W.N.P. Barbellion
The Journal of a Disappointed Man
June 2.
From the local paper:
"A comrade in the Gloucesters writing to a friend at – mentions that Pte. J – has been fatally shot in action. J – was well known here for years as an especially smart young newsvendor."
June 3.
What a bitter disappointment it is to realise that people the most intimately in love with one another are really separated by such a distance. A woman is calmly knitting socks or playing Patience while her husband or sweetheart lies dead in Flanders. However strong the tie that binds them together yet they are insufficiently en rapport for her to sense even a catastrophe – and she must wait till the War Office forsooth sends her word. How humiliating that the War Office must do what Love cannot. Human love seems then such a superficial thing. Every person is a distinct egocentric being. Each for himself and the Devil take the hindmost. "Ah! but she didn't know." "Yes, but she ought to have known." Mental telepathy and clairvoyance should be common at least to all lovers.
This morning in bed I heard a man with a milkcart say in the road to a villager at about 6.30 a.m., "… battle … and we lost six cruisers." This was the first I knew of the Battle of Jutland. At 8 a.m. I read in the Daily News that the British Navy had been defeated, and thought it was the end of all things. The news took away our appetites. At the railway station, the Morning Post was more cheerful, even reassuring, and now at 6.30 p.m. the Battle has turned into a merely regrettable indecisive action. We breathe once more.
June 4.
It has now become a victory.
June 11.
Old systems of Classification: Rafinesc's Theory of Fives, Swainson's Theory of Sevens, Edward Newman's book called Sphinx Vespiformis tracing fives throughout the animal world, Sir Thomas Browne's Quincunx, chasing fives throughout the whole of nature – in the words of Coleridge, "quincunxes in Heaven above, quincunxes in the Earth below, quincunxes in the mind of man, in optic nerves, in roots of trees, in leaves, in everything!"
Old false trails:
The Philosopher's Stone (Balthazar Clæs).19
A universal catholicon (Bishop Berkeley's tar-water). Mystical numbers (as per above).
My father was Sir Thomas Browne and my mother Marie Bashkirtseff. See what a curious hybrid I am!
I toss these pages in the faces of timid, furtive, respectable people and say: "There! that's me! You may like it or lump it, but it's true. And I challenge you to follow suit, to flash the searchlight of your self-consciousness into every remotest corner of your life and invite everybody's inspection. Be candid, be honest, break down the partitions of your cubicle, come out of your burrow, little worm." As we are all such worms we should at least be honest worms.
My gratitude to E – for plucking me out of the hideous miseries of my life in London is greater than I can express. If I were the cheap hero of a ladies' novel I should immolate my journals as a token, and you would have a pretty picture of a pale young man watching his days go up in smoke by the drawing-room fire. But I have more confidence in her sterling good sense, and if I cannot be loved for what I am, I do not wish to be loved for what I am not.
Since the fateful Nov. 27th, my life has become entirely posthumous. I live now in the grave and am busy furnishing it with posthumous joys. I accept my fate with great content, my one-time restless ambition lies asleep now, my one-time, furious self-assertiveness is anæsthetised by this great War; the War and the discovery about my health together have plucked out of me that canker of self-obsession. I sit at home here in this country cottage in perfect isolation – flattened out by a steam hammer (tho' it took Armageddon to do it!), yet as cheerful and busy as a Dormouse laying up store for the winter. For I am almost resigned to the issue in the knowledge that some day, someone will know, perhaps somebody will understand and – immortal powers! – even sympathise, "the quick heart quickening from the heart that's still."
July 19.
Omniscience
An omniscient Caledonian asked me to-day:
"Where are the Celebes? Are they E. or N.E. of the Sandwich Group?"
I marked him down at once as my legitimate prey. Sitting back in my chair, I replied slowly in my most offensive manner:
"The Island of Celebes is of enormous size and curious shape situated in the Malay Archipelago."
The Caledonian made no sign. Instead of grinning at his error and confessing to a "floater," he endeavoured to carry on by remarking, "That of course would be N. of Papua," just for all the world as if his error was a minor one of latitude and longitude.
Ignoring his comment, I continued:
"From the Zoogeographical point of view, Celebes is unequalled in importance, having the strangest fauna almost of any island on the face of the globe. Then there's 'Wallace's Line,'" I said, being purposely obscure.
The Caledonian said nought but "looked hurt." It was so obvious that he didn't know, and it was so obvious that I knew that he didn't know, that after my farcical truculence I expected the tension to dissolve in laughter. Yet it is hard for a Caledonian to say "God be merciful to me, ignorant devil that I am." So I pursued him with more information about "Wallace's Line," with an insouciant air, as much as to say, "Wallace's Line of course you heard discussed before you were breached."
"Some do say, you know, that the Line is 'all my eye and Betty Martin,' e. g., R – ."
This gave him his first opportunity of finding his feet in this perilously deep water. So he said promptly, eager to seem knowledgeable with an intelligent rejoinder:
"As! yes, R – is an authority on Fishes."
I assented. "At the last meeting of the British Ass. he tore the idea to shreds."
The drowning Caledonian seized at any straw:
"Fishes, however, are not of paramount importance in cases of geographical distribution, are they?"
I knew he was thinking of marine fishes, but I did not illumine him, and merely said:
"Oh! yes, of very great importance," at which he looked still more "hurt," decamped in silence and left me conqueror of the field but without the spoils of victory: it was impossible to bring him to say "I do not know" – four mono-syllables was all I wanted from the man who for months past has been lecturing me on all things from Music and the Drama to Philosophy, Painting and – Insects.
July 20.
The cradle came a few days ago but I had not seen it until this morning when I unlocked the cupboard door, looked in and shuddered.
"That's the skeleton in our cupboard," I said on coming down to breakfast. She laughed, but I really meant it.
E – keeps a blue bowl replenished with flaming Poppies in our room. The cottage is plagued with Ear-wigs which fly in at night and get among the clothes and bedlinen. This morning, dressing, she held up her chemise to the light saying: "I always do this – you can see their little heathen bodies then against the light…" Isn't she charming?
July 30.
The other day R – and I were sitting on a stile on the uplands in perfect summer weather and talking of happy days before the War – he was in khaki and I was resting my "gammy" leg… As we talked, we let our eyes roam, resting luxuriously wherever we pleased and occasionally interrupting the conversation with "Look at that cow scratching herself against the Oak," or "Do you see the oats waving?" In the distance we saw a man and a boy walking up towards us along the path thro' the corn, but the eye having momentarily scrutinised them wandered away and the conversation never paused. When next I looked, they were much nearer – crossing the furrows in the potato field in fact, and we both stopped talking to watch – idly. The boy seemed to be about 10 years old, and it amused us to see his great difficulty in stepping across the furrows.
"Poor little chap," R – said, and we laughed.
Then the boy stumbled badly and all at once the man lifted his walking-stick and beat him, saying ill-naturedly, "Step between the furrows," and again, "Step between the furrows." Our enchanting little picture was transfigured in an instant. The "charming little boy" was a natural idiot – a gross, hefty creature perhaps 30 years of age, very short and very thick, dressed in a little sailor suit. I said, "Heavens," and R – looked positively scared. We stood aside for them to get over the stile, the "boy" still suffering from his over exertion, breathing stertorously like a horse pulling uphill and still evidently fearful of the big stick behind. He scrambled over the stile as best he could, rolling a wild eye at us as he did so – a large, bulgy eye with the lower lid swollen and sore, like the eye of a terrified ox on the way to the slaughter house. So much then for our little picture of charming childhood! The man followed close at his heels and looked at me with stern defiant eyes. "Yes, that is my son," his eyes declaimed, "and I'll thank you to avert your gaze or by the Lord I'll beat you too."
A Yellow Cat
Last week, I saw a yellow cat perched up quite high on a window ledge at the S – Underground Station in celestial detachment from the crowd of serious, black-coated gentlemen hustling along to and from the trains. He had his back turned to us, but as I swept past in the stream, I was forced to look back a moment, and caught the outline of his whiskers – it made me smile intensely to myself and secretly I gave the palm to the cat for wisdom.
July 31.
This War is so great and terrible that hyperbole is impossible. And yet my gorge rises at those fatuous journalists continually prating about this "Greatest War of all time," this "Great Drama," this "world catastrophe unparalleled in human history," because it is easy to see that they are really more thrilled than shocked by the immensity of the War. They indulge in a vulgar Yankee admiration for the Big Thing. Why call this shameful Filth by high sounding phrases – as if it were a tragedy from Euripides? We ought to hush it up, not brag about it, to mention it with a blush instead of spurting it out brazen-faced.
Mr. Garvin, for example, positively gloats over the War each week in the Observer: "Last week was one of those pivotal occasions on which destiny seems to swing" – and so on every week, you can hear him, historical glutton smacking his lips with an offensive relish.
For my part, I never seem to be in the same mind about the War twice following. Sometimes I am wonderstruck and make out a list of all the amazing events I have lived to see since August, 1914, and sometimes and more often I am swollen with contempt for its colossal imbecility. And sometimes I am swept away with admiration for all the heroism of the War, or by some particularly noble self-sacrifice, and think it is really all worth while. Then – and more frequently – I remember that this War has let loose on the world not only barbarities, butcheries and crimes, but lies, lies, lies – hypocrisies, deceits, ignoble desires for self-aggrandizement, self-preservation such as no one before ever dreamed existed in embryo in the heart of human beings.
The War rings the changes on all the emotions. It twangs all my strings in turn and occasionally all at once, so that I scarcely know how to react or what to think. You see, here am I, a compulsory spectator, and all I can do is to reflect. A Zeppelin brought down in flames that lit up all London – now that makes me want to write like Mr. Garvin. But a Foreign Correspondent's eager discussion of "Italy's aspirations in the Trentino," how Russia insists on a large slice of Turkey, and so forth, makes me splutter. How insufferably childish to be slicing up the earth's surface! How immeasureably "above the battle" I am at times. What a prig you will say I am when I sneer at such contemptible little devilries as the Bodies' trick of sending over a little note, "Warsaw is fallen," into our trenches, or as ours in reply: "Gorizia!"
"There is no difference in principle between the case of a man who loses a limb in the service of his country and that of the man who loses his reason, both have an obvious claim to the grateful recognition of the State." – A morning paper.
A jejune comment like this makes me grin like a gargoyle! Hark to the fellow – this leader-writer over his cup of tea. But it is a lesson to show how easily and quickly we have all adapted ourselves to the War. The War is everything; it is noble, filthy, great, petty, degrading, inspiring, ridiculous, glorious, mad, bad, hopeless yet full of hope. I don't know what to think about it.
August 13.
I hate elderly women who mention their legs. It makes me shudder.
I had two amusing conversations this morning, one with a jealous old man of 70 summers who, in spite of his age, is jealous – I can find no other term – of me in spite of mine, and the other with a social climber. I always tell the first of any of my little successes and regularly hand him all my memoirs as they appear, to which he as regularly protests that he reads very little now.
"Oh! never mind," I always answer gaily, "you take it and read it going down in the train – it will amuse you." He submits but is always silent next time I see him – a little, admonitory silence. Or, I mention I am giving an address at – , and he says "Oom," and at once begins his reminiscences, which I have heard many times before, and am sometimes tempted to correct him when, his memory failing, he leaves out an essential portion of his story. Thus do crabbed age and boastful youth tantalise one another.
To the social climber I said slyly:
"You seem to move in a very distinguished entourage during your week ends."
He smiled a little self-consciously, hesitated a moment and then said:
"Oh! I have a few nice friends, you know."
Now I am sorry, but though I scrutinised this lick-spittle and arch belly-truck rider very closely, I am quite unable to say whether that smile and unwonted diffidence meant simple pleasure at the now certain knowledge that I was duly impressed, or whether it was genuine confusion at the thought that he had perhaps been overdoing it.
Curiously enough, all bores of whatever kind make a dead set at me. I am always a ready listener and my thrusts are always gentle. Hence the pyramids! I constantly act as phlebotomist to the vanity of the young and to the anecdotage of the senile and senescent.
August 13.
… I stood by his chair and looked down at him, and surveyed carefully the top of his head, neck, and collar, and with admirable restraint and calm, considered my most reasonable contempt of him. In perfect silence, we remained thus, while I looked down at a sore spot in the centre of his calvarium which he scratches occasionally, and toyed with the fine flower of my scorn… But it is a dangerous license to take. One never knows…
Equilibrium Restored
To clear away the cobwebs and to purge my soul of evil thoughts and bitter feelings, went for a walk this evening over the uplands. Among the stubble, I sat down for a while with my back against the corn pook and listened to the Partridges calling. Then wandered around the edge of this upland field with the wind in my face and a shower of delicious, fresh rain pattering down on the leaves and dry earth. Then into a wood among tall forest Beeches and a few giant Larches where I rested again and heard a Woodpecker tapping out its message aloft.
This ramble in beautiful B – shire country restored my mental and spiritual poise. I came home serene and perfectly balanced – my equilibrium was something like the just perceptible oscillation of tall Larch-tree tops on the heights of a cliff and the sea below with a just perceptible swell on a calm and perfect June day. I felt exquisite – superb. I could have walked all the way home on a tight rope.
September 2.
Just recently, I have been going fairly strong. I get frequent colds and sometimes show unpleasant nerve symptoms, but I take a course of arsenic and strychnine every month or so in tabloid form, and this helps me over bad patches.
Under the beatific influence of more comfortable health, the rare flower of my ambition has raised its head once more: my brain has bubbled with projects. To wit:
(1) An investigation of the Balancers in Larval Urodeles.
(2) The Present Parlous State of Systematic Zoology (for "Science Progress").
(3) The Anatomy of the Psocidæ.
Etc.
The strength of my ambition at any given moment is the measure of my state of health. It must really be an extraordinarily tenacious thing to have hung on thro' all my recent experiences. Considerately enough this great Crab lets go of my big toe when I am sunk low in health, yet pinches devilishly hard as now when I am well.20
A Bad Listener
When I begin to speak, T – will sometimes interrupt with his loud, rasping voice. I usually submit to this from sheer lack of lung power or I may have a sore throat. But occasionally after the fifth or sixth interruption I lose my equanimity and refuse to give him ground. I keep straight on with what I intended to say, only in a louder voice; he assumes a voice louder still, but not to be denied, I pile Pelion on Ossa and finally overwhelm him in a thunder of sound. For example:
"The other day" – I begin quietly collecting my thoughts to tell the story in detail, "I went to the – "
"Ah! you must come and see my pictures – " he breaks in; but I go on and he goes on and as I talk, I catch phrases: "St. Peters" or"Michael Angelo" or "Botticelli" in wondrous antiphon with my own "British Museum" and "I saw there," "two Syracusan," "tetradrachms," until very likely I reach the end of my sentence before he does his, or perhaps his rasp drives my remarks out of my head. But that makes no difference, for rather than give in I go on improvising in a louder and louder voice when suddenly, at length made aware of the fact that I am talking too, he stops! leaving me bellowing nonsense at the top of my voice, thus: "and I much admired these Syracusan tetradrachms, very charming indeed, I like them, the Syracusan tetradrachms I mean you know, and it will be good to go again and see them (louder) if possible and the weather keeps dry (louder) and the moon and the stars keep in their courses, if the slugs on the thorn (loudest) – " he stops, hears the last few words of my remarks, pretends to be appreciative but wonders what in Heaven's name I can have been talking about.
September 3.
This is the sort of remark I like to make: Someone says to me: "You are a pessimist."
"Ah! well," I say, looking infernally deep, "pessimism is a good policy; it's like having your cake and eating it at the same time."
Chorus: "Why?"
"Because if the future turns out badly you can say, 'I told you so,' to your own satisfaction, and if all is well, why you share everyone else's satisfaction."
Or I say: "No, I can't swim; and I don't want to!"
Chorus: "Why?"
"Because it is so dangerous."
Chorus: "Why?"
The Infernally Wise Youth: "For several reasons. If you are a swimmer you are likely to be oftener near water and oftener in danger than a non-swimmer. Further, as soon as you can swim even only a little, then as an honourable man, it behoves you to plunge in at once to save a drowning person, whereas, if you couldn't swim it would be merely tempting Providence."
Isn't it sickening?
A Jolt
Yesterday the wind was taken out of my sails. Racing along with spinnaker and jib, feeling pretty fit and quite excited over some interesting ectoparasites just collected on some Tinamous, I suddenly shot into a menacing dead calm: that stiflingly still atmosphere which precedes a Typhoon. That is to say, my eye caught the title of an enormous quarto memoir in the Trans. Roy. Soc., Edinburgh: The Histology of – .
I was browsing in the library at the time when this hit me like a carelessly handled gaff straight in the face. I almost ran away to my room.
My Pink Form just received amazes me! To be a soldier? C'est incroyable, ma foi! The possibility even is distracting! To send me a notice requesting me to prepare myself for killing men! Why I should feel no more astonished to receive a War Office injunction under dire penalties to perform miracles, to move mountains, to raise from the dead: My reply would be: "I cannot." I should sit still and watch the whole universe pass to its destruction rather than raise a hand to knife a fellow. This may be poor, anæmic; but there it is, a positive fact.
There are moments when I have awful misgivings: Is this blessed Journal worth while? I really don't know, and that's the harassing fact of the matter. If only I were sure of myself, if only I were capable of an impartial view! But I am too fond of myself to be able to see myself objectively. I wish I knew for certain what I am and how much I am worth. There are such possibilities about the situation; it may turn out tremendously, or else explode in a soap bubble. It is the torture of Tantalus to be so uncertain. I should be relieved to know even the worst. I would almost gladly burn my MSS. in the pleasure of having my curiosity satisfied. I go from the nadir of disappointment to the zenith of hope and back several times a week, and all the time I am additionally harassed by the perfect consciousness that it is all petty and pusillanimous to desire to be known and appreciated, that my ambition is a morbid diathesis of the mind. I am not such a fool either as not to see that there is but little satisfaction in posthumous fame, and I am not such a fool as not to realise that all fame is fleeting, and that the whole world itself is passing away.
I smile with sardonic amusement when I reflect how the War has changed my status. Before the War I was an interesting invalid. Now I am a lucky dog. Then, I was a star turn in tragedy; now I am drowned and ignored in an overcrowded chorus. No valetudinarian was ever more unpleasantly jostled out of his self-compassion. It is difficult to accustom myself to the new role all at once: I had begun to lose the faculty for sympathising in others' griefs. It is hard to have to realise that in all this slaughter, my own superfluous life has become negligible and scarcely anyone's concern but my own. In this colossal sauve-qui-peut which is developing, who can stay to consider a useless mouth? Am I not a comfortable parasite? And, God forgive me, an Egotist to boot?
The War is searching out everyone, concentrating a beam of inquisitive light upon everyone's mind and character and publishing it for all the world to see. And the consequence to many honest folk has been a keen personal disappointment. We ignoble persons had thought we were better than we really are. We scarcely anticipated that the War was going to discover for us our emotions so despicably small by comparison, or our hearts so riddled with selfish motives. In the wild race for security during these dangerous times, men and women have all been sailing so closehauled to the wind that their eyes have been glued to their own forepeaks with never a thought for others: fathers have vied with one another in procuring safe jobs for their sons, wives have been bitter and recriminating at the security of other wives' husbands. The men themselves plot constantly for staff appointments, and everyone is pulling strings who can. Bereavement has brought bitterness and immunity indifference.
And how pathetically some of us cling still to fragments of the old regime that has already passed – like ship-wrecked mariners to floating wreckage, to the manner of the conservatoire amid the thunder of all Europe being broken up; to our newspaper gossip and parish teas, to our cherished aims – wealth, fame, success – in spite of all, ruat coelum! Mr. A.C. Benson and his trickling, comfortable Essays, Mr. Shaw and his Scintillations – they are all there as before, revolving like haggard windmills in a devastated landscape! A little while ago, I read in the local newspaper which I get up from the country two columns concerning the accidental death of an old woman, while two lines were used to record the death of a townsman at the front from an aerial dart. Behold this poor rag! staggering along under the burden of the War in a passionate endeavour to preserve the old-time interest in an old woman's decease. Yet more or less we are all in the same case: I still write my Journal and play Patience of an evening, and an old lady I know still reads as before the short items of gossip in the papers, neglecting articles and leaders… We are like a nest of frightened ants when someone lifts the stone. That is the world just now.
September 5.
… I was so ashamed of having to fall back upon such ignominious publications for my literary efforts that on presenting him with two copies, I told the following lie to save my face:
"They were two essays of mine left over at the beginning of the War, you know. My usual channel became blocked so I had to have recourse to these."
"Where do you publish as a rule?" he innocently asked.
"Oh! several in the Manchester Guardian," I told him out of vanity. "But of course every respectable journal now has closed down to extra-war topics."
I lie out of vanity. And then I confess to lying – out of vanity too. So that one way or another I am determined to make kudos out of myself. Even this last reflection is written down with an excessive appreciation of its wit and the intention that it shall raise a smile.
September 9.
Still nothing to report. The anxiety is telling on us all. The nurse has another case on the 22nd.
I looked at myself in the mirror this morning – nude, a most revolting picture. An emaciated human being is the most unlovely thing in creation. Some time ago a smart errand boy called out "Bovril" after me in the street.
On my way to the Station met two robust, brawny curates on the way to the daily weekday service – which is attended only by two decrepit old women in black, each with her prayer-book caught up to her breast as if she were afraid it might gallop off. That means a parson apiece – and in war time too.
September 10.
My sympathy with myself is so unfailing that I don't deserve anybody else's. In many respects, however, this Journal I believe gives the impression that I behave myself in the public gaze much worse than I actually do. You must remember that herein I let myself go at a stretch gallop: in life I rein in, I am almost another person. Would you believe it, E – says I am full of quick sympathy with others and extraordinarily cheerful, nay gay. Verily I lead a curious double existence: among most people, I pass for a complaisant, amiable, mealy-mouthed, furry if conceited creature. Here I stand revealed as a contemptuous, arrogant malcontent. My life has embittered me an fond, I have the crabbed temper of the disappointed man insufficiently developed yet to be very plainly visible beneath my innate affable, unassuming, humble, diffident, cheerful characteristics. With fools on every hand I am becoming insolent, aggressive, self-declamatory. Last evening came home and got down Robert Buchanan's sonnet, "When He returns and finds the world so drear," and felt constrained to read it out to E – . I poured out its acid sentiment with the base revenge of a vitriol thrower, and then became quiescent.
It is a helpless feeling, sitting still and watching circumstances pounding away at my malleable character and moulding it wrongly.
September 14.
An American Neighbour
We have a delightful American neighbour here whose life revolves like the fly-wheel of an engine. Even when not in eruption his volcanic energy is always rumbling and can be heard. Seeing he is a globe trotter, I was surprised to observe his most elaborate precautions for catching the train and getting a seat when he takes his wife and family to town. He first of all plants himself and all his property down at a certain carefully selected point along the platform as if he were in the wild west lying in wait for a Buffalo. Then as the train comes in, his eye fixes on an empty compartment as it passes and he dashes off after it in furious pursuit up the platform, shouting to his family to follow him. Having lassooed the compartment, squaw and piccaninnies are hustled in as if there was not a moment to lose, what time the black-coated, suburban Englishmen look on in pain and silence, and then slowly with offensive deliberation enter their respective carriages.
The Stockbroker
Another neighbour who interests me is mainly notable for his extraordinary gait. He is a man with a large, round head, a large round, dissolute looking face and fairly broad shoulders, below which everything tapers away to a pair of tiny feet neatly booted. These two little feet are excessively sensitive to road surface – one would say he had special sense organs on his toes, to judge by the manner in which he picks out his path along the country road in short, quick, fussy steps: his feet seem to dissect out the road as if boning a herring. A big bunion is as good as a sense organ, but his feet are too small and elegant.
September 24.
The second nurse arrived to-day. Great air raid last night of which we heard nothing, thank God!
My nerves are giving way under the strain… One leg (the left) drags abominably… We shall want a bath-chair as well as a perambulator.
Crawled up thro' the path-fields to the uplands and sat in a field in the sun with my back against a haystack. I was so immobile in my dejection that Flies and Grass-hoppers came and perched about me. This made me furious. "I am not dead yet," I said, "get away," and I would suddenly drive them off… In horrible dejection…
Even my mental powers are disintegrating – that's the rub. Some quite recent incidents I cannot remember even when reminded of them: they seem to have passed clean out of my mind – a remarkable sensation this.
My sensibility is dulled too. It chagrins me to find that my present plight by no means overwhelms me with anguish as it would have done once. It only worries me. I am just a worried ox.
September 26.