a significant victory in the battle with his personal demons, and he begins to write an account of his experiences: "The Ordeal of Gilbert Pinfold". Background Evelyn Waugh's professional and private circumstances, in the years after the Second World War, prefigured those of his fictional counterpart Pinfold. Before the war he had established himself as a writer, mainly of light satirical fiction. His wartime experiences, including service in the Royal Marines and the Royal Horse Guards, changed his personal and literary outlook, and put him into what his biographer David Wykes describes as "a mood of introspection ... that endured to the end of his career". Despite occasional reversions to his former style, in general Waugh's post-war fiction aspired to a more serious purpose. In an essay published in Life magazine in April 1946, he wrote: "In my future books there will be two things to make them unpopular: a preoccupation with style and the attempt to represent man more fully, which, to me, means only one thing, man in his relation to God." The commercial success of Brideshead Revisited, published in 1945, provided Waugh with the financial means to pursue his writing career in a leisurely fashion. He worked intermittently on his novel Helena for five years, while completing shorter projects and carrying out much unpaid work, particularly for Catholic organisations. In a marked change from his pre-war life, he ceased to socialise and became increasingly concerned to protect his privacy. To this end he adopted an overtly hostile persona as a defence mechanism, to repel the outside world. By the early 1950s Waugh was troubled on a number of fronts. He was afflicted with writer's block, and was unable to make progress with his current novel, the second in his Sword of Honour trilogy. He had financial worries, a legacy of his free-spending post-war habits combined with accumulated tax liabilities and a lack of remunerative productivity. His general health was poor; he suffered from toothache, sciatica and rheumatism, and his memory was faulty. He was also drinking heavily, the effects of which were aggravated by a large intake of chloral and bromide washed down with crème de menthe—a treatment for insomnia that he concealed from his doctors. A shortage of cash was the principal reason why, in 1953, Waugh agreed to be interviewed on radio by the BBC, first in the Overseas Service's Personal Call programme and then