This attitude proved a useful means of self-defence. When I had dramatised my misery, I enjoyed it, and acute mental pain turned into merely æsthetic malaise.
November 4.
A lurid day. Suffering from the most horrible physical languor. Wrote the Doctor saying I was rapidly sliding down a steep place into the sea (like the swine I am). Could I see him?
Endured an hour’s torture of indecision to-night asking myself whether I should go over to ask her to be my wife or should I go to the Fabian Society and hear Bernard Shaw. Kept putting off the decision even till after dinner. If I went to the flat, I must shave; to shave required hot water – the landlady had already cleared the table and was rapidly retreating. Something must be done and at once. I called the old thing back impulsively and ordered shaving water, consoling myself with the reflection that it was still unnecessary to decide; the hot water could be at hand in case the worst happened. If I decided on matrimony I could shave forthwith. Should I? (After dark I always shave in the sitting-room because of the better gaslight.)
Drank some coffee and next found myself slowly, mournfully putting on hat and coat. You can’t shave in hat and coat so I concluded I had decided on Shaw. Slowly undid the front door latch and went off.
Shaw bored me. He is mid-Victorian. Sat beside a bulgy-eyed youth reading the Freethinker.
November 9.
In the evening asked her to be my wife. She refused. Once perhaps … but now …
I don’t think I have any moral right to propose to any woman seeing the state of my health and I did not actually intend or wish to … It was just to get it off my mind – a plain statement … If I don’t really and truly love her it was a perfectly heartless comedy. But I have good reason to believe I do. With me, moments of headstrong passion alternate with moods of perfectly immobile self-introspection. It is a relief to have spoken.
November 10.
Very miserable. Asked R— three times to come and have dinner with me. Each time he refused. My nerves are completely jangled. Tu l’as voulu, George Dandin – that’s the rub.
November 11.
She observed me carefully – I’m looking a perfect wreck – tu l’as voulu, George Dandin – but it’s mainly ill-health and not on her account.
I said, –
‘Some things are too funny to laugh at.’
‘Is that why you are so solemn?’
‘No,’ I answered, ‘I’m not solemn, I am laughing – some things are too solemn to be serious about.’
She saw me off at the door and smiled quietly – an amused faraway smile of feline satisfaction …
November 12.
Horrible nervous depression. Thinking of suicide with a pistol – a Browning. Or of 10 days’ mysterious disappearance, when I will go and live in a good Hotel, spend all my money, and live among human beings with eyes and noses and legs. This isolation. Am I going mad? If I disappeared, it would be interesting to see if any one missed me.
November 13.
Still thinking of suicide. It seems the only way out. This morning my Essay was returned by the Editor of —. One by one I have been divested of all my most cherished illusions. Once my ambitions gave me the fuel with which to keep myself alive. One after another they have been foiled, and now I’ve nothing to burn. I am daily facing the fact that my ambitions have overtaxed my abilities and health. For years, my whole existence has rested on a false estimate of my own value, and my life been revolving around a foolish self-deception. But I know myself as I am at last – and am not at all enamoured. The future has nothing for me. I am wearied of my life already. What is there for any of us to do but die?
November 14.
Before going over to-night bought London Opinion deliberately in order to find a joke or better still some cynicism about women to fire off at her. Rehearsed one joke, one witticism from Oscar Wilde, and one personal anecdote (the latter for the most part false), none of which came off, tho’ I succeeded in carrying off a nonchalant or even jaunty bearing.
‘Don’t you ever swear?’ I asked. ‘It’s a good thing, you know, swearing is like pimples, better to come out, cleanses the moral system. The person who controls himself must have lots of terrible oaths circulating in his blood.’
‘Swearing is not the only remedy.’
‘I suppose you prefer the gilded pill of a curate’s sermon: I prefer pimples to pills.’
Is it a wonder she does not love me?
I wonder why I paint myself in such horrid colours – why have I this morbid pleasure in pretending to those I love that I am a beast and a cynic? I suffer, I suppose, from a lacerated self-esteem, from a painful loneliness, from the consciousness of how ridiculous I have made myself, and that most people if they knew would regard me with loathing and disgust.
I am very unhappy. I am unhappy because she does not care for me, and I am chiefly unhappy because I do not care for her. Instead of a passion, only a dragging heavy chain of attraction … some inflexible law makes me gravitate to her, seizes me by the neck and suspends me over her, I cannot look away …
In the early days when I did my best to strangle my love – as one would a bastard child – I took courage in the fact that for a man like me the murder was necessary. There were books to write and to read, and name and fame perhaps. To these everything must be sacrificed … That is all gone now. No man could have withstood for ever that concentrated essence of womanhood that flowed from her …
Still the declaration has made amends. She is pleased about it – it is a scalp.
Yet how can I forgive her for saying she supposed it was a natural instinct for a girl not to feel drawn to an invalid like me? That was cruel tho’ true.
November 19.
I might be Captain Scott writing his last words amid Antarctic cold and desolation. It is very cold. I am sitting hunched up by the fire in my lodgings after a meal of tough meat and cold apple-tart. I am full of self-commiseration – my only pleasure now. It is very cold and I cannot get warm – try as I will.
My various nervous derangements take different forms. This time my peripheral circulation is affected, and the hand, arm, and shoulder are permanently cold. My right hand is blue – tho’ I’ve shut up the window and piled up a roaring fire. It’s Antarctic cold and desolation. London in November from the inside of a dingy lodging-house can be very terrible indeed. This celestial isolation will send me out of my mind. I marvel how God can stick it – lonely, damp, and cold in the clouds. That is how I live too – but then I am not God.
I fall back on this Journal just as some other poor devil takes to drink. I, too, have toyed with the idea of drinking hard. I have frequented bars and billiard saloons and in fits of depression done my best to forget myself. But I am not sufficiently fond of alcohol (and it would take a lot to make me forget myself). So I plunge into these literary excesses and drown my sorrows in Stephens’ Blue-black Ink. It gives me a sulky pleasure to think that some day somebody will know …
It is humiliating to feel ill as I do. If I had consumption, the disease would act as a stimulus – I could strike an attitude feverishly and be histrionic. But to be merely ‘below par’ – to feel like a Bunny rabbit perennially ‘poorly’, saps my character and mental vigour. I want to crawl away and die like a rat in a hole. A bronzed healthy man makes me wince. Healthy people regard a chronic sickly man as a leper. They suspect him, something fishy.
November 20.
Still at home ill.
If anything, R— is more of a précieux than I am myself. At the present moment he is tickling himself with the idea that he’s in love with a certain golden-haired damsel from the States. He reports to me fragments of his conversations with her, how he snatches a fearful joy by skirting dangerous conversational territory, or he takes a pencil and deftly outlines her profile or the rondeur of her bosom. Or he discourses at length on her nose or eye. I can well imagine him driving a woman crazy and then collecting her tears in a bottle as mementoes. Then whenever
he requires a little heart stimulus he could take the phial from his waistcoat pocket and watch the tears condensing.
‘Why don’t you marry her out of hand and be done with all this dalliance? I can tell you what’s the matter with you,’ I growled, ‘you’re a landscape artist … You’ll grow to resemble that mean, Jewy, secretive, petty creature, J. M. W. Turner, and allow no human being to interfere with your art. A fine artist perhaps – but what a man! You’ll finish up with a Mrs Danby.’
‘Yes,’ he answered, quoting Tennyson with great aptness, ‘and “lose my salvation for a sketch”, like Romney deserting his wife. If I were not married I should have no wife to desert.’
It is useless to argue with him. His cosmogony is wrongly centred in Art not life. Life interests him – he can’t altogether resign himself to the cowl and the tonsured head, but he will not plunge. He insists on being a spectator, watching the maelstrom from the bank and remarking exquisitely, ‘Ah! there is a very fine sorrow’, or, ‘What an exquisite sensation.’ The other day after one of our furious conversational bouts around this subject, I drew an insect, cut it out, and pinned the slip in a collecting box. Then suddenly producing the box, and opening it with a facetious grin, I said, –
‘Here is a jolly little sorrow I caught this morning.’ The joke pleased him and we roared, bellowed.
‘That terrible forefinger of yours,’ he smiled.
‘Like Cardinal Richelieu’s eyes – piercing?’ I suggested with appreciation. (It is because I tap him on his shirt front in the space between waistcoat and tie aggressively for emphasis in conversation.)
‘You must regard my passion for painting,’ he began once more, ‘as a sort of dipsomania – I really can’t help myself.’
I jumped on him vehemently, –
‘Exactly, my pernickety friend; it’s something abnormal and unnatural. When, for purposes of self-culture, I see a man deliberately lop off great branches of himself so as to divert his strength into one limb, I know that if he is successful he’ll be something as vulgar as a fat woman at a country fair; and if he is unsuccessful he’ll be just a pathetic mutilation … You are trying to pervert a natural instinct. You want to paint, I believe. Quite so. But when a boy reaches the age of puberty he does not grow a palette on his chin but hair … Still, now you recognise it as a bad habit, why need I say more?’ (‘Why indeed?’) ‘It’s a vice, and I’m very sorry for you, old boy. I’ll do all I can – come and have some dinner with me to-night.’
‘Oh! thank you very much,’ says my gentleman, ‘but I’m not at all sorry for myself.’
‘I thought as much. So that we are not so very much agreed after all. We’re not shaking hands after the boxing contest, but scowling at each other from the ropes and shaping for another round.’
‘Your pulpit orations, my dear Barbellion, in full canonicals,’ he reflected, ‘are worthy of a larger audience … To find you of all people preaching. I thought you were philosopher enough to see the angle of every one’s vision and broadminded so as to see every point of view. Besides, you are as afraid of marriage as I am, and for the same reasons.’
‘I confess, when in the philosophic citadel of my own armchair,’ I began, ‘I do see every one’s point of view. You sit on the other side of the rug and put out the suggestion tentatively that murder may be a moral act. I examine your argument and am disposed to accept it. But when you slit up my brother’s abdomen before my eyes, I am sufficiently weak and human to punch you on the nose … You are too cold and Olympian, up above the snowline with a box of paints.’
‘It is very beautiful among the snows.’
‘I suppose so.’
(Exit.)
November 23.
Great physical languor, especially in the morning. It is Calvary to get out of bed and shoulder the day’s burden.
‘What’s been the matter?’ they ask.
‘Oh! senile decay – general histolysis of the tissues,’ I say, fencing.
To-night, I looked at myself accidentally in the glass and noticed at once the alarming extent of my dejection. Quite unconsciously I turned my head away and shook it, making the noise with my teeth and tongue which means, ‘Dear, dear.’ M— tells me these waves of ill-health are quite unaccountable unless I were ‘leading a dissolute life, which you do not appear to be doing’. Damn his eyes.
Reading Nietzsche
Reading Nietzsche. What splendid physic he is to Pomeranian puppies like myself! I am a hopeless coward. Thunderstorms always frighten me. The smallest cut alarms for fear of blood poisoning, and I always dab on antiseptics at once. But Nietzsche makes me feel a perfect mastiff.
The Test for True Love
The test for true love is whether you can endure the thought of cutting your sweetheart’s toe-nails – the onychotomic test. Or whether you find your Julia’s sweat as sweet as otto of roses. I told her this to-night. Probably she thinks I only ‘saw it in a book’.
Chopin
On Sunday, went to the Albert Hall, and warmed myself at the Orchestra. It is a wonderful sight to watch an orchestra playing from the gallery. It spurts and flickers like a flame. Its incessant activity arrests the attention and holds it just as a fire does – even a deaf man would be fascinated. Heard Chopin’s Funeral March and other things. It would be a rich experience to be able to be in your coffin at rest and listen to Chopin’s Funeral March being played above you by a string orchestra with Sir Henry Wood conducting.
Sir Henry like a melanic Messiah was crucified as usual, the Hungarian Rhapsody No. 2 causing him the most awful agony …
November 28.
Rodin
More than once lately have been to see and admire Rodin’s recent gifts to the nation exhibited at the Victoria and Albert Museum. The ‘Prodigal Son’ is Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony done in stone. It was only on my second visit that I noticed the small pebble in each hand – a superb touch! – what a frenzy of remorse!
The ‘Fallen Angel’ I loved most. The legs of the woman droop lifelessly backwards in an intoxicating curve. The eye caresses it – down the thighs and over the calves to the tips of the toes – like the hind limbs of some beautiful dead gazelle. He has brought off exactly the same effect in the woman in the group called ‘Eternal Spring’, which I have only seen in a photograph.
This morning at 9 a.m. lay in bed on my back, warm and comfortable, and, for the first time for many weeks, with no pain or discomfort of any kind. The mattress curved up around my body and legs and held me in a soft warm embrace … I shut my eyes and whistled the saccharine melody for solo violin in Chopin’s Funeral March. I wanted the moment prolonged for hours. Ill-health chases the soul out of a man. He becomes a body, purely physical.
November 29.
This evening she promised to be my wife after a long silent ramble together thro’ dark London squares and streets! I am beside myself!
December 6.
I know now – I love her with passion. Health and ambition and sanity are returning. Projects in view: –
(1) To make her happy and myself worthy.
(2) To get married.
(3) To prepare and publish a volume of this Journal.
(4) To write two essays for Cornhill which shall surely induce the Editor to publish and not write me merely long complimentary and encouraging letters as heretofore.
Wired to A—, ‘The brave little pennon has been hauled down.’
December 7.
Have so many projects in view and so little time in which to get them done! Moreover I am always haunted by the fear that I may never finish them thro’ physical or temperamental disabilities – a breakdown in health or in purpose. I am one of those who are apt to die unexpectedly and no one would be surprised. An inquest would probably be unnecessary. I badly want to live say another twelve months. Hey! nonny-no! a man’s a fool that wants to die.
December 9.
… I shook her angrily by the shoulders to-night and said, ‘Why do I love you? – Tell me�
�, but she only smiled gently and said, ‘I cannot tell …’ I ought not to love her, I know – every omen is against it … Then I am full of self-love: an intellectual Malvolio proud of his brains and air of distinction …
Then I am fickle, passionate, polygamous … I am haunted by the memory of how I have sloughed off one enthusiasm after another. I used to dissect snails in a pie-dish in the kitchen while Mother baked the cakes – the unravelling of the internal economy of a Helix caused as great an emotional storm as to-day the Unfinished Symphony does! I look for the first parasol in Kensington Gardens with the same interest as once I sought out the first snowdrop or listened for the first Cuckoo. I am as anxious to identify an instrument in Sir Henry’s Orchestra as once to identify the song of a new bird in the woods. Nothing is further from my intention or desire to continue my old habit of nature study. I never read nature books – my old favourites – Waterton’s Wanderings, Gilbert White, The Zoologist, etc. – have no interest for me – in fact they give me slight mental nausea even to glance at. Wiedersheim (good old Wiedersheim) is now deposed by a text book on Harmony. My main desire just now is to hear the best music. In the country I wore blinkers and saw only zoology. Now in London, I’ve taken the bit into my mouth – and it’s a mouth of iron – wanting a run for all my troubles before Death strikes me down.
The Journal of a Disappointed Man Page 16