Self-inflicted Satire

THE ORDEAL OF GILBERT PINFOLD (232 pp.)--Evelyn Waugh--Little, Brown ($3.75).

In the dozen novels that comprise his resounding theater, Evelyn Waugh has beaten the stylish stuffing out of a fantastic troupe of highly comic puppets. For his latest book, Waugh has retired momentarily to the wings to inflict upon himself the special punishment of the aging entertainer--a hard, self-appraising look in the dressing-room mirror.

The Ordeal of Gilbert Pinfold tells the story of a character admittedly like Waugh himself--fiftyish, a successful novelist, Tory, Roman Catholic, snobbish, a connoisseur of manners and wine, member of a first-class club and old boy of a second-class public school.*

Pinfold, at the moment, is cracking up. Nothing serious, of course; it is just that a neighbor, Reggie Graves-Upton, has come into possession of a box designed (like Wilhelm Reich's "orgone box"--TIME, June 4, 1956) to measure "Life-Waves." Pinfold gets the odd notion that Graves-Upton's box is measuring him. He imagines things, and Mrs. Pinfold presently decides that her husband needs a long sea voyage to cure him of "the fashionable agonies of angst."

All at Sea. Aboard the S.S. Caliban, bound out of Liverpool for Rangoon, things get worse. The lascar stewards curse foully--yet only Pinfold seems to hear. Something, he thinks, is wrong with the ship's ventilating gear; by some acoustic or electrical freak, he hears conversations, snatches of music, and a dog snuffling in the night. Then he somehow listens to an obscene lecture on sex by some evangelical clergyman (though none appears on the passenger list). New voices make themselves heard. They become menacing and are well-informed on Pinfold's private affairs:

"Lord of the Manor of Lychpole" (Waugh himself lives in a stately house called Piers Court).

"I thought he was a Catholic. They aren't allowed to commit suicide, are they?"

"That wouldn't stop Pinfold. He doesn't really believe in his religion, you know. He just pretends to because he thinks it aristocratic. It goes with being Lord of the Manor."

Torture by Radio. Other voices make sinister suggestions that Pinfold is a Communist and a pansy, and that he caused the suicide of a tenant and a brother officer during the war. The voices are heard composing a petition to have Pinfold removed from the captain's table.

Most horrifying of all (to a novelist), Pinfold hears a man called Clutton-Cornforth reviewing his books on the BBC: "The basic qualities of a Pinfold novel . . . may be enumerated thus: conventionality of plot; falseness of characterization; morbid sentimentality; gross and hackneyed farce alternating with grosser and more hackneyed melodrama; cloying religiosity."

Pinfold clearly cannot take much more of this punishment; he begins to behave oddly in front of the other passengers and to send enigmatic messages to his wife. But he still struggles on against his ghostly tormentors, who possess "a huge but incomplete and wildly inaccurate dossier covering the whole of Mr. Pinfold's private life." Then, as suddenly as they began, the voices cease. He had been taking sleeping draughts, and when he stopped, the voices stopped too.

"Poisoning," his doctor at home briskly diagnoses. Despite some lingering fears that he was the victim of an electronic trick by a BBC man called Angel (who may or may not have worn a beard), or had become the subject of diabolic possession, Pinfold settles back happily to a quiet novelist's life.

Inner Reality. This, probably the most offbeat novel of the season, and certainly Waugh's strangest, gains much of its quality from Waugh's rare knack of creating character and situation with the flick of a few words of dialogue. His ability to give airy nothings a local habitation and a name is untouched by the delusory subject matter. There is reality amid the hallucinations. Many standard Waugh phobias, e.g., journalists, book reviewers, evangelical clergymen, may be identified. In a prefatory note, the publishers state: "Three years ago Mr. Waugh suffered a brief bout of hallucination closely resembling what is here described . . . Mr. Waugh does not deny that 'Mr. Pinfold' is largely based on himself . . . Since his disconcerting voyage he has learned that a great number of people suffer in this way from time to time. He believes this record may amuse them."

The story has a happy ending, with Pinfold cured of his voices and setting about making a narrative of his odd delusions. He resolves to return later to the unfinished novel on which he had been working. Devoted Waugh-mongers can only hope that this is really autobiographical. It is almost 16 years now since Waugh published a portion of My Father's House in the defunct highbrow review Horizon.

That sample gave promise of being up to the level of early-vintage Waugh. For all its high curiosity value, The Ordeal of Gilbert Pinfold is hardly that. It may even remind some readers of the story of the man who complained to his doctor not so much because he had the habit of talking to himself, but that he was such a damned bore. Fortunately, Pinfold's voices were scripted by a novelist who may be many things, but never a bore.

*Waugh, 53, is a member of exclusive White's as well as Pratt's and St. James'. His school: Lancing.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.