Birthday; Donleavy, Dangerfield, and me

James Patrick Donleavy- who answers to Mike- is ninety years old today, which is interesting to consider given the comments he made during a 1975 interview with The Paris Review:

INTERVIEWER 

Donoghue said about you: Where most of us become afraid of death at about age forty, you were always afraid of death. Is that so?
DONLEAVY
I was quite obsessed with it always, and fascinated by it. Still am. It has always frightened me in the United States. I’m very fearful of dying and death here. I’m tense every day until my wife gets home. You can’t walk in comfort anywhere in this city. You have to be constantly conscious of what’s going on around you. It makes it impossible for me to conduct my business as an author . . . I don’t get any chance for reverie. You build up this fear and suddenly the fear is all around you. It prevents you from enjoying anything. You’re constantly surprised as you walk out into the street to find it’s a sunny day and people are walking along unhampered in their lives.
INTERVIEWER
Do you remember growing up with fear at all?
DONLEAVY
No, I don’t. No. I keep thinking back to the period which Fairy Tale in New York concerns—the years around 1950. I don’t recall there being the kind or extent of street violence there is now.
I don’t have feelings like that in Ireland. There you die in your bed if you possibly can, and are taken to your cemetery. I did have a cemetery in the previous house I had. I’m now hoping to have another private cemetery on this place, but I’ll need county council approval.
INTERVIEWER
Is it easy to establish a private cemetery?
DONLEAVY
Yes, you just get planning permission.
INTERVIEWER
You can’t bury anybody on your front lawn?
DONLEAVY
Yes you can. There was in fact a case where a gentleman in England buried his wife in his back garden. The neighbors objected and it was taken to Court and he won. You can, in fact, bury yourself where you like.

Donleavy was born in New York, the son of an Irish immigrant father and an Irish-Australian mother of considerable means. After World War II, Donleavy read zoology at Trinity College, Dublin, though he had no interest in a career doing lab work:

I was always interested in medicine and science. But I knew that I was going to be a writer. Donoghue was someone who used to come into my rooms at Trinity and see something in the typewriter and glance at it. I’d ask him, “What do you think of that, Donoghue?” and he’d say “It stinks!” This went on for days and days, every time he’d come in trying to get food from me. And then—he was a classicist—one night I typed out some Plato and left it in my typewriter, and I had it ready for him as he popped in. And I said, “Okay, Donoghue, there it is in the typewriter. Now let’s have your opinion on that.” “That stinks too.” “Look, Donoghue, I’ve tried awfully hard with this.” He’d say, “Doesn’t matter. You’re never going to make it.” I made him give it a second reading, but he said it still stunk. Then I revealed to him it was Plato. And that stopped him staring at my typewriter. He finally conceded, “What the hell, you work hard, maybe you’ll make it.”

He got in mind writing a novel about what it was like to be young and in Dublin, with clever friends and the world at your feet and yet the sense it was all a bubble, at popping’s verge. Everyone would graduate and move on and get old and the moment, lost, could never be regained. He started it in 1949, and took three years to finish it.

Donlevy created an American at Trinity, Sebastian Dangerfield, whom he based on a friend. Dangerfield, reading law, with an English wife and a baby, managed to neglect both studies and family while boozing and blaspheming his way around the city, his charming dissipation always opening doors and bar tabs.

He fell in with Brendan Behan, and they became great frenemies, styling themselves writers when neither had published a word, and punctuating their literary debates with fist fights out on the curb. Behan broke into Donleavy’s house of a weekend, and, as recompense for sleeping in his bed, eating his food, and stealing his shoes, left Donleavy eighty pages of editing notes on what became The Ginger Man. While the loss of the shoes irked Donleavy no end the notes gave him the confidence to submit the book for publication.

Dense- Donleavy moved back and forth between first and third person with dexterity, often indulging long, verbless sentences, and unspooling a tale as rude as it could be- The Ginger Man was deemed brilliant and completely unpublishable by Scribner’s. Bennett Cerf at Random House barely had time to get it out of the envelope before rejecting it. Some of the nearly fifty publishers who turned it down were willing to consider it again only after severe pruning.

Donleavy demurred:

I had a sense that the book held itself together on the basis of these scatalogical parts. That its life was in these parts. And I was quite aware that cutting them would be severely damaging to it. So, to continue, that summer when I was in Boston, Little, Brown saw it. The editor called me around there on a hot, sweaty afternoon. He sat me a good distance away from his desk, and the manuscript was in a shadowy corner of the room. He leaned back in his chair very nervously and pointed at the manuscript, with his hand trembling, and said, “There’s obscene libel in that book!” So that was the end of Little, Brown.

Finally, at Behan’s behest, Donleavy submitted the manuscript to Maurice Girodias, the owner of Paris-based Olympia Press. Girodias’s specialties were pornographic novels and- as a cover and tax offset for his huge profits- anything classy that was banned in Britain or America. The latter he printed in a high-class line- Samuel Beckett and Vladimir Nabokov were among his authors. The rest went in a “Traveler’s Companion” series where one found Frank Harris, Henry Miller, John Cleland's Fanny Hill, and lesser authors’ works bearing titles like How To Do It, Roman Orgy, and Heaven, Hell and the Whore. Feeling the breath of French regulators closing in on him for pushing the limits of even French laissez-faire, Girodias published The Ginger Man in the Companion series, to be able to claim that line, too, was avant-garde, not salacious.

Trying to highlight his diamond in the pigsty, Girodias tagged The Ginger Man as “a special book”, which backfired spectacularly. In Olympia-speak, that suggested something unusually naughty. Donleavy, who had cheerfully cashed his 250 pound advance and was contemplating the sunlit uplands of authorship, was outraged. ''That was basically the end of my career,'' he said. ''I was 'a dirty book writer' out of Paris.''

It was 1955, and Donleavy was 29 years old.

After Girodias blocked his sale of the UK rights to a London publisher and sued him for breach of contract, Donleavy summoned all the anger and brawlery his heritage, and training as a pugilist (he claimed once he had a deal to fight Norman Mailer on television but Mailer wimped out) gave him for the twenty-year legal battle. It was a fight to the death, and observers joked both sides were funding the litigation with royalties from the same book.

The war drained them both financially, but Donleavy had the slightly deeper pockets. Forced into bankruptcy, Girodias put Olympia Press on the block at a closed auction. Donleavy, catching wind of the scheme, got his wife and secretary into the sale and bade them bid hard. Girodias folded at $8,000. Donleavy found himself, briefly, as both plaintiff and defendant in the same suit. Donleavy the author settled with Donleavy, his new publisher.

In the process, Donleavy became a formidable expert on international copyright law. When Atlantic tried to back out of publishing his second novel (too salacious for Boston), he dispatched a letter threatening to sue for $375,000.41. Timorously replying that while they felt confident they’d whup Donleavy's ass in court, Atlantic published the book. Donleavy maintained the specificity of the damage claim bamboozled the publisher’s lawyers into thinking he had a smoking gun of unknown origins and danger.

Donleavy  took up negotiating and drafting his own contracts, for himself and other writers (he single-handedly bullied to death an unauthorized James Bond movie for the author Ian Player), but the Olympia battle left him a cynical, suspicious and semi-reclusive character (he wasn’t much on marriage, either, after one of his several wive threw him over, married up into the Guinness brewing family, and revealed neither of their children were his).

A change in Irish tax law in the 1960s beckoned writers and artists to live, income-tax free. Donleavy set up in a manor house he inherited from his mother, on a 180-acre cattle farm. He has spent six decades there, letting the place fall down about him and harboring a grudge against the land he joined as a citizen in 1969. He cast them as a"small inbred population of highly active begrudgers" in The Ginger Man, and has never gotten over his book having been banned there until 1975.

Though a successful play, The Ginger Man has been under some sort of Hollywood curse for decades. Every effort to film it has foundered. Johnny Depp, a Donleavy friend who maintains that without The Ginger Man, there would have been no Hunter S. Thompson, has tried and failed, more than once, to get the story on screen. Donleavy’s pique has been salved by the book’s 45 million copies sold; its ranking as 99th of the 100th most influential novels in English, and savvy business deals like licensing the title to a chain of pubs.

Donleavy was a popular and prolific author through the 1970s and 80s; producing seventeen books and hundreds of articles, always appearing in interview and book jacket shots as a classic Irish squire in tweeds and plus fours. His last book came out in 1998 and he has a room in his house filled with bankers boxes of unfinished work.

In a profile three years ago, The New York Times looked ahead to a post-Donleavy world and said his passing would mark the end of “an eminent bohemian of unclassifiable stature”; of his first- and greatest- book, the novelist John Banville has praised it for its “sweet and delicate melancholy.”

I picked up The Ginger Man in the 1990s, on a lark. I was curious to solve a question that had floated in and out of mind for a decade: what was it about? In 1980, I was in my last year at Oxford, an American grad student headed for law school back home, terrified at being in way over my head- socially and academically- yet, inexplicably, a success of sorts in almost everything I tried. I got good reviews in a musical about Watergate; was a well-regarded writer for the university paper; even dismissed in some circles as a dumb jock, given my large presence in the Mansfield College 1st VIII. I was rarely paralytic after pub crawls (and never in the gutters). One of my rowing mates once threw his arm ‘round my shoulders and declared, “You know, I never really think of you as a foreigner.” After finishing my exams in May, I spent a glorious summer in Oxford with nothing to accomplish but the having of as much fun as was possible with my friends, whom I knew I’d probably never see again.

I bought the book- in Seattle, around 1995- after a friend from those days mentioned in a letter that, among my posse at The Emperors Wine Bar (The High, just up from the Sheldonian and across from Blackwell’s), I was known, behind my back, as “The Ginger Man.”