W.N.P. Barbellion
The Journal of a Disappointed Man
June 29.
Sleep
Sleep means unconsciousness: unconsciousness is a solemn state – you get it for example from a blow on the head with a mallet. It always weightily impresses me to see someone asleep – especially someone I love as to-day, stretched out as still as a log – who perhaps a few minutes ago was alive, even animated. And there is nothing so welcome, unless it be the sunrise, as the first faint gleam of recognition in the half-opened eye when consciousness like a mighty river begins to flow in and restore our love to us again.
When I go to bed myself, I sometimes jealously guard my faculties from being filched away by sleep. I almost fear sleep: it makes me apprehensive – this wonderful and unknowable Thing which is going to happen to me for which I must lay myself out on a bed and wait, with an elaborate preparedness. Unlike Sir Thomas Browne, I am not always so content to take my leave of the sun and sleep, if need be, into the resurrection. And I sometimes lie awake and wonder when the mysterious Visitor will come to me and call me away from this thrilling world, and how He does it, to which end I try to remain conscious of the gradual process and to understand it: an impossibility of course involving a contradiction in terms. So I shall never know, nor will anybody else.
July 2.
I've had such a successful evening – you've no idea! The pen simply flew along, automatically easy, page after page in perfect sequence. My style trilled and bickered and rolled and ululated in an infinite variety; you will find in it all the subtlest modulations, inflections and suavities. My afflatus came down from Heaven in a bar of light like the Shekinah – straight from God, very God of very God. I worked in a golden halo of light and electric sparks came off my pen nib as I scratched the paper.
July 3.
The Clever Young Man
Argued with R – this morning. He is a type specimen of the clever young man. We both are. Our flowers of speech are often forced hot-house plants, paradoxes and cynicisms fly as thick as driving rain and Shaw is our great exemplar. I could write out an exhaustive analysis of the clever young man, and being one myself can speak from "inspired sources" as the newspapers say.
A common habit is to underline and memorise short, sharp, witty remarks he sees in books and then on future occasions dish them up for his own self-glorification. If the author be famous he begins, "As – says, etc." If unknown the quotation is quietly purloined. He is always very self-conscious and at the same time very self-possessed and very conceited. You tell me with tonic candour that I am insufferably conceited. In return, I smile, making a sardonic avowal of my good opinion of myself, my theory being that as conceit is, as a rule, implicit and, as a rule, blushingly denied, you will mistake my impudent confession for bluff and conclude there is really something far more substantial and honest beneath my apparent conceit. If, on the other hand, I am conceited, why I have admitted it – I agree with you – but tho' there is no virtue in the confession being quite detached and unashamed – still you haven't caught me by the tail. It is very difficult to circumvent a clever young man. He is as agile as a monkey.
His principal concern of course is to arouse and maintain a reputation for profundity and wit. This is done by the simple mechanical formula of antithesis: if you like winkles he proves that cockles are inveterately better; if you admire Ruskin he tears him to ribbons. If you want to learn to swim – as it is safer, he shows it is more dangerous to know how to swim and so on. I know his whole box of tricks. I myself am now playing the clever young man by writing out this analysis just as if I were not one myself.
You doubt my cleverness? Well, some years ago in R – 's presence I called – "the Rev. Fastidious Brisk," – the nickname be it recalled which Henley gave to Stevenson (without the addition of "Rev."). At the time I had no intention of appropriating the witticism as I quite imagined R – was acquainted with it. His unexpected explosion of mirth, however, made me uncomfortably uncertain of this, yet for the life of me I couldn't muster the honesty to assure him that my feather was a borrowed one. A few weeks later he referred to it again as "certainly one of my better ones" – but still I remained dumb and the time for explanations went for once and all. Now see what a pretty pickle I am in: the name "Brisk" or "F.B." is in constant use by us for this particular person – he goes by no other name, meanwhile I sit and wonder how long it will be before R – finds me out. There are all sorts of ways in which he might find out: he might read about it for himself, someone might tell him or – worst of all – one day when we are dining out somewhere he will announce to the whole company my brilliant appellation as a little after-dinner diversion: I shall at once observe that the person opposite me knows and is about to air his knowledge; then I shall look sternly at him and try to hold him: he will hesitate and I shall land him with a left and right: "I suppose you've read Henley's verses on Stevenson?" I remark easily and in a moment or so later the conversation has moved on.
August 1.
Am getting married at – Register Office on September 15th. It is impossible to set down here all the labyrinthine ambages of my will and feelings in regard to this event. Such incredible vacillations, doubts, fears. I have been living at a great rate below surface recently. "If you enjoy only twelve months' happiness," the Doctor said to me, "it is worth while." But he makes a recommendation… At his suggestion E – went to see him and from his own mouth learnt all the truth about the state of my health, to prevent possible mutual recriminations in the future.15 To marry an introspective dyspeptic – what a prospect for her!.. I exercise my microscopic analysis on her now as well as on myself… This power in me is growing daily more automatic and more repugnant. It is a nasty morbid unhealthy growth that I want to hide if I cannot destroy. It amounts to being able at will to switch myself in and out of all my most cherished emotions; it is like the case in Sir Michael Foster's Physiology of a man who, by pressing a tumour in his neck could stop or at any rate control the action of his heart.
August 2.
House pride in newly-wed folk, for example, H. and D. to-day at Golder's Green or the Teignmouth folk, is very trying to the bachelor visitor. They will carry a chair across the room as tenderly as tho' it were a child and until its safe transit is assured, all conversation goes by the board. Or the wife suddenly makes a remark to the husband sotto voce, both thereupon start up simultaneously (leaving the fate of Warsaw undecided) while you, silenced by this unexpected manœuvre, wilt away in your chair, the pregnant phrase still-born on your lips. Presently they re-enter the room with the kitten that was heard in the scullery or with a big stick used to flourish at a little Tomtit on the rose tree. She apologises and both settle down again, recompose their countenances into a listening aspect and with a devastating politeness, pick up the poor, little, frayed-out thread of the conversation where it left off with: "Europe? you were saying…" I mobilise my scattered units of ideas but it is all a little chilly for the lady of the house if she listens with her face and speaks with her lips – her heart is far from me: she fixes a glassy eye on the tip of my cigarette, waiting to see if the ash will fall on her carpet.
August 6.
The most intimate and extensive journal can only give each day a relatively small sifting of the almost infinite number of things that flow thro' the consciousness. However vigilant and artful a diarist may be, plenty of things escape him and in any event re-collection is not re-creation…
To keep a journal is to have a secret liaison of a very sentimental kind. A journal intime is a super-confidante to whom everything is told and confessed. For an engaged or married man to have a secret super-confidante who knows things which are concealed from his lady seems to me to be deliberate infidelity. I am as it were engaged to two women and one of them is being deceived. The word "Deceit" comes up against me in this double life I lead, and insists I shall name a plain thing bluntly. There is something very like sheer moral obliquity in these entries behind her back… Is this journal habit slowly corrupting my character? Can an engaged or married man conscientiously continue to write his journal intime?
This question of giving up my faithful friend after September I must consider.
Of course most men have something to conceal from someone. Most married men are furtive creatures, and married women too. But I have a Gregers Werle-like passion for life to be lived on a foundation of truth in every intercourse. I would have my wife know all about me and if I cannot be loved for what I surely am, I do not want to be loved for what I am not. If I continue to write therefore she shall read what I have written…
My Journal keeps open house to every kind of happening in my soul. Provided it is a veritable autochthon – I don't care how much of a tatterdemalion or how ugly or repulsive – I take him in and – I fear sponge him down with excuses to make him more creditable in other's eyes. You may say why trouble whether you do or whether you don't tell us all the beastly little subterranean atrocities that go on in your mind. Any eminently "right-minded" Times or Spectator reader will ask: "Who in Faith's name is interested in your introspective muck-rakings – in fact, who the Devil are you?" To myself, a person of vast importance and vast interest, I reply, – as are other men if I could but understand them as well. And in the firm belief that whatever is inexorably true however unpleasant and discreditable (in fact true things can never lack a certain dignity), I would have you know Mr. Times– and Mr. Spectator-reader that actual crimes have many a time been enacted in the secrecy of my own heart and the only difference between me and an habitual criminal is that the habitual criminal has the courage and the nerve and I have not. What, then, may these crimes be? Nothing much – only murders, theft, rape, etc. None of them, thank God; fructify in action – or at all events only the lesser ones. My outward and visible life if I examine it is merely a series of commonplace, colourless and thoroughly average events. But if I analyse myself, my inner life, I find I am both incredibly worse and incredibly better than I appear. I am Christ and the Devil at the same time – or as my sister once called me – a child, a wise man, and the Devil all in one. Just as no one knows my crimes so no one knows of my good actions. A generous impulse seizes me round the heart and I am suddenly moved to give a poor devil a £5 note. But no one knows this because by the time I come to the point I find myself handing him a sixpenny-bit and am quite powerless to intervene. Similarly my murders end merely in a little phlegm.
August 7.
Two Adventures
On a 'bus the other day a woman with a baby sat opposite, the baby bawled, and the woman at once began to unlace herself, exposing a large, red udder, which she swung into the baby's face. The infant, however, continued to cry and the woman said, —
"Come on, there's a good boy – if you don't, I shall give it to the gentleman opposite."
Do I look ill-nourished?
"'Arma virumque cano,'" a beggar said to me this morning in the High Street, "or as the boy said, 'Arms and the man with a dog,' mistaking the verb for the noun. Oh! yes, sir, I remember my Latin. Of course, I feel it's rather invidious my coming to you like this, but everything is absolutely 'non est' with me," and so on.
"My dear sir," I answered expansively, "I am as poor as you are. You at least have seen better days you say – but I never have."
He changed in a minute his cringeing manner and rejoined:
"No, I shouldn't think you had," eyeing me critically and slinking off.
Am I so shabby?
August 8.
By Jove! I hope I live! … Why does an old crock like myself go on living? It causes me genuine amazement. I feel almost ashamed of myself because I am not yet dead seeing that so many of my full-blooded contemporaries have perished in this War. I am so grateful for being allowed to live so long that nothing that happens to me except death could upset me much. I should be happy in a coal mine.
August12.
Suffering from indigestion. The symptoms include:
Excessive pandiculation,
Excessive oscitation,
Excessive eructation,
Dyspnœa,
Sphygmic flutters,
Abnormal porrigo, a desiccated epidermis.
August16.
Lice or "Creeping Ferlies" 16
I probably know more about Lice than was ever before stored together within the compass of a single human mind! I know the Greek for Louse, the Latin, the French, the German, the Italian. I can reel off all the best remedies for Pediculosis: I am acquainted with the measures adopted for dealing with the nuisance in the field by the German Imperial Board of Health, by the British R.A.M.C., by the armies of the Russians, the French, the Austrians, the Italians. I know its life history and structure, how many eggs it lays and how often, the anatomy of its brain and stomach and the physiology of all its little parts. I have even pursued the Louse into ancient literature and have read old medical treatises about it, as, for example, the De Phthiriasi of Gilbert de Frankenau. Mucius the lawgiver died of this disease so also did the Dictator Scylla, Antiochus Epiphanes, the Emperor Maximilian, the philosopher Pherecydes, Philip II. of Spain, the fugitive Ennius, Callisthenes, Alcman and many other distinguished people including the Emperor Arnauld in 899. In 955, the Bishop of Noyon had to be sewn up in a leather sack before he could be buried. (See Des Insectes reputés venimeux, par M. Amoureux Fils, Doctor of Medicine in the University of Montpellier, Paris, 1789.) In Mexico and Peru, a poll-tax of Lice was exacted and bags of these treasures were found in the Palace of Montezuma (see Bingley, Animal Biog., first edition, iii.). In the United Service Magazine for 1842 (clix., 169) is an account of the wreck of the Wager, a vessel found adrift, the crew in dire straits and Captain Cheap lying on the deck – "like an ant-hill."
So that as an ancient writer puts it, "you must own that for the quelling of human pride and to pull down the high conceits of mortal man, this most loathesome of all maladies (Pediculosis) has been the inheritance of the rich, the wise, the noble and the mighty – poets, philosophers, prelates, princes, Kings and Emperors."
In his well-known Bridgewater Treatise, the Rev. Dr. Kirby, the Father of English Entomology, asked: "Can we believe that man in his pristine state of glory and beauty and dignity could be the receptacle of prey so loathesome as these unclean and disgusting creatures?" (Vol. I., p. 13). He therefore dated their creation after the Fall.
The other day a member of the staff of the Lister Institute called to see me on a lousy matter, and presently drew some live Lice from his waistcoat pocket for me to see. They were contained in pill boxes with little bits of muslin stretched across the open end thro' which the Lice could thrust their little hypodermic needles when placed near the skin. He feeds them by putting these boxes into a specially constructed belt and at night ties the belt around his waist and all night sleeps in Elysium. He is not married.
In this fashion, he has bred hundreds from the egg upwards and even hybridised the two different species!
In the enfranchised mind of the scientific naturalist, the usual feelings of repugnance simply do not exist. Curiosity conquers prejudice.
August 27.
Am spending my summer holidays in the Lakes at Coniston with G – and R – … I am simply consumed with pride at being among the mountains at last! It is an enormous personal success to have arrived at Coniston!
August 29.
Climbed a windy eminence on the other side of the Lake and had a splendid view of Helvellyn – like a great hog's back. It is fine to walk over the elastic turf with the wind bellowing into each ear and swirling all around me in a mighty sea of air until I was as clean-blown and resonant as a sea-shell. I moved along as easily as a disembodied spirit and felt free, almost transparent. The old earth seemed to have soaked me up into itself, I became dissolved into it, my separate body was melted away from me, and Nature received me into her deepest communion – until, UNTIL I got on the lee side of a hedge where the calm brought me back my gaol of clay.
September 1.
Fourteen days hence I shall be a married man. But I feel most dejected about it. When I fell down the other day, I believe I slightly concussed my spinal column, with the result that my 1913 trouble has returned, but this time on the left side! paralysis and horrible vertigo and presentiments of sudden collapse as I walk.
September 2.
I fear I have been overdoing it in this tempting mountain region. Walking too far, etc. So I am slacking. It was fortunate I did not get concussion of the brain – I came within an inch of it: the hair of my head brushed the ground.
A Buxom Rogue in Earthenware
I knocked at the door of Sunbeam Cottage the other morning to know if they had a boat for hire. The door was promptly opened by a plump, charming little wench of about 17, and I caught a glimpse of the kitchen with its gunrack holding two fowling pieces, a grandfather clock in one corner and a dresser full of blueish china.
"We don't let our boat out for hire," she answered with a smile so honest and natural and spontaneous that I was already saying to myself I had never met with anything like it at all when she stretched up her bare, dairy-maid arm – strong, creamy and soft, just reached a big key strung to a wooden block and lying on the top shelf of the dresser and at once handed it to me with:
"But you are quite welcome to use it and here is the key to the boathouse."
I now felt certain that she was one in a million and thanked her most awfully. I have never met such swiftly-moving generosity.
"It's very nice on the Lake just now," she said. "I like to lie in the boat with a book and let her drift."
I asked her if she would not come too, but this tight little fairy was too busy in the house. She is Clara Middleton done in earthenware.
Subsequently R – and I often visited the cottage and we became great friends, her mother showing us some letters she received as a girl from John Ruskin – a great friend of hers. The gamekeeper himself said that for his part he could never read Ruskin's books – it was like driving a springless cart over a rocky road. We all laughed and I said he was prejudiced in view of the letters which began: "My darling," and finished up "Yr loving J.R."
But Mrs. – said he had never read them, and Madge (ah! that name!) said her father had never shewn the least interest in them at which we laughed again, and the gamekeeper laughed too. He is such a jolly man – they all are delightfully simple, charming folk and we talked of Beasts and Birds that live on the mountains.
September 4.
Bathed in the Lake from the boat. It was brilliantly fine. R – dipped her paddles in occasionally just to keep the boat from grounding. Then I clambered over the bows and stood up to dry myself in the sun like one of Mr. Tuke's young men.
September 7.
My 26th birthday. In London again. Went straight to the Doctor and reported myself. I quite expected him to forbid the marriage as I could scarcely hobble to his house. To my amazement, he apparently made light of my paralysis, said it was a common accident to bruise the os coccyx, etc.
September 8.
Am staying at – for a few days to rest and try to be better by that fateful 11th, when I am married.
Later: My first experience of a Zeppelin raid. Bombs dropped only a quarter of a mile away and shrapnel from the guns fell on our roof. We got very pannicky and went into a neighbour's house, where we cowered down in our dressing-gowns in absolute darkness while bombs exploded and the dogs barked.
I was scared out of my life and had a fit of uncontrollable trembling. Later we rang up – and – , and thank Heavens both are safe. A great fire is burning in London, judging by the red glare. At midnight sat and drank sherry and smoked a cigar with Mr. – , my braces depending from my trousers like a tail and shewing in spite of dressing-gown. Then went home and had some neat brandy to steady my heart. H – arrived soon after midnight. A motor-omnibus in Whitechapel was blown to bits. Great scenes in the city.
September 9.
Very nervy to-day. Hobbled down the road to see the damage done by the bombs.
September 10.
A swingeing cold in the head thro' running about on the night of the raid. Too feeble to walk far, so Mrs. – went into the town for me and purchased my wedding-ring, which cost £2 5s. 0d.