© National Portrait Gallery, London

This interview took place in March 1975 in New York City in a large apartment overlooking the East River. Mr. Donleavy was in the United States to deliver the manuscript of his latest book, The Unexpurgated Code, to his publisher, Seymour Lawrence, in Boston.

We watched from the window as he strode purposefully down the center of Seventy-second Street to the fence overlooking the river and stood there for some time before he rang the bell. He told us later that he often used to come to that place on his meanderings about the city and that it figures in his second novel, A Singular Man.

Donleavy is a slight man with a long nose and sad green eyes. He sat near the window as we talked, and the light shone through his thin gray beard, making him seem somehow fragile—a quality he does not otherwise exude. He feels that of all his characters he most resembles George Smith, of A Singular Man. Though born in Brooklyn and raised in the Bronx, he speaks with a British accent and uses British slang. During both sessions he drank orange juice continually and ate only a small portion of food. He keeps trim by daily exercise—swimming and workouts at The New York Athletic Club when he is in New York or on his own farming estate in Ireland, where he has lived since 1969.

Mr. Donleavy’s first novel, The Ginger Man, was published in June 1955. His subsequent novels have been A Singular Man (1963), The Saddest Summer of Samuel S (1966), The Beastly Beatitudes of Balthazar B (1968), The Onion Eaters (1971), and A Fairy Tale of New York (1973). His collection of short stories, Meet My Maker the Mad Molecule, was published in 1964. His plays, adapted from his novels, are The Ginger Man, Fairy Tales of New York, A Singular Man, and The Saddest Summer of Samuel S. They have all been produced in London and New York. The Unexpurgated Code: A Complete Manual of Survival and Manners, will be published this summer.

INTERVIEWER

Did you always know you would be a writer?

J. P. DONLEAVY

I wrote poetry at an early age but I didn’t get that driving desire to be a writer until I was at Trinity College in Dublin.

INTERVIEWER

How did that happen? Weren’t you a successful painter at that point?

DONLEAVY

I had had three exhibitions of my paintings in Dublin and having more or less exhausted the Irish art world, I traveled to London with some pictures and went to a gallery. One or two of the gallery’s owners were very impressed with the work, but said I wasn’t famous, and therefore, it didn’t matter that my pictures were striking and original. Not being famous, I wasn’t entitled to have anyone recognize them or me.

I realized that the only way you could ever tackle the world was to write something that no one could hold off, a book that would go everywhere, into everyone’s hands. And I decided then to write a novel that would shake the world. I shook my fist and said I would do it. “That’s what I’m going to do, and no one’s going to stop me.” I did that again and again and again. Still do it.

INTERVIEWER

So you started writing The Ginger Man while you were at Trinity?

DONLEAVY

I had just left. I’d moved to the cottage I had in Kilcoole, County Wicklow. I had built a sunporch on to it and I remember forcing myself day after day to sit at this little makeshift table on the porch. It took me seven days to get the first page and a half. I wouldn’t give up; I kept at it and at it. After about ten days, I finally managed to write about two or three pages. Then I fought and smashed and pressed on. Driving myself for several hours a day. After I’d written about thirty or forty pages, it suddenly began to ease up a lot. And then the book actually began to take on a slight personality of its own, which helped me a bit. I kept on going until I had about 140 pages.

INTERVIEWER

Did you finish the book at your cottage?

DONLEAVY

No. I wrote some on the Isle of Man and then came to America and wrote it for a year in the United States. Being out of Ireland provided a very helpful distance. My mother lives up in the Bronx and I wrote a lot of it there. I also wrote a lot of it in the West End of Boston—a little place called Poplar Street, which they’ve subsequently pulled down. It was a slum, between the back of Beacon Hill and the Charles, just to the side of the Mass. General Hospital. It’s totally gone. In those days it was a fantastic ghetto where you had the whore coming home at night, and the baker across the street. I lived there in those days for eleven dollars a week, and didn’t really want for much at all. My biggest luxury was a nickel for The New York Times. I would buy a copy and walk to the Public Gardens and read for an hour.

INTERVIEWER

How did you motivate yourself?

DONLEAVY

That was easy. It was simply money and fame. I was aware as anyone is, that in this world you can just be swept away. I’m aware of this just as much now. New York is a great place to be reminded of it. You arrive here, and Good Lord, you find out in ten seconds that nothing whatever matters, especially your own small life. So I knew I had to write a book that would be the best work in the world. It was that simple.

INTERVIEWER

What is it that makes one have that confidence? Is it just exuberance?

DONLEAVY

It could be gross stupidity.

INTERVIEWER

How did it manifest itself? Did you tell your mother?

DONLEAVY

Yes. I used to declare it openly to everybody when I was totally unpublished. The first thing anyone asks you in America is: What have you published? I’d published nothing (laughs) but I used to declare quite openly who I was, what I was. I had incredible nerve. What happens, I think, with a heavy, feverish desire is that the imagination will supply for that desire an impetus so that it can be carried out. Your imagination drives you with this burning fever. You’re looking for some one person out there somewhere who will one day hear your voice and suddenly write back. After you’re a published and accepted author, you don’t have this as an energy anymore.

INTERVIEWER

Did the success of The Ginger Man inhibit your later output?

DONLEAVY

No. I was never affected because The Ginger Man wasn’t a success. It amounted to nothing whatever! It took about eight years from its publication in 1955 to 1962 or ’63 before it ever began to make its way, to get any kind of wide recognition.