But what a queer woman! … [And I, too, a queer man, drunken with wormwood and gall.]
August 6.
E— and I were very modern in our courtship. Our candour was mutual and complete – parents and relatives would be shocked and staggered if they knew … You see I am a biologist and we are both freethinkers. Voilà! … I hate all reticence and concealment … There is a good deal of that ass, Gregers Werle, in my nature.
August 7.
My Gastrocnemius
I become dreadfully emaciated. This morning, before getting off the bed I lifted my leg and gazed wistfully along all its length. My flabby gastrocnemius swung suspended from the tibia like a gondola from a Zeppelin. I touched it gently with the tip of my index finger and it oscillated.
August 17.
My beloved wife comes home this evening after a short, much needed holiday.
August 27.
My gratuity has turned out to be unexpectedly small. I hoped at least for one year’s salary. And the horrible thing is I might live for several years longer! No one was ever more enthusiastic for death than I am at this moment. I hate this world with its war, and I bitterly regret I never managed to buy laudanum in time. There are only E— and dear R— and one or two others – the rest of the people I know I hate en bloc. If only I could get at them. I hate to have to leave them to themselves without getting my own back.
August 31.
My darling sweetheart, you ask me why I love you. I do not know. All I know is that I do love you, and beyond measure. Why do you love me? – surely a more inscrutable problem. You do not know. No one ever knows. ‘The heart has its reasons which the reason knows not of.’ We love in obedience to a powerful gravitation of our beings, and then try to explain it by recapitulating one another’s characters just as a man forms his opinions first and then thinks out reasons in support.
What delights me is to recall that our love has evolved. It did not suddenly spring into existence like some beautiful sprite. It developed slowly to perfection – it was forged in the white heat of our experiences. That is why it will always remain.
September 1.
Your love, darling, impregnates my heart, touches it into calm, strongly beating life so that when I am with you, I forget I am a dying man. It is too difficult to believe that when we die true love like ours disappears with our bodies. My own experience makes me feel that human love is the earnest after death of a great reunion of souls in God who is love. When as a boy I was bending the knee to Haeckel, the saying ‘God is Love’ scarcely interested me. I am wiser now. You must not think I am still anything but an infidel (as the Churchmen say), – I should hate not to be taken for an infidel – and you must not be surprised that an embittered, angry, hateful person like myself should believe in a Gospel of Love. I am embittered because an intense desire to love has in many instancesfn11 been baulked by my own idealising yet also analytical mind. I have wanted to love men blindly, yet I am always finding them out, and the disappointment chills the heart. Hence my malice and venom: which, dear, do not misconstrue. I am as greedy as an Octopus, ready out of love to take the whole world into my inside – that seat of the affections! – but I am also as sensitive as an Octopus, and quickly retract my arms into the rocky, impregnable recess where I live.
September 2.
But am I dying? I have no presentiments – no conviction – like the people you read of in books. Am I, after all, in love? ‘I dote yet doubt; suspect yet strongly love.’ It is all a matter of degree. Beside Abélard and Héloïse, our love may be just glassy affection. It is a great and difficult question to decide. I love no one else but E—, that, at least, is a certainty, and I have never loved anyone more.
September 3.
My bedroom is on the ground floor as I cannot mount the stairs. But the other day when they were all out, I determined to clamber upstairs if possible, and search in the bedrooms for a half-bottle of laudanum, which Mrs — told me she found the other day in a box – a relic of the time when — had to take it to relieve pain.
I got off the bed on to the floor and crawled around on hands and knees to the door, where I knelt up straight, reached the handle and turned it. Then I crawled across the hall to the foot of the stairs, where I sat down on the bottom step and rested. It is a short flight of only 12 steps and I soon reached the top by sitting down on each and raising myself up to the next one with my hands.
Arrived at the top, I quickly decided on the most likely room to search first, and painfully crawled along the passage and thro’ the bathroom by the easiest route to the small door – there are two. The handles of all the doors in the house are fixed some way up above the middle, so that only by kneeling with a straight back could I reach them from the floor. This door in addition was at the top of a high but narrow step, and I had to climb on to this, balance myself carefully, and then carefully pull myself up towards the handle by means of a towel hung on the handle. After three attempts I reached the handle and found the door locked on the inside.
I collapsed on the floor and could have cried. I lay on the floor of the bathroom resting with head on my arm, then set my teeth and crawled around the passage along two sides of a square, up three more steps to the other door which I opened and then entered. I had only examined two drawers containing only clothes, when a key turned in the front door lock and E— entered with — and gave her usual whistle.
I closed the drawers and crawled out of the room in time to hear E— say in a startled voice to her mother: ‘Who’s that upstairs?’ I whistled, and said that being bored I had come up to see the cot: which passed at that time all right.
Next morning my darling asked me why I went upstairs. I did not answer, and I think she knows.
September 4.
I am getting ill again, and can scarcely hold the pen. So good-bye Journal – only for a time perhaps.
Have read this blessed old Journal out to E—. It required some courage, and I boggled at one or two bits and left them out.
September 5.
Leap-frog
Some girls up the road spent a very wet Sunday morning playing leap-frog in their pyjamas around the tennis lawn. It makes me envious. To think I never thought of doing that! and now it is too late. They wore purple pyjamas too. I once hugged myself with pride for undressing in a cave by the sea and bathing in the pouring rain, but that seems tame in comparison.
Liebestod
A perfect autumn morning – cool, fine and still. What sweet music a horse and cart make trundling slowly along a country road on a quiet morning! I listened to it in a happy mood of abstraction as it rolled on further and further away. I put my head out of the window so as to hear it up to the very last, until a Robin’s notes relieved the nervous tension and helped me to resign myself to my loss. The incident reminded me of the Liebestod in ‘Tristan’, with the Robin taking the part of the harp.
For days past my emotions have been undergoing kaleidoscopic changes, not only from day to day but from hour to hour. For ten minutes at a time I am happy or miserable, or revengeful, venomous, loving, generous, noble, angry, or murderous – you could measure them with a stop-watch. Hell’s phantoms course across my chest. If I could lie on this bed as quiet and stony as an effigy on a tomb! But a moment ago I had a sharp spasm at the sudden thought that never, never, never again should I walk thro’ the path-fields to the uplands.
September 7.
My 28th birthday.
Dear old R— (the man I love above all others) has been in a military hospital for months. It is a great hardship to have our intercourse almost completely cut off.
Dear old Journal, I love you! Good-bye.
September 29.
I could never have believed so great misery compatible with sanity. Yet I am quite sane. How long I or any man can remain sane in this condition God knows … It is a consummate vengeance this inability to write.fn12 I cannot help but smile grimly at the astuteness of the thrust. To be sure, how cunning to deprive me o
f my one secret consolation! How amusing that in this agony of isolation such an aggressive egotist as I should have his last means of self-expression cut off. I am being slowly stifled.
Later. (In E.’s handwriting.)
Yesterday we shifted into a tiny cottage at half the rental of the other one, and situated about two miles further out from the village … A wholly ideal and beautiful little cottage you may say. But a ‘camouflaged’ cottage. For in spite of the happiness of its exterior it contains just now two of the most dejected mortals even in this present sorrow-laden world.
September 30.
Last night, E— sitting on the bed by me, burst into tears. It was my fault. ‘I can stand a good deal but there must come a breaking point.’ Poor, poor girl, my heart aches for you.
I wept too, and it relieved us to cry. We blew our noses. ‘People who cry in novels,’ E— observed with detachment, ‘never blow their noses. They just weep.’ … But the thunder clouds soon come up again.
October 1.
The immediate future horrifies me.
October 2.
Poushkin (as we have named the cat) is coiled up on my bed, purring and quite happy. It does me good to see him.
But consider: A paralytic, a screaming infant, two women, a cat and a canary, shut up in a tiny cottage with no money, the war still on, and food always scarcer day by day. ‘Give us this day our daily bread.’
I want to be loved – above all, I want to love. My great danger is lest I grow maudlin and say petulantly, ‘Nobody loves me, nobody cares.’ I must have more courage and more confidence in other people’s good-nature. Then I can love more freely.
October 3.
I am grateful to-day for some happy hours plucked triumphantly from under the very nose of Fate, and spent in the warm sun in the garden. They carried me out at 12, and I stayed till after tea-time. A Lark sang, but the Swallows – dear things – have gone. E— picked two Primroses. I sat by some Michaelmas Daisies and watched the Bees, Flies and Butterflies.
October 6.
In fits of maudlin self-compassion I try to visualise Belgium, Armenia, Serbia, etc., and usually cure myself thereby.
October 12.
It is winter – no autumn this year. Of an evening we sit by the fire and enjoy the beautiful sweet-smelling wood-smoke, and the open hearth with its big iron bar carrying pot-hook and hanger. E— knits warm garments for the Baby, and I play Chopin, César-Franck hymns, Three Blind Mice (with variations) on a mouth-organ called ‘The Angels’ Choir’, and made in Germany … You would pity me, would you? I am lonely, penniless, paralysed, and just turned twenty-eight. But I snap my fingers in your face and with equal arrogance I pity you. I pity you your smooth-running good luck and the stagnant serenity of your mind. I prefer my own torment. I am dying, but you are already a corpse. You have never really lived. Your body has never been flayed into tingling life by hopeless desire to love, to know, to act, to achieve. I do not envy you your absorption in the petty cares of a commonplace existence.
Do you think I would exchange the communion with my own heart for the toy balloons of your silly conversation? Or my curiosity for your flickering interests? Or my despair for your comfortable Hope? Or my present tawdry life for yours as polished and neat as a new three-penny bit? I would not. I gather my mantle around me and I solemnly thank God that I am not as some other men are.
I am only twenty-eight, but I have telescoped into those few years a tolerably long life: I have loved and married, and have a family; I have wept and enjoyed, struggled and overcome, and when the hour comes I shall be content to die.
October 14 to 20.
Miserable.
October 21.
Self-disgust.
FINIS.
[Barbellion died on December 31.]
A Last Diary
‘We are in the power of no calamity while Death is in our own.’
Religio Medici.
1918
March 21.
Misery is protean in its shapes, for all are indescribable. I am tongue-tied. Folk come and see me and conclude it’s not so bad after all – just as civilians tour the front and suppose they have seen war on account of a soldier with a broken head or an arm in a sling. Others are getting used to me, though I am not getting used to myself.
Honest British jurymen would say ‘Temporarily insane’ if I had a chance of showing my metal. I wish I could lapse into permanent insanity – ’twould be a relief to let go control and slide away down, down. Which is the farthest star? I would get away there and start afresh, blot out all memory of this world and its doings. Here, even the birds and flowers seem soiled. It makes me impatient to see them – they are indifferent, they do not know. Those that do not know are pathetic, and those knowing are miserable. It is ghostly to live in a house with a little child at the best of times – now at the worst of times a child’s innocence haunts me always.
March 25.
I shall not easily forget yesterday (Sunday). It was just like Mons Sunday. The spring shambles began on Thursday in brilliant summer weather. Yesterday also was fine, the sky cloudless, very warm with scarcely a breeze. They wheeled me into the garden for an hour: primroses, violets, butterflies, bees; the song of the chaffinches and thrushes – otherwise silence. With the newspaper on my knee, the beauty of the day was oppressive. Its unusualness at this time of year seemed of evil import. Folk shake their heads, and they say in the village there is to be an earthquake on account of the heat. In rural districts simple souls believe it is the end of the world coming upon us.
At such times as these my isolation here is agonising. I write the word, but itself alone conveys little. I spend hours by myself unable to talk or write, but only to think. The war news has barely crossed my lips once, not even to the bedpost – in fact, I have no bedpost. And the cat and canary and baby would not understand. It is hard even to look them in the face without shame. All the while I hear the repeated ‘kling’ in my ears as the wheel of my destiny comes full circle – not once but a hundred superfluous times. When am I going to die? This is a death in life.
I intended never to write in this diary again. But the relief it affords could not be refused any longer. I was surprised to find I could scribble at all legibly. Yet it is tiring.
March 26.
In reply to a query from me if there were any fresh news in the village this afternoon, my mother-in-law thus (an obiter dictum, while dandling the babe): ‘No, not good news anyway. Still, when there’s a thorough assault, we’re bound to lose some … Dancy, dancy, poppity pin’, etc.
But we are all moles, in cities as in villages, burrowing blindly into the future. These enormous prospects transcend vision; we just go on and go on – following instinct, nursing babies, and killing our enemies. How unspeakably sorrowful the whole world is! Poor men, killing each other. Murder, say, of a rival in love, is comparatively a hallowed thing because of the personal passion. Liberty? Freedom? These are things of the spirit. Every man is free if he will. Yet who is going to lend an ear to the words of a claustrated paralytic? I expect I’m wrong, and I am past hammering out what is right. I must anæsthetise thought and accept without comment. My mind is in an agony of muddle, not only about this world but the next.
May 29.
Publication of the Journal
This journal in part is being published in September (D.V.). In the tempest of misery of the past three weeks, this fact at odd intervals has shone out like a bar of stormy white light. By September I anticipate a climax as a set-off to the achievement of my book. Perhaps, like Semele, I shall perish in the lightning I long for!
My dear E— has had a nervous breakdown – her despairing words haunt me. Poor, poor dear – I cannot go on.
June 1.
A fever of impatience and anxiety over the book. I am terrified lest it miscarry. I wonder if it is being printed in London? A bomb on the printing works?
When it is out and in my hands I shall believe. I have been out in
a beautiful lane where I saw a white horse, led by a village child; in a field a sunburnt labourer with a black wide-brimmed hat lifted it, smiling at me. He seemed happy and I smiled too.
Am immensely relieved that E— is better. I cannot, cannot endure the prospect of breaking her life and health. Dear woman, how I love you!
Regard these entries as so many weals under the lash.
June 3.
When it is still scalding, grief cannot be touched. But now after twenty-five days, I look back on those dreadful pictures and crave to tell the story. It would be terrible … I scorn such self-indulgence, for the grief was not mine alone, nor chiefly, and I cannot desecrate hers.
The extraordinary thing is that all this has no effect on me. The heart still goes on beating. I am not shrivelled.
The Journal of a Disappointed Man Page 31