J.P. Donleavy

by J. P. Donleavy

  The De Alfonce Bank headquarters extend to seven commodious floors and provide accommodation for its clients in several lavish suites and the players will have at their twenty four hour disposal fine dining facilities, De Alfonce courts, both open and enceinte, and a computer centre directly connected to every financial trading exchange in the world. Minimum deposits required are of the magnitude of One Million Irish punts. Clients of the parent bank are limited in number to twenty five all of whom are ranking De Alfonce players.

  Foreign branches of the De Alfonce Bank with De Alfonce courts are also situated in New York, Houston, Los Angeles, London, Rome, Paris, Prague, Moscow, Hong Kong, Budapest, Tokyo and Zurich and are governed by the same principles which apply to the founding bank in Dublin. Such widespread strategic access to world happenings gives a unique advantage to the parent bank’s ability to strike fast and gain foot holds in special situations where the outcome is to the bank and its members’ advantage, the latter who will occasionally join to exercise pressure when necessary to accomplish a desired result in such special situations. For those financiers who occasionally like to get away from it all, a special oasis branch with all the usual De Alfonce facilities and its own harem is secretly situated in the Gobi desert.

  We look forward to receiving your cheque and your platinum key will be sent by return registered post.

  The Honourable Founder

  De Alfonce Tennis

  1991

  PART 8

  Introductions and Reviews on Other Authors

  Review of Selina Hastings’s Biography of Evelyn Waugh

  I write these words from a fast up and coming European country called Ireland and from a house haunted with the ghost of James Joyce, who once visited here. And also haunted, too, by other literary gentlemen who came to roam along these verdant byways of Westmeath, and one of whom was Evelyn Waugh, who while he was staying at nearby Pakenham Hall (now Tullynally Castle) actually thought of buying this house I live in, and who is the present subject of this quite marvellous biography by Selina Hastings. And a more scholarly encyclopaedic and compendious work you could not find, and one, which in revealing so much of her examinee’s life, and which takes the care to transcribe her subject’s eccentric spelling and punctuation, has turned one’s previous idea of Waugh upside down.

  Straight off sporting a dramatic photographic portrait, one is confronted by the Waugh no nonsense eyes staring at you out of the jacket cover of this extraordinary book. Immediately inside are the author Selina Hastings’s two pages of acknowledgements which provide a Debrettish litany taken from the nobility of the British literary world, which formidable list alone attests to this lady biographer’s splendid credentials. And reaffirmed throughout this work as she eloquently describes the phases and periods of Waugh’s existence, all the way from naughty school boy, to and through university days to officer and gentleman and to finally becoming the father of a brood and the reclusive squire puffing cigars and quaffing his after dinner port on his country estate. Taken through this kaleidoscopic life, one has to adjust again and again, as emerges in each phase, a nearly new and different person in the flesh of Evelyn Waugh.

  It is also pleasantly reassuring to find, as far as this gentleman’s writing is concerned, that Waugh has, long past his death, remained a famed literary figure which this present work is, I’m sure, to the delight of his heirs, to amply prolong. And does so with such vividness that one feels Selina Hastings was alive and living in such scenes as she relates, at least those of the more respectable variety. And one can nearly hear Waugh’s best eccentric aristocratic vowels, such being among such folk de rigueur as he insults and belittles the many he thought so deserving around him, and to a degree that one imagines the Waugh coat of arms, which he ultimately devised, proclaiming as a motto.

  ‘I’ll abbreviatedly thank you not to morally or intellectually fuck about with me, you low cur.’

  From the first page this work is awingly meticulous, and even in scenes where one felt there was lots more to say, somehow Selina Hastings manages to leave nothing unsaid. Having rubbed shoulders with one or two of the protagonists in this book and stayed in some of the same houses, and exchanged words similarly deeply dipped in the deepest snobbery, one is fascinated now by the revelations of Waugh’s origins and his early behaviour come to light. And being able, as the essence of the later man emerges, to see the reasons why. Juxtaposed with male friends, there are his life long platonic friendships with both highly intelligent and beautiful women as well as the elaborate documenting of public school homosexuality, the latter being done in such a subtle way as to portray Waugh as the eventual practising heterosexual he was to become.

  And then, as immensely important as such things are to Europeans, every step in the awakening and honing of Waugh’s life long snobberies are described, as he and Frank Pakenham, later Earl of Longford, ‘climbed the slopes of London society together, to comport in patrician circles’. And in this regard, all Americans should breathe a great sigh of relief to have been born on that North American continent where the democratic use of money and rising from no account beginnings may be sung from the roof tops and matters more than a socially awesome pedigree. For here in this biography is demonstrated in both text and photographs an élitism of a kind that knows no rival. With tweeds, walking sticks, foxhunting kit and poses on the stoops of stately homes in leather boots and shiny black bowlers, along with suitable expressions on the faces to reflect the splendour of that life, to prove it.

  Although Waugh took on these appurtenances of the upper crust, he was no real snob as a snob no real author can afford to be, and he did in this regard as a writer make it known ‘I reserve the right to deal with the people I know best.’ Which indeed to know them even better, one supposes, also involved the celebration of the self indulgent, smoking and drinking to excess, remaining unbothered to be physically unfit and delighting in the epicurean. Although missing out on serious shooting and fishing, it was clearly advantageous for Waugh to maintain a patrician bias that suited his notions of superiority, and thus he ‘assumed a part that much appealed to him as that of landed country gentleman’. Waugh even maintaining that he would have liked ‘to have been descended from a useless Lord’. But when he married his second wife, Laura, his in laws the Herberts found ‘disturbingly vulgar his exaggerated admiration for the upper classes’.

  Now then. I don’t know who any more, across these good old United States, gives much of a fig in the matters of social standing and climbing but all those born and raised on the American continent may be glad they were when they read this book. Depicting as it does social snobberies galore and the agony and bitter peril encountered by those who attempt to socially step up a notch or two. And those who taste doom when they try and don’t succeed. Selina Hastings makes amply clear why Waugh has attracted so much scrutiny as to his social credentials, which weren’t in fact, seen from an American point of view, half bad. Damn decent in fact. However, as one has already averred, that as authors must embrace all, they can’t afford to be snobs or social climbers and one might instead say that, for his practical day to day use, Waugh posed as one. In any event in Selina Hastings’s biography there is more than enough evidence for the reader to form his own opinions.

  Ah but then, my goodness, just as one has established Waugh’s credentials as a gentleman comes an odd bomb shell as one turns a page in this work full of surprises. Waugh might, as according to his in laws, have had an exaggerated admiration for the upper classes but he could take liberties with and even be destructive and unmindful of the impression he made upon the kaleidoscopic array of your upper echelon characters of the time. As in this one instance he did with a grandiose disregard for other people’s property, when Waugh, staying as a guest of his friend Alistair Graham at Barford, a country house, tore out of their big Times Atlas the full page of Africa. This ungenteel act would have to be regarded as not the behaviour of a gentleman and such news getting around could put pa
id to your social climbing for all time. As it did instantly with Graham’s mother, a very proper American from Savannah, Georgia.

  However, it put no stop to Waugh and somehow snobbery of some kind or another seems eternally attached to his name. And in a peculiar Irish context I’m sure Selina Hastings will forgive me in revealing a snobbery I verily believe was, according to a written observation unearthed from Texas University archives, and wielded between Waugh and a once lord paramount of London’s literary world, Cyril Connolly, whom Waugh referred to as originating from a long line of Irish bog trotters, and Connolly angrily riposting that the only time his ancestors had ever trotted in an Irish bog was upon a horse or to shoot snipe.

  This tome is unobtrusively packed with facts and many a lively description and recollection out of Waugh’s life, done in many cases so vividly that again and again one has to remind oneself of Selina Hastings’s youthful looks in her photograph to know that she could not have been there. In the stories unfolding of travel, university and his later squirearchical existence, all serve as brilliantly wonderful explanations if not an apologia for Waugh’s churlishness and for the life led then. Where your once hysterically pukka vowels were the prow by which you pierced your way to succeed and alerted others to your esteem. Now they are no longer proclaimed aloud except perhaps in the dustier corners of your better clubs. Making this not so distant past enlightening to read in the light of today’s American ‘power’ accent which, spoken, has the last word and culturally conquers all. And also Hastings’s historic record is fascinating from the vantage point of a changed Britain, where one’s so called upper class accents slip, drop and even mumble away their traceable identity, making it almost comforting to know from this biography and from a snob’s point of view that it wasn’t always like that.

  Waugh has to be your genuine eccentric. Eager to get to war and then providing a strange picture flitting from place to place dining and seeing old friends, and at times it sounded as if he were doing the London season, and from Claridge’s was attending Ascot, Henley and Wimbledon. Hastings gives brilliantly amusing descriptions of close combat with boredom and some of the best renditions of the one upmanship relationships among the English that can be found. And especially of Waugh, known to be brave, being perhaps the only man in military history who, often shunned by his fellow officers, was thought by his senior officers to be too rude and offensive to be allowed to go into battle. Waugh post war, even retaining his reputation in America where he spread his incivility from coast to coast. And one would have liked to have been eavesdropping when he paid his visits to Forest Lawn Memorial Park, certainly one of America’s most astonishing places, and certainly by the magical account of its existence further immortalized in Waugh’s The Loved One. Which I hope soon to hear that someone will yet make into another film. Following of course the one made of the present book.

  Finally we find Waugh, his entry into the world of the landed gentry accomplished, living in the country house surrounded by your few sylvan acres but perhaps without the mile long entrance drive and the agreeable vista of parklands viewed from a stately home’s mullioned windows, but nevertheless enjoying a reasonable resemblance to a lordly abode. And himself ensconced in White’s, one of your better London clubs, and adding another nice social notch to his upper class existence where the members took their satisfaction on rainy days watching out the club windows at the passing damn public getting wet. And by the sound of and through Hastings’s words, she must know more than a few club men, for one gets that sense of the ennobling contentment and comfort to be found in such precincts. A refuge which Waugh more and more sought and seemed deeply to enjoy in later life. And why not. Where a gent in blissfully male exclusivity could pleasantly contemplate his self esteem and where, over his second gin and tonic, had he the imagination, could let his senses merrily waft in the breeze of reverie. Ah but where I hasten to point out via Selina, Waugh did, as he sat in lonely isolation, get accused by a fellow member of looking like a stuck pig.

  In his life lived, Waugh’s seemed to achieve greatest contentment while still in his early thirties, and at the time of his second marriage to Laura, mother of his children. He is then described as being ‘good looking, affectionate and with enormous charm, funnier than any man alive’ and it’s hard then to remember a just as strongly opposing view arising from a contemporary of school days, when the young Waugh is described as ‘an exhibitionist with a cruel nature that cared nothing about humiliating his companions so long as he could expose them to ridicule’. However, these qualities as it happens perfectly suit the very English sport of foxhunting and prevent one from being surprised at Waugh taking it up, as he did, ‘as a means of social advancement at which he was courageous and determined’.

  One can at times reading this book feel alone with Waugh on his numerous travels in places like Casablanca or Marrakesh. But in less civilized environs one wonders how Waugh, easily given to being irritated, bore ‘the miseries of climate and terrain and the discomfort of the bites and itches of jiggers, fleas and ticks’. But one wonders even more, as there’s no mention of such, at how he seemed miraculously protected from the constriction of anacondas, piranhas’ teeth and jaws of crocodiles. But then we already know he might have been too distastefully rude to have been bitten. He also withstood without injury the abuse of devout official Catholics for his so called obscene, immoral and sacrilegious work. And one must say that Waugh with his bluntly pragmatic and confessional nature, revealing his emotions, had an enviable personality perfectly suited to being and remaining a writer. And in this, one feels through Selina’s observations that Waugh owed much to the wisdom and forbearance of his literary agent, A. D. Peters. Which helped Waugh achieve to live in inconceivably lovely houses. And in business as a writer, to stand up for his prices.

  This surely is a brilliant pen which wrote this tome about a writer who, now that one has read it, richly deserved to be so written about. With Selina Hastings’s pertinent comments and fluently evocative lines such as one describing this era. ‘Arrived in Paris, Evelyn and Laura dined off pressed duck and fraises de bois at the Tour d’Argent before boarding the night express to Rome.’ And then she ends in her own words not much different from Waugh’s most descriptive when saying his ‘last years were bleak and wretched but his death was an unparalleled blessing, dying shriven on Easter Sunday, the most joyful day in the church’s year,’ which words come close to ending this astonishing book about an astonishing man who even as he lies contented in his grave still serves so well to inspire the courageously curmudgeonly in all of us.

  1995

  Introduction to John Ryan’s Remembering How We Stood

  John Ryan was my first publisher, who presented my earliest writing, a short story, ‘A Party on Saturday Afternoon’, in the pages of his magazine Envoy. However, I knew him long before that. As an invariably polite, quiet and somewhat shy individual, who when at the bar of a pub would patiently listen to anyone’s stories and if prompted sufficiently could tell splendid tales of his own. He was also a rare man in Irish life who could harbour many a secret from which, I suspect, comes much of the wisdom lurking in his words.

  In Dublin, following the Second World War, there was a celebratory air and the pubs of the capital city were jammed. And in the years following, of which John Ryan writes, there was a carelessness about life with the hopeless present being made tolerable by adorning the days ahead with rosy dreams. These, for target practice, always being promptly shot down in flames by your listeners, who in a public house need have no mind for having to please a host or hostess.

  Intellectual social life, rather than being conducted in the salons of Dublin and country houses, as it seemed to have been in the decades previously, was nearly entirely exercised where drink was for sale or available in one or two of the more impromptu places such as that now legendary basement redoubt, the Catacombs. Unselfconsciousness and face breaking being rampant at the time, no one knew or much cared that
a so called literary period was then in the making. Comeuppance and instant amusement were all the rage and you were as good as your last fist thrown or sentence uttered. While delving into the problem of obtaining a lifetime private income, food, not for thought, but to devour was on every mind. And if little hope of that was to be had, then a drink held in your fist was the preferred substitute. The exception to all this deprivation and behaviour was John Ryan.

  Courtesy a mother who was as intrepid as she was charming and who ran her considerable business of the Monument Creameries, Ryan was one of the few who personally had available to him both food and drink in plentisome quantity. With money to spare and able to elect to a degree as to what he did with his time, he could have done as nearly all did, spend his days racing and dining evenings at Jammets and the Red Bank with jodhpured cronies. However, Ryan had a distinct consciousness of the value and worth of the writers, painters and poets of the period. And he chose to be interested in his native city and the relics left by so many of its literary sons who had fled or been driven out. It was nearly as if to redress such wrong that Ryan had collected their books, music and pictures and let it be known that such banned and ridiculed things were still to be seen and heard back in the creator’s native land and that there remained at least one man there who kept their names alive and held them in high esteem. For as this book reveals, Ryan was himself, as well as a publican and publisher, also a creator of painting, writing and music. And he in turn self effacingly cherished and nourished those in the same pursuit who, embattled, still remained in this land so hostile to their survival.