‘The Ordeal of Gilbert Pinfold’: A Strange Tale of Madness
A review of ‘The Ordeal of Gilbert Pinfold’, by Evelyn Waugh; Chapman & Hall, 1957.
It is hard to write about madness. But some writers have done it well. In ‘The Yellow Wall-paper’, Charlotte Perkins Gilman relates a woman’s decline after her husband locks her away in a room. Brett Easton Ellis mocks yuppie culture through a violently insane banker in American Psycho. One could mention Fight Club, Crime and Punishment. One could even mention Hamlet.
But Evelyn Waugh’s The Ordeal of Gilbert Pinfold sticks out. It sticks out because it is particularly vivid, and it is vivid because it is based on an event from Waugh’s own life. It deals with an older writer, a stand-in for Waugh, who has trouble with his health and feels out of place in the world, finding modern life unbearable. His somewhat reckless response one day is to mix some drugs and drink to help him sleep and clear his head. He then boards a ship bound for Ceylon.
It deals with an older writer, a stand-in for Waugh, who has trouble with his health.
It perhaps goes without saying that Pinfold does not find the peace he seeks. Instead, he starts to hear voices. These are snide, mocking. And they seem to come from the other passengers. At first, Pinfold tries to ignore them; but this becomes increasingly hard. For the voices grow louder, the comments more personal. They call him a fraud, they claim he is keeping dark secrets. The voyage continues, but Pinfold is tortured by fear and doubt, unsure if what he is hearing is real or not.
Pinfold’s madness cuts him off from the others on the ship. It mirrors his general isolation from the world. As the voices grow louder and more insistent, Pinfold sinks deeper into himself, reminding us that loneliness is not dependent on bodily separation. The voices he hears are his own, played, as it were, at full volume: cruel, unceasing, charged with fear and guilt. Waugh reveals the truth of Satan’s claim in Paradise Lost: that ‘The mind is its own place, and in it self/Can make a Heav’n of Hell, a Hell of Heav’n.’ The psyche is frail, and our grip on reality is weaker than we think.
Pinfold’s madness cuts him off from the others on the ship.
But to a great extent, Pinfold causes his own pain. He has made himself vulnerable. For he has not made peace with the world in which he lives. Stuck in his ways, loath to adapt, vexed by change and scornful of its fruits, he thinks he is stronger than he is, strong enough to be, or at any rate to posture as, independent. ‘His strongest tastes were negative,’ writes Waugh. ‘He abhorred plastics, Picasso, sunbathing, and jazz — everything in fact that had happened in his own lifetime. The tiny kindling of charity which came to him through his religion sufficed only to temper his disgust and change it to boredom.’ And thenhe walls of that world close in, he cannot handle it.
Waugh’s prose is as cool and crisp as ever. (Clive James wrote somewhere that all of English writing peaks in Waugh’s style.) There is wit too. Waugh is too funny and clever not to let it show. But the mood of The Ordeal of Gilbert Penfold is chiefly sombre. Penfold’s madness is sketched with care, and we are drawn into his fear and confusion. The real and the imagined merge, so that often we do not know what is true and what is only true for Pinfold. Our unease builds as the story unfolds.
The mood of The Ordeal of Gilbert Penfold is mostly sombre.
It is a short story and a simple one, too, dealing only with Penfold and his eponymous ordeal. There are few subplots to distract us. We have the sense of being pulled into someone else’s nightmare and, powerless to end it, are forced to suffer with the dreamer and wait for deliverance. For Pinfold, there is no guarantee that the nightmare will end. By extension we too feel claustrophobic, trapped, far too aware of our human frailty.
This is a dark, strange tale about a man fighting his own mind. Waugh shows keen insight into human mental fragility. Though it is markedly different from his other work, The Ordeal is still a story that needs real skill to pull of, and reminds us why Waugh should be counted among our greatest-ever writers. Through Pinfold, Waugh shows us how thin the line between sanity and madness can be.
