The Journal of a Disappointed Man

by W. N. P. Barbellion

  March 3.

  I often sit in my room at the B. M. and look out at the traffic with a glassy, mesmerised face – a fainéant. How different from that extremely busy youth who came to London in 1912. Say – could that lad be I? How many hours do I waste day-dreaming. This morning I dreamed and dreamed and could not stop dreaming – I had not the will to shake myself down to my task … My memories simply trooped the colour.

  It surprised me to find how many of them had gone out of my present consciousness and with what poignancy of feeling I recognised them again! How selfishly for the most part we all live in our present selves or in the selves that are to be.

  Then I raced thro’ all sorts of future possibilities – oh! when and how is it all going to end? How do you expect me to settle down to scientific research with all this internal unrest! The scientific man above all should possess the ‘quiet mind in all changes of fortune’ – Sir Henry Wotton’s How happy is he born and taught.

  The truth is I am a hybrid: a mixture of two very distinct temperaments and they are often at war. To keep two different natures and two different mental habits simultaneously at work is next to impossible. Consequently plenty of waste and fever and – as I might have discovered earlier for myself – success almost out of the question. If only I were pure-bred science or pure-bred art!

  March 4.

  Life is a dream and we are all somnambuloes. We know that for a fact at all times when we are most intensely alive – at crises of unprecedented change, in sorrow or catastrophe, or in any unusual incident brought swiftly to a close like a vision!

  I sit here writing this – a mirage! Who am I? No one can say. What am I? ‘A soap-bubble hanging from a reed.’

  Every man is an inexhaustible treasury of human personality. He can go on burrowing in it for an eternity if he have the desire – and a taste for introspection. I like to keep myself well within the field of the microscope, and, with as much detachment as I can muster, to watch myself live, to report my observations of what I say, feel, think. In default of others, I am myself my own spectator and self-appreciator – critical, discerning, vigilant, fond! – my own stupid Boswell, shrewd if silly. This spectator of mine, it seems to me, must be a very moral gentleman and eminently superior. His incessant attentions, while I go on my way misconducting myself, goad me at times into a surly, ill-tempered outbreak, like Dr Johnson. I hate being shadowed and reported like this. Yet on the whole – like old Samuel again – I am rather pleased to be Boswelled. It flatters me to know that at least one person takes an unremitting interest in all my ways.

  And, mind you, there are people who have seen most things but have never seen themselves walking across the stage of life. If someone shows them glimpses of themselves they will not recognise the likeness. How do you walk? Do you know your own idiosyncrasies of gait, manner of speech, etc.?

  I never cease to interest myself in the Gothic architecture of my own fantastic soul.fn5

  March 6.

  The Punch and Judy Show

  Spent a most delightful half-an-hour to-day reading an account in the Encyclopædia Britannica (one of my favourite books – it’s so ‘gey disconnekkit’) the history of the Punch and Judy Show. It’s a delightful bit of antiquarian lore and delighted me the more because it had never occurred to me before that it had an ancient history. I am thoroughly proud of this recent acquisition of knowledge and as if it were a valuable freehold I have been showing it off saying, ‘Rejoice with me – see what I have got here.’ I fired it off first in detail at —; and H— and D— will probably be my victims to-morrow. After all, it is a charming little cameo of history: compact, with plenty of scope for conjecture, theory, research, and just that combination of all three which would suit my taste and capacity if I had time for a Monograph.

  March 22.

  I waste much time gaping and wondering. During a walk or in a book or in the middle of an embrace, suddenly I awake to a stark amazement at everything. The bare fact of existence paralyses me – holds my mind in mortmain. To be alive is so incredible that all I do is to lie still and merely breathe – like an infant on its back in a cot. It is impossible to be interested in anything in particular while overhead the sun shines or underneath my feet grows a single blade of grass. ‘The things immediate to be done,’ says Thoreau, ‘I could give them all up to hear this locust sing.’ All my energies become immobilised, even my self-expression frustrated. I could not exactly master and describe how I feel during such moments.

  March 23.

  Johnson v. Yves Delage

  I expect we have all of us at one time or another heard ourselves addressing to annoying, objectionable acquaintances some such stinging castigation as Hazlitt’s letter to Gifford, or Burke’s letter to a Noble Lord, or Johnson’s letter to Lord Chesterfield, or Rousseau’s letter to the Archbishop of Paris. If only I could indulge my self! At this moment I could glut my rancours on six different persons at least!

  What a raging discontent I have suffered to-day! What cynicism, what bitterness of spirit, what envy, hate, exasperation, childish petulance, what pusillanimous feelings and desires, what crude efforts to flout simple, ingenuous folk with my own thwarted, repressed self-assertiveness!

  A solemn fellow told me he had heard from Johnson who said he had already had much success from collecting in moss.fn6 With an icy politeness I asked who Johnson was. Who the Hell is Johnson? As a quid pro quo I began to talk of Yves Delage, which left him as much in the dark as he left me. Our Gods differ, we have a different hierarchy.

  ‘Well, how’s your soul?’ said R—, bursting in with a sardonic smile.

  I gave him a despairing look and said:

  ‘Oh! a pink one with blue spots’, and he left me to my fate.

  Had tea with the — and was amazed to find on the music tray in the drawing-room of these inoffensive artists a copy of —’s Memoir on Synapta. Within his hearing, I said, ‘Did you and Mrs — find this exciting reading?’ And I held it up with a sneer. I felt I had laid bare a nerve and forthwith proceeded to make it twinge. —, of course, was glib with an explanation, yet the question remains incalculable – just how pleased that young man is with himself.

  After tea went out into the Studio and watched these two enthusiasts paint. I must have glowered at them. I – the energetic, ambitious, pushing youth – of necessity sitting down doing nought, as unconsidered as a child playing on the floor. I recollected my early days in my attic laboratory and sighed. Where is my energy now?

  Mrs — plays Chopin divinely well. How I envied this man – to have a wife play you Chopin!

  March 24.

  It is fortunate I am ill in one way for I need not make my mind up about this War. I am not interested in it – this filth and lunacy. I have not yet made up my mind about myself. I am so steeped in myself – in my moods, vapours, idiosyncrasies, so self-sodden, that I am unable to stand clear of the data, to marshal and classify the multitude of facts and thence draw the deduction what manner of man I am. I should like to know – if only as a matter of curiosity. So what in God’s name am I? A fool, of course, to start with – but the rest of the diagnosis?

  One feature is my incredible levity about serious matters. Nothing matters, provided the tongue is not furred. I have coquetted with death for so long now, and endured such prodigious ill-health that my main idea when in a fair state of repair is to seize the passing moment and squeeze it dry. The thing that counts is to be drunken; as Baudelaire says, ‘One must be for ever drunken; that is the sole question of importance. If you would not feel the horrible burden of time that bruises your shoulders and bends you to the earth, you must be drunken without cease.’

  Another feature is my insatiable curiosity. My purpose is to move about in this ramshackle, old curiosity shop of a world sampling existence. I would try everything, meddle lightly with everything. Religions and philosophies I devour with a relish, Pragmatism and Bishop Berkeley and Bergson have been my favourite bagatelles in turn. My conscio
usness is a ragbag of things: all quips, quirks, and quillets, all excellent passes of pate, all the ‘obsolete curiosities of an antiquated cabinet’ take my eye for a moment ere I pass on. In Sir Thomas Browne’s Pseudodoxia, I am interested to find ‘why Jews do not stink, what is the superstition of sneezing after saluting, wherefore negroes are black’, and so forth. There is a poetic appropriateness that in A.D. 1915 I should be occupied mainly in the study of Lice. I like the insolence of it.

  They tell me that if the Germans won it would put back the clock of civilisation for a century. But what is a meagre 100 years? Consider the date of the first Egyptian dynasty! We are now only in A.D. 1915 – surely we could afford to chuck away a century or two? Why not evacuate the whole globe and give the ball to the Boches to play with – just as an experiment to see what they can make of it. After all there is no desperate hurry. Have we a train to catch? Before I could be serious enough to fight, I should want God first to dictate to me his programme of the future of mankind.

  March 25.

  Often in the middle of a quite vivid ten seconds of life, I find I have switched myself off from myself to make room for the person of a disinterested and usually vulgar spectator. Even in the thrill of a devotional kiss I have overheard myself saying, ‘Hot stuff, this witch.’ Or in a room full of agreeable and pleasant people, while I am being as agreeable as I know how, comes the whisper in a cynical tone, ‘These damned women.’ I am apparently a triple personality:

  (1) The respectable youth.

  (2) The foul-mouthed commentator and critic.

  (3) The real but unknown I.

  Curious that these three should live together amiably in the same tenement!

  In a Crowd

  A crowd makes egotists of us all. Most men find it repugnant to them to submerge themselves in a sea of their fellows. A silent, listening crowd is potentially full of commotion. Some poor devils suffocating and unable any longer to bear the strain will shout, ‘Bravo’, or ‘Hear, hear’, at every opportunity. At the feeblest joke we all laugh loudly, welcoming this means of self-survival. Hence the success of the Salvation Army. To be preached at and prayed for in the mass for long on end is what human nature can’t endure in silence and a good deal of self can be smuggled by an experienced Salvationist into ‘Alleluia’ or ‘The Lord be praised.’

  Naming Cockroaches

  I had to determine the names of some exotic cockroaches to-day and finding it very difficult and dull raised a weak smile in two enthusiasts who know them as ‘Blattids’ by rechristening them with great frivolity, ‘Fat ’eds.’

  ‘These bloody insects,’ I said to an Australian entomologist of rare quality.

  ‘A good round oath,’ he answered quietly.

  ‘If it was a square one it wouldn’t roll properly,’ I said. It is nice to find an entomologist with whom I can swear and talk bawdy.

  March 26.

  A Test of Happiness

  The true test of happiness is whether you know what day of the week it is. A miserable man is aware of this even in his sleep. To be as cheerful and rosy-cheeked on Monday as on Saturday, and at breakfast as at dinner is to – well, make an ideal husband.

  … It is a strange metempsychosis, this transformation of an enthusiast – tense, excitable, and active, into a sceptic, nerveless, ironical, and idle. That’s what ill-health can do for a man. To be among enthusiasts – zoologists, geologists, entomologists – as I frequently am, makes me feel a very old man, regarding them as children, and provokes painful retrospection and sugary sentimentality over my past flame now burnt out.

  I do wonder where I shall end up; what shall I be twenty years hence? It alarms me to find I am capable of such remarkable changes in character. I am fluid and can be poured into any mould. I have moments when I see in myself the most staggering possibilities. I could become a wife-beater, and a drug-taker (especially the last). My curiosity is often such a ridiculous weakness that I have found myself playing Peeping Tom and even spying into private documents. In a railway carriage I will twist my neck and risk any rudeness to see the title of the book my neighbour is reading or how the letter she is reading begins.

  April 10.

  ‘Why,’ asks Samuel Butler, ‘should not chicken be born and clergymen be laid and hatched? Or why, at any rate, should not the clergyman be born full grown and in Holy Orders, not to say already beneficed? The present arrangement is not convenient … it is not only not perfect but so much the reverse that we could hardly find words to express our sense of its awkwardness if we could look upon it with new eyes …

  As soon as we are born, if we could but get up, bath, dress, shave, breakfast once for all, if we could ‘cut’ these monotonous cycles of routine. If once the sun rose it would stay up, or once we were alive we were immortal! – how much forrader we should all get – always at the heart of things, working without let or hindrance in a straight line for the millennium! Now we waltz along instead. Even planets die off and new ones come in their place. How infinitely wearisome it seems. When an old man dies what a waste, and when a baby is born what a redundancy of labour in front!

  Two People I Hate in Particular

  The man walking along the pavement in front of me giving me no room to pass under the satisfactory impression that he is the only being on the pavement or in the street, city, country, world, universe: and it all belongs to him even the moon and sun and stars.

  The woman on the ’bus the other night – pouring out an interminable flow of poisonous chatter into the ear of her man – poor, exhausted devil who kept answering dreamily ‘Oom’ and ‘Yes’ and ‘Oom’ – how I hated her for his sake!

  April 11.

  Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony

  If music moves me, it always generates images – a procession of apparently disconnected images in my mind. In the Fifth Symphony, for example, as soon as the first four notes are sounded and repeated, this magic population springs spontaneously into being. A nude, terror-stricken figure in headlong flight with hands pressed to the ears and arms bent at the elbows – a staring, bulgy-eyed mad-woman such as one sees in Raemaekers’s cartoons of the Belgian atrocities. A man in the first onset of mental agony on hearing sentence of death passed upon him. A wounded bird, fluttering and flopping in the grass. It is the struggle of a man with a steam-hammer – Fate. As tho’ thro’ the walls of a closed room – some mysterious room, a fearful spot – I crouch and listen and am conscious that inside some brutal punishment is being meted out – there are short intervals, then unrelenting pursuit, then hammerlike blows – melodramatic thuds, terrible silences (I crouch and wonder what has happened), and the pursuit begins again. I see clasped hands and appealing eyes and feel very helpless and mystified outside. An epileptic vision or an opium dream – Dostoievsky or De Quincey set to music.

  In the Second Movement the man is broken, an unrecognisable vomit. I see a pale youth sitting with arms hanging limply between the knees, hands folded, and with sad, impenetrable eyes that have gazed on unspeakable horrors. I see the brave, tearful smile, the changed life after personal catastrophe, the Cross held before closing eyes, sudden absences of mind, reveries, poignant retrospects, the rustle of a dead leaf of thought at the bottom of the heart, the tortuous pursuit of past incidents down into the silence of yesterday, the droning of comfortable words, the painful collection of the wreckage of a life with intent to ‘carry on’ for a while in duty bound, for the widow consolation in the child; a greyhound’s cold wet nose nozzling into a listless hand, and outside a Thrush singing after the storm, etc., etc.

  In the Third Movement comes the crash by which I know something final and dreadful has happened. Then the resurrection with commotion in Heaven: tempests and human faces, scurryings to and fro, brazen portcullises clanging to, never to open more, the distant roll of drums and the sound of horses’ hoofs. From behind the inmost veil of Heaven I faintly catch the huzzas of a great multitude. Then comes a great healing wind, then a few ghostlike tappings on th
e window pane till gradually the Avenue of Arches into Heaven comes into view with a solemn cortège advancing slowly along.

  Above the great groundswell of woe, Hope is restored and the Unknown Hero enters with all pomp into his Kingdom, etc., etc.

  I am not surprised to learn that Beethoven was once on the verge of suicide.

  April 15.

  There is an absurd fellow … who insists on taking my pirouettes seriously. I say irresponsibly, ‘All men are liars’, and he replies with the jejuneness and exactitude of a pronouncing dictionary, ‘A liar is one who makes a false statement with intent to deceive.’ What can I do with him? ‘Did I ever meet a lady,’ he asked, ‘who wasn’t afraid of mice?’ ‘I don’t know,’ I told him, ‘I never experiment with ladies in that way.’

  He hates me.

  May 11.

  This mysterious world makes me chilly. It is chilly to be alive among ghosts in a nightmare of calamity. This Titanic war reduces me to the size and importance of a debilitated housefly. So what is a poor egotist to do? To be a common soldier is to become a pawn in the game between ambitious dynasts and their ambitious marshals. You lose all individuality, you become a ‘bayonet’ or a ‘machine gun’, or ‘cannon fodder’, or ‘fighting material’.