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The Ordeal of Gilbert Pinfold: A Conversation Piece by Evelyn Waugh (1957)

‘Why does everyone except me find it so easy to be nice?’
(Mr Pinfold after an uncomfortable visit to his mother, in The Ordeal of Gilbert Pinfold)

As I’ve commented umpteen times while reviewing his oeuvre, Evelyn Waugh had a lifelong (fictional) interest in mental illness, with numerous of his characters going mad, having nervous breakdowns, becoming alcoholics, committing suicide or being locked up in asylums. The sequence came to a head in his 1957 novel, The Ordeal of Gilbert Pinfold, in which the protagonist undergoes a full-blown mental collapse and becomes subject to auditory hallucinations i.e. hearing voices, lots of voices, threatening with all kinds of violence and humiliation.

Terminology

‘Pinfold’ is a rare English word which means ‘a pound for stray animals, a fold, as for sheep or cattle, a place of confinement or restraint’ so for a while I thought it was an abstruse but apt word indicating the character’s confinement in his cabin and in his madness. But Selina Hastings’ biography of Waugh says it was the name of the Catholic family who originally owned Waugh’s country house at Stinchcombe in Gloucestershire.

Gilbert appears to be a reference to the popular Edwardian music hall song about a certain type of Edwardian dandy and ne’er-do-well (which, as it happens, is mentioned several times in the comic novels of Saki).

‘I’m Gilbert, the filbert,
The knut with the K,
The pride of Piccadilly,
The blasé roué.’

Waugh sub-titled Pinfold ‘a conversation piece’. This is the name of a specific genre of art. According the Tate website, a conversation piece is:

an informal group portrait popular in the eighteenth century, small in scale and showing people – often families, sometimes groups of friends – in domestic interior or garden settings. (Tate)

‘Small in scale’, well it is the shortest of Waugh’s novels. Most of them (apart from the bloated Brideshead Revisited) clock in around 240 pages in the Penguin editions. At 157 pages Pinfold is around 60% the usual length (which explains why the Penguin edition is bulked out with the post-war short story Tactical Exercise and novella Love Among The Ruins.)

Gilbert Pinfold

It’s a transparently autobiographical book, but with modifications. Gilbert Pinfold is a moderately successful novelist with 12 books to his name (like Waugh) turning 50 when the story begins. It’s interesting to read Waugh’s portrait of his character, presumably fairly self-portraying.

he had written a dozen books all of which were still bought and read. They were translated into most languages and in the United States of America enjoyed intermittent but lucrative seasons of favour. Foreign students often chose them as the subject for theses, but those who sought to detect cosmic significance in Mr. Pinfold’s work, to relate it to fashions in philosophy, social predicaments or psychological tensions, were baffled by his frank, curt replies to their questionnaires; their fellows in the English Literature School, who chose more egotistical writers, often found their theses more than half composed for them. Mr. Pinfold gave nothing away. Not that he was secretive or grudging by nature; he had nothing to give these students. He regarded his books as objects which he had made, things quite external to himself to be used and judged by others. He thought them well made, better than many reputed works of genius, but he was not vain of his accomplishment, still less of his reputation. He had no wish to obliterate anything he had written, but he would dearly have liked to revise it, envying painters, who are allowed to return to the same theme time and time again, clarifying and enriching until they have done all they can with it. A novelist is condemned to produce a succession of novelties, new names for characters, new incidents for his plots, new scenery; but, Mr. Pinfold maintained, most men harbour the germs of one or two books only; all else is professional trickery of which the most daemonic of the masters–Dickens and Balzac even–were flagrantly guilty.

Pinfold lives in Lychpole, a secluded village some hundred miles from London and some time is spent, in a leisurely civilised old fashioned way, describing the local gentry, most living in ‘reduced circumstances’ since the war and being: Colonel and Mrs. Bagnold, Mr. and Mrs. Graves, Mrs. and Miss Fawdle, Colonel and Miss Garbett, Lady Fawdle-Upton and Miss Clarissa Bagnold.

Pinfold’s Catholicism

Who knows whether this is how Waugh saw himself, but his portrait of Pinfold’s faith is shy and private.

The Pinfolds were Roman Catholic, Mrs. Pinfold by upbringing, Mr. Pinfold by a later development. 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. His trade by its nature is liable to the condemnation of the clergy as, at the best, frivolous; at the worst, corrupting. Moreover by the narrow standards of the age his habits of life were self-indulgent and his utterances lacked prudence. And at the very time when the leaders of his Church were exhorting their people to emerge from the catacombs into the forum, to make their influence felt in democratic politics and to regard worship as a corporate rather than a private act, Mr. Pinfold burrowed ever deeper into the rock.

Pinfold’s friends

But Mr. Pinfold was far from friendless and he set great store by his friends. They were the men and women who were growing old with him, whom in the 1920s and ’30s he had seen constantly; who in the diaspora of the ’40s and ’50s kept more tenuous touch with one another, the men at Bellamy’s Club, the women at the half-dozen poky, pretty houses of Westminster and Belgravia to which had descended the larger hospitality of a happier age.

Where Bellamy’s is the name of the fictional London gentleman’s club which features in many of Waugh’s fictions, not least the Sword of Honour trilogy which he was writing at the same time as Pinfold.

Grumpy old man

His strongest tastes were negative. 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. There was a phrase in the ’30s: ‘It is 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 always with disappointment how little of his life was past, how much there was still ahead of him.

A protective shell

In an earlier review I wrote of the practical usefulness of adopting the persona of a grumpy old man. Playing a predictable and grumpily humorous role means you never actually have to be yourself, never have to reveal your true feelings. It is fascinating and moving to read Waugh’s own description of this:

As a boy, at the age of puberty when most of his school-fellows coarsened, he had been as fastidious as the Bruiser and in his early years of success diffidence had lent him charm. Prolonged prosperity had wrought the change. He had seen sensitive men make themselves a protective disguise against the rebuffs and injustices of manhood. Mr. Pinfold had suffered little in these ways; he had been tenderly reared and, as a writer, welcomed and over-rewarded early. It was his modesty which needed protection and for this purpose, but without design, he gradually assumed this character of burlesque. He was neither a scholar nor a regular soldier; the part for which he cast himself was a combination of eccentric don and testy colonel and he acted it strenuously, before his children at Lychpole and his cronies in London, until it came to dominate his whole outward personality. When he ceased to be alone, when he swung into his club or stumped up the nursery stairs, he left half of himself behind and the other half swelled to fill its place. He offered the world a front of pomposity mitigated by indiscretion, that was as hard, bright and antiquated as a cuirass…

As a little boy he had been acutely sensitive to ridicule. His adult shell seemed impervious. He had long held himself inaccessible to interviewers and the young men and women who were employed to write ‘profiles’ collected material where they could. Every week his press-cutting agents brought to his breakfast-table two or three rather offensive allusions. He accepted without much resentment the world’s estimate of himself. It was part of the price he paid for privacy. (p.15)

A protective disguise, a front of pomposity – quotes worth bearing in mind when you read Waugh’s biography, letters or diary.

Structure

This short novel is divided into eight chapters:

  1. Portrait of the artist in middle-age (see the excerpts above)
  2. Collapse of elderly party (he becomes ill)
  3. An unhappy ship (hears voices on the cruise ship)
  4. The hooligans (hears voices of hoodlums threatening to break in and beat him)
  5. The international incident
  6. The human touch
  7. The villains unmasked — but not foiled
  8. Pinfold regained

2. Collapse of elderly party

The setup is straightforward. Pinfold has trouble getting to sleep and has been dosing himself for years with a sleeping draught which he dissolves in Crême de Menthe. In the evenings he drinks wine and brandy with dinner. He was fit in his 20s and 30s but now spends most of his day slumped in an armchair. He smokes cigars. He starts to suffer from insomnia, waking up, padding round, sleepily taking another draught.

Things take a turn for the worse when his joints begin to ache, specially his feet and ankles and calves. The local doctor, Dr Drake, prescribes some ‘rheumatism pills’, large grey pills, supposedly very strong. He takes both the sleeping draughts and pills in haphazard amounts, often far more than prescribed. He becomes clumsy. He becomes forgetful and cantankerous. He develops crimson patches on the back of his hands. His face turns an unhealthy purple colour.

And it is the depths of winter, freezing cold in the house so that he and his wife hunker down in just two rooms where they can afford to light a coal fire.

With the result that he becomes obsessed with getting away from this cold climate and taking a cruise to somewhere hot. Now it has been emphasised from the start that his wife is the practical one, who manages all the affairs of the small farm on their land. What’s more there’s been a period of litigation about land they let during the war and now want back. Managing all this means she won’t be able to come with him.

There’s a lot of peripheral detail about hassling the travel company in increasingly clumsy desperation and then going to see his mother, who he doesn’t get on with, at her house in Kew, to say goodbye, in a short-tempered fractious way which he regrets as soon as they leave. His wife packs for him since he’s become incapable of doing it himself. They stay overnight in a hotel in London where he struggles to cope, is too ill to go downstairs for dinner which is wife has by herself. Next morning she sees him to the train to the port. He can barely climb onto it. He drops his luggage. He keeps lighting cigars, forgetting about them and dropping them.

3. An unhappy ship

Finally he makes it aboard the SS Caliban, run by captain Steerforth, a basic steamer taking passengers to Rangoon and stopping at ports en route. It is not luxurious. There is no en suite, he has to share a bathroom. Plenty of plumbing and cabling is visible on the ceiling. He takes more of the pills and passes out of his bed.

Next morning he dressed and staggers to the captain’s table for breakfast, gets talking to the chap he shares a bathroom with, a Mr Glover, solid colonial chap who runs a business in Ceylon and plays golf. Glover tells him the passengers are a regular bunch, and all know each other.

Mr Pinfold begins to experience aural hallucinations. He thinks he can hear a jazz band playing from a wireless or gramophone. He can hear a dog barking. Waking in the darkness he can hear an entire evangelical church service being carried out somewhere beyond the bed. Worse, he overhears a vicar having a one on one interview with a sobbing schoolboy who he is counselling to stop masturbating.

At the next meal, when he mentions the dog and the jazz music and the church service to his neighbour, Glover, the latter has heard nothing. He struggles to stand up from the table. At after dinner drinks he suspects all the other guests of laughing at him. Or conspiring against him. Paranoia.

More hallucinations. He thinks he hears yells and roars from the deck above more suitable to a pirate ship. One of the black sailors appears to be injured. He hears the captain explaining to the passengers that he will be sent back to England and given the best medical treatment available. Then he hears the captain talking to a woman with a hard grating voice, telling her the injured sailor is actually being sent to a hellhole. Pinfold worries whether he should tell someone, but then the jazz music cuts in, deafeningly loud as if being played right there in his cabin.

Looking at the tangle of wires and cables on his ceiling he wonders whether they carry communications from all over the ship and have somehow gotten fused or damaged so that he can hear conversations (and music and religious services and confessions).

The days pass in a daze and the hallucinations become more florid, as lying on his bed in his cabin he hears a choral performance, or two old generals gossiping about him and how ‘tight’ he looks. He is oddly relaxed about all this, after all he has made a career out of gossip, or fictions about gossip:

The voices of the two old gossips faded and fell silent. Mr. Pinfold lay smoking, without resentment. It was the sort of thing one expected to have said behind one’s back–the sort of thing one said about other people. (p.57)

One morning he hears the Captain and a sadistic, harsh-voiced woman whom Pinfold nicknames ‘Goneril’, at first interrogating and then torturing one of the ‘coloured’ seamen. (‘Coloured’ in this context, appears to mean from India.) Presumably this scene of erotic torture, like the one with the schoolboy being questioned about masturbation, are straightforward Freudian projections of Pinfold’s own fantasies or repressed memories (?).

When the pair have apparently tortured the seaman to death, Pinfold hears the voice of a kindly nurse called Margaret, and then of the ship’s surgeon saying he only obeys orders and will record a natural death.

And then, for some reason, as if by magic, the pains in his legs and feet disappear. He is able to stand up straight and immediately goes for a joyful walk around the decks, feeling healthy and happy.

4. The hooligans

But the aural hallucinations do not desist. When he is dressing in his cabin he hears clear as day the voice of a literary critic Algernon Clutton-Cornforth really laying into his book on a BBC radio programme.

But the centre of this chapter is the arrival of new voices, a couple to teenage boys who he hears threatening to break down his cabin door and thrash him. They accuse him of being a Jew named Peinfeld. They accuse him of being a sodomite. They accuse him of stealing a moonstone and abandoning his mother to die a pauper. They blame him for the death of a neighbouring farmer back near his place in the country. He is an arriviste, the kind of man destroying the English countryside. The hooligans dance with hatred and anger, threatening to break his cabin door down and whip him to within an inch of his life.

But then they try the cabin door and announce it is locked. In reality, the door isn’t locked at all, and yet in the fantasy it is what prevents the fantasy from being disproved.

What gives the book its peculiar quality is the way that Pinfold, in the grip of his delusions, takes all this at face value and literally. At one point he hears the voice of an old general trying to calm the young hoodlums down and then, at the end of the fantasy, one of them goes off to be sick over the railings and then is comforted by the soothing voice of his mother. So far so fantastical. What makes it an odd mix of odd, funny or sad is that Pinfold then gets a copy of the passenger list and tries to figure out who this family could be, who the mother, who the old general, who the young thugs.

In the same way he is convinced that the scene he overheard in which the captain and the woman he nicknamed Goneril torture a steward, apparently, to death – he is convinced it was real.

All this gives rise to a sort of comedy, on the face of it the same kind of social comedy at which he excelled in the 1930s novels, when he finds himself at dinner with the captain, a drops a few heavy hints about stewards, and murder at sea, and disposing of bodies. The captain answers in polite generalities but the other guests at the table are puzzled, as you or I might be. But in Pinfold’s paranoia, he reads into their puzzled expressions the fear that they are all in on it!

Then the voices of the young women chatting about how they’re going to give him gifts to make up for the fright the young men have caused him. When he returns to his cabin, he of course finds nothing, but the girls voices urge him to look, look.

In the dining room the voices pursue him. In the lounge he hears the hooligans or the old generals or Margaret and her friend. Back in his cabin he hears a radio programme hosted by someone he knows where people read out letters from celebrities and, of course, they’re all from him, so he is forced from the cabin and to take strolls round the ship.

He continues his attempts to rationalise all these voices. Maybe it’s not a question of faulty wiring of the ship’s communications but maybe some of it is a play: that would explain the melodramatic aspects of some of the incidents, for example the torturing of the steward. Maybe it wasn’t the captain after all.

In a particular corner of the lounge he hears the lead hooligan and his father discuss the best ways to punish Pinfold for being such a beast, which include taking him to court. Bide your time, says the father. We’ll get him eventually.

5. The international incident

His hallucinations escalate. As they pass the straits into the Mediterranean Pinfold thinks he overhears the fact that the ship has been boarded by the Spanish navy and commanded to steam to Algeciras. The captain has refused and so the ship is becalmed while the matter is escalated to NATO and the UN. When he goes up on deck Pinfold is surprised to observe that there is no Spanish ship in sight (obviously it must be hiding below the horizon), nobody else has noticed any Spaniards, the ship appears to be steaming steadily East and the captain is calm and relaxed at dinner. Everyone is behaving as if nothing has happened. All very strange!

But as soon as he’s back in his cabin, the plot resumes and now Pinfold overhears the conversation between the captain and his chief officers. To his amazement he learns that the passenger who eats at a table by himself is a VIP government agent. It’s him the Spanish are after. What the captain proposes is that they will substitute Pinfold for the agent, pull him from his cabin, dress him similarly, stuff identical papers in his pockets and hand him over to the Spanish authorities. They’ll fake a tussle on the gangplank to the other ship as if trying to save him but in fact ensure that the Spaniards secure him and sail off. Apparently he has a wife and children but some story will be concocted to cover his disappearance.

Pinfold is a patriot so he’s happy to impersonate the agent, if the latter truly must be saved. but only if he’s consulted and asked in a formal way. He makes up his mind to confront the captain. He hears the Spanish corvette he’s to be transferred to coming alongside, hailing of crews, throwing of ropes, clattering of gangplank. Brave and determined, Pinfold leaves his cabin to confront the situation…

Only to find the corridor, the gangways and the decks utterly deserted. Nobody else in sight, no other ship, no gangplanks, no Spanish, no nothing. For a moment he is gripped by real, genuine, heart-stopping fear. Maybe he is going mad. Seconds later what you could call the secondary mind, the rationalising mind, takes over and he decides the Spanish spy scenario doesn’t exist, it’s true – because it was all concocted by the young hooligans! who have somehow taken over control of the radio apparatus and are playing hoaxes and tricks on him.

In this way his tortured mind establishes two levels of hallucinations, the ones which are real, and the trick ones being perpetrated by the hooligans.

6. The human touch

Margaret emerges as the kindly sister of one of the teenage hooligans. She is countered by ‘Goneril’, the tough woman who supervised the torture. In an anticipation of the final part of Unconditional Surrender Goneril accuses Pinfold of wanting to die, of going up on deck to throw himself overboard.

When he walks round the deck he thinks everyone is talking about him, judging him, accusing him of being gay, wearing make-up, being a religious hypocrite, drunk, impotent, a fascist blackshirt, involved in a scandal in the army, a communist, a Jew, a clapped-out author, on the scrapheap…and so it goes on.

But while most of the voices vilify him, one, Margaret’s, becomes more and more concerned and eventually declares she is in love with him. ‘Can they meet?’ he asks. ‘No’ she says, that would be against the rules. Later she returns chaperoned by her mother who insists that Pinfold declares his love for her daughter. But he can’t he says; he’s a married man. Pinfold gets fed up and calls the mother an old bitch. To his surprise, this makes her husband, the old colonel, burst out laughing. There’s an unnerving element of sex in her father’s talk, telling young Margaret that she needs an older man to induct her into the mysteries of sex.

All this develops into Margaret being undressed and clad in epithalamium weeds, while Pinfold goes through an array of emotions, recalling his promiscuous twenties (he frequented brothels abroad) through to his Catholic faith and then his fidelity to his wife. Nonetheless the expectation of a pretty pink nymph coming to his bed excites him, then she hesitates to come in, asks him to say something kind.

This passage really goes on and on, dragging out this scene where in his head he is preparing to seduce a teenage virgin.

Eventually he gets bored, puts his pyjamas on and gets into bed. As he’s drifting off, he thinks he sees the cabin door slip open for a second then shut; then hears Margaret’s voice wailing that she did, she did go to him but he was snoring, the General upbraiding him, saying the snoring was a sham. It’s because he’s impotent, ‘Aren’t you, Gilbert, aren’t you?’

7. The villains unmasked – but not foiled

Next morning he is determined to move cabin, but not before he hears a new scene, which is the telegraph officer reading out loud his messages to his wife (and earlier, when he was still in England) out loud to the group of bright young things associated with the jazz music.

Pinfold manages to confront the captain, accusing the telegraph officer of reading out his telegrams, saying he is the victim of all kinds of accusations and the ship’s communications are faulty since he can overhear conversations from all round the ship in his cabin. He asks to move cabin. The captain arranges it straightaway.

Back in his cabin the voices are sad to see him go. But the new cabin is no quieter. In fact the move escalates the number and location of voices. Everywhere he goes on the ship he hears voices., He becomes convinced it’s all being controlled by a young man from the BBC who came to interview him at Lychpole a few weeks before he left and who, he thinks, must have smuggled himself aboard with a voice projection device. It’s something to do with the wireless, the wire-less.

In a series of operations a carefully co-ordinated sequence of voices follow him round the ship or all its passengers take part in co-ordinated conversations against him as he passes. But the strategy is starting to wear thin. One night Pinfold confronts Angel, saying he knows who he is and what he’s trying to do.

And then he gains the upper hand. He writes a long letter home to his wife explaining that the BBC chap Angel is aboard with some kind of new-fangled device the Germans and Russians were working on during the war to project voices into people’s heads and soften them up for interrogation. He announces he has been persecuted since he’s been aboard so he’s going to leave the ship at Port Said and fly to Colombo.

He has his last dinner at the captain’s table and is civil to everyone. the voices in the cabin warn him that he can’t escape but he puts out the light and sleeps. On his way to the cabin he meets the dark-suited figure who had eaten apart and discovers he is Mr Murdoch, a northern industrialist. Murdoch is being collected by a company car and asks Pinfold if he would like a lift. Pinfold gratefully accepts.

the next day they are driven in the company car through a landscape Pinfold finds more heavily armed and warlike than during the Second World War, with barbed wire fences and checkpoints at repeated intervals from Port Said to Cairo. Pinfold experiences a wonderful sense of liberation of being free of the voices. But that night Murdoch takes him to dinner with business associates at Ghezira. But as Pinfold starts to mention a mutual friend (who is a lord) Goneril interrupts him. I.e. they have followed him.

8. Pinfold regained

So Pinfold flies on to Colombo but a reduced set of voices accompany him all the way and talk to him almost continuously, mostly hateful Goneril and lovely Margaret. Margaret now claims all the other male voices were done by her brother, Angel, who is a great mimic. And her brother is married to Goneril (Mr and Mrs Angel), so that’s how the three of them are linked.

In Colombo he writes a telegram to his wife explaining about the ‘box’ which is projecting the voices into his head but saying it’s mostly alright now. He meets an acquaintance from New York who invites him to go visit some ruins with him. Later in the day a telegram arrives form his wife imploring him to return home. Obviously, to her, his telegrams appear quite deranged. By now he is used to the voices. They witter on during that evening’s meal with the American, but no longer frighten or worry him. Now they just bore him.

He gets another telegram from his wife saying she’s flying out to join him but that decides him to return and he telegraphs her to that effect. One last day in Colombo, then by ship to Bombay, Karachi, past Aden and into the Med. Rome. Plane to Paris. The voices talk to him, wheedling and cajoling but he ignores them.

Finally Angel explains that it was all a scientific experiment which has gone badly wrong. When they get back to Blighty he will turn the box off and Pinfold will never hear from any of them again as long as he promises to tell no-one about the experiment, about his – Angel’s – role in it. But as the plane circles over London Pinfold refuses: he says Angel has behaved very badly and he is going to expose him.

He takes a car to the taxi where he and his wife always stay. It is all frightfully British. She has checked with a friend in the BBC and the Angel who came to interview at Lychpole has never been out of the country. She tells him they don’t exist. The voices he heard are only in his head. None of these people exist. And as she says it, Margaret agrees.

‘It’s perfectly true, darling,’ said Margaret. ‘I never had a brother or a sister-in-law, no father, no mother, nothing… I don’t exist, Gilbert. There isn’t any me, anywhere at all… but I do love you, Gilbert. I don’t exist but I do love… Goodbye… Love…’ and her voice too trailed away, sank to a whisper, a sigh, the rustle of a pillow; then was silent.

Pinfold tells his wife they’ve gone, and he knows, for certain, that they have, completely. She’d come to town with a view to getting him admitted to a nursing home. Now he says he just wants to go home. The pack bags, go to Paddington and catch the train home. He explains his sudden return to a few neighbours. Then spends whole evenings reliving the experience, telling his wife every detail, wondering about bits, for example why the attacks and criticism on him were so crude and generic when he himself knows much worse things he’s done.

It ends with him going to see the local doctor, not a very advanced thinker but in tune with Pinfold’s conservatism. He says it simply sounds like mixing the medicines did it. Has he stopped taking the grey pills? Yes. And have the voices stopped? Yes. Well, there you are then.

‘Those voices were pretty offensive, I suppose?’
‘Abominably. How did you know?’
‘They always are. Lots of people hear voices from time to time–nearly always offensive.’
‘You don’t think he ought to see a psychologist?’ asked Mrs. Pinfold.
‘He can if he likes, of course, but it sounds like a perfectly simple case of poisoning to me.’

Well, there you go. The voice of incurious English philistinism. It’s not much advanced on ‘then I woke up and it was all a dream’. Next day, after Mass, he settles himself in the library, spreads a new quire of foolscap before him and writes in his neat, steady hand the title of this book, The Ordeal of Gilbert Pinfold.

Thoughts

The auditory hallucinations are, apparently, closely based on what Waugh himself experienced.

It’s my (limited) understanding that psychotics often identify the problem with the latest gadgets or technology, through which they hear voices, often persecuting. Thus Pinfold for a long time thinking the voices he’s hearing are coming from the ship’s internal communications system which, in his delusions, he thinks, by a freak engineering accident, is audible in his cabin and at a certain place in the lounge.

Then he goes on to associate it more specifically with a new piece of technology accessed by Angel through his position at the BBC and brought with him aboard the ship. Or, later, being deployed against him from a distance. In other words the delusion of some kind of device being used to create the voices persists despite all the evidence to the contrary.

Slurs

Modern readers might bridle at the way some of his hallucinatory persecutors ‘accuse’ Pinfold of being a Jew or a homosexual. But at the time of writing casual antisemitism was still common in the kind of social circles Waugh frequented and homosexual acts were still a criminal offence. To be precise, the accusation that he’s Jewish is spoken not by him but by two foul-mouthed, angry hooligans threatening violence, And finally, these are only some of the accusations his unconscious hurls at him, which also include countless other insults as well (being a thief, abandoning his mother, being a snob, a fake, and so on), which are themselves only part of a florid array of scenarios (torture, murder, deflowering a virgin and so on) which his unconscious throw at him.

Aboard ship

One of the things which interests me most about Pinfold is the way it is set aboard a ship, on a cruise into the warm Mediterranean. It brings back all Waugh’s other descriptions of being aboard ship and sailing across the Med in Labels, Remote People, Black Mischief, Waugh in Abyssinia and Scoop. In all those books being aboard ship signified freedom and escape. But here the ship signifies the opposite, which is being trapped, ‘cabined and confined’.

But the setting aboard ship also solves a problem. If the episodes had happened at home it would have been pretty dull for the reader reading descriptions of his bedroom and landing and bathroom and so on. And his wife would have intervened in the first half hour to tell him it’s all nonsense and then send for a doctor.

So the setting aboard ship does at least four things.

  1. It is an unusual and exotic setting, unlike home.
  2. It means he doesn’t have the comforts of home, wife and doctor, who would damp down the incidents and stifle the narrative before it got started.
  3. Instead the comforts of home and familiar faces are replaced by the discomforts of a strange place which brings out and reinforces the disconcerting alienness of his experiences.
  4. Lastly – and given Waugh’s focus on social interaction, this may be the most positive reason for the setting – it provides a large cast with whom Pinfold can have comic misunderstandings and comic interactions.

Madness like being an author

There is an obvious literary interpretation which is that writing a novel is a little like being mad in the sense that you invent characters and everything they say and do. Some authors describe hearing their characters speak in their heads, many authors have reported that their characters become more ‘real’ and present to them than ‘real’ people. Many authors base their fictions on their own lives and freely incorporate not only their experiences but their feelings, feelings of guilt and regret and persecution. Well, Pinfold’s ‘madness’ can be seen as, in one way, only a small step beyond the cultivation of characters and voices which novelists practice as a profession.

Is that it?

Ultimately, this short novel has the same feel as his other longer post-war fictions, Scott-King’s Modern Europe and Love Among the Ruins. They feel like good ideas, which are professionally worked through and contain many pretty details and are written in a lovely clear prose style and yet…lack punch. Lack conviction or depth or real feeling. Maybe I ought to be moved by Pinfold’s plight but I am not, at all.

The Loved One is much funnier and the Sword of Honour trilogy is a magnificent achievement. Beside either of them, Pinfold feels shallow and, crucially, not, in the end, very entertaining. Presumably Waugh’s awareness of this is part of the reason he wittily sub-titled Pinfold ‘a conversation piece’, but conversation pieces are designed to be warm and charming. The opening chapter profiling Pinfold certainly has these qualities; but the extended portrait of a man suffering from paranoid hallucinations on a long sea cruise is, in the end, neither warm nor charming. The relationship with his wife never comes alive. In fact none of it really comes alive for me. It all feels somehow small.

And as to it being in the slightest bit useful or interesting as a depiction of actual mental illness, no. The ending when his doctor says, ‘Well, just don’t mix your medicines, old boy’, is dishearteningly bathetic. If you want to see how English prose can convey off-the-scale states of mental extremity, try reading Samuel Beckett’s novels The Unnamable (1953) or How It Is (1964), published while Waugh was alive but coming from a different galaxy altogether. Compared with them, Waugh’s novel reads like an odd but comforting children’s story.

Credit

The Ordeal of Gilbert Pinfold by Evelyn Waugh was published by Chapman and Hall in 1957. All references are to the 1984 Penguin paperback edition.

Related link

Evelyn Waugh reviews

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by Simon on January 14, 2022  •  Permalink
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Posted by Simon on January 14, 2022

https://astrofella.wordpress.com/2022/01/14/the-ordeal-of-gilbert-pinfold-evelyn-waugh/

For Your Eyes Only by Ian Fleming (1960)

Bond liked cheerful, expansive people with a zest for life. (p.146)

Five short stories. Four of them started life as plots for a TV series that was never made, indicating: a) how happy Fleming was to engage in popular culture, and b) how keen to monetise his creation. The hardback editions had a sub-title which seems to have been dropped from my paperback version – Five Secret Occasions in the Life of James Bond.

1. From a View to a Kill
2 For Your Eyes Only
3 Quantum of Solace
4 Risico
5 The Hildebrand Rarity

1. From a View to a Kill

Although he lost his virginity there on a wild night when he was 16 (p.6), Bond has cordially disliked Paris since the War. ‘One cannot drink seriously in French cafés.’ (p.5) Paris has been pawned to East Europeans, tourists, Germans. In his opinion, you can only actually see it properly for two hours between five and seven am; after that it is hidden by a thundering stream of black metal (p.8), ie monstrous traffic (and this is 1959!). Bond is feeling stale after a mission to extract a Hungarian from the East went wrong (the defector was blown up in a minefield).

Into Bond’s ennui bursts a car screeching to the pavement and a glamorous woman walking right up to his table. Turns out to be Mary Ann Russell from the service; there’s a flap on at Station F. Bond is driven there and briefed. A motorbike courier to SHAPE (Supreme Headquarters Allied Powers Europe) has been shot and his Top Secret documents stolen. Bond drives to the SHAPE headquarters in northern France, is greeted by the unhelpful American Colonel Schreiber in charge, and sets about interviewing everyone.

Slowly Bond puts pieces together and is particularly intrigued by the story of a group of gypsies who recently vacated a clearing along the Route Nationale where the cyclist was shot. Bond investigates and finds a suspicious-looking mound at the vacated site. He dresses in camouflage and returns to stake out the clearing. After a very long time, to his amazement, the mound divides in two and people come out of it: a motorcyclist dressed in NATO uniform, helped by two assistants. Off he drives, the assistants withdraw inside the secret hideaway, then the mound slowly closes up. Bond waits a long time then slips away.

Next day he borrows a NATO motorcyclist outfit and sets off on the morning run. He is not surprised when an identically-dressed motorbike courier cruises up behind him. Before the assassin can take a shot, Bond himself swerves his bike and shoots the baddie, who goes flying into a tree. Dead.

Bond motors to the clearing where NATO troops are waiting. When he enters with the bike, the mound opens as the assistants think it is their leader; but when he doesn’t reply to some question put in Russian, a fight breaks out. Shots are fired, Bond is jumped on by one of the baddies who pummels him to the ground and the baddie is making for his gun when a shot rings out and the baddie’s body goes flying. Bond looks up to see Mary Ann Russell striding among the soldiers, dressed in brown shirt and tight jeans, a smoking .22 pistol in her hand. Lucky, eh? And sexy.

This story is so silly it’s hard to know where to start. I sympathised with the notion of Paris ruined by traffic, and enjoyed descriptions of the cafés and geography of north Paris where Bond likes to stay. After that… nonsense.

2. For Your Eyes Only

Introducing a posh old couple, the Havelocks. Their family have owned one of the best estates in Jamaica for 300 years, given it by a grateful Oliver Cromwell to an ancestor who signed King Charles’s death warrant (just as Honeychile Riders’ ancestor was alleged to have done in Dr No, and just as falsely).

Out of the blue they are visited by three Hispanics, led by a Major Gonzales. They represent a businessman in Cuba who wishes to buy the property. Gonzales unzips airline bags which contain half a million dollars cash and offers to pay on the spot. Mr Havelock refuses and angrily tells the three to leave his property, at which Gonzales sighs, signals to his two assistants, who step forward and pump the Havelocks full of bullets. They return to their car, which is stolen, drive down to the bay and abandon it, take a dinghy out to a waiting yacht and sail away.

Cut to M briefing Bond in London. He is uncertain and shifty because he is personally involved: turns out he was best man at the Havelocks wedding in 1925. Gonzales is the hit man for an ex-Nazi, von Hammerstein, who’s made a fortune working for the Cuban dictator Batista’s Intelligence Service. Now it looks like Castro’s communists might take over, von Hammerstein, like others, is getting his money out of Cuba and investing in nearby property, ie in Jamaica. Now the same gang is intimidating the Havelocks’ daughter, Judy, into selling. What does Bond think?

Assassinate them, says Bond. M gives him the file marked ‘For Your Eyes Only’ which shows that von Hammerstein, Gonzales et al are holed up in a luxury ranch near a place called Echo Lake in Vermont, USA, up near the Canadian border.

Bond flies to Canada (he doesn’t like the new faster, bigger jets: less luxury, everything more cramped and rushed; it’s interesting that Fleming records these journeys in such detail just as luxury travel began to be degraded by the advent of mass tourism.)

Bond meets a security man from the Mounties, Colonel ‘Johns’, who humorously says this whole operation is off-the-record but they’ll give him all the help they can, before handing over maps, a hunting rifle and permits, directions, clothes, a hired car.

Bond drives off south, crosses the border into the States on foot, finds his way to the lakeside house – very nice – tests his sights, waits for sunrise except – a voice tells him not to move! A young woman dressed like an Amazon is pointing a bow and very modern steel arrow right at him. She is Judy Havelock and she has also come here to kill von Hammerstein, to avenge her parents, and if Bond gets in her way, she’ll shoot him too.

After some bickering they reach an agreement that Judy has first shot. The group of baddies come out to frolic in the morning sunshine, von Hammerstein an ugly, squat, hairy, pasty man, Gonzales a creepy Hispanic. The two goons have an impromptu competition to shoot empty champagne bottles thrown in the air, the winner gets a night with one of the two scantily-clad hookers who are fawning and simpering around them.

As von Hammerstein goes to dive off the edge of the quay into the lake a steel arrow shoots him through the heart. In a second Bond has shot dead one of the goons with his hunting rifle, then turns to the next one, misses, then hits. But all this has given Gonzales time to let off bursts of machine gun fire into the woods where Bond and the girl are hiding and then push over and hide behind a steel table on the lakeside lawn. After taking pot shots at each other, Gonzales makes a break for the house and Bond stands and nails him with one shot.

Then he finds Judy, wounded and bleeding, hit by one of the goons’ bursts of firing. Disappointingly, she has been transformed from no-nonsense Amazon into simpering girly. When they originally met and were bickering Bond said several times ‘This is man’s work’ and I was hoping she would humiliate him, somehow save him when he got into trouble and generally kick this saying back in his teeth. Alas, the narrative, Fleming and Bond all confirm the saying, as poor girly Judy now says she had no idea it would be so brutal and so horrible and, as Bond ties a tourniquet round her bleeding arm, allows him to kiss her, then kiss her again.

I enjoyed the banter and repartee with the Canadian Mountie, ‘Colonel Johns’, who sets things up for Bond, the working bond created between two professionals who know what each other are about. But the entire hit man storyline is morally dubious, and then the last minute ‘James you’re so manly!’ conversion of tough woman into fawning girl is as sick-making as the similar ‘sudden conversion’ ending of Goldfinger.

3. Quantum of Solace

This is the standout story of the collection, and in a different class from the others.

Bond has done a job in Nassau, capital of the Bahamas, a place he cordially dislikes because it is so disgustingly rich. The job was throwing firebombs into two ships carrying arms to Castro’s forces in Cuba. (Historical note: Castro’s communist forces officially overthrew Batista on January 1, 1959.) Now Bond’s just had to endure a gruellingly formal and dull dinner party at the Governor’s place, but the other guests – a Canadian natural gas millionaire and his chatty wife – have left and, over drinks, after a bit of chat, the Governor settles in to tell Bond a story.

The Governor was telling it in a rather elderly narrative style which gave it a ring of truth. (p.106)

It’s about a man the Governor was at Oxford with, ‘let’s call him Philip Masters’, who won a place in the Foreign Office and was posted to Nigeria. Very shy, troubled childhood (parents divorced, brought up by an aunt) he found happiness among the kindness of Nigerians. On a flight back to the UK he is strapped in and generally fussed over by a stunningly attractive air stewardess, Rhoda Llewellyn. By the end of his flight, he invites her for a date, one thing leads to another, and they get married. Then he is posted out to the Caribbean which is where the Governor ran into him again, in Bermuda.

Briefly, the wife slowly gets bored of being the wife of a colonial official, it’s not at all as glamorous as she’d imagined. They take up golf but she far outshines her husband and enjoys flirting with the men at the club. Eventually, the inevitable happens and she takes up with one of the rich young men in the fast set, son of a millionaire with his own speedboat etc. Doesn’t bother hiding it, brazenly open, demands a separate bedroom from her meek retiring husband, walks all over Masters, humiliates him in public.

The Governor calls Masters in for a meeting, tells him he’s getting a terrible reputation, says he’s packing him off to Washington for five months to handle trade negotiations, during which he must sort out his private affairs.

During those five months, while her husband is away, the millionaire playboy gets tired of Rhoda and, prevailed on by his parents, very publicly dumps her. Chastened and suddenly shunned by posh and smart society, she decides to change her ways and is ready to be meek and obedient when her husband returns. Unfortunately, Masters has also changed and returns utterly ruthless, focused and decisive. He announces he is divorcing her in one year. His private detective has gathered all the evidence required for a quick legal action. For that year their house will be partitioned in two so their paths never cross, he will never see her and, from this point onwards, never speak to her. She pleads, she begs, she breaks down in tears – he doesn’t relent.

By now Bond, despite himself, is genuinely hooked. And this is where the Governor introduces his theory: human relationships can be repaired and made to work as long as there is a bare minimum amount of affection between the partners, just enough warmth for communication to remain open – as long as there is a quantum of solace, the tiniest particle of warmth and sympathy. That gone, everything is gone.

So none of Rhoda’s pleading made any impact, the couple put up a diplomatic facade of man and wife for the rest of his posting, but had not a shred of affection. In his final week before Masters leaves for his next appointment – not taking her – Rhoda pleaded for some money to live on after he left and he rubbed salt in the wounds by grudgingly giving her the car and the radiogram (the house had been rented for the duration of his appointment). When she goes to the car dealer, after Masters had departed, she finds both car and radiogram were themselves hired and have outstanding bill on them, which she has to pawn her belongings to pay. Masters has systematically reduced her to poverty.

Rhoda carries on for a while, eking a living hanging round with the flash set at the golf club, being passed from one man to another until she has sunk to the level of being a sort of posh courtesan. Finally, one of her patrons, a lofty Lady who disapproved of all her behaviour but still pitied her, got her a job as receptionist at a hotel in Jamaica, where she moved, relieved to flee the Bahamas at last.

Throughout the narrative Bond has occasionally commented on the story or the Governor has paused so they can top up their drinks or light a cigar. Reminiscent of the many chaps-chatting-over-port-and-cigars frame narratives of Victorian and Edwardian times, found in Sherlock Holmes stories or, most famously, in the long after-dinner narrative which makes up Joseph Conrad’s novella, Heart of Darkness.

By this point in the story, the Governor and Bond have left the panelled drawing room and walked through the landscaped grounds down to the security gates. The pace of the frame narrative has been beautifully timed to accompany or bring out the detail of the main story.

It is here, at the gates, that the Governor turns and adds the conclusion of his tale. It was while working as receptionist that Rhoda made an impression on a rich guest, a millionaire from Canada. They got married and have been very happy ever since, Rhoda turning out to be the most devoted and loyal of wives.

And – in the unexpected, simple and breath-taking twist – the Governor reveals that this was the very couple who Bond had shared such a dull dinner with earlier that evening, the Canadian millionaire and his twittering wife.

Bond laughed. Suddenly the violent dramatics of his own life seemed very hollow. The affair of the Castro rebels and the burned out yachts was the stuff of an adventure-strip in a cheap newspaper. He had sat next to a dull woman at a dull dinner party and a chance remark had opened for him the book of real passion – of the Comédie Humaine where human passions are raw and real, where Fate plays a more authentic game than any Secret Service conspiracy devised by Governments. (p.128)

The Wikipedia article on this collection says one of the stories was a conscious homage to Somerset Maugham. Surely it is this one, with its leisurely, slow-paced account of human weakness, set against a civilised after-dinner frame story, reminding me of the urbane and brilliantly persuasive stories in Maugham’s own spy novel, Ashenden.

4. ‘Risico’

It’s interesting to see that herion smuggling was enough of a topical issue/concern in 1959 to base fiction on.

Bond is sent to Rome to contact an Italian heroin smuggler-turned-CIA-informant, Kristatos. Kristatos tells him the Big Man behind the smuggling into Britain is the padrone of the very restaurant where they’re eating, one Enrico Colombo. And sure enough we see Colombo a) eating his spaghetti like a pig b) conferring with his beautiful German concubine/assistant, Lisl Baum c) using gadgets hidden in a chair to record Bond and Kristatos’s conversation, during which K says he’ll break up the smuggling ring if Bond will kill Colombo. So Colombo discovers Bond is out to kill him. It’s all written so as to make us think Colombo is a Drax-Dr No style baddie.

Colombo and Baum then play act a massive row, complete with her throwing wine in his face, just as Bond is leaving the restaurant, so that Bond steps in as the English gent and offers her a lift in a taxi back to her hotel. This is a long enough journey for her to tell Bond she’s moving onto Venice tomorrow, and she’ll be sunbathing out on the beach of the Lido, if he fancies meeting.

So Bond takes the train (and is amusingly grumpy about the rudeness and discomfort of Italian trains), checks into a hotel, then goes out to the Lido. Here he traipses across the beach to find the almost naked blonde bombshell sunbathing, as promised. But barely have they started flirting before three goons in dark suits start approaching up the beach. Bond walks fast towards the village end of the strand in a bid to escape, but two of the men cut of at an angle across the spit of sand until BOOM! one of them is blown up – it is an abandoned minefield which the Italian authorities, typically, haven’t got round to clearing. Gruesome.

Meanwhile, Bond had arrived at the concrete sea-wall and was walking along it towards a group of fishermen and safety until – he realises the fisherman are all pointing their spearguns at him and the fat one in the middle is Colombo! They have just begun to have typical good guy-bad guy banter (‘So Mr Bond…’) when the third of the goons sneaks up behind Bond and knocks him unconscious with the hilt of his Luger.

Bond comes to in a ship at sea. The door is open and he goes on deck to find Colombo tremendously happy and chatty. In the TWIST or volta in the story, Colombo tells Bond that Kristatos is the one who is running the heroin smuggling operation into Britain. Sure, Colombo is a smuggler and a crook, but he absolutely refuses to touch drugs. Bond finds himself trusting the open, smiling, hearty man before him who gives him his gun back. Somehow they have become friends.

And – in what is becoming a routine revelation – it turns out the heroin which goes through the pipeline to Britain to hook and undermine the nation’s youth is supplied by Russia, from her poppy fields in the Caucasus. No matter how remote and fantastical the plot, somehow Fleming always manages to make SMERSH at the root of it.

Colombo explains that their ship is about to enter the harbour of Santa Maria, where they will find Kristatos’s gang of hired Albanian thugs loading massive rolls of newsprint (remember the massive rolls of newsprint towards the end of Moonraker?) onto a ship moored at the quay.

Colombo’s boat comes alongside and throws grappling hooks into the Albanian ship and the shooting starts immediately. Bond saves the day by shooting out the man in the warehouse who was using a machine gun on our boys, then dodges behind the warehouse to see Kristatos a) set off a boobytrap, which blows up the warehouse b) jump into his car and speed off. Third shot lucky, Bond shoots him in the back and the car careers out of control.

Bond is taken back onto Colombo’s ship with much back-patting and Italian gratitude for shooting the machine gunner in the warehouse. Now, the Italian assures him, this massive drug peddling pipeline has been closed down. To round things off, Colombo tosses Bond a hotel key: the key to the room of Lisl Baum – she’s waiting for him.

So he saves the day for England, makes a new foreign friend, and gets to sleep with the pretty blonde. Job done!

(P.S. The title ‘Risico’ is how Kristatos pronounces ‘risk’: so there’s an irony in Kristatos’s word being taken as the title, since the whole adventure turns out to be not just risky, but fatal for him.)

5. The Hildebrand Rarity

The story opens with Bond scuba diving in the Seychelles, and shooting a massive sting ray. Apparently, Fleming himself had scuba diving lessons in Jamaica from the legendary Jacques Cousteau, so knew what he was talking about – but the ability to convey the wonder and beauty of the underwater world is entirely his own.

Bond is in the Seychelles at the order of M to investigate alleged sabotage and infiltration by communist forces. He finds nothing to report on and is left with a week in hand, hence the diving. His local contact, Fidele Barbey, member of an influential local family, picks him up on the beach and says he knows Bond is bored and so has got him a few days helping out with the diving on the luxury yacht of an American millionaire who’s visiting the islands.

Bond takes an instant dislike to the millionaire, a rude and boorish man (of German descent) named Milton Krest, who insists on calling the galley the kitchen, the luxury yacht – the Wavekrest – ‘it’ (instead of ‘she’) and generally outraging all good naval traditions and Bond’s sense of the proprieties. Krest is rude about Britain, then about Europeans generally, before going on to insult the Seychellois.

Turns out Krest commissioned his yacht as a tax fiddle: he tells the US taxman it is engaged on ‘scientific research’ expeditions. To justify this he has to find and send back specimens to the Smithsonian Institute in Washington. He has already, crudely and corruptly, bought most of the specimens on the list he was given from local zoos and aquariums: all he needs now is the extremely rare Hildebrand Rarity.

Bond and Barbey are introduced to Krest’s (stunningly beautiful) English wife, Elizabeth, and the crew of hard-faced Germans, and then they set sail to remote coral islands where the Rarity was once sighted before the war.

Over dinner, Krest gets drunk, insults everyone and lets it be known that he not only verbally abuses his wife, but whips her with a dried-out stingray tail, which he calls ‘the Corrector’. Bond is fascinated by her craven ‘slave’ mentality, and the word slave recurs numerous times throughout the story, for although Krest routinely reduces her to tears, Elizabeth defends her husband to the others.

What must this woman have to put up with, this beautiful girl he had got hold of to be his slave – his English slave?… There was something painfully slavish in her attitude towards him. (pp.194-195)

The Wavekrest anchors off an isolated atoll and Bond and Barbey go snorkelling although, ironically, it is the shouting, can-do Yank, Krest, who actually spots the Rarity. He kills it – and everything else around it – by pouring a five-gallon drum of poison into the water. (Bond shows an unexpected but actually quite characteristic sensitivity about killing – murdering – all these beautiful innocent sea creatures, and describes their death throes in pitiful fashion.)

That night Krest gets more drunk than usual, abuses Bond and Barbey, tells his wife he’s going to beat her tonight, despite her tearful pleading to be ‘forgiven’ and, when he finds Bond out on the after-deck with her, for just a moment, threatens to kill Bond – or have him killed by his thuggish crew. As he walks drunkenly back into the main cabin, Krest’s silhouette looks like a baboon. Yes, he is a very bad man.

Resisting the temptation to beat the daylights out of him, Bond instead sleeps out on deck and hears Krest clamber drunkenly into his hammock several decks away. In the middle of the night he’s woken by the sound of choking and struggling. He gets to Krest’s deck to find the millionaire has been choked to death, with the Hildebrand Rarity rammed down his throat.

Bond coolly assesses this, the umpteenth scene of a violent death which he’s encountered in his career, and decides to fake the cause of death. He removes the fish and replaces it in its specimen jar in the main cabin, then carefully frays one of the ropes supporting Krest’s hammock, snaps it, and throws Krest’s body overboard. The best he can do to make it look like an accident.

Job done. Now Bond is intrigued to discover which of the other two did it: the wife has an obvious motive but Barbey is hot-blooded and was getting angry at Krest’s racist taunts over dinner. Next morning both turn out to have a lazy breakfast and sunbathe as if nothing had happened. Eventually Bond gets impatient and asks after their host, sparking a search, during which the crew discover the broken hammock, signs that the disoriented, drunk man may have fallen over the guard rail etc.

The crew are horrified and radio the authorities, but neither Mrs Krest nor Barbey are at all upset. Mrs Krest – lithe, beautiful bikini-wearing Mrs Krest – asks Bond if he will accompany her for the four-day cruise on to Mombasa. Suppressing  his suspicions that she is the murderer, Bond agrees. A man’s got to do what a man’s got to do…

The story features a very exotic location and the (then) luxury pastimes of snorkelling and diving; Fleming’s dislike of the vulgar rich, and of vulgar rich Americans in particular; along with an extended, if rather shallow, treatment of the sado-masochistic master-slave relationship, some superficial pondering why women stay with men who beat and abuse them. But all reconciled in the promise of four days of sexual pleasure with the said abused wife. And so a trite, sailing into the sunset wind-up.

You can see how the four treatments for TV episodes have the quick, violent action necessary for TV, the lack of depth and the cheap resolutions. As stories they are entertaining enough, but Quantum of Solace is in a class of its own.

Credit

For Your Eyes Only by Ian Fleming was published in 1960 by Jonathan Cape. All quotes and references are to the 2006 Penguin paperback edition.

Related links

Other thrillers from 1960

The Bond novels

1953 Casino Royale Bond takes on Russian spy Le Chiffre at baccarat then is gutted to find the beautiful assistant sent by London to help him and who he falls in love with – Vesper Lynd – is herself a Russian double agent.
1954 Live and Let Die Bond is dispatched to find and defeat Mr Big, legendary king of America’s black underworld, who uses Voodoo beliefs to terrify his subordinates, and who is smuggling 17th century pirate treasure from an island off Jamaica to Florida and then on to New York, in fact to finance Soviet spying, for Mr Big is a SMERSH agent. Along the way Bond meets, falls in love with, and saves, the beautiful clairvoyant, Solitaire.
1955 Moonraker An innocent invitation to join M at his club and see whether the famous Sir Hugo Drax really is cheating at cards leads Bond to discover that Drax is in fact a fanatical Nazi determined on taking revenge for the Fatherland by targeting an atom-bomb-tipped missile – the Moonraker – at London.
1956 Diamonds Are Forever Bond’s mission is to trace the route of a diamond smuggling ‘pipeline’, which starts in Africa, comes to London and then to follow it on to New York, and further to the mob-controlled gambling town of Las Vegas, where he wipes out the gang, all the while falling in love with the delectable Tiffany Case.
1957 From Russia, with Love Bond is lured to Istanbul by the promise of a beautiful Russian agent who says she’ll defect and bring along one of the Soviets’ precious Spektor coding machines, but only for Bond in person. The whole thing is an improbable trap concocted by head of SMERSH’S execution department, Rosa Klebb, to not only kill Bond but humiliate him and the Service in a sex-and-murder scandal.
1958 Dr. No Bond is dispatched to Jamaica (again) to investigate the mysterious disappearance of the station head, which leads him to meet up with the fisherman Quarrel (again), do a week’s rigorous training (again) and set off for a mysterious island (Crab Key this time) where he meets the ravishing Honeychile Rider and the villainous Chinaman, Dr No, who sends him through a gruelling tunnel of pain which Bond barely survives, before killing No and triumphantly rescuing the girl.
1959 Goldfinger M tasks Bond with finding out more about Auric Goldfinger, the richest man in England. Bond confirms the Goldfinger is smuggling large amounts of gold out of the UK in his vintage Rolls Royce, to his factory in Switzerland, but then stumbles on a much larger conspiracy to steal the gold from the US Reserve at Fort Knox. Which, of course, Bond foils.
1960 For Your Eyes Only (short stories) Four stories which started life as treatments for a projected US TV series of Bond adventures and so feature exotic settings (Paris, Vermont, the Seychelles, Venice), ogre-ish villains, shootouts and assassinations and scantily-clad women – but the standout story is Quantum of Solace, a conscious homage to the older storytelling style of Somerset Maugham, in which there are none of the above, and which shows what Fleming could do if he gave himself the chance.
1961 Thunderball Introducing Ernst Blofeld and his SPECTRE organisation who have dreamed up a scheme to hijack an RAF plane carrying two atomic bombs, scuttle it in the Caribbean, then blackmail Western governments into coughing up $100,000,000 or get blown up. The full force of every Western security service is thrown into the hunt, but M has a hunch the missing plane headed south towards the Bahamas, so it’s there that he sends his best man, Bond, to hook up with his old pal Felix Leiter, and they are soon on the trail of SPECTRE operative Emilio Largo and his beautiful mistress, Domino.
1962 The Spy Who Loved Me An extraordinary experiment: an account of a Bond adventure told from the point of view of the Bond girl in it, Vivienne ‘Viv’ Michel, which opens with a long sequence devoted entirely to her childhood in Canada and young womanhood in London, before armed hoodlums burst into the motel where she’s working on her own, and then she is rescued by her knight in shining armour, Mr B himself.
1963 On Her Majesty’s Secret Service Back to third-person narrative, and Bond poses as a heraldry expert to penetrate Blofeld’s headquarters on a remote Alpine mountain top, where the swine is carrying out a fiendish plan to use germ warfare to decimate Britain’s agriculture sector. Bond smashes Blofeld’s set-up with the help of the head of the Corsican mafia, Marc-Ange Draco, whose wayward daughter, Tracy, he has fallen in love with, and in fact goes on to marry – making her the one great love of his life – before she is cruelly shot dead by Blofeld, who along with the vile Irma Bunt had managed to escape the destruction of his base.
1964 You Only Live Twice Shattered by the murder of his one-day wife, Bond goes to pieces with heavy drinking and erratic behaviour. After 8 months or so M sends him on a diplomatic mission to persuade the head of the Japanese Secret Service, ‘Tiger’ Tanaka to share top Jap secret info with us Brits. Tiger agrees on condition that Bond undertakes a freelance job for him, and eliminates a troublesome ‘Dr Shatterhand’ who has created a gruesome ‘Garden of Death’ at a remote spot on the Japanese coast. When Bond realises that ‘Shatterhand’ is none other than Blofeld, murderer of his wife, he accepts the mission with gusto.
1965 The Man With The Golden Gun Brainwashed by the KGB, Bond returns from Japan to make an attempt on M’s life. When it fails he is subjected to intense shock therapy at ‘The Park’ before returning fit for duty and being dispatched to the Caribbean to ‘eliminate’ a professional assassin, Scaramanga, who has killed half a dozen of our agents as well as being at the centre of a network of criminal and political subversion. The novel is set in Bond and Fleming’s old stomping ground, Jamaica, where he is helped by his old buddy, Felix Leiter, and his old secretary, Mary Goodnight, and the story hurtles to the old conclusion – Bond is bettered and bruised within inches of his life – but defeats the baddie and ends the book with a merry quip on his lips.
1966 Octopussy Three short stories in which Bond uses the auction of a valuable Fabergé egg to reveal the identity of the Russians’ spy master in London; shoots a Russian sniper before she can kill one of our agents escaping from East Berlin; and confronts a former Security Service officer who has been eaten up with guilt for a wartime murder of what turns out to be Bond’s pre-war ski instructor. This last short story, Octopussy, may be his best.

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by Simon on May 16, 2016  •  Permalink
Posted in Adventure, Books, Sex, Short stories, Spy novel, Thriller
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Posted by Simon on May 16, 2016

https://astrofella.wordpress.com/2016/05/16/for-your-eyes-only-ian-fleming/

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