Notes on Evelyn Waugh: Drugs, Interviews and Gilbert Pinfold
A BBC interview from 1960, available on YouTube, provides the most substantial audiovisual record of Evelyn Waugh, by that stage a popular and highly respected author with all his classic works behind him: Brideshead Revisited, Decline and Fall, A Handful of Dust, Scoop and so on. For a reader of Waugh’s books, it is a striking document, the lack of insight Waugh provides being the most insightful thing about it. Waugh undertook the interview for money: he lived grandly, as his son Auberon testified, and he needed income to keep up his stately pile. Having accepted a large fee for the short interview, there is something rather ungenerous in his laconic answers and dodging of questions.
Waugh hated the interview form and had had a bad interview with BBC interviewers in 1953. His disdain for this cohort had been given expression in his interesting autobiographical novel, The Ordeal of Gilbert Pinfold (1957), and watching Waugh’s interview in conjunction with reading that book sheds much greater light on his character than watching the interview alone.
The interview ranges over Waugh’s life. He shuts down conversation by a variety of methods: he can’t talk about his childhood because “my memory is awfully bad”; he can’t talk about his relationship with his older brother because “I really didn’t know him at all well until after the war.”
On childhood: “I had an absolutely idyllically happy childhood. I guess that is why I have so few memories of it.”
Does he remember his dreams? “No, I know I do dream every night of my life but the dream disappears the moment I wake up.”
Had he any consciousness of missing a sister? (A strange question, but the interviewer explains it is because he notes a theme of the importance of the brother-sister relationship in Waugh´s books.) “I wasn’t aware of missing anything. My life was idyllically happy.”
Is there a purpose in Waugh’s books? Is he trying to scourge his readers into reform? “No, no, no, no, I am just trying to write books.” No one as intellectually coherent as Waugh, the interviewer points out, can write books without having a purpose in mind: “Quite unconscious.” At this point the interviewer gives up the line of questioning and ask which of Waugh´s books is his own favourite? “One called Helena is awfully good.” Why? “It is just much the best, you know. It is the best written, the most interesting theme.”
Even on his own books, for most writers the one subject on which they can be considered authorities, Waugh cannot muster up an insight. One would get the impression that Waugh was incapable of self-reflection from this interview and that he was so guarded and reticent that he had little of interest to say on any subject.
It is surprising, then, to read the autobiographical Pinfold, in which Waugh delves deeply into his own psyche. Waugh says in this interview that Pinfold is an “almost exact” account of his own illness, though “cut down a lot”. Waugh’s illness refers to a point in the 1950s in which he suspected he was: “Absolutely mad! Clean off my onion!” (Philip Eade, Evelyn Waugh: A Life Revisited, Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 2016, loc 6413), a state of affairs partially attributable to an addiction to sleeping pills.
In this autobiographical portrait, Waugh shows a keen insight into his own character. He notes that “the part for which [Pinfold] cast himself was a combination of eccentric don and testy colonol and he acted it strenuously” (The Ordeal of Gilbert Pinfold/Tactical Exercises/Love Among the Ruins, Penguin, 1967, p. 15) This combination of eccentricity and abrasiveness, with a deeply conservative and often misanthropic worldview thrown in, was Waugh’s own persona, and it is interesting that he associates it with strenuous acting and the notion of casting himself in a part.
Pinfold at the opening of the book is, like Waugh at the time of his own psychiatric episode, in his late forties, a well-known author but lazy, sedentary and over-indulgent in alcohol (16). ( Waugh once noted: “I never draw a sober breath” [Eade, loc 5461].) He also has the perennial Waugh problem: “Why does everybody except me find it so easy to be nice?” (31) He is irascible and touchy. He goes on a long sea cruise to get some rest and relaxation but, once ensconced in his cabin, begins to hear voices. He hears many voices, and they are all talking about him. Not only talking about him, but doing so very negatively and aggressively.
[E]veryone was talking about him, loudly and unashamedly, but not in his praise.
(100)
Eventually, Pinfold imagines, they do up a petition to have him removed from the ship. All the passengers sign it. The voices are those of other passengers, Pinfold’s neighbours in England, a team of BBC interviewers and others. They make a number of repeated accusations against him: he’s a drunk; he’s a homosexual; he looks down on everybody. The first and last accusations have some truth as relates to Pinfold, and indeed to Waugh. The issue of homosexuality is not one that is explored with relation to Pinfold, but Waugh had certainly experimented with homosexuality in his younger days as an Oxford undergraduate, as documented by Eade (based on Waugh’s own remarkably frank letters).
The upshot is that Pinfold reveals that Waugh, despite his carefully cultivated air of indifference to or distaste for humanity in general, was obsessive and paranoid about people’s opinions of him. Through the medium of fiction, he was able to be unusually honest about this, yet in personal contact, he remained deeply committed to the persona of the eccentric don and the testy colonel. His persona, then was very much at odds with his internal life, which certainly contributes to the sense of unease and defensiveness emanating from Waugh during the BBC interview.
Ultimately, in Pinfold, the eponymous character declares that he has “had enough of psychology” (154) and is relieved to find that the voices were a result of over-indulgence in the sleeping mixture of bromide and chloral. This is unconvincing. Such concoctions may cause paranoia, but the form the paranoia took cut very close to the bone for Waugh.
It is unfortunate that the only surviving visual record of Waugh as person is so uninspiring, and fails to do him justice. But he was pre-eminently a writer, and was uncomfortable in most other spheres, especially in later life. As he wrote himself in the 1940s:
I do not want any more experiences in life. I have quite enough bottled and carefully laid in the cellar, some still ripening, most ready for drinking, a little beginning to lose its body… [I] don’t want to influence opinions or events or expose humbug or anything of that kind. I don’t want to be of service to anyone or anything. I simply want to do my work as an artist.
loc 5365
This attitude bore some notable fruits, such as Pinfold, a very interesting and readable account of a mental breakdown. Waugh lived most of his life before television became a household object. Perhaps his was the last generation in the UK for whom writing was the pre-eminent form of public expression. By comparing the insight and stylistic elegance of works like Pinfold with Waugh’s surviving television appearance, we see that it was only by reading his writing that we can understand and appreciate him.
The Victorian Sage 