A Tale Well Told
FOWLES, JIR
A Tale Well Told THE BEASTLY BEATITUDES OF BALTHAZAR B By J. P. Donleavy Delacorte. 403 pp. $6.95. Reviewed by JIB FOWLES Instructor, American Language Institute, New York University In the 10...
...The language is frolicsome and stinging, the comedy rich (largely in the character of a blustering Uncle Edouard...
...Donleavy began to fall from favor...
...Admittedly, its concerns are not breathlessly contemporary, and may even seem a bit archaic (money...
...This is not to say that all the criticism has been unreasonable...
...In contrast to the previous novels, the story is more prominent than the style...
...A Singular Man in the theme of wealth...
...Shying away from Donleavy means avoiding one of the few really great writers we have...
...Beefy's real name, it cannot go unsaid, is also Balthazar...
...These trials lead Beefy to conclude that Balthazar personifies a beatitude?a thing of grace, prospect caught up in meekness...
...An unbecoming narrowing of intent was indisputable...
...Then trouble comes...
...Balthazar, in his timid search for succor and love, makes a bad marriage, not to his True Love...
...Beefy is cut off without a shilling...
...only his money bolsters him...
...Style, then, is Donleavy's strong point...
...His three earlier novels and one collection of short pieces have revealed a prose which puts off many readers...
...Some (myself included) saw this as the best of Donleavy's books in its willfully fantastic doings and brutal humor...
...The Saddest Summer of Samuel S was similarly deprecated: The character was a bore, the conflict drab, the book too short to amount to much...
...Money talks among these characters, and Balthazar survives better than his chum...
...Nevertheless, other readers may find too much soap opera in the closing...
...sentences can be rudely elliptical, their subjects alternating without much reason between the first and third persons...
...There is no ducking the charge that much of this book will be familiar to Donleavy's readers...
...Only his method of voicing them is original...
...To younger readers Dangerfield's shameless contest with the venerabilities of college, public authority, property, family, and sex spoke grand romance...
...He has no interest in being "the spokesman for a generation...
...By both critical and popular indexes, Donleavy had slipped...
...Somehow Balthazar finds the strength to submit himself to an it's-almost-too-good-to-be-true kind of romance...
...Balthazar is again miserably shy and solitary...
...The second, A Singular Man, featured a magnate—not a creature to be drawn to the hearts of the younger set...
...His hero has untold amounts of mazuma —the trustees won't say how much, but there would appear to be no end to it—and all too little happiness...
...Because it is so readable, The Beastly Beatitudes of Balthazar B is probably the novel for those as yet uninitiated into Donleavy's talent to begin with...
...Other episodes come dangerously close to this sort of excess, but more often Donleavy works for and gets a belly laugh...
...The lost sheep and the lone wolf make a peculiarly satisfactory duo...
...His place in American letters is lofty and thus precarious...
...Although their friendship remains strong, the turn of events lends an unwanted imbalance to its ecology...
...but it is all the more refreshing for this...
...Chapters are crowned with what amounts to nonsense verse...
...An additional sign that Donleavy has set out to recapture a wide audience is that the story here is far more commonplace than his others...
...So the question is whether or not Donleavy has shot his wad...
...It is a good tale, well formed and well told...
...Perhaps they can be criticized as too maudlin, but I bought them...
...For instance, Balthazar, drunk on sherry and love, attempts a cross-country traipse back to Trinity College and is ensnared in a clothesline heavy with foundation garments...
...the words he selects are often unexpected, even untoward...
...touching sentiments...
...The missing door handles of the cab kept closed by string...
...Beefy is as brazen as ever...
...as always, Donleavy gives homage to the curse of lonesome-ness...
...It draws heavily upon such poetic techniques as alliteration, frequently of the "Simple Simon" variety?witness the title of his new book...
...it is as if a monied Sebastian Dangerfield had been split down the middle in order to play separate roles...
...Still, the book is not a patchwork...
...The book is larded with the kind of exorbitant comic antics that made The Ginger Man famous, some of them unfortunately overworked...
...Balthazar's father dies and his mother keeps aloof...
...The apposition of these two lends a structural rigor to the rest of the book...
...others found it stilted, lacking an interesting hero...
...Material seemed to be growing scanty...
...The line between fidelity to a personal vision and the repetition of material is not one that Donleavy draws as rigorously as other authors...
...Donleavy had almost 400 pages to prepare me for them and he did a good job...
...several episodes in his novels duplicated those in his short stories...
...And to walk the city as I did, down the dim lit streets and by the great walls and green railings behind which I would go to live...
...They complement each other almost too perfectly...
...Balthazar's fecklessness makes him all the more forlorn...
...it has been uniformly awesome throughout his writings...
...In part, this decline was the result of a widespread misconception of the task Donleavy set himself...
...Reviewed by JIB FOWLES Instructor, American Language Institute, New York University In the 10 years readers have had with him, J. P. Donleavy has achieved a notability that befalls few writers...
...The red faces of the men and the white faces of the women...
...and the pathos poignant...
...A book by Donleavy is like no other in English fiction...
...Their owner is too berserk and the police too imbecilic for the reader to happily accept the pages devoted to this episode: A self-defeating shrillness intrudes...
...His books have not been equally received, however...
...It resembles The Ginger Man in the importance of Dublin, the traits of the characters, and the brand of haplessness...
...Subsequent novels were measured against The Ginger Man and fared poorly...
...When Balthazar is sent to England, he pitifully suffers the inhumanity of a British public school until Beefy, a savvy child of astounding precocity, comes to his rescue...
...social standing...
...To a great extent, his fame rests with his first, The Ginger Man...
...Overnight Donleavy became something of a cult hero...
...At the root of this attention is Donleavy's singular style of writing...
...and The Saddest Summer of Samuel S in the emphasis on pensiveness...
...The novel opens with Balthazar B's early loveless childhood in France—a departure for Donleavy, who until now has refrained from dealing with anything except adults...
...Donleavy lays out a regular tale of the poor little rich boy...
...To this extent the title is sarcastic...
...Next to Dublin for college...
...His concerns are the ancient ones of love and death, of loneliness and comfort, of individual purpose...
...Each book was slighter than the previous one, perhaps an indication of diminishing fervor...
...Its high eccentricity befits Donleavy's version of an uncomfortable world...
...These heavy-hearted tones are maintained to the very end...
...The last scenes are melancholy, brimming with sorrow...
...While his friendship with Beefy is his mainstay, it is his undoing too, and following an hilarious escapade their university careers are terminated...
...Unlike the heroes of other Donleavy novels, he has few wiles to call upon...
...And yet, as discordant as this sounds in its parts, those willing to learn to read it have discovered that the system is entire, that virtually nothing is extraneous or false...
...What could not be seen until sometime after The Ginger Man is that Donleavy is really a very old-fashioned writer...
...In bulk alone The Beastly Beautitudes of Balthazar B represents a hearty effort—it's a big book...
...While the book does not quite reach the heights of The Ginger Man or A Singular Man, it is far superior to most recently published American novels and deserves to be widely read...
...It is the Dublin of The Ginger Man, rendered in the same grainy, evocative manner at which Donleavy excels: "To smile suddenly at this city...
...But it is Donleavy at his best...
...The irreverence and audacity of its hero, Sebastian Dangerfield, captured the fancies of a large audience...
...each new book results in revised judgments of his talent...
Vol. 51 • December 1968 • No. 23
