The Journal of a Disappointed Man

by W. N. P. Barbellion

  (1917: I think after three years of Armageddon I feel quite ready to go back to top hats and civilisation.)

  July 8.

  Sunset in Kensington Gardens

  The instinct for worship occurs rhythmically – at morning and evening. This is natural, for twice a day at sunrise and sunset – however work-sodden we may be, however hypnotised by daily routine – our natural impulse is (provided we are awake) to look to the horizon at the sun and stand a moment with mute lips. During the course of the day or night, we are too occupied or asleep – but sunrise is the great hour of the departure and sunset is the arrival at the end. Everything puts on a mysterious appearance – to-night the tops of the elms seemed supernaturally high and, pushing up into the sky, had secret communion with the clouds; the clouds seemed waiting for a ceremony, a way had been prepared by the tapissier, a moment of suspense while one cloud stretched to another like courtiers in whispered conversation; a rumour of the approach; then slowly the news came thro’ that the sun had arrived for immediate departure.

  July 14.

  Have finished my essay. But am written out – obviously. To-night I struggled with another, and spent two hours sucking the end of my pen. But after painfully mountainous parturition, all I brought forth were the two ridiculous mice of one meretricious trope and one grammatical solecism. I can sometimes sit before a sheet of paper, pen in hand, unable to produce a word.

  July 19.

  For a walk with R— in the country, calling for tea at his Uncle’s house at —. Played clock golf and made the acquaintance of Miss —, a tall, statuesque lady, with golden hair, as graceful as an antelope and very comely, her two dear little feet clad in white shoes peeping out (as R— said) like two white mice one after the other as she moved across the lawn.

  Coming home I said to R— histrionically, ‘Some golden-haired little boy will some day rest his head upon her bosom, beautiful in line and depth, all unconscious of his luck or of his part in a beautiful picture – would that I were the father to make that group a fait accompli.’ R—, with meticulous accuracy, always refers to her as ‘that elegant virgin’.

  July 25.

  While sketching under Hammersmith Bridge yesterday, R— heard a whistle, and, looking up, saw a charming ‘young thing’ leaning over the Bridge parapet smiling like the blessed Damozel out of Heaven.

  ‘Come down,’ he cried.

  She did, and they discussed pictures while he painted. Later he walked with her to the Broadway, saw her into a ’bus and said ‘Good-bye’, without so much as an exchange of names.

  ‘Even if she were a whore,’ I said, ‘it’s a pity your curiosity was so sluggish. You should have seen her home, even if you did not go home with her. Young man, you preferred to let go of authentic life at Hammersmith Broadway, so as to return at once to your precious water-colour painting.’

  ‘Perhaps,’ replied he enigmatically.

  ‘Whatever you do, if ever you meet her again,’ I rejoined, ‘don’t introduce her to that abominable —. He is abominably handsome, and I hate him for it. To all his other distinctions he is welcome – parentage, money, success, but I can never forgive him his good looks and the inevitable marriage to some beautiful fair-skinned woman.’

  R. (reflectively): ‘Up to now, I was inclined to think that envy as a passion did not exist.’

  ‘Have you none?’

  ‘Not much,’ he answered, and I believe it.

  ‘Smug wretch, then. All I can say is, I may have instincts and passions but I am not a pale water-colour artist … What’s the matter with you,’ I foamed, ‘is that you like pictures. If I showed you a real woman, you would exclaim contemplatively, “How lovely”; then putting out one hand to touch her, unsuspectingly, you’d scream aghast, “Oh! it’s alive, I hear it ticking.” “Yes, my boy,” I’d answer severely with a flourish, “That is a woman’s heart.” ’

  R— exploded with laughter and then said, ‘A truce to your desire for more life, for actual men and women … I know this that last night I would not have exchanged the quiet armchair reading the last chapter of Dostoievsky’s The Possessed for a Balaclava Charge.’

  ‘A matter of temperament, I suppose,’ I reflected, in cold detachment. ‘You see, I belong to the raw meat school. You prefer life cooked for you in a book. You prefer the confectioner’s shop to cutting down the wheat with your own scythe.’

  July 26.

  The B. M. is a ghastly hole. They will give me none of the apparatus I require. If you ask the Trustees for a thousand pounds for the propagation of the Gospel in foreign parts they say, ‘Yes.’ If you ask for twenty pounds for a new microscope they say, ‘No, but we’ll cut off your nose with a big pair of scissors.’

  July 27.

  To a pedantic prosy little old maid who was working in my room this morning, I exclaimed, –

  ‘I’d sooner make a good dissection than go to a Lord Mayor’s Banquet. Turtle Soup ain’t in it.’

  She was uninspired, and said, ‘Oom’, and went on pinning insects. Then more brightly, and with great punctilio in the pronunciation of her words, having cleared her throat and drawn herself up with great deliberation to deliver herself of a remark, she volunteered, –

  “I whish I had nevah taken up such a brittle grooop as the Stones (Stoneflies). One dare not loook at a Stone.’

  Poor dear little old maid. This was my turn to say ‘Oom’.

  ‘Pretty dismal work,’ I added ambiguously. Then with malice aforethought I whistled a Harry Lauder tune, asked her if she had ever heard Willie Solar sing, ‘You made me love you’, and then absent-mindedly and in succession inquired, –

  ‘What’s become of all the gold?’

  ‘What’s become of Waring?’

  ‘What shall I sing when all is sung?’

  To which several categorical interrogations she ventured no reply, but presently in the usual voice, –

  ‘I have placed an Agrionine in this drawer for security and, now I want it, cannot find it.’

  ‘Life is like that,’ I said. ‘I never can find my Agrionines!’

  August 1.

  All Europe is mobilising.

  August 2.

  Will England join in?

  August 12.

  We all await the result of a battle between two millions of men. The tension makes me feel physically sick.

  August 21–August 24

  In bed with a fever. I never visit the flat now, but her mother kindly came over to see me.

  September 25.

  [Living now in rooms alone.]

  I have – since my return from Cornwall – placed all my journals in a specially made cabinet. R— came to dinner and after a glass or so of Beaune and a cigarette, I open my ‘coffin’fn4 (it is a long box with a brass handle at each end), and with some show of deliberation select a volume to read to him, drawing it from its division with lavish punctiliousness, and inquiring with an oily voice, ‘A little of 1912?’ as if we were trying wines. R— grins at the little farce and so encourages me.

  September 26.

  Doctor’s Consulting Rooms – my life has been spent in them! Medical specialists – Harley Street men – I have seen four and all to no purpose. M— wrote me the other day, –

  ‘Come along and see me on Tuesday; some day I dare say we shall find something we can patch.’

  He regards me with the most obvious commiseration and always when I come away after a visit he shakes me warmly by the hand and says, ‘Good-bye, old man, and good luck.’ More luck than the pharmacopœia.

  My life has always been a continuous struggle with ill-health and ambition, and I have mastered neither. I try to reassure myself that this accursed ill-health will not affect my career. I keep flogging my will in the hope of winning thro’ in the end. Yet at the back of my mind there is the great improbability that I shall ever live long enough to realise myself. For a long time past my hope has simply been to last long enough to convince others of what I might have done – had I l
ived. That will be something. But even to do that I will not allow that I have overmuch time. I have never at any time lived with any sense of security. I have never felt permanently settled in this life – nothing more than a shadowy locum tenens, a wraith, a festoon of mist likely to disappear any moment.

  At times, when I am vividly conscious of the insecurity of my tenure here, my desires enter on a mad race to obtain fulfilment before it is too late … and as fulfilment recedes ambition obsesses me the more. I am daily occupied in calculating with my ill-health: trying to circumvent it, to carry on in spite of all. I conquer each day. Every week is a victory. I am always surprised that my health or will has not collapsed, that, by Jove! I am still working and still living.

  One day it looks like appendicitis, another stoppage, another threatened blindness, or I develop a cough and am menaced with consumption. So I go on in a hurricane of bad dreams. I struggle like Laocoon with the serpents – the serpents of nervous depression that press around the heart tighter than I care to admit. I must use every kind of blandishment to convince myself that my life and my work are worth while. Frequently I must smother and kill (and it calls for prompt action) the shrill voice that cries from the tiniest corner of my heart, ‘Are you quite sure you are such an important fellow as you imagine?’ Or I fret over the condition of my brain, finding that I forget what I read, I lose in acuteness of my perceptions. My brain is a tumefaction. But I won’t give in. I go on trying to recollect what I have forgotten, I harry my brain all day to recall a word or name, I attack other folk importunately. I write things down so as to look them up in reference books – I am always looking up the things I remember I have forgotten …

  There is another struggle, too, that often engrosses all my energies … It is a horrible thing that with so large an ambition, so great a love of life, I should nevertheless court disaster like this. Truly Sir Thomas Browne you say, ‘Every man is his own Atropos.’

  In short, I lead an unfathomably miserable existence in this dark, grey street, in these drab, dirty rooms – miserable in its emptiness of home, love, human society. Now that I never visit the flat, I visit about two houses in London – the Doctor’s and R—’s Hotel. I walk along the streets and stare in the windows of private houses, hungry for a little society. It creates in me a gnawing, rancorous discontent to be seeing people everywhere in London – millions of them – and then to realise my own ridiculously circumscribed knowledge of them. I am passionately eager to have acquaintances, to possess at least a few friends. If I die to-morrow, how many persons shall I have talked to? or how many men and women shall I have known? A few maiden aunts and one or two old fossils. I am burning to meet real live men, I have masses of mental stuff I am anxious to unload. But I am ignorant of people as of countries and live in celestial isolation.

  This, I fear, reads like a wail of self-commiseration. But I am trying to give myself the pleasure of describing myself at this period truthfully, to make a bid at least for some posthumous sympathy. Therefore it shall be told that I who am capable of passionate love am sexually starved, and endure the pangs of a fiendish solitude in rooms, with an ugly landlady’s face when … I despair of ever finding a woman to love. I never meet women of my own class, and am unprepossessing in appearance and yet I fancy that once my reserve is melted I am not without attractions. ‘He grows on you,’ a girl said of me once. But I am hypercritical and hyperfastidious. I want too much … I search daily in the streets with a starved and hungry look. What a horrible and powerful and hateful thing this love instinct is! I hate it, hate it, hate it. It will not let me rest. I wish I were a eunuch.

  ‘There’s a beautiful young thing,’ R— and I say to one another sardonically, hoping thereby to conceal the canker within.

  I could gnash my teeth and weep in anger – baulked, frustrated as I am at almost every turn of life – in my profession, in my literary efforts, and in my love of man and woman kind. I would utter a whole commination service in my present state of mind.

  October 7.

  To me woman is the wonderful fact of existence. If there be any next world and it be as I hope it is, a jolly gossiping place, with people standing around the mantelpiece and discussing their earthly experiences, I shall thump my fist on the table as my friends turn to me on entering and exclaim in a loud voice, ‘WOMAN.’

  October 11.

  Since I grew up I have wept three times. The first time they were tears of exasperation. Dad and I were sitting down side by side after a wordy combat in which he had remained adamant and I was forced both by conscience and argument to give in, to relinquish my dissections, and go off to some inquest on a drowning fatality. The second time was when Mother died, and the third was to-day. But I am calm now. To-day they were tears of remorse …

  On occasion bald confession in this Journal is sweet for the soul and strengthens it. It gives me a kind of false backbone to communicate my secrets: for I am determined that some day some one shall know. If God really intervenes in our affairs, here is an opportunity. Let Him save me. I challenge Him to save me from perishing in this ditch … It is not often I am cornered into praying but I did this morning, for I feel defeated this day, and almost inarticulate in my misery.

  Nietzsche in a newspaper I read to-day: ‘For myself I have felt exceptionally blest having Hell’s phantoms inside me to thrust at in the dark, internal enemies to dominate till I felt myself an ecstatic victor, wrenching at last good triumphant joys thro’ the bars of my own sickness and weakness – joys with which your notions of happiness, poor sleek smug creatures, cannot compare! You must carry a chaos inside you to give birth to a dancing star.’

  But Nietzsche is no consolation to a man who has once been weak enough to be brought to his knees. There I am and there I think I have prayed a little somehow to-day. But it’s all in desperation, not in faith. Internal chaos I have, but no dancing star. Dancing stars are the consolation of genius.

  October 12.

  Am better to-day. My better self is convinced that it is silly and small-minded to think so much about my own puny destiny – especially at times like these when – God love us all – there is a column of casualties each day. The great thing to be thankful for is that I am alive and alive now, that I was alive yesterday, and even may be to-morrow. Surely that is thrilling enough. What, then, have I to complain of? I’m a lucky dog to be alive at all. My plight is bad, but there are others in a worse one. I’m going to be brave and fight on the side of Nietzsche. Who knows but that one day the dancing star may yet be born!

  October 13.

  Spent the evening in my lodgings struggling with my will. Too flabby to work, disinclined to read, a dreadful vague unrest possessing me. I couldn’t sit still in my chair, so walked around the table continuously like a squirrel in a cage. I wanted to be going out somewhere, talking to some one, to be among human beings.

  Many an evening during the past few months, I have got up and gone down the road to look across at the windows of the flat, to see if there were a red light behind the curtains, and, if so, wonder if she were there, and how she was. My pride would never allow me to visit there again on my own initiative. K— has managed to bring about a rapprochement but I go very seldom. Pride again.

  I wanted to do so to-night. I thought I would just go down the road to look up at the windows. That seemed to be some comfort. Why do I wish to do this? I do not know. From a mere inspection one would say that I am in love. But remember I am also ill. Three times to-night I nearly put on my boots and went down to have a look up! What ridiculous weakness! Yet this room can be a frightful prison. Shall I? I cannot decide. I see her figure constantly before me – gentle, graceful, calm, stretching forth both hands and to me …

  Seized a pack of cards and played Patience and went on playing Patience because I was afraid to stop. Given a weak constitution, a great ambition, an amorous nature, and at the same time a very fastidious one, I might have known I was in for trouble.

  October 14.
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br />   Marie Bashkirtseff

  Some time ago I noticed a quotation from one, Marie Bashkirtseff in a book on Strindberg, and was struck with the likeness to a sentiment of my own. Who are you? I wondered.

  This evening went to the Library and read about her in Mathilde Blind’s introductory essay to her Journal. I am simply astounded. It would be difficult in all the world’s history to discover any two persons with temperaments so alike. She is the ‘very spit of me’! I devoured Mathilde Blind’s pages more and more astonished. We are identical! Oh, Marie Bashkirtseff! how we should have hated one another! She feels as I feel. We have the same self-absorption, the same vanity and corroding ambition. She is impressionable, volatile, passionate – ill! So am I. Her journal is my journal. All mine is stale reading now. She has written down all my thoughts and forestalled me! Already I have found some heartrending parallels. To think I am only a replica: how humiliating for a human being to find himself merely a duplicate of another. Is there anything in the transmigration of souls? She died in 1886. I was born in 1889.