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

Literary Review, Summer, 1997 by Thomas E. Kennedy

Undoubtedly that could have been the case, but I had an advantage in that I was a painter and had already exhibited and was out there already battling in the public forum as it were.

Do you still paint?

Yes and I have given several exhibitions in recent years and must now have sold hundreds of pictures. Occasionally even a reader will show up to buy something.

When you write, do you create by word or image? Does inspiration come to you as phrase or as picture, or both?

I think both, but it is true I am very much taken with the sound of words, and I write in a way that every sentence has to fit. I worry also if a paragraph gets too long--a matter of the human eye and how it perceives the page.

How does inspiration come? Do you sit back and close your eyes and see a picture that you have to find words for, or do the words go off like electricity, creating their own experience, pictures, senses?

A little bit of both I guess. I sometimes get surprised that you can take words just because they happen to be there and then turn them into part of fulfilling your story, like bricks that you can use to build a wall.

Do you gather and save bricks for when they will come in handy? When you are out looking at your cattle, say, do you jot down inspirations, observations, phrases, etc.?

Yes, I tend to, but perhaps not when my dangerous bull is near. And my notebooks get filled up, and sometimes I hardly use the notebook. I generally concern myself with three or four different projects at the same time. Sometimes I take notes for years and years, and then when

I finally sit down to write the book, I might not even refer back to the notes.

Do you revise as you're writing or tend to let the writing run its own course and then go back to it to revise?

I revise all the time, again and again, until the final is reached, when I might not have progressed more than a couple of thousand words.

When you are working on a novel, do you generally see it as a whole in advance or do you have an intuition, a fragment of character or scene, a voice that you follow into the novel? Does your work surprise you as you are writing? Who was it said, no surprise for the writer, no surprise for the reader?

Only at certain points. You come to the end of the chapter and you don't know how it's going to end until it suddenly ends. This happens to most of my chapters. As to what you see in advance, the Darcy Dancer books, for example, I can trace back to their origin. I was going around the countryside not far from here to look at an old Georgian mansion of some architectural merit. Some people were interested in seeing the building, and I came with them. They said this place was going to fall down, and it was a magnificent building and no one was doing anything about it. Turns out that the man who lived in the building moved out of the main house and into a small sort of stable he had there and we went into this building, this great big country house, and nothing in this house had been touched. The place had mirrors like that in it (pointing to the great gilt-framed mirror above the fireplace). The roof, the main kingbeam or kingpost or whatever you call it, had fractured through dry rot and part of the ceiling had come right down into the main hall. Then the thing that dumbfounded me: in this main hall where you looked down toward the servants' quarters, there was a row of hangers--all of this man's things, his hunting coats, his caps, his hats, were all still hanging there, and antique furnishings worth thousands of pounds, and the rain was coming down into the building. No one ever interfered with this. It was his property, his place, and he moved out into the stables. Well, that, with a combination of other factors, inspired these Darcy Dancer books. Just a week ago, I was walking along the hills and someone said, "Ah, how's Darcy Dancer?" There in the countryside, that's what they read of mine, not The Ginger Man.