All posts tagged Conversation piece

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/

Joshua Reynolds: The Life and Times of The First President of the Royal Academy by Ian McIntyre (2003)

Sir Joshua Reynolds (1723-1792) was one of – if not the – leading English painter of the 18th century. He specialised in portraits, painting about 2,000 of them during a long and busy professional career, as well as 200 ‘subject pictures’, and over 30 self-portraits.

Self-portrait by Sir Joshua Reynolds (1780) Note the bust of Michelangelo, the Rembrandtesque hat, and the text of one of his Discourses folded in his hand © Royal Academy of Arts

Reynolds promoted a ‘Grand Style’ in painting which was less interested in visual or psychological accuracy to his sitters than in placing them in idealised and heroic poses and settings. He was known – and criticised – for pinching aspects from the Old Masters – poses, tints, props, tricks of lighting and so on.

So when you look at this painting – of Reynolds’s lifelong friend, the successful actor David Garrick – you see that not only is he caught between the two allegorical figures representing Comedy and Tragedy, but that the figures are each painted in different styles – the figure of Comedy on the left in a flirty rococo style of Correggio, the figure of Tragedy is done in a consciously ‘antique’ or neo-classical style reminiscent of Guido Reni, dressed in Roman robes with a stern profile – and Garrick in the middle, is wearing a historical costume reminiscent of van Dyck but his face is done in an unashamedly realistic or figurative style.

David Garrick Between Tragedy and Comedy by Joshua Reynolds (1760)

Reynolds was a founder and first president of the Royal Academy of Arts. He gave an inaugural lecture and this soon settled into an annual – later, biannual – lecture or ‘discourse’. At the end of his life these were published together as 20 or so Discourses about art, which were influential for decades afterwards.

The biography

Ian McIntyre’s biography of Sir Joshua Reynolds is a big book, weighing in at 608 pages, including index and notes (542 pages of actual text). What makes it hugely enjoyable is the way McIntyre very deliberately widens its scope to become a portrait of the age. Not a page goes by without entertaining and often amusing digressions away from the basic chronology of events.

For example, before we’re ten pages in we’ve had a whistlestop history of Devon and the town Reynolds was born in, Plympton, from Roman times to his birth in 1723. There’s an interesting explanation of the medieval and Renaissance tradition of Emblem Books and in particular the work of Jacob Cats, little known in this country but hugely influential on the continent. A little detour into the life of a well-known gypsy of the early 18th century, Bamfylde Carew. And so on.

The book is packed with footnotes, often as many as six on a page, giving biographical snapshots of every single person Reynolds comes into contact with, reads or meets or writes to or mentions, often with a bit of background about their achievements in art or literature – Reynolds cultivated friendships with the leading writers of the time – or, quite often, the wars or battles they were involved in, as a) Reynolds painted a large number of military and naval personnel and b) Britain was almost continually at war throughout the 18th century.

This blizzard of contextual information is partly explained because, as McIntyre candidly points out, we don’t actually know all that much about Reynolds’s life. We know he went to Italy to study the Old Masters for an extended stay from ages 25 to 27 (1750-52). Then he returned to London, set up a studio, and quickly became very successful. We have annual business ‘pocketbooks’ he kept, and these are packed full of appointments with sitters, practical notes about rents and paints and canvas and shopping (p.94). We have the accounts and minutes of the Royal Academy which he set up and ran from 1768 till his death in 1792, the Discourses he published to the world – the written version of the lectures he delivered at the Academy – and numerous descriptions of him in the diaries and letters of contemporaries – but not much more.

Reynolds didn’t keep a diary or interesting notes and thoughts about art which contain breath-taking insights and ideas. He never married, and so didn’t have either a wife or children to write memoirs about him. He doesn’t appear to have had affairs, or if he did they were kept very secret (the issue is discussed on p.85). His sister, Fanny, was his housekeeper for 25 years, followed by a niece.

Er, that’s about it in terms of a ‘personal’ life.

`So in a way McIntyre’s strategy of padding out the story with reams and reams of information about pretty much everyone else alive at the time was a necessity – a factual account of just Reynolds’s life would be quite sparse. Still, McIntyre’s encyclopedic approach makes for a highly enjoyable account.

As does his rangy, slangy style. He is at pains to emphasise that he is not a stuffy art critic, he’s one of the boys:

  • Then, brushing away a crocodile tear, he [an anonymous critic] put the boot in. (p.319)
  • Reynolds was taking a fair amount of stick in the press… (p.320)

18th century artists

Thus McIntyre doesn’t just place Reynolds in the 18th century art world – he introduces us to quite an intimidating number of 18th century artists, starting with Reynolds’s predecessors in Britain, referencing leading contemporary painters in France and Italy, and then a host of other contemporary painters – the famous, the not so famous, and the downright obscure. They include – and this list excludes all the many sculptors:

  • Sir Godfrey Kneller (1646 – 1723) leading portraitist of his time
  • Francesco Solimena (1657 – 1747) leading Italian painter of the Baroque
  • Jonathan Richardson (1667 – 1745) whose book, An Essay on the Theory of Painting inspired young Reynolds
  • Joseph Highmore (1692-1780)
  • William Hogarth (1697-1764) leading English artist, caricaturist and printmaker
  • Jean-Baptiste-Siméon Chardin (1699 – 1779) ‘the other great middle-class painter of the century’ specialising in quiet domestic scenes, in contrast to either grand historical paintings, or pink and blue rococo
  • John Shackleton (? – 1767) Principal ‘Painter in Ordinary’ to George II and George III
  • Thomas Hudson (1701-1779) Reynolds was apprenticed to him
  • Francesco Zuccarelli (1702 – 1788) Italian landscape painter from Venice
  • Jean-Étienne Liotard (1702 – 1789) French portraitist working mainly in pastel
  • Francis Hayman (1708 – 1776)
  • Arthur Devis (1712 – 1787) started as landscape artist, then portraits of members of pro-Jacobite Lancashire families, then portraits of London society
  • Allan Ramsay (1713 – 1784) rising star arrived in London from Rome in 1738, painted the definitive image of the coronation of King George III and a stream of royal commissions
  • Claude-Joseph Vernet (1714 – 89) landscape and marine painter
  • Richard Wilson (1714 – 82) ‘the classic master of British 18th century landscape painting’
  • Henry Robert Morland (1716 – 1797) Young woman shucking oysters
  • Richard Dalton (1720 – 91)
  • Katherine Read (1721-1778) Scottish portrait painter
  • John Astley (1724 – 1787) portrait painter
  • George Stubbs (1724 – 1806) English painter of horses
  • Francis Cotes (1726 – 1770) pioneer of English pastel painting
  • Thomas Gainsborough (1727 – 1788)
  • Anton Raphael Mengs (1728 – 1779) German artist, precursor of neo-classicism
  • Charles Catton (1728 – 98) coach painter to George III
  • George Barrett Senior (1732 – 1784) Irish, leading contemporary landscape painter
  • Jean-Honoré Fragonard (1732 – 1806) late Rococo painter of remarkable facility, exuberance, and hedonism
  • Robert Edge Pine (1730 – 1788)
  • George Romney (1730 – 1802) portrait painter in the Reynolds / Ramsay league
  • Sawrey Gilpin (1733 – 1807) English animal painter, illustrator and etcher who specialised in painting horses and dogs
  • Johann Zoffany (1733 – 1810) German neo-classical painter
  • Joseph Wright (1734 – 1797) to become Wright of Derby
  • Jeremiah Meyer (1735 – 1789) Painter in Miniatures to Queen Charlotte, Painter in Enamels to King George III
  • John Singleton Copley (1738 – 1815) Anglo-American painter, active in both colonial America and England
  • Benjamin West (1738 – 1820) first American artist to visit Rome, settled in London as a painter of historical scenes, early pioneer of neo-classicism
  • Nicholas Pocock (1740 – 1821) master of a merchant ship aged 26, he became a noted painter of naval battles
  • Ozias Humphry (1740 – 1810) a leading English painter of portrait miniatures, later oils and pastels
  • Angelica Kauffman (1741 – 1807) history painter and portraitist
  • Ozias Humphrey (1742 – 1810) a leading English painter of portrait miniatures, later oils and pastels
  • Mary Moser (1744 – 1819) English painter specialised in flowers
  • Philip Reinagle (1749 – 1833) pupil of Allan Ramsey, specialised in hunting pictures – Members of the Carrow Abbey Hunt
  • Robert Smirke (1753 – 1845) English painter and illustrator, specialising in small paintings of literary subjects
  • James Gillray (1756 – 1815) British caricaturist and printmaker
  • Thomas Rowlandson (1757 – 1827) English artist and caricaturist of the Georgian Era
  • Maria Cosway (1760 – 1838) Italian-English artist and educationalist
  • John Opie (1761 – 1807) English painter of historical subjects and portrait, took London by storm in 1781
  • Thomas Phillips (1770 – 1845) leading English portrait painter of the day, notable for portraits of William Blake and Lord Byron
  • Benjamin Haydon (1786 – 1846) British painter who specialised in grand historical pictures,

As with many of McIntyre’s digressions about contemporary figures, I found it well worth taking a few minutes to look up each of these painters. I was particularly drawn to some of the pictures of Jean-Étienne Liotard who I’d never heard of before.

The Chocolate Girl by Jean-Etienne Liotard (1744)

Provenances

An interesting aspect of Reynolds’s career is the number of portraits which have gone missing or are disputed. That the authorship of works of art can be disputed is significant: it shows you that, when the provenance of a painting is crystal clear, then the experts can confidently pontificate about its distinctive composition and style; but where there is no signature of clear history of ownership, where the authorship is disputed, then style and composition are not enough to determine the identity of the painter. Take this portrait of a black man.

Portrait of an African by Allan Ramsay (1757-60)

It is instructive to learn that it was once thought to be a portrait of Olaudah Equiano and painted by Joshua Reynolds, but is now generally accepted to a portrait of the young Ignatius Sancho painted by the Scottish painter, Allan Ramsay. The point being that the ‘house style’ of 18th century portrait painters was so similar, overlapped at so many points, that even experts can’t tell them apart.

Destructions

McIntyre’s book is extremely thorough. He documents the sitters and the painting sessions for what seems like every one of Reynold’s nearly two and a half thousand paintings. But a theme which emerges is the dismayingly large number of paintings which have been lost or destroyed, by Reynolds:

  • Portrait of Lady Edgcumbe – destroyed by bombing during Second World War
  • Portrait of Thomas Boone – untraced
  • Portrait of Jane Hamilton – untraced
  • Portrait of Mrs Baddeley – untraced
  • Portrait of Alexander Fordyce – untraced
  • Portrait of Elizabeth Montagu – untraced

No fewer than nineteen works by Reynolds were destroyed in a disastrous fire at the family seat of the Dukes of Rutland, Belvoir Castle in Grantham, Leicestershire, in 1816 (in which also perished works by Titian, Rubens and Van Dyck).

Or other artists of the day:

  • Benjamin West’s Cimon and Iphigenia and Angelica and Medoro – untraced

Which gives rise to a meta-thought: I wonder what percentage of all the paintings ever painted, still exist? Half? A quarter? To put it another way – how much of all the art ever created has been ‘lost’?

[The beginnings of an answer are given in Peter H. Wilson’s vast history of the Thirty Years War where he writes that Dutch artists produced several million paintings in the 16th and 17th centuries combined – ‘of which perhaps 10 per cent survive‘ (p.816). 10% – is that a good working guesstimate?]

Miscellaneous notes

Reynolds’s first studio was at 5 Great Newport Street, in London’s West End. It was on the edge of the country, with a good sized garden both behind and in front (inconvenient in rainy weather since rich people’s carriages couldn’t park right outside the door, p.119). His rival, Allan Ramsay (1713 – 84) lived round the corner in Soho Square.

In 1760 he moved to a house on the west side of Leicester Fields, later Leicester Square. The Prince of Wales kept a big house dominating the north side. Hogarth had lived since 1733 in a house on the east side.

Reynolds’s style is considered ‘more masculine and less ornamental’ than that of his main rival, Allan Ramsay, who was therefore generally thought to be the better painter of women portraits (p.117).

Penny-pinching Reynolds was careful with money. Anecdotes abound. He got up early to visit the fishmarket to select the best value fish then returned home with detailed instructions to his servant about which ones to buy. He made a fuss about the value of an old mop (p.122)

Vandal Reynolds was fantastically disrespectful of old paintings. Apparently, he stripped back layer by layer of paint to see how they had been painted, a number of Venetian paintings and one by Watteau – stripped them right down to the canvas until he had utterly destroyed them (p.239).

Factory production None of your romantic waiting-for-inspiration nonsense, 18th century painters painted to order and commission and on an awesome scale. Allan Ramsay’s portraits of George III and Queen Charlotte dressed for his coronation (1761) was so popular that his studio i.e. assistants, produced no fewer than one hundred and fifty pairs of the paintings to meet the market; buyers including members of the royal family, sovereigns, heads of state, colonial governors, ambassadors, corporations, institutions and courtiers.

Knock ’em out, pile ’em high was the watchword. When one aristocratic sitter offered to come for an additional sitting so that Reynolds could have a session devoted to her hands (of which she was very proud) Reynolds casually told her not to bother as he normally used his servants as models for hands (p.137). (This chimes with the revelation in James Hamilton’s book that Gainsborough generally painted the entire body of his sitters from models, often his wife or grown-up daughters.)

Anti-romanticism

It has been the fate of arts to be enveloped in mysterious and incomprehensible language, as if it was thought necessary that even the terms should correspond to the idea entertained of the instability and uncertainty of the rules which they expressed.

To speak of genius and taste as any way connected with reason or common sense, would be, in the opinion of some towering talkers, to speak like a man who possessed neither, who had never felt that enthusiasm, or, to use their own inflated language, was never warmed by that Promethean fire, which animates the canvas and vivifies the marble.

If, in order to be intelligible, I appear to degrade art by bringing her down from her visionary situation in the clouds, it is only to give her a more solid mansion upon the earth.  It is necessary that at some time or other we should see things as they really are, and not impose on ourselves by that false magnitude with which objects appear when viewed indistinctly as through a mist. (Discourse 7)

No good at drawing Reynolds was acknowledged to be more interested in colour and tone than in drawing and design. He himself confessed he wasn’t too strong on anatomy. One of the hardest parts of pure figure drawing is hands and Reynolds’s sitters hands are often ungainly, stylised or hidden. He wasn’t too bothered about strict visual accuracy:

The likeness consists more in taking the general air, than in observing the exact similitude of every feature. (quoted on page 127)

‘Flying colours’ Throughout his career Reynolds experimented with materials that make an oil painting, incorporating at one time or another, asphalt, wax, charcoal, experimenting with non-traditional types of key colours such as incarnadine for red. This was often disastrous, as scores of anecdotes testify, the painter Benjamin Haydon just one who was sharply critical of his over-treatment of his paintings (quoted page 282).

One painting, being carried to its patron, was knocked in the street and the entire creation simply slid off the canvas and onto the street. Many others complained that the colours changed. The sky in Admiral Barrington’s portrait changed from blue to green within months of receiving it (p.362). Hence his reputation for ‘flying colours’ and many burlesques and parodies about them.

Rich As a result of his astonishing industry, Reynolds was by 1762 making £6,000 a year (p.141). By way of comparison, the homely parson in Goldsmith’s The Deserted Village has a stipend of:

A man he was, to all the country dear,
And passing rich with forty pounds a year.

By about 1780 it cost 50 guineas for a ‘head’, 70 guineas for a ‘half length’, 200 guineas for a full length (p.361).

Reynolds’s deafness In Rome in 1751 Reynolds suffered a heavy head cold which left him partially deaf. For the rest of his life he carried about an ear trumpet. There are numerous humorous anecdotes of him pretending not to hear unflattering or critical remarks.

Reynolds’s height Sir Joshua Reynolds was five feet five and one-eighths of an inch tall (p.149).

Reynolds and the king Despite his prolific portrayal of the British aristocracy, Reynolds was disliked by King George III and never got the post of Principle Painter in Ordinary which he aimed for. This post went to Allan Ramsay in 1761. A number of reasons are given for this dislike, for example that when Reynolds was offered the presidency of the newly founded Royal Academy in 1768 but said he’d have to consult his close friends, Dr Johnson and Edmund Burke. Since it was a royal appointment which the king had personally agreed, he was offended that Reynolds hesitated, and particularly offended at the mention of Edmund Burke, a critic of the king. And his friendship with John Wilkes, a radical critic of the king and the Establishment as a whole (p.322).

Reynolds and Dr Johnson I’d like to like Dr Johnson more than I do. At the end of the day, his bluff English pragmatism comes close to philistinism. His rudeness was legendary, as was his greed (the story of a host setting out bowls of clotted cream, strawberries and a jar of cider for a party of guests and Johnson eating the lot, or asking for pancakes and eating 13 in a row) and his addiction to tea. And his depression: letters are quoted in which he describes his morbid fear of being left alone to his thoughts. Which is why it was difficult to get rid of him; he’d pop round for tea then stay, talking interminably, till past midnight. If he was ever left out of a conversation:

His mind appeared to be preying on itself; he fell into a reverie accompanied with strange antic gesticulations. (Reynolds, quoted page 210)

Reynolds and his sister Reynolds’s sister, Francis (1729 – 1807), acted as his housekeeper from when he moved to London in the early 1750s until 1779, when some kind of argument – still unknown – led to her leaving and her place being taken by their nieces. Fanny was an artist in her own right, of histories and portraits. She also wrote and won the support of Dr Johnson, who encouraged her and remained friendly and supportive even after the break with her brother. Mutual friends were critical of Reynolds’s treatment of her, e.g. Mrs Thrale (p.327).

Reynolds and Gainsborough The ‘Grand Style’ which Reynolds spoke about in his Discourses meant improving on nature, removing blemishes and imperfections, creating an idealised image.

The likeness consists more in taking the general air, than in observing the exact similitude of every feature. (p.127)

And by ‘idealised’ he often meant aspiring to the style of Roman art and architecture, all pillars and togas. Thus Gainsborough and Reynolds disagreed about what their sitters should wear. Gainsborough, the more informal, casual and bohemian (p.338) of the pair thought it was an important part of capturing a sitter’s personality that they wore their own clothes; Reynolds, by contrast, kept a wardrobe of ‘idealised’ costumes and often painted his sitters in Romanised togas and tunics. The Dowager Duchess of Rutland complained that Reynolds made her try on eleven different dresses before settling on what she dismissed as ‘that nightgown’ (p.151).

Benjamin West, the American painter of historical scenes and second President of the Royal Academy, is quoted criticising Reynolds’s fondness for dressing his female sitters in antique robes, pointing out how much more interesting and useful for posterity it would be to see them in their actual everyday wear.

Technical terms

Conversation piece an informal group portrait, popular in Britain in the 18th century, beginning in the 1720s, distinguished by portrayal of a group apparently engaged in genteel conversation or some activity, very often outdoors. Typically the group will be members of a family, but friends may be included, and some groups are of friends, members of a society or hunt, or some other grouping.

Fancy picture Fancy picture refers to a type of eighteenth century painting that depicts scenes of everyday life but with elements of imagination, invention or storytelling. The name fancy pictures was given by Sir Joshua Reynolds to the supreme examples of the genre produced by Thomas Gainsborough in the decade before his death in 1788, particularly those that featured peasant or beggar children in particular. (Source: Tate)

Profile portrait The profile portrait ultimately derived from coins and medals from ancient Rome. It could be used as a commemoration of the dead, or as a tribute to the living great.

Eighteenth century London courtesans

In terms of his desire to associate himself with the celebrity of others, the most compelling paintings by Reynolds are surely his portraits of courtesans which he began to make from the late 1750s onwards.

I include this list not out of a conscious or unconscious wish to define women by their sexuality, but because these women’s lives are fascinating, and the niche they occupied in the society of their time so startlingly different from our day.

Eighteenth century women artists

  • Katherine Read (1721-1778) Scottish portrait painter
  • Angelica Kauffman (1741 – 1807) history painter and portraitist
  • Mary Moser (1744 – 1819) English painter specialised in flowers
  • Maria Cosway (1760 – 1838) Italian-English artist and educationalist

Those are the ones I noticed in the text, anyway. There’s a full list online:

Blog posts about the 18th century

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by Simon on July 6, 2020  •  Permalink
Posted in Art, Biography, War
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Posted by Simon on July 6, 2020

https://astrofella.wordpress.com/2020/07/06/joshua-reynolds-ian-mcintyre/

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