J.P. Donleavy at his home in Levington Park House. (Photo: Noel Shrine)
By Noel Shrine, Contributor
At 89, J.P. Donleavy celebrated 60 years of his best-selling cult-classic, The Ginger Man. At his countryside retreat near Mullingar, he spoke to Noel Shine about his extraordinary life and the novel that gave rise to his notoriety all those years ago.
℘
℘
J.P. Donleavy first came to prominence at a time in the 20th century when to be a novelist had a certain cachet. An era when television, pop music, and the virtual world of the internet had yet to be subsumed into the culture. A more innocent time when the church-state axis held sway over the moral compass in much the same way the humanist brigade do now. It was a far-off land, where to utter the word “nipple” was considered taboo and “balloons,” positively inflammatory. It was against this backdrop that a loose affiliation of young, Irish writers converged on late 1940s Dublin to form what would later be regarded as the vanguard of modern Irish literature. Theirs was essentially a European aesthetic, at odds with the prevailing insularity which typified Ireland at that time. A motley crew which included the likes of Flann O’Brien, Paddy Kavanagh, Brendan Behan, Mary Lavin, Samuel Beckett in absentia, and standing there among them, the Irish-American, James Patrick Donleavy.