The Ordeal Of Gilbert Pinfold – Evelyn Waugh, 1957 ★½

Waugh at Sea

A willingness to dish on oneself may make for a more scintillating companion; not so a better novel.

By sending up a drug- and alcohol-impaired middle-aged novelist not unlike author Evelyn Waugh himself, The Ordeal Of Gilbert Pinfold would seem a must-read for curious Waugh fans. What better target for a master satirist than himself? But even fans will find their enthusiasm dimmed by a surprisingly lackluster protagonist and paper-thin plot. Was Waugh, like Pinfold, running on empty late in the game?

Gilbert Pinfold is a well-regarded representative of an older generation of writers of “so much will and so much ability to please,” now rendered a quaint oddity by angrier, younger artists. Semi-retired, Gilbert putters around his country estate popping various pills and chemicals to help him sleep. He also drinks. To clear his head and kickstart a stalled novel, he decides on a cruise to Ceylon. No sooner has his voyage on the Caliban begun than he hears disembodied voices call out to him from his cabin ceiling. Has poor Gilbert lost his mind?

“You just pretend to be hard and worldly, don’t you?” accuses one. “And you can’t blame people if they take you at your own estimate.”

Waugh wrote this after a near-breakdown he had while travelling soon after turning 50. In a short introduction, he acknowledges an element of autobiography and suggests Ordeal “may amuse” others who have experienced similar trials. He even subtitled it “A Conversation Piece,” presumably the same way his friend and colleague Graham Greene dubbed his lighter novels “entertainments.”

Waugh in 1957 was at a career crossroads. Known in his youth for sometimes edgy but broadly humorous fiction, he had in early middle age hit a deeper vein of emotional investment with Brideshead Revisited (1945), which colored everything he wrote after. His “Sword Of Honour” trilogy (Men At Arms, Officers And Gentlemen, and Unconditional Surrender) are all great books, but their serious tone pulled readers even farther from the Waugh of his early fame.

Written between Officers And Gentlemen and Unconditional Surrender, The Ordeal Of Gilbert Pinfold attempts a tricky balancing act. How to recapture his broadly comic spirit of old while allowing himself to explore his Catholicism and its place in the modern day? Whatever readers wanted, religion was what drove Waugh, for better or worse.

Waugh attempts to give his spiritual focus a humorous dimension, in line with his apparent objective of producing something old Waugh readers would enjoy. He plays up his own public image of the 1950s:

He had been received into the Church – “conversion” suggests an event more sudden and emotional than his calm acceptance of the propositions of his faith – in early manhood, at the time when many Englishmen of humane education were falling into communism. Unlike them Mr. Pinfold remained steadfast. But he was reputed bigoted rather than pious.

The opening chapter is amusing in places. The problem I find is that this section doesn’t have much of a story to it, just a serious of observations about a life lived in luxury and confusion.

A BBC interview Waugh gave in November 1953 is fictionalized in The Ordeal Of Gilbert Pinfold. Later, Pinfold imagines his BBC interviewer harassing him aboard the Caliban, unseen but heard everywhere. Image from https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b05ndh2t

Pinfold earns a reputation for oddity among his neighbors and sweats over an upcoming interview with the BBC, knowing he wears a target. Mostly he’s just getting old and weird:

There was a phrase in the ‘30s, “It’s later than you think,” which was designed to cause uneasiness. It was never later than Mr. Pinfold thought. At intervals during the day and night he would look at his watch and learn with disappointment how little of his life was past, how much was still ahead of him.

There is also that stalled novel in his desk, subject of much revision but little focus. Much of Pinfold’s time is spent drinking and sleeping. To help with the latter, he takes a mix of bromide and chloral hydrate, splashed with crème de menthe.

His wife is concerned: “You haven’t always been altogether making sense lately and you’re a very odd colour. Either you’re drinking too much or doping too much, or both.”

Hence Pinfold’s decision in chapter 2 to go on holiday, which takes up the other six chapters of the novel. Why does he go it alone? Why does his worried spouse let him? Waugh gives reasons, but they smack of the same sort of contrivance that colors the rest of the book.

One early warning sign for Pinfold is when he becomes convinced a Victorian washstand sent to him as a gift has been damaged in transit. The episode was based on this antique, a gift to Waugh which sparked a similarly embarrassing fuss. Image from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Narcissus_washstand.

Once Pinfold gets on board the ship, the novel quickly becomes surreal. Pinfold imagines various atrocities committed aboard the Caliban which he alone can hear. At first the victims are anonymous sailors; over time he hears passengers plot with the ship’s captain to lay into Pinfold himself. He suspects “a number of frayed and partly disconnected wires” running through the ventilation shaft along his cabin ceiling transmit clandestine conversations from various parts of the ship.

The more he hears, the more convinced he becomes of a vast conspiracy involving the whole of his life:

“It’s all a joke. Gilbert’s a sport. Gilbert’s enjoying it as much as we are. He often did this sort of thing when he was our age – singing ridiculous songs outside men’s rooms at Oxford. He made a row outside the Dean’s rooms. That’s why he got sent down. He accused the Dean of the most disgusting practices. It was all a great joke.”

The fact Pinfold is hallucinating is immediately apparent, and significantly curtails our investment in the character. It becomes not unlike the cringe comedy of “Curb Your Enthusiasm,” where we watch our main protagonist engage in a series of increasingly awkward social interactions because he’s trapped by a hair-trigger reaction to imagined slights. At least Larry David in “Curb” is a likable jerk who often deserves what he gets, and rolls with the punches well. Poor Pinfold is in the throes of a breakdown, and mostly helpless.

There are some amusing highlights, but after a while the hallucinogenic episodes take the character of endless tape loops, like a long chapter where Pinfold hears himself accused of being Jewish and gay by a pair of louts who conveniently vanish into thin air whenever Pinfold ventures outside to confront them. “Come out of your wooden hut, you old queer,” they jeer.

The port of Colombo in British Ceylon, today the independent island nation of Sri Lanka, is Pinfold's destination in The Ordeal Of Gilbert Pinfold. Image from https://picclick.com/Colombo-Harbour-Landing-Jetty-Ceylon-Sri-Lanka-Real-331838513878.html.

The more they go on, the wilder their accusations grow, and the more desperate their designs:

“You have no conception of the ramifications of power of a man like Pinfold in the modern age. He’s attractive to women – homosexuals always are. Margaret is distinctly taken with him. Even your mother doesn’t really dislike him. We’ve got to work cautiously and build up a party against him.”

Pinfold’s reactions – running outside his cabin cane in hand, or attempting to glean intelligence from mystified fellow passengers – are too subdued or mild for any real comic payoff. The accusations have no validity, so it’s difficult to tie them to religious or personal guilt. Sometimes, as when he hears himself being denounced on a radio broadcast, Pinfold doesn’t react at all, which kills the point.

Waugh skips the intricate plotting of his past novels to mimic a narcotic dream. There is a fine tradition for this in English literature, but what we get comes in the form of stop-and-go fragments rather than a fantasy on par with “Kubla Khan” or “A Day In The Life.”

That may reflect the nature of the substance Pinfold/Waugh was abusing. Yet the result is curiously unsatisfying, like Waugh published this a draft too soon.

Being Waugh, he can’t help but be diverting in places, though the self-referential nature of the story will be lost on those with no deep investment in Waugh going in. Waugh books are often navel-gazing exercises, but his gift for pulling in readers seems to escape him here.

One almost-saving grace is Margaret, the plotter mentioned above. Alone among the invisible conspirators, she seems to take a liking to Pinfold, and even suggests a rendezvous in his cabin. Pinfold, we are reminded, is a good Catholic, but a man of the flesh, too. He imagines attempting foreplay with her in his bed:

How to shift her? Was she portable? He wished that he knew her dimensions.

All this is in vain, as Margaret never does appear. Eventually he vacates his cabin, and over time takes some control of the situation. The voices now follow him everywhere, spying upon his every thought, but he learns to deal with them by reading books backwards until they cry uncle.

As a novel, Ordeal is more like a pair of short stories, or rather a short story and then a novella, the first being of Pinfold at home, allowing Waugh to have some fun with his cranky public image; the second his breakdown aboard the Caliban, which goes on too long and peters out without any clear resolution beyond the idea Pinfold is going to use his experience to write a new novel.

Even the Catholic element seems tacked on, thrown in by Waugh to give this goofy, adventitious farce some emotional depth. But like the jokes, the spiritual dimension falls flat. Waugh in later life could still write a great book, as the troubled, brilliant Unconditional Surrender would later prove. But bringing off something lighter and more farcical seems either beneath or beyond him somehow, so late in the game.