The Journal of a Disappointed Man

by W. N. P. Barbellion

  It is perhaps not the whole explanation to say that my milky affability before, say bores or clods, is sheer personal cowardice … It is partly real affability. I am so glad to have opposite me some one who is making himself pleasant and affable and sympathetic that I forget for the moment that he is an unconscionable time-server, a sycophant, lick-spittle, toady, etc. My first impulse is always to credit folk with being nicer, cleverer, more honest and amiable than they are. Then, on reflection, I discover unpleasing characteristics, I detect their little motives, and hate myself for not speaking. The fellow is intolerable, why did I not tell him so? Bitter recriminations from my critical self upon my flabby amiable half.

  On the whole, then, I lead a pretty disgraceful inner life – excepting when I pull myself together and smile benignly on all things with a philosophical smugness, such as is by no means my mood at this present moment. I am so envious that a reprint of one of Romney’s Ramus girls sends me into a dry tearless anger – for the moment till I turn over the next page … Inwardly I was exacerbated this morning when R— recited, ‘Come and have a tiddle at the old Brown Bear’, and explained how a charming ‘young person’ sang this at breakfast the other morning. It was simply too charming for him to hear.

  To-night as I brushed my hair, I decided I was quite good-looking, and I believe I mused that E— was really a lucky girl … All that is the matter with me is a colossal conceit and a colossal discontent, qualities exaggerated where a man finds himself in an environment which …

  You observant people will notice that this explanation is something of a self-defence whereby the virtue goes out of my confession. I plead guilty, but great and unprecedented provocation as well. Intense pride of individuality forbids that I should ever be other than, shall I say, amiably disposed towards myself au fond, however displeased I may be with my environment. It is indeed impossible without sending him to a lunatic asylum ever to knock a man off the balance of his self-esteem … A man’s loyalty to himself is the most pig-headed thing imaginable.

  January 2.

  The Fire Bogey

  ‘This Box contains Manuscripts. One guinea will be paid to any one who in case of danger from fire saves it from damage or loss.’

  Signed: W. N. P. BARBELLION.

  I have had this printed in large black characters on a card, framed and nailed to my ‘coffin’ of Journals. I told the printer first to say Two Guineas, but he suggested that One Guinea was quite enough. I agreed but wondered how the devil he knew what the Journals were worth – nobody knows.

  Next month, I expect I shall have a ‘hand’ painted on the wall and pointing towards the box. And the month after that I shall hire a fireman to be on duty night and day standing outside No. 101 in a brass helmet and his hatchet up at the salute.

  These precious Journals! Supposing I lost them! I cannot imagine the anguish it would cause me. It would be the death of my real self and as I should take no pleasure in the perpetuation of my flabby, flaccid, anæmic, amiable puppet-self, I should probably commit suicide.

  August 7.

  Harvey who discovered the circulation of the blood also conducted a great many investigations into the Anatomy and development of insects. But all his MSS. and drawings disappeared in the fortunes of war, and one half of his life work thus disappeared. This makes me feverish, living as I do in Armageddon!

  Again, all Malpighi’s pictures, furniture, books and MSS. were destroyed in a lamentable fire at his house in Bononia, occasioned it is said by the negligence of his old wife.

  About 1618, Ben Jonson suffered a similar calamity thro’ a fire breaking out in his study. Many unpublished MSS. perished.

  A more modern and more tragic example I found recently in the person of an Australian naturalist Dr Walter Stimpson, who lost all his MSS., drawings, and collections in the great fire of Chicago, and was so excoriated by this irreparable misfortune that he never recovered from the shock, and died the following year a broken man and unknown.

  Of course the housemaid who lit the fire with the French Revolution is known to all, as well as Newton’s ‘Fido, Fido, you little know what you have done.’

  There are many dangers in preserving the labours of years in MS. form. Samuel Butler (of Erewhon) advised writing in copying ink and then pressing off a second copy to be kept in another and separate locality. My own precautions for these Journals are more elaborate. Those who know about it think I am mad. I wonder … But I dare say I am a pathetic fool – an incredible self-deceiver!

  Anyhow – the ‘coffin’ of raw material I sent down to T— while I retain the two current volumes. This is to avoid Zeppelins. R— took the ‘coffin’ down for me on her way home from school, and at Taunton, inquisitive porters mistaking it, I suppose, for an infant’s coffin carried it reverently outside the station and laid it down. She caught them looking at it just in time before her train left. Under her instructions they seized it by the brass handles and carried it back again. I sit now and with a good deal of curiosity fondle the idea of porters carrying about my Journals of confession. It’s like being tickled in the palm of the hand … Two volumes of abstracted entries I keep here, and, as soon as I am married, I intend to make a second copy of these … Then all in God’s good time I intend getting a volume ready for publication.

  January 30.

  Hearing Beethoven

  To the Queen’s Hall and heard Beethoven’s Fifth and Seventh Symphonies.

  Before the concert began I was in a fever. I kept on saying to myself, ‘I am going to hear the Fifth and Seventh Symphonies.’ I regarded myself with the most ridiculous self-adulation – I smoothed and purred over myself – a great contented Tabby cat – and all because I was so splendidly fortunate as to be about to hear Beethoven’s Fifth and Seventh Symphonies.

  It certainly upset me a little to find there were so many other people who were singularly fortunate as well, and it upset me still more to find some of them knitting and some reading newspapers as if they waited for sausage and mashed.

  How I gloried in the Seventh! I can’t believe there was any one present who gloried in it as I did! To be processing majestically up the steps of a great, an unimaginable palace (in the ‘Staircase’ introduction), led by Sir Henry, is to have had at least a crowded ten minutes of glorious life – a suspicion crossed the mind at one time ‘Good Heavens, they’re going to knight me.’ I cannot say if that were their intentions. But I escaped however …

  I love the way in which a beautiful melody flits around the Orchestra and its various components like a beautiful bird.

  January 19.

  An Average Day

  After a morning of very mixed emotions and more than one annoyance … at last sat down to lunch and a little peace and quiet with R—. We began by quoting verse at one another in open competition. Of course neither of us listened to the other’s verses. We merely enjoyed the pleasure of recollecting and repeating our own. I began with Tom Moore’s ‘Row gently here, my Gondolier.’ R— guessed the author rightly at once and fidgeted until he burst out with, ‘The Breaths of kissing night and day’ – to me an easy one. I gave, ‘The Moon more indolently sleeps to-night’ (Baudelaire), and in reply he did a great stroke by reciting some of the old French of François Villon which entirely flummoxed me.

  I don’t believe we really love each other, but we cling to each other out of ennui and discover in each other a certain cold intellectual sympathy.

  At the pay desk (Lyons’ is our rendezvous) we joked with the cashier – a cheerful, fat little girl, who said to R— (indicating me), –

  ‘He’s a funny boy, isn’t he?’

  ‘Dangerous,’ chirped R—, and we laughed. In the street we met an aged, decrepit newsvendor – very dirty and ragged – but his voice was unexpectedly fruity.

  ‘British Success,’ he called, and we stopped for the sake of the voice.

  ‘I’m not interested,’ I said – as an appetiser.

  ‘What! Not … Just one, sir: I haven’t
sold a single copy yet and I’ve a wife and four children.’

  ‘That’s nothing to me – I’ve three wives and forty children,’ I remarked.

  ‘What!’ in affected surprise, turning to R—, ‘he’s Brigham Young from Salt Lake City. Yes I know it – I’ve been there myself and been dry ever since. Give us a drink, sir – just one.’

  In consideration of his voice we gave him 2d. and passed on …

  After giving a light to a Belgian soldier whose cigarette had gone out, farther along we entered a queer old music shop where they sell flageolets, serpents, clavichords, and harps. We had previously made an appointment with the man to have Schubert’s Unfinished Symphony played to us, so as to recall one or two of the melodies which we can’t recall and it drives us crazy. ‘What is that one in the second movement which goes like this?’ and R— whistled a fragment. ‘I don’t know,’ I said, ‘but let’s go in here and ask.’ In the shop, a youth was kind enough to say that if we cared to call next day, Madame A—, the harp player, would be home and would be ready to play us the symphony.

  So this morning, before Madame’s appearance, this kind and obliging youth put a gramophone record of it on, to which we listened like two intelligent parrots with heads sideways. Presently, the fat lady harpist appeared and asked us just what we wanted to find out – a rather awkward question for us, as we did not want to ‘find out’ anything excepting how the tunes went.

  I therefore explained that as neither of us had sisters or wives, and we both wanted, etc. … so would she …? In response, she smiled pleasantly and played us the second movement on a shop piano. Meanwhile, Henry the boy, hid himself behind the instruments at the rear of the shop and as we signed to her she would say, –

  ‘What’s that, Henry?’

  And Henry would duly answer from his obscurity, ‘Wood wind’, or ‘Solo oboe’, or whatever it was, and the lad really spoke with authority. In this way, I began to find out something about the work. Before I left, I presented her with a copy of the score, which she did not possess and because she would not accept any sort of remuneration.

  ‘Won’t you put your name on it?’ she inquired.

  I pointed gaily to the words ‘Ecce homo’, which I had scribbled across Schubert’s name and said, ‘There you are.’ Madame smiled incredulously and we said, ‘Good-bye.’

  It was a beautifully clement almost springlike day, and at the street corner, in a burst of joyousness, we each bought a bunch of violets off an old woman, stuck them on the ends of our walking-sticks, and marched off with them in triumphant protest to the B. M. Carried over our shoulders, our flowers amused the police and —, who scarcely realised the significance of the ritual. ‘This is my protest,’ said R—, ‘against the war. It’s like Oscar Wilde’s Sunflower.’

  On the way, we were both bitterly disappointed at a dramatic meeting between a man and woman of the artizan class which instead of beginning with a stormy, ‘Robert, where’s the rent, may I ask?’ fizzled out into, ‘Hullo, Charlie, why you are a stranger.’

  At tea in the A.B.C. shop, we had a violent discussion on Socialism, and on the station platform, going home, I said that before marriage I intended saving up against the possibility of divorce – a domestic divorce fund.

  ‘Very dreadful,’ said R— with mock gravity, ‘to hear a recently affianced young man talk like that.’

  … What should I do then? Marry? I suppose so. Shadows of the prison-house. At first I said I ought not to marry for two years. Then when I am wildly excited with her I say ‘next week’. We could. There are no arrangements to be made. All her furniture – flat, etc. But I feel we ought to wait until the War is over.

  At dinner-time to-night I was feverish to do three things at once: write out my day’s Journal, eat my food, and read the Journal of Marie Bashkirtseff. Did all three – but unfortunately not at once, so that when I was occupied with one I would surreptitiously cast a glance sideways at the other – and repined.

  After dinner, paid a visit to the — and found Mrs — playing Patience. I told her that 12,000 lives had been lost in the great Italian earthquake. Still going on dealing out the cards, she said in her gentle voice that that was dreadful and still absorbed in her cards inquired if earthquakes had aught to do with the weather.

  ‘An earthquake must be a dreadful thing,’ she gently piped, as she abstractedly dealt out the cards for a new game in a pretty Morris-papered room in Kensington.

  January 20.

  At a Public Dinner

  … The timorous man presently took out his cigarette-case and was going to take out a cigarette, when he recollected that he ought first to offer one to the millionaire on his right. Fortunately the cigarette case was silver and the cigarettes appeared – from my side of the dinner-table – to be fat Egyptians. Yet the timorous and unassuming bug-hunter hesitated palpably. Ought he to offer his cigarettes? He thought of his own balance at the bank and then of the millionaire’s and trembled. The case after all was only silver and the cigarettes were not much more than a halfpenny each. Was it not impertinent? He sat a moment studying the open case which he held in both hands like a hymn book, while the millionaire ordered not wines – but a bass! At last courage came, and he inoffensively pushed the cigarettes towards his friend.

  ‘No, thanks!’ smiled the millionaire, ‘I don’t smoke.’

  And so, ’twas a unicorn dilemma after all.

  February 15.

  Spent Xmas week at work in her studio, transcribing my Journals while she made drawings. All unbeknown to her I was copying out entries of days gone by – how scandalised she would be if …!

  February 22.

  What an amazing Masque is Rotten Row on a Sunday morning! I sat on a seat there this morning and watched awhile.

  It was most exasperating to be in this kaleidoscope of human life without the slightest idea as to who they all were. One man in particular, I noticed – a first-class ‘swell’ – whom I wanted to touch gently on the arm, slip a half-a-crown into his hand and whisper, ‘There, tell me all about yourself.’

  Such ‘swells’ there were that out in the fairway, my little cockle-shell boat was wellnigh swamped. To be in the wake of a really magnificent Duchess simply rocks a small boat in an alarming fashion. I leaned over my paddles and gazed up. They steamed past unheeding, but I kept my nerve all right and pulled in and out quizzing and observing.

  It is nothing less than scandalous that here I am aged 25 with no means of acquainting myself with contemporary men and women even of my own rank and station. The worst of it is, too, that I have no time to lose – in my state of health. This accursed ill-health cuts me off from everything. I make pitiful attempts to see the world around me by an occasional visit (wind, weather, and health permitting) to Petticoat Lane, the Docks, Rotten Row, Leicester Square, or the Ethical Church. To-morrow I purpose going to the Christian Scientists’. Meanwhile, the others participate in Armageddon.

  February 23.

  Looking for Lice at the Zoo

  The other day went to the Zoological Gardens, and, by permission of the Secretary, went round with the keepers and searched the animals for ectoparasites.

  Some time this year I have to make a scientific Report to the Zoological Society upon all the Lice which from time to time have been collected on animals dying in the gardens and sent me for study and determination.

  We entered the cages, caught and examined several Tinamous, Rhinochetus, Eurypygia, and many more, to the tune of ‘The Policeman’s Holiday’ whistled by a Mynah! It was great fun.

  Then we went into the Ostrich House and thoroughly searched two Kiwis. These, being nocturnal birds, were roosting underneath a heap of straw. When we had finished investigating their feathers, they ran back to their straw at once, the keeper giving them a friendly tap on the rear to hurry them up a bit. They are just like little old women bundling along.

  The Penguins, of course, were the most amusing, and, after operating fruitlessly for some time on a tr
oublesome Adèle, I was amused to find, on turning around, all the other Adèles clustered close around my feet in an attitude of mute supplication.

  The Armadillo required all the strength of two keepers to hold still while I went over his carcase with lens and forceps. I was also allowed to handle and examine the Society’s two specimens of that amazing creature the Echidna.

  Balæniceps rex like other royalty had to be approached decorously. He was a big, ill-tempered fellow, and quite unmanageable except by one keeper for whom he showed a preference. While we other conspirators hid ourselves outside, this man entered the house quietly and approached the bird with a gentle cooing sound. Then suddenly he grabbed the bill and held on. We entered at the same moment and secured the wings, and I began the search – without any luck. We must have made an amusing picture – three men holding on for dear life to a tall, grotesque bird with an imperial eye, while a fourth searched the feathers for parasites!

  February 28.

  What a boon is Sunday! I can get out of bed just when the spirit moves me, dress and bath leisurely, even with punctilio. How nice to dawdle in the bath with a cigarette, to hear the holiday sound of Church bells! Then comes that supreme moment when, shaven, clean, warm and hungry for breakfast and coffee, I stand a moment before the looking-glass and comb out my towzled hair with a parting as straight as a line in Euclid. That gives the finishing touch of self-satisfaction, and I go down to breakfast ready for the day’s pleasure. I hate this weekday strain of having to be always each day at a set time in a certain place.