JP Donleavy: author whose debut novel The Ginger Man scandalised society and sold 45 million copies

His best-selling – and scabrous – semi-autobiographical account of an American in Dublin funded a gentlemanly life in Ireland

Donleavy, pictured at his Westmeath estate in 1997. ‘To sit at a desk and think, and write, you must have peace, and to buy peace costs a fortune,’ he once declared (Rex)

JP Donleavy, the Irish-American novelist whose 1955 debut, The Ginger Man, was rejected by 45 publishers for its scabrous, sexually explicit content but eventually sold more than 45 million copies and came to be regarded as a modern classic, died on 11 September after a stroke at a hospital near his home in Mullingar, Co Westmeath. He was 91.

Donleavy was a New York native who moved to Ireland for university, adopted an outfit of corduroy and tweed (along with a matching brogue) and established himself as an itinerant successor to James Joyce. He wrote more than a dozen novels and story collections, many of them set in Dublin, and was sometimes described as one of the funniest – and finest – writers in the English language.

“No contemporary writer is better than JP Donleavy at his best,” The New Yorker wrote in a review of Meet My Maker the Mad Molecule, a 1964 collection with an alliterative title that became a feature in books like The Saddest Summer of Samuel S (1966), The Beastly Beatitudes of Balthazar B (1968), and The Destinies of Darcy Dancer, Gentleman (1977).

Yet Donleavy’s literary reputation rested almost entirely on his first novel. The Ginger Man was a semi-autobiographical account of red-bearded Sebastian Dangerfield, an impoverished American Second World War vet who studies at Trinity College, exposes himself on a train and strays far from his wife, Marion.

The novel’s bawdy descriptions nearly prevented it from being published. Rather than cut the salacious bits, which in Donleavy’s opinion contained the core of the book, he followed the suggestion of Irish poet and writer Brendan Behan and submitted the novel to Olympia Press in Paris.

The publishing house would later release Vladimir Nabokov’s Lolita. At the time, however, it was launching a series of potentially lucrative pornographic novels under the name Traveller’s Companion, and scooped up Donleavy’s book alongside such titles as White Thighs and School for Sin.

“When I discovered that the novel was published in this pornographic series, I realised I would never have any reputation, that the book would never exist in any real form – it was just a piece of pornography,” he told The Guardian in 2004. “It wouldn’t get any reviews. It was a total nightmare.”

Still, an abridged version of the book began to gain traction in Britain, and Donleavy found his revenge against Olympia in a two-decade long legal war over the rights to his novel. (He prevailed and eventually acquired the bankrupt Olympia at auction, through a holding company called the Little Someone Corporation).

Donleavy’s book employed an experimental style, with shifting points of view and staccato sentences: “Sebastian went looking for aspirin. The house looks unusually empty. The closet. Marion’s clothes are gone. Just my broken rubbers on the floor. The nursery. Cleaned out. Bare. Take that white cold hand off my heart.” But the book sold more than 45 million copies and eventually landed at No 99 on the US Modern Library’s list of the 100 best novels of the 20th century.

A theatrical adaptation starring Richard Harris opened in London in 1959 before moving to Dublin, where opposition from critics and the Catholic church led it to close after just three performances. A television adaptation aired on the BBC in 1962. And while a long-sought film version of the book never transpired, Donleavy leveraged his book sales into a new life of leisure, spending decades in a 18th-century manor west of Dublin, where he raised cattle on his 180-acre estate, swam in his indoor pool, and regaled visitors with stories of how a young James Joyce once slept in the house as a child.

“Money is everything in my profession,” he told the Paris Review in 1975, settling into his newfound financial security. “One’s mind almost becomes a vast cash register ... To sit at a desk and think, and write, you must have peace, and to buy peace costs a fortune.”

James Patrick Donleavy was born in Brooklyn on 23 April 1926 and raised in the Bronx, where he took up boxing as a child. His parents were Irish immigrants, and his father worked for the city fire department. Donleavy served in the Navy during the Second World War before moving to Dublin, where he studied zoology at Trinity College and frequently found himself in the middle of bar fights; his appearance as a bearded Yankee “narrowback,” he said, likely caused a few of the brawls, which included fights with Behan.

Donleavy also became an accomplished painter and was exhibited in Dublin three times before he took a set of canvasses to London and was told he wasn’t famous enough to be exhibited. “I realised that the only way you could ever tackle the world was to write something that no one could hold off, a book that would go everywhere, into everyone’s hands,” he later told the Paris Review. “And I decided then to write a novel that would shake the world. I shook my fist and said I would do it.”

Donleavy’s idiosyncratic style continued in his later books, which often featured chapters that ended with short poems and misspellings such as “limozine.” His legal fights also persisted: His second novel, A Singular Man (1963) – fittingly about a man facing a barrage of legal threats – was published only after he threatened to sue Atlantic Monthly Press, which had avoided publishing the novel over concerns about its sexual content.

Some critics accused him of recycling his picaresque plots and ideas, which at times seemed to verge on the nihilistic. Donleavy, however, seemed to have never lost his sense of humour; in 1975, he published a satirical guide to manners, The Unexpurgated Code, that advised readers on how best to deal with “being excluded from Who’s Who” and how to change their names to win new friends.

His first marriage, to Valerie Heron, ended in divorce in 1969. He married Mary Wilson Price, an actress, the following year, and they divorced in 1989. Donleavy had two children from his first marriage, Philip and Karen, and two children from his second marriage, Rebecca and Rory.

In 2011, it was reported that Donleavy had not fathered his two children with Price. A DNA test in the early 1990s had confirmed that Rebecca was the daughter of brewing scion Kieran Guinness, and Rory was the son of Kieran’s older brother Finn, whom Price married after her divorce from Donleavy. “My interest is only to look after the welfare of the child,” Donleavy told The Times, “and after a certain stage, you can’t worry about their parentage.”

JP Donleavy, author, born 23 April 1926, died 11 September 2017

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