J.P. Donleavy: An Author and His Image

by J. P. Donleavy

  Although that nation is now two hundred years old, it seems by its din, violence and energy that it only decided to begin yesterday. With its weaving concrete highways aswarm with citizens encapsulated in steel. A society rolling on wheels and daily fanned by a consumer propaganda to buy, buy, buy. And keep the vast coast to coast heap glowing. And the horseless carriages propelled on the infinite highways heading anywhere and everywhere in a million streams that by day snake like long dark threads and at night make twin white eyes moving one way and red tails the other. Only slowed or stopped momentarily by tornadoes, blizzards and earthquakes. And these itinerant occupants steering and tapping a throttle with their toes. Nudging over speed limits, listening to jazz and symphonies, lighting cigarettes and making phone calls in the vehicle they put on like a coat. Wearing it with its brand name. And by the colour, style and size, telling the world who they are.

  Each time I go to these United States I start anew trying to figure them out. And after two weeks I decide that like anywhere, greed, lust and envy make them work. But in America it is big greed, big lust, big envy. Laced liberally with larceny. And unlike most of the rest of the world at least everyone gets their chance. And if it’s slow in coming, you can always buy a gun. Stop someone on a highway or street, or walk into a bank. And give me the money. Or I’ll blow your fucking head off.

  But when growing up there, I remember it somehow more peaceful. Playing marbles on the dusty hard ground. Along summer shady streets of the uttermost northern Bronx. Or wandering woods shooting chipmunks with slingshots carved from the forked branches of the dogwood tree. Folk would give you an apple and a quarter if you mowed their lawn. Fights could be mean but were mostly fair. It seemed then a safe place to be. Except someone might pull your trousers down, smack you in the face with a snowball or bust your model aeroplane. And you knew where the bad places were. Where something really awful could happen. And that’s where you didn’t go. Or if you did you were ready for trouble with your fist curled up. And your legs ready to run.

  But mostly, across that wide spacious land, you could get big continuous hi theres and hellos. As I did when summers my Irish immigrant father took us motoring west. Always in a brand new car. Crossing on the Lincoln highway. Out as far as Nebraska. Reading the rhyming signs of Burma Shave along the road. Or shouting when we saw a Hex sign on a Pennsylvania barn. The plenitude of the endless waving tassels of corn under the blazing sunshine across Indiana. The only fear was in Chicago. Where there was an epidemic of infantile paralysis. And I saw ambulances and fire trucks roaring through the streets. With the stories of the whole city once burning down racing through my mind.

  But out in each small town you could always find a sweet smelling tourist house with dew on their front lawn in the morning. Big creamy thick milkshakes at the local drugstore at night. And across the darkened plains, the wailing lonely sound of the freight trains. My father would with his big hands folded behind his back go down main street. To find any local philosophers taking an evening sit on the community bench. Or members of the volunteer fire department to tell them fire stories of the sky scraper city back east. For him America was great. Bigger and better than anywhere else in the world. And Ireland where he had come from was where they didn’t have a pot to piss in.

  And while I was growing America grew and grew. With those dreamland suburbias spreading ever more widely between the cities. And even the right side of the tracks sometimes became the wrong. With enough get up and go go go, you could, provided you didn’t try it by writing poetry and symphonies, grow up to be merely a modest millionaire. And one hardly remembered the hungry men begging door to door during the Depression. Who would call at our brick house on the highest hill in the Bronx. And although my father would not give them money, he would invite these gentlemen into our tiled kitchen to sit and eat with us. Great heaping helpfuls of meat, potatoes and vegetables. And glasses and glasses of my father’s elderberry wine. Before midnight came, with my father’s roaring laughter and telling and listening to stories, the men would be at least well fed and distinctly unsteady on their feet. Departing down the front steps to navigate the steep potholed hill to the bottom. Where an elevated train thundered above the road. And it was the only time I knew there were poor people in America.

  Because we had some neighbours too near who drove big bullet proof touring cars and never seemed to work for their money, we moved to another community and a lesser hill two miles across a river and railroad tracks. Here the Bronx streets were cosier. With lots of nice little boys just like myself to play with. Summers we spent in a shingle house back from the road between potato fields out near golden sand dunes and a pounding sea. With the haunting names we’d pass getting there, of Jericho, Babylon, Patchogue and Ouoque. Making me think we were heading away from civilization. And one autumn, nightly, from my high bedroom window in back of the house, I could watch the rockets exploding their rainbow of colours over the distant World’s Fair. Or on clear days see the trihedron they called a trilon and the big silver ball they called a perisphere. And everywhere and everything said that America was big strong and beautiful. Then came the Lindbergh kidnapping. New Jersey was suddenly somewhere awful. But the culprit was found in the east Bronx, a waste land of ugly junk lots, vegetable patches and shacks. Just where someone ought to live who would commit a grievous crime.

  Cans now took the place of the glass jarred preserves that used to be made and stocked in our cellar each summer. My father’s big wine barrels disappeared. I played street hockey on roller skates. And America seemed eternally peaceful. Until a foreign power did something evil on Sunday morning. I got expelled from a prep school and narrowly graduated from another. Just in time to go to war. And as a sailor one lonely Saturday afternoon with a twenty four hour pass, I left my base at Little Creek, Virginia, where I was being trained as radar man in a crew. To sail an amphibious landing craft on to the Japanese occupied islands in the Pacific. Which I did not delight to think was really my cup of tea. Especially with the suicidal attitude of the enemy. And as one did then, most sensibly, instead of disappearing into the sailor swarming, beer swilling and even prostitute famished town of Norfolk, I would, if I didn’t seek out the peace of the local library, go and visit another naval base. And I remember, as evening approached and great flood lights switched on, walking along the harbour quay of this vast naval installation. Passing under the giant grey prows and anchors of aircraft carriers, battle ships, cruisers and destroyers, all combat ready with their planes and tapering steel guns, one next to another as far as my legs could take me. And I thought good lord, what idiot foreign power ever decided to take on this.

  And someone did. And we saw arriving behind big wire fences prisoners of war. To whom we were ordered not to speak. And the hours were countable till the war in Europe was over. Sailors ran out of their Quonset huts and looked up as if something would happen in the sky. Others took fire axes and chopped desks in half that they were supposed to carry somewhere. Moored flocks of amphibious ships in the harbour were hooting and beer began to flow. I had some time previously, after much insistent begging of a welfare officer that I be given a chance to, taken mental exams and physical tests. And one day, instead of sailing out to the Pacific to land assault troops on a Japanese defended beach, I found myself on the leafy gently rolling hills of Maryland. At a strange institute of education called the Naval Academy Preparatory School. Which stood in a splendid stone edifice overlooking the town of Port Deposit on the shores of the Susquehanna River. It was here, while the Japanese war was daily coming closer to an end, that I first heard among these incredible naval collected intelligentsia, the name James Joyce. And listened to an extremely human and erudite literary English instructor talk about good writing.

  Between bouts of algebra, and strange insubordinations inspired by the student body writing to their senators and congressmen that the food was lousy or their pillows too hard, there were also calculus and trigonometry. While a fellow sailor ga
ve private recitals playing Sibelius on the school organ. And these clever young chaps, so many of whom through their influential fathers had intimate connections with power in Washington, DC, could have our entire barracks sound proofed overnight or more peaches and cream for dessert or the commanding officer countermanded when he cut leave to discipline ‘you bunch of spoiled god damn congressional ass kissing sea duty shy bastards’. While I further heard of Dublin’s wide wide O’Connell Street, a big brewery and the drinking word stout.

  It was in the peaceful library of this school where I conjured up a magical mystery about Europe’s largest municipal park called Phoenix in Dublin. And the stories of a returned sailor friend who told me you could in Ireland drink quietly and secretly with a glass of this black beer and piece of cheese in a little mahogany cubby hole in a pub called a snug. So with my piss poor high school record being instantly rejected by every university I applied to in America, and my mother’s information that there was a college called Trinity, I wrote to Ireland to ask could I come. And I ran around for days looking at a letter emblazoned with an escutcheon of a lion, book, harp and castle which said, yes, please do.

  Throughout one’s American upbringing somehow Europe seemed a strange and more tolerant clime. From which came the music of Mahler, Handel and Fauré. And from where, refreshingly winging the oceans on short wave radio, you might hear a dirty uncensored word. Spoken out of its war torn wise old ways. But it was its pomp and circumstance which seemed to call. Even as one never wanted to leave the sweat socks, gleaming polished loafer shoes and the lazy just hanging around days of billiards and beaches. Or the beer saloons and dates at night with the tanned skinned, bright toothed ladies. But deep in one’s background there always lurked the sense of a foreign world in my parents’ lives. For I had always been forbidden soda pop. And whenever I saw Coca Cola in another kid’s ice box I was filled with awe. There were no candy bars, bicycles or white bread. Instead my mother daily gave one an eyedropper drop of iodine in a glass of water. And pressure steamed five vegetables from the garden. Enviously I would see my friends trip down to the delicatessen to fetch back their combination salads and bologna meals. And sunny afternoons leaving on my way to the beach, my father, tending his dahlias, would smilingly say, ‘You have nothing to do but to enjoy yourself.’

  And so one October day climbing on an aeroplane, which three times went down the runway of Idlewild airport and didn’t take off, till on its fourth attempt three days later, I flew for fourteen hours via Gander to Shannon. Landing in this toy country. With its dazzlingly white swans sailing on glistening ponds nestled in the quiet green pastures. Straight out of a fairy tale. And in a small prefab building by the grassy landing field, for breakfast I had bacon rashers. These, monstrous and mahogany, were curled thick next to two gleaming sunny fried eggs. The big crystal grains of sugar. A strange liquid called tea. The yellow yellow butter. The corrugated crusted brown flecked soda bread. And the simplicity. In this sea fresh moist air. Here all you had to do was to keep warm. And dry. To eat. To sleep. To listen. And drink in the pubs. And before you froze to death you had to start doing all these things in a hurry.

  In Europe’s slow awakening after the war, Ireland was an isolated outpost. And you found that you came as a glamorous envoy from an invincible and the most powerful and richest nation on earth. Folk greeted you with a ready smile or with a curiosity titillated by lurking envy. You were an American over and above everything else about you. People came as they might to a museum to look in your cupboard. At the array of your fourteen pairs of shoes. Your fifteen suits and neat tall stacks of shirts and underwear. And like Americans did you even gave some of them away. Folk sought your company. And bought you drinks till, when everyone was drunk enough, they’d ask you why the hell did you do what you did to the Iroquois Indians or tell you that America had no culture. And suddenly, patriotism awake, and with the cry of ‘off to the beach fighting amphibians we sail at break of day’, an evening would erupt in war.

  But otherwise, America for nearly seven years was remote way back west beyond the massive big blue green crashing Atlantic ocean. But you found it in other Americans you met. Always delighting and cherishing to be in their openly spoken and crut free company. Where you could say your whole meaning with a smile. As these handful of expatriates demonstrated things like the jitter bug and how the zoot suit was worn. Or played their specially airmailed records that otherwise would take years to reach Ireland. And when they did and were put on some awfully modern citizen’s gramophone, their smooth rendition was usually short lived. Terminated by some sincerely drunk poet who would soon pee into the loud speaker or be thrown crashing against the turntable in a fight. Often started over a split infinitive in the song’s lyric. And then you knew that the only America you could now know would mostly reach you in the weekly news magazines. To restir your memory and some of your dreams. Of that wonder golden land being buried deeper and deeper by the new life you knew.

  But as far away as you may go, or as foreign as your life can ever become, there is something American that always stays stained American in you. Even if it’s only the bliss of slathering vanilla ice cream over the deep blue purple of blueberry pie. And as a land, it always, however faintly, glows with promise. And during those new born years after the Second World War when expatriates like me tried their luck and educations in Europe, spending their days in primitive strange discomfort, chilled and damp in Ireland, albeit with a white coated college servant to administer afternoon tea, or their nights bitten by bed bugs in Paris, they always felt that back there waiting for them across the seas westward was that place they knew and understood, called home. To which, when the chips were down, they could flee for comfort and safety. Back to the oodles of soap, showers, chocolate milkshakes and big purring automobiles. Of the pneumatic thighed drum majorettes prancing amid the cheering, banners, bunting, the hot dogs and beer. Of monstrous sleek money rich corporations where, yes, the grey charcoal flannel suited man would say, welcome back, how nicely, Mr D, you are qualified by your five cultured years in Europe, and by the way I like your accent, I really do, and here, with our board’s most heartfelt compliments, is your first monthly big bushel of dollars.

  And yet when I read now back in my letters written then when I, like others, with hope confidently tucked up in the crook of one’s tweed jacketed arm, returned to that land of opportunity, I see the word escape, and other words to an intending traveller, formerly of Dayton, Ohio, decamped from Dublin, and now holding out at Mount Ararat Road, Surrey, wishing to join me. And to whom I wrote:

  The Northern Uttermost Bronx

  A Solemn Saturday.

  Dear Gainor,

  Unfortunately your letter finds me in a beaten state. Coming here is the biggest mistake I have ever made in my life. Someone who has read The Ginger Man manuscript has pointed out that if it were published here it could mean my passport would be revoked by the State Department and I would be forever doomed to stay in this country. If you come be prepared for the utmost in despair. There will be no pie in the sky as expected. This is not the land of the big noble rich, everyone is screwed. There is a fantastic red scare here, the whole country undergoing a rigorous censorship. I want to go back to Europe where I can regain my dignity. Come if you will but there is no good life here. It is sad and bitter. Where no man has the opportunity to feel any love. This is a land of lies. The whole country is strangling with the tentacles of the Church and various American legions of Decency. It’s all vulgarity, obscenity and money. A country of sick hearts and bodies. So tragic that I just sit and sit full of pain. The only good thing about it is that they deserve what they are getting. If there is a war they deserve that too and I’ll be cheering both sides on to beat the living shit out of one another. All the wonderful things in me are locked up. But I’ll beat them yet. Best thing is to bring the books of Franz Kafka and read them here. However, strangely enough your elegant accent will be of help.

  Yours reg
retfully unencouraging

  GUTS

  And my intrepid friend Gainor did come. Just, as he said, like an emigrant or worse probably. Arriving in the middle of a hot June on the SS Georgic, penniless and thirty years old. He got a job with the American Express Company and took up residence across the street from the Flat Iron building on Fifth Avenue New York. Where I remember that he borrowed a cup of sugar from a girl living across the hall. And that little item of domesticity stunned me. But I was reassured when in his first week, having walked miles with the hot pavements burning his feet through the holes in his shoes, he had socked someone into the tracks of the subway for their persistent rudeness, and being the impeccable gentleman that he was and instead of running, as any good New Yorker would, he called for medical aid and for the good chaps in the station change booth to stop the train. Following all of which he was temporarily arrested and chronically sued.

  And so started my friend’s saga in the New World. As I rather cautiously hid out, first in a cabin in the woods overlooking the Housatonic River near Bridgewater, Connecticut, stubbornly, resolutely, writing The Ginger Man. And then deep in a ghetto in Boston. Where strangely amid all the poverty, stinking garbage pails and packed families, and being frequently awakened at late night by a noisy prostitute, I began enjoying America on my budget of eleven dollars a week. Twenty one dollars a month for rent, twenty cents a pound for kidneys and ten cents a pound for green peppers or grapes and all of it fried in olive oil with slabs of egg plant. And there in these narrow Boston streets with the odd visits of some old friends many years previously returned from Europe, I had flickers of hope. But also in my tiny sunless rooms, bed bugs.