The Author and His Image by J.P. Donleavy Viking 310pp, £20 in UK
Love me, love me! the author seems to plead. Admire me. Envy me. Or at least marvel at the fractured syntax, the quirky illiteracy, the shine of this self-portrait, this image, this icon. Which come in short pieces collected. Of sub-Joycean Abbey Theatre mid-Atlantic Irish. Published in newspapers and magazines during two decades of yellowing and brittling and diminishing potency. His eyes now moistly yearning. God knows.
Donleavy's peculiar, sometimes irritatingly staccato style is evidently derived from genuine original ignorance. In an essay entitled "Tools and Traumas of the Writing Trade", he recommends alienation and "an empty head. From which learning and knowledge, the two greatest enemies of a working writer, have been eliminated". They were never there. He feels there is nothing disadvantageous in "whopping grammatical errors" and idiosyncratic spelling. Uninhibited by academic orthodoxy, he still writes "infers" in the present volume, when he seems to mean "implies", and uses "I" when "me" would be correct. He prefers to write an improvised language which is always recognisably his own.
The squireen of Mullingar was born in Brooklyn, he repeatedly proclaims, and raised in what he calls "the uttermost northern Bronx", as distinct from that great mainland borough's less salubrious southern marches. His American lower education was frag mented by expulsions for bad behaviour, and his undergraduate years at Trinity, Dublin, on the GI Bill, were rambunctious. Guinness having been taken, there were brawls.
In Irish exile, unencumbered by any sort of scholasticism or literary discipline, and fizzing with testosterone, the young Irish American was perfectly qualified to write an exuberant, anti-authoritarian, pseudo-Hibernian comic masterpiece. That is what The Ginger Man is, a masterpiece of its genre, enjoyed and praised by multitudes on both sides of the Atlantic, including Dorothy Par ker, who justly described it as "a rigadoon of rascality, a bawled-out comic song of sex".
The novel is a faithful, shocking chronicle of Dublin student life forty years ago, when Ireland was poor - except for the rich - and a timidly sensual maiden lady, Miss Lilly Frost, half-obeying religious prohibitions, allowed Sebastian Dangerfield only what the author calls "cloacal communion".
Donleavy's other great contribution to 20th-century culture was to bring his crooked Parisian publisher, Maurice Girodias, to his knees. After two decades of multinational litigation, Donleavy managed even to take over the Olympia Press. Girodias had commissioned pornography and also published some works of literary merit by authors such as Nabokov and Beckett, helping, incidentally, to bring about the breakdown of censorship in Britain, the United States and Ireland. The Ginger Man, neither pornographic nor literary, is in a special, bawdy-line category.
If Donleavy had retired immediately after those successes, he might be regarded by the public and his peers with sympathetic affection. However, as this collection of ephemera in amber abundantly demonstrates, there have been continual attempts to repeat himself and a continuous falling off. The scandalous undergraduate has aged without growing up.
Though he is 71 this year, though his protagonists have moved up from bacon and eggs and porter to caviare and champagne, his writing remains the same. He describes Wimbledon, the Dublin Horse Show and a Desmond Guinness house-party with naive sycophancy. He should write more often in terms of his favourite dish - pancakes, bacon and maple syrup.
In a melancholy piece called "Pasha of Heartbreak House", he describes how he has ended up alone, "rattling around in a big old house". There, surrounded by his parklands, he writes, he is "often bereft, lonely, and having again and again been left in the lurch by one beautiful woman after another". He concludes the book with a help-wanted advertisement, offering "remuneration modest, food and wine plentiful" to a "pleasantly attractive younger lady of principle with a bent for flower arranging and entertaining" and a willingness to live with him.
But the jacket photograph shows Donleavy posing as a whitebearded countryman, as shabby as Richard Harris in The Field. What happened to those Savile Row tweeds Donleavy used to believe were so important?
If you cannot love The rich, old Ginger Man, For heaven's sake Pity him