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

Literary Review, Summer, 1997 by Thomas E. Kennedy

You finished the GM around 1952-53, twenty years after the Supreme Court decision which "legalized" Joyce's Ulysses. It seems odd that the only edition of GM published in the U.S. until 1965 was an expurgated one.

Seymour Lawrence brought out an edition in 1965, which was the first real hardcover uncut edition, and how the book I had imagined would be published when I sent it to a press in Paris years before.

I understand that Maurice Girodias published GM under the Olympia imprint that he used for pornographic books rather than the imprint he used for Beckett and Nabokov and such. Why did he do that?

Yes, in effect that's correct. He had two imprints under Olympia Press, Collection Merlin and the Traveller's Companion Series. He would bring out a new series of pornographic books each spring, and the French government would descend upon him to ban them all, but he just sort of kept one step ahead. When I sent the manuscript to Paris, I mentioned that extracts had appeared in the Manchester Guardian, which was highly regarded in Europe. And Jack Kahane, Girodias's father, was a Mancunian, from Manchester, and knew how highly esteemed the Guardian was. Girodias knew that, so when he published his whole set of new pornographic books, he included GM in that Traveller's Companion Series so he could plead that it was, in fact, genuine literature, having been excerpted in the Manchester Guardian. To protect the dirty books. He did the same thing to Nabokov's Lolita to the extent that he published it in the same format, but not in the Traveller's Companion Series. So I was the only writer he had actually done that to. He was worried about Nabokov, who had contracted through an agent. Brendan Behan recommended the Olympia Press to me, and I wouldn't put it past him if he said to Girodias, "Oh, he's some drunken sod back in Dublin who doesn't care about what you do with his books," and Girodias thought he might take this chance ... but on second thoughts Behan took writing and The Ginger Man very seriously and is unlikely to have said any such thing. Nabokov got in legal troubles with him, but successfully extricated himself.

My position was totally different; I couldn't afford lawyers, and literally, the book was ruined. But to my surprise, I found an English publisher to bring it out, and I flew to Paris and offered Girodias a very beneficial deal, splitting the foreign rights and proceeds fifty-fifty. But slowly and surely, when I got to Paris, I discovered that the book had already been handed around, people had read and knew it, and it had a coterie of readers there. That is how the action began. He suddenly realized that maybe there was some money in GM. His attitude was like with Beckett and Nabokov: "I'll put these guys books out because they're good books, and I'll sell my dirty books because they make money." Though, of course, such so-called good books as The Ginger Man and Lolita could and did end up able to buy and sell the entirety of Olympia Press.