JP Donleavy

Presenter0:00

Hello, I'm Kirsty Young, and this is a podcast from the Desert Island Discs archive. For rights reasons we've had to shorten the music. The programme was originally broadcast in two thousand seven.

Presenter0:27

My castaway this week is the writer JP Dunleavey. A novelist and playwright for more than fifty years, the work that has defined his life is the novel The Gingerman, the story of Sebastian Dangerfield, a feckless, unwashed charmer, dedicated to boozing, bedding women, and the pursuit of cash. Published in nineteen fifty six, it became a word of mouth cult classic, and has never been out of print since. But it immediately plunged its author into a legal battle that spanned the next twenty years. Born in Brooklyn in the nineteen twenties of Irish immigrant parents, Dunleavey says he was never literary, and only started writing to support his preferred career, that of an artist.

Presenter1:10

JP Dunlevy, we think of writers quite often as people who live on the outside and observe. It strikes me that your life has been very different from that. Quite a lot of boozing and battling and carousing yourself. You seem to have plunged right into life.

JP Donleavy1:27

I'm not sure that that's actually true, but uh certainly in those days after the war, coming to Ireland and Dublin, uh Dublin was en fate and uh people approached it from all over the world and so you had a really strange convention of human beings in the city of Dublin.

Presenter1:49

When you use the phrase en fête, it's it's that a French term for the whole village pouring out onto the streets and and in a sense just celebrating life.

JP Donleavy1:57

In a way, yes, because you'd always use the term the pubs were jammed, which they were and in my case there was a great party always being held down the street in somebody's place, and so on. And Dublin was full of that in those days.

Presenter2:12

One of your peers in those early days in Dublin was Brendan Behan.

JP Donleavy2:16

Mm-hmm.

Presenter2:17

Is it true that he was the first person to read The Ginger Man?

JP Donleavy2:19

He was indeed. He broke into my cottage in Kilcool, where I had a studio, and I was away for three days, came back, found the interior of the cottage in total disarray. Then I went out to my studio and I saw two manuscripts, one next to mine, and I opened it up and there was the word Bostall, and I knew whose manuscript it was immediately, and it was Behan's. And he was the first to read it and had a pencil ready and made corrections and suggestions throughout the manuscript, which I still have, obviously. And then he autographed it.

Presenter3:00

And did you take the advice that he had given you?

JP Donleavy3:03

It turned out I was furious at first over all this advice, and later discovered that I followed every single suggestion made.

Presenter3:12

And there was no sign of him. He I mean, I read that he stole your shoes when he came to visit.

JP Donleavy3:16

Yes, indeed. And that was in for the purpose of keeping his feet dry, as he used to say himself. I hate getting my feet wet. And he said, So I just I filled up a trunk with your shoes and walked to the pub, which is a mile away, and every, say, fifty, sixty, a hundred yards the shoes would get wet. I took them off, threw them in the field, put on a dry pair and he said, I got to the pub with my feet dry.

Presenter3:44

Do tell me about your first piece of music.

JP Donleavy3:47

Oh the Farnham Youth Choir. I was one sad, very sad Christmas period. I don't usually observe Christmas at all unless say children are around and everyone was away from where I live, it's a big isolated mansion in Ireland. And suddenly it got very sad and kind of depressing. And suddenly this piece of music was being performed by this youth choir, and I was just stunned by hearing it. And it became one of my favourite pieces of music. And I learned much later that it was also a piece of music favoured by the model, say, for the ginger man called Againa Stephen Christ, and it turned out to be his favourite music that I had no idea about.

Speaker 34:45

If I were she

Speaker 34:51

Oh, what of time runs between him and me?

JP Donleavy4:54

You want to see

Speaker 35:02

I must eat preload.

Presenter5:10

The Farnham Youth Choir and the Water of Time. Uh what about the the matter of survival, as you describe it? I mean I know you were you were a boxer in in your day, indeed you still I read box now to to keep yourself in shape.

JP Donleavy5:22

Every single day I do my shadow boxing.

Presenter5:27

But it hints I mean, obviously, uh boxing is not these days certainly a typical thing for a writer to do. It hints at somebody who has a quite a pugnacious quality to their nature.

JP Donleavy5:35

Well, it wasn't that so much, no, it was a skill that one honed. I grew up in a very kind of I'd almost describe it now, as a lavish, exciting background in New York City. There's a picture of me because of the business of being born in Brooklyn and raised in the Bronx. It gives a totally different picture how I did grow up in New York. My background in New York was fabled almost beyond belief. And I became a boxer on a boxing team in a prep school and then at the New York Athletic Club. And so that was my background. It was a sport that one.

Presenter6:12

Home for a long time, JP Dunleavy, has been rural island. But as you say, you were born in Brooklyn nineteen twenty five. What were the circumstances of your childhood?

JP Donleavy6:21

Well, we lived in a place where it was the highest hill in the Bronx, and we moved from there to this small community called Woodlawn, which was separated from New York City on all sides by open countryside practically. And we even as I grew up, my young friends I didn't trap myself, but they had trapping lines and used to sell furs to the Hudson Bay Company at the end of the summer. So the life was very rural and I learned how an American l Indian lived, how you played, and we behaved and grew up like American Indians.

Presenter6:59

Your parents, then, were Irish immigrants. How aware were you of your Irish background?

JP Donleavy7:03

Not in the least. They never brought up Ireland to me. I never heard of Ireland. I never heard of I never knew any Irish people. Nothing to do with Ireland. Very strange. So when I grew up you were taught how to dine at tables and do everything that was sort of the acceptable behaviour of America.

Presenter7:23

You have a sort of quasi aristocratic air about you. I mean, you sit opposite me today in in a splendid looking tweed waistcoat and and beautifully uh turned out and you say you live in this mansion in Ireland. Is that something that you've cultivated or something that is just naturally where you feel most at home?

JP Donleavy7:38

No, as an author you've always looked for the ideal places to work. That literally is how it's come about. And the most practical thing in the world is not to have people bothering you, so you get a big mansion surrounded by all the land you can s get a hold of. So I have practically fifteen square miles or so to, you know, indulge in privacy and uh beauty. And that's all you know is beauty day and night.

Presenter8:07

Tell me about your second piece of music.

JP Donleavy8:10

Even to this day it worries me that Stephen Foster, one of America's great composers, was found dead on a New York street with ten cents in his pocket when he died. And I've never recovered from this image of this marvellous composer. I've always liked to listen to any of his music. It always has moved me, knowing about his life.

Speaker 38:35

Oh, Susanna.

Speaker 38:40

Don't go to cross who said that

Speaker 38:44

Yeah.

Speaker 38:47

I'm going to lose it.

Speaker 38:50

I drove.

Speaker 39:00

Whole Suzanne love built your bright for me.

JP Donleavy9:01

Uh

Presenter9:06

The Mormon Tabernacle Choir and O Susannah You were thrown out of your first prep school, JP Dunlevy. Why was that?

JP Donleavy9:13

I was a bad influence on the student body, evidently. I think I s tried to start something like a fraternity, and my younger brother was also at this same prep school, and they threw him out as well, just to get rid of both of us.

Presenter9:31

When did the boxing start?

JP Donleavy9:31

Yeah.

JP Donleavy9:32

That was always going on because my closest friend, a gentleman called Tommy Gill, we would always go down to the boxing room of the New York Athletic Club and get in the ring and go a few rounds with someone.

Presenter9:45

Never scared?

JP Donleavy9:47

No, it didn't particularly frighten me. But the thing about me was simply this, is that I grew a beard when I left the US Navy. But in Ireland, I was the only man in Ireland with a beard. And I could never go to a pub without some voice saying, you know, why have you got that beard? That would always lead to a fight. But all these... Literally a fistication. Oh, yes, yes, I'd be attacked. I wouldn't attack someone. I'd warn them off and so on. But it would end up in a fight. And so as they went on, my reputation in Dublin got to a point where some man who'd been at Arnhem, parachuted at Arnhem, I remember this vividly, I think he was about six foot seven inches tall or something. He heard about it and said, where is this guy? You know, the people he was, he said, there he is over there. And he said these words. He said, that little guy? And the man next to him said, that's what they all say. And there was no fight. But let's be clear. And I never had another fight.

Presenter10:12

Lit literally a fisticide.

Presenter10:51

But let's be clear

Presenter10:53

But the story that it was based on, when you say those fights ended pretty quickly, that was you ending it with your left hook. It wasn't them leaving you lying flat.

JP Donleavy10:59

Yes, and when I did throw it you couldn't see the punch. I mean my p punches were literally like such lightning that uh you couldn't see them and that disturbed people.

Presenter11:10

Have you still got a mean left hoot?

JP Donleavy11:12

Yes, it's slightly faster than it used to be because now I seem to practise it more having to demonstrate it as people don't believe you.

Presenter11:23

I'm not going to ask you to demonstrate. I'm just going to ask you about your third piece of music.

JP Donleavy11:27

Well, I have this Red Army ensemble singing Annie Laurie, and the combination, I suppose, my interest in the Russian choirs came from my friend Gaina Stephen Christ, who loved the Russian music. And suddenly this came up. I don't know how I ever got this vinyl, I think it is, of the Russian Red Army singing Annie Laurie, but I realized that I was probably listening to one of the greatest tenors of all time who sings this.

Speaker 212:05

Melton's brace are won.

Speaker 212:12

Oh, he won't let me.

Speaker 212:20

What the hell is that?

Speaker 212:23

I even walk.

Presenter12:30

The Red Army Ensemble and Annie Laurie. Let's come then to your life in Ireland. You ended up at Trinity College in Dublin. How did you end up there?

JP Donleavy12:39

When I got out of the Navy to apply to universities, they were all booked up full and I just one day asked my mother were there any universities in Ireland? She said yes, Trinity College Dublin.

JP Donleavy12:53

And I wrote off and they said come over.

Presenter12:55

It was as easy as that.

JP Donleavy12:56

Just that, yes.

Presenter12:57

And so it was nineteen forty six when you pitched up in Dublin.

JP Donleavy13:00

I was mesmerized by it, and I found in my undergraduate years that I would go off walking in Dublin. I would actually patrol through the most appalling slums that you could ever find or imagine could exist, and for some reason they fascinated me. But any American who came to Ireland in those days, toilet paper was the major thing straight away. But I never complained about anything. I was mesmerized by it.

Presenter13:28

I mean, you mentioned their toilet papers. You're saying things like that didn't exist. I mean, there wasn't sort of running water, there weren't all the things that you were used to. The fire.

JP Donleavy13:35

That's right. Yes, the skip, as they call them, your college servant, had to go out and get a bucket and bring buckets up to your rooms at Trinity. And if you had to use the lavatory, you had to go two hundred yards out in the cold winter to what I'd call the latrines. It was a pretty rough ride.

Presenter13:56

You mentioned there your your servant carrying the water up the stairs and and the the the set of rooms that you had. I mean, f from my point of view that does sound like rather a grand life at the same time. It was rather a rarified life.

JP Donleavy14:05

It looks rather

JP Donleavy14:06

Yes, indeed. And Nocta was an ex corporal. He was my the servant, and he uh would salute my guests as they came and arrived.

Presenter14:17

Amazing that you haven't yet mentioned talking about your university days anything to do with study. Did much much studying get done?

JP Donleavy14:24

Hardly, hardly. And of course then the lectures were, you know, I suppose like Oxford and Cambridge, the same kind of methods they used. You could either g attend or not attend. And they had some quite famed people at Trinity in those days, E. T. S. Walton, who first split the atom with Lord Rutherford, J. Bronte Gatinbe, one of the greatest zoologists of the time. So Trinity had a l sort of an aura about it.

Speaker 214:45

But

Presenter14:57

Much more to talk about. First, though, tell me about your fourth piece of music.

JP Donleavy15:01

Now, this is a piece of music I think that was recommended to me by somebody who probably thought my taste in music was so appalling that perhaps I ought to have something which was uh a bit more dignified and sophisticated. So this is uh not, I suppose, a choice I could claim for myself.

Presenter16:23

Part of the second movement of Ravel's piano concerto in G major, and you said there, J.P. Dunlevy, very honestly chosen by one of your friends really to impose a little bit of dignity and sophistication on you, which relates nicely to those college days where there was not much dignity and sophistication on the streets of Ireland and in the pubs of Ireland. And we mentioned that Brendan Behan was one of your associates in those days. How did you first meet him?

JP Donleavy16:47

I met him, I think we were introduced to each other as writers, and this was sort of in those days to call yourself a writer anywhere in Dublin was to invite instant ridicule for the rest of your life. And so it took a short time before insults were exchanged back and forth. Suddenly we were invited out each other, out in the middle of the street outside of David Burns to fight. And Bian, very wisely at that point, said, You know, he said, there isn't a single one of them in the pub has bothered to come out and watch us fight. So Behan and I didn't fight and we became pals. We walked off to another pub and had a drink.

Presenter17:33

It's interesting that this uh friendship that was based initially on a sort of antipathy and antagonism towards each other. H how did you view him as an individual?

JP Donleavy17:37

Fine.

JP Donleavy17:39

Yeah.

JP Donleavy17:43

Well, I couldn't uh didn't know what to make of him. He never kind of uh in any way adjusted to b being proper uh or as so called. And if someone, if he did get a new suit, which he did once, and someone said, Brendan, you've got a new suit on, have you? Oh, he said and he got upset over this. He went out and immediately in the gutter, rolled over a few times, came back in and his suit all in a state of certain dilapidation, I suppose. But then people d complained about his condition in the pub. So he reached over and took his pint of port a Guinness and poured it down on the top of his head and said, I'm taking a shower now. That was being anything that he might say or do he would capitalise on immediately. And he was tremendous entertainment.

Presenter18:37

He died, of course, when he was just aged forty-two.

JP Donleavy18:39

Dium, very early death.

Presenter18:41

W was your appetite for wine, women, and song ever in danger of leading you down the same path?

JP Donleavy18:47

No, I wasn't. I had bought this little place, small holding out in Wicklow, and uh I became a country liver, and so every once in a while I would continue to go into Dublin, but never the activity of Trinity College, because I married at such an early age. I was still at Trinity.

Presenter19:07

Uh was that a conscious decision for your own sanity and health? Did you think if I came.

JP Donleavy19:11

Yes, I was aware that you couldn't do this and paint or write or do anything. And it became I imposed a discipline upon myself in those early days.

Presenter19:23

Tell me then about your fifth piece of music.

JP Donleavy19:26

Well, this is a piece which I'm always reminded because I guess my closest, longest friend lives down in Wales. And so my attachments to Wales comes through him, you see. And I just thought, well, it deserves to be reminded that of these associations of things one celebrates after so many years, and I'm presently doing it now.

Speaker 219:47

Yeah.

Presenter20:25

Fron Male Voice Choir and Land of My Fathers. This first great novel then, The Ginger Man, where did it come from?

JP Donleavy20:33

Well, it could have been the fact that you realized that the time was now going to pass after the war, the peace had come to Europe, and the time that we were all enjoying at universities and uh that world and the period was ending and going to be over. And that must have been a force behind my interest in just recreating that and holding on to it in some way.

Presenter21:06

And what about the character of Sebastian Dangerfield? He seems to to constantly be embracing life, but at the same time constantly being knocked back by life, having to deal with what it throws at him, writing him as a character. How close were you to understanding that sort of attitude, that sort of state of mind?

JP Donleavy21:24

Oh yes, I could understand it. He was very one thing, he was a mesmerizing person. If he went into a public house, um he literally anyone there, no matter who they were, he could engage them in conversation and change that man into one of the most extraordinary people in the world just listening to him and the conversation that would go back and forth. And most of the things that descended upon him was just literally a lack of a private income.

Presenter21:53

In the book I mean, a lot of people find the book very, very shocking, and we'll we'll come on to that a l a little bit later. But the stuff that you were writing on the page when you were writing The Ginger Man, were you conscious that other people would be shocked by it? Or was it simply life as you knew it and you had to be honest?

JP Donleavy22:08

Oh yes, I had to make up my mind as I wrote the book to put down on on the page something that had a realism of it. In other words, I wasn't trying to, you know, be outrageous in any way. It was just reportage in a sense, and to report it as uh briefly, as uh clearly as one could, to uh be absorbed by a reader who would see it there on the page.

Presenter22:35

Of course, one of the reasons also that people associate it with you is because there was this legendary legal battle that lasted for twenty years. We're going to go on to talk about that because it is fascinating. But before we do, tell me about your next piece of music, your sixth piece of music.

JP Donleavy22:48

A lot of my music that I choose has come from the fact that you're trying to look for things to use in productions of various things. And I'm always looking for things to fill in. I almost thought it would do to open up the background music to, say, the film of The Gingerman, and somehow the contrast somehow interested me.

Presenter23:40

The Hilliard Ensemble with Jarn Grebarek and Parse Mihi Domine. So there you were, JP. You'd uh written this first great masterpiece in your early thirties. Is it true, as I have read, that it was turned down by thirty publishers?

JP Donleavy23:54

I think closer to forty five publishers. It was turned down by nearly everyone. I suppose the uh censorship at the time prevented a lot of people from doing anything with it, considering for publication.

Presenter24:10

When it was eventually published, I mean it got a significant critical acclaim. Dorothy Parker reviewed it as brilliant, piccaresque, a novel to stop them all, an Irish comic masterpiece, The Guardian called it a triumph. Interestingly, though, they weren't actually reviewing the full text, because the full text was thought to be rather too meaty for people's tastes. What was it that troubled people so much? Was it the sexual content?

JP Donleavy24:33

Usually that, yes, that and slightly outrageous four-letter words and so on. And the general reality of it, I think, made anything that was obscene in the book become far more communicating to people. That was the thing that people don't realize, that even today they get shocked and so on. It's because of the reality of it. And the other strange case with my things where I take myself seriously as an author is simply this, is that so many people's lives had been saved by the books. And they all are almost the same story of men lying in beds, dying. And somebody comes into the room with a bag full of books and dumps the books on their bed and says, Here, read these and they've all survived.

Presenter25:27

Saved how? You mean by the lives they're leading, they see themselves reflected back in the pages?

JP Donleavy25:30

Whatever it is, the book in reading The Gingerman, you get up and live again. You don't die in bed after reading the book.

Presenter25:40

Tell me about this extraordinary legal battle, then, that you were almost immediately plunged into after the publishing of the book. What happened?

JP Donleavy25:47

Well, he published the book in this series of books called Traverse Companion Series, which was his pornographic books.

Presenter25:56

He being the publisher.

JP Donleavy25:57

That's right, in Paris, called the Empire Paris.

Presenter26:00

So you objected to it being bracketed in with

JP Donleavy26:02

In the pornography list, yes.

Presenter26:04

And you took him on.

JP Donleavy26:06

Well, he uh I went off to get the book published elsewhere by other publishers and he sued me in most countries in the world.

Presenter26:17

How come it lasted twenty years, this legal battle?

JP Donleavy26:19

Well, it could never end. The battles continued. There were delays of all kinds of things. Suddenly one day arrived that the Olympia Press was up for sale in Paris, and I sent my wife and my secretary over to Paris with a lot of money, and they bought it in the auction. And now you're looking at the owner of the Olympia Press, Paris.

Presenter26:45

So you might have left the street fighting behind a long, long time ago, but you are a you're a fighter, you're a tenacious type.

JP Donleavy26:51

Well, y I yes, it I'm not someone who who v volunteers to attack people. I'm quite the opposite. But when I am attacked, I do react pretty kind of uh seriously.

Presenter27:07

Tell me about your seventh piece of music.

JP Donleavy27:10

Well, the Humming Chorus from Madame Butterfly comes about in the same way that one or two of the other pieces do, namely associated with a production of mine of Fairy Tales in New York, the play. And I just remember it from when Susan Hampshire was the young lady who played this role and she's on stage. Her boyfriend has vanished away. And she said as this piece of music began to get played that her eyes at one point would go out over the audience and she'd see the audience sparkling and she realized it was like diamonds, tears in everyone's eyes through this scene.

Presenter28:56

The humming chorus from Puccini's Madam Butterfly. There have been rumours of in fact you mentioned it when you were talking about the Hilliard Ensemble piece, your sixth piece of music, that you imagined it being used for the Ginger Man, possibly in the opening scene. You can imagine it making quite a a fantastic movie. I is there any chance of that coming off in the near future? Indeed, is Johnny Depp going to play Sebastian Dangerfield?

JP Donleavy29:18

Well, the only news one ever gets of such situations is always sort of gossip or something like that. But I did read very recently in Cara, this is the Aer Lingus magazine, they have a great big photograph of Mr. Depp, and um there he is on the cover, and he does actually say that's what he's going to do, and then at the end of it he describes me what a wonderful person I am.

Presenter29:48

What about the life you lead now? You've described it as um a semi-secluded life, a very rural life. You say you've got your fifteen acres around you, you you have this very great mansion that you live in. Do you do you feel lonely, or do you feel quite content to be on your own?

JP Donleavy30:02

It's a pretty lonely business and it's very isolating. It's not good for you. And um I think isolation, which happens to all writers, it's inevitable that they all suffer from that at some stage.

Presenter30:16

And what about painting? Are you still doing that?

JP Donleavy30:19

Yes, now I'm doing that more than ever. It's like the most unbelievable thing. I had a an exhibition a short while ago and the prices were pretty low, I'm afraid. But it sold out in twenty minutes.

Presenter30:35

Tell me about your last piece of music.

JP Donleavy30:38

Well, this again comes from my looking for music to suit certain things in a play, and it's again Fairy Tales of New York, where this music is playing in the background, and this Clarence Vine figure says, it's my favorite music I've chosen. Isn't she very beautiful?

Presenter31:53

Part of the second movement of Beethoven's Emperor Concerto, played by Maurizio Pollini with the Berlin Philharmonic, conducted by Claudio Abado. So, of course, we will give you the Bible and the complete works of Shakespeare, and you're allowed to choose one book to take. What will it be?

JP Donleavy32:09

Well, I might have to say something awful. Um something I often find myself looking through is the nineteen seventy two Social Register of New York, which would make me sound like an awful snob, but it's only to check on people who whose grave sites in s various cemeteries in New York I know about or have visited or something like that or for architectural reasons and then finding out where they lived, you see, while they were alive.

Presenter32:41

And what about the luxury? We allow you something to make life a little more bearable on the island.

JP Donleavy32:45

Well, I thought the most practical little thing would be an orange squeezer or something like that, because those things I find in my life do become something I'm indispensable. Uh I've noticed I have a long spoon with a tiny little sort of end to the spoon when I use it to make um dressings, garlic dressings normally.

Presenter33:09

So, which the the squeezer? I don't know, it sounds a bit too practical. The spoon sounds impractical enough to be a luxury. You take the spoon?

JP Donleavy33:16

Eh, yes, I'd take the spoon, yes.

Presenter33:18

And if the waves were to threaten to wash away your disks, which one would you endeavour to save?

JP Donleavy33:24

Probably just hearing it now, I think Beethoven's uh uh piece that we've played.

Presenter33:32

The Emperor Concerto. JP Dunlevy, thank you very much for letting us hear your Desert Island discs.

JP Donleavy33:37

Well, I'm delighted to have been here. It's one of the stranger episodes of my entire life.

Presenter33:52

You've been listening to a podcast from the Desert Island Dists archive. For more podcasts, please visit bbc.co.uk slash radio four.