Word: sebastians
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...evening began with a joke. Seven members of the orchestra played the Schleptet in E flat, S.O., by musicologist Peter Schickele, more familiarly known as P.D.Q. Bach (1807 -- 1742), the last and the least of Johann Sebastian's sons. Satirizing serious music, the Schleptet demands a wide range of comic effects, including a nose-dive by the French horn player, which sends fragments of a collapsible horn sailing across the stage into the audience, and woodwind burps usually reserved for a beginner's practice room...
...polite society. He has had some time to observe these, having fled the hopelessly declasse shores of New York City, his birthplace, to more genteel echelons in Ireland. His first novel, The Ginger Man, instantly revealed an affection for the upper classes and their dirty linen. In creating Sebastian Dangerfield, dissolute hero and impoverished aristocrat, Donleavy unleashed one of the most charming rogues of twentieth century English literature--suave, jaunty, devilishly...
...this irreverence suggests that Donleavy is himself a sort of Sebastian Dangerfield, and in fact The Ginger Man was written with highly autobiographical intentions. In the 25 years since its publication, however, Donleavy has changed considerably. The dandyish narrator of The Unexpurgated Code is far removed from Donleavy the young novelist...
This theme of denied fulfillment--and its relation to money--is expanded in quite a different way in Donleavy's next novels, A Singular Man, The Saddest Summer of Balthazar B, and particularly The Beastly Beatitudes of Balthazar B. In Beastly Beatitudes, Donleavy proffers a hero entirely antithetical to Sebastian Dangerfield. Balthazar ("possession of treasure") is sincere, decent, loving and wealthy. Yet he is plagued by the same consuming unhappiness as Dangerfield. The tone of the whole book, in fact, is unlike that of The Ginger Man: Balthazar B is a wistful tale, and though lightened by brilliant flashes...
...surprising then, that The Unexpurgated Code should display such unmitigated humor. On the surface, it would seem that the old Sebastian Dangerfield had won out in Donleavy. Yet somewhere between the lines of the narrator's counsels and the social spoofing, you sense in Donleavy an inverted romanticism, a genuine attachment to the order and chivalry of the aristocracy, a sadness that living is not what he would conceive it or hope it to be. In the jacket photo, Donleavy's face is wary, truculent even, thoroughly distrustful. You suspect the jaunty mien, the gentlemanly deportment, is a carefully constructed...