The Beastly Beatitudes of Balthazar B
![](http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/thumb/4/47/BeastlyBeatitudes.jpg/220px-BeastlyBeatitudes.jpg)
The Beastly Beatitudes of Balthazar B is the third full-length novel by
Plot
Balthazar B (whose final name is never revealed) is born to riches in Paris. His father dies when he is young and his mother neglects him for her lovers. Instead he is brought up by a nanny and relies for male advice on his Uncle Edouard, who instructs him in the worldly life of an elegant
After Beefy and Balthazar meet up again in London, Beefy's allowance is stopped and he plans to recoup his fortunes by making a rich marriage. Balthazar is trapped into a soulless, upper middle-class marriage by Millicent, a scheming friend of Beefy's fiancée (‘the Violet Infanta’) who is only interested in Balthazar's money. Beefy only discovers after his own marriage that this was also the Violet Infanta's interest in him, she turning out to be penniless. But while their marriage is happy, Millicent leaves Balthazar on discovering his enduring love for Elizabeth Fitzdare, taking their son with her. At the end, having paid a visit to Elizabeth's grave to make his farewell, Balthazar is called back to Paris for his mother's funeral.
Reception
Early reviews appreciated the novel's comic set pieces, its "humor that stops just short of poetry",[1] and John Leonard described Donleavy as "a comic writer rivaling Waugh and Wodehouse".[2] The New York Times commented that "the prep school passages are wonderful, followed by one of the most perfect love affairs in modern literature. This romp of a novel is lush and lovely, bawdy and sad."[3] But despite the humour, the reviewer in Time commented that "the overall tone of the book is tragic and almost elegiac".[4]
Donleavy's trademark writing is described as "an intricate prose style characterized by minimal punctuation, strings of sentence fragments, frequent shifts of tense, and lapses from standard third-person narration into first-person stream of consciousness,"[5] and was particularly appreciated. However, in terms of the plotting, there was not a lot that was new. John Deedy, writing in Commonweal, praised the first hundred pages (of the book's 400) but then found the Trinity College episodes "warmed-over Ginger Man", only excepting the Fitzdare romance; everything after her disappearance struck him as disappointing.[6] Similarly, in his article in Life, John Leonard had already asked "how many novels must [Donleavy] write about Trinity College before he graduates?"
Eventually the novel was adapted for the stage by Donleavy himself and ran in 1981–82 at the Duke of York's Theatre, London, and then in the US in 1985.[7] In 2012, when the novel was being considered for filming, it was reported at that date to have been translated into over twenty languages.[8]
References
- ^ Robert Scholes, The Saturday Review, 23 November 1968
- ^ Life, 22 November 1968
- ^ Quoted in Grove-Atlantic publicity
- ^ Time, 6 December 1968
- ^ Nasrullah Mambrol, Literary Theory and Criticism Notes, 31 May, 2018
- ^ 7 March, 1969
- ^ The J.P.Donleavy Compendium
- ^ Megan Elsen, The Film Stage, 13 March 2012