An Author and His Image E-Book

J.P. Donleavy

• Herausgeber: The Lilliput Press
• Kategorie: Sachliteratur, Reportagen, Biografien
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 484

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2011

Beschreibung

J. P. Donleavy has been writing now for forty-five years and, as he admits, an answer to the question why is ' difficult to dig out of a long past'. Yet over these pages he author's query is largely answered for him: he has written so much for so long because he writes so very well. From the banks of the Seine to the streets of the Bronx, from the stables of the Dublin Horse Show to cocktails at Claridge's, we are transported by these collected short pieces into the singular and spirited world of J. P. Donleavy. Bringing an uncommonly objective yet affectionate eye to his writings on his own birthplace, America, balancing unabashed adoration with good-humoured bewilderment in his depiction of his heart's home, Ireland, the author presents us with a fresh, engaging vista that could only be his own. Whether reviewing a book on sexual exercises for women or paying homage to Yeats, the impress is unmistakably Donleavy's. The initial publication of these pieces in various newspapers and journals around the world gave the author particular pleasure because he knew that he would reach people who were not normally book readers. However, he admits that the fate of most periodicals and newspapers is to be used to 'wrap fish, keep vagrants warm and help light fires'. Books, on the other hand, 'preserve their pages better between covers', and with their publication here he hopes that 'these pieces separately written over these many years can now keep each other company'. An Author and His Image offers a comprehensive overview of one of the most original and incisive voices of the last half-century.

Leseprobe

Contents

Title Page

Introduction Why Do I Write

PART 1 The Writer and His Art

An Author and His Image

Tools and Traumas of the Writing Trade

An Essay in Contemplation of Writing the Second Volume of The Historyof the Ginger Man

Shaun Beary – A Portrait of the Playwright as a Man

PART 2 People and Places

My Own Romantic Bronx

An Expatriate View of America

Rat Holes and Magic Places

To London from Mullingar

Come to Cong Where the Glamour is Still Glowing

PART 3 What a Sport

Georgian Cricket or Whither Goes Those Wickets

Sexual Exercises for Women

Whither Goeth Those Racquets and Riches at Wimbledon

Dublin Horse Show

Donleavy is Better Than McEnroe

The Manly Art of Knocking Senseless

PART 4 Life, Death and Affairs of the Heart

Whither Goeth That Bullet

Sentimental Journey – My Favourite Hotel

My First Love

Pasha of Heartbreak House

Love Letters Straight to the Heart

PART 5 Gone But Not Forgotten

W. B. Yeats Commemoration

Christmas Recollections – for Better or Worse

Remembrance of a Pain Past

The Funeral of Denny Cordell

The Funeral of the General

PART 6 Castles and Mansions, Conduct and Etiquette

An Open Letter to Those of the Nobility Befuddled by Clutter

Ghosts and Dolls in Donegal

Upon Conduct Becoming and Unbecoming a Philanderer

Nothing Looks Better Than a Harris Tweed Jacket and Faded Blue Jeans on a Sunday

PART 7 Dear Old Dublin

Trinity Quatercentenary

The Dublin Ghosts Remembered on Bloomsday

Night Out in Dublin

The Bloom of a City

The De Alfonce Bank

PART 8 Introductions and Reviews on Other Authors

Review of Selina Hastings’s Biography of Evelyn Waugh

Introduction to John Ryan’s Remembering How We Stood

Review of John de St Jorre’s The Good Ship Venus

A Voyage to the Swiftian City – an Introduction to Gulliver’s Travels

A Bit More Blarney about the Emerald Isle

PART 9 Ireland, Then and Now

The Water of Life

The Second Revolution – the Modern Enthral of the New Ireland

A Book of Irish Quotations

The Boy is Back in Town

Pasha of Heartbreak House Seeks Companion

By the Same Author

Copyright

Introduction

Why Do I Write

I don’t imagine my reasons for writing could differ greatly from those of any other author. But since I have been writing now for about forty five years, the answer to the question ‘Why do I write’ seems difficult to dig out of a long past.

Having been a painter before becoming an author taught me that the written word travelled further and reached deeper and into more minds than a painting, and was also something, once published, no amount of tearing up or a boot through a canvas could destroy or stop. Also there is the satisfaction that the written word could willy nilly penetrate and annoy people in the privacy of their own homes. And the greater justice could be done as their immediate resentments might anger them enough to put dents in their more valuable pieces of antique furniture. Or words instead touch their sensibilities so that they know they listen to a kindred soul.

But I’m sure the basic reason why one writes must originate and still lurk in one’s vanity. Which, as a testament to one’s existence, might flower in the bliss of fame and fortune. The reason also can be found in wanting to shake one’s tiny fist against a monstrous and indifferent world and speak words about that world one felt should be spoken and that no one else dared speak, especially to a world cautioning with punishment that such words should not be spoken. But as much as the conscious reason to write, the unconscious reasons must be equally as strong, and one such reason must be the mating instinct. To let kindred spirits in the world know as soon as possible that one had a beautiful if occasionally obscene mind. And to make known, if not flaunt, the uniqueness of one’s identity. Which, too, comes contradictorily out of the awareness of one’s own insignificance.

If the reasons above are why I began to write, that asks, too, another question. Why does one continue to write. And here is, if not a profound, at least an eminently sensible answer. I’m sure that at no time in my life has it ever been lost upon me that scribbling down whatever came into one’s day dreaming mind and later constructing and embellishing it, and then selling it, and turning one’s worst moments into money, is a damn nice way to make a living. Of course, too, one way or another, you live what you write. Suffering the same pain, embarrassment, sorrow and joy. Even being involved in the same mystery and love that speaks on your pages. And in the reflected romantic glory of that world of written life, you endure better your own lived life. And you not only preserve the past, but help defy death in the present.

During those forty five years there has always been a particular pleasure in publishing these short pieces and sketches in various newspapers and periodicals worldwide knowing that they would reach a public who were not normally book readers and for a moment or two one would penetrate vicariously into their lives. But as they say, periodicals and newspapers wrap fish, keep vagrants warm and help light fires. However, one keeps faith that books preserve their pages better between covers and these pieces separately written over these past twenty one years can now keep each other company.

J. P. Donleavy

Mullingar, 1996

PART 1

The Writer and His Art

An Author and His Image

An author is always unconsciously fighting for an image and when he gets one, consciously fighting against it. But an image is often the most important endowment he can have. And a novelist usually has made his long before someone meets him. By his picture on a book jacket, or in a newspaper, for drunkenly socking a headwaiter on the jaw, or just by rumours that he is recently being released from the institution.

But most times folk see him as the autobiographical hero of what he’s written. When you find yourself faced, as I might be, by avid readers of ASingularMan, thinking that I am reclusive, rich, lonely and sad but with a private part two feet long. Or by readers of TheOnionEaters, wondering if I’m in my damp Irish castle, overwhelmed by uninvited guests, plaster and other matters falling from the ceiling, rats nibbling at my shoelaces, as I sit in front of a turf fire bemused by my three testicles. And when you’re the author of TheGingerMan and folk had warning I was coming, especially to their house, the furniture would be secretly screwed down, the drink locked up, and the key hidden to one’s host’s wife’s chastity belt.

However, the author starts out with no image at all except his burning sincerity, determination and dedication, and perhaps an occasional fist shook in a scorning relative’s face that by God he’s going to be rich and famous. A legend in his lifetime. The author of a paragraph that school children have to memorize or not get into college. His female readers tucked up in corners of the world on lonely beds, reliving the words of that writer reclusively somewhere who has such a beautiful or such an extremely dirty mind. To whom such sad and obscene things must have happened. And that they, had they known him, those years ago, would have realized, that as he scooped up his fudge sundae at the local candy store, that even the way he held his spoon reeked with destiny.

So an author really begins with an image of himself. As a lonely ignored hero to a private public he carries around in his mind. Who clap, cheer and encourage. To get him through the unknown years. And speak an unspoken answer to all the voices saying, who do you think you are. Proust or something. He thinks he is Balzac. Because he owes for last month’s rent and yesterday’s hashish. His close friends plant careful seeds of despair in his open hearted yearning for recognition. By someone. Preferably sitting on an editorial throne of judgement, surrounded by unabridged dictionaries. But instead this someone happens to be the best known literary gossip writer on the biggest serious newspaper. Who, as he dismisses one more pompous best selling novelist just flown into town, ends his column saying he has just read a manuscript of promise delivered by hand to his club. A young man obviously writing under duress, just north of 233rd Street in the Bronx, and especially deserving of a Foundation grant. And on this dream the author hibernates.

Till the unbelievable one day he wakes up for good when he is finally published. The book does not soar into the stratosphere. That’s the place where people think you sit overlooking the Plaza Fountain taking noonday breakfast with the waiter plugging in the phone to take your calls from the Coast with your Louis Roederer and scrambled eggs. But alas for this author a major silence of five years descends. Of distant minor little voices saying to one another, hey you ought to read this book.

And one day you meet one of these voices. Which says are you really him, just standing here in your moccasins in the supermarket on Columbus Avenue and West 70th Street, with two cans of frozen orange juice, powdered coffee, salami and jar of stuffed olives. I mean gee isn’t everyone dying to know you. Aren’t you crowded out of your mind with tour dates and seminars. I mean holy cow don’t you know who you are.

With this previous incident you rush one hundred and ten yards home to sit and think. Squeaking in the wicker chair in your begrimed bay window. Three solid hours next to an unringing phone. My God I was recognized. Someone knew me. And I saw her ashen faced tell her husband as I left. And they watched me carrying the specially reduced bargains. They’re going to think I haven’t got a pot to piss in. That my book which didn’t sell, didn’t sell. And now the people who didn’t buy it will never buy it. The writer blundering into his first taste of fame. And at a loss as to what props to carry or what demeanour to wear.

But the one he unconsciously or consciously tries to wear is the one which sells books. And it’s not easy to know which image does that. But the experimental struggle to find out is immense. If it calls for mounting a horse top hatted and pink coated and chasing a fox across New Jersey most authors would risk their necks, followed closely by their tweed suited publishers commandeering an ambulance, photographers in attendance. But what the author really wants is not to be out there, face flushed, hustling in the market place. But to be seen quietly, just recognizable by candlelight, solemnly dining with an adoring stunning woman, with the word whispered through the swank hotel’s lobby, he’s in there, boy just look at those white chamois gloves he wears to eat his lobster.

But in the hurrying world no image lasts for long. And the practice of private elegance becomes little comforting with book emporiums returning books to the publisher. The author in his economic rejection sets out to commune with nature. Next publishing season he will sell his deep sincerity acquired contemplating in an uninhabited mountain range in Utah. He’s only bitten once by a rattlesnake, poisoned twice by ivy and chased three times by a grizzly bear. And eighteen months and one wife later we see him on his next book jacket. Standing in front of his isolated mountainside cabin. Built with local logs with his own two bare hands. Smoke curling from the chimney. His most recent wife a Bryn Mawr graduate holding her homemade jar of wild blackberry jam in the doorway. Both grinning with the outdoor purity of it all.

Her name is Martha. She summers at the Vineyard. Her father is an investment banker. She was born and bred in Boston. And she’s the initial M in the most recent novel’s dedication. To M, who stood by. She hunts to hounds. Her bowler hatted image sweeps the fashion magazines. As she momentarily lies prostrate on the literary altar of sacrifice. And deeply interested and profoundly influenced by the Far East. There are photographs to prove it. Of her newly shaved head and the saffron nightdress she wears for evening cocktails. Until just recently. She tried on a pair of horns. When she discovered the Hopi Indians.

Not much of the author’s image is seen these days. But his wife is frequently quoted in her interviews about the god damn trouble she’s having with her husband’s meddling in her first novel. At which she works feverishly while, she complains, he spends his days, feet propped up on their tropical fish tank, the television blaring with a six pack of beer by his chair reading movie magazines while proclaiming his admiration for ditch digging Austrian women. Because at long last the neighbourhood loners and the smart kids in the colleges are beginning to read his books and the royalties are trickling in.

The fan letters come. Some of adulation. Others disconcerted because not one of their friends has ever heard of you. One offers you the rights to his life story. Enclosing a photograph but wants it understood that it is not a homosexual proposition. Profits split fifty fifty because the balance between comedy and tragedy in your work is so achingly true to life. The author takes comfort that he has sprinkled a little magic in these distant lives. That makes their voices speak back. And know that your own voice has been heard. Even by a young woman who’s read everything you’ve written. She sees in you a sad dispossessed heart like her own. Ready to take gymnastic advantage of her measurements, 37–27–37. She presently resides in an elegant mental institution, listening to Brahms as she writes. She thinks you are a bit of a phoney but someday she’d like to meet you, drink champagne and read Pushkin together.

By now the author’s first book is acclaimed. His second reprinted. His third adapted for the stage and produced on Broadway. And to keep the pot simmering his image is overhauled. He was now the most famous non selling, unknown best selling underground author in the world. Little legends begin appearing on the copyright page. Seventh printing. Ninth printing. Literary gossips whisper, hoping it isn’t true, hey this guy must be getting rich. The critics are waiting. For his fourth book. To pan this affluent author who served no public penance for his growing sales and fame. Who now had a secretary waiting, legs crossed, pencil poised in case he wanted to sue someone. His second law suit will soon be going to court. Someone’s named a restaurant after one of his books. His horse kicked an anti blood sport enthusiast. And the legal bills flood in.

Somehow the author blames the reflection of his heartfelt words that lie wounded on the page. Which make him look like a pushover. Publishers say look at all that serious adoration he’s getting, what the hell does he need to reserve all his subsidiary rights for, too. Anyway our warranty clause will make him pay for all our costs in that last legal action. On the next book jacket the writer insists to be seen scowling. His two eyes staring out from the page say I’ll get you yet, you son of a bitch. He also wanted to be photographed with a sub machine gun across his knees so his former wife Martha and her lawyers would get the message. That nobody is going to take half his royalties plus his Mercedes shooting brake, Connecticut country house and sixteen Arab horses.

But members of his own profession. They see him on easy street. Able to buy first class plane tickets and champagne for the dazzling girl that sits next to him on the way to Mexico. To whom he’s thought to gallantly say, my car’s meeting me at the airport can I give you a lift. And in case you want to see my private island my yacht is getting up steam to sail.

But there is another contingent who have a different picture of you. And they don’t like your image one damn bit. They live in nice little white houses. With nice little watered green lawns. With wives who comb their hair back straight and wear earrings on Saturday nights when other wives just like them with two children, four and six, come to dinner. Their husbands have cosy dens with pipe racks and paperbacks where they dissect you. And while keeping your name off the bulletin boards, make sure you get the dismissed reputation they think you deserve. These are the academics. They are sure you cannot do without them. Because they are certain you want desperately to hear that word masterpiece. And they might just, if only you’d answer their letters, be on the verge of saying it. But for the time being they must reserve judgement because they understand you can’t spell and do not know who wrote TheDecameron.

So the author’s image as it glows, or glowers, waxes briefly and wanes again. A strange star in a familiar solar system. Until people sidle up at the cocktail party, look him carefully up and mostly down. Desperately wanting to remind you. That all you are is just a human being. But what are you working on now. The question means don’t think you can afford to rest your laurels on those other old hat books you wrote. The author affects a departing stance, that he’s just a micro second in town from his East Hampton summer house. Their eyes narrow, they pluck the stuffed olive off the toothpick and chew while their eyes mist over with a genuine concern for your career. Which always means do you think you’ve shot your bolt. Which in turn means does the author think he is still capable of sexual intercourse.

Suddenly the time’s come yet again for the author to present yet another image. Of his bulging bicep when he’s been shaking hands with prize fighters. Or even demonstrating how fast and hard he can hit with a right hook. He comes mornings in the altogether skipping rope out of his bedroom. The new wife Helga from the Cincinnati proletariat and a graduate of Ohio State, keeps the shades down so the neighbours won’t see what a nut she thinks he’s making out of himself. But he’s telling the world that if someone gets hit in one of his books, the punch might have come delivered from the still powerful muscles of the author. Who has plenty of uppercuts and right hooks left. And even at the advanced age of forty six can go two consecutive rounds in the ring. With any other two fisted writer you care to mention.

By such machinations the author hopes to keep his public guessing. And despite his headline dissipations he is still far from needing handouts on the geriatric come back trail. Nor had he yet been driven, as they’d all like to see him go, to the light chocolate coloured walls of the boarding house room. From whence he hobbles unshaven to sell blood every time a manuscript returns special delivery and rejected by a publisher.

But still now, creeping into latter middle age, there’s an image left, carefully cultivated and lurking behind each novel the writer published. And that is the novel, not yet ready, that he never published. Which, when he did, would turn the tide, already beginning to slowly wash the author right out of one Who’sWho after another. This is the big book. The one the author has always secretly been working on. Kept behind bars in packing cases in the basement of the Federal Reserve Bank at 33 Liberty Street. The major work, the deeply serious one for which the author had all the warm up publications. Behind a door weighing ninety tons, it sits there in the subterranean vault, five hundred thousand words safe from critics and beyond the chequebook blandishments of publishers. Any moment now, the last orgy of work upon it will be begun. When finally published, journalists will take off their typewriter covers and say, here at long last, after all those awful pot boilers, the germ of promise sown so many years ago now blossoms to make us tremble in our tracks with the rumble of printing presses.

But the author ends as he began. If ever he did begin. Pained in isolation. Pained by glad facing among the cocktails. Further away than ever from the kindred souls to whom he sent the songs he sings. Alone. Again locked up in his own tiny world. Haunted a little by the ricochets of all the accumulated images. Fading as they come back to tempt yet another change. And hope to sell another book. But you know no matter what you do the world will always finally turn its face away. Back into all its own troubled lives. Busy to be seen with a new pair of shoes and heard with another author’s name. Forgetting what you wanted them to see. Silent with what you wanted them to say. And empty with what you wanted them to feel.

Except somewhere you know there will be a voice. At least once asking. Hey what happened to that guy, did he die, you know the one, who wrote that book, can’t remember his name but he was as famous as hell. That was the author. And that was his image.

1978

Tools and Traumas of the Writing Trade

One late summer sunny day during a long London afternoon perambulation and while innocently looking in the window of an old established cheese shop, the definition of what writing is all about hit me. Writing is turning one’s worst moments into money. And money is one of the motives for becoming a writer. The others are leisure and money, women and money, fame and money, and sometimes just money all alone by itself.

And to the young dreaming writer money portrays itself as a blazing blue beautiful world set on a gently nodding horizon complete with a twelve metre racing yawl. Under his captain’s hat, the author as sailor, a gentle breeze, two published novels and a currently running West End stage production behind him, he stands in the rear cockpit, binoculars at the ready, searching the evening shore ahead where on some mysterious promontory a faintly lighted dining table is being laid ready for his appearance. And he appears. And out of the flowery landscaped darkness folk rush to him and say, their eyes glistening, gee your conversation is even more beautiful than your book, and gosh, you’re even better looking than your photograph.

And as a youthful American, such dreams are dreamed sitting at one’s kitchen table over the milk and peanut butter during the years of high school while Ma is saying, ‘Haven’t you done your homework yet, Junior.’ ‘But Ma, I’m going to be a famous writer and a millionaire.’ Ma says, ‘Drink your milk and go and do your homework. How do you ever expect to get a job with the Asbestos Company.’ A few minutes later when no one is looking, Junior has closed his biology book and sneaks out into the summer evening for an illicit smoke with friends. Walking along the maple shaded street, rinding that no one else believes his dream yet saying behind a shaking fist, ‘I’ll make one hundred thousand dollars with my first best seller and then they’ll be sorry.’

And so the budding writer, among his uncaring sceptical cronies and invariably hostile family, learns that being a writer is antisocial, anticommunity, because it’s not a job, and that the natural reaction of the immediate working society around him is to destroy or drive out the bad apple in its midst. Who would want to be a millionaire without first filling out an application form. Or who would forsake an afternoon’s tennis to lonely reconnoitre in the local cemetery. And now when he meets with his friends and they say, ‘Hey, what are you really going to be when you grow up’ and all one can say is, ‘Rich’, and they say, ‘How’ and you say, ‘I’m going to be a dentist’, the writer has picked up a useful tool in his survival, cunning.

As the high school years go by, the first steps towards the great dream ahead are taken when the poems get written. The girls say, ‘That’s really beautiful, but you copied it out of a book.’ The boys say, ‘Gee you’re a Shakespeare.’ College approaches. The four years of indoctrination for the corporation. Or the grooming of a literate mind till it’s full of the most recently accepted critical opinions that can be safely repeated for graduation. This is where the young writer founders. And toys with his maiden trauma. As he offers his scribblings for appraisal, he’s told, ‘Get your degree first, your security, then think of becoming a writer.’ And during this testing time the road ahead fatefully forks, when you can no longer think or dream of becoming a writer, you must be a writer. Or else get shunted off on an English course in literature to the conniving assassinating world of criticism, grants and fellowships, rarely to return to that of writing.

But collegiate or not, one more indoctrination is inevitable. And most traumatic of all. The nice girl turns up. She likes you because you have a beautiful sensitive mind. You’re so good at judging people, so good at turning the world into visions. She says, ‘You would look so handsome making decisions behind a desk. Just what they’re looking for on Madison Avenue. And then we could move to Scarsdale or Sunningdale out of all this filthy mess.’ And so, if you haven’t told her to go to hell, and she’s still stealing from the supermarket, one day sometime later a little baby is born. Along with the infant screams and sleepless nights, the relentless sledgehammer of responsibility lands. You get to recognize the tiptoe to the apartment door of the rent collector and the disguised voices of the terminators of gas and electricity. Plus the soft uncomforting words of the bank, ‘But you’ve got no regular job or collateral for a loan.’

And so we come to the first indispensable tool of the writer. Money. And by money is meant capital. For only with capital can come independence and the long term purchase of time. The writer’s most important ingredient. Time to wake up in the morning haunted with the anxiety that the money is running out. Time to sit at the typewriter putting down that first page, haunted by the anxiety that one will never write a second. And finally time to realize that you may need a year, or two or three. When surely by that time you’ll be in the asbestos plant or the poorhouse.

On your first pages the struggle may go on for weeks. The sentences trying to find life. That can begin to weave a story that lives. Which in turn can lend you confidence to continue on. Spelling out the words you clutch from your brain. And that conjure on the page a meaning you want to mean. Until suddenly, one day, a chord is struck. It will have a strange reverberating music. But when you hear it you’ll know you’re on your way. Able now to further brazen through the chronic prevailing ignominy. And at last sure, when no one else is, that you’re a writer.

And what did you do for money. Only God knows. And it would embarrass him. But now you have a desk, a typewriter, carbon paper, a wife screaming why don’t you get a job. You also have the vague but burning presumption that you have written something that someone else might want to read. And also make your Ma and Pa drop dead with shame. Plus a slew of relatives who will also tell them I told you so. But all this brings into function the second most important tool of the writer, a suicidal and ruthless nerve. It’s a trait which makes your friends a trifle shifty eyed and much uncomfortable. And with it there comes the slow but sure alienation, a stepping back and apartness from the world around you. For the born writer this has happened years ago, when his girl friend or later mother in law said he had a dirty disgusting mind. Or when, for his evil influence on other students, he was expelled from high school or kicked out of college. And leaving all your old neighbourhood friends to whisper, ‘He isn’t the same George we used to know when he told us he was going to be a dentist.’

And along with this alienation an author finds his next best all purpose tool is that of an empty head. From which learning and knowledge, the two greatest enemies of a working writer, have been eliminated. Which alas will provoke an oft heard refrain about you, ‘Holy cow, not only can’t he spell but he’s illiterate too.’ But your business now is to see and hear both in yourself and in the world around you. Especially involving the incidents which caused you the most acute embarrassment. These, your uninhibited observations and feelings, are the building bricks and cement. Variously styled by others as malicious rumour and falsehood. They accumulate and get mixed in dreams, conversations and drunken brawls. And get coloured by despairs and joys and tempered by passing time and morbid hangovers. To finally unearth during the long bouts of lonely despair as the threads which bind and weave your story.

But hopefully, and amid protests from those nearest and dearest that ‘My God that’s not literature that’s libel’, this narrative as it unfolds becomes a novel. And the writer has found that the everyday tools he has needed have not been a university course in English, journalism or writing, but the accumulated gossip, hearsay and scandal circulating among his more steadfast cronies, a thousand or more dollars or pounds, a typewriter, a disciplined use of it for three or four hours a day, the finishing of a page, the rewriting of it, watching each sentence catch fire and bring to life another and that another, until one day arrives. The writer reaches over on his desk and pinches between thumb and forefinger a stack of paper. He lifts it and it has weight. He punches holes, threads through ribbon, or nuts and bolts, puts on a cardboard cover, and suddenly he’s got a manuscript. This is where the traumas begin.

All the old friends in search of their life’s safety are gone on their ways to higher degrees. Or to steady or not so steady jobs mending tracks on the railroad. One penurious oddball is left. Like you he’s decided that for the time being he’ll continue doing what everyone else describes as nothing. He frequently on his hungry evenings comes and scrapes the bottom of the spaghetti bowl. You say, ‘Read this.’ He says between mouthfuls and brief perusals of your heartfelt scurrilous prose, ‘You’re crazy.’ You pull away the bottle of wine. As he tugs back the manuscript for another look, he says, ‘Wait, maybe you’re a genius, but get a second opinion.’

The author studies the literary pages of newspapers. And in his incredible innocence mails off his manuscript to the most prominent publisher in sight. Meanwhile he peruses fashion magazines listing town houses and country estates. He looks over the Daimler limozines at the local suppliers. And takes an interest in yachts providing a library and study attached to the owner’s suite. But as the silent days lengthen as they accumulate, he goes back to wandering, waiting and contemplating in his favourite cemetery again. And when with a last handful of change he buys a beer in his local pub, he still answers, ‘Nothing’, to an old pal who asks suspiciously, ‘What are you doing now.’ But next morning he knows. For at the end of three long weeks a crushingly bulky reply has at last come. From the awe inspiring firm under whose banner these past twenty one days you dreamt you would take your first bounding steps to fame and fortune.

Dear Sir,

Thank you for giving us the opportunity of reading enclosed returned herewith but we do not feel it suitable for our lists.

Yours faithfully,

The Editors.

The first thing you go and do is to sit and write. A furious reply. The first and rudest of which is torn up to write another.

Dear bunch of Editors,

You stupid bastards have just turned down what will be one of the great best sellers of the last half of this decade.

Yours sincerely,

The Author.

And alas, as the glowering wife loudly smoulders and innocent kiddies cower quietly, you realize that the words of both your letter and manuscript are just as effective as throwing the paper on which they are written in a ball as hard as you can against the sky scraping massiveness or genuine Georgian brick in which these titans of the published word reside, daily solving the world’s toughest crossword puzzles and trading epigrams with colleagues on their hourly visits to the water cooler.

But the penurious oddball who, along with his deep researching of his own non existent sex life, has been philosophizing elsewhere. He has on the breeze of his eccentricities sailed into the current latitudes of literature and is lapping up a more lavish lasagne and grabbing at the now vintage wine. He says, ‘I have a friend who has a crazy manuscript.’ And the thin, poem writing many university educated blonde says, ‘Hey gee isn’t that interesting I have a friend who is a publisher.’

So in a big building sits a guy behind a desk who majored in English and now makes thirty thousand dollars a year, leaning against a wall at various cocktail parties with that look, ‘I’ve read Proust in the original, straight through, one summer in my cottage up on the Cape, and I am sure there is no new Proust budding in the Bronx.’ However, uncrossing his legs and pulling up his English woven socks, he condescends to continue the never ending search for new talent and enduring penmanship and says, ‘Let us have a look at this crazy manuscript.’ And of course this is the novel which would make one’s folks, if they read it, drop dead. This publisher reads it. He finds he is glued to every word and shocked into the bargain. He is certain that this is not literature. And if it is it would not make him look good at his next cocktail party. And so carefully disguising the offending tome with the nice blue wrapper borrowed from his copy of TheShorterOxfordEnglishDictionary, he sneaks the manuscript back to the mailing room. And there with it safely parcelled, he writes that under separate cover is returned this volume which the editor finds not only unpleasantly unsuitable but also that season’s leading candidate as the most unlikely book for publication.

One more trauma and the author learns a rule, that what is original and vital, and offered, will be rejected. This rule is rarely ever changed, neither by fame, fortune, nor acclaim, and rejection will happen again and again. For in the nature of publishing everyone is searching for what is unhackneyed and alive while handing over a cheque to an agent who has an imitation of last season’s best seller. Which the publisher’s representatives think they can subscribe in hundreds of copies at the bookstore. So where does this leave the author. It leaves him thoroughly depressed and back again among his neighbourhood tombstones wondering if any soul alive out there will ever hear him, so thoroughly has the loud world quelled his tiny voice.

But the word has at last got round. That the author looks well in bathing costume. And has a criminally dirty mind. Another young woman, a graduate, a doctor of modern English literature, says so. And that there is a socially redeeming aspect to the honest and explicit treatment of sex in his manuscript. And the word sex is soon described as brutish and unbridled. And these words in turn gain those of shockingly explicit. And the whole damn reader’s report goes whispered hurriedly from tipster to publisher whose legal advisers counsel that the sodomy is defensible on literary grounds plus a prosecution would immensely help sales. And suddenly the word carnal gets converted to ‘Our Standard Contract’. And this latter, as the author sits trembling reading it, is being amended with their most recently fairest option clause for the writer’s next six books on the same terms. And meanwhile, ‘Have you an agent.’ The answer, ‘No’, and the reply, ‘Just sign here.’ But through the remainder of that unforgettable afternoon the author’s ears are thundering with printing presses, the flash of camera bulbs, and the hundreds of blonde smiling women fresh in from Scarsdale and Sunningdale with their books to sign and themselves free that evening to dine with the author at the Ritz.

But months go by. As the publisher’s editor, under the guise of correcting the spelling, attempts to rewrite one’s book in standard English. Next the author accidentally gets a peek at a proof of the jacket. And one looks for one’s name. And finally finds it. And says to the publisher, ‘Make it bigger,’ and he says, ‘That’s the regulation size for all first novels.’ Slowly the author gets a changing glimpse of his future. His name insignificantly there on the luridly illustrated cover. And prophetically written on a tombstone astride which is the naked heroine.

Next, the publisher’s list is published. And the unadorned print doesn’t look half bad. Nor the blurb describing the author as this untamed child of his times whose soul must speak out. And now once again the writer sees himself at long long last standing on high ground, the sailing skiff if not the yacht would be delivered from the boat yard soon. Meanwhile on the three figure advance, the first figure of which is one, his wife has had dental treatment, his children new shoes and he, a new seersucker suit. The wind is gently blowing through his recently tonsured hair. As the distant roar of the printing presses rises. And then subsides. To a soothing spiritual sound. Once heard never forgotten. Of fresh banknotes floating endlessly down from heaven.

Publication day comes. The world does stop. But only for a fractional second as the sun sets just that bit more slowly than yesterday. There are no full page screaming advertisements or even book displays. But you did see an obscure review along with that photograph taken by the wife outside the welfare office. And the words beneath ‘shows promise’. And at the end of the review, ‘We should await his next book with interest.’ But luckily someone else has said, ‘This isn’t a book for the squeamish or to give your Aunt Christabel for Christmas.’ And such words have caught the attention of a few old friends who instead of calling you, call their lawyers. And if you have been honest enough to have written what you’ve felt and heard, you’ve also thereby invaded everyone’s privacy and held them up to ridicule and contempt, but you avoid being sued for libel because no one dare get up in court and say, ‘That’s me he’s writing about.’

However, following all the dashed hopes, renewed despairs and the unending, ‘Well I’m sorry I do read books, but I’ve never heard of you,’ finally, five years later just as you go down for the third time, voices are speaking up. A discerning few are beginning to discover the novel and say, ‘Gee you ought to read that.’ The book starts to sell. Someone wants to dramatize it, someone wants to reprint it, translate it and film it, and are offering money. The author at long last smiles, shakes his fist close up in his wife’s face and, mouth watering, runs to his contract. Alas he reads here, turns over and he reads there, but mostly he turns over again and reads where he finds the words ‘the Publisher shall exclusively negotiate all rights, including spinoff, character and merchandising, and receive 85 per cent of all monies accruing therefrom.’ After his first feeble moments of white faced anger the author searches in a pitch black soul for words of comfort, fairness and justice to temper his own screams of woe, ‘Those dirty rats, they never promoted my book, never advertised it, they let it die and here they are, five years later, jumping with both feet on to my gravy train.’

And yet when the author is writing his first book, it somehow exists, that words written on paper and unpublished are valueless. And they are. Till that day arrives when someone puts down five or more dollars to purchase these scribbles in their published form, when it dawns on the writer that he is in business. Just like anyone else. And the time now has come, if his outrage has left him any remaining sense at all, when the author goes to his local library and borrows his first volumes on contract and copyright. These are two subjects which never occur to him during the years sweating out his creative words. Believing as he blindly must that the world will always somehow discover, admire and reward genius. At least the author discovers, somewhat to his surprise, that copyright is a big pie, full of juicy fruits better known as licences and assignments, all of which can make money. And the author owns all of it. For a while. And for ever in two countries in the world. Portugal and Nicaragua.

Among the countries in which he owns least is the United States of America. Where fellowships, prizes and grants are poured down the throats of writers. Yet an author could not be ensured to receive the rightful earnings of his work, should he outlive the term of copyright protection, or fail to comply with the complicated regulations. Which until recently required you wake up on a certain morning and search your pocket for two dollars and write to Washington for the forms, and fill them out without a mistake, and send them back before twelve o’clock midnight, Sundays not included, on the last day following twenty eight years of publication. The situation resulting from such failure is known as public domain. Into which a living author’s work may fall. Which does not mean it benefits the public but does mean that publishers, who preach and breast beat in the name of art and letters, don’t have to pay an author a royalty on his work.

And this brings one to one last tool in the writing trade, a lawyer. That few writers can afford. Especially in their first eager innocent steps, which, should he survive these, then for the good author and the best author, litigation will be his lot. For folk, mistaking his heartfelt feelings expressed in his work for softness, and relying on his poverty, automatically try to make him the scapegoat of any dispute. Critics remain always his enemies. Except over the years they hopefully will take more and more print and space to condemn you. Invariably sneakily referring to criticisms of a previous book to see to what extent they dare degrade you with your presently published volume. And the author’s weapon at this period becomes silence. In which he remains sacred to that final word he puts on the page. But alas that one tool which the author needed in his first steps, and that he still now needs more than ever, is money.

Through all his traumas and through the too slowly waxing and the too quickly waning of his reputation, hopefully, you finally find the author safely arrived. To that acceptable but declining condition pleasantly known as his prime. Which means you are faintly branded as famous amid the growing hordes of people who have never heard of you. But odd invitations come to give talks at colleges. Interviewers again and again report your daily routine. From dawn nonstop till midnight changing typewriters as they overheat. Yet now you really are a writer. And if there is an occasional glow of joy it mostly comes when walking during your recreation. With a little wine and a little travel. And you may from your country house go up to town. To lie abed that night with a first class woman, in a first class hotel and next morning greet the world with interest. And find the charmingly literate hotel’s director has seen to a display of your work in the lobby bookstall. Breakfast is brought. Of buckwheat cakes with creamy melted butter and splashed with pure maple syrup and surrounded by rashers of bacon and golden toasted sausages. Stacked by your hand as you munch, the cities’ newspapers both saucy and serious. And you leisurely read while drinking your coffee. Having just listened pleased to sales reports from your most recent publisher on the telephone. And now you make an appointment for tea with an old pal who has long since forgotten he was at length libelled as an unsavoury character in your first novel.

And just as you settle into the lapsang souchong balmy accords of afternoon tea, merely one day like this can nearly answer why be a writer. Forever sweating on a page. Hoping still to find a few voices out there to echo back your own. And make you know another mind, kindred and understanding, has seen your ghosts, felt your love, and had his own worried loneliness broken and driven away awhile with laughter. And meanwhile you’ve lived the usual story. You can’t win. But if you don’t fight, you lose. And there is a victory. To remain a writer, reach the age of forty, be solvent and still love your trade.

1977

An Essay in Contemplation of Writing the Second Volume of TheHistoryoftheGingerMan

Since it involves despair and trepidations in the cities of London, Paris and New York one must be deadly serious about these following words as they are written out in the boglands of Ireland about these glamorous sounding destinations. And which were once and may remain especially alluring to women whose resolves of celibacy in the old days were occasionally weakened when they were by invitation drawn forth, às a magnet might, to what could be thought the illicit milieu of the foreign hotel bedroom. Particularly in Paris where the possibility of romance could be expected, if not always achieved, and where at least hotel proprietors did not blink an eyelash over the clearly lasciviously hell bent couple seeking accommodation.

But for me very little of that sort of dalliance was to be had in that idyllic city on the Seine which was to become for many years of my life a remote unfathomable dark world of jurisprudence complicated by the French language and the wonderful snobberies of its protocol. Now then. Who among you in this age of enlightenment is still antique enough to have ever heard of so called ‘dirty books’ that once were nearly the sole source of personal erotic entertainment handy to hand and brought back to English speaking shores and eagerly to be found by customs hidden deep in a traveller’s personal luggage. And who among you would know what it’s like to have a finger of outrage pointed or an accusing hatchetman from a tabloid say you were corrupting the innocent and were purely, if not so simple, a filthy pornographer whose disgusting mind was his only stock in trade. And tomorrow’s headline would advise you to flee pronto for the obscurity of some thoroughly foreign and distant land.

Them times now are long gone and best forgot but ah suddenly persecutors all seem to be awake again and in a different guise. The euphemists raging are on the march and have invaded the publishing houses and the world of disseminated information, pointing to the new naughty and forbidden words which are no more allowed to be fictionally said of himself giving herself a well deserved fist in the gob or the root of a boot up the rear. And dare one say it, Paris, as in the past, is again culturally screaming awake and may now be the place of freedom of expression once more. Significant enough when you hear that the scholar’s pens are presently busily at work, dissecting a literary period, occurred just after the Second World War, and which has now over the ensuing years hugely come into being. Described in recent books such as ExiledinParis by James Campbell, who, taking us vividly back to those times of personal liberation and exhilaration, re-enacts many a literary drama. John de St Jorre’s TheGoodShipVenus in itself a wonderful study not only of the erotic voyage of The Olympia Press but also of those migrant displaced and alien persons who were the sailors and found Paris a congenial if temporary home.

And then comes that strangest and most curious figure of all, the great sexual liberator and founder of the Paris Olympia Press, and who became my nemesis and sworn enemy, and I his, and who was best known under the name of Maurice Girodias. But then let us dwell a little upon how things were then. The cheapness of living life in one of the most alive cities in the world. With idleness breeding dreams, literary history was to be easily made. There were endless boulevards to stroll, endless side streets to lurk in and numberless cafés in which to sit bemused. Because later your book would be published and fêted across America. Meanwhile the sale of a pair of slightly used shoes or the entitlement to your foreign visitor’s petrol coupons could finance two of you in an inexpensive hotel and provide meals for a fortnight. A bag of coffee beans would make you for at least a few hours a mogul attracting the girls. And even though one dined in elbow touching proximity to the French who always seemed to think one was going to steal an escargot or borrow their cutlery, it nevertheless never made the oeufs mayonnaise taste any the less wonderful. Which was why, if you hadn’t yet been there, the words, ‘Hey pal, you got to go to Paris,’ were on every American’s lips.

It was then with these now legendary literary figures, and with their books notching up notches on their writing belts, that Paris proved to be where it was all happening. Along with the pseudonymous pornographers there were the writers who were making their names known. Vladimir Nabokov, Allen Ginsberg, William Burroughs, Eugene Ionesco, Samuel Beckett, Richard Wright, James Baldwin and Christopher Logue to mention but a few. Alas, already retreating from the world of words, I of course, but for the single exception of Christopher Logue, whom I got to know later, knew none of them. Yet in the now distant retrospect I can see that I was, because of my own written words, none the less up to my oxsters in this literary demi monde which in France always bordered on the beau monde. But I was not to be seen in deep existentialist discussion over an aperitif in the café but rather with my nose in a tome of torts and with my tail nearly between my legs and slowly but surely becoming surrounded by lawyers, who, all having to sit down and read the book I wrote, were, ironically, becoming my first readers if not fans. With once fourteen of them all collected together in the sixteenth district near Avenue Foch animatedly having cocktails in the grand saloon of my very elegant principal counsel.

At the end of the first volume of TheHistoryoftheGingerMan I’d achieved publication in Britain and recognition with blasts of both praise and condemnation for this work and a victory over its first appearance in the pseudonymous and pornographic Traveller’s Companion series published by The Olympia Press. But I was not then to know, as several publishers, forty five of whom had previously turned the book down, were now fighting over the rights to publish it, that I was entering a battle which would nearly take up the remainder of my life. But in the vast struggle I was quickly learning things. It became early apparent that in all the opening forays, threats, claims, charges, torts, legal statements, ultimatums, writs, summonses, and where the author was caught in between, no instance ever arose where the scribbler was not immediately cited, to be castigated, inculpated and upon whom not only ridicule for obscenity could be heaped but all blame for legal costs and pecuniary damages could be dumped.

This is not to say that there are not some fair and wonderful people in publishing. But having said that, let me say this. Fairness and humanity sure did seem far removed from the salvoes of writs whistling over one’s head. And if a clause appeared able to catch the poor and ostensibly trembling author by the toe, so be it, the poor defenceless scribbler of obscenity deserved it. And yours truly started digging in the law. And where a statute could be shoved down some bully’s throat or a clause tightened around his neck, the scribbler only hesitated that moment or two in the interests of historically preserving the concept of courtesy. One’s life became seclusion and caution. Friendly correspondence came to a halt. Social occasions became lawyers’ meetings. Which surprisingly were not always gloomy and indeed gave me moments during which I took comfort from these astute gentlemen, who were by their professions made wise in the ways of life. And who indeed I found could give their intellectual utmost to the protection of one of their poorer clients.

Ah but many out in the wide, wide world don’t know authors. He who by the nature of his profession must get his daily bread from day dreaming thoughts which get turned into words. Like, you no good dirty rat. And the author, as all authors do when pushed, and in dealing with their written remarks, can get just as clever as the cleverest of lawyers, and into whose mouths the author will even suggest those phrases, which only by rude intent prevent their usefulness. And certainly having levered myself up out of innocence, I seemed to be getting increasingly concerned over who got their hands on the money as this seemed to be the most desired prize to be gained by the publishers and their retinue of legal advisers. I was to learn quite early on that the great litigator himself, Maurice Girodias, was heard to say, ‘That bastard Donleavy for all his wallowing in self pity is possessed of an astute naïvety.’

TheGingerMan was burgeoning, revenue plonking into coffers. Publications here, publications there, publications everywhere. The pot getting larger and larger for every throw of the dice. With piracy rearing its unpleasant head even new enemies were cropping up and urgently needing to be wiped out. As time and a few further educating trials and hearings went by, trips between Paris, London and New York increased as one retreated deeper and deeper into a not unpleasant seclusion. It no longer seemed strange to come out of one court room, fly to another continent and city and within hours enter another chamber of law. As a little victory here and a little victory there occurred, it became less and less that blame was heaped upon and the scribbler himself made a scapegoat. In fact it was becoming apparent that folk were hesitating to use or even mention my name at all. My implacable obstinacy had somehow grown in the minds of my adversaries to be something to be reckoned with along with a few of my earlier precautionary cables such as:

Gentlemen

Only For

The Moment

Am I Saying

Nothing

These words put together homemade I regarded as the quintessence of all letters written by all lawyers. I had learned, too, that when it came time to say something a little more descriptive, such as estimating an assessment of damages, it was a good thing to make the numerals quite odd sounding sums like $300,946.22, and immediately below in the communication, spell out in capitals:

THREE HUNDRED THOUSAND, NINE HUNDREDAND FORTY SIX DOLLARS AND TWENTY TWO CENTS

Amazingly no one seemed to mind what the Three Hundred Thousand Dollars was for, but my opponents would call in high powered consulting lawyers from distant cities to analyse and find out what the Nine Hundred and Forty Six Dollars and especially the Twenty Two Cents was about.