ZZ: The film is a director's medium rather than a writer's, wouldn't you say?

JPD: I'm not sure that's absolutely true. Certainly a director has a lot to do with a film, and conflict arises on the basis that all the story telling should be visual, but I feel that drama is very much involved with speech on the screen as well as action. I think the director's role is a little bit over-rated...I think that if a few of them got a little less full of their creative selves, it'd be a lot better for them and films, because I think they tend to over-estimate their abilities or what they in fact contribute to making pictures.

ZZ: You seem to have a lot of realism in your novels.

JPD: Yes. As I've often said before, I'm a kind of highbrow reporter...I only do what any good newspaper man does, and perhaps sometimes not as well. But I generally look at things, and if I'm writing about a place, I'll have examined everything, even the geology of the ground on which the building stands, and the architecture of every part of it...it's very fascinating to do that. I'm a great expert on New York City; I know everything that there is to know about it - all its underground tunnels, where buildings were put up and what stood there before them...these sort of things are just naturally fascinating to me. I'm just interested in the bedrock of geology and even climatic conditions - I'm always aware of what is happening to the weather at any given time in the United States, and the tides and all that sort of thing and even if none of this information ever comes into the book, it's still something I'm unconsciously aware of as I work.

ZZ: Do you have books on your shelves - books like Whitakers Almanac, for reference?

JPD: Yes, I have a lot of reference books...I adore them. Often , when I'm looking at books, I'll buy everything I see...stacks of them, and I love examining them and maps too are another great favourite of mine; I love looking at maps of cities.

ZZ: Did you do any special research for 'A Singular Man'?

JPD: For that book, I drew very much upon my own experiences in the fields of litigation and intimidation; for instance, in common with anybody who's making money, I deal a lot with lawyers and have plenty of law cases. 'A Singular Man' arose from my observations of life in New York; the troubles and life of a man making money...how he suffers all these rather nebulous trials he can never quite put his finger on, but which are constantly threatening him. And the money aspects, the power of it and the accumulation of it, how it affected George Smith, and the relationships which came about in his business.

ZZ: What sort of litigation were you involved in then? One is used to successful pop musicians going through various court case, but how does it come about for a writer?

JPD: With a writer, it usually comes when he begins to make money, because suddenly everybody thinks that they own what is making the money. My litigation started originally with 'The Ginger Man' and extended over a period of about 17 years. I mean, these days, I employ lawyers all over the world, like probably any big corporation - as many as fifteen lawyers work for me in different places. When he first starts writing, any author thinks that it's capable of making money, but as soon as it actually does make money and profit, you find that a lot of fingers are reaching for it, and you have a lot of piracies and infringements and so on. I'm a very mild looking man, but that's maybe very deceptive; it's often thought that writers are people who have no business sense, and no abilities to protect their interests, but I think it's been discovered that as soon as a writer makes money, he quickly turns into a business man and finds this way of protecting his interests. I'm no exception...I have no agents, or people working for me in that capacity, but I generally employ people who run things for me.

ZZ: Without an agent, do you have one of your lawyers to fix each deal?

JPD: No, I fix all my own deals and do all my own contracts. Though I employ all these lawyers, I take care of all the negotiation, which I have discovered is indeed a very wise thing to do. When you are involved in a lot of litigation, you quickly learn a good bit about the law, though it's a big mistake not to take legal advice...I have a very healthy respect for lawyers myself. But generally, you have to be ruthless and take a very strong position on what you own and with to protect - If not, you can find yourself in more difficulties than ever.

ZZ: You live on a farm outside Mullingar in County Westmeath. Do your surroundings affect your writing?

JPD: Until now, I was always finding myself lacking ideal working conditions and was always desperate for them - but now, in some respects I suppose, I have the best conditions I've ever had. The house I presently have is one which has kind of wings around a courtyard, and all of my working rooms are in one wing. It's a biggish place with an internal telephone system for phoning other parts...you'd die walking otherwise...but it's the best working conditions I've had so far - with my windows overlooking a rose garden.

ZZ: Do you type all your own books?

JPD: I type a lot of the work and do some in longhand, and then my secretary generally retype the clean copy for me. Then I work on the clean copy, working rather as a film editor puts together a film script; I write over things and cut things out. If I did all the retyping myself, I'd find it dreadful, because I lose my temper very easily...I get furious when I make a typing mistake.

ZZ: You described yourself as a farmer earlier...

JPD: Well, yes - that was inadvertent. I bought the house with some land and in order to keep the grass short, I bought some cattle which I thought would act as lawnmowers. Then, after buying a few cattle, my wife, who in fact runs the farm and has become quite an expert farmer and cattle breeder, went out and bought, by mistake, some heifers - and that's how we got into cattle breeding. You see, she was out to buy some bullocks and didn't know the difference at the market - and she ended up with a dozen heifers. She phoned me up, crying about her mistake, so I said "That's great - bring them home." ...and we got a bull and started to have babies. As you probably know yourself, cattle prices have been zooming, and now we have quite a big herd, and a lot of pedigree bulls a nd pedigree heifers and so on. So I often find myself out in the rain, wrestling with bulls and cattle, giving them injections and treating their eyes and all kinds of things...and also delivering calves!

ZZ: As a writer, did you have any influences on you from other writers at all?

JPD: Yes, I think so. Certainly people like James Joyce, Franz Kafka and Henry Miller - but since I was a painter before I wrote, I sort of cut off a lot of what might have been stronger influences on me as a writer, and sort of started out fresh in a way. I look upon that as having been an advantage - but those writers I mentioned were certainly an influence in one way or another.

ZZ: Are you ever aware, if I may ask a totally irrelevant question, about rock music?

JPD: Yes. I watch it very carefully and listen to a lot of it; I watch 'Top of the Pops' and though I'm quite critical of it, when something strikes my interest, I take it up and follow it...and some pop music I find very impressive and very beautiful.

ZZ: Do you have albums at home?

JPD: Yes, because my children, who are quite grown up now, have collections of music and stuff - but I myself try to listen and will, in fact, buy various pop music which I find impressive.

ZZ: Which groups have impressed you?

JPD: Well, I can't probably reel off the names of various people, but one of them, for instance, that piece of music...is it Peter Skellern who sings that 'You're a Lady'?

ZZ: Yes, Peter Skellern.

JPD: Now that was a piece of music that I found most impressive - a very kind of profound piece - and that's the kind of thing which will catch my attention. There are a lot of composers and singers whose work is excellent...I think it's very exciting and interesting, the things being done in music today.

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