J P DonleavyJ. P. Donleavy greatly resented the cold shoulder of the Irish literary establishment, who pointed to his Ne

In his later years, Donleavy lived in some style – it might have been the model for “shabby chic”, at Levington Park, near Mullingar in County Westmeath, which is about as close to Irish heartland as it is possible to get. He liked to tell the story of the young James Joyce being driven up to the house in a horse and trap, when John Stanislaus Joyce was inspecting country houses.

Not that Donleavy was there to greet his fellow wordsmith. James Patrick Donleavy – known to his friends as “Mike” – was born in Brooklyn on April 23 1926, the child of Irish emigrants. He was educated in the New York public school system and served in the US Navy during the Second World War. At its end, “feeling the tug”, as he put it to a Scottish journalist, he moved to Ireland and studied at Trinity College, Dublin, leaving “without a scroll but with a certain . . . reputation”.

It was the reputation of one of his contemporaries, the scapegrace Gainor Stephen Crist, a fellow naval veteran, who became the model for Sebastian Dangerfield, the anti-hero of Donleavy’s first novel The Ginger Man, which was first published in Paris in June 1955.

Donleavy eventually collected his advance in London, in cash from a dealer in “unusual” books (“his speciality was bondage and flagellation”) who counted it out in pound notes.

Donleavy liked to describe Crist as a “soiled angel” and wept a little during a BBC Scotland interview as he recalled his friend. When Donleavy captioned a photo of the unprepossessing Crist in his autobiographical book JP Donleavy’s Ireland, he wrote: “Crist at the side gate of Trinity from which he is exiting to pawn an electric fire. This saintly expedient gentleman on this day had resolutely made the decision that money for a few pints and a ball of malt in the pub would keep him as comfortably warm as any electric fire.” This is as perfect an example of the Donleavy prose style as could be wished for.

Predictably, The Ginger Man caused a furore and was banned in Ireland and in the New York library system where Mike had gained much of his literary education. He also became embroiled in a legal fracas with the equally controversial owner of the Olympia Press, Maurice Girodias, whose great publishing wheeze was putting out sexy books under the camouflage of a “Traveller’s Library”.

Donleavy was offered $350,000 for the film rights, which rather heated up the discord with Girodias, but for some strange reason, the film was never made, and so far, no one has revived the idea. Other novels followed, all with strikingly memorable titles, but none had quite the impact of Donleavy’s debut.

A Singular Man appeared nearly a decade later in 1963, followed by some short stories collected as Meet My Maker the Mad Molecule and a novella The Saddest Summer of Samuel S. Having written a play called Fairytales of New York at the turn of the 1960s, he dropped the plural form and turned them into a novel.

A lady’s man, enthusiastic drinker and amateur pugilist, all ideally practised in some permutation, Donleavy lived according to a certain shabbily chivalric morality. In 1975, he published The Unexpurgated Code, an essential handbook for male manners and survival, packed with useful tips and warnings. Those who visited him at Levington Park were privileged to see many of them put to effective use.

He had “dabbled” in marriage early with Valerie Heron; they had two children before divorcing in 1969. He remarried, but his second marriage, to Mary Wilson Price, also ended in divorce two decades later.

The novels came more slowly in later years, and Are You Listening, Rabbi Löw and That Darcy, That Dancer, That Gentleman were not regarded as his best. He was reduced to telling the back story of his greatest success in The History of The Ginger Man.

Then, quite unexpectedly, he came back in quite a different style with two astonishing late works, written in an unfamiliarly limpid style that read like the old Donleavy triple-distilled. He read portions of The Lady Who Liked Clean Rest Rooms on BBC Scotland in the course of a long interview, and returned three years later to read from his last masterpiece Wrong Information Is Being Given Out At Princeton, a very European fable that seemed quite simply to baffle critics who expected nothing else from him than new iterations of Sebastian Dangerfield.

He spent his last years in relative isolation at Levington Park, with its glorious views down over Lough Owel, receiving visitors and fan mail with a mixture of warmth and cantankerousness.

BRIAN MORTON