Only for the Moment Am I Saying Nothing: An Interview with J.P. Donleavy

Literary Review, Summer, 1997 by Thomas E. Kennedy

In the taxi, a Powder Fresh car freshener, hung from the interior light, dangles and sways with the road, and the driver, a young father of three with a scarred cheek, talks of football and the cost of food as we roll through the green countryside. A fat young fellow with folded arms and sandy hair sitting on a fence watches as we fly past. We pass a shop that says Paddy's, a sloping green field with a rook circling in the air above, old thatched-roof farmhouses, hedges, stone walls. The speed limit is forty, and the driver does ninety around a "Slow Dangerous Bend." Then it says, "Welcome to County Westmeath," We stop to ask directions of an Esso boy who says, "I know of a Donleavy out on the other side of town," and a surge of joy lifts me: that I am in Ireland to meet J.P. Donleavy who has written books that have brightened many a drear December of my discontent.

J.P. Donleavy's The Ginger Man--along with Joseph Heller's Catch-22, Ken Kesey's One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, and J.D. Salinger's Catcher in the Rye--has been one of the most influential American novels of the past fifty years. All four novels have characterized and defined the spirit of the American individual at war with a repressive society, each in its own way. Suppressed for more than a decade, The Ginger Man's first unexpurgated publication outside of France was the British paperback by Corgi in 1961, its first unexpurgated hardcover edition from Seymour Lawrence having to wait till 1965. Since then it has sold several million copies and developed a vast cult following. The novel has been performed on stage many times, adapted by its author, and eminences from the film industry such as Robert Redford, Mike Nichols, Sam Spiegel, and John Huston have attempted to negotiate film rights over the years, but Donleavy is reluctant to relinquish control of the project.

The critics received The Ginger Man with enthusiastic praise. Critical reaction to Donleavy's next eleven novels, however, has been less resounding. The complaint is that Donleavy merely repeats himself--in fact, the theme and content of his books vary greatly, although they do share a vision of death's inevitability and man's dark-comically earnest wish to evade it, a vision as old and established as the ancient Sumerian Epic of Gilgamesh.

Critic George Grella admires Donleavy's mix of verisimilitude with fantasy, his celebration of "the eroticism of all materiality." There is a recurrent theme of loss of the loved one--Dangerfield's first love drives a car off a bridge; George Smith's Sally (A Singular Man) dies in a car crash; Balthazar B.'s love dies in a fall from a horse; and Cornelius Christian's wife also dies. In A Fairy Tale of New York, the main character is an apprentice mortician; in A Singular Man, there is a central image of a mausoleum.

"Like all good comic writers," says Grella, "Donleavy grounds his vision in a dark view of the world." Beneath it all lie "fear, guilt, and the dread of death." Yet comic the books are, mine fields of belly laughs, farce, and the laughter of sharp recognition.

A Singular Man is a dark comic masterpiece of another sort, and The Onion Eaters, which caused the critics to wrinkle their noses, is vastly popular among readers. Time has shown that J.P. Donleavy does not need the critics, for his books continue to sell famously, without rave reviews, without even being advertised.

This interview was conducted in Donleavy's 25-room mansion in Mullingar, about sixty miles from Dublin. I was admitted by a housekeeper into a spacious, comfortable sitting room where a high-heaped peat fire was already burning. I sat on a cozy sofa before the fire and a wall of pictures, and a marble fireplace with tall ivory carvings. On a side table, a Handel concerto and a photo of Donleavy with someone wearing a patch on his eye and a beard. All the paintings seem to be signed by Donleavy himself, and enormous coloured pillows are spread all across the great plank floor. On another side table, a leather bound book by Gay Talese, another of Darcy Dancer. The coffee table is a walnut plank across two small mill wheels with a Fortnum and Mason catalogue on top of it. Alongside the fireplace, a basket of peat and andirons. Snapshots here and there, a boy, a strange-looking sheep; on the wall a great brass tongs stretched open, looking like something Skully might wish to use on Sebastian Dangerfield. Above the mantle, an ornately framed mirror.

As I wait, from time to time the telephone rings with a kind of giggling sound. On one radiator, a pewter fish. To one side of the room, a grand piano of dark wood. Donleavy's secretary, Miss Jacqueline Killard, comes in, young and modern in black tights, to assure me Mr. Donleavy will be here soon.

As the wait extends, I begin to feel nervous. I notice rips in the bottom of the easy chairs and a sofa--a dog? a cat? The fire burns low. I get up and push the door shut not to let the heat out, feel an incipient chill in the air, look back a moment later and see the door has swung open again.