The Beastly Beatitudes of Balthazar B was published by Delacorte Press in 1968, and it is Donleavy’s most tender and most beautiful novel — a book whose surface comedy conceals a deep sadness about the impossibility of preserving innocence in a brutal world.
Balthazar B is a half-French, half-English boy of extraordinary gentleness and wealth, raised by a succession of nurses and servants in Paris, sent to an English public school where he is tormented and bewildered, and eventually arriving at Trinity College Dublin — Donleavy’s eternal setting — where he encounters Beefy, a monstrous figure of appetite and energy who becomes his inseparable friend.
Beefy is a variation on Sebastian Dangerfield — enormous, lecherous, violent, funny, and absolutely without scruple — but seen from the outside rather than the inside. Where The Ginger Man put the reader inside the consciousness of the scoundrel, Balthazar B shows him from the perspective of the innocent bystander who is alternately appalled and enchanted by his friend’s outrages. The comedy of their friendship — Beefy dragging the reluctant Balthazar through a series of catastrophic adventures — is sustained and brilliant.
But the novel’s real subject is loss: the loss of childhood, the loss of love (Balthazar’s affairs all end in separation), and the loss of the brief period of freedom that youth provides before responsibility closes in. The final sections, in which Balthazar returns to Paris as an adult, are among the most melancholy pages Donleavy ever wrote.
Collecting The Beastly Beatitudes of Balthazar B
First edition (Delacorte Press, New York, 1968): Cloth binding, dust jacket.
Market values:
- First edition in dust jacket: $30–$80
- Without jacket: $8–$20
- First UK edition (Eyre & Spottiswoode): $25–$60