The train is late and a well-preserved bearded man stands at the station doorway scanning the alighting passengers. You are right in front of J.P. Donleavy, staring hopefully at him, before he realises it is you he is collecting and he asks why the train was late, and the first thing that strikes you about this American of Irish parentage is the drawling English accent. He says "yah", for example, instead of "yes".
The second noticeable thing is his faded, tatty denim jeans and matching shirt. Then the navy flat cap and the combat-style waistcoat in whose pockets, he explains, he keeps notebooks and pencils to jot down ideas.
The sun is shining in Mullingar as he talks about how the place has been transformed in recent years. The whole country, in fact, is unrecognisable since he wrote The Ginger Man. It is the book that earned him his initial reputation as a pornographer masquerading as a writer and the work most people recognise him for - this despite the fact that he has enjoyed moderate success with more than 10 novels and several plays in the intervening years.
The reason for this visit is that the play of his book has been revived and is currently being performed in the New Theatre in Temple Bar. The book's main character - boozing, womanising, carousing Sebastian Dangerfield - has been dusted down in order to tread the boards again. The 73-year-old Donleavy is quietly pleased. Yah, things have changed and, as he drives, Donleavy points out places where housing estates have been recently developed and empty green fields that he imagines will also be developed, and remarks how this midlands version of a metropolis has altered an awful lot since he bought his home 27 years ago.
The big rusty gate of Levington House swings into view, and he skips out of the car to open it, drives through, then hops out to close it again. At the end of the drive is his 18th-century Ginger Mansion. "It is even bigger inside than it actually looks," he says. From the outside the house looks absolutely huge.
Donleavy is clearly proud of his domain - the 20-odd room house, the 180 acres it sits upon, the 85 cattle roaming the land - even, one suspects, the vestibule just inside the front door from where a dozen or so home-made walking sticks protrude. He is now a cattle-farmer and a dry stone wall builder as much as he is an author. Every day he works the land, wearing tweed plus fours, stick in hand, living up to every inch of the country squire image - one which only mildly irritates him.
His sister, Rita, over visiting from the US, passes by and announces that she is off to the shops to pick up some groceries. When she is gone, Donleavy, who is unnervingly polite about everything, suggests coffee - either the fresh kind, or if immediately required, some heated-up stuff that he has made earlier. He brings a pot of something that falls somewhere between the two. Later he remarks that some people might say he was stingy - miserly, in fact.
His absence while he is busy brewing/ heating the coffee provides the chance to explore the long, rectangular front sitting-room. There is a grand piano in the corner, and on top of it are displayed dozens of Christmas cards - the posh kind with pictures of the wannabe royal families who sent them on the cover. One is from the comedian Billy Connolly.
On a long bench that doubles as a coffee table there are carefully-arranged piles of The Farmers Journal, local newspapers and Sotheby's catalogues. The marble mantelpiece heaves with unanswered invitations to important-sounding functions and parties. Elsewhere in the house there is an algae-covered swimming pool, a sauna and a makeshift gym where he works out with shadow-boxing every day. You can almost hear Loyd Grossman's nasal drone: Who lives in a house like this?
J.P. Donleavy, who sits amid the faded grandeur of his home sipping lemon tea, came here in the 1940s after leaving the US army, supported by a GI grant enabling him to study anywhere in the world. He chose Trinity College and, coming from an affluent New York background, he was "totally astonished" by it.
He had "considerable money" even then but "unlike others I never complained . . . about the toilet paper, the lack of hot water, the chill - it was always cold in my rooms - I was fascinated with Dublin and the people I got to know". He was fascinated, too, with the city's poverty: "Seeing urchins running barefoot around the slums was a brand-new thing for me . . . it was a fact of life here at that time." It was the winter of 1946 when he arrived: "You could get toast with butter and bacon and an egg, which was unusual in Europe then."
It was the relationships he formed - particularly with a fellow student Gainor Crist, who was the inspiration for Sebastian Dangerfield - and his adventures around Dublin that provided the impetus for The Ginger Man. "Most of my friends were people like Brendan Behan", says Donleavy who, it soon transpires, could name-drop for Ireland. That Dublin is unrecognisable from the currently much-coveted weekend destination with its rain-sodden pavement cafes and self-conscious sophistication.
How has it changed? What happened, he says, was "the greatest revolution that has ever hit any group of people on the face of the Earth since history began . . . it is a physical phenomenon and it is called television. Before that Ireland was a population ruled by the church, and with the advent of TV, people might have kept their mouths shut, but their minds were changing . . . they were seeing a chink of light ahead." Another thing that has provoked change is "money - and that revolution is very fresh, just months old. That has produced another upheaval, as great probably as the first, which was the release of information". This development has won the battle against censorship, endured when The Ginger Man was first published in Paris in 1955, just months before Lolita.
"I was a banned author . . . I was the real thing . . . The Ginger Man became a cause celebre in terms of censorship and a magistrate in Manchester made an order for the book's destruction", he says. The changes he enthusiastically outlines have proven, he says, that the natural abilities of the Irish are "quite astonishing". We have graduated, he believes, from "the gombeen character which came from a degree of poverty; now you see very stylish people, you hardly ever see a cleric anywhere and Ireland is still undergoing the most incredible revolution any society has ever, ever undergone."
For several years now Donleavy has had female secretaries working in the house with him to help administer the farm, but is currently thinking of employing a male. "Men have a different way of relating to each other", he says, but doesn't expand any further.
A rather hermit-like character, he details how he should get out more to parties, but it's too much bother. He especially dislikes attending parties held by English people. "They are so unpleasant . . . the English have this snobbery," he says disdainfully, making it sound like "snarberry" in his Anglo-American accent.
All over the house are paintings and photographs, of his children and of women that Donleavy refers to as his "ladyfriends". He has been married twice and has two children. On a tour of the house he opens the door to a playroom still strewn with toys: "This is really a house for children", he says.
One does not detect loneliness or regret when he says things like this, but sometimes there is the sense that, while he is King in his Castle, some vital element is missing. At other times he radiates an unswerving sense of self, a resolute pride, even arrogance, that cannot be shaken even by the most cutting accusations or book reviews. And in his time he has had some horrible reviews.
On the drive back to Mullingar, he talks about how pleased he is about The Ginger Man revival, and how his latest book, The Woman Who Liked Clean Restrooms, has been enjoying "100 per cent rave reviews" across the US. A bad review, he says with admirable Donleavy self-preservational logic, is always written by a bad writer. "I really do believe that", he says.
The Ginger Man continues in the New Theatre, beside the old Project Arts Centre in Temple Bar, Dublin, until August 28th