persuaded to attend a Foyle's Literary Luncheon, as a means of promoting the book. He informed his audience that "Three years ago, I had quite a new experience. I went off my head for about three weeks". To further stimulate sales the dust-jacket also emphasised Waugh's experiences of madness, which brought him a large correspondence from strangers anxious to relate their own parallel experiences—"the voices ... of the persecuted, turning to him as confessor". Waugh's friends were generally enthusiastic about the book. Anthony Powell thought that it was one of Waugh's most interesting works, and Graham Greene placed it among the writer's best fiction. The Donaldsons thought that he had "succeeded wonderfully" in providing so vivid an account of his experiences. John Betjeman, reviewing the book for The Daily Telegraph, wrote: "The Ordeal of Gilbert Pinfold is self-examination written as a novel, but unlike other such works, which are generally dreary and self-pitying, this, because it is by Mr Waugh, is readable, thrilling and detached". Other reviewers were generally more circumspect. Philip Toynbee in The Observer found it "very hard to say whether it is a good book or not; it is certainly an interesting and a moving one". He sensed in Waugh's writing a "change of gear", a point picked up by John Raymond in the New Statesman. Raymond thought Waugh was the only current English novelist whose work showed signs of development, and that in Pinfold had produced "one of his wittiest, most humane entertainments", a work of self-revelation only marred, in Raymond's view, by an unsatisfactory conclusion. The Times Literary Supplement'''s reviewer R. G. G. Price deemed it a "thin little tale", while acknowledging that Waugh as a comic writer could reasonably be compared with P. G. Wodehouse in terms of originality and humour. Donat O'Donnell in The Spectator was dismissive, calling the story "moderately interesting, almost entirely unfunny and a little embarrassing". On the book's autobiographical nature O'Donnell commented: "The Waugh of before Brideshead seldom wrote about himself; the Waugh of after Brideshead seldom writes about anything else". Reviewing the American edition in The New York Times, Orville Prescott found the book's central situation far too slight for a full-length novel; furthermore, "the reader's knowledge that the voices are delusions robs Mr Waugh's story of any narrative conflict or suspense ... Mr Pinfold's ordeal is neither humorous nor pathetic". A few weeks after the book's publication,