J.P. Donleavy is Still Standing (Published 2014) (2024)

J. P. Donleavy is, arguably, the funniest living American novelist, but the circ*mstances of his life and work require a person making that argument to qualify and amplify and clarify certain facts. For instance, J. P. Donleavy is not dead. At 87, he lives a bit like a genial hermit, a bit like a gentleman farmer. He looks a lot like a stately imp, in his red bucket hat and green flannel shirt, as he sits with his back to a fireplace spilling ages of ashes into the kitchen of his stone manor-house at Levington Park, a rambling estate 50-odd miles west of Dublin. Out on the acreage, four dozen cows graze beneath the gray bowl of the sky.

J. P. Donleavy is not dead, it bears repeating — particularly because it has been nearly 60 years since his first book, “The Ginger Man,” arrived in the world with an air of immortality already attached. Many of the millions who adore that 1955 novel, cherishing its ne’er-do-well hero as a holy fool jazzier than any beatnik and fiercer than any Angry Young Man, may subconsciously suppose that a novel so elemental was not so much authored as unearthed. Its tricks of pace and force of feeling give it a permanent immediacy — a quality attested to by the tallies of both art (99th on Modern Library’s 100 Best Novels list) and commerce (more than 45 million copies sold).

Though “The Ginger Man” was his defining hit, the man’s bibliography is replete with eccentric wonders — 11 novels, five nonfiction volumes, four plays, two novellas, a story collection and an autohagiography called “The History of the Ginger Man: The Dramatic Story Behind a Contemporary Classic by the Man Who Wrote It and Who Fought for Its Life.” To open “The Beastly Beatitudes of Balthazar B” (1968) or “The Destinies of Darcy Dancer, Gentleman” (1977) is to encounter sagas about rich boys written in rich prose, dry wit mingling with moist farce, humor inextricable from delicate sadness. The hard, bright modernist style is as indelible and inimitable as that of Woolf or Faulkner or James Joyce. Which is all to say that J. P. Donleavy is, inarguably, a proper full-fledged novelist by any measure.

And which, also, brings us to the matter of Donleavy’s nationality, or lack thereof. “I would say I’m an American,” the native New Yorker says, in an accent he Anglicized to posh perfection as a student at Dublin’s Trinity College. “They had in Ireland in those days a term to describe people like me, narrowback.” Born to Irish immigrants — whose fancy manners were such that his mother developed “the undeserved reputation of being the richest woman in the Bronx” — Donleavy served in the United States Navy in World War II and went to Trinity on the G.I. Bill. By the time “The Ginger Man” was published, he had settled abroad; after a 1969 change to Irish tax law exempted writers and artists from paying income tax, he took up citizenship. J. P. Donleavy’s status as, arguably, the funniest living American writer relies on his not-quite-Americanness. The sting of his social comedy, the pang of his characters’ homesickness, the keenness of his ear for dialogue — these all are surely functions of his status as a permanent outsider, an odd fish swimming the mid-Atlantic apart from all the usual schools of thought. Donleavy, a lord of the manor throwing foreign turf into his fireplace, has enjoyed a privileged position for studying privilege. His life and work suggest a perverse revision of the James Joyce formula for making it as an Irish writer — “silence, exile and cunning.”