JP Donleavy

Desert Island Discs

BBC

Society & Culture, Music Commentary, Music, Personal Journals

4.4 • 13.7K Ratings

🗓️ 4 March 2007

⏱️ 35 minutes

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Summary

Kirsty Young's castaway this week is the writer J P Donleavy. The author of a dozen novels as well as numerous plays and short stories, he remains best known for his first novel, The Ginger Man, which is widely regarded as a modern classic. Born in 1926 and raised in New York, J P Donleavy was the son of Irish immigrant parents. They told him little of Irish culture when he was growing up but, after the war, he moved to Dublin to take up a place at Trinity College. He was already a skilled boxer when he arrived in Ireland and found that street-fighting was almost a form of public entertainment in the city - and one which he excelled in. Despite Trinity's stature, his student life revolved around drinking, partying, writing and painting. He became friends with Brendan Behan and the legendary Irish writer became the first person to read the completed script of The Ginger Man.

Although The Ginger Man was banned in Ireland and expurgated in Britain and America it became a word-of-mouth success. But its publication plunged J P Donleavy into a legal battle that took 20 years to resolve. It was a legal struggle, though, that was worth fighting for - for the past 50 years it has never been out of print.

[Taken from the original programme material for this archive edition of Desert Island Discs]

Favourite track: 2nd movement of Emperor Concerto by Ludwig van Beethoven Book: 1972 Social Registry of New York Luxury: His own long-handled spoon to make dressings.

Transcript

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0:00.0	Hello I'm Krestey Young and this is a podcast from the Desert Island Discs archive.
0:05.0	For rights reasons, we've had to shorten the music.
0:08.2	The program was originally broadcast in 2007. My castaway this week is the writer J.P. Dunleavy, a novelist and playwright for more than 50 years, the work that has defined his life is the novel The Ginger Man,
0:38.0	the story of Sebastian Dangerfield, a feckless unwashed charmer, dedicated to boozing, bedding women and the pursuit of cash.
0:46.0	Published in 1956, it became a word-of-mouth cult classic and has never been out of print since. But it immediately plunged its
0:55.0	author into a legal battle that spanned the next 20 years. Born in Brooklyn in
1:00.4	the 1920s of Irish immigrant parents.
1:03.0	Dunleavy says he was never literary
1:05.0	and only started writing to support his preferred career,
1:09.0	that of an artist.
1:10.0	J.P Dunleavy, we think of writers quite often as people who live on the outside and observe.
1:17.0	It strikes me that your life has been very different from that.
1:20.0	Quite a lot of boozing and battling and carousing yourself you seem to have plunged right into life.
1:27.1	I'm not sure that that's actually true but certainly in those days after the war coming to Ireland and Dublin, Dublin was on
1:37.0	fate and people approached it from all over the world and so you had a really strange
1:45.0	convention of human beings in the city of Dublin.
1:50.0	When you use the phrase en fait is that French term for the whole village pouring out onto the streets and in a sense just celebrating life.
1:57.0	In a way, yes, because you'd always use the term the pubs were jammed, which they were. And in in my case there was a great party
2:05.2	always being held down the street in somebody's place and so on and Dublin was
2:10.3	full of that in those days. One of your peers in those early was He was indeed broke into my cottage in Kilcole where I had a studio and I was away for three days
2:27.8	came back, found the interior of the cottage in total disarray. Then I went out to my studio and I saw two manuscripts, one
2:37.7	next to mine and I opened it up and there was the word Bostle and I knew whose manuscript it was immediately and it was
	...

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