Title: Johnny mentioned in acticle about JP Donleavy
Karen - May 15, 2007 05:13 PM (GMT)
Yes, this was the event I attended Friday.
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB1179187851...=googlenews_wsj
CULTURAL CONVERSATION
Naughty Paintings and Once-Scandalous Words
By AMY FINNERTY
May 15, 2007; Page D6
New York
Last week, the novelist J.P. Donleavy departed the genteel comfort of Levington Park, his 18th-century estate in Ireland, to attend a quirky little gallery opening at the National Arts Club in New York's Gramercy Park. The show, on view until May 22, features the writer's own roguish, often explicit renderings -- he is a self-taught artist -- of priapic dogs, predatory fish, and lusty human figures. The Brooklyn-born, Bronx-bred Mr. Donleavy never took art classes when he attended Trinity College, Dublin, on the G.I. Bill, and he has embraced his lack of formal training. The work has a childlike immediacy that conjures elementary school art class -- except, that is, for paintings of nude women with titles like, "I Don't Know Why but He Likes Them This Size."
An absence of artistic sobriety, and of a college degree, didn't keep Mr. Donleavy from becoming a best-selling author, either. His first of 10 novels, "The Ginger Man" (1955), chronicles the misadventures of Sebastian Dangerfield, a degenerate American law student, married and broke in Ireland, determined to avoid anything so banal as the classroom or steady work, and occupied instead with women and liquor. Writing in Esquire, Dorothy Parker called it "lusty, violent, and wildly funny."
As a disengaged student at Trinity himself, Mr. Donleavy sat in on some life-drawing sessions with members of the "White Stag" set, Bohemians reacting to the stultifying morality of postwar Ireland. Given his scandalous literary debut soon thereafter, and the titles of his paintings, one wonders whether it might have been the prospect of naked models that attracted him. But "I am the painter who became a writer and has been rediscovered as a painter," he tells me in his suite at the New York Athletic Club. And it's true that his last opening in Dublin attracted avid attention from buyers, critics and curious fans of his writing.
His self-invention as an artist took form in the 1940s. "Suddenly," he recalls, "I saw the high prices Jack Yates [W.B.'s brother] was charging for his pictures . . . I started to slap paint on a canvas." His first exhibit, in Dublin in 1948, reaped mixed reviews. Realizing he hadn't painted enough to fill the gallery, he hurried to his easel on the day of the show and worked furiously, hanging the works, still wet, on the gallery walls. "[The Irish painter] Phyllis Hayward, who was pretty outspoken, came along, and she would pronounce: 'You do have nerve!' So that's the kind of encouragement I got."
But Mr. Donleavy, who has painted for pleasure and modest profit ever since, doesn't worry too much about art critics and book reviewers: "Like most writers or people who live isolated lives, you should try not to . . . look into the kind of machinations of how well known you are, who reads you, because you'd drive yourself crazy. Writers are best when they're failures and struggling and rejected. . . . So that's been my history. Total isolation."
This isn't entirely accurate. As a young man, Mr. Donleavy was actively engaged with a vibrant group of writers and artists in Dublin. He has been married twice, has had children and stepchildren, and is joined for this interview by a female travel companion, an agent and a lawyer friend. But he seems to enjoy his image as an eccentric literary eminence, holed up in a lavish pile. Except for local schoolkids and the odd, lit-cult follower, few would dare to drop in unannounced at his house, set on his organic cattle farm in the Irish Midlands. Signs by the gate offer vivid warnings of bloodhounds, high voltage fences and aggressive bulls, and of what might befall trespassers.
A boyish delight in the illicit, so palpable in Mr. Donleavy's writing, is undiminished by age. But the writer, now 81, is weary from his transatlantic journey. He describes the oppressiveness of the first-class service on his flight to New York. "I'm an emotional and physical wreck, having made that trip over here. Food shoved in front of you every half hour. And out of politeness, because if nothing else in my life I am earnestly polite, I would try to eat the damn thing off the plate and make it look as if I'd paid some attention. And as soon as that had happened, they'd take it away, and then a new one came in, you see. . . ."
Mr. Donleavy laments that he has no private jet at his disposal. "I now have sympathy for all these people who look extravagant. They have yachts and all this stuff. But they need it," travel conditions being as intolerable as they are. "I'm not in that league." He is sure that Johnny Depp would never put up with commercial air travel. He hopes that Mr. Depp, whose breeding and physical elegance he greatly admires, will play Sebastian Dangerfield in a film adaptation of "The Ginger Man" that has been in discussion for some time.
Mr. Donleavy's most famous book is still popular, and has benefited greatly from negative press. Banned in Ireland until the early 1970s (for sexual content that, while robust, seems tame by today's standards), it was stigmatized even in New York -- a sure route to commercial success. "There was an encyclical letter read from every Catholic pulpit in America at the time. They were warned not to read this book."
That was not Mr. Donleavy's first opportunity to embarrass his parents, tolerant Bronx immigrants who prospered from some shrewd real-estate investments in their adopted city. Young James Patrick was expelled from Fordham Prep for being a "bad influence," by founding a fraternity and holding its first and last meeting at a saloon.
In the war, Mr. Donleavy ended up in the Amphibious Corps. "That was practically a suicide force. But at some stage in the Navy you could take examinations in the fleet, and I got an appointment to the U.S. Naval Academy at Annapolis. There I attended the strangest school I've ever attended in all my life -- the Naval Academy Preparatory School."
In class with the sons of congressmen and generals, Mr. Donleavy won his first literary recognition, as a ghostwriter of essays for less creative classmates. "There were a lot of these Southerners: 'Hey, J.P., will you raaahht me one of those things you do?' I was an expert at assuming their identities. But a teacher, who was a pretty sophisticated gentleman, said, 'I believe there is a ghostwriter at work in this school.'" Learning from his teacher that a Joycean influence was at work in his essays, young J.P. went to the school library and read James Joyce for the first time.
Joyce was not then treated with the reverence that came later, says Mr. Donleavy. "The impression you got was that he was a dissolute medical student who just drank and whored -- to use that European word -- through Dublin. No one looked upon him as a great innovator." Still, Mr. Donleavy was drawn to Ireland by his reading of Joyce, and by impressions picked up from fellow G.I.s who had had tours abroad. The allure of the pub, and of collegial self-discovery, kept him at arm's length from his microbiology studies; he left Trinity without a degree in 1949.
While soaking up the intellectual atmosphere and painting away, Mr. Donleavy was developing his literary voice. Among his earliest published writings were letters to the Irish Times, defending himself against critics of his art. A man in search of an audience, he felt that he could reach a wider one with writing. In 1952, he handed in part of his "Ginger Man" manuscript to Scribner's in New York. Receiving praise but no deal, he moved on to London, where his friend, the writer Brendan Behan, declared, "This book is going to go around the world and beat the bejesus out of the Bible." Not quite, but it has sold more than 45 million copies and been translated into two-dozen languages, despite a distinctly unsavory debut, beating out "The Onion Eaters," "Wrong Information Being Given Out at Princeton," and all of Mr. Donleavy's other books and plays.
"I was first published by The Olympia Press in Paris, who published pornography. So my beginnings were dreadful in that regard. But I was also published alongside Vladimir Nabokov. He was furious because they tried to publish ["Lolita"] as pornography."
Mr. Donleavy was paid an upfront fee for "The Ginger Man," then spent "years in litigation" with his publishers when the book "began to persist and become a worthy economic prospect." In the end, he sent his beautiful second wife to Paris to bid on the failing press, when it went up for auction. "You're looking happily now at the owner of the Olympia Press Paris. I own that company."
Mr. Donleavy, gentleman farmer and minor print baron, is not too concerned about the prices on his paintings at the National Arts Club -- most are in the $2,000 to $5,000 range -- or about the reviews the show might receive. He is, instead, intent on reclaiming his inner child every time he paints. "I feel like anyone who scratches a piece of paper, children especially, are natural talents as artists. The thing that defeats children from becoming great artists are adults coming up to them and looking at it and saying, 'Well, let's see, maybe we can make that look more like a dog.' All it is, is the suppression of the child. Society wipes them out, fills them with fear."
The writer-painter-farmer then poses a rhetorical question beyond the powers of most children: "Dare I do this? Are people going to laugh at me?" J.P. Donleavy doesn't really care.
Ms. Finnerty writes about culture for the Journal.
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB1179187851...=googlenews_wsj
CULTURAL CONVERSATION
Naughty Paintings and Once-Scandalous Words
By AMY FINNERTY
May 15, 2007; Page D6
New York
Last week, the novelist J.P. Donleavy departed the genteel comfort of Levington Park, his 18th-century estate in Ireland, to attend a quirky little gallery opening at the National Arts Club in New York's Gramercy Park. The show, on view until May 22, features the writer's own roguish, often explicit renderings -- he is a self-taught artist -- of priapic dogs, predatory fish, and lusty human figures. The Brooklyn-born, Bronx-bred Mr. Donleavy never took art classes when he attended Trinity College, Dublin, on the G.I. Bill, and he has embraced his lack of formal training. The work has a childlike immediacy that conjures elementary school art class -- except, that is, for paintings of nude women with titles like, "I Don't Know Why but He Likes Them This Size."
An absence of artistic sobriety, and of a college degree, didn't keep Mr. Donleavy from becoming a best-selling author, either. His first of 10 novels, "The Ginger Man" (1955), chronicles the misadventures of Sebastian Dangerfield, a degenerate American law student, married and broke in Ireland, determined to avoid anything so banal as the classroom or steady work, and occupied instead with women and liquor. Writing in Esquire, Dorothy Parker called it "lusty, violent, and wildly funny."
As a disengaged student at Trinity himself, Mr. Donleavy sat in on some life-drawing sessions with members of the "White Stag" set, Bohemians reacting to the stultifying morality of postwar Ireland. Given his scandalous literary debut soon thereafter, and the titles of his paintings, one wonders whether it might have been the prospect of naked models that attracted him. But "I am the painter who became a writer and has been rediscovered as a painter," he tells me in his suite at the New York Athletic Club. And it's true that his last opening in Dublin attracted avid attention from buyers, critics and curious fans of his writing.
His self-invention as an artist took form in the 1940s. "Suddenly," he recalls, "I saw the high prices Jack Yates [W.B.'s brother] was charging for his pictures . . . I started to slap paint on a canvas." His first exhibit, in Dublin in 1948, reaped mixed reviews. Realizing he hadn't painted enough to fill the gallery, he hurried to his easel on the day of the show and worked furiously, hanging the works, still wet, on the gallery walls. "[The Irish painter] Phyllis Hayward, who was pretty outspoken, came along, and she would pronounce: 'You do have nerve!' So that's the kind of encouragement I got."
But Mr. Donleavy, who has painted for pleasure and modest profit ever since, doesn't worry too much about art critics and book reviewers: "Like most writers or people who live isolated lives, you should try not to . . . look into the kind of machinations of how well known you are, who reads you, because you'd drive yourself crazy. Writers are best when they're failures and struggling and rejected. . . . So that's been my history. Total isolation."
This isn't entirely accurate. As a young man, Mr. Donleavy was actively engaged with a vibrant group of writers and artists in Dublin. He has been married twice, has had children and stepchildren, and is joined for this interview by a female travel companion, an agent and a lawyer friend. But he seems to enjoy his image as an eccentric literary eminence, holed up in a lavish pile. Except for local schoolkids and the odd, lit-cult follower, few would dare to drop in unannounced at his house, set on his organic cattle farm in the Irish Midlands. Signs by the gate offer vivid warnings of bloodhounds, high voltage fences and aggressive bulls, and of what might befall trespassers.
A boyish delight in the illicit, so palpable in Mr. Donleavy's writing, is undiminished by age. But the writer, now 81, is weary from his transatlantic journey. He describes the oppressiveness of the first-class service on his flight to New York. "I'm an emotional and physical wreck, having made that trip over here. Food shoved in front of you every half hour. And out of politeness, because if nothing else in my life I am earnestly polite, I would try to eat the damn thing off the plate and make it look as if I'd paid some attention. And as soon as that had happened, they'd take it away, and then a new one came in, you see. . . ."
Mr. Donleavy laments that he has no private jet at his disposal. "I now have sympathy for all these people who look extravagant. They have yachts and all this stuff. But they need it," travel conditions being as intolerable as they are. "I'm not in that league." He is sure that Johnny Depp would never put up with commercial air travel. He hopes that Mr. Depp, whose breeding and physical elegance he greatly admires, will play Sebastian Dangerfield in a film adaptation of "The Ginger Man" that has been in discussion for some time.
Mr. Donleavy's most famous book is still popular, and has benefited greatly from negative press. Banned in Ireland until the early 1970s (for sexual content that, while robust, seems tame by today's standards), it was stigmatized even in New York -- a sure route to commercial success. "There was an encyclical letter read from every Catholic pulpit in America at the time. They were warned not to read this book."
That was not Mr. Donleavy's first opportunity to embarrass his parents, tolerant Bronx immigrants who prospered from some shrewd real-estate investments in their adopted city. Young James Patrick was expelled from Fordham Prep for being a "bad influence," by founding a fraternity and holding its first and last meeting at a saloon.
In the war, Mr. Donleavy ended up in the Amphibious Corps. "That was practically a suicide force. But at some stage in the Navy you could take examinations in the fleet, and I got an appointment to the U.S. Naval Academy at Annapolis. There I attended the strangest school I've ever attended in all my life -- the Naval Academy Preparatory School."
In class with the sons of congressmen and generals, Mr. Donleavy won his first literary recognition, as a ghostwriter of essays for less creative classmates. "There were a lot of these Southerners: 'Hey, J.P., will you raaahht me one of those things you do?' I was an expert at assuming their identities. But a teacher, who was a pretty sophisticated gentleman, said, 'I believe there is a ghostwriter at work in this school.'" Learning from his teacher that a Joycean influence was at work in his essays, young J.P. went to the school library and read James Joyce for the first time.
Joyce was not then treated with the reverence that came later, says Mr. Donleavy. "The impression you got was that he was a dissolute medical student who just drank and whored -- to use that European word -- through Dublin. No one looked upon him as a great innovator." Still, Mr. Donleavy was drawn to Ireland by his reading of Joyce, and by impressions picked up from fellow G.I.s who had had tours abroad. The allure of the pub, and of collegial self-discovery, kept him at arm's length from his microbiology studies; he left Trinity without a degree in 1949.
While soaking up the intellectual atmosphere and painting away, Mr. Donleavy was developing his literary voice. Among his earliest published writings were letters to the Irish Times, defending himself against critics of his art. A man in search of an audience, he felt that he could reach a wider one with writing. In 1952, he handed in part of his "Ginger Man" manuscript to Scribner's in New York. Receiving praise but no deal, he moved on to London, where his friend, the writer Brendan Behan, declared, "This book is going to go around the world and beat the bejesus out of the Bible." Not quite, but it has sold more than 45 million copies and been translated into two-dozen languages, despite a distinctly unsavory debut, beating out "The Onion Eaters," "Wrong Information Being Given Out at Princeton," and all of Mr. Donleavy's other books and plays.
"I was first published by The Olympia Press in Paris, who published pornography. So my beginnings were dreadful in that regard. But I was also published alongside Vladimir Nabokov. He was furious because they tried to publish ["Lolita"] as pornography."
Mr. Donleavy was paid an upfront fee for "The Ginger Man," then spent "years in litigation" with his publishers when the book "began to persist and become a worthy economic prospect." In the end, he sent his beautiful second wife to Paris to bid on the failing press, when it went up for auction. "You're looking happily now at the owner of the Olympia Press Paris. I own that company."
Mr. Donleavy, gentleman farmer and minor print baron, is not too concerned about the prices on his paintings at the National Arts Club -- most are in the $2,000 to $5,000 range -- or about the reviews the show might receive. He is, instead, intent on reclaiming his inner child every time he paints. "I feel like anyone who scratches a piece of paper, children especially, are natural talents as artists. The thing that defeats children from becoming great artists are adults coming up to them and looking at it and saying, 'Well, let's see, maybe we can make that look more like a dog.' All it is, is the suppression of the child. Society wipes them out, fills them with fear."
The writer-painter-farmer then poses a rhetorical question beyond the powers of most children: "Dare I do this? Are people going to laugh at me?" J.P. Donleavy doesn't really care.
Ms. Finnerty writes about culture for the Journal.