J. P. Donleavy Weathers Scandal And Time
Now the story is all over the press — that the famed author of The Ginger Man, J.P. Donleavy, was cuckolded by not one but two Guinness brothers who consorted with his wife while staying in Donleavy’s twin gate lodges when attending the American actress Mary Wilson Price’s fab hunt parties.
Give this author some credit for discretion for not attempting to make hay of the fact found that two of J.P Donleavy.’s children long raised by him were actually sired by 2 different Guinneae still big-time in the stud. Horsebreeders.
Some of the more poignant chapters in Ireland Unhinged deal with my visiting Donleavy at his hauntingly lonely Levington Park estate outside Mullingar. One could almost hear the ghosts of his maddest characters banging around down gloomy halls — like the bizarre butler Crooks, and the triumphantly bonkers Major McFugger, and Clementine of The Glands (latter two from The Onion Eaters, perhaps his finest book). The great writer was so owlish and lost in time, but gentlemany, that he touched me.
Yet he spoke so obliquely that certain phrases caught my ear, such as “There once were a lot of children around this house, not all of them mine, since there were various women here.” What on earth did that mean, I wondered.
Investigating in detail, I found out the truth, but ultimately decided publishing it would be too scurrilous. For all those interested in a lenghty, personal, and ultimately deeply appreciative profile of a great writer of Ireland — the last anywhere — maybe you will read my own book, here shamelessly plugged — IRELAND UNHINGED.
