Ulick O'Connor: Tall tales from a real roaring boy

Ulick O'Connor was once bewitched in New York. Literally. At a bookshop reading, he met an old girlfriend who had been studying witchcraft in Haiti and was now a Qualified Witch. They fetched up in bed but, after a 3am row about toe-sucking, she departed, leaving a rabbit's foot under the pillow. The next morning, everything started going wrong for O'Connor. The cab he was in crashed, the restaurant he visited was closed due to food-poisoning, he fell off the Fifth Avenue pavement and sprained his ankle – and back in his hotel, he discovered he had dropped two inches in height. "I'd marked my height on the wallpaper in the morning, just in case she tried a shrink job on me," he says, as if this were pretty standard behaviour, "and I hadn't realised they'd removed the wall-to-wall carpet for cleaning just before lunch..."

Mr O'Connor has a knack for getting into scrapes, and fights and confrontations, and weird conversations. A famous, indeed notorious figure in Ireland for his books, TV appearances and sporting prowess, he has an alarming reputation for truculence. And now that a record of his life in Ireland, England and America in the Seventies has been published by John Murray (Diaries 1970-1981), British readers have an opportunity to inspect one of the Republic's most vivid characters – and certainly one of its biggest mischief-makers.

Ulick enraged the entire Behan clan by publishing a biography of the great playwright Brendan that outed him for the first time as a bisexual; Brendan's brother Dominic recorded in The Sunday Times his intention "to take Mr O'Connor by the scruff of the neck and sock him halfway round London". Staying in Stockholm, he incurred the lifelong froideur of Edna O'Brien by hoaxing her into believing that the local newspaper wanted to photograph her naked and hoisted aloft by the Swedish boxer, Ingmar Johansen.

He had a furious row with Yeats's cousin, Monk Gibbon, about whether or not Proust was sexually promiscuous. His Diaries record a startlingly mouvementé life, shuttling between grand addresses – Leixlip Castle, Mount Stewart, Tara Hall, Castletown – and grand names, the Dublin County haut monde of Guinnesses, Gowries, Beits, Londonderrys and assorted literary folk. And through the pages reverberates the voice of the literary flâneur, by turns languid and energised, wry and excitable, endlessly alert to the details and debris of other people's lives, constantly ransacking the Rolodex he keeps in his head, full of other people's reputations and family connections. He would come across as an Irish Anthony Powell, were he not so raspingly pugilistic.

"I met them all through Billy Wicklow," he told me (that's the short version of William Cecil James Philip John Paul Forward-Howard, 8th Earl of Wicklow, Baron Clonmore, a classic Anglo-Irish aristocrat with estates in County Wicklow). "He was friendly with the Brideshead set, Waugh and Acton and Howard and Betjeman. He'd have them over to dinner in the Kildare Street Club after the war, when food was rationed in England but not in Dublin. I'd be there to make witty conversation.

"Billy used occasionally to take me to Oxford for dinner. Once, when I was there, I asked a chap in the street where I'd find Oscar Wilde's rooms, and he said 'I'm dining there myself'. It was Desmond Guinness. We became very close friends. I used to spend Christmas Day with him and Mariga and their two children."

Through them he met a slew of legendary figures. He was once summoned by Mariga Guinness at 2am because, in her unique locution, "Mosebags is pouncing!"; Oswald Mosley was dissuaded from pouncing by Ulick's imminent arrival.

The son of Matt O'Connor, dean of medicine at the Royal College of Surgeons, and one of the first Catholics to conquer the heights in this Protestant-Ascendancy profession, Ulick read philosophy at University College Dublin, and learned both social mobility and rhetorical skill at the college's famous Literary and Historical Society, Dublin's equivalent of the Oxford Union. Even then, he was trouble. "The President of the university, a fascist-minded guy called Tierney, banned me from attending a debate because of some 'misbehaviour', so I sent a telegram to the Irish Times saying 'I will be there', and I disguised myself as a woman. I got Jackie MacGowran, who was at the Abbey Theatre, to do the make-up. It even fooled my Dad and Mum when I tried it out on them. The day of the debate, nobody recognised me. All the boxing club were sitting around saying, 'That fucker won't turn up', and me saying, 'Please mind your language'. Eventually I revealed myself and handcuffed myself to the desks. But the president lost his nerve and called in the coppers."

The Diaries begin in 1970, when O'Connor gave up the Irish Bar to write full-time. He was 40, well-off, able to sustain life without a proper job. "I was living in the family home with a housekeeper and the old nanny, I was writing a sports column for the Sunday Mirror, I was putting on one-man shows at the Abbey and touring them very cheaply because you had only to pay yourself and the man doing the lighting.

"I used a lot of Odyssean cunning to survive as an artist without surrendering to a job. And from 1966, I had an income from the States because I'd been on The Johnny Carson Show and an impresario called Johnny Cadick booked me to appear at 50 ladies' clubs. Doing that gave me enough money to live in New York for four months."

He settled in the Chelsea Hotel, behind the memorial plaques to Behan and Dylan Thomas. "I had no arrière-pensée about the Chelsea," said O'Connor in his airy way. "I thought it had something to do with the Chelsea Flower Show." But he found himself hanging out with Viva Superstar from Warhol's Factory, and Gregory Corso and other Sixties literary flotsam. "I was hooked," he says fondly. "I was thrown into the whole American explosion – New York had the best abstract painting, the modern poetry explosion, Kerouac and the Beats – and I had all the fallout of the Vietnam War. The streets were filled with marching protesters. A million people on Boston Common. Lawyers and priests going to jail. I had it all for years, courtesy of these blue-rinsed ladies on the ladies'-club circuit..."

Back in Dublin, between these heady excursions, O'Connor started to drink alcohol. Weird, eh? How could this raffish house-party animal, Behan fan and bookish Dubliner possibly not take a drink until he was 40? "I was too much of a sportsman," he said with a note of defensiveness. "I'd be out with my weights, my pole-vaulting, my rugby. But when I gave up sport at 28, I looked around Dublin and saw the state of the two professions I was involved in. In the law, there was a high percentage of alcoholics who'd appear, wig askew, in court – you'd see a brilliant mind slaughtered by alcohol in front of a judge. And the literary profession was probably the most alcoholic in western Europe; Paddy Kavanagh was dying of drink, Behan was dying of it, Myles na Gopaleen was dying of it – and those were just the major ones. To see really fine minds lying in a pool of vomit while people sneered at them – I just thought, 'What's the point?' "

Far more congenial was to play the traditional Dublin role of boulevardier, endlessly prowling the purlieus of Stephen's Green and Merrion Square, bringing gossip and news and new-minted smart remarks. "People were always pulling strokes," he remembered. "You couldn't go down Grafton Street without being buttonholed by people saying, 'Did you hear what happened?' The day they convicted John Christie, the murderer who buried the girls in his garden after he'd raped them, I remember being told, 'What d'you think they're calling his house now? Corpus Christi'

"And there was Bird Flanagan who once tied a sausage to his fly buttons and opened his coat and flashed at a policeman, who strode over and arrested him, and the Bird drew out a razor and sliced off the sausage and the policeman fainted. And the time he rode a horse into the Gresham Hotel through the swing doors and went up to the bar and when the barman said it was after hours, he said 'It's not for me you fool, it's for the horse...'"

An hour in Mr O'Connor's company, and you emerged drenched in a flood of stories, quotations, arguments, memories of rows and ruckuses, prodigally dispensed one-liners and bits of airy wisdom. He is a spectacular name-dropper, but that's OK with me, provided they're good names, and they are: from Samuel Beckett to Jake LaMotta, from Peggy Ashcroft to Viva Superstar, Oswald Mosley ("Mosley had a narcissus complex, and it could have steered him into becoming a major statesman – but once he got in front of those microphones at Earls Court, with his extraordinary powers of oratory, he was lost") to Muhammad Ali, Paul Bowles to Michéal MacLiammoir. Plus a host of less-renowned local figures "who put all their genius into their lives rather than their work, and went around like ambulant encyclopaedias".

As, of course, he himself has done, though his Diaries represent a convenient halfway house between the two. Like his hero Baudelaire, Ulick O'Connor can't resist trying on roles, "a roving soul in search of a body", and, as it were, trying on people – the odder the better. "I've made a point all my life of getting to know people," he says, "and if I like them, I don't give a fuck what they are. If I met a Black and Tan I liked, then I'd take him out for a drink".

And with the first instalment of these rambunctious memoirs safely delivered, he can savour the prospect of Volume Two. "I'll really get hold of some of the gurriers who've been giving me a hard time in the past few years," he grates. "It's a great weapon to hold over them."

'The Ulick O'Connor Diaries 1970-1981' is published by John Murray, £22.50