and journalist Rebecca West and Pan Books, an additional distraction that delayed the novel's completion. In January 1957 Waugh rewrote the ending, creating a circularity with a return to the words that introduce the novel, and also gave the book its subtitle, "A Conversation Piece". Waugh did not explain his choice of wording for the subtitle, but David Wykes in his literary biography believes it is an ironic reference to the traditional British paintings of families and friends in social gatherings; in this case the "conversation" is with enemies, not friends. The main title is an echo of George Meredith's Victorian novel The Ordeal of Richard Feverel. By the end of January 1957 the book was in the publishers' hands. Themes Autobiography Waugh confirmed the autobiographical basis for the novel on several occasions; at the book's launch on 19 July 1957, to Robert Henriques in a letter of 15 August 1957 ("Mr Pinfold's experiences were almost exactly my own."), and to John Freeman in a Face to Face television interview in 1960. As well as the congruence with real life of specific incidents in the book, Pinfold's age and his domestic and professional circumstances as revealed in the first chapter closely mirror Waugh's. The fictional counterpart shares Waugh's aversions to modern life; he hates "plastic, Picasso, sunbathing and jazz—everything, in fact, that had happened in his own lifetime". Pinfold expresses the same attitude towards his books—"objects that he had made, things quite external to himself"—that Waugh had demonstrated in the second of his 1953 radio interviews. The BBC interviewer Stephen Black appears in the novel as "Angel", and other associates of Waugh make brief appearances. The poet John Betjeman is represented as "James Lance", Waugh's priest Philip Caraman is "Father Westmacott", and Christopher Sykes is "Roger Stillingfleet". In his biography Sykes maintains that the depiction of Mrs Pinfold does not represent Laura Waugh to any degree—"not the glimmer of a resemblance". The name "Margaret", awarded to Pinfold's gentler tormentor, was that of Waugh's second daughter for whom, he wrote to Ann Fleming in September 1952, he had developed a sexual passion. When cured of his hallucinations, Waugh confided to Nancy Mitford that his "unhealthy affection" for his daughter Margaret had disappeared. Pinfold's adopted defensive persona, "a combination of eccentric don and testy colonel", was the same that Waugh cultivated to keep the world at bay. Pinfold adheres to an outmoded