W.N.P. Barbellion
The Journal of a Disappointed Man
Then I stretched my whole length out along a flat plank on the sands, which was as dry as a bone and warm. There was not a soul on the sands. Everything was bare, clean, windswept. My plank had been washed clean and white. The sands – 3 miles of it – were hard and purified, level. My eye raced along in every direction – there was nothing – not a bird or a man – to stop it. In that immense windswept space nothing was present save me and the wind and the sea – a flattering moment for the egotist.
At the foot of the cliffs on the return journey met an old man gathering sticks. As he ambled along dropping sticks into a long sack he called out casually, "Do you believe in Jesus Christ?" in the tone of voice in which one would say, "I think we shall have some rain before night." "Aye, aye," came the answer without hesitation from a boy lying on his back in the sands a few yards distant, "and that He died to save me."
Life is full of surprises like this. The only other sounds I have heard to-day were the Herring Gull's cackle. Your own gardener will one day look over his rake and give you the correct chemical formula for carbonic acid gas. I met a postman once reading Shelley as he walked his rounds.
June 28.
I am writing this by the lamp in the cabin among the sandhills waiting for H – to arrive from town with provisions. I wear a pair of bags, a dirty sweater, and go without hat or shoes and stockings. There is a "Deadwood Dick" atmosphere here. I'm a sort of bronco-breaker or rancher off duty writing home. In a minute I haven't the slightest doubt, H – will gallop into the compound, tether his colt and come in "raising Cain" for a belly-full of red meat… If I am going to live after all (touch wood) I shall go abroad and be in the open.
I eat greedily, am getting very sunburnt, am growing hairy (that means strength!), and utter portentous oaths. If I stayed here much longer I should grow a tail and climb trees.
After a supper of fried eggs and fried bread done to a nicety, turned in at ten, and both of us lay warm and comfortable in bed, smoking cigarettes and listening to Hoffmann's Barcarolle on the gramophone. We put the lamp out, and it pleased us to watch the glow of each other's cigarettes in the dark… Neither of us spoke… Went to sleep at midnight. Awoke at sunrise to hear an Owl still hooting, a Lark singing, and several Jackdaws clattering on our tin roof with their claws as they walked.
July 1.
In London Again
Returned to London very depressed. Am not so well as I was three weeks ago. The sight of one eye is affected, and I am haunted by the possibility of blindness. Then I have a numb feeling on one side of my face, and my right arm is less mobile.
Left darling Mother in a very weak state in bed, with neuritis and a weak heart. She cried when I said "Goodbye," and asked me to go to Church as often as I could, and to read a portion of Scripture every day. I promised. Then she added, "For Dad's sake;" just as if I would not do it for her. Poor dear, she suffers a deal of pain. She does not know how ill I am. I have not told her.
July 3.
Back at work. A terrible day. Thoughts of suicide – a pistol.
July 8.
I get thro' each day with the utmost difficulty. I have to wrestle with every minute. Each hour is a conquest. The three quarters of an hour at lunch comes as a Godsend. I look forward to it all the morning, I enter into it with joyful relief with no thought of the dreadful moment impending when I must return and re-enter my room. By being wise like this, I manage to husband my spirits and am relatively cheerful for one hour in the middle of each difficult day.
July 9.
Several times I have gone to bed and hoped I should never wake up. Life grows daily more impossible. To-day I put a slide underneath the microscope and looked at it. It was like looking at something thro' the wrong end of a telescope. I sat with eye glued to the ocular, so as to keep up a pretence of work in case some one came in. My mind was occupied with quite different affairs. If one is pondering on Life and Death, it is a terrible task to have to study Mites.
July 10.
Am doing no work at all… I sit motionless in my chair and beat the devil's tattoo with my thumbs and think, think, think in the same horrible circle hour after hour. I am unable to work. I haven't the courage to. I've lost my nerve.
At five I return "home" to the Boarding-house and get more desperate.
Two old maids sat down to dinner to-night, one German youth (a lascivious, ranting, brainless creature), a lady typist (who takes drugs they say), a dipsomaniac (who has monthly bouts – H – carried him upstairs and put him to bed the other night), two invertebrate violinists who play in the Covent Garden Orchestra, a colonial lady engaged in a bedroom intrigue with a man who sits at my table. What are these people to me? I hate them all. They know it and are offended.
After dinner, put on my cap and rushed out anywhere to escape. Walked to the end of the street, not knowing where I was going or what doing. Stopped and stared with fixed eyes at the traffic in Kensington Road, undetermined what to do with myself and unable to make up my mind (volitional paralysis). Turned round, walked home, and went straight to bed 9 p.m., anxiously looking forward to to-morrow evening when I go to see her again, but at the same time wondering how on earth I am to get through to-morrow's round before the evening comes… This is a hand-to-mouth existence. My own inner life is scorching up all outside interests. Zoology appears as a curious thing in a Bagdad bazaar. I sit in my room at the B.M. and play with it; I let it trickle thro' my fingers and roll away like a child playing with quicksilver.
July 11.
Over to the flat. She was looking beautiful in a black dress, with a white silk blouse, and a Byron collar, negligently open in front as if a button had come out. She said I varied: sometimes I went up in her estimation, sometimes down; once I went down very low. I understood her to say I was now UP! Alleluia!
July 14.
… It would take too long and I am too tired to write out all the varying phases of this day's life – all its impressions and petty miseries chasing one another across my consciousness or leap-frogging over my chest like gleeful fiends.8
July 21.
Thoroughly enjoyed the journey up to town this morning. I secretly gloated over the fact that the train was dashing along over the rails to London bearing me and all the rest of the train's company upon their pursuits – wealth, fame, learning. I was inebriated with the speed, ferocity, and dash of living… If the train had charged into the buffers I should have hung my head out of the window and cheered. If a man had got in my way, I'd have knocked him down. The wheels of the carriage were singing a lusty song in which I joined.
July 30.
… We talked of men and women, and she said she thought men were neither angels nor devils but just men. I said I thought women were either angels or devils.
"I am afraid to ask you which you think me."
"You needn't," I said shortly.
August 9.
Horribly upset with news from home. Mother is really ill. The Doctor fears serious nerve trouble and says she will always be an invalid. This is awful, poor dear! It's dreadful, and yet I have a tiny wish buried at the bottom of my heart that she may be removed early from us rather than linger in pain of body and mind. Especially do I hope she may not live to hear any grievous news of me… What irony that she should lose the use of her right arm only two years after Dad's death from paralysis. It is cruel for it reminds her of Dad's illness… What, too, would she think if she could have heard M – 's first words to me yesterday on one of my periodical visits to his consulting room, "Well, how's the paralysis?"
In the evening went over to see her. She was wearing a black silk gown and looked handsome… She is always the same sombre, fascinating, lissom, soft-voiced She! She herself never changes… What am I to do? I cannot give her up and yet I do not altogether wish to take her to my heart. It distresses me to know how to proceed. I am a wily fish.
August 10.
Sat in the gardens with her. We sat facing the sun for a while until she was afraid of developing freckles and turned around, deliberately turning her back on good King Sol… I said it was disrespectful.
"Oh! he doesn't mind," she said. "He's a dear. He kissed me and said, 'Turn round my dear if you like.'"
Isn't she tantalising?
I wanted to say sarcastically, "I wonder you let him kiss you," but there was a danger of the remark reviving the dead.
August 14.
I tried my best, I've sought every loophole of escape, but I am quite unable to avoid the melancholy fact that her thumbs are – lamentable. I am genuinely upset about it for I like her. No one more than I would be more delighted if they were otherwise… Poor dear! how I love her! That's why I'm so concerned about her thumbs.
August 21.
A wire from A-came at 11.50 saying "Darling Mother passed peacefully away yesterday afternoon." … Yesterday afternoon I was writing Zoology and all last night I slept soundly… It was quite sudden. Caught the first train home.
August 23.
The funeral
August 31.
Staying at the Hotel du Guesclin at Cancale near St. Malo with my dear A – .
This flood of new experiences has knocked my diary habit out of gear. To be candid, I've forgotten all about myself. I've been too engrossed in living to stand the strain of setting down and in cold blood writing out all the things seen and heard. If I once began I should blow thro' these pages like a whirlwind… But what a waste of time with M. le batelier waiting outside with his bisque to take us mackerel fishing!..
September 8.
Returned to Southampton yesterday. Have spent the night at Okehampton in Devonshire en route for T – Rectory. This morning we hatched the ridiculous idea of hiring two little Dartmoor ponies and riding out from the town. A – rides fairly well tho' he has not been astride a beast for years. As for me, I cannot ride at all! Yet I had the idea that I could easily manage a pretty little pony with brown eyes and a long tail. On going out into the Inn yard, was horrified – two horses saddled – one a large traction beast… I climbed on to the smaller one, walked him out of the yard and down the road in good style without accident. Once in the country, however, my animal, the fresher of the two, insisted on a smart trot which shook me up a good deal so that I hardly kept my seat. This eventually so annoyed the animal that it began to fidget and zigzag across the road – no doubt preparing to break away at a stretch gallop when once it had rid itself of the incomprehensible pair of legs across its back.
I got off quickly and swopped horses with A – .
Walked him most of the way, while A – cantered forward and back to cheer me on. Ultimately however this beast, too, got sick of walking and began to trot. For a time I stood this well and began to rise in my saddle quite nicely. After two miles, horrible soreness supervened, and I had to get off – very carefully, with a funny feeling in my legs – even looked down at them to assure myself they were not bandy! In doing so, the horse – this traction monster – stepped on my toe and I swore.
On nearing the village, L – arrived, riding A – 's animal and holding his sides for laughing at me as I crawled along holding the carthorse by the bridle. Got on again and rode into the Rectory grounds in fine style like a dashing cavalier, every one jeering at me from the lawn.
September 28.
Having lived on this planet now for the space of 24 years, I can claim with some cogency that I am qualified to express some sort of opinion about it. I therefore hereby record that I find myself in an absorbingly interesting place where I live, move and have my being, dominated by one monstrous feature above all others – the mystery of it all! Everything is so astonishing, my own existence so incredible!
Nothing explains itself. Every one is dumb. It is like walking about at a masqued Ball… Even I myself am a mystery to me. How wonderful and frightening that is – to feel yourself – your innermost and most substantial possession to be a mystery, incomprehensible. I look at myself in the mirror and mock at myself. On some days I am to myself as strange and unfamiliar as a Pterodactyl. There is a certain grim humour in finding myself here possessed of a perfectly arbitrary arrangement of lineaments when I never asked to be here and never selected my own attributes. To the dignity of a human being it seems like a coarse practical joke… My own freakish physique is certainly a joke.
October 4.
In London Again
K – comes in from her dancing class, nods to me, hugs her sister around the neck and says, —
"Oh! you dear thing, you've got a cold."
"I shouldn't do that," I remark, green-eyed, "she's in an awful wax to-night."
She: "Oh! I don't mind K – !"
(Laughter!)
October 8.
Heard a knock at the door last night, and, thinking it was R – , I unbolted it and let in a tramp who at once asked God to bless me and crown all my sorrow with joy. An amiable fellow to be sure – so I gave him some coppers and he at once repeated with wonderful fervour, "God bless you, sir."
"I wish He would," I answered, "I have a horrible cold."
"Ah, I know, I gets it myself and the hinfluenza – have you had that, sir?"
In ten minutes I should have told him all my personal history. But he was thirsting for a drink and went off quickly and left me with my heart unburthened. London is a lonely place.
To-day journeyed to – where I gave evidence as an expert in Economic Entomology at the County Court in a case concerning damage to furniture by mites for which I am paid £8 8s. fee and expenses and travelled first class. What irony! (See June 30, 1911.)
October 11.
I may be a weak, maundering, vacillating fool but I cannot help loving her on one day, being indifferent the next and on some occasions even disliking her… To-day she was charming, with a certain warm glossy perfection on her face and hair… And she loves me – I could swear it. "And when a woman woos …" etc. How difficult for a vain and lonely man to resist her. She tells me many times in many dainty ways that she loves me without so much as stopping her work to talk.
I wish I were permanently and irresistibly enamoured. I want a bouleversement…
October 13.
Went to see a Harley Street oculist about the sight of one eye, which has caused a lot of trouble and worry of late and continuously haunted me with the possibility of blindness. At times, I see men as trees walking and print becomes hopelessly blurred.
The Specialist however is reassuring. The eye is healthy – no neuritis – but the adjustment muscles have been thrown out of gear by the nervous troubles of last spring.
Was ever man more sorely tempted? Here am I lonely and uncomfortable in diggings with a heart like nascent oxygen… Shall I? Yes, but… And I have neither health nor wealth.
October 22.
The British Museum Reading Room
I saw it for the first time to-day! Gadzooks!! This is the only fit ejaculation to express my amazement! It's a pagan temple with the Gods in the middle and all around, various obscure dark figures prostrating themselves in worship.
For any one who is not simply a Sheep or Cow or whose nervous organisation is a degree more sensitive than the village blacksmith's, it is a besetting peril to his peace of mind to be constantly moving about an independent being, with loves and hates, and a separate identity among other separate identities, who prowl and prowl around like the hosts of Midian – ready to snarl, fight, seize you, bore you, exasperate you, to arouse all your passions, call up all the worst from the depths where they have lain hidden… A day spent among my fellows goads me to a frenzy by the evening. I am no longer fit for human companionship. People string me up to concert pitch. I develop suspicions of one that he is prying, of another that he patronises. Others make me horribly anxious to stand well in their eyes and horribly curious to know what they think of me. Others I hate and loathe – for no particular reason. There is a man I am acquainted with concerning whom I know nothing at all. He may be Jew, Gentile, Socinian, Pre-adamite, Anabaptist, Rosicrucian – I don't know, and I don't care, for I hate him. I should like to smash his face in. I don't know why… In the whole course of our tenuous acquaintance we have spoken scarce a dozen words to each other. Yet I should like to blow up his face with dynamite. If I had £200 a year private income I should be in wait for him to-morrow round a corner and land him one – just to indicate my economic independence. He would call for the police and the policeman – discerning creature – on arrival, would surely say, "With a face like that, I'm not surprised."
R – said to me this morning, "Well, have you heard?" with an exuberance of curiosity that made my blood boil – he was referring to my Essay still at the bar of the opinion of the Editor of the English Review. "You beast," I snapped and walked off.
R – shouted with laughter for he realizes my anger with him is only semi-serious: it is meant and not meant: meant, for it is justified by the facts; not meant, for I can't be too serious over anything au fond.
Of all the grim and ridiculous odds and ends of chance that Fortune has rolled up to my feet, my friendship with a man like B – is the grimmest and most ridiculous. He is a bachelor of sixty, rather good-looking, of powerful physique and a faultless constitution… His ignorance is colossal and he once asked whether Australia, for example, tho' surrounded by water, is not connected up with other land underneath the sea. Being himself a child in intelligence (tho' commercially cunning), he has a great respect for my brains. Being himself a strong man, he views my ill-health with much contempt. His private opinion is that I am in consumption. When asked once by a lady if I were not going to be "a great man" one day, he replied, "Yes – if he lives." I ought to walk six miles a day, drink a bottle of stout with my dinner, and eat plenty of onions. His belief in the curative properties of onions is strong as death…
His system of prophylaxis may be quickly summarised, —
(1) Hot whisky ad lib. and off to bed.
(2) A woman.
These two sterling preventives he has often urged upon me at the same time tipping out a quantity of anathemas on doctors and physic…
He is a cynic. He scoffs at the medical profession, the Law, the Church, the Press. Every man is guilty until he is proved innocent. The Premier is an unscrupulous character, the Bishop a salacious humbug. No doctor will cure, for it pays him to keep you ill. Every clergyman puts the Sunday-school teacher in the family way. His mouth is permanently distorted by cynicism.
He is vain and believes all women are in love with him. When playing the Gallant, he turns on a special voice, wears white spats, and looks like a Newmarket "Crook."
"I lost my 'bus," a girl says to him. "Lost your bust," he answers, in broad Scotch. "I can't see that you've done that." … His sexual career has been a remarkable one, he claiming to have brought many women to bed, and actually to have lain with women of almost all European nationalities, for he has been a great traveller…
This man is my devoted friend!.. And truth to tell I get on with him better than I do with most people. I like his gamey flavour, his utter absence of self-consciousness, and his doggy loyalty to myself – his weaker brother. He may be depraved in his habits, coarse in his language, boorish in his manners, ludicrous in the wrongness of all his views. But I like him just because he is so hopeless. I get on with him because it is so impossible to reclaim him – my missionary spirit is not intrigued. If he only dabbled in vice (for an experiment), if he had pale, watery ideas about current literature – if – to use his own favourite epithet – he were genteel, I should quarrel.
October 30.
Having developed a passion for a piece of sculpture by R. Boeltzig called the Reifenwerferin – the most beautiful figure of a woman. I am already devoted to Rodin's "Kiss" and have a photo of it framed in my bedroom. Have written to Bruciani's.
I suspect that my growing appreciation of the plastic art is with me only distilled sensuality. I enjoy my morning bath for the same reason. My bath is a daily baptism. I revel in the pleasure of the pain of the cold water. I whistle gleefully because I am clean and cool and nude early in the morning with the sun still low, before the day has been stained by clothes, dirt, pain, exasperation, death… How I love myself as I rub myself down! – the cool, pink skin – I could eat it! I want to be all day in a cold bath to enjoy the pain of mortifying the flesh – it is so beautiful, so soft, so inscrutabl – if I cut out chunks of it, it would only bleed.
November 8.
The other morning R – said hyperbolically that he hadn't slept all night for fear that, before he had time to put an arresting hand on my shoulder and say "Don't," I might have gone and become "Entangled." …
… No, I'm as firm as a rock, my dear. But in imagination the affair was continued as follows, —
She: "I am fond of you, you know."
He: "I wish you wouldn't say these things to me – they're quite embarrassing."
She: "Oh! my dear, I'm not serious, you know – you're such a vain young man."
He: "Well, it's equally embarrassing any way."
She: "Then I am serious."
Tears.
I say: "I wish you would take me only for what I am – a blackguard with no good intentions, yet no very evil ones – but still a blackguard, whom you seem to find has engaging manners."
I breathe freely hoping to have escaped this terrible temptation and turn to go. But she, looking up smiling thro' a curtain of wet eyelashes, asks, —
"Won't the blackguard stop a little longer?" In a moment my earth works, redoubts, and bastions fall down, I rush forward impetuously into her arms shouting, "I will, I will, I will as long as for eternity."
(Curtain.)
I dramatised this little picture and much more last night before going to sleep when I was in a fever. I should succumb at once to the first really skilful coquette.
November 9.
Ludo
We played Ludo together this evening and she won 2s. 6d. Handsomely gowned in black and wearing black ornaments, she sat with me in the lamplight on the sofa in the Morris Room, with the Ludo board between us placed on a large green cushion. Her face was white as parchment and her hair seemed an ebony black. I lolled in the opposite corner, a thin, elongated youth, with fair hair all stivvered up, dressed in a light-brown lounge suit with a good trouser crease, a soft linen collar and – a red tie! Between us, on its green cushion the Ludo board with its brilliantly coloured squares: – all of it set before a background formed by the straight-backed, rectangular, settle-like sofa, with a charming covering which went with the rest of the scheme.
"Rather decorative," – remarked in an audible voice, turning her head on one side and quizzing. I can well believe it was. She looked wholly admirable.
November 21.
My Nightmare
Can't get rid of my cough. I have so many things to do – I am living in a fever of haste to get them done. Yet this cough hinders me. There is always something which drags me back from the achievement of my desires. It's like a nightmare; I see myself struggling violently to escape from a monster which draws continuously nearer, until his shadow falls across my path, when I begin to run and find my legs tied, etc. The only difference is that mine is a nightmare from which I never wake up. The haven of successful accomplishment remains as far off as ever. Oh! make haste.
November 29.
The English Review has returned my Essay! – This is a keen disappointment to me. "I wish I could use this, but I am really too full," the Editor writes. To be faintly encouraged and delicately rejected – why I prefer the printed form.
December 1.
More Irony
Renewed my cold – I do nothing all day but blow my nose, cough, and curse Austin Harrison.
M – thinks the lungs are all right. "There is nothing there, I think," said he, this morning. Alleluia! I've had visions of consumption for weeks past and M – himself has been expecting it. I always just escape: I always almost get something, do something, go somewhere, I have dabbled in a variety of diseases, but never got one downright9 – but only enough to make me feel horribly unfit and very miserable without the consolation of being able to regard myself as the heroic victim of some incurable disorder. Instead of being Stevenson with tuberculosis, I've only been Jones with dyspepsia. So, too, in other directions, big events have always just missed me: by Herculean efforts I succeeded in giving up newspaper journalism and breaking thro' that steel environment – but only to become an Entomologist! I once achieved success in an Essay in the Academy, which attracted attention – a debut, however, that never developed. I had not quite arrived. It is always not quite.
Yesterday, I received a state visit from the Editor of the Furniture Record seeking advice on how to eradicate mites from upholstering! I received him ironically – but little did he understand.
I shot up like a ball on a bagatelle board all steamy into zoology (my once beloved science) but at once rolled dead into the very low hole of Economic Entomology! Curse… Why can't I either have a first-rate disease or be a first-rate zoologist?
Now just think what a much better figure I should have cut, from the artistic view point, had I remained a newspaper reporter who had taught himself prodigious embryology out of F.M. Balfour's Textbook, who had cut sections of fowls' eggs and newt embryos with a hand microtome, who had passionately dissected out the hidden, internal anatomy of a great variety of animals, who could recite Wiedersheim's Comparative Anatomy of Vertebrates and patter off the difference between a nephridium and a cœlomic duct without turning a hair – or the phylogenetic history (how absorbing!) of the kidney – pronephros, mesonephros and metanephros and all the ducts!.. All this, over now and wasted. My hardly-won knowledge wrenched away is never brought into use – it lies piled up in my brain rotting. I could have become a first-rate comparative anatomist.
December 3.
Cold better. So back at work – gauging ale at Dunfermline as R – puts it.
December 9.
In the evening found it quite impossible to stay in the house any longer: some vague fear drove me out. I was alarmed to be alone or to be still. It is my cough, I think.
Had two glasses of port at the Kensington Hotel, conversed with the barmaid, and then came home.
December 10.
"Don't be an old fossil," she said to me to-night, irrelevantly.
"A propos of what?" I inquired.
"Mother, here's W – proposing to E – ! Do come," cried – , with intent to confuse. I laughed heartlessly.
Dear, dear, where will it all end? It's a sad business when you fall in love with a girl you don't like.
December 26.
Spent a romping day at the Flat. Kissed her sister twice under the mistletoe, and in the evening went to a cinema. After supper made a mock heroic speech and left hilarious.