J. P. Donleavy wrote several novels and made a small reputation as an artist, but the one work with which he will be forever associated is "The Ginger Man," which, like The Catcher in the Rye or Lord of the Flies, became a classic – though only after a difficult gestation.
"The Ginger Man", which chronicled the boozing and sexual exploits of one Sebastian Dangerfield, an American “studying law” in repressive post-war Dublin, hits on a narrative voice so beguilingly quirky it gives focus to a storyline that otherwise was meanderingly episodic.
Brendan Behan, who was the first to read it, is reputed to have said:
"This book is going to go around the world and beat the bejaysus out of the Bible.”
It was its non-Biblical content which got it into trouble.
The manuscript was rejected by 45 publishers, partly on account of its often baffling, ungrammatical narrative (his aversion to question marks, for example), but more because of its sexual content.
At Behan’s suggestion, Donleavy sent it to Maurice Girodias, founder of the Olympia Press, a Paris-based English-language publisher of erotic fiction and avant-garde classics by such authors as Vladimir Nabokov, Henry Miller, William Burroughs, Samuel Beckett and Lawrence Durrell.
Girodias agreed to publish the book but, to Donleavy’s chagrin, included it in Olympia’s pornographic “Traveller’s Companion” series, alongside such titles as School for Sin, White Thighs and The Whip Angels.
Furious at what he saw as a betrayal, Donleavy declared his part of the agreement null and void.
He then signed a contract with the mainstream English publisher Neville Spearman, who brought out another edition.
Girodias sued for breach of contract, beginning a legal tussle lasting years which ended in a coup so stunning that even Girodias had to admire it – with Donleavy buying the rights to Olympia Press at auction after reducing his opponent to bankruptcy.
Years later, in "The History of The Ginger Man: An Autobiography", Donleavy wrote a piece of doggerel:
When you find a friend
Who is good and true
F--- him
Before he f---s you.
In the meantime, "The Ginger Man" had become a bestseller.
Initially banned in America and Ireland, it hit the front pages when a stage adaptation starring Richard Harris was closed down by Dublin’s Archbishop McQuaid (an indignant Harris threatened to send the manuscript to the Pope).
Donleavy received a message that John F Kennedy wanted to meet him – though the president was assassinated before the meeting could be arranged.
He also received a handwritten letter from Kennedy’s widow Jackie and a friend claimed that he had overheard Marilyn Monroe saying it was the only novel she had read in a year.
Eventually it sold more than 45 million copies worldwide.
Donleavy was often described as an “Irish” writer and The Ginger Man was later reissued in a “Great Irish Writers” series published by the Irish Independent.
Yet in fact he was born and brought up in America and though he lived in Ireland, on and off, for years, his accent remained American and he never felt that the Irish people had accepted him as one of their own.
James Patrick Donleavy (for some reason always known to friends as “Mike”) was born in Brooklyn to immigrant parents.
Unusually for Irish Americans his parents rarely referred to Ireland and James’s first sight of his ancestral country came in the cinema, when he saw Liam O’Flaherty’s The Informer.
Towards the end of the Second World War he served in the US Navy and, at the end of the war, he decided to take advantage of the GI Bill to study Microbiology at Trinity, Dublin.
He never graduated, showing more interest in drinking and brawling.
Anthony Cronin, author of Dead as Doornails, a memoir of Dublin literary life, recalls him as “rather striking looking, with hawkish features and a little beard … You couldn’t say he was part of the literary scene, though there was talk of a big novel about Dublin. But everybody was talking about writing a big novel.”
As well as exchanging blows with Brendan Behan in the middle of Fleet Street (Behan bore no grudges), in one encounter Donleavy was said to have seen off six of Edna O’Brien’s male relations. He had, he proudly recalled, “the fastest left hook in the business”.
But Donleavy was astute enough to realise that while, in his case, such activities sprang from high spirits, for his contemporaries they were only the most obvious manifestations of their frustration and despair at the poverty and social repression they faced every day – expressed in The Ginger Man through Sebastian Dangerfield’s desire to “get out of this country which has ruined me”.
Donleavy returned to America, with the manuscript of his debut novel, only to find the McCarthy witch-hunt in full swing.
Eventually, he returned to Europe and lived for a time in England.
But he could not stay away from Ireland.
He kept going back, then returned for good, but this time in the persona of a country gent.
He bought Balsoon, a three-storey Georgian dower house in Meath, where he was always photographed in tweeds.
Then he moved to Levington in Mullingar, Westmeath, a chilly, crumbling 18th century pile on the shores of Lough Owel, with 180 acres on which he established a herd of Hereford cattle.
Donleavy went on to write some 15 more novels (including The Beastly Beatitudes of Balthazar B and the ribald Darcy Dancer trilogy, The Destinies of Darcy Dancer, Gentleman, Leila, and That Darcy, That Dancer, That Gentleman.
There were also plays – he won an Evening Standard award for Fairy Tales of New York – and various works of non-fiction.
But reviews were mixed.
While Peter Ackroyd praised the novel based on his earlier play, A Fairy Tale of New York" as “one of the funniest novels of recent times”, his The Lady Who Liked Clean Rest Rooms was panned as the work of a nut.
One Irish reviewer felt that Donleavy’s linguistic quirkiness, which had seemed bracingly radical in The Ginger Man, had become increasingly “mannered and threadbare” in his subsequent work – “the posturings of a one-trick pony in a three-piece tweed suit”.
Donleavy tended to be philosophical about bad reviews, observing that they had a certain promotional value.
His novel The Onion Eaters, he boasted, was perhaps the worst reviewed book of all time (though it won an enthusiastic notice from Auberon Waugh, who called it a “glorious farce”), while what he considered to be his finest work, The Saddest Summer of Samuel S, had been virtually ignored.
Donleavy actually started out as an aspiring artist.
Though unschooled, he opened his first one-man show in a gallery on St Stephen’s Green in Dublin, when still at Trinity.
Two paintings were purchased by Ernest Gébler, a friend who used them to plug holes in the fence on his estate to prevent his neighbour’s sheep from wandering in.
After this dispiriting start, and as his writing took over, Donleavy’s painting became a predominantly private pursuit, but he had a number of modestly successful exhibitions in galleries in London and Dublin, culminating in “Beastly Beasts, Birds, People and Places” at the Molesworth Gallery in Dublin, featuring, according to one reviewer, “strange beasts, dogs with erections and wisecracking fish”.
Donleavy married Valerie Heron, an Englishwoman with whom he had a son and daughter.
But they separated and later divorced.
He lived for years in London with Tessa Sayle, a leading literary agent.
Then, on a visit to New York, he met Mary Wilson Price, an East Coast “aristocrat” and actress.
He married Mary and brought her back to Ireland.
But the new Mrs Donleavy’s gregarious instincts did not match her husband’s enjoyment of solitude.
Mary had two children during their marriage, but she left him, taking the children with her.
An acrimonious custody battle ensued, in the privacy of the London High Court where, it was later reported, DNA evidence was provided showing that Donleavy was not the father of their children.
The divorce went through and Mary later married Finn Guinness, a scion of the brewing family, but Donleavy continued to acknowledge their children as his in his "Who’s Who" entry.
The world at large remained ignorant of their true parentage until Mary admitted publicly that, while married to Donleavy, she had had an affair with Finn’s elder brother Kieran Guinness, and that he had fathered their daughter, Rebecca.
She then had an affair with Finn and had a son, Rory.
Donleavy remained remarkably sanguine about his wife’s betrayal.
His love for the two children he had believed were his remained undimmed and he stayed on good terms with both Mary and Finn.
But interviewers who found him rattling around his crumbling Irish country pile, where it was “hard to move without dislodging tiny flakes of plaster”, described a rather forlorn figure.
When asked whether there was anyone significant in his life, he replied in the negative:
“My isolation has reached a point where I do not know how someone could fit into it.”
As Auberon Waugh once remarked after spending a few days in the company of Donleavy:
"The mystery of J. P. Donleavy accompanies him up the stairs like a cloud of peat smoke.”
Over the years there were several rumours that The Ginger Man would be made into a film.
Amid a flurry of publicity, it looked as if Johnny Depp might play the Sebastian Dangerfield role. But nothing came of it.
He is survived by his children.
J P Donleavy, born April 23 1926, died September 11 2017
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