Mr. Beluncle by V. S. Pritchett

First published: 1951

Type of work: Satiric comedy

Time of work: c. 1935

Locale: London

Principal Characters:

• Mr. Philip Beluncle, the protagonist, a businessman
• Ethel Beluncle, his wife
• Henry Beluncle, the oldest of their three sons
• George Beluncle, the middle son
• Leslie Beluncle, the youngest son
• Mary Phibbs, Henry’s girlfriend
• Linda Truslove, Mr. Beluncle’s business partner, a widow
• Judy Dykes, Linda’s unmarried, crippled sister
• David Vogg, a half-mad newspaper vendor and street-corner preacher

The Novel

Mr. Beluncle is essentially a collection of English middle-class characters, comic and tragicomic, in juxtaposition and collision. They undergo no development and engage in little action. What plot there is has three foci: the Beluncle family, the Beluncle-Truslove business, a small furniture manufacturing firm, and the Church of the Last Purification, to which Mr. Beluncle, Henry, Mary, and Judy belong.

The family is introduced on a Sunday, the only time the father is at home for the day. In addition to Henry, there are two younger boys, George and Leslie, and Mr. Beluncle’s senile mother. Basic animosities are soon revealed: between husband and wife, wife and mother-in-law, Henry and George and their father. The source of much of the ill feelings is Mr. Beluncle himself, whose principal idiosyncrasies are crucial to what little plot there is. He is house-crazy: Waking on Sunday morning before the rest, he “again set out occupying residences, sold all his furniture, moved new furniture into... mansions all over England....” His newest obsession is a large, expensive place called Marbella, which he cannot possibly afford (his partner, Linda Truslove, has just told him he is on the verge of bankruptcy)—but the “Divine Mind” of the Purification Church seems to have ordained its purchase. Marbella soon becomes crucial in his relations with his sensible business partner. It also becomes evident that he has a powerful affinity for other people’s money, which he “invests” in his misrun business and personal extravagances; he has “invested” his mother’s, sister’s, and partner’s money, and he is always on the lookout for more to support his impractical schemes and expensive tastes. People are important to him in proportion to their potential as “investors.”

As the slow Sunday passes, Mr. Beluncle is seen tyrannizing over family members. Ethel alternately rages at and resigns herself to her fate. Her husband’s house mania and financial follies have meant many moves as bill collectors have closed in. The Purification Church is another bone of contention. When he offers some religious platitude to justify having his way, she reminds him that she is a “heathen.” Her attitude toward Linda Truslove alternates between outbursts of jealousy, and gratitude for the partner’s stabilizing influence on the firm. Ethel’s domestic tussles with her husband’s deaf, senile mother provide an outlet for her acid-tongued frustration and furnish much of the early comedy in the novel.

Henry works in his father’s business. He is in love—or thinks he is—with Mary Phibbs, a rather ordinary girl whom he hopes to visit after church. The father disapproves of the girl and frustrates the boy’s plans, leaving him resentful and guilt-ridden after the confrontation. Although carried through the novel, the love affair comes to nothing, as Henry is to go to France at the end.

Sunday activities—church, dinner, an automobile ride to Marbella, the father’s latest obsession—bring in the other two boys. The youngest, Leslie, is treated by the family as a kind of court jester, his shrewd and often cutting remarks being good-naturedly tolerated even by the father. The middle son, George, is a bit dull-witted and, unlike the other two, deeply loves his father—who puts him down at every opportunity. Beluncle seems contemptuous of him for not having a job but blocks him whenever a job seems to materialize. Neither of the younger boys plays a significant role in the minimal plot.

The small manufacturing firm in which Beluncle and Linda Truslove are partners is the setting in which the relations of the latter are developed. She came into the business with the death of her husband, Beluncle’s first partner, and fell in love with her self-centered coworker. Plain, sensible, and increasingly embittered as Beluncle’s nature is revealed to her, she cares for her rather demanding crippled sister, Judy Dykes. As Linda Truslove works in the office, Beluncle daydreams about Marbella, bullies his son and other workers, and rushes mindlessly into bankruptcy.

The Church of the Last Purification is the key to what little action there is in the novel. Members are “a healthy-looking collection of clean, smiling people, broad and bummy. . . and . . . dressed expensively.” They are “living examples of prayer promptly answered,” following “a religion I can breathe in,” as Mr. Beluncle puts it. Henry, his father, and Mary Phibbs attend, Henry later losing his faith. Judy Dykes is an ardent though scarcely love-filled member; when she suddenly becomes able (barely) to walk, the church members regard it as a miracle. Actually, the cure seems to have been brought about by the half-mad street-corner “witness,” David Vogg, who had gone to the Truslove home to denounce her as a heretic. In the ensuing turmoil, she fell (screaming, “Kill him”), and the shock seems to have brought movement back to her legs. Vogg later returns to throw rocks at her, uproot the garden plants, and break a window. Judy Dykes soon dies, dulling the brightness of the “miracle.”

The end of the novel comes when Mr. Beluncle’s financial follies bring the expected ruin: Mrs. Truslove being out of town, he commits himself to buy Marbella and begins a huge expansion of the business facilities at a time of business recession. Much is implied rather than stated outright, but apparently his partner brings legal action to recover what she can of her money by liquidation of the firm’s assets.

The Characters

Memorable characters, major and minor, are what Mr. Beluncle is about. To a breathtaking degree, the novel is autobiographical, as is obvious to a reader of A Cab at the Door (1968), V. S. Pritchett’s account of his formative years. Ethel and Philip Beluncle are only slightly altered versions of the author’s parents; Henry is clearly recognizable as the young Pritchett; Linda Truslove is a plainer version of Miss H. of the autobiography; and the Purification Church “theology” is the satirist’s version of his real father’s Christian Science. The fictional mother and the real-life one even use the same old saw: “I know the difference between a sixpence and a shilling.” At the close of both books, Henry/Pritchett goes to France. After a few months have passed, a reader of both books cannot separate the Beluncles from the Pritchetts without difficulty.

Mr. Beluncle himself is self-absorbed, self-indulgent, autocratic, optimistic to the point of madness, and the appropriator of other people’s money, yet this flamboyant man inspires love: His wife will defend him against all comers; tears of thwarted love roll down his son George’s cheek; Linda Truslove has loved him for years. In the Purification Church, he finds the cloudy abstractions that gave him scope: “It looks to me,” observes Ethel, “that Divine Love means someone puts up the money.”

Ethel is the perfect foil to her husband: “The more Beluncle dressed, the less she dressed: their marriage had always been a duel.... The more he sat, the more she stood. The more he was the lord, the more she, vindictively, was the slave.” When she “wished to be outrageous she ruined a meal.” Her arguments with her deaf, senile mother-in-law provide good comedy, especially when the old lady announces that she has been robbed. When there is nothing else going on, she rages against Linda Truslove. Still, she can be penitent, and flashbacks reveal her as a happy, high-spirited young wife.

Henry is in most ways the typical young man (he is nineteen) trying to break away from the family; he has literary aspirations and wants to distance himself from the petty quarrels and the father’s “religion.” Then there is the added pull of the love affair with Mary Phibbs to make his rebellion more painful, complicated further by his doubt that he is really in love with this rather ordinary girl.

Perhaps the only sane figure in the novel, many of the scenes of which are pure farce, Linda Truslove elicits the reader’s sympathy; she is a plain, sensible woman in love with a flamboyant married man who has taken her money and is unresponsive. “He had infected her—for she now regarded it as an infection—. . . with the unwilling belief that he could be anything he said he was. He had simply to speak, to let his deep and changeable voice strike not only her ear but her whole body.” Added to her frustrations with Mr. Beluncle and increasing the reader’s sympathy for her are those arising from the care of her demanding, crippled sister, Judy Dykes.

Sniffing out sin and heresy at every corner, the half-mad newspaper vendor David Vogg has utter contempt for the bland theology of the Purification Church, prompting his visit to Judy Dykes and her “miraculous” cure. Actually, his contempt is for mortal man: Coming out of the darkness when someone enters his newspaper shop, he looks “with blazing, upright, sarcastic hostility at the customer.”

Minor characters are presented with equal vividness. Henry’s schoolmaster, O’Malley, comes into the classroom “showing his small teeth with the grin of one about to feast off human vanity” and walks “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.” Lady Roads, a force in the Purification Church, is “a large and bold woman, in a royal blue dress, who put on a tragic and exalted face when she came to the platform. She had . . . large, sad, malicious eyes. In a melancholy and shouting voice she announced the hymn....”

Critical Context

Mr. Beluncle is Pritchett’s fifth and last novel; after its publication in 1951, he returned to what were probably his first loves and stronger vehicles for his literary talents: short stories and literary criticism. He also wrote a second volume of his autobiography, Midnight Oil (1971), which together with his first, A Cab at the Door, is of great interest to readers of his fiction. (They are the best novels, one critic observed.) Like his good friend and contemporary, George Orwell, he draws heavily on people he has known to populate his fiction. Unlike Orwell, he has written short stories in abundance, excellent ones on which his future reputation may rest. A recognition of his achievement in this field was his selection as the editor of the Oxford Book of Short Stories (1981).

Mr. Beluncle is often regarded as the author’s most important novel, although the earlier Dead Man Leading (1937) is viewed by some as a better one, certainly a better plotted one. It may be demanding too much of the novel, however, to ask for elaborate structure; its primary value lies in its reflection of the rather chaotic youth of the author, full of unresolvable dilemmas and apparent dead ends, and its high comedy acted by memorable clowns.

Bibliography

Breit, Harvey. Review in The Atlantic Monthly. CLXXXVIII (October, 1951), p. 80.

Havighurst, Walter. Review in Saturday Review of Literature. XXXIV (October 13, 1951), p. 35.

Laski, Marghanita. Review in The Spectator. CLXXXVII (October 26, 1951), p. 552.

Oldsey, Bernard, ed. Dictionary of Literary Biography, Vol. 15, part 2, British Novelists: 1930-1959, 1983.

Time. Review. LVIII (October 8, 1951), p. 124.

The Times Literary Supplement. Review. October 19, 1951, p. 660.