Mr. Beluncle: A Novel (Modern Library Classics) Read online

  A murmur of laughter came from the other boys….

  “I would, sir.”

  “Oh no you wouldn't, sir,” said Mr. O'Malley. “Oh no you wouldn't. You couldn't, sir. You'd be dead, sir.”

  This scene, too, has its twin in Pritchett's oeuvre. His oft-anthologized story “The Saint” also concerns the “isolated and hated” Church of the Last Purification, Toronto. In that story, a schoolteacher-who is, like Beluncles Mr. O'Malley, an Irishman in England-condemns the church, in much the way O'Malley does, asking the narrator the very same “if you fell out a window” question, his eyes sparkling with pure pleasure.

  There was a reason Pritchett wrote so often about radical religion (and the rejection of it): What better way to examine hypocrisy, self-discovery, the influence of one's parents, the price of nonconformity, and the warped vanity of the outcast?

  This is Mr. Beluncle inducing his sons to join him at a lecture by a Mr. Van der Hoek, which will presumably show the superiority of spiritual life over the world of material possessions:

  “I want you boys to come … Mr. Van der Hoek is one of the Big Three in the movement. That man gave up a thousand pounds a year in dentistry [to join the church]. Sacrificed everything. I don't know what he makes now. Three thousand perhaps,” said Mr. Beluncle.

  Religion, then, as a way to better yourself spiritually, morally, socially, and financially.

  Mr. Beluncle wounds nearly everybody he meets; and all of those wounded submit willingly to their hurts. Mr. Beluncle is a family novel, and Jeremy Treglown, in his sharp, persuasive biography of Pritchett, calls the book “a study of abusive relationships.”8 But while Treglown's modern phrase certainly fits the way that we in the twenty-first century would view Beluncle's treatment of his sons and especially his wife, you may find it useful also to see the novel as a depiction of family politics as they existed in the twilight of household autocrats like Beluncle. The novel plays out along the front edge of the social changes that would force husbands and fathers to reconsider the nature of patriarchy; twenty years after the events of this story-or, if not twenty, then fifty-Beluncle's brand of middle-class familial despotism will have gone the way of the doctor's housecall.

  Beluncle's sons-unlike their father in their sensitivities, and more like the men of our generation-often find themselves crying when Beluncle speaks to them, sometimes for no reason other than the heaviness of his presence in their lives; sometimes it's merely the peculiar joy they feel in yielding to his will.

  It's handy for Mr. Beluncle when people yield to his will, because he sees disagreement as his religion would have him perceive “error”-that is, he persuades himself that it isn't important.

  It was a way [for Beluncle to turn] realities into unrealities and that was rather urgent. … A quotation from the Bible would transpose the dispute to the moral plane where it would become more congenial and more manageable.

  Religion, then, is also a way to get out of any moral dilemmas that are bothersomely real.

  Although Mr. Beluncle dominates the book, Pritchett is an excited connoisseur of human quirks, and the novelist's all but Tolstoyan touch gives unpredictably, complexity, and singleness to most every character: the corybantic schoolteacher O'Malley, who gnashes his teeth if he's called Irish; the secretary Miss Vanner, whose cheeks color over “in some continual, unpeaceful, private struggle” and whose “sorrow was a way of punishing” the men she dealt with; Mr. Phibbs, the socialist churchgoer who “had the detachment of those belonging to an old culture which has reached the phase of contemplation”; Mrs. Truslove, Beluncle's business partner, who takes off her glasses when she talks of private matters-the most private being her platonic sort-of love affair with Mr. Beluncle, which is an infidelity only because it's approached in a spirit of infidelity.

  V. S. Pritchett, like Henry James, is a writer on whom no detail is lost.

  3.

  Not that this book is perfect.

  I mentioned that Pritchett gives complexity to most every character. Consider Mr. Beluncle's wife, Ethel, who “even in sleep seemed to be shouting out an insult.” It's a surprise that despite her prominence in the novel, Ethel seems underused by Pritchett. Not that he doesn't make this woman vivid for us; as ever, with a hunter's eye, Pritchett targets the little rifts in the sides of his character's speech or appearance or ethics. He always strikes a great note, describing his people in wonderful detail-but Ethel, for one, never gets a second note. Her sorrow is mentioned without being fully investigated. This is a shame, because that long disappointment, Ethel Beluncle's daily life, offered the author a chance to examine even further the human cost of household despotism; it was a chance Pritchett missed. (In the coming years, quite a few women novelists would, of course, write about this with famous success.)

  E. M. Forster said of Charles Dickens's characters that often they're “flat but vibrating very fast.” The characters are, in other words, the quintessence of their eccentricities and nothing besides. Pritchett is as good as any writer in history at depicting the surface life of his characters, but at his worst-which comes very rarely-the luminosity of those characters comes across as merely stagy. I'm thinking mainly of Beluncle's youngest son, Leslie, an irritating and falsely precocious boy, who deals out lame one-liners like a TV sitcom kid. What's more, Mr. Beluncle's sister is introduced with a flourish, but then the subplot dedicated to her languishes.

  Which brings us to another criticism: At times-not often, mind you, but occasionally-Mr. Beluncle's narrative lacks a sense of forward progress. Now and again one gets the feeling, even with the most inspired, distinctive characters-and there are many of them: Mrs. Truslove, Henry Beluncle, Mr. Vogg, Chilly, Mrs. Vanner, Mr. Phibbs, and of course the classic, inimitable Mr. Beluncle himself-that Pritchett isn't putting them through their paces enough, that the novel's story lines aren't as fruitful as they might have been.

  Perhaps all this accounts for the one knock against Pritchett that dogged him even when he was in vogue: that the man was a better short story writer than novelist. Think of him as an English John Cheever-another writer who had an intelligence for the rigors of the concise, a lyrical gift, and a calling to observe the conventions of his own class and place. But if both men never exceeded the brilliance of their short stories, they also wrote novels that dazzled in their own right-Cheever's Bullet Park and Falconer and, of course, this near masterpiece of Pritchett's. And make no mistake. For its small blemishes, Mr. Beluncle is still a book to be admired and loved.

  That's why it kills me to have written at all critically of it. I point out what I see as the novel's few flaws just to prove that I'm not merely a witness for the defense. But you don't speak ill of one of the writers you most esteem and enjoy without feeling heavy-hearted and suspicious of your own conclusions. Kingsley Amis thought Mr. Beluncle proved that Pritchett was mid-century England's leading author, and I agree with him. This is an inviting and expert book, wise and beautiful, and best of all, it's heartbreaking and funny at once: It holds in view the totality of a distinctive family, in all its viciousness and affection, its sadness and comedy.

  A book in which brutality is only one facet of an unhappy family's daily life-maybe that's why this novel has been undervalued by today's readers, who have come of age to the simplicity of melodrama.

  Recently, I read a book that was published not too long after Pritchett wrote Mr. Beluncle: Richard Yates's Revolutionary Road, a harrowing story of desolation in the American suburbs. It's a book that, more than ten years after Yates's death, has found quite a large following among young writers and readers. Revolutionary Road's revival, in fact, prompted the biographer Blake Bailey to write A Tragic Honesty: The Life and Work of Richard Yates, a 2003 bestseller. Yates's novel is very fine, severe, gorgeous in parts, its every scene lighted by the kind of crucial authorial compulsion you often find in the classics. All the same, Mr. Beluncle is the superior book on almost every count. I compare them because both take consumerism, the suburbs,
and troubled families as their chosen topics-and yet these novels go about their business quite differently.

  A story of brutal, unremitting desolation-a Revolutionary Road-will always be more fashionable than a story that, without melodrama, shows a troubled family's life in all its many sides.

  Melodrama, being histrionic and unchanging in the bleakness of its tone, rarely achieves the complexity of real art: Everything is awful all the time is just the simplistic, artless Everything is wonderful all the time stood on its head. Pritchett understood that. As much as people called him a craftsman, an old warhorse, and a man of letters, V. S. Pritchett was a true artist. In his novels, in his hundreds of stories, there's never a hint of melodrama or sentimentality.

  And so, more even than Pritchett's X-ray eye for detail, his eager and grounded intellect, the power of his prose-the very fun of it-the quality that stays with me most about Mr. Beluncle is that, while an author like Richard Yates has disdain for the characters in Revolutionary Road, V. S. Pritchett's sweetness of temperament led him to empathize even with the nastiest or most wretched of his people.

  ———

  He's one of the very best writers of the twentieth century.

  DARRIN STRAUSS is the author of the novels Chang and Eng, The Real McCoy, and the forthcoming Family Love. He teaches at New York University and lives in Brooklyn.

  NOTES

  1. The people who wrote these kindnesses about Pritchett were, in order: Frank Kermode, Irving Howe, and Philip Toynbee. The good news for today's readers is that the Modern Library has just published a new edition of Pritchett's revelatory Essential Stones, along with this re-release of Mr. Beluncle.

  2. The New York Review of Books, “V.S.P.,” 11/08/1990

  3. V. S. Pritchett, More Collected Stones, “The Last Throw” (New York: Random House, 1983), page 61.

  4. V. S, Pritchett, London Perceived (New York: Random House, 1976) pp. 1-2.

  5. Mr. Beluncle, p. 101.

  6. V. S. Pritchett, Collected Stones, “Sense of Humor” (New York: Random House, 1982), p. 112.

  7. V. S. Pritchett, Collected Stones (New York: Random House, 1982), preface, p. x.

  8. Jeremy Treglown, V. S. Pritchett: A Working Life (New York: Random House, 2005) p. 208.

  To Dorothy

  MR. BELUNCLE

  I

  Twenty-five minutes from the centre of London the trees lose their towniness, the playing fields, tennis courts and parks are as fresh as lettuce, and the train appears to be squirting through thousands of little gardens. Here was Boy-stone before its churches and its High Street were burned out and before its roofs were stripped off a quarter of a mile at a time. It had its little eighteenth-century face-the parish church, the alms-houses, the hotel, the Hall-squeezed by the rolls and folds of pink suburban fat. People came out of the train and said the air was better-Mr Beluncle always did-it was an old town with a dormitory encampment, and a fizz and fuss of small private vegetation.

  The Beluncles were always on the look out for better air. Mr Beluncle moved them out to Boystone from the London fume of Perse Hill when Henry was fourteen and had a bad accent picked up at half a dozen elementary schools.

  “Aim high,” said Mr Beluncle, “and you'll hit the mark.”

  He wrote to six of the most expensive Public Schools in England and read the prospectuses in the evening to his family, treating them as a kind of poetry; blew up when he saw what the fees were, said, “Every week I pick up the paper and see some boy from Eton or Harrow has been sent to prison, dreadful thing when you think what it cost their fathers,” and sent his boys to Boystone Grammar School.

  The Beluncle boys lifted their noses appreciatively. The air was notably better than at Perse Hill Road. They were shy, reserved and modest boys who kept away from one another in school hours and who rarely came home together. When they saw one another, they exchanged deep signals out of a common code of seriousness and St Vitus's dance. “We are singular,” they twitched. “No one understands us. We have a trick up our sleeves, but it is not time to play it.” They separated and carried on with their shyness which took the form of talking their heads off.

  The Beluncles talked with the fever of a secret society.

  O'Malley was the frightening master at Boystone School. There was always silence when he came scraping one sarcastic foot into the room, showing his small teeth with the grin of one about to feast off human vanity.

  He was a man of fifty with a head like an otter's on which the hair was drying and dying. He had a dry, hay-like moustache, flattened Irish nostrils. He walked with small, pedantic, waltzing steps, as though he had a hook pulling at the seat of his trousers and was being dandled along by a chain. Mr O'Malley was a terrorist. He turned to face the boys, by his silence daring them to move, speak or even breathe. When he had silenced them, he walked two more steps, and then turned suddenly to stare again. He was twisting the screw of silence tighter and tighter. After two minutes had passed and the silence was absolute, he gave a small sharp sniff of contempt, and put his hands under the remains of his rotting rusty gown and walked to his desk.

  One afternoon in the spring term, after the French period, O'Malley went straight to his desk in a temper and said in an exact and mocking voice:

  “I have been asked by the headmaster,” he said, “to enquire into your private lives. This is deeply distasteful to me, as a matter of principle. I do not consider, as I have told the headmaster, it is desirable to encroach on anyone's private affairs; nevertheless I am obliged to do so. Eh?” he suddenly asked.

  The silence, beginning to slacken, suddenly tightened again.

  “I am not going to have my history period wrecked by a piece“—Mr O'Malley's voice gave a squeal of temper—“of bureaucratic frivolity. I intend to get through this quickly. And“—Mr O'Malley's voice now became musical, sadistic and languid—”any de-lays will inevitably lead to three hours' detention on Saturday for the whole form.”

  A delighted smile came on Mr O'Malley's face, an open grin that raised his moustache. The otter seemed to be rising through the ripples.

  “In alphabetical order I shall ask each boy in turn to tell me what he intends to do when he leaves this school and what religious denomination he belongs to. The replies,” said Mr O'Malley with scorn, “as to all official enquiries, will, of course, be either dishonest or meaningless.”

  Mr O'Malley opened a large red book. He looked like a man, with knife and fork ready to enjoy an only too human meal.

  “I'll take it alphabetically,” he said, talking with his pen in his mouth. “Anderson-what will Anderson do when he leaves school?”

  “Clerk, sir,” said Anderson.

  “Clerk, sir,” mocked Mr O'Malley. “And what does Anderson think his religion is?”

  “Church of England, sir,” said Anderson.

  “Church of England,” said Mr O'Malley, taking his pen out of his mouth and making a note of it. “Agnew?”

  “Clerk and Church of England, sir.”

  “Alton? Clerk and Church of England?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Yes, sir. Liar, sir,” said Mr O'Malley.

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Andrews? Clerk and Church of England?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Liar, sir,” said Mr O'Malley savagely. “Next, sir? Come on, sir. Baker, sir?”

  Henry Beluncle saw the question coming towards him. For the first time in his life, he saw coming to him a chance he had often dreamed of; a chance to play the Beluncle trick. On the subject of religion the Beluncles were experts. The word “God” was one of the commonest in use in their family. It was a painful word. Its meaning was entangled in family argument. The Deity was like some elderly member of the family, shut in the next room, constantly discussed, never to be disturbed, except by Mr Beluncle himself who alone seemed jolly enough to go in and speak to Him. God was a kind of manager and an interminable conversationalist; a huge draft of capricious garrulity always em
erged.

  For God, in the Beluncle family, was always changing His mind. Once God had been a Congregationalist; once a Methodist. He had been a Plymouth Brother, the several kinds of Baptist, a Unitarian, an Internationalist; later, as Mr Beluncle's business became more affluent, he had been a Steiner, a Theosophist, a New Theologian, a Christian Scientist, a Tubbite, and then had changed sex after Mrs Eddy to become a follower of Mrs Crowther, Mrs Beale, Mrs Klaxon and Mrs Parkinson-ladies who had deviated in turn from one another and the Truth. He had never been a Roman Catholic or a Jew.

  Only once-it was just before the Deity's change of sex, Henry seemed to recall-had there been no God in the Beluncle family. It had been a period of warmth and happiness. They had all had a seaside holiday that year, the only holiday in the history of the family. Mr Beluncle himself had gone winkling. On Saturday afternoons Mr Beluncle went for walks with his arm round Mrs Beluncle's waist. There was fried fish in the evenings, a glass of stout now and then, and hot rides in charabancs to commons where strong-scented gorse grew and people came home singing. The air smelled of cigars. Mrs Beluncle was amorous and played the piano. Mr Beluncle read booklets on salmon fishing-there being a canal at the back of the house-and Mrs Beluncle used scent and was always warm-eyed, hot in the face and had frilly blouses on Sundays. Up a tree in the garden, Henry and his brother George smoked pipes made out of elderberry wood and left notes for little girls under stones in neighbouring gardens.

  And then, as on a long summer afternoon, when the castle of delicate and crinkled white cloud that lies remote without moving over the thousand red roofs of a bosky suburb, swells and rises and turns into the immense and threatening marble mass of impending thunder, and there is the first grunt of a London storm, God came back. A book called Productive Prayer, in a red cover, three and sixpence post free, came into Mr Beluncle's soft hands. It was followed by one bearing the photograph of a fearless young man in horn-rimmed spectacles, called Christ: Salesman, and then by a pearl grey volume called The Key to Infinity. God came back but He had been cleaned of impurities: He was called Mind.