Hugh Leonard doesn't accept the past as defining the future. He sees each new moment of time as a fresh piece of paper to be dealt with. His voice and use of language-whether as playwright, first-time novelist or grieving husband-can make one ponder deeply. His acerbic tongue, however, is another story. By Ronald Quinlan

"MY LIFE IS EVERY MOMENT OF MY LIFE. It is not a culmination of the past, we are an aggregate, I do believe that, unfortunately we are all the foolishness and all the crimes we did. We're also all the kindnesses we did. I like to think of life like that. I hate to think of life as if we understood time. We don't understand time. I don't understand - I time, or its nature. It's much more involved," he says without missing the proverbial beat.

Hugh Leonard has always been one ready to give anyone their answer, be it on questions profound or trivial. And today will be no different it appears.

He is taking his lunch alone at the Club in Dalkey, a 74 year old, shy - but far from retiring - private yet public man. Looking fit and tanned and sporting the garb of an elderly gentleman, he has just returned from a two-week vacation in idyllic Tuscany with the lady whom he terms his AF or American friend.

As we talk, he clears the last of a hearty meal from an ample platter, obviously enjoying the rich cuisine, but all the while taking.

I care not to detract from either his impeccable sartorial elegance or indeed his sense of social etiquette. In other words, Mr Leonard never speaks with his mouth full.

But his mouth is always full, full of words that is. And he weaves them like a silken thread that is capable of both seducing and reducing the listener, sometimes simultaneously with words that can be disarming and sometimes, quite literally alarming.

A nice or not-so-nice example of this verbal vitriol still manages to bring a smile to his face as he recalls an episode for our I mutual pleasure or appreciation as the case may have been.

"I remember a writer asked me if so-and so's work would be lasting and I said he will be read long after Shakespeare and Samuel Beckett are forgotten." He pauses, Cheshire cat grin beginning to emerge, "And then I couldn't help it and I added 'And not until then.' I could see the smile on this writer's face and it took about three minutes for the insult to sink in. I didn't mean to insult him. It was a lulu and Ijust had to say it. A thing well done is worth doing.

It was obvious he enjoyed regaling me with the episode as much as I enjoyed listening to it, but hasn't he learned to temper his tongue somewhat and avoid employing this -'perverse skill' as he terms it!

"I restrain myself a great deal. I don't say it or I phrase it differently. But now and again I drop a lulu because I cannot resist it," he chuckles.

Lulus aside, Leonard has been putting his wit and humor to more productive and profitable ends lately, with the result that at the tender age of 74, he has just had his first novel, A Wild People, published in Ireland to much critical acclaim.

A Wild People follows the misadventures and exploits of its narrator, TJ Quill, a meek, middle-aged Dubliner paralyzed by his overbearing and stubborn wife, Greta and intimidated by his aptly named friend,'Thorn' Thornton.

Quill's liberation and empowerment arrives in the form of an affair with the adventurous Josie and his engagement as archivist and biographer to the late and great Western filmmaker Sean O'Fearna (who Leonard admits to being'mischievously based' on John Ford).

The book makes for lively and entertaining reading and is to be released in the United States in the near future.

As with his plays, Leonard says he created the characters and then wondered if he could make them go somewhere. "I started with a dinner party and then I found certain events, the events were true but the people are fictitious. I just had fun with it," he says.

Perhaps because of the autobiographical nature of Leonard's other work, particularly his Tony award-winning play Da and his delightful memoirs, Home Before Night and Otlt After Daule, there were suggestions in some quarters that there was more than a hint of truth to the characters in A Wild Peol~le. What did he make of that!

"It's a natural thing for people to say, you know, who's in this book! Gossip is more popular than literature. I find myself get ting a little defensive. People come along and I'm waiting for that first question."

Would he agree that this inquisitiveness, or need to dissect the minutiae of fiction a symptom of the modern day pre occupation with the tell-all biography of a person's life!

"If I go on television and say things I did, that may be interesting or may not, but when you write a book, word gets around that it's based on somebody else--then it becomes a secret and a secret has got to be plumbed into and found out and it's rather delightful. Everybody love secrets, they love the roman g clef, who the hell is this really! It doesn't apply in terms of this book."

He says he is happy with the novel and counts it among the three works he is proudest of, along with Summer - a play that did very well in the United States - and A Life - currently playing at the Irish Repertory Theater in New York.

But his satisfaction with the book is tinged with a deep regret. Paule, his beloved wife of 45 years, died in April of last year from an asthma attack in their Dalkey home leaving him distraught. Ironically, just as TJ Quill in the novel was finally free to express himself, his creator was silenced by grief. How did he cope!

"I'm a writer and what I do is write. I wasn't able to do anything else. Paule was totally obsessing my mind," he says. So he decided to exorcise the pain through a series of letters to Paule which were published in Ireland's Sunday Independent newspaper, prompting an unprecedented response from a mostly sympathetic readership, many of whom had also suffered bereavement. Leonard says the letters helped him to understand his loss and concentrate on what he had to do in his work.

I remembered reading that he believes that there are two people in every writer, one who experiences life and another who records it. So I ask him about this belief.

"There is another person. Arnold Bennett was a writer I admired. Amold Bennett was actually taking notes at his father's deathbed and so there were two Amold Bennetts, one who was grieving and one who was standing to one side looking at himself mourning as the father died. I think with every writer there are two people there.

So did he observe his own grief at his wife's death!

"The writer was not observing the grief," he says, visibly shaking, "That didn't happen to me at all. I was taken completely by surprise. My wife died within a few minutes from an asthma attack. I was utterly destroyed. There was nobody standing to one side. I was mad, crazy, I was howling.

"And now I feel like the writer observing the grief, but it is difficult to be removed or detached from it." Leonard's obvious sadness may have subsided since last year, but one gets the feeling it merely fell dormant rather than extinguished itself.

While at a party in New York, a friend came over to offer his condolences. The friend told him that when his own wife died, he had shouted, howled at the moon and screamed at God. In reply, all Leonard could say was 'snap' before walking away. Others told him he would meet someone. He didn't believe them.

What about love! Is there just one great love out there for all of us, a complementary, yet equal half of the same whole! Or can we love many times over!

"We were married for almost 45 years. That's a hell of a lot of living together. We fought all the time, it wasn't a great love or anything, it wasn't a great all consuming passion. She was just there and I couldn't move without her. A lot of people were startled because we didn't seem devoted but we were," he says, his voice shaking. "It's like having half of your side amputated [when they die]. It takes a lot to get over it."

"I came down to the living room one day and my wife was standing in the living room. It wasn't an illusion. I saw her out of the corner of my eye. I could tell you what she was wearing. And the moment I saw her, she vanished. I've always believed in survival and I don't care if people believe I was imagining it, I wasn't. She stayed around a long time, in one way or another," he says.

Did anything positive come from Paule's death!

"I think, strangely, I'm a much nicer person since my wife died. I found out what pain is, so on that level I'm much nicer." If he is nicer now, what does he regret from the past:, "I went through life like an idiot for a great deal of the time saying there's nothing I would change. And that was a very arrogant thing to say. There's a lot I would change in the personal sense. There are people I would have steered clear of, things I would have done differently, hurts I would not have imposed if I'd been old enough in advance. This cannot be helped. It's a part of living. As somebody once said, we're not punished for our sins, we're punished by them."

If his wife's death has made him want to be a better man, then it is the natural progression of a question that has occurred to him before.

In his play, A Life, Leonard asked: "who is the better man; the one who never dissembled, lied, loafed or betrayed a trust, but was without a shred of affection for his fellow humans, or one of life's drones, who probably never read a book in his life and yet oozed good nature!"

It is a question that Leonard says he still cannot answer. But which type does he prefer, the cold and calculating Drumm or Lar the lazy layabout!

"Most people would prefer an evening with Lar. I'd prefer an evening with Drumm. The conversation would probably be better. I'd prefer the challenge of it. I would be impatient with Lar."

He based the character of Drumm on Mulligan, his boss in the Land Commission, the job where he had languished for fourteen years before escaping to the world of writing, a profession he calls an illness, a virus that no science can isolate and cure.

Although Mulligan was seemingly bereft of affection towards everyone--including his own wife--the young Leonard or Jack Keyes Byrne as he was then known, liked the man.

"I felt sorry for him, affectionate towards him. But he wouldn't let himself be loved. My father I liked too, but it was only after his death that I got to know him by writing the play [Dal.

Speaking of the play Da, was Martin Sheen the perfect actor to play the part of the young Hugh Leonard in the screen version!

"I don't think anyone is the perfect one to play me," he says firmly.

I was wrong. I had imagined that given Leonard's well-known love of the movies and all things Hollywood that he would have been flattered to have been brought to life on the big screen by an acknowledged cinematic heavyweight.

There was a time perhaps. And it is that time that Leonard says he wishes to write about in his next book, adding the cautious proviso "if I get to write it".

"The book I want to write is called Fillums. That's what we called them here. The films were a totally false world because of censorship. In that the villain always had to die. It taught you a lot about American censorship and manners, and this great innocence that died with World War Two. I was a child in the Thirties. I became a prey to this kind of falsehood. We were corrupted into innocence I like to think. We were innocent people. The movies put a sense of justice around our lives in that the villain always had to die. And when the villain didn't die in World War Two, we were very disillusioned. We didn't like Frank Capra anymore for example."

And if he gets to write it, he hopes to finish it. He says he's taking everything day by day now.

But these are not the words of a man suddenly aware of his own mortality. Rather they suggest that Leonard is living each day as fully as he can, conscious of how precious life is. His AF or American friend for one, refuses to let him feel sorry for himself he says.

"What's the matter with you! You've like already had your second bowl of bitch flakes this morning," she intoned much to his surprise and delight one day when he looked a little glum.

"She is well aware that I am grieving for my wife. Like a lot of Americans she has this limitless energy. She is very cheerful and has a lot of wit. She's the best kind of person for me," he says.

I ask him about the women in his life. I discerned a thread that connects them all. They were and are, all strong; from his adoptive mother, to Paule and now the American friend. Would he agree!

"My mother was passionate. She was stubborn, the dominant one in the family. She dominated my father a lot. Paule wasn't so much strong as stubborn. She was always fighting to maintain a space that wasn't being challenged. And there have been other women and a few were weak. I've always enjoyed a woman's company more than men's," he says. Why is that!

"Well, they're usually better looking," he says, dropping the mother of all lulus.

However, Leonard is no Lothario when it comes to the opposite sex. He insists on letting his lady friends know that there is no Lebensraum, or room to expand. By way of illustration, he points out the no-go zone around the midriff as he explains what is forbidden territory. He is interested in the region between their ears only. Once the ground rules have been stated he says, there is a common reaction.

"They feel absolutely outraged, but then they become your very good friend, once they know there's no risk of emotional involvement." He does seem to have an emotional attachment to the place where he grew up though. Leonard has lived in Dalkey for all but ten of his seventy-four years. Given the American theatergoing public's love of his work, would he not consider going to live and work there!

"I've always loved America. But I don't want to live there, because I'm Irish. I don't think it would suit me. I'm not that fond of Ireland, but it's what I've grown up with and I guess I'm stuck with it." And so Hugh Leonard continues to write in the place where he was born and raised. He takes care to leave off in the middle of a sentence so there is a point at which to begin the following day, a common thread that binds past and present together.