Waugh’s Green World: Reconceptualising The Ordeal of Gilbert Pinfold as a Transcoded Production of King Lear

ABSTRACT This article makes the case for interpreting Evelyn Waugh’s The Ordeal of Gilbert Pinfold (1957) as a transcoded performance of King Lear, directed and enacted through the hallucinations of the eponymous writer-protagonist. Suffering from writers’ block and bromide poisoning, Pinfold unconsciously re-creates and inhabits the roles of the king, his fool and Cordelia within a green world setting suggested by his own disordered mind. This exegesis of Waugh’s intricate method of textual adaptation, which encompasses numerous additional hypotexts from The Tempest to Waugh’s own contemporaries, urges Pinfold’s recognition as an exemplar of criticism-through-practice that may be applied across a wide spectrum of symbiotic creative relationships. Reconceptualising Pinfold in this way affords a new understanding of the later text’s notoriously baffling conclusion, which in turn generates a new lens through which to view King Lear. Throughout his ordeal, the embattled Pinfold demonstrates his commitment to the inseparable qualities of modesty and truthfulness that define Cordelia’s character. By ultimately handing Pinfold-as-Cordelia the victory Shakespeare denied her, Waugh announces both his adaptation and adapted text as meditations on the nature of, and need for, personal integrity and the right to emotional privacy.

was suffering from bromide poisoning which led him to experience auditory hallucinations during the trip.In Pinfold these distressing circumstances are related in a tone of humorous detachment that led to patchy critical classification, with varying levels of approval, as a comedy. 1 It is clear from Waugh's personal writings, and his recently discovered engagement diaries, 2 that King Lear was on his mind both during his psychotic episode of 1954 and throughout the drafting process of the text that episode inspired.Pinfold was composed in two bursts of creativity in 1956, during which time Waugh was constantly re-reading Lear, and the play's presence resonates throughout the text to such an extent that the second work may be studied as a form of postmodern, disordered adaptation of the first.
Waugh and Shakespeare are both famously intertextual.R. A. Foakes observes that it is 'taken for granted that Shakespeare never invented where he could borrow', 3 and Lear entered the Stationer's Register hot on the heels of King Leir, another play based on a story that itself originated in oral storytelling cultures. 4Pinfold is, in turn, littered with gestures across the Shakespeare canon and to Waugh's wider contemporary and inherited literary landscapes.Many of these allusions are, to use Gérard Genette's term, manifest. 5Its marine setting and re-Christening of the M.V. Staffordshire as the S.S. Caliban, for example, indicate The Tempest.Some references are fairly localised, such as Waugh's tongue-in-cheek nod to James Joyce's (similarly) autobiographical novel in his first chapter title -'Portrait of the Artist in Middle Age'and Pinfold's hallucinated enemies' self-comparison with the secret 'little band doing good' in T.S. Eliot's The Cocktail Party (1949). 6Others are more general, such as Pinfold's witnessing of 'a scene which might have come straight from the kind of pseudo-American thriller he most abhorred' 7 or his feeling 'as though he had come to the end of an ingenious, old-fashioned detective novel'. 8infold's most fascinating allusions operate in a liminal space between the secret and the manifest.A book, author or character might be named explicitly in one association or context before retreating below the surface of the narrative.There, its influence grows unchecked and, in some cases, becomes systemic.
Recently, John Bowen has detailed this phenomenon in the complex system of allusions to Charles Dickens that weaves through the Waugh ouevre.The connection between these two authors is most explicit in Waugh's A Handful of Dust, but Bowen digs below the more modest surface indicators of 1 See Cooke, Barbara, intro to Waugh, Evelyn, The Complete Works of Evelyn Waugh Volume 14, lxix-lxxi.
Dickens in Pinfoldan early portrayal of him as a professional trickster, a passing reference to Bleak House, and the naming of the Caliban's captain after David Copperfield's nefarious James Steerforthto configure the relationship between the two writers as a kind of oscillation between parasite and host. 9owen supports this modelling through Pinfold's preoccupation with forms of invasion.Pinfold's depiction of the way an upsetting incident can take hold of the mind, as well as its protagonist's growing belief that his hallucinated tormentors have hijacked his brainwaves, owe much to the parasitic.
The concept of the parasite is familiar to deconstruction and adaptation theory, and in the latter has often been used pejoratively when a new work is considered overly dependent on its source text or 'host'.Here, though, that relationship is inverted.Now, the manifest references to hypotexts in an adaptation like Pinfold become the itching, rashes and swellings that indicate the presence of additional body of literature living under the surface of the main narrative.When it does emerge, it will be in a changed state, exiting at a stylistic and interpretive remove from the initial point of entry.
Waugh was a seasoned traveller who knew too well that a body can host many parasites simultaneously.Accommodating Shakespeare within Pinfold need not require the expulsion of Dickens or any other hypotext but rather a suitably chaotic form of co-existence, into which many additional literary creatures might also burrow and bite.
The relationship between Lear as adapted text and Pinfold as adaptation, then, is not dyadic.Rather, the two texts are links in what Robert Stam characterises as an 'intertextual daisy chain', 10 which reaches back into the web of hypotexts that informed and influenced Lear before travelling through the multiple supplementary texts that surround Pinfold and forward into later adaptations of Waugh's own work. 11Lear takes the place of a first hypotext among equals.
Furthermore, by myself adapting the model Bowen has developed beyond the specific case of Waugh and Dickens, I hope to demonstrate its applicability to the analysis of a wide range of symbiotic creative relationships, in-and outside the Waugh canon as well within Pinfold itself.Most ambitiously, I suggest that it also offers a new lens through which to view King Lear.In effect, Pinfold is a transcoded production of Lear, which fragments and performs the play via the written word.Its textual staging reveals what its director considered to be at the heart of his source text, and Waugh's thematic exploration of personal integrity and the right to emotional privacy operate as a form of Lear criticism-through-practice.Stam,27. 11 For example in 1960, in a particularly circular move, the BBC producer Michael Bakewell adapted Pinfold for the radio ('Successful Radio Play from a Waugh Novel', The Times, 8 Jun 1960, 16).
and psychological assault by the protagonist himself.Moreover, the book's denouement has baffled critics who are unable to recognise it as the victory its protagonist clearly considers it to be.If, however, it is understood as the redemptive climax of a Lear adaptation, in which Pinfold triumphs in the name of modest yet tenacious truthfulness, then this recognition becomes not only possible but compelling.

The Postmodern Pinfold
Waugh scholars including Douglas Lane Patey and Naomi Milthorpe have framed Pinfold as a postmodern text. 12They do so by pointing to its self-analytic mechanisms and surface-play, observing how the text comments on the creative process and adopts a closed-circle structure in which the last words of the text are also its first.It does not attempt to suspend readerly disbelief but rather ironises the relationship between biographical stimulus and literary output, for example when a group of fellow passengers aboard the Caliban anticipate their fictionalisation.These passengers are discussing one of Pinfold's previous novels, mistaking its name, and he attempts to extricate himself from the conversation.This leads one of the group to remark that they have 'embarrass[ed] the author'.Another disagrees: 'No […] It is his humour.He is going to make notes of us.You see, we shall all be in a humorous book'. 13For Pinfold's readers, of course, they already are.Pinfold has much in common, first by accident and later by design, with a contemporaneous text that is considered an early postmodern classic.In 1957 Muriel Spark published her debut novel, The Comforters, which follows an 'hallucinated novelist' 14 and is alsoas its protagonist Caroline remarksabout '[c]haracters in a novel'. 15Spark's distinct comedic technique of using the narrative voice to echo exactly the thoughts of its characters is established in The Comforters through Caroline's terrifying experience of hearing her own thoughts (in this example, about her fiancé's mother) repeated back to her by a disembodied voice: […] On the whole she did not think there would be any difficulty with Helena.Just then she heard the sound of a typewriter.It seemed to come through the wall on her left.It stopped, and was immediately followed by a voice remarking her own thoughts.It said: On the whole she did not think there would be any difficulty with Helena. 16his phenomenon finds a slightly skewed parallel in Pinfold when the protagonist ventriloquises his own hallucinated voices.At the novel's conclusion, his imagined adversaries tell him that they were never on board the Caliban but communicated with him via radio waves and 'worked the whole thing from the studio in England.' On hearing this, Pinfold immediately turns to his wife and says: 'They must be working the whole thing from a studio in England[.]' 17augh read and generously reviewed The Comforters as he was revising the end of his own manuscript.As well as noting the uncanny spontaneous connections between the texts, it is likely that Spark's novel inspired him to develop the ouroboros concept with which he was already experimenting.While as a student author Waugh had been inspired by continental Modernism, his later writing is usually considered more elegant than innovative.By the 1950s he had stepped decidedly out of the cultural current and so was surprised to find himself part of the zeitgeist once again.
A further similarity between the Waugh and Spark texts allies them with postmodern explorations in surface representation and challenges to the concept of novelistic interiority.Waugh's reviewers typically highlighted theatrical, or at least theatre-adjacent, features in his novels and he was known for witty dialogue and a stylistic rejection of psychological depth.As a rule, his characters speak, and do, much more than they think.In her incisive analysis of Vile Bodies, another dialogue-heavy Waugh novel, Milthorpe draws out several aesthetic features that will be re-framed in Pinfold.She compares his practice to Wyndham Lewis's 'external method' and details how he, Waugh, 'ruthlessly expunges interiority from his characters […] In this flat world, intimacy or emotion is rendered illegible, effaced and replaced with mere talk'. 18atey sees the character of Pinfold as a reprisal of this method, arguing that he has no psychology to speak of.19While Patey's argument cannot, on its own, provide a wholly satisfactory assessment of Pinfold, it does perfectly illustrate the trajectory of The Comforters' most unpleasant character.Georgina Hogg, we are told, 'simply disappear[s]' when on her own; on entering her 'mousy room at Chiswick' she vanishes from the page because she 'had no private life whatsoever'. 20hile Pinfold's postmodernism has been noted, thus far these readings have relied on the metatextual and ludic elements of the text. 21If, in addition to these features, it is also recognised as particularly intricate form of literary adaptation then it is transformed from a minor work of an emerging literary style to a trailblazing, genre-and form-defying 'conversation piece' that cements its place amongst its contemporaries through its radical reimagining of the Shakespearian canon.

Waugh and Shakespeare
Shakespeare's influence on Waugh can be traced from the author's childhood.As soon as he could write he kept a diary, which he continued intermittently throughout his life.As a schoolboy, Waugh titled these diaries with quotations he later found 'naïve, trite and pretentious'. 22On one cover, for example, he inscribed a misquotation from Macbeth in an elaborate Gothic hand: 'A tale told by a madman full of wind and fury signifying nothing'. 23Deeper allusions inform his published works, where King Lear appears early and reappears with increasing frequency.In Waugh's second novel, Vile Bodies (1930), his protagonist looks at a pitiful older man and wonders: 'Has he given all to his daughters?'. 24In his new critical edition of A Handful of Dust (1934), Henry Woudhuysen compares Tony Last's 'speech and tone' with the deposed Lear's. 25 In Brideshead Revisited (1945), Waugh gives the name Cordelia to a young Catholic virgin whose simple faith and uncompromising truthfulness embarrasses the narrative's more complex, worldly characters.In Pinfold, these values are embodied in the protagonist himself and govern the pattern of his ultimate, self-judged, triumph.
These references are the visible symptoms of Lear's enduring residence in Waugh's psyche.There is also evidence that, when Waugh began suffering from auditory hallucinations in early 1954, Lear sounded in the depths of his subconscious.When time or ill health prevented Waugh from keeping a full journal, he used his personal engagement diaries as aides mémoires.The psychotic episode that inspired Pinfold is recorded in this way, as Waugh jotted down events that he had hallucinated along with some opaque aphorisms.On Friday 5th February, for instance, he echoes Edgar's words of comfort to his blind father in scrawling 'Ripeness is all / Silenus is all therefore Ripe / & unripe silenus'. 26ear remained established in Waugh's mind into 1956, when he came to write Pinfold.The book was composed during 1956, and in February that year he 'went through blizzards to Bristol' to see a production of the play starring Eric Porter as Lear and Moira Shearer (most famous for her leading role in the 1948 ballet film The Red Shoes) as Cordelia.Following this production Waugh wrote a letter to his friend Ann Fleming in which he identified 22 Waugh, A Little Learning, 103. 23Cf Shakespeare, Macbeth, 5.5.25-7:'[…] a tale/ Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury,/ Signifying nothing […]'.
This diary volume begins with an entry from 20 January 1920; see Evelyn Waugh, Personal Writings 1903-1921:  Precocious Waughs, edited by Alexander Waugh.Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017, xli and 24. 24See Waugh, Vile Bodies, 94 and 175. 25 Waugh, A Handful of Dust, lxxxiv. 26Cf Shakespeare, King Lear, 5.2.11.himself with the aging king ('Lear's sufferings seemed no sharper than mine') and told her that he had begun compulsively re-reading the play.'I say', he wrote, 'what a good film Lear would make!The only Shakespeare play obviously designed for the cinema.' 27 Waugh had had some experience in this area.When young, he had been commissioned for a treatment of a 'Sapper' (Herman Cyril McNeile) novel.Waugh's treatment was not filmed, but he used the experience to write the short story 'Excursion in Reality'. 28Several of Waugh's own works were also adapted during his lifetime.In 1948, he travelled to the United States to oversee a dramatisation of Brideshead Revisited but withdrew his novel from filming when he considered that the 'essence of the story' was being lost.In particular, he wished to protect the representation of Cordelia as 'the good Catholic woman standing up against all odds'. 29At times Pinfold has the character of a filmic construction.It uses, for example, a point-of-view close-up to describe an irritated Pinfold ('his mind like a cinema camera trucked furiously forward to confront the offending object close-up with glaring lens […]') 30 and on completion of a rough full draft Waugh advised his agent that the typescript was not yet for 'final shooting'. 31He re-used the cinematic metaphor in promising his publisher 'a revised and retyped shooting script before Christmas'. 32Waugh never produced a formal screenplay or treatment for Lear.However, I suggest that Pinfold performs and recodes the content of older narrative, and draws on Shakespearian forms to embed its tragedy in a comedic framework.Through this 'multiplication of registers,' 33 Lear's king, fool, and daughters are refracted through authorial personae and fictionalised authorial imagination.Their roles are enacted upon a version of the heath, rendered in Waugh's narrative as a Shakespearian green world where they dissemble, subvert, and ultimately speak the truth.
The SS Caliban as a Green World Waugh adopts a structure for his revision based on the New Comedy model Shakespeare himself adapted from the Ancient Roman theatre.A New Comedy was usually a farcical romance in which a space of misrule is entered, often in disguise, and confusions and chaos ensue.This world is then left behind or infiltrated by the restorers and representatives of reason, and the complications created there are more-or-less resolved at the play's conclusion.In applying this structure to Shakespeare's romantic comedies, 27 Waugh to Ann Fleming, 25 February 1956;cited in Mark Amory (ed.),The Letters of Evelyn Waugh (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1980), 468. 28Stannard, Evelyn Waugh, 285-6. 29'Evelyn Waugh, Noted British Author, Visited Campus Last Week', The Heights (Boston College) (19 Nov 1948), 1 and 8, reprinted in A Little Learning, 504-5; 505. 30Waugh, Pinfold, 5. 31 Waugh to A. D. Peters, 24 Nov 1956;Austin TX, Harry Ransom Center, Manuscript Collection MS-04438, Box 11. 32 Waugh to Jack MacDougall, [c. 5 Dec 1956]; Reading, Reading University Special Collections, ABP1/66. 33Stam, 18ff.
Northrop Frye described it as 'the drama of the green world' with links not only to the 'fertile world of ritual' but also to a 'dream world that we create out of our own desires'.It is associated with summer and warmth, and stands aloof from accepted legal and social systems. 34n Pinfold, this green world is contained within an unremarkable steamer named the S.S. Caliban.Pinfold's stated motive for setting out on a sea voyage is to 'get away'. 35He is suffering from writers' block, from an unusually cold winter, and from substance abuse intended to ease his insomnia and depression.He chases the sun to a floating, self-contained world whose location is constantly shifting.This insulated community sails through international waters, answerable to no-one but its captain.Normal procedures of life are suspended and, as Pinfold's ordeal intensifies, the laws of nature itself apparently come unstuck.His hallucinations reference the life and works of his creator, resulting in unhinged and illogical confrontations with a half-fictitious, halffactual past.
By 'locating confusion, and indeed action, primarily within the mind' of its protagonist, 36 Waugh can be seen to follow specifically Shakespearian developments of the New Comedy in which characters undergo subjective bewilderment rather than simply becoming embroiled in farcical situations that operate independently of personality or personal context.As John Creaser explains, Shakespeare also introduced 'malign' and Saturnalian elements into the classic format, thereby troubling the epistemic boundary between tragedy and comedy. 37Pinfold is similarly troubling, blending escape with imprisonment, and tomfoolery with menace; at one point the hero attempts to rationalise the situation by concluding that he is 'the victim of a practical joke […] of hoaxes and threats'. 38Pinfold is the lovers of Midsummer Night's Dream, driven to frenzy and violence in the wood by Puck's distortions.More poignantly still he is Malvolio, deceived by the mischief-makers of Twelfth Night and then terrorised by unseen voices in the dark.
The ship is an ideal site in which these contradictions might play out.It promises adventure and expanded horizons but curtails freedom of movement, confining its passengers to smaller quarters and company than most would enjoy at home. 39The apparent blandness of the outward setting -Pinfold's vessel is 'clean, trustworthy and comfortable, without pretence to luxury'throws the protagonist's hidden turmoil into sharp relief. 40Bright young people play deck games and drink cocktails on board a ship that announces 34 Frye, 'Archetypal Criticism: Theory of Myths', 131-239: 182-3. 35Waugh, The Ordeal of Gilbert Pinfold, 12. 36 Creaser, 'Forms of confusion', 81-101; 90. 37Ibid., 84. 38Waugh, The Ordeal of Gilbert Pinfold, 81. 39See Hammill, '"Seeking for Horizons"', 23-5 June 2022. 40Waugh, The Ordeal of Gilbert Pinfold, 19.
trickery, the fantastical, and even the daemonic in its very name.In The Tempest, Caliban mocks and deceives Trinculo and Stephano in an upturned boat; here, Pinfold's marine world itself is turned upside-down. 41Waugh's use of The Tempest also invokes the spirit of Ariel who, like Pinfold's hallucinations, may be heard but not seen.According to John Creaser, New Comedies enable their audiences to laugh 'without restraint at predicaments which in reality […] would be brutal or mortifying'. 42In Pinfold, however, the ordeal is 'brutal' and 'mortifying' precisely because it is unreal.This ensures that the 'comedy' of Pinfold, if such it is, remains always uneasy.
Once Pinfold has embarked on the Caliban, he realises that he has not really 'escaped' anything but, like many attempting to flee their own demons by changing locations, is rather 'brought up against' himself and his 'confusions'. 43mphasising the latent threat contained in the green world's disorientation and disorder is in keeping with the personal and doctrinal theology that drove Waugh's aesthetic.He had converted to Catholicism at twenty-six, and cherished the Church's teachings as an antidote to the disruption and rootlessness he experienced in his own life and associated with the modern condition in general. 44In a post-conversion short story, Waugh describes the saying of mass as a 'shape in chaos'.The fact that the Latin liturgy had remained unchanged and reliable throughout the 'age of the world' was a source of comfort, providing him with an essential, immovable, point of reference. 45It is within this context that, when Waugh's perception of the essential and immovable was challenged by the intrusion of phenomena he could not explain, he seriously considered that he might be possessed. 46o Waugh, disruption was literally ungodly.Nevertheless, Pinfold also indicates that it might be necessary for creative genesis.Without chaos, after all, there would be nothing from which a 'shape' might be made.As Bowen has argued, the term 'daemonic' focusses a good deal of Waugh's aesthetic and affective energy."Daemonic" is a suggestive, if complex, term.Creaser, 'Forms of Confusion', 83. 43Ibid., 87. 44Woudhuysen, for example, claims a likeness for Lear and Waugh's A Handful of Dust in that both portray 'exhausted humanity beset by madness.That madness is not individual or personal, so much as affecting the world as a whole' (lxxxiv). 45Waugh, 'Out of Depth', 136. 46Waugh, The Ordeal of Gilbert Pinfold, xl.
"devilish, malevolent, evil; (also) crazed, frenzied" as the OED puts it, but it can also invoke the "inner or attendant spirit, especially as a source of creative inspiration or genius." 47ce his ordeal is over, Pinfold declares that it was the 'most exciting thing … that ever happened to me' and immediately settles down to create narrative from the experience. 48In a space of misrule, things are broken in order that they may be remade.In Waugh's green world, the breaking is the re-making.Pinfold, whose 'inner spirit' is itself 'frenzied', is possessed by the characters of King Lear and acts out all their parts, inhabiting a series of 'radically contradictory states of mind and consciousness' 49 within his own crazy one-man play.The 'frenzied' setting of Pinfold's production is born of his own predicament and so he is in a sense its director too, though, unlike the Tempest's Prospero, action on board the Caliban unfolds according not to his conscious will but his unconscious agency.

Pinfold the Player
From the opening chapters of Pinfold, the narrative encourages readers to look upon its protagonist as an actor by foregrounding his behaviour as a performance: The part for which he cast himself was a combination of eccentric don and testy colonel and he acted it strenuously […] 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. 50llingly, Pinfold is not only an actor in this scenario, but its casting director too.Once embarked on the Caliban, his repertoire expands to encompass characters from the play that so obsessed his creator.Pinfold the actor-director will play, by turns, the roles of Lear's king, fool, and only honest daughter.The increasing obliqueness with which the text references these respective characters is in inverse proportion to their significance to Pinfold's personal integrity, in all senses of the word.
The parallels between Pinfold and King Lear the character are clear and wellacknowledged in the text.Each is tormented, and afraid that his torments will drive him to insanity.To underscore the point, upon realising that one of his hallucinations has no basis in fact, Pinfold is 'struck with real fear' and calls out in Lear's words: 'O let me not be mad, not mad, sweet heaven!' 51 As he grew older, Waugh became increasingly hostile towards modern understandings of the mind.When serving in WW2, he had been subjected to a form of psychoanalytic questioning which he found both irrelevant and intrusive, 52 and his last book-length publication, the autobiography A Little Learning, makes repeated side-swipes at 'modern psychologists'. 53As such, there is a pathetic irony to his identification of Pinfold with a character who, in the 1950s, was increasingly subject to psychoanalytic readings.Waugh was certainly aware of this trend; during the period that saw his most intense obsession with Lear, the Stratford Memorial Theatre were touring a production of the play, directed by George Devine, which presented the king as struggling against a fast-moving senility. 54Its Lear was played by Sir John Gielgud, whom Waugh greatly admired. 55ike Lear, Pinfold is driven to near-madness by a 'Goneril', in his case an hallucinated 'doxy' who goads him with a harsh and grating voice apparently designed to cause him 'peculiar pain'. 56Pinfold himself names her, highlighting the sense in which Lear's treatment by his elder daughters, who wear down his authority and dignity, and undermine his judgment, is replayed via the methods Pinfold attributes to his own tormentors.He outlines their strategy in a letter to his wife: They don't need any of the old physical means of persuasion.[…].They first break the patient's nerve by acting all sorts of violent scenes which he thinks are really happening.They confuse him until he doesn't distinguish between natural sounds and those they induce.They make all kinds of preposterous accusations against him. 57nfold's surface identification with Lear is useful as a statement of intent which ensures that his ordeal cannot be read without drawing a parallel with the psychological torment of the ageing and dispossessed king.However, while he might identify with Lear in terms of age and mental state, his actions and motivations have more in common with his fool and his youngest daughter, two characters often closely associated in criticism and performance.In the first case, the narrative makes a direct claim for Pinfold-as-clown through its description of the types of performance which he feels compelled to enact.His 'eccentric don and testy colonel' pose is categorised as 'burlesque', and a little later on we hear specifically of how he 'play[s] the fool' to his children. 58arrowing the association further to identify Pinfold with Lear's fool is not specifically indicated by the text, but a thematic connection can be made that implicates Cordelia too.Early on, Pinfold reads in the newspaper that an 52 Waugh, The Early Years of Alec Waugh, 217−18. 53See Waugh, A Little Learning, e.g. 23, 39 and 41. 54 The British Library, 'Photographs of John Gielgud as Lear, 1955'.Accessed 9 July 2022. 55Gielgud had also recently suffered a very public interrogation followed by mental breakdown.In 1953 he was fined for homosexual soliciting; though he was not visible in court, his voice was instantly recognisable and he was shattered by the resulting embarrassment.See Waugh, A Little Learning, 57 and 210. 56Waugh, The Ordeal of Gilbert Pinfold, 30-5. 57Ibid., 90.Italics in original. 58Waugh, The Ordeal of Gilbert Pinfold, 5 and 12.
actor called Cedric Thorne has hanged himself in his theatre dressing-room.This happened in Stratford, and so the Memorial Theatre is strongly indicated; it seems reasonable to assume that Thorne was acting in a Shakespearian play.Does Thorne's (fictional) death imitate Lear's art?It is one of only two Shakespeare plays to depict death by hanging.The other is Titus Andronicus, which features a clown killed in this way.Cordelia is certainly hanged in Lear, and there is interpretive space for considering that the king's fool suffers the same fate.In his 2007 production, for example, Trevor Nunn took Lear's closing reference to his 'poor fool' being hanged literally and had the character captured with Gloucester and executed in a deeply unsettling dumb show. 59ear articulates Cordelia's closeness to the fool, who 'pine[s] away' when she leaves her father's court, and the two parts can be doubled. 60It is, perhaps, fanciful to suggest that the death of Cedric Thorne leaves a vacancy to be filled in Pinfold's mad play; that it leaves space for two hanged characters may stretch indulgence too far.And yet Cedric Thorne plays no function in this narrative beyond his suicide.Pinfold remembers his fate at the height of his delusions, accusing his hallucinated malefactors of causing the actor's death: 'I know exactly what you did to Cedric Thorne', he says.'I know exactly what you are trying to do to me.' 61 Cordelia's name is mentioned only once in the text, when a hallucinated nurse apparently called Margaret is described as 'a sort of Cordelia'.Although Margaret will play a key role in the unfurling madness of Pinfold, she is quickly separated from direct association with the Lear character.This retreat shifts the text's identification with Cordelia across the boundary from manifest into secret, thereby eliding the integral role she is to play in this disordered adaptation.And as is appropriate to both this green world setting and interpretive tradition, Pinfold-Cordelia functions as both counterweight and extension to Pinfold-thefool.The later Shakespearian fools in particular, influenced by the melancholic whimsy of Robert Armin, are recognised as speakers of the truth. 62Cordelia might eschew pretence, but she shares the fool's tendency to say what others know to be true yet do not wish to hear.Her honesty and integrity form the blueprint for Pinfold's actions.His refusal, like Cordelia's, to perjure himself sets conflict and disaster in train but ultimately leads to the resolution of the plot.

What Shall Pinfold Speak?
In addition to establishing its eponymous character as both principal and protagonist, the novel's opening sequences also proceed according to the same logic as Lear.In the play, we are presented with a scene in which three women are apparently asked to speak freely on a very personal topic.Their father asks them to each describe how much they love him, in front of an audience.Their material wellbeing depends on their replies.As such, all three know that the gesture to true emotional expression is a pretence: they all know that only one answer is expected of them, an answer only two are prepared to give.
Similarly, in an event which our narrator identifies as a root cause of Pinfold's distress, our protagonist participates in a radio interview which, to him, appears engineered to elicit specific responses rather than to record what its subject truly wishes to say.This incident is based on Waugh's own experience conducting an interview for the BBC's Frankly Speaking series from his home in Gloucestershire in September 1953.He was by this postwar period well known for his idiosyncratic politics, which were loosely conservative and occasionally anarchic.They were at odds with the cultural establishment of the 1950s, and his interviewers seemed determined to exacerbate and caricature this difference.When the conversation turned to law and order, Waugh explained that he considered capital punishment merciful because it gave a sinner time to repent before divine judgment.Rather than following up the theological implications of this statement, his interviewers chose to ask if he would be prepared to 'do the hanging' himself.At first, Waugh attempted to deflate the question by pointing out, quite reasonably, that it would be 'very odd' for the authorities 'to choose a novelist for such a task' but that he would 'certainly' do so if required.Would he like such a job?'Not in the least'. 63n the fictional version of this interview, Pinfold has reluctantly agreed to speak with a group of 'BBC men' who are also due to interview the actor Cedric Thorne.The specific questions are not detailed, but we are told that the lead interviewer.seemed to believe that anyone sufficiently eminent to be interviewed by him must have something to hide, must be an impostor whom it was his business to trap and expose, and to direct his questions from some basic, previous knowledge of something discreditable. 64nfold sees off this perceived challenge and is relatively pleased with his performance, remarking as the interview is aired that '[they] tried to make an ass of me […] I don't think they succeeded'. 65The combative, faintly absurd nature of the encounter will however come back to haunt Pinfold on the Caliban.Towards the end of the ordeal his hallucinations turn interrogatory, in a manner that mimics and distorts the Frankly Speaking interview.This was edited before broadcast, and the aired version has lost some of the original transcript's aggression and repetition about seemingly irrelevant details.One interviewer, for example, was determined to establish exactly when and for how long the young Waugh was engaged in carpentry, repeating 'I think we ought to get this clear.How old are you now, Mr Waugh?[…] I think we ought to get this carpentry cleared up' with bewildering tenacity. 66n the broadcast, this becomes a much less heated, more commonplace, exchange: Q: Were you ever a carpenter?A: Not a very good one, but better than most people.I went to a school of carpentry and I made a bed table of mahogany that is still in use after thirty or forty years.Q: How old were you when you took up carpentry?A: Well when I say thirty or forty years I'm exaggerating it must be thirty years.I was about twenty-five.Q: How long were you doing carpentry?A: Actual carpentry a very brief time, but that was the nearest I got to doing what I wanted to do. 67e idea that the nation would be on tenterhooks, waiting for the precise dates of a novelist's early adventures in carpentry to be confirmed once and for all, is palpably absurd.As Waugh would later write of Pinfold, it seems that his interviewers are resolved to catch him out in an obscure lie, and will keep questioning him until his guilt is exposed.In a scene that echoes the kind of interrogation with which Waugh would have been familiar from his war service, Pinfold is cross-examined by a pair of elderly men who might be barristers, bureaucrats or some combination of the two.The line of attack adopted by his hallucinated interrogators bears an uncanny resemblance to the Frankly Speaking transcript, with Pinfold's integrity restingamongst other thingson reporting on the number of shoes in his possession.After leading Pinfold into agreeing he owns a dozen pairs, the questioners retort that they have him 'down here as possessing ten': […] why did you tell me a dozen, Pinfold?He did say a dozen, didn't he?
I don't like this, Pinfold.You have to be truthful.Only the truth can help you. 68uthfulness, however, is not synonymous with confession.Pinfold may not lie, but he also refuses to divulge his secrets.As well as seeking to establish the exact number of shoes Pinfold may or may not own, the voices further comply with the mechanics of the green world by encouraging him to confront aspects of his or rather, Waugh'spast.As his disorientation increases, Pinfold's voices accuse him of, and interrogate him about, a series of misdemeanours drawn piecemeal from vindictive fantasy and Waugh's autobiography.In particular, the voices ask Pinfold about his whereabouts in early 1929. 69In 1929, Pinfold's creator was on honeymoon with his first wife, who fell gravely ill with pleurisy during the trip.Whilst she was incapacitated, Waugh met up with his university lover Alastair Graham and the two men toured Cairo brothels together. 70The Waughs divorced soon after.Much as the narrative earlier invoked the name of Cordelia before promptly diverting its attention elsewhere, this switch from trivial to serious questioning about Waugh's real-life sexual deviances disguises what is almost certainly a guilty autobiographical memory amongst insignificant detail.

Dénouement
Pinfold and Lear share a last similarity in the apparent ambivalence of their conclusions or dénouements.According to Leo Salingar, Shakespeare's psychological development of the New Comedy form allows its characters to experience self-growth; Creaser observes that the denouement and resolution of a Shakespearian comedy are then driven by the characters' newfound self-knowledge. 71infold does conform to the letter of a classic comedic conclusion in that its action is neatly resolved.The ordeal is a temporary aberration, which fades when Pinfold realises that the voices he has been hearing issue from his own mind.It is, however, difficult to see what Pinfold could have learned in the green world.He does not appear to have had any sort of epiphany, or resolved to change his ways.For Douglas Lane Patey, this is because the narrative's apparent autobiography is 'bait' for all the commentators who would psychoanalyse its author.It begins in a confiding tone, and many reviewers praised its opening chapter as a 'self-portrait of remarkable detachment and objectivity'. 72This portrait, argues Patey, is no more or less than another veneer, another front.This reading turns the joke onto Waugh's interviewers, and by extension Pinfold's reviewers, whose attempts at psychoanalysis are inherently futile.The Nation's May Sarton was one of many to fall into the trap.According to her review, Pinfold 'somehow emerges sane without ever facing what his unconscious was trying to tell him […] He has not come to grips with his fantasies; he has simply admitted that they are fantasies'. 73Her common but fatal mistake is to assume that Pinfold's voices bring a hidden message.Failure to decode this message means that he has not 'come to grips' with his psychosis.
Accepting Pinfold as an enactment of 'radical externality' 74 offers some explanation for the deflective strategies of Pinfold-the-fool.It also renders 69 Ibid., 86-7. 70Eade, Evelyn Waugh, 132. 71Creaser, 'Forms of Confusion', 91. 72Milthorpe,Evelyn Waugh's Satire,41.the disappearance of Pinfold's voices a feasible justification for his self-categorisation as 'the victor' of his struggles.However, if the whole narrative is to be dismissed (or applauded) as a trick, then the significance of Pinfold's coming to a rational understanding of his psychosis is lost.Given that, for Waugh, a lack of order represented a kind of cosmic horror, his investment in reconciling subjective experience with material reality should not be underestimated.I would argue that successful deflection is, moreover, only one facet of Pinfold's triumph.Fooling may be his means of self-defence, but his refusal to be goaded into either self-revelation or apostasy is a matter of moral principle.This refusal initially takes the form of dissembling and deflection before, ultimately, Pinfold speaks his truth.
Pinfold's real and hallucinated interviewers appear to be united in the conviction that he is hiding something that it is their job to uncover.The attitude is mirrored by various critics who not only assumed that Pinfold's hallucinations were trying to tell him something, but also that they knew what that 'something' was. 75None is interested in honesty, but all wish to extract confession and compliance from their quarry.Pinfold, however, does not comply, and through refusal asserts the right to his privacy and his innocence alike.The nature of Pinfold's torment evolves during his ordeal.At first, he can only overhear strange, off-stage activities happening outside his cabin.Then, the voices begin to address him directly.They are at first most concerned with supposed offences committed by Pinfold, but by the time he leaves the Caliban, he has become convinced that the voices in fact issue from a shadowy group trying to 'psychoanalyse' him through remote means.Thwarting his questioners becomes vital to the sanctity of his private, inner life, which he must protect from a form of psychic invasion.He does so by rendering his outer life as performance.
Pinfold-the-fool adopts disguises to protect himself from the invasive malevolence of the green world.However, unlike the temporary inhabitants of the Athens woods or the Forest of Arden, this is not a world that he simply "enters", but rather one he himself has brought into existence.The narrative conveys that the Caliban, taken on its own merits, is without pretence; it is Pinfold's illness that turns it into a scene of chaos and dissolution.As such, Pinfoldthe-director is subliminally responsible for what unfolds there.In this role, he proves unwilling to wholly abandon his cast to the deconstructive and bewildering power of the green world, and at times the setting adopts similar diversionary tactics to those deployed through the burlesques of Pinfold-the-fool.As such, the green world of Pinfold's own making neither permits him to wholly escape from himself, nor fully strips back the measures Pinfold-the-fool has put in place to guard his subjectivity.
Fooling, disguise and deflection help to protect Pinfold from the most destructive effects of the green world.Waugh also adopted these strategies in his daily life, such as when he used feminine pseudonyms in order for his writing to go unnoticed.During Pinfold's composition, Waugh began signing letters to the Catholic press that concerned his deeply and privately held beliefs as 'Teresa Pinfold'. 76In Pinfold, our protagonist is directly associated twice with feminine personae.On the first occasion, the (possibly imagined) stares of fellow passengers make him feel like a 'noteworthy, unaccompanied female' being harassed in a foreign town; later, he compares his management of the hallucinations to the actions of a 'mother of fractious children who has learned to go about her business with a mind closed to their utterances'. 77his psychic cross-dressing is more than a simple means of camouflage.In a section of the Frankly Speaking interview that contributed to Waugh's mental breakdown, he is asked what he considers to be the 'important feminine characteristics'.He offers 'humility' and, when catechised on whether he 'prefer[s] women to have more humility than men', asserts that the quality is 'in their [women's] nature'. 78While this might appear to be a misogynistic utterance, both Waugh and Pinfold's use of feminine disguises show the depth of their investment in the value of humility.We are told early on that Pinfold's 'modesty' needs protecting, 79 and it is modesty that we see in action through his identification with the disinherited daughter over and above the overmighty king.In Lear, humility is a reserve of strength and the source of Cordelia's moral power.This is equally true of her namesake in Brideshead Revisited, and also of Helena, the titular character of another Waugh novel, who seeksand findsthe cross on which Christ was crucified.In Waugh's universe humility exists not to be exploited or dominated by masculine superiority, but rather envied and emulated.
Pinfold's final triumph over his enemies is achieved by refusing to recognise the rules of their game and speaking out against them.Both tactics are at work in the Frankly Speaking interview.His comments on the improbability of a novelist being asked to perform state-sanctioned executions are a kind of fooling, one of many attempts in the interview to lighten its mood or change its course.Elsewhere, he is asked to comment on his interactions with 'the man in the street' or his attitude to the 'ordinary run of mankind'.Waugh explained, with increasing irritation, that he could not answer any questions 76 See Cooke, lxxv-lxxvi. 77Waugh, The Ordeal of Gilbert Pinfold, 66 and 96. 78Waugh,Pinfold,5.by the Duke of Albany in the play's final lines.Absorbing the catastrophe effected by the hypocritical declarations of love performed by his wife Goneril and sister-in-law Regan, the duke exhorts his listeners to 'Speak what we feel, not what we ought to say.' 84 This statement appears to sanction Cordelia's catalytic refusal to perjure herself as her elder sisters do.In Pinfold's portrayal of Cordelia, he fights ceaselessly against making false statements for the convenience of his questioners, be they real TV interviewers or hallucinated psychoanalysts.But, when read alongside Cordelia's initial refusal, dissention emerges between Albany's endorsement of 'speak [ing] what we feel' and Cordelia's desire to 'Love, and be silent'. 85Cordelia, aware that her love for her father is profound and ineffable, wants to protect her emotional privacy.This wish is denied her.Pinfold-as-Cordelia, however, fights for this right too, defended by the burlesque and deflections afforded by Pinfold-as-fool.
The impetus for this action is aesthetic as well as moral, and develops Waugh's early engagement with radical externality.His commitment to such a technique also makes sense of his ambivalence towards Dickens.In a detailed disentanglement of King Lear and Dickens' influences on Waugh, Bowen cites an interview in which the latter author appears to conflate the death of Dickens' Bleak House character Jo with Edgar's alter-ego Tom O'Bedlam: It isn't the novelist's business to feed the reader with emotions.If your novel's any good the reader should get emotions from it, perhaps not ones you intend but they should be there.What I think you don't want is the splendid rhetorical passages of Dickens about death and Tom's all cold, you know; beautiful to read aloud and brings everyone to tears, but I think it's bad novel-writing. 86wen draws attention to Waugh's criticism that Dickens manufactures cheap sentiment in his readers.It is possible to discern a symmetry between Dickens' purported manipulations of his readers and the hallucinated psychoanalysts' treatment of their patients in Pinfold: rather than addressing existing mental health conditions, the psychoanalysts create madness where it did not previously exist.Dickens fabricates emotions in his readers, while psychiatrists force their subjects to express emotions of their own construction.
This discussion began by applying a model of influence devised by John Bowen to characterise the parasitical relationship he delineates between Evelyn Waugh and Charles Dickens.It argued that the very nature of the parasite accommodates multiple infestations in one host, and suggested that Shakespeare in general and King Lear in particular had also invaded Waugh's mind.It is appropriate enough, then, to find Dickens still sharing space with Lear and 84 Shakespeare, Lear, 5.3.325. 85Ibid., 1.1.62. 86Waugh, Evelyn, interview with Elizabeth Jane Howard, Monitor (16 Feb 1964, BBC TV), reprinted in A Little Learning, 575-583: 580.
Pinfold here, at the point of exit.And, like the relationship between Waugh and Dickens, both Lear and Pinfold may act in turn as invader and host.
It is unnecessary to require Pinfold's dependence on the text it adapts; as Linda Hutcheon has argued, 'multiple versions of a story […] exist laterally, not vertically' and the book can be read without reference to the play.However, if a reader knows Lear then that knowledge both nourishes Pinfold and highlights the later text's restorative power. 87Pinfold's re-enactment of Cordelia's battle frames Albany's closing comments as an endorsement of her character, but also reveals that he has only half hit the mark.By contrast, Waugh's narrative operates on a full understanding of her motivation and tenacity, and accepting Pinfold's success as a rehabilitation of her standpoint justifies reading the conclusion of this confounding narrative as a triumph.
In handing the personal, as well as the moral, victory to Pinfold-as-Cordelia, Waugh's production is in some senses a revisionist adaptation of Lear. 88Its success, however, operates differently to Nahum Tate's 'happily ever after' 1681 version of Shakespeare's treatment, or the multiple source texts for Lear that see Cordelia surviving for long enough to rule Britain.As far as the source texts are concerned, this is not really a 'happy ending' but simply a more drawn-out disaster, as Cordelia's reign is usually plagued with challenges to her power and ends with her suicide. 89Tate's materially redemptive plot, more palatable to audiences than the 'original' Shakespeare text from its debut well into the nineteenth century, reprieves Lear, Gloucester and Cordelia without concerning itself with long-term consequences. 90Pinfold's salvation is of a different order.He prevails in the physical world as a direct consequence of his psychic bravery and personal integrity, and the greater part of his accomplishment is, appropriately, known only to him. 91augh's critics have Pinfold battling his own demons, and failing to understand the 'message' that his hallucinations convey.Reading Pinfold however as an adaptation of King Lear transforms its protagonist into the inheritor of Cordelia's mantle, and re-stages his ordeal as a crusade against the demonic, the intrusive and the false.As such, it allows Pinfold's readers to share its protagonist's opinion that he does, indeed, emerge victorious.
The move to associate the character with oppressed, colonised subjects had already begun in intellectual circles with Octave Mannoni's 1950 essay 'La psychologie de la colonisation'.Likewise, Frank Kermode's 1954 figuration of Caliban as the exploration not of a monster but of 'natural man' would have lasting influence, but it had only just been published when Waugh was at work on Pinfold and was not yet part of the popular imaginary.Broader public perceptions did not really change until the 1970s, with Jonathan Miller's paradigmshifting Tempest at the Mermaid Theatre (1970) and writer Fernández Retamar's famous declaration that Caliban's plight was symbolic of Cuba's 'cultural situation'.Waugh, by contrast, grew up with Edwardian depictions of Caliban, such as that supplied by Arthur Rackham for the 1909 edition of Charles and Mary Lamb's Tales from Shakespeare.For him and his contemporaries Caliban was blasphemous, chimeric, and grotesque (Retamar cited inVaughan and Vaughan, Shakespeare's Caliban, 156; Warner, 'Other Men's Monsters', 8).