As a "semi-autobiographical work of fiction", perhaps The Ordeal Of Gilbert Pinfold can only really be understood and appreciated through the lens of the author's real life ordeal. Like the eponymous Gilbert Pinfold, Evelyn Waugh was feeling ill and, suffering from insomnia, self-medicated with powerful sleeping draughts and alcohol. Waugh decided to escape an English winter with a trip to Ceylon, but once aboard ship, he began to have auditory hallucinations that ranged (in his fictionalised account) from the mundane (a dog) to the insidious (voices prompting him to jump overboard).
I assumed that Pinfold/Waugh was suffering from some form of paranoid schizophrenia, but learned that according to the Royal College of Psychiatrists:
Both author and protagonist describe alcoholic hallucinosis – a relatively rare complication of prolonged alcohol abuse which involves the development of psychotic symptoms. In heavy drinkers the disorder tends to occur in the tailing-off phase of a binge rather than on stopping completely, and is characterised by auditory hallucinations.
The self-parodying way in which Waugh unfolds the hilarity and humiliation of Pinfold’s journey belies the imaginable horror of his own experiences. Writing to his wife Laura from his own cruise he describes the “acute persecution mania” from which he is suffering and the discomfort of hearing malevolent voices repeating everything he has thought or read. By this point of his life Waugh had alienated himself from his friends and frittered away most of his money. Service as a Royal Marine in wartime, and supporting his second wife, six children, and an alcohol habit had taken its toll and, like Gilbert Pinfold, the voices heard at sea probably speak of a myriad of unconscious fears. For Pinfold there are questions about sexuality, religious belief, fascism, alcoholism, literary mediocrity, and a death wish. For Waugh we wonder to what extent these are shared.
This diagnosis would explain why the character of Pinfold is eventually cured of the hallucinations in concert with running out of his sleeping draught, and on the advice of his physician, not procuring more. That's pretty much the plot of it, it's a rather thin but enjoyable book, and even though Pinfold's experience didn't fill me with horror exactly, here are a few scenes that struck me for one reason or another. If they mirror actual hallucinations endured by Waugh, they reveal quite a bit about his subconscious mind.
A young woman believes she is in love with Pinfold and her family encourages her to go to him. Her father says--
"You'll not be my little Mimi ever again, any more after tonight and I'll not forget it. You're a woman now and have set your heart on a man like a woman should. The choice is yours not mine. He's old for you but there's good in that. Many a young couple spend a wretched fortnight together through not knowing how to set about what must be done. And an old man can show you better than a young one. He'll be gentler and kinder and cleaner; and then, when the right time comes you in your turn can teach a younger man -- and that's how the art of love is learned and the breed survives. I'd like dearly to be the one myself to teach you, but you've made your own choice and who's to grudge it you?...But for God's sake come on parade like a soldier. Get yourself cleaned up. Wash your face, brush your hair, take your clothes off."
A radio program on the BBC:
"Gilbert Pinfold," he heard, "poses a precisely antithetical problem, or shall we say? the same problem arises in antithetical form. The basic qualities of a Pinfold novel never vary and they may be enumerated thus: conventionality of plot, falseness of characterisation, morbid sentimentality, gross and hackneyed farce alternating with grosser and more hackneyed melodrama; cloying religiosity, which will be found tedious or blasphemous according as the reader shares or repudiates his doctrinal preconceptions; an adventitious and offensive sensuality that is clearly introduced for commercial motives. All this is presented in a style which, when it varies from the trite, lapses into positive illiteracy."
And a hint that Pinfold probably knew that, despite all efforts to find a reasonable explanation for the voices, they were an indication of sickness:
One night they tried to soothe him by playing a record specially made by Swiss scientists for the purpose. These savants had decided from experiments made in a sanatorium for neurotic factory workers that the most soporific noises were those of a factory. Mr. Pinfold's cabin resounded to the roar and clang of a factory.
"You bloody fools," he cried, "I'm not a factory worker. You're driving me mad."
"No, no Gilbert, you are mad already, " said the duty-officer. "We're driving you sane."
This conversation happens to Pinfold with flesh and blood people and makes me wonder if it actually happened to Waugh, and if it did, how ironic:
The (Scandinavian) woman now leant across and said in thick, rather arch tones:
"There are two books of yours in the ship's library, I find."
"Ah."
"I have taken one. It is called The Last Card."
"The Lost Chord," said Mr. Pinfold.
"Yes. It is a humorous book, yes?"
"Some people have suggested as much."
"I find it so. Is it not your suggestion also? I think you have a peculiar sense of humour, Mr. Pinfold."
"Ah."
"That is what you are known for, yes? Your peculiar sense of humour?"
"Perhaps."
"May I have it after you?" asked Mrs. Scarfield. "Everyone says I have a peculiar sense of humour too."
"But not so peculiar as Mr. Pinfold?"
"That remains to be seen," said Mrs. Scarfield.
"I think you're embarrassing the author," said Mr. Scarfield.
"I expect he's used to it," she said.
"He takes it all with his peculiar sense of humour," said the foreign lady.
"If you'll excuse me," said Mr. Pinfold, struggling to rise.
"You see he is embarrassed."
"No," said the foreign lady. "It is his humour. He is going to make notes of us. You see, we shall all be in a humorous book."
I include this scene because I wondered what Waugh had against Westward Ho!, though having not read it, and only guessing at which it is of the many books there are by that title, it intrigued me, made me giggle:
Mr. Pinfold fought back with the enemy's weapons (and) set out to wear them down with sheer boredom. He took a copy of Westward Ho! from the ship's library and read it very slowly hour by hour.
This scene is included only because it tweaked in me what Annie Dillard referred to as our own private astonishments (discussed in my review of her book For the Time Being and its relation to Zen, Drugs and Mysticism). Remembering his first time parachuting in the armed forces, Pinfold described the freefall thus:
(I)n that moment of solitude prosaic, Mr. Pinfold had been one with hashish-eaters, and Corybantes and Californian Gurus, high on the back-stairs of mysticism.
I enjoyed the way that The Ordeal Of Gilbert Pinfold ended. In what other manner could an author deal with such a trying experience?
Mr. Pinfold sat down to work for the first time since his fiftieth birthday. He took the pile of manuscript, his unfinished novel, from the drawer and glanced through it. The story was still clear in his mind. He knew what had to be done. But there was more business first, a hamper to be unpacked of fresh, rich experience—perishable goods. He returned the manuscript to the drawer, spread a new quire of foolscap before him and wrote in his neat steady hand
The Ordeal of Gilbert Pinfold
A Conversation Piece
Chapter One
Portrait of the Artist in Middle Age
Overall, this was an interesting look into a descent into madness (even if it was a temporary state brought on by a mix of alcohol and drugs), and also the protagonist's attempts to logically account for everything that's going on. There were many funny bits and the narrator of this audiobook made much of the material (the menace of Goneril was captured beautifully), but even though I went into this knowing that it was semi-autobiographical, I never felt a real connection to the characters or the plot. My only previous experience with Waugh was Brideshead Revisited, which I barely remember, but I would be willing to try him out again.
