“Cheever tried a few times to engage Donleavy in some conversation, and as Cheever was as gifted in conversation as any man I have ever met, I grew more and more furious at Donleavy’s coldness and unresponsiveness and total discourtesy. I was thinking, frankly, that I should throw the lout in a puddle, if there was one handy, when Cheever spoke up. ‘Do you know, Mr. Donleavy,’ Cheever said, ‘that no major writer of fiction was ever a shit to another writer of fiction, except Hemingway and he was crazy?”

– John Irving,
from a Paris Review ‘Art of Fiction’ interview (1986.) The incident happened at the Iowa Writers Workshop in the mid-seventies, when chauffeured J. P. Donleavy was a guest lecturer. Irving brought with him John Cheever since both Irving and Cheever were Donleavy fans. Attired in a three-piece suit with a walking stick, Donleavy scoffed at the notion of teaching writing, or reading contemporary literature, and generally behaved as if he were “unhappy royalty in a hick town.”