(2 of 3)
For that matter, Balthazar's whole life appears predestined to failure. The idyl with his 24-year-old nanny Bella, when he is but twelve, leads to his first sexual experience, the fathering of a never-to-be-seen son, and an agonizing separation. His next amorous adventure, initiated by Beefy when they both turn up at Trinity College in Dublin, is with a poor working-class girl named Breda. For that, he and Beefy are both booted from college. An engagement to wealthy Miss Fitzdare ends in a tragic riding accident. And, trapped into an ugly, upper-class London marriage, he is further betrayed by his scheming wife. Always Balthazar is seduced and somehow left abandoned. Always he retreats a little further into the elegant prison of his refined sensibilities.
While the overall tone of the book is tragic and almost elegiac, the individual scenes are often hilarious and demonstrate Donleavy's adeptness at using his lyrical Joycean prose to explore human emotions. A scene of touching pathos, for example, is broken up when Balthazar is discovered naked and feverishly ill in Breda's bed by her employer's wife. The female fight that follows is unmatched in literature for its comic ferocity. Hair curlers are grabbed, bellies butted, Balthazar's breakfast food spilled, bottles of urine knocked over, dresses ripped—all while Balthazar lies abed and the mistress's husband tries to mediate as if he were secretary-general of the U.N. In the battle, the wife's false teeth are smashed. The husband's tragicomic speech caps the whole episode:
"Your woman when she married me had an awful resentment as I was with a full set of me own natural teeth. And she couldn't abide it as she was with out real ones of her own. She wasn't satisfied till I went to the dentist down there over the way and had every last one of mine torn out of my head and a set like her own put in. Here are hers now. Just look at that. Sure you never know where justice will strike next."
Delicate Troubles. Much of the book echoes The Ginger Man, particularly because Beefy is so reminiscent of that rascal O'Keefe, Sebastian Dangerfield's friend. And many of the sexual scenes, often dominated by Beefy's rhetoric, bear an uncomfortable resemblance to those of the earlier book. But there is a dramatic shift in focus from the blatant hardships of the lower classes in Ginger Man to the more subtle and delicate troubles of the moneyed aristocracy. In both cases, there doesn't seem to be much justice for such money-haunted people as Balthazar, Beefy, Dangerfield and O'Keefe. "God's mercy on the wild Ginger Man," wrote Donleavy. God's mercy on poor Balthazar B.
Like Balthazar B, James Patrick Donleavy, who is currently on a U.S. lecture tour, is a shy man with fine features and a soft, halting voice. And like Balthazar, he compensates for his shyness with a bold appearance, in this case, a scraggly Van Gogh kind of beard, heavy tweeds and knickers (augmented in foul weather by a cape and a Sherlock Holmes hat), and a walking stick. To all outward appearances, then, he seems like a turn-of-the-century product of the British Isles. In fact, he was born in Brooklyn of Irish parents.