The Journal of a Disappointed Man

by W. N. P. Barbellion

  But, by Jove, I wreak vengeance on my familiars, and on those brethren even weaker than myself. They get my concentrated gall, my sulphurous fulminations, and would wonder to read this confession.

  Cynicism

  For an unusually long time after I grew up, I maintained a beautiful confidence in the goodness of mankind. Rumours did reach me, but I brushed them aside as slanders. I was an ingénu, unsuspecting, credulous. I thoroughly believed that men and women and I were much better than we actually are. I have not come to the end of my disillusions even now. I still rub my eyes on occasion. I simply can’t believe that we are such humbugs, hypocrites, self-deceivers. And strange to say it is the ‘good’ people above all who most bitterly disappoint me. Give me a healthy liar, or a thief, or a vagabond, and he arouses no expectations, and so I get no heart-burning. It is the good, the honest, the true, who cheat me of my boyhood’s beliefs … I am a cynic then, but not a reckless cynic – a careworn unhappy cynic without the cynic’s pride. ‘It is easy to be cynical,’ someone admonished me. ‘Unfortunately it is,’ I said.

  We are so cold, so aloof, so self-centred even the warmest friends. Men of piety love God, but their love for each other is so commonly but a poor thing. My own affections are always frosted over with the Englishman’s reserve. I hesitate as if I were not sure of them. I am afraid of self-deception, I hate to find out either myself or others. And yet I am always doing so. Mine is a restlessly analytical brain. I dissect everyone, even those I love, and my discoveries frequently sting me to the quick. ‘To the pure all things are pure’, whence I should conclude I suppose that it is the beam in my own eye. But I would not tolerate being deceived concerning either my own beam or other people’s motes.

  March 12.

  Archæopteryx and Mudflats

  Yesterday I collected two distinct and several twinges and hereby save them up. They were more than that – they were pangs, and pangs that twanged.

  (Why do I make fun of my suffering?)

  One was when I saw the well-known figure of the Archæopteryx remains in the slab of Lithographic sandstone of Bavaria: a reproduction in an illustrated encyclopædia. The other was when someone mentioned mud, and I thought of the wide estuary of the T—, its stretches of mudflats and its wild-fowl. We were turning over some pages and she said:

  ‘What’s that?’

  ‘Archæopteryx,’ said I.

  ‘Whatever is Archæopteryx?’

  ‘An extinct bird,’ I answered mournfully.

  Like an old amour, my love of palæontology and anatomy, and all the high hopes I entertained of them, came smarting to life again, so I turned over the page quickly.

  But why need I explain to you, O my Journal? To others, I could not explain. I was tongue-tied.

  ‘I used to get very muddy,’ I remarked lamentably, ‘in the old days when stalking birds on the mudflats.’

  And they rather jeered at such an occupation in such a place, just as those beautiful sights and sounds of zostera-covered mud-banks, twinkling runnels, swiftly running thin-legged waders, their whistles and cries began to steal over my memory like a delicate pain.

  To my infinite regret, I have no description, no photograph or sketch, no token of any sort to remember them by. And their doom is certain. Heavens! how I wasted my impressions and experiences then! Swinburne has some lines about saltings which console me a little, but I know of no other descriptions by either pen or brush.

  March 15.

  How revolting it is to see some barren old woman lovesick over a baby, bestowing voluptuous kisses on its nose, eyes, hands, feet, utterly intoxicated and chattering incessantly in the ‘little language’, and hopping about like an infatuated cock grouse.

  May 5.

  The nurse has been here now for over five weeks. One day has been pretty much the same as another. I get out of bed usually about tea-time and sit by the window and churn over past, present and future. However, the Swallows have arrived at last, though they were very late, and there are also Cuckoos, Green Wood-peckers, Moor-hens, calling from across the park. At night, when the moon is up, I get a great deal of fun out of an extremely self-inflated Brown Owl, who hoots up through the breadth and length of the valley, and then I am sure, listens with satisfaction to his echo. Still, I have much sympathy with that Brown Owl and his hooting.

  What I do (goodness knows what E— does), is to drug my mind with print. I am just a rag-bag of Smollett, H. G. Wells, Samuel Butler, the Daily News, the Bible, the Labour Leader, Joseph Vance, etc., etc. Except for an occasional geyser of malediction when some particularly acrid memory comes uppermost in my mind, I find myself submitting with a surprising calm and even cheerfulness. That agony of frustration which gnawed my vitals so much in 1913 has disappeared, and I, who expected to go down in the smoke and sulphur of my own fulminations, am quite as likely to fold my hands across my chest with a truly Christian resignation. Joubert said, ‘Patience and misfortune, courage and death, resignation and the inevitable, generally come together. Indifference to life generally arises with the impossibility of preserving it’ – how cynical that sounds!

  May 8.

  This and another volume of my Journal are temporarily lodged in a drawer in my bedroom. It appears to me that as I become more static and moribund, they become more active and aggressive. All day they make a perfect uproar in their solitary confinement – although no one hears it. And at night they become phosphorescent, though nobody sees it. One of these days, with continued neglect they will blow up from spontaneous combustion like diseased gunpowder, the dismembered diarist being thus hoist upon his own petard.

  June 1.

  We discuss post mortem affairs quite genially and without restraint. It is the contempt bred of familiarity, I suppose. E— says widows’ weeds have been so vulgarised by the war widows that she won’t go into deep mourning. ‘But you’ll wear just one weed or two for me?’ I plead, and then we laugh. She has promised me that should a suitable chance arise, she will marry again. Personally, I wish I could place my hand on the young fellow at once, so as to put him thro’ his paces – shew him where the water main runs and where the gas meter is, and so on.

  You will observe what a relish I have for my own macabre, and how keenly I appreciate the present situation. Nobody can say I am not making the best of it. One might call it pulling the hangman’s beard. Yet I ought, I fancy, to be bewailing my poor wife and fatherless child.

  June 15.

  I sit all day in my chair, moving 8 feet to my bed at night, and 8 feet from it to my chair in the morning – and wait. The assignation is certain. ‘Life is a coquetry of Death that wearies me, Too sure of the amour.’

  July 5.

  It is odd that at this time of the breaking of nations, Destiny, with her hands so full, should spare the time to pursue a non-combatant atom like me down such a labyrinthine side-track. It is odd to find her determined to destroy me with such tremendous thoroughness – one would have thought it sufficient merely to brush the dust off my wings. Why this deliberate, slow-moving malignity? Perhaps it is a punishment for the impudence of my desires. I wanted everything so I get nothing. I gave nothing so I receive nothing. I am not offering up my life willingly – it is being taken from me piece by piece, while I watch the pilfering with lamentable eyes.

  I have tendered my resignation and retire on a small gratuity.

  July 7.

  My hand gets a little better. But it’s a cat and mouse game, and so humiliating to be the mouse.

  … Parental affection comes to me only in spasms, and if they hurt, they do not last long. Curiously enough, as in the case of very old people, my consciousness reverts more easily to conditions long past. I seem unable to apprehend all the significance of having a nine-months old daughter, but some Bullfinches or Swallows seen thro’ the window rouse me more. No one can deny I have loved Birds to intoxication. In my youth, birds’ eggs, and little nestlings and chicken sent me into such raptures I could never tell it to you ade
quately … I am too tired to write more.

  July 23.

  Reading Pascal again. If Shelley was ‘gold dusty from tumbling among the stars’, Pascal was bruised and shaken. The one was delighted, and the other frightened. I like Pascal’s prostration before the infinities of Time, Space and the Unknown. Somehow, he conveys this more vividly than the uplift afforded him by religion.

  July 25.

  I don’t believe in the twin-soul theory of marriage. There are plenty of men any one of whom she might have married and lived with happily, and simpler men than I am. Methinks there are large tracts could be sliced off my character and she would scarcely feel the want of them. To think that she of all women, with a past such as hers, should be swept into my vicious orbit! Yet she seems to bear Destiny no resentment, so I bear it for her and enough for two. At our engagement I gave her my own ring to wear as a pledge – we thought it nicer than buying a new one. It was a signet ring with a dark smooth stone. Strange to say it never once occurred to me till now that it was a mourning ring in memory of a great-uncle of mine, actually with an inscription on the inside.

  July 26.

  As long as I can hold a pen, I shall, I suppose, go on trickling ink into this diary!

  I am amusing myself by reading the Harmsworth Encyclopædia in 15 volumes, i.e., I turn over the pages and read everything of interest that catches my eye.

  I get out of bed about ten, wash and sit by the window in my blue striped pyjama suit. It is so hot I need no additional clothing. E— comes in, brushes my hair, sprinkles me with lavender water, lights my cigarette, and gives me my book-rest and books. She forgets nothing.

  From my window I look out on a field with Beech hedge down one side and beyond, tall trees – one showing in outline exactly like the profile of a Beefeater’s head, more especially at sunset each evening when the tree next behind is in shadow. The field is full of blue Scabious plants, Wild Parsley and tall grass – getting brown now in the sun. Great numbers of White Butterflies are continually rocking themselves across – they go over in coveys of four or five at a time – I counted 50 in five minutes, which bodes ill for the cabbages. Not even the heaviest thunder showers seem to debilitate their kinetic ardour. They rock on like white aeroplanes in a hail of machine-gun bullets.

  Then there are the Swallows and Martins cutting such beautiful figures thro’ the air that one wishes they carried a pencil in their bills as they fly and traced the lines of flight on a Bristol board. How I hanker after the Swallows! so free and gay and vigorous. This autumn, as they prepare to start, I shall hang on every twitter they make, and on every wing-beat; and when they have gone, begin sadly to set my house in order, as when some much loved visitors have taken their departure. I am appreciating things a little more the last few days.

  August 1.

  A Jeremiad

  When I resigned my appointment last month, no one knows what I had to give up. But I know. Tho’ if I say what I know no one is compelled to believe me excepting out of charity. It will never be discovered whether what I am going to state is not simply despairing bombast. My few intimate friends and relatives are entirely innocent of science, not to say zoology, and all they realise is the significant fact that I am prone to go to extravagant lengths in conversation. But you may take it or leave it: I was the ablest junior on the staff and one of the ablest zoologists in the place – but my ability was always muffled by the inferior work they gave me to do. My last memoir published last December was the best of its kind in treatment, method and technique that ever issued from the institution – I do not say the most important. It was trivial – my work always was trivial because they put me in a mouldy department where all the work was trivial and the methods used as primitive, slipshod and easy as those of Fabricius, the idea being that as I had enjoyed no academic career I was unsuited to fill other posts then vacant – one, work on the Cœlenterates and another on Vermes, both rarely favoured by amateurs and requiring laboratory training. Later, I had the mortification of seeing these posts filled by men whose powers I by no means felt inclined to estimate as greater than my own. Meanwhile, I who had been dissecting for dear life up and down the whole Animal Kingdom in a poorly equipped attic laboratory at home, with no adequate instruments, was bitterly disappointed to find still less provision made even in a so-called Scientific Institution so grandly styled the British Museum (N.H.). On my first arrival I was presented with a pen, ink, paper, ruler, and an enormous instrument of steel which on enquiry I found to be a paper cutter. I asked for my microscope and microtome. I ought to have asked what Form I was in.

  So I had to continue my struggle against odds, and only within the last year or so began to squeeze the authorities with any success. In time I should have revolutionised the study of Systematic Zoology, and the anonymous paper I wrote in conjunction with R— in the American Naturalist was a rare jeu d’esprit, and my most important scientific work.

  In the literary world I have fared no better. My first published article appeared at the age of 15 over my father’s name, my motive being not so much modesty as cunning – if the literary world (!) ragged it unmercifully, there was still a chance left for me to make good.

  My next achievement of any magnitude was the unexpected printing of a story in the Academy after I had unsuccessfully badgered almost every other newspaper. This was when I was 19. No proof had been sent me and no intimation of its acceptance. Moreover, there were two ugly printer’s errors. I at once wrote off to correct them in the next issue. My letter was neither published nor acknowledged. I submitted, but presently wrote again, politely hinting that my cheque was overdue. But – screams of silence, and I thought it wise not to complain in view of future printing favours. I soon discovered that the journal had changed hands and was probably on its last legs at the time of my success. As soon as it grew financially sound again no more of my stories were accepted.

  A more recent affair I had with the American Forum, which delighted me by publishing my article, but did not pay – tho’ the Editor went out of his way to write that ‘payment was on publication’. I did not venture to remonstrate as I had another article on the stocks which they also printed without paying me. In spite of uniform failure, my literary ambition has never flagged.fn10 I have for years past received my rejected MSS. back from every conceivable kind of periodical, from Punch to the Hibbert Journal. At one time I used to file their rejection forms and meditated writing a facetious essay on them. But I decided they were too monotonously similar. My custom was when the ordinary avenues to literary fame had failed me – the half-crown Reviews and the sixpenny Weeklies – to seek out at a library some obscure publication – a Parish Magazine or the local paper – anything was grabbed as a last chance. On one of these occasions I discovered the Westminster Review and immediately plied them with a manuscript and the usual polite note. After six weeks, having no reply, I wrote again and waited for another six weeks. My second remonstrance met with a similar fate, so I went into the City to interview the publishers, and to demand my manuscript back. The manager was out, and I was asked to call again. After waiting about for some time, I left my card, took my departure and decided I would write. The same evening I told the publishers that the anonymous editor would neither print my article nor return it. Would they kindly give me his name and address so that I could write personally. After some delay they replied that although it was not the custom to disclose the editor’s name, the following address would find her. She was a lady living in Richmond Row, Shepherd’s Bush. I wrote to her at once and received no answer. Meanwhile, I had observed that no further issues of the review had appeared on the bookstalls, and the booksellers were unable to give me any information. I wrote again to the address – this time a playful and facetious letter in which I said I did not propose to take the matter into court, but if it would save her any trouble I would call for the MS. as I lived only a few minutes’ walk distant. I received no answer. I was busy at the time and kept putting off executing
my firm purpose of visiting the good lady until one evening as I was casually reading the Star coming home in the ’bus, I read an account of how some charitably disposed woman had recently visited the Hammersmith Workhouse and removed to her own home a poor soul who was once the friend of George Eliot, George Henry Lewes, and other well-known literary persons of the sixties and had, until it ceased publication a few months before, edited the once notable Westminster Review.

  Recently, however, there has been evidence of a more benevolent attitude towards me on the part of London editors. A certain magnificent quarterly has published one or two of my essays, and one of these called forth two pages of quotation and flattering comment in Public Opinion, which thrill me to the marrow. I fear, however, the flood-tide has come too late.

  If this achievement impressed me it did not seem to impress anyone else. A— regarded it as a joke and laughed incredulously when someone told him of ‘P.O.’s’ eulogy. You see I am still his foolish little brother. I am secretly very nettled too because E— treated the whole matter very indifferently. She did not even take the trouble to read the paper’s critique, and tho’ she volunteered to buy several copies to send to friends, she never remembered to do so, and the whole affair has passed out of her mind.

  Now a pleasant paragraph that appeared in the press noticing some drawings of a friend of her friend, she read twice and marched off to Francesca with it in great glee. Another successful young person got his photo into the picture papers – a man we know only by hearsay, and yet it impressed her until I recalled, what strange to say she had quite forgotten, how the photographers wished to publish her own photograph in the picture papers at the time of our marriage. But she scornfully refused. (And so did I.)