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The Rake's Progress
An expat American writer, his sprawling Irish estate, and the cult classic that made him famous
BY JAMES CONAWAY
Fifty years ago, a new novel set
in Dublin but written by an American caused an international
sensation. J.P. Donleavy's The Ginger Man, a controversial
work temporarily banned in his native country, would
eventually sell many copies worldwide and make the author
rich. Donleavy, figuring he had no future as a writer
in the States, settled permanently in Ireland and used
some of the money he made from The Ginger Man to buy
a country estate in the lovely, rolling countryside
of County Westmeath, where he set himself up as a kind
of latter-day Anglo-Irish lord. In an 18th-century manor
house on 100-plus acres, he wrote more books and plays,
painted, and contributed in one way or another to a
legend that grew even as his literary star descended.
| Sebastian Dangerfield, the hero of J.P. Donleavy's novel The Ginger Man, may be one of the most colorful wastrels in fiction. He's a boozer, a womanizer, and a swindler trying to get by at Dublin’s Trinity College--and slink through life by any means necessary. Donleavy began the book while he, himself, was a student at Trinity, and it was first published in Paris in 1955. The journey toward publication, however, was difficult and the outcry afterward loud. Scribner’s, Random House, and Little, Brown had all turned the book down because of pages upon pages of scatology (there's a famous scene involving a toilet crashing into a kitchen, but we won't ruin it for you), and an editor at Little, Brown had deemed several passages "obscene libel." After it finally appeared, the novel was banned in the United States. Only later was an unexpur-gated edition released. It grew slowly into a cult classic.
Donleavy lives at Levington Park, an 18th-century manor house in Ireland's County Westmeath. A tour of the house reveals colorful interiors, and just beyond the grounds lie lush, green countryside and the lake known as Lough Owel. |
The Ginger Man is about an American choosing the life
of an expat for the irreverent freedom it provides from
the conventions of American life. I read the novel in
high school and thought it, if suggestive of James Joyce,
wildly entertaining-proof that a world existed beyond
the uptight America of the late 1950s. I read some of
Donleavy's subsequent, less adventuresome novels and
then more or less forgot about him. Only recently, when
planning a long-overdue trip to Ireland, did I think
of his house, called Levington Park, and decide to ask
for an invitation. I wanted to see how it and this native
of Brooklyn, now 81, had fared in the Anglo-Irish world
of foxhounds and wellies, in a famous house with eight
bathrooms, an indoor swimming pool, and a colorful first
owner.
"Mr. Donleavy would be happy to receive you here
to see Levington Park, which does have some architectural
and historical interest."
The note, written by his secretary, contains directions
from the outskirts of the central Irish city of Mullingar
to a dirt road and a big, rusty, anonymous gate that
requires strength and determination to open. On the
far side, amid unmown grass, are beech and chestnut
trees and a curving driveway leading to "an old
discolored house," in the words of James Joyce,
who visited here in 1900. Joyce was a teenager at
the time, traveling with his father, a minor public
official dealing with a local problem. Joyce later
wrote about the house in Stephen Hero, a precursor
to A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. Joyce's
description still applies, with the additions of an
ancient Toyota, hairy with green mold, abandoned next
to a functional Subaru Outback with gloves and a walking
stick on the back seat.
For more of this article, look for the
November/December
2007 issue on newsstands or e-mail us to purchase
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