The Journal of a Disappointed Man

by W. N. P. Barbellion

  October 15.

  A man is always looking at himself in the mirror if for no other reason than to tie his tie and brush his hair. What does he think of his face? He must have private opinions. But it is usually considered a little out of taste to entertain opinions about one’s personal appearance.

  As for myself, some mirrors do me down pretty well, others depress me! I am bound to confess I am biassed in favour of the friendly mirror. I am not handsome, but I look interesting – I hope distinguished. My eyes are deep-set … but my worst moments are when the barber combs my hair right down over my forehead, or when I see a really handsome man in Hyde Park. Such occasions direct my gaze reflexly, and doubt like a thief in the night forces the back door!

  To-day, M— sent me dancing mad by suggesting that I copied R— in my manner of speech and opinions. Now R— has a damned pervasive way of conducting himself – for all the world as if he were a high official of the Foreign Office. I, on the contrary, am shy, self-conscious, easily overlooked, and this makes me writhe. As we are inseparable friends – everybody assumes that I am his tacky-lacky, a kind of appoggiatura to his big note. He, they suppose, is my guide, philosopher, and Great Mæcenas – Oxford befriending the proletariat. The thought of it makes me sick – that any one should believe I imbibe his ideas, echo his conceits, and even ape his gestures and manner of voice.

  ‘Lost yourself?’ inquired a despicable creature the other morning as I came out of R—’s room after finding him out. I could have shot him dead! … As for — more than one person thinks that he alone is the brilliant author until at last he himself has got into the way of thinking it.

  ‘It makes me hate you like mad,’ I said to him to-day. ‘How can I confront these people with the naked truth?’

  R— chuckled complacently.

  ‘If I deny your alleged supremacy, as I did this morning, or if suddenly, in a fit of spleen, I’m induced to declare that I loathe you (as I sometimes do)’ – (more chuckles) – ‘that your breath stinks, your eyes bulge, that you have swollen jugulars and a platter face: they will think I am either jealous or insincere … To be your Echo tho’! – my God!’ I spat. We then grinned at one another, and I, being bored, went to the lavatory and read the newspaper secure from interruption.

  Resignation

  In the Tube, a young widow came in and sat in front of me – pale-faced, grief-stricken, demure – a sort of ‘Thy Will be Done’ look. The adaptability of human beings has something in it that seems horrible. It is dreadful to think how we have all accommodated ourselves to this War. Christian resignation is a feeble thing. Why won’t this demure widow with a loud voice blaspheme against this iniquitous world that permits this iniquitous war?

  October 21

  I myself (licking a stamp): ‘The taste of gum is really very nice.’

  R.: ‘I hate it.’

  I: ‘My dear fellow’ (surprised and entreating), ‘envelope gum is simply delicious.’

  R.: ‘I never lick stamps – it’s dangerous – microbes.’

  I: ‘I always do: I shall buy a bookful and go away to the seaside with them.’

  R.: ‘Yes, you’ll need to.’

  (Laughter.)

  Thus gaily and jauntily we went on to discuss wines, whiskies, and Worthington’s, and I rounded it up in a typical cock-eyed manner, –

  ‘Ah! yes, it’s only when the day is over that the day really begins – what?’

  October 23.

  I expressed to R— to-day my admiration for the exploit of the brave and successful Submarine Commander Max Kennedy Horton. (Name for you!) R— was rather cold. ‘His exploits,’ said this bloody fool, ‘involve loss of life and scarcely make me deliriously eulogistic.’

  I cleared my throat and began, –

  ‘Your precious sociology again – it will be the ruin of your career as an artist. It is so interwoven into the fibre of your brain that you never see anything except in relation to its State value. You are afraid to approve of a lying, thieving rogue, however delightful a rascal he may be, for fear of what Karl Marx might say … You’ll soon be drawing landscapes with taxpayers in the foreground, or we shall get a picture of Ben Nevis with Keir Hardie on the summit.’ And so on to our own infinite mutual amusement.

  The English Review returns my Essay. I am getting simply furious with an ambition I am unable to satisfy, among beautiful London women I cannot get to know, and in ill-health that I cannot cure. Shall I ever find any one? Shall I ever be really well? My one solace is that I do not submit, it infuriates me, I resent it; I will never be resigned and milky. I will keep my claws sharp and fight to the end.

  October 24.

  Went to Mark Lane by train, then walked over the Tower Bridge, and back along Lower Thames Street to London Bridge, up to Whitechapel, St Paul’s, Fleet Street, and Charing Cross, and so home.

  Near Reilly’s Tavern, I saw a pavement artist who had drawn a loaf with the inscription in both French and English: ‘This is easy to draw but hard to earn.’ A baby’s funeral trotted briskly over the Tower Bridge among Pink’s jam waggons, carts carrying any goods from lead pencils and matches to bales of cotton and chests of tea.

  In the St Catherine’s Way there is one part like a deep railway cutting, the whole of one side for a long way, consisting of the brickwall of a very tall warehouse with no windows in it and beautifully curved and producing a wonderful effect. Walked past great blocks of warehouses and business establishments – a wonderful sight; and everywhere bacon factors, coffee roasters, merchants. On London Bridge, paused to feed the sea-gulls and looked down at the stevedores. Outside Billingsgate Market was a blackboard on an easel – for market prices – but instead some one had drawn an enormously enlarged chalk picture of a cat’s rear and tail with anatomical details.

  In Aldgate, stopped to inspect a street stall containing popular literature – one brochure entitled Suspended for Life to indicate the terrible punishment meted out to —, a League footballer. The frontispiece enough to make a lump come in the juveniles’ throats! Another stall held domestic utensils with an intimation, ‘Anything on this stall lent for 1d.’ A newsvendor I heard exclaim to a fellow-tradesman in the same line of business, –

  ‘They come and look at your bloody plakaard and then parsse on.’

  Loitered at a dirty little Fleet Street bookshop where Paul de Kock’s The Lady with the Three Pairs of Stays was displayed prominently beside a picture of Oscar Wilde.

  In Fleet Street, you exchange the Whitechapel sausage restaurants for Taverns with ‘snacks at the bar’, and the chestnut roasters, with their buckets of red-hot coals, for Grub Street camp followers, selling L’Indépendance Belge or pamphlets entitled, Why We Went to War.

  In the Strand you may buy war maps, buttonhole flags, etc., etc. I bought a penny stud. One shop was turned into a shooting gallery at three shots a penny where the Inner Temple Barristers in between the case for the defence and the case for the prosecution could come and keep their eye in against the time the Germans come.

  Outside Charing Cross Station I saw a good-looking, well-dressed woman in mourning clothes, grinding a barrel organ …

  Returned to the Library and read the Dublin Review (article on Samuel Butler), North American Review (one on Henry James) and dined at seven. After dinner, read: Evening Standard, Saturday Westminster, and the New Statesman. Smoked six cigarettes and went to bed. To-morrow Fifth Symphony of Beethoven.

  October 25.

  Too Late

  Yesterday’s ramble has left me very sore in spirit. London was spread out before me, a vast campagne. But I felt too physically tired to explore. I could just amble along – a spectator merely – and automatically register impressions. Think of the misery of that! I want to see the Docks and Dockland, to enter East End public-houses and opium-dens, to speak to Chinamen and Lascars: I want a first-rate, first-hand knowledge of London, of London men, London women. I was tingling with anticipation yesterday and then I grew tired and fretful and m
orose, crawled back like a weevil into my nut. By 6.30 I was in a Library reading the Dublin Review!

  What a young fool I was to neglect those priceless opportunities of studying and tasting life and character in North —, at Borough Council meetings, Boards of Guardians, and electioneering campaigns – not to mention inquests, police courts, and country fairs. Instead of appraising all these precious and genuine pieces of experience at their true value, my diary and my mind were occupied only with – Zoology, if you please. I ignored my exquisite chances, I ramped around, fuming and fretting, full of contempt for my circumscribed existence, and impatient as only a youth can be. What I shall never forgive myself is my present inability to recall that life, so that instead of being able now to push my chair back and entertain myself and others with descriptions of some of those antique and incredible happenings, my memory is rigid and formal: I remember only a few names and one or two isolated events. All that time is just as if it had never been. My recollections form only an indefinite smudge – odd Town Clerks, Town Criers (at least five of them in wonderful garb), policemen (I poached with one), ploughing match dinners (platters of roast beef and boiled potatoes and I, bespectacled student of Zoology, sitting uncomfortably among valiant trenchermen after their day’s ploughing), election meetings in remote Exmoor villages (and those wonderful Inns where I had to spend the night!) – all are gone – too remote to bear recital – yet just sufficiently clear to harass the mind in my constant endeavours to raise them all again from the dead in my consciousness. I hate to think it is lost; that my youth is buried – a cemetery without even headstones. To an inquest on a drowned sailor – disclosing some thrilling story of the wild seas off the coast – with a pitiful myopia – I preferred Wiedersheim’s Comparative Anatomy of Vertebrates. I used to carry Dr Smith Woodward’s Palæontology with me to a Board of Guardians meeting, mingling Pariasaurus and Holoptychians with tenders for repairs and reports from the Master. Now I take Keats or Tchekov to the Museum!

  London certainly lies before me. Certainly I am alive at last. Yet now my energy is gone. It is too late. I am ill and tired. It costs me infinite discomfort to write this entry, all the skin of my right hand is permanently ‘pins and needles’ and in the finger tips I have lost all sense of touch. The sight of my right eye is also very bad and sometimes I can scarcely read print with it, etc., etc. But why should I go on?

  A trance-like condition supervenes in a semi-invalid forced to live in almost complete social isolation in a great whirling city like London. Days of routine follow each other as swiftly as the weaver’s shuttle and numb the spirit and turn palpitating life into a silent picture show. Everywhere always in the street people – millions of them – whom I do not know, moving swiftly along. I look and look and yawn and then one day as to-day I wake up and race about beside myself – a swollen bag ready to burst with hope, love, misery, joy, desperation.

  Apologia pro vita mea

  How may I excuse myself for continuing to talk about my affairs and for continuing to write zoological memoirs during the greatest War of all time?

  Well, here are some precedents: –

  Goethe sat down to study the geography of China, while his fatherland agonised at Leipzig.

  Hegel wrote the last lines of the Phenomenology of Spirit within sound of the guns of Jena.

  While England was being rent in twain by civil war, Sir Thomas Browne ensconced in old Norwich, reflected on Cambyses and Pharaoh and on the song the Sirens sang.

  Lacépède composed his Histoire des Poissons during the French Revolution.

  Then there were Diogenes and Archimedes.

  This defence of course implicates me in an unbounded opinion of the importance of my own work. ‘He is quite the little poet,’ some one said of Keats. ‘It is just as if a man remarked of Buonaparte,’ said Keats, in a pet, ‘that he’s quite the little general.’

  A Woman and a Child

  On the way to the Albert Hall came upon the most beautiful picture of young maternity that ever I saw in my life. She was a delightfully girlish young creature – a perfect phœnix of health and beauty. As she stood with her little son at the kerb waiting for a ’bus, smiling and chatting to him, a luminous radiance of happy, satisfied maternal love, maternal pride, womanliness streamed from her and enveloped me.

  We got on the same ’bus. The little boy, with his long hair and dressed in velvet like little Lord Fauntleroy, said something to her – she smiled delightedly, caught him up on her knees and kissed him. Two such pretty people never touched lips before – I’m certain of it. It was impossible to believe that this virginal creature was a mother – childbirth left no trace. She must have just budded off the baby boy like a plant. Once, in her glance, she took me in her purview, and I knew she knew I was watching her. In travelling backwards from Kensington Gardens to the boy again, her gaze rested on me a moment and I, of course, rendered the homage that was due. As a matter of fact there was no direct evidence that she was the mother at all.

  The Albert Hall Hag

  While waiting outside the Albert Hall, an extraordinarily weird contrast thrust itself before me – she was the most pathetic piece of human jetsam that ever I saw drifting about in this sea of London faces. Tall, gaunt, cadaverous, the skin of her face drawn tightly over her cheekbones and over a thin, pointed, hook-shaped nose, on her feet brown sandshoes, dressed in a long draggle-tailed skirt, a broken-brimmed straw hat, beneath which some scanty hair was scraped back and tied behind in a knot – this wretched soul of some thirty summers (and what summers!) stood in the road beside the waiting queue and weakly passed the bow across her violin which emitted a slight scraping sound. She could not play a tune and the fingers of her left hand never touched the strings – they merely held the handle.

  A policeman passed and, with an eye on the queue, muttered audibly, ‘Not ’arf’, but no one laughed. Then she began to rummage in her skirt, holding the violin by the neck in her right hand just as she must hold her brat by the arm when at home. Simultaneously sounds issued from her mouth in a high falsetto key; they were unearthly sounds, the tiny voice of an articulating corpse underneath the coffin lid. For a moment no one realised that she was reciting. For she continued to rummage in her skirt as she squeaked, ‘Break, break, break, on thy cold grey stones, O sea’, etc. The words were scarcely audible tho’ she stood but two yards off. But she repeated the verse and I then made out what it was. She seemed ashamed of herself and of her plight, almost without the courage to foist this mockery of violin-playing on us – one would say she was frightened by her own ugliness and her own pathos.

  After conscientiously carrying out her programme but with the distracted, uncomfortable air of some one scurrying over a painful task – like a tired child gabbling its prayers before getting into bed – she at length produced from her skirt pocket a small canvas money bag which she started to hand around. This was the climax to this harrowing incident – for each time she held out the bag, she smiled, which stretched the skin still more tightly down over her malar prominence and said something – an inarticulate noise in a very high pitch. ‘A woman,’ I whispered to R—, ‘she claims to be a woman.’ If any one hesitated a moment or struggled with a purse she would wait patiently with bag outstretched and head turned away, the smile vanishing at once as if the pinched face were but too glad of the opportunity of a rest from smiling. She stood there, gazing absently – two lifeless eyes at the bottom of deep socket holes in a head which was almost a bare skull. She was perfunctorily carrying out an objectionable task because she could not kill the will to live.

  As she looked away and waited for you to produce the copper, she thought, ‘Why trouble? Why should I wait for this man’s aid?’ The clink of the penny recalled her to herself, and she passed on, renewing her terrible grimacing smile.

  Why didn’t I do something? Why? Because I was bent on hearing Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony, if you please … And she may have been a well-to-do vagrant – well got up for the occas
ion – a clever simulator? …

  October 28.

  Rigor Bordis

  Rigor bordis! – I write like this as if it were a light matter. But to-night I was in extremis … First I read the paper; then I finished the book I was reading – ‘Thus Spake Zarathustra’. Not knowing quite what next to do, I took my boots off and poured out another cup of coffee. But these manœuvres were only the feeble attempts of a cowardly wretch to evade the main issue which was: –

  How to occupy myself and keep myself sane during the hour and a half before bedtime.

  Before now I have tried going off to bed. But that does not work – I don’t sleep. Moreover, I have been in the grip of a horrible mental unrest. To sit still in my chair, much less to lie in bed doing nothing seemed ghastly. I experienced all the cravings of a dissolute neurotic for a stimulus, but what stimulus I wanted I did not know. Had I known I should have gone and got it. The dipsomaniac was a man to be envied.

  Some mechanical means were necessary for sustaining life till bedtime. I sat down and played a game of Patience – no one knows how I loathe playing Patience and how much I despise the people who play it. Tiring of that, sat back in my chair, yawned, and thought of a word I wanted to look up in the Dictionary. This quest, forgotten until then, came like a beam of bright light into a dark room. So looked the word up leisurely, took out my watch, noted the time, and then stood up with elbows on the mantelpiece and stared at myself in the glass … I was at bay at last. There was simply nothing I could do. I would have given worlds to have some one to talk to. Pride kept me from ringing for the landlady. I must stand motionless, back to the wall, and wait for the hour of my release. I had but one idea, viz., that I was surely beaten in this game of life. I was very miserable indeed. But being so miserable that I couldn’t feel more so, I began to recover after a while. I began to visualise my lamentable situation, and rose above it as I did so. I staged it before my mind’s eye and observed myself as hero of the plot. I saw myself sitting in a dirty armchair in a dirty house in a dirty London street, with the landlady’s dirty daughter below-stairs singing, ‘Little Grey Home in the West’, my head obscured in a cloud of depression, and in my mind the thought that if life be a test of endurance I must hang on grimly to the arms of the chair and sit tight till bedtime.