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

Literary Review, Summer, 1997 by Thomas E. Kennedy

What other writers do you look to as your mentors, if any?

I suppose some have influenced one years earlier. Probably in a strange way I have avoided a lot of influence by the happenstance of being a painter and writing forewords to exhibitions I used to give and that set me with my first publications as a writer so the influences of others didn't get to me because I was already up and running as an artist. But in writing the GM, as I wrote through the book and it is only now that I have been reading some old letters written at the time that I discovered how I was actually in the process of learning how to become a writer and to use words.

If I were to say what influence I could perceive, I would say Joyce and Ulysses. Had you read it?

Never totally, but clearly Joyce would have been an influence. Then, too, when I was writing GM, you can see on the cover of my Ireland book a picture of the desk where I worked, and that is where Brendan Behan wrote Borstal Boy, too. In fact, he broke into my house once when I was away, and he started reading the manuscript of GM and correcting it, editing it, and he autographed across the top of the page, Brendan Behan. I resented that, but I was amazed that as I continued to work on the book, I found myself actually acceding to a lot of the kind of changes he was making.

Do you generally take advice from editors of the houses that publish your books, or do they come out as you send them in?

As I send them in.

You mentioned the real-life counterpart of Dangerfield. When you wrote A Singular Man, were you thinking of Howard Hughes?

Not particularly of Hughes, but of myself being put in that position, doing legal battle with the world. I had law cases with Girodias in Paris, London, and New York, gigantic situations--fourteen lawyers at the height of the case. Lord Goodman, one of the major figures in British law, finally represented me in London. But I started out with nothing. However, over the years, as I had to, by necessity, learn, and in consulting with lawyers all the time, did become familiar with legal matters. Girodias luckily hadn't wiped me out in the early stages, which he should have done. You know when you find some author like that, get rid of him right away and make sure he doesn't come back. For writers without knowing seem to excel in legal matters--they're dangerous. I slowly got richer, more powerful, comparatively speaking. I operated in a place that I refer to as Tax Dodgers' Towers in London. No one knew I lived there. I had another address in London, in Fulham, and that's where mail came to, and from which mail would be collected two or three times a week, and there was a person who answered the telephone at that number--in those days they had real people answering, and that was my front, the poor author who lived down in Fulham, but in fact I lived up in the top of this tower in some elegance.

Was it to avoid the confrontations due to your legal cases, or were there other people, young writers and so forth, bothering you?