J.P. Donleavy: An Author and His Image

by J. P. Donleavy

  As that year wore on with some encouragement from an editor of Scribner’s, Publishers, I sat over a typewriter, having sometimes to retreat to a park bench to get desperately needed sleep. And then peck out more words of this novel I began to suspect would never find a publisher in this land. But there were still some simple pleasant things that I found in America. Unearthed by one’s daily life. Like a copy of the New York Times. And reading it under the leafy trees near the swan boats in Boston’s Public Gardens. Or a walk along the Charles River with the quietly inhabited horizon of the old Back Bay red brick houses. The free symphony concerts you listened to lying on the grass. The penny admission to the local swimming pool. Or my big weekly thirty cent excursion to meet A. K. Donoghue waiting in front of the Co Op in Harvard Square. Mildly telling me as I mildly tuned an ear to the latest conclusions being reached about Russia at Harvard’s Russian Center. And the news was that it was a big drab land of grey life. And as I listened to Donoghue’s voice and to his constantly fermenting mind erupting with the woes and wonders of sex, power, money and women, faded were some of the other small displeasures, as the fat guy in the corner grocery persistently attempted to cheat me of two or three cents on every transaction.

  My beard brought suspicious looks and sometimes even the faint growl of a challenge, which was never pursued when I’d stop, look back and wait. I sustained myself with reminders of Europe, the remnants of which were here and there in the West End of Boston. Behind me, in even darker and smaller rooms, lived an elderly Polish Jew. Who mornings would grab me as I stood on my formerly vegetable store front stoop, his two fingers pinching my cheeks to ask, when I said I was Irish, that why didn’t I admit I was a Jew, as such a fine better class yid he had never seen. He wanted to know why such an educated man who spoke so cultured lived in such a place. I asked him the same question. He said because of his old age and independence. That his son and daughter in law always wanted him to take a bath and throw out his junk he every dawn collected. And then he would try to peek through the crack in the door behind me. ‘Hey what do you do in there.’ I said write. And he gave a grin because he thought I meant I was a bookie. And this too was America, and something that was life between these narrow fly infested streets. Where I could watch in admiration, a kid lie down in the middle of the gutter, and stop the horn blowing traffic while he balanced a spinning top on the side of his nose.

  But something in one’s bowels was saying no to this land. Where my childhood friends were growing up, just as their parents did, to be trapped trembling and terrified in a nightmare. And to temporarily comfort myself with the reassurance that there had survived before me other writers on this massive continent, I paid a visit, on my return to New York, to Herman Melville’s grave. It was in a cemetery I had known from childhood. And in which, during a school summer vacation, I had cut grass. For an author often another author’s life can feed him some romantic energy to keep tempered the tenacity of his own brooding pessimistic spirit. But at the cemetery, and unlike Shakespeare’s Stratford on Avon, it seemed they had never heard of the man, and searched out the location from his file and helpfully marked it on a map. I could see as I reached the tree shaded hill that not many, if any, previous feet had come to read some heartfelt words Melville may have written on the gravestone of a son who predeceased him. And on his own tomb was chiselled a feather pen. That his next of kin felt him worthy of. To tell a stranger that here lay a man in whose life there had been the written word.

  And through that struggling parsimonious year, the idea that America wanted great writers and great books to heap rewards upon them relentlessly vanished. I was told by my father. That you couldn’t get anywhere unless you got on a big TV programme like The Ed Sullivan Show. And this suggestion was as crushing as alas it was true. And centuries away from my own fist shaking determination and resolve. Which was now that I had to escape or die. For even if I were to gladface on that box to the millions of eyes, I knew that my uncensored two or three cents’ worth in their ears would have them jumping in their cars and heading to the studio to stomp and strangle me. But then, I was getting what writers never really want to accept that they thrive on. Obscurity and rejection. And this is what America gives in abundance. However, with my energy spent, and my vengeance sworn with the words I wrote, I now knew that a lyric voice could not be heard unless heralded coast to coast by a throbbing promotional media campaign. And that that country, be it the home of my birth and where I grew up, was not about to give it to me. And if I stayed, they would, without even trying, or knowing, kill me.

  I saved my dollars and dimes in dribs and drabs in desperate anxiety to buy a ticket to catch the Europe boat. Even popping nickels and pennies, one by one into a cigar box atop my dresser. My first wife and child Philip had already flown. And in that white old house on a hill in the Bronx I pulled the shades down to the sill so that no one could draw a bead and shoot me before I got out. When I could muster the confidence, I walked in the cemetery of Herman Melville. And met Gainor Stephen Crist there in the wintry snow between the mausoleums. He approved the setting but mildly objected to the inconvenience. But at least he agreed that in there, sitting on the marble steps up to the sepulchres of the rich or of some robber baron’s tomb, we were in peace and safety. Albeit a hell of a lot poorer, even though alive, than those entombed so splendidly dead. And now with the myth of America as the place you could return to shattered.

  Slowly but even more surely, one’s own life began to explode. On a drunken Greenwich Village spree with Gainor Crist I had badly cut my wrist putting my fist through a pane of glass as I missed something I was trying to hit. A kindly taxi driver drove me free of charge to St Vincent’s Hospital. And I remembered a previous taxi trip in Europe when, with me in my death throes, the driver demanded to be paid. And my brother T. J., who played his haunting Knobly Wood Concerto simultaneously on two pianos waking me at 3 a.m., had nearly been stabbed to death by a pair of aggrieved hispanics downtown. Who after he had taken them to a party and his hostess had asked them all to leave tried to kill him for the slight. Daily I went on a pilgrimage to Bellvue Hospital, that massive pile of wards, corridors and morgue by a grey cold East River. Where my brother lay hourly hanging on by a thread of life. My voice becoming fainter coming out of my throat. And Gainor Stephen Crist in his own ridiculous desperations, and now under constant siege from many aggrieved citizens of the United States, supplied the only distractions I got. And even he, a far better survivor than I was, was also setting his sights to recross at the first moment possible that deep blue green Atlantic. But I never thought for one second that in the chaos of his life he would ever make it.

  I sat holding on to the edges of my desk fighting and fighting to keep afloat in a sea of despair. Knowing bleakly in my bones that my voice was not going to be heard in America. Where some strange ghost seemed to arise and chase us. And point a finger. Because we were traitors to the wonderful happy way of American life. And this spectre was everywhere. On the ceaseless groaning moaning highways. Written on the faces in the subways, buses and bars. And Gainor for a few days hid out with me in the Bronx. Later saying that he remembered it as the most peaceful and pleasant time he had ever spent. Even my father, weaker in his years and perhaps dimmer in his belief of America’s greatness and who himself was beginning to die, voiced contentment. Where, over orange juice, pots of coffee and frying sausage meat in the kitchen, my younger brother T. J., convalescing, regaled us on the wintry sunny mornings with stories of his once selling cemetery plots and gravestones. And how in six months he didn’t sell one. Which he thought was because of his well brought up gentle demeanour. With both Crist and myself thinking that soon we would be becoming his first customers. But someone got wind of Gainor’s whereabouts. In this tiny cut off community of Woodlawn in this most northern uttermost Bronx. And threats suddenly got closer, deciding him to retreat to what he was sure was absolutely secure rural harmony with sympathetic friends in Woodstock, upstate New Y
ork.

  And some days later a letter arrived written January 25, 1953, which began:

  ‘My dear Mike, My God!! this has been an unbelievable nightmare.’

  He related a story which even I, who had always been of the opinion that he was more than mildly lacking in certain discretions and unheeding of clearly impending pitfalls, thought he did not deserve. He had, in sandals in a snow storm, begun by hitchhiking from the George Washington Bridge. And got picked up three successive times by three successive and persistently aggressive homosexuals. To whom he kindly explained that his life was already too complicated for him to do justice to or encourage their advances. And would they please just let him out in the snow storm again. His letter ended with ‘May B.O.P. intercede for us all.’ These initials stood for the Blessed Oliver Plunkett, Ireland’s martyred Bishop of Armagh of Cromwell’s time, who now, as a result of such intercessions, has by the power of Crist and Rome, been made a saint. Gainor had, among other unfortunate things, been at the wheel of a borrowed car on an empty road while rescuing a lost lesbian. And, forgetting what country he was in, drove on the left Irish English side. A marvellous custom those two races retain in common. And shortly there came, with the first other car to approach in the middle of a continuing blizzard at 3 a.m., a head on collision.

  Without a driving licence Gainor Crist had been arrested, and stood trial at 4 a.m. before a pyjamad Justice of the Peace in that gentleman’s cellar. He was humanely only fined but, having no money, the reluctant judge was compelled to imprison him in Kingston jail. His knees as a result of the accident were swollen up like footballs. Late the next day, his hostess with whom he was staying paid his fine. He returned with her where they both decided they needed a good stiff drink. Gainor sat in his sofa chair with the bottle next to him. His hostess crossed the sitting room floor to get some ice. Half way there she disappeared from sight. For the first time in his kindly gentlemanly life, although he did however reserve moments for administering violent instant justice, he did not instantly leap to aid a female surely gone somewhere in distress and certainly out of sight. But instead Gainor uncorked the whiskey bottle and lifted it to his lips. And in one long Dublin gargle swigged nearly the entire contents. And though Protestant he was, he then blessed himself with the sign of the cross and said the Roman Catholic act of contrition.

  When hobbling to investigate, as noble chap he always ultimately was, particularly with ladies, he found himself staring down into a black chill abyss. His hostess had fallen through a trap door under a rug on the floor and plunged fifteen feet down into a cellar where she badly sprained one and broke her other ankle. And when Gainor had a reflective moment to express words again. They came to my ears from his very heart.

  ‘Mike, pray God I may escape this bloody place before further disaster overtakes me. I must get out of here before I wind up in an asylum for the insane.’

  And so on a cold 3 o’clock afternoon in February some twenty five years ago, hysterically mute and with the western setting sun bleakly blazing a red tint across Hoboken, I stood on the stern of a ship ready to set sail for Europe. The pink lights glinting on the thousands of stacked up sky scraper windows of Manhattan Island. The Hudson grey dark and cold. Fleeing this nation on the back of the good ship Franconia and on one of that vessel’s very last journeys. Leaving this land that was, in its culturally commercial way, conquering the entire earth. As well as me. They were serving beef tea in the garden lounge topside. The skipper on his bridge. Lines being cast off and tug boats waiting to nudge the vessel midstream. And then I heard Crist. Racing and pounding down the pier. With his paper bag, and a wicker basket covered gallon of chianti. He was shouting as they drew up the gangway and he jumped the last couple of feet. Together we watched the New York skyline disappear in a winter’s gathering afternoon mist. My voice gone, I wrote on the ship’s stationery for my stalwart companion, Gainor Stephen Crist, words that have gone through my mind on my every visit to the United States since.

  ‘There it goes, a runaway horse, with no one in control.’

  I had spent my most solitary Christmas eve ever, in the front bedroom of my Bronx childhood home, listening to the choir of King’s College, Cambridge. Heartily homesick for some gorse and heather covered piece of land I hoped would await my return somewhere in Europe, somewhere in Ireland. With all the latter’s sanitary shortcomings. And Gainor Crist had spent his last days sleeping on the subways. Carrying with him his trusty immigrant’s brown paper bag. Which contained among other sentimental and practical things, two child’s cowboy suits for his daughters in Europe, a sweater, corkscrew, piece of cheese, length of rope, and an Aran Islander’s hat. This last a navy blue thick woolly head covering with a tassel which he wore on his interborough rapid transit journeys going nowhere from last stop to last stop. And one wondered, what didn’t America have for us. It could have been as simple a thing as that bushel of dollars we always dreamed was there. But even though one could have taken fistfuls of that mullah and celebratorily thrown it up to come down again in a soothing shower from the sky, one somehow felt that with no kindred spirits like our own ready to speak and say, ‘This place stinks.’ That money alone would never be enough. Even though money is always enough. And yet if there were voices of dissent and if they did dare speak. One could have said, ‘This place really stinks.’

  Yet, in my first months in New York I had my marvellous long walks. When my work each day on The Ginger Man finished sometime after one p.m. and I would go down the steep hill to Katonah Avenue to catch the bus along the cemetery fence to the elevated train. And stare from this roaring vehicle into the stacked up windows of the Bronx until it plunged downward past the Yankee Stadium and let me off walking up into the sunlight of the downtown city where I would wander, wander and wander. Full of reverie born from the streams of faces, buildings and streets. Where each man was carrying as carefully as he could his fragile breakable spirit. And I clutched my few feeble dollars, wondering more than a little where I would get some more.

  Late afternoon I’d return to the New York Athletic Club, a tall greystone tower overlooking Central Park, to work out in the gym, followed by the boxing room. Where one talked to the resident philosophers Arthur Donovan and Frank Fullam. And this latter boxing instructor, who did much more for my hopes and contentment than he did for my left and right hooks. And would, when I said I had painted some pictures, greet me next day with introductions to the best galleries on 57th Street. And when I said I was instead now writing a novel, he had ready the next afternoon further introductions to publishers and powers extant in the Book of the Month Club. And as much as anywhere else in America, I remember this room. Peopled as it was then, and in the years before I went to Europe, by admirals, a prep school friend, Thomas Gill, film stars, former mayors, present judges and local city eccentrics. It was an oasis where I could disappear behind my whirring skipping rope and pounding boxing gloves and run, swim and later read. And even trade verbal fisticuffs with the then Commodore Manning and exchange pleasantries with Commodore Baylis. And then early evening sometimes to go visit with a childhood friend, John Duffy, down Thompson Street who was also fighting his own battles, perhaps even harder than my own, as a young American composer and one of the few who did not think me strange or changed. And sometimes even see another, Richard Gallagher, one of the few old friends who had come to visit me on my bearded return from Europe. And to whom America had given little as he grew up. So never expecting much, as perhaps I did, America gave him more than it gives most of us. And he now and long has reigned as a New York philosopher of many profound findings gleaned in his Kojak job as a police lieutenant in command of a thriving section of Manhattan homicide. And these men, I think, must have retained something I had lost in Europe, which enabled them to stay and fight and live. And they were and still are America.

  For many years afterwards, wherever he was, Crist wrote me a reminder, lest I ever forget, of that day we both stood watching silently from the
stern of the departing SS Franconia as New York disappeared into a dull winter’s afternoon. Fleeing for ever that land. Which quotes no gross national product of the soul. Which still vibrates, throbs and swarms with machine, media and people. That gives rise to twenty thousand murders a year. Many beneficially committed in the punishment of discourtesy. And where, if they make car bumpers one pound lighter, they can change the whole economy. Reducing fuel consumption by 1 per cent. And make Arab oil sheikhs bite their fingernails. The country where your media mesmerized brain shuts off when the media does. Where the poisons used to preserve and flavour food and the smoke you smoke are preached as patriotic. Where an alleged Mafia member is described as having a tall specially built domestic chimney attached to his residence where he conveniently cremates his rubouts and the other affluent locals are too timid to object to the extremely unpleasant fumes. Where parents, bereaved by a son being stabbed to death on a subway train, have their house and home ransacked and robbed while they’re attending his funeral. And you find that both father and mother are blind to boot. Where the elderly move in terror through the streets hoping to get back to their lock enfettered doors alive with their groceries. Where prestigious periodicals carry advertisements for porno films. And where as you fall asleep at night you think you hear, and you do hear, the distant screams of victims and wails of sirens across this quasi criminal nation. Ah but then, but then, it practically is, it is, a free country. Where nobody seems too elegant to lie cheat or commit larceny. Or sue you for negligence committed in an act of mercy. Where someone can be killed in an argument over who discovered America. Or a Prince of a President smashed dead who, if nothing else, made America appear to the rest of the world to rise like a phoenix from the graft, ashes and ethnic hates and shine in a splendour it had not known for long years before and it has not known since. But yet it’s still a place, become over these years, and growing slowly out of this spilt blood where now the honest voice is more than mouselike amid the lion loud deceit. And a young man, because he knows you’re hungry and broke, will give you a free hamburger from behind his counter even though he also knows he will be fired for it. And men like him grow little gardens of beauty in some still desperate slum.