J.P. Donleavy: An Author and His Image

  ‘Verily now Paddy O’Brien or you Jim Gallagher, me old friend, as I am with a beseechment, an hosanna and an hallelujah having just now strayed absent mindedly and wandered more than was good for me and left as I was so marooned with me sobriety overcoming me that with me taste buds in ferment I’m here in a hurry to continue to be in my mild and enjoyable state of previous inebriation. Standing before you in some solemnity, as I’ve done more than once in the dock before the British courts where dropping me in a hangman’s noose they were planning to constrict me fatally by the neck which predicament put me firmly amind of that Epiphany said by all good Protestants, that I know that my redeemer liveth. And as you can see my neck is not yet broken and allows me to render the present request, that would you, ever Paddy or you Jim, plonk down upon the mahogany a genuine bottle from Locke’s Distillery and pour out of it a large whiskey, and thus shall my eyes be pleasantly bedazzled with its anciently grand liquid golden gleam yielding on the palate its superb spiciness and gentle fruitiness and with the aromatics of it hurrying up me nose the sweet malty honeyed velvetyness, it would be informing me belly, which is with the thirst, screaming that me throat is cut. And whiskey taken internally.

  Is every bit

  As good

  For bowels

  As

  It is good for

  Lust

  1995

  The Second Revolution – the Modern Enthral of the New Ireland

  Following the TV antennae flying their masts over Dublin, and beaming in the nonchalant amorality of the BBC, the Second Revolution has now dawned. The cattle dealers’ lunch has all but disappeared. Even the gossip is modernized. It’s now who is in the shiny blue BMW, revving his or her way down the intimacy of Dawson Street, and has the crates of fresh chilled champagne delivered each dawn like the milk to the front door.

  The last of the diehard cynics, the once conscience of the nation, lurking out there behind their suburban shrubberies from Dollymount to Dalkey, are saying little and less as their days creep closer to the crematorium. This last tradition shattering innovation to be imported said to be faster to send you to heaven.

  I tell you all that because now I tell you that Ireland is ready to bask in her blaze of glory. An ancient green nation known alive to the world afar for dancing Gaelic hell out of all the competition. Them nearby British themselves, too, God bless them, are coming along likewise, winning their battles here and there. And they must be good at a fight, for as the saying goes they beat the Germans and didn’t they come as close as damn it to nearly beating the Irish as well.

  Their eminently intelligent Prince of Wales has come to make friends. But then indeed it need not be reminded to anybody that Ireland is truly the land of the welcomes. And glad to see him were most, for the Prince, horticulturalist extraordinary that he is, knows there are few places in the world that can grow a blade of grass faster or bigger than on the emerald isle and no where can grow a blade more nutritious.

  Now then. What I have already had to say is said in even louder words by the brave British pound, for so long supreme, it has at last finally succumbed to the Irish punt. The latter nation, too, having had so many saints, has increased another value, with new saints for the tourists to adore. Never mind Yeats and Joyce and forget old Gogarty and his ivory Martello tower.

  The recent ready to be sanctified and to go down singing in history are Hume and Haughey and Adams, with the spectrum widening to President Robinson, herself admired by the world. These outstanding citizens emerging in an Ireland modern and new, bursting from its long bondage of isolation, ready now to outdo the Danes and Dutch in freedoms of the flesh. Excel the French in the quality of cheese. And noblest and best of all, to out do the Swiss in banking. But of course thoroughly wised up to this, haven’t them foreign financial institutions in their dozens been glad to elbow in upon the gravy and join the other guzzling snouts at the trough.

  And so the cornucopia has come. Nicely now refilled to overflowing by the European Union. Millions stacked up in the vaults. And why not, this is the land where the gombeen man was invented who was once the little village banker with his book of credit and his shelves full of food. And he especially goeth as Ireland goeth and Ireland goeth well. And ask where he doth now be found. He now be found, as he always was, behind his counter in every village and down the side streets of every town.

  And these days he’s blossomed in a supermarket in his neat light blue suit behind his accountant’s cash register and in the thickening files of his solicitors as he accumulates more gold. He’d be behind the big building boom, behind the new pub and nightclub availing of this new freedom of making a monster profit. And not a thing is wrong with that because it has been a long time coming. For Ireland needs its millionaires. For no one is better to splash the optimism in a country’s reputation around the globe.

  But just to put things a little bit more in perspective, while the brogue is beginning to reverberate all over the Internet. Didn’t the dawn of the Protestant Catholic come without a sound of hyperbole and to be found proliferating in your better golf and tennis clubs.

  And Reverend Ian Paisley himself would be amazed if not amused to see them taking tea with the international set as they populate these rural parkland palaces across the country that would make you think you were in your first earthly paradise. But the Reverend Ian Paisley maybe was pleased when the first chink or crack in the carapace of the great Church of Rome came when meat was no longer forbidden on Friday, leaving the long devout population, who hated fish all their lives, up standing shaking their fists back at Rome for the past penitent needlessness of it all.

  And pleased, too, should Reverend Paisley be as Protestantism, too, is also infiltrating other great Romanish traditions threatening to fall asunder, as they are now out, by God, even to ban the last spiritual glory left among the Catholic clergy, their celibacy.

  Ireland may not have put a mouse on the moon yet, but the whole country is firmly pledged to get up and go with the great and the good. And few would be left not predicting better times ahead. The wrong pipes attached to the right pipes and the days of having to go up to the bedroom to turn the lights off in the kitchen are gone.

  All the modern medicines and gentle techniques for toying with intestines are here. The good native doctor is now better than your previous foreign imported edition and knows every blessed thing about your better health. With a mere peek at you he’d be able to diagnose and tell you to eat more garlic and chew your carrots well.

  As for the taste of food, the French are here in droves, no longer complaining about the cooking. And no longer complaining about the complacency and inefficiency of the natives, the Germans are becoming natives themselves.

  A new morality most profound and cataclysmic is fermenting in the revolution. The young are in rebellion voting for people instead of politics. Traditional parents are changing, authority diminished. Politicians especially those up loudest howling on their hind legs are not always believed and perhaps never were.

  The homosexual of old is gone when once it was a stigma that would drive you out of the country or you could seek the refuge of the church. The pregnant single girl no longer has to leave for foreign more permissive parts. Welfare is everywhere keeping the wolf from many a door. Again it’s the cornucopia of the EU and its plenitude which pours out plenty for bypasses around them rustic little towns so you won’t be wasting time getting to Dublin or Galway and back. And who can’t say that isn’t progress.

  But with the nation in its modern enthral, one might ask, just to be romantic for a moment, are there any of the old Anglo Irish left. And you’d have to say that only merely a few are in a mansion here and there, still hanging on quietly to their after dinner port and British vowels. Ah but bravely in their place has come a new aristocracy replacing those who with generations of land, wealth and so called good breeding gave a vision of poise and beauty.

  Their places now taken by Kitty, Edna, Maeve, Bridget and
Dymphna who were once found behind the village chemist’s counter and there they are now, it’s cocktail time. Radiantly engowned atop the grand stairs. Having read Joyce and Beckett, Heaney and Hughes cover to cover, and with their own tiaras sparkling upon their hair. And himself isn’t doing badly either in black tie and sporting your long Havana Bolivar cigar.

  The news, too, is seeping into the Republic that God did not invent us. But never mind that rumour for a moment. No longer are there droves emigrating out into the far off world to become pagans. The Bishops are still given headlines for their opinions to inform what the Catholic Church thinks. But it angers the young minds of Ireland for now they think what they think. As the golf courses, hotels and tourists multiply, there are the nightclubs till dawn, cocaine, hashish and ecstasy.

  Murder victims are to be found under the floor boards and in the boots of cars. And in a land so expensive it’s a relief to know that the cheapest thing in Ireland still remains these days the company and conversation of the people. And listen a moment as I harp back to the good bad old days.

  It only seems but a micro second ago that of a Dublin evening when the late dark of June had descended, I ventured down that fashionable street of Grafton that walks its way through so many Dubliners’ lives. My eye spotting the shadow of a crane rising high in the sky, I turned east into Duke Street and I knew instantly that another great step forward in progress was in the making.

  Massive lorries, flood lights and roaring machinery all over the place. I knew the crow bar bending Irish held the world record in the time it took to beat a concert grand piano to a pulp and pieces but I wasn’t ready for this. The Bailey, that old hostelry of Yeats, Joyce and Beckett, was gone. Turned into a massive hole in the ground. And not a single sign of any anti blood sport folk, nor a single chanting voice nor torch light procession of protesting architectural preserving purists to be seen.

  Nor an echo left of all the blazing afternoons and nights of rhetoric preached from the poets and out of mouths that lost a week’s wages on the last race with mouths to feed at home. Drowning their sorrow in more sorrow. And lonely was I to realize that the old times of The Ginger Man were finally vanished for their second hand worth into a bunch of old books and pub signs.

  But then one can turn to go back into the new of the old Ireland. And fashionable Grafton Street still with its flow of pedestrians in many colours of skin and every colour and shape of cloth. Where mummers and mimes did tip toe past in frozen poses. Where the perfume of a roasted coffee hovered, as a poet stood guard at the gates of Bewley’s Oriental Café. Reminding still of the country where the songs born out of pain go singing. Religion has been diminished, prejudices nearly abolished.

  A revolution has raged, everything turned on its head. And in this land where they are adored, the voices of children echo. Where the brooding heavens carry their veils of rain to hide all her sins and keep her safe in her graces. And where above all your self importance can still achieve the heights.

  1995

  A Book of Irish Quotations

  I was being interviewed not that long ago in New York City by an attractive young lady journalist who said she’d just returned from attending at a conference of Irish publishers and in seeing nothing anywhere referring to me at this, she asked what about J. P. Donleavy, doesn’t he live in Ireland and write books. The reply she got was, ‘Oh him, he’s nothing but a black mark on Irish publishing.’

  How nice it is then to pick up a book, fresh from the O’Brien Press, which in every way is a credit to Irish publishing. The fine book has now become a native reality. And this present volume has a tasteful attractive design by Jacques Teljeur, photograph by Pieterse Davison and quotations edited by Sean McMahon. Ireland is standing up on its hind legs these days and getting as go ahead modern as any place on earth. Even Mullingar, out here beyond the Bog of Allen, could once boast of its own publishing house, the Lilliput Press, now moved to Dublin. And there is a rampant rumour that John Betjeman was first published with a poem in our own local newspaper, the Westmeath Examiner. And indeed another rumour is that a young James Joyce trod in the halls of this very house where I write. This Mullingar association may also be why the astonishing life sized wax effigy of Mr Joyce is in the lobby of a local hotel.

  Ah but that’s not all. Here, too, in Ireland was born the most astonishing legislation in the history of nations, an antidote to the previous kicking of authors and poets in the teeth, the destruction of manuscripts, the insult and ridicule, the banning of books and paintings and where now by the grace of Charles Haughey, father of such, artists may live with the fruit of their work, tax free. And if the proof of the pudding be in its immediate reading, ah then you can imagine what is said in the present volume concerning such an enlightened man. And here straight away may we aptly quote from Conor Cruise O’Brien, who clearly is an incisive commentator: ‘If I saw Mr Haughey buried at midnight at a cross-roads, with a stake driven through his heart – politically speaking – I should continue to wear a clove of garlic round my neck just in case.’

  But surely, in spite of Mr O’Brien‘s words, this man Charles Haughey must be destined to become, when his time is nigh, canonized and ultimately the patron saint of Ireland’s Painters, Poets, Composers, Sculptors and Writers, all of whom will quote only words of praise for this political gentleman in the next edition of this work.

  Here, too, in this volume are the stunning insights of many an Irish author like Flann O’Brien, Patrick Kavanagh and George Bernard Shaw. And there is no doubt whatever that being Irish or even merely being in Ireland, when it comes to putting a word out of a mouth or on a page, gives you a knife edged head start over the rest of the world, in seeking to cut gems fashioned in the infinities of philosophy. Taking, as can be done in the Irish vernacular, grand leaps through the imagination. That invariably would leave you landing in a conclusion that would amount to as near next to nothing as made no difference. If you follow my version of Erse jargon.

  Now there is no where on the face of the earth where a turn of phrase is more admired and, if admired, repeated than in Ireland. Even I myself, the black mark on Irish publishing, am quoted. Although I don’t see any of my better ones, especially when I had Ireland particularly in mind, such as, ‘Will God ever forgive the Catholics.’ Never mind. This book has Beckett, Behan, Betjeman, right on to Honor Lilbush Wingfield Tracy, the latter by God has for many a year been employing her brilliant marksmanship with bull’s eyes galore upon the natives.

  Even here are the words of the Rev. Ian Paisley, staunch fighter for Protestant freedom, who has for so many long years faithfully sung the song of the Orange Man with such honest fervour that were he ever to stroll the length of central Dublin from the Rotunda to St Stephen’s Green, he would be a pied piper cheered and followed by every devout Catholic who could walk a Dublin street, worshipped as he secretly is south of the border. And none of your smart remarks are invited here as to where would you ever find a devout Catholic in Dublin.

  This book at the least is a major insight into Ireland, that country that, if it could ever be understood at all, would only be more misunderstood as a result. Leaving the understander forever in frustration but with knowing as much as one can ever know about this race. For whom the joy of disagreement has always been an Irish tradition and blessing, an Irishman always willing to see both sides of an argument provided it can result in a fight. And you can quote me on that.

  1984

  The Boy is Back in Town

  Taking one on a merry ride, this is a story, with Desmond Guinness as its instigator, which is a long time in the making and much devoid of the principle of socialism and equal shares for all. In this pursuit I was this while back on an optimistic day hurrying up to Dublin hoping the rattles and whines one hears in one’s car are not about to express themselves further by sending all four wheels spinning off in all directions. Parking my motor machine in one venerable club I walked but a mere few paces to another and there within at
one of its large Georgian windows overlooking the trees and shrubs across in St Stephen’s Green, I took a glass of Guinness in the beautiful company of the famed lady Rachel Murray, who has a wonderfully eccentric savvy in matters aesthetic and over whom Desmond Guinness sighs with awe.

  It is five thirty precisely on this fine Dublin afternoon. And in no city in the world could you be feeling more contented. Out of the blue a fax arrives to say the Loyko Trio is playing that very night at Whelan’s Pub in Wexford Street and where Desmond Guinness will be, and urges me to be, at 9.00 p.m. Meanwhile, as it does in Dublin, another engagement intervenes. Caught in immense traffic, Rachel and I slowly motor out through streets where both Brendan Behan and Jonathan Swift once sported about, and along the central avenue of Phoenix Park to ply the tricky roads this way and that till we reach the walled parklands and the splendour of Luttrellstown Castle. And wouldn’t you know by the style of the people arriving there and the grand samplings of furniture to be seen that there was no shortage in Ireland of the well fixed in this world or the champagne flowing to keep their thirst slaked.

  Now it’s been a long time since I’ve been in Dublin. But from the midlands these days, and on the new bypasses, one can hurry across the Bog of Allen and up to town in a trice. To let the senses get stimulated again by the teeming civilization. And if the state of the capital is anything to go by you could get soon stimulated out of your mind, so swept has the city been with its dramatic changes. Duke Street, half down, is half up again. The thoroughfares all about are flowing full with your fancy motor vehicles. Folk sublimating their road rage are looking out over their steering wheels and down their bonnets at any of youse who’s got a conspicuous licence plate announcing the advanced in years state of your chariot. And with land prices and house prices flying into the sky, and with the watchword ‘Forward with the Rich’ being whispered loud and clear from Ballsbridge to Blackrock, you’d ask where is all the money coming from. And best keep that a mystery.