Touring Ireland with J. P. Donleavy

Press, 29 July 1989, Page 22

Touring Ireland with J. P. Donleavy

J. P. Donleavy’s Ireland: In All Her Sins and in Some of Her Graces. By J. P. Donleavy. Penguin, 1989. 223 pp. $27.95 (paperback). The Penguin Guide to Ireland 1989. Edited by Alan Tucker. Penguin. 280 pp. $19.99 (paperback). (Reviewed by Stan Darling) What a treat it is to read Donleavy again. Donleavy, the postwar Trinity College student turned Irish country squire, turns his choppy, descriptive, headlong style to good use here as he turns it on himself. The book is about Ireland, true, but it is more about his own journey as a student and budding writer of “The Ginger Man.” J. P., known as Mike to friends and sparring partners (the latter included Brendan Behan), met Ireland on his own cranky terms and managed to make it charming as well as offputting to a young man fresh from America and the war. Donleavy’s parents were both Irishborn, from Galway and County Longford, and his mother eventually bought a village house in the years after he left university when Donleavy lived nearby as a struggling writer. Years later, after trying life in a London high-rise he dubbed “Tax Dodgers’ Towers,” Donleavy found he could do even better under a new Irish law which made things "tax eternally free for my future and past creative scribbles.” Donleavy takes the reader through his early years on Long Island in the U.S. Navy; then across the sea to Dublin and Trinity College. From his damp rooms at No. 38, where at first he painted much more than he scribbled, he takes us on journeys through the streets of a grey, bleak city he never fully warmed to. But he did warm to the interiors (pubs, cheap eating places, rooms where parties are held). His descriptions are marvellous. The book’s descriptions of

Charnelchambers, a warren of basement rooms which were the scene of all sorts of activity (real and imagined, or at least heavily fictionalised), reach the height of hilarity. Charnelchambers is host to a cast of characters that would do justice to any comic novel, including the Princess, Basil, The Awful Three and Daniel the Dengerous, the Lead Pipe Maniac. Things started off seedy and just got worse down there, and Donleavy handles the comings and goings with seeming ease. Donleavy’s encounters with Behan, complete with occasional fisticuffs, are also a highlight. Behan and Donleavy were working on their books, “Borstal Boy” and “Ginger Man” respectively, at the same time, and Behan came down the coast from Dublin to the Kilcooie country cottage where Donleavy was living with his first wife, the Irish sister of a Trinity College roommate. Behan broke into the house when he found it unoccupied and took a load of Donleavy’s shoes (the young writer had many pairs). He wore them crosscountry as he slogged across the bogs to a pub a couple of miles away, tossing each pair away as it got wet. Donleavy later had to retrieve them all. Donleavy is often not taken with Irish ways, and he makes his dislikes clear, but that cannot keep him from coming back for more. He finds that the country has a literary culture he had not seen at first, and his writing about it is again interesting and rude (but this time, not rudeness for its own sake). He finds comfortable retreats from the damp land he cannot ignore, especially at his mother-in-law’s estate on the Isle of Man. But even here, Irish morals intrude and another fight looms (this time involving, on the sidelines, a young Edna O’Brien). One of Donleavy’s companions in

Ireland is Gainor Stephen Crist, an American now known as the model for Sebastian Dangerfield, the Ginger Man. Crist, he says, was “very largely instrumental in bringing to my notice aspects of Ireland I might never have come to know, due to my own absorbing fascination at the time with wine, women and song.” As an American, Donleavy says, Crist spoke of wielding a double-edged sword in Ireland “which by one’s accent and tolerant outlook allowed one to assume alliances on nearly every religious and political side and enjoy a congenial fraternity right up and down the rungs of the jealously guarded Irish social ladder.” Penguin’s 1989 guide to Ireland is a production, constantly revised, with loads of practical information and simple but useful maps. Written by nine contributors, men and women, it includes a list of books for further reading about each of the country’s regions.