1/21/06 at 07:11 AM

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Source:
unison.ie

JP goes to Hollywood

21 January 2006
Irish Independent

'Yes I do rather admire Mr Depp ...'

After half a century in print, JP Donleavy's classic 'The Ginger Man' is to be brought to the screen with Johnny Depp in the lead. Kim Bielenberg met the author in his Georgian pile in Westmeath

At the gates of Levington Park, JP Donleavy's estate in Westmeath, there is a sign warning visitors to beware of rampaging bulls and wolfhounds.

Two granite lions and a battered estate car, once white but now a shade of green, stand sentinel outside the slightly crumbling Georgian mansion, where the author of The Ginger Man, one-time boxer and inventor of a new variety of tennis, has hung his hat since 1971.

After a sonorous Edwardian buzz at the door, my reception seems to follow a tried and trusted routine that could be written in stage notes.

Jenny, his friendly young assistant, ushers me into a large drawing room with an oak fire, and then disappears to fetch tea and cake.

There is a short interlude. So, I can take in the scene. It is a snooper's paradise: paintings by Donleavy adorn the walls; there are piles of books; a few copies of Hello!; a grand piano; a Christmas card from Shane MacGowan; and next to it a photo of Winston Churchill holding a machine-gun.

Then the man himself enters with impeccable timing, strolling through a different door to the one I had entered, and offering a firm hand. Here he is, a youthful 79-year-old, one of the last survivors of the hard-drinking Dublin literary scene of the '50s. His contemporaries - Behan, Kavanagh, and Flann O'Brien - have long since gone to their graves, but Donleavy is fit as a fiddle, full of bravado and as lucid as ever.

"I am sorry it is so cold in here, but our central heating has packed in," says JP, known by his friends as 'Mike', as he pokes the mossy logs in the grate.

His New York accent is softened with Anglo-Irish cadences, and he fills the role of a tweedy country gent perfectly. But unlike many of those who are genuinely to the manor born, he has a comic self-awareness. You get the feeling that the pose is all a bit of a joke.

Donleavy has a new spring in his step following the news that Johnny Depp, an admirer of Donleavy's work, wants to bring The Ginger Man to the screen. The pair recently met up in New York and got on swimmingly. Depp will try where countless others - including John Huston and Robert Redford - have failed.

"I must say that I do rather admire Mr Depp. He has this wonderful ability with accents. I found him very intelligent and knowledgeable."

Donleavy may be an admirer of Depp, but he can be forgiven for not always having his finger on the pulse of popular culture. When I mention that Depp modelled his pirate character in Pirates of the Caribbean on the Rolling Stone Keith Richards, Donleavy asks with mock bewilderment: "Who is Keith Richards?"

The Ginger Man, first published by a pornographic imprint in Paris in 1955, has sold 20m copies and has never gone out of print.

Its hero, Sebastian Dangerfield, an American student at Trinity College in the late '40s, is one of the great cads in Irish literature. The renegade student spends much of his time rambling around Dublin, getting drunk, burning the furniture, cheating the landlord and chasing anything in a skirt.

Donleavy, who was himself a student at Trinity, based at least part of the character on his fellow American student Stephen Gainor Crist.

Gainor Crist was a well-known character around the so-called literary pubs of Dublin in the '50s. The writer Anthony Cronin once recalled him as a charming, bowler-hatted gent with a cane.

Donleavy, as gifted a storyteller in person as he is on the page, seems genuinely moved as he speaks of Crist, his friend from Trinity. He says his death remains a mystery.

"Nobody can be absolutely sure what happened to him. He is supposed to have died on a boat on the way to America in the '60s, and there is a gravestone somewhere, but nobody actually saw him dead.

"A few years ago I was walking along Grafton Street and I was convinced that I saw him, making these nervous, fidgeting movements with his hands," says Donleavy, rising from his seat and walking across the room to imitate Crist's gestures. "Perhaps he is still alive."

Donleavy recalls Brendan Behan with a similar fondness. Behan was one of the first people to read the manuscript of The Ginger Man, marking it with his suggestions. Donleavy picks the manuscript out of a box and shows me Behan's scrawl.

"Brendan is remembered by many people as a comical drunk, but he was actually a very erudite man.

"One of the complaints I have about him is that he stole all my shoes. Once he came to my house in Wicklow and decided on one rainy evening that he had had enough of the country, and wanted to walk miles to the pub. But he hated getting his feet wet. So he took lots of my pairs of shoes; and every time a pair would get wet, he would throw it into the field, and put on another pair."

Whether he likes it or not, Donleavy is now part of the Irish literary furniture. He claims that he has not been made welcome by elements of the Irish literary establishment, but his books have sold consistently here.

Although it was banned for many years for reasons of obscenity, a recent Irish book survey showed that The Ginger Man was the seventh best-selling book in Ireland since 1930.

"I think I realised how popular it was when I took the bus home one day. When I came near to the house, I moved towards the front and the driver quoted a whole passage of The Ginger Man back to me."

Donleavy is angered by the recent moves to cap the tax-free earnings of writers and artists in Ireland.

"Writers, artists and musicians do more than anyone else to promote this country. Those U2 fellows are more valuable to Ireland than any industry." Although frequently described as a recluse (perhaps misleadingly given that he has appeared in Hello!) Donleavy is an engaging host. He loves to talk about making dry stone walls on his farm, his fondness for cattle and his prowess as a boxer.

"At one time I was one of the fastest punchers in the business," declares the author who boxed when he was in the American navy, and was once provoked to throw a punch in a Dublin pub when someone teased him about his beard.

He rises from his seat and throws three swift left hooks into the shadows before surprising me by pulling out a picture of himself next to 'Smokin' Joe Frazier. "I was just giving a him a bit of inspiration before his fight with Muhammad Ali," he says implausibly.

The stories flow on until late in the afternoon, and a dark gloom descends over Levington Park. Sadly, it is time to leave. As I leave, edging through the gravel, I remember Donleavy's parting shot in The Ginger Man:

"God's mercy on the wild Ginger Man"