posted on 15 Jun 2023

The Ordeal of Gilbert Pinfold by Evelyn Waugh

Written late in his career – there was only one more work of fiction to come before his death in 1966 – The Ordeal of Gilbert Pinfold is a largely autobiographical novel covering what Waugh himself called his ‘mad period’. In late 1953 and into 1954, Waugh fell into a cycle of professional doubt and depression which he decided to battle with a cocktail of drink laced with copious amounts of bromide and chloral – a recipe that had disastrous results. In an attempt to kick-start his writing, he booked a sea voyage to Sri Lanka (then Ceylon) but found himself plagued by hallucinations and mysterious voices caused by the drugs.

It is this experience that forms the central core of this novel. Gilbert Pinfold is a writer (and a very clear, almost arch self-portrait of Waugh) who starts taking bromide and chloral as a cure for his incessant insomnia. Pinfold is fastidious in most things except for his drinking and consumption of the prescribed drugs and when he decides he will get away from his wife and his domestic circumstances in order to try and write his next book, he books a voyage to Ceylon.

The vast majority of the book is then taken up with the emergence of an increasingly complex set of hallucinogenic experiences in which Pinfold hears voices he assumes are being accidentally piped into his cabin, conversations outside his cabin on deck which deliberately seem to taunt him and music that keeps his awake and seems to have no clear place of origin. As readers we know this can’t be real and Pinfold’s attempts to explain them seem increasingly unlikely but, despite the almost farcical nature of these incidents, he finds himself obsessed with finding out who is persecuting him. These voices become increasingly critical of Pinfold, both as a writer and as a person and he finds himself moving from anger to outrage and to a sort of grudging acceptance that some of their cutting assessments of him are merited.

Pinfold convinces himself that the architect of his persecution is a BBC broadcaster called Angel who he has met before and who he thinks has the technical expertise to stage the mysterious voices and music. When the ship gets to Alexandria, he decides to abandon the rest of the journey and return home – by which time he is now having almost structured and rational conversations with ‘Angel’ and a younger woman ‘Margaret’ who professes her love for Pinfold.

Finally back home, Pinfold’s wife and doctor convince him that his experiences are entirely imaginary and the result of the drug abuse. The disappearance of the hallucinations seems to confirm to Pinfold that he has won a personal victory over his demons and this liberates him to start his new novel, The Ordeal of Gilbert Pinfold.

Always teetering on the edge of black humour and semi-farce, the book is ultimately not one of Waugh’s best. The first third is, in my view, vintage stuff with Waugh drawing a slyly acidic portrait of himself - but that’s about where the good stuff stops. The extended playing out of the hallucinations onboard get increasingly tedious and lack any kind of tension or sense of momentum. As a portrait of a mind in distress or of the perils of drug dependency, there’s very little here to be learned. 

Writing for the New York Times in a review published in 1957, Gerald Sykes captures the strength of the first section of the book in these well-chosen words:

“And yet the first part of it is first-rate. Its "portrait of the artist in middle age," before he sets forth on his tedious journey, is a genuine gothic horror, a gargoyle to terrify anyone who has ever contemplated a literary career. Mr. Pinfold is publicly successful; he is so prosperous that he does not write as much as he could, because the tax-gatherer would only take his earnings away from him; but privately he is in such advanced decay that even the most long-standing habits of self-congratulation have failed. The acid bath so often prepared for others has now found its way into his own tub.”

Fans of Waugh will probably find enough here – just – to merit reading it but if you’re new to Waugh, this is definitely not the place to start.

Paperback copies of the book are easily found online and you can expect to pay well under £10 for one.

 

Terry Potter

June 2023