BOOK: Evelyn Waugh, "The Ordeal of Gilbert Pinfold"

The Complete Works of Evelyn Waugh. Volume 14: The Ordeal of Gilbert Pinfold: A Conversation Piece. Ed. by Barbara Cooke. Oxford University Press, 2023. 9780198717836. xcv + 221 pp.

This is a very unusual novel, but I liked it better than I had expected. Already in my post about Waugh's A Tourist in Africa I remarked how early Waugh seemed to get old, or at least started to feel old. We see yet more examples of this in the editor's introduction to the present volume: at the age of 50, “as well as toothache he [i.e. Waugh] was suffering from insomnia and rheumatism, and found alcohol effective in dulling all three. He took bromide and chloral as sleeping aids, but also used them as painkillers during the day.” (P. xxxiv.) He began suffering from false memories (“My memory is not at all hazy” but rather “sharp, detailed & dead wrong”, p. xxx) and aural hallucinations, hearing voices that existed only in his head. In early 1954, he wanted to vacation on Ceylon for a few weeks, and boarded a ship bound for Colombo, but his condition got bad enough during the voyage that he was disembarked at Port Said and, with the help of another passenger, sent to Colombo by airplane instead (p. xxxviii). Waugh's problems continued there as well as after his return home, and he even consulted a priest, thinking it might be a case of demonic possession (p. xl). Eventually a doctor realized that “Waugh had been poisoned by his preferred combination of soporifics, anti-depressants, and alcohol” (p. xl), and he got better after switching to different drugs.

Waugh then decided (with some encouragement from his doctor) to write a lightly fictionalized account of these experiences, and The Ordeal of Gilbert Pinfold is the result. It is remarkable how closely Pinfold's experiences in the novel match Waugh's experiences in real life, though he did of course change enough details that nobody could feel libelled. Gilbert Pinfold, the eponymous protagonist of the novel, is a successful middle-aged writer; conservative by temperament and a Catholic; he lives with his wife in the countryside, surrounded by declining gentry; he is afflicted by a growing set of health problems — all, in short, exactly like Waugh in real life. Even some of the more bizarre details are taken from life: one of Pinfold's neighbours has a quack medical device called “the Box” which “exercised diagnostic and therapeutic powers” (p. 3), again based on such a device owned by one of Waugh's neighbours (p. lxii).

Pinfold books a passage to Ceylon on a ship, partly to escape the English winter for a few weeks and partly to finish a novel he's been working on. But he is clearly in a bad way, and between his drinking and his narcotics, he becomes “intermittently comatose” and drowsy (p. 13) even before boarding the ship. You can't help feeling how unwise it is for him to travel alone in this condition.

But it is after boarding the ship that things start getting really wacky. In his cabin, Pinfold starts hearing all sorts of sounds, noises, loud music, snatches of conversation between other people. He figures this must be due to some communications equipment that had been used on the ship during the WW2 and then left behind in a state of unpredictable malfunction (pp. 24, 31). At no point does he seem to doubt that the things he hears are real, but when he alludes to them in conversations with other passengers, nobody seems to have heard of them. Consequently Pinfold starts to believe that they are all in league against him, playing pranks and mocking him behind his back. Some of the things he hears are even more disturbing, e.g. an accident in which a sailor was badly injured, and another where the Captain and his mistress tortured another sailor to death (pp. 28–30, 35–7).

Pinfold begins to hear what are apparently BBC programmes in which critics and comedians savage him and his work (pp. 39, 53); and he hears the voices of several young passengers accusing him of all sorts of things such as being a Jewish refugee named Peinfeld, an impotent homosexual, a bad writer on the brink of bankrupcy, and the like. He wonders if all that he's been hearing are radio plays put on by his enemies.

Things get still more bizarre when the ship nears Gibraltar. Due to some dispute over that territory, Spanish officials insist on boarding the ship and inspecting it. Pinfold overhears their conversation, and later hears the Captain discussing the situation with a few other passengers and hatching a plan. The Spaniards are apparently looking for a secret agent that is travelling aboard the ship, and the Captain intends to throw them Pinfold with some false papers to make them think he is the man they're looking for. [In Waugh's manuscript the Captain was even more hostile to Pinfold; see the cut passages on pp. 126–7.] Pinfold hears the Spanish navy ship approach, but then steps out of his cabin and sees no trace of it. He briefly wonders if he is going mad, but concludes that it's all just radio plays (p. 64).

Pinfold hears people gossiping about him all over the ship, but when he tries to deny some of the rumours in conversation with other passenges, they are merely confused. One of the recurring characters whose voices he hears, a young woman named Margaret, is apparently fond of Pinfold and persuades him to let her come to his cabin. He hears her at the door, but when he opens it, she is nowhere to be seen.

Pinfold's chief tormentors are a family of four, but when he complains to the Captain, there turns out to be no such people on the passenger list. Pinfold concludes that the leader of his enemies is a BBC technician named Angel, one of the crew that did an interview with Pinfold shortly before his departure for Ceylon. Angel and his associates are ludicrously well organized and track Pinfold's every move (p. 85). Apparently Angel has a device similar to the aforementioned ‘Box’ and is using it to brainwash Pinfold; but their power over him is waning since he stopped taking his sleeping drugs. Pinfold even turns the tables on them: realizing that they cannot help but hear his thoughts, he torments them by reading boring books and the like :))

To get away from his enemies' influence for good, Pinfold disembarks at Port Said and continues to Colombo by plane. It turns out that he can still hear his enemies' voices; Margaret tells him there's just three of them — she, her brother Angel, and Angel's wife, whom Pinfold has nicknamed “Goneril” after a villain from King Lear. By now Pinfold simply ignores the latter two, but he still talks to Margaret from time to time, as she has always been nice to him.

At the urging of his wife, Pinfold returns to England and things are finally cleared up. Her inquiries at the BBC revealed that Angel has been in England all this time, not on Pinfold's ship; and a priest whom she consulted at Pinfold's request assured her that there is no such device as ‘the Box’. Pinfold finally realizes that he has been talking to himself all this time, and the voices stop; his physician explains it was probably due to the combination of drugs he had been taking. Pinfold puts his half-finished novel aside and begins writing a new one based on his recent ordeals.

*

I'm glad that the book has a reasonably happy ending, with Pinfold in a much better condition, both physical and mental, than at any earlier point in the book. How could you not sympathize with the unfortunate man throughout his ordeal, and cheer on him as he tries to figure out what is happening and how to face the enemies who constantly assail him! It must be terrifying to have your mind play tricks on you like that. But I also couldn't help being surprised, and slightly disappointed, by the fact that it took him so long to realize that he had been hallucinating all this time. Waugh took care that the reader constantly receives signs that the voices Pinfold hears exist only in his head, but Pinfold never notices those signs, and he stubbornly avoids grappling with the possibility that the things he hears are delusions.

Even his initial idea, about malfunctioning WW2-era communications equipment, is implausible; and it is completely impossible that any such equipment could explain why he eventually hears voices all over the ship, not just in his cabin. By then he has switched to the other explanation, of ‘the Box’ which communicates with him telepathically; but that, of course, is even more implausible. His total lack of skepticism is disappointing;* it should have been obvious to him that his attempts to explain his experiences with some external source like that did not work. Moreover, there is a distinct lack of motive — it's just not plausible that the whole complement of passengers aboard the ship would be in league against poor Pinfold, or that some random BBC technician would go to so much trouble to organize a vast conspiracy against him.

[*But perhaps I shouldn't be disappointed; Waugh, after all, is someone who converted to Catholicism as a grown-up — surely not something that a skeptically-minded person would be likely to have done.]

Despite this minor downside, this was a surprisingly enjoyable novel; its subject was something quite new and fresh to me, and I kept wondering, as the story progressed, what crazy stunt the voices in Pinfold's head would pull next. I was almost a little disappointed in the end when it turned out that it all has a simple medical explanation, an unfortunate combination of alcohol and drugs; the world would be a slightly more charming and fantastical place if the grand conspiracies and vicious pranks that Pinfold is subjected to were real.

Miscellaneous

Waugh joked in a letter to a friend: “everyone over 40 is dotty in England now. I am sure they used not to be. It ought to secure a sympathetic reception to my work in progress” (p. xli). :))

A similar idea appears in a passage removed from the manuscript version of the novel: when deciding to write up his experiences at the end of the book, Pinfold says “it might amuse a certain number of people. To judge by what the papers say, very nearly half the inhabitants of the kingdom are more or less barmy at one time or another.” (P. 219.)

I was surprised to see, from the critical apparatus (appendix B), how censored the American edition of this novel was. The characters in the novel frequently refer to Middle Easterners as “Wogs”, surely fairly tame stuff as far as ethnic slurs go, at least by 1950s standards; and yet in the American edition, more or less all instances of this word were replaced by something neutral and inoffensive (see e.g. two instances on p. 132). I found this all the more surprising since, as far as I know, “wog” was hardly used in American English at all, so they shouldn't have had any reason to find it particularly offensive. The American edition also tones down some of the anti-Semitic rhetoric that the voices in Pinfold's head abuse him with (pp. lvi, 124). The editor's introduction says that “such practice had been commonplace in the United States for some time” (ibid.) and gives two examples of novel titles being censored: Agatha Christie's Ten Little Niggers (1930) appeared in America as And Then There Were None (1931); and The Coloured Countries (a 1930 travel book by Waugh's brother Alec) appeared in America as The Hot Countries.

A funny anecdote about Harold Macmillan, the British Prime Minister: “In 1974, he told Muriel Spark about a visit to Moscow during which he and Krushchev had talked in the garden to avoid bugged offices. Macmillan was perfectly aware that the trees were bugged too.” (P. lxi.) This reminded me of the old joke about the material that the Soviets used to build foreign embassies. It was called microconcrete: 10% concrete, 90% microphones :)

I was pleasantly surprised to learn that Waugh was apparently on friendly terms with John Heygate, the man for whom his first wife had left him; here we see Heygate writing a letter to Waugh, praising Pinfold as “all too true and altogether convincing” (p. lxxi, n. 140).

Bizarrely, a composer named Nicholas Nabokov offered to write “a short opera” based on this novel; but Waugh wasn't keen on the idea (“Nabokov may make an opera if I may sing in it & design the scenery”, p. lxxiii), and nothing came of it.

I enjoyed this description of Pinfold's grumpy conservatism, and had much sympathy with it: “His strongest tastes were negative. He abhorred plastics, Picasso, sun-bathing and jazz—everything in fact that had happened in his own lifetime.” (P. 4.) In his manuscript, Waugh initially added the wireless, the telephone, aeroplanes, psychiatrists, popular newspapers, and Corbusier to this list (p. 145). I like Mr. Pinfold better and better! :))

I feel compelled to record a particularly disgusting case of hyphenation: “teleg-|raphist” (p. 29), but apparently it isn't wrong.

Pinfold remembers an old acquaintance from his club who said: “Poor old Nailsworth, his mother was a whore, so's his wife. They say his daughter's going the same way. . .” (p. 69). My god, how the money rolls in :)))

Pinfold is arguing with the voices in his head: “ ‘You're driving me mad.’/ ‘No, no, Gilbert, you are mad already,’ said the duty-officer. ‘We're driving you sane.’ ” (P. 89.)

Waugh on experimental literature: “Experiment? God forbid! Look at the result of experiment in the case of a writer like Joyce. He started off writing very well, then you can watch him going mad with vanity. He ends up a lunatic.” (P. 107.)

Apparently Waugh received a lot of mail with questions from students of literature “who are writing about one & want one, virtually, to write their theses for them”, and simply replied with a printed refusal (p. 108).

Waugh's wife Laura was so devoted to her farm that her son “later insinuated that she preferred her cows to her children” :)) (p. 108). One time she even used her neighbour's ‘Box’ (the pseudo-medical device) “on an ailing cow, which immediately recovered” (p. 109).

I was interested to see Waugh use the word unattested in the sense ‘not certified/approved by some authority’ (p. 7, l. 247; see also the note on p. 112). This is the only sense which the corresponding word has in Slovenian (neatestiran), but I haven't encountered it in this sense in English yet — so far I've only seen unattested as ‘not proven, by some sort of records, to have existed’.

Waugh once said in an interview “that ‘real’ painting ‘stopped with the French Impressionists’ ” (p. 113). Once again I am happy to agree with him :]

Waugh in a letter to Ann Fleming: “My sexual passion for my ten year old daughter is obsessive [. . .] I can't keep my hands off her” (p. 129). :)))

When King Farouk of Egypt was deposed in 1952, much of his property was auctioned off by the government, including “Geiger counters, a signed photograph of Adolf Hitler, and one of the world's largest collections of pornography” (p. 133) :)

Poor Pinfold is being slandered by the voices in his head: “ ‘[he] gives the most peculiar parties at Lychpole.’ — ‘Not when his wife is there?’ — ‘No, but the moment she goes away. Absolute orgies.’ — ‘I've never been to an orgy. I often wonder what really goes on at them.’ — ‘Better go to Lychpole when Mrs Pinfold's away. You'd soon find out there.’ ” :)) (P. 195, in a manuscript passage omitted from the final version of the novel.)

In my posts about previous books in this series, I often complained about errors and misprints; but this time I noticed only two of them, so it's only fair that I praise the publishers for that. There's “Krushchev” on p. lxi (should be “Khrushchev”); and on p. 128, the entry for 69.159–66 refers to pages “lxi–lxii” instead of “xli–xlii”.

ToRead:

• Cyril Connolly: The Missing Diplomats (1952). A book about British diplomats who turned out to be working for the Soviet Union. Mentioned here on p. 128; the author was a friend of Waugh.
• Charles Kingsley: Westward Ho! “Deeply conservative, anti-Catholic, and imperialist 1855 novel [. . .] about a sixteenth-century seafarer” (p. 132). Pinfold reads it slowly to harass Angel and his gang, who can't help but hear his thoughts (p. 92).