In spite of physical difficulties surrounding me in a meshwork, I have now unaided corrected my proofs in joyful triumph – an ecstatic conqueror up to the very end. I take my life in homœopathic doses now. I am tethered by but a single slender thread – curiosity to know what Mr Wells says in the Preface – a little piece of vanity that deserves to be flouted.
November 29.
O all ye people! the crowning irony of my life – where is the sacred oil? – is my now cast-iron religious convictions shortly summarised as Love and Unselfishness. These, my moral code, have captured the approval, not only of my ethical but my intellectual side as well. Undoubtedly, and dogmatically if you like, a man should be unselfish for the good of the soul and also to the credit of his intellect. To be selfish is to imprison in a tiny case the glorious ego capable of penetrating to the farthest confines of the universe. As for love, it is an instinct and the earnest, like all beauty, physical as well as moral, of our future union into One. ‘One loving heart sets another on fire.’ – St Augustine (Confessions).
December 1.
What I have always feared is coming to pass – love for my little daughter. Only another communication string with life to be cut. I want to hear ‘the tune of little feet along the floor’. I am filled with intolerable sadness at the thought of her. Oh! forgive me, forgive me!
December 3.
The ‘Puggilist’
‘My word! you do look a figure!’ the old nurse exclaimed to me to-day in the course of one of the periodical tetanuses of all my muscles, when the whole body is contorted into a rigid tangle. ‘I shall never make a puggilist’ (the word is her own), I said.
I was rather impressed, though, for she is one of those who, like Mr Saddletree, I believe, in The Heart of Midlothian, never notice anything. She would not notice if she came into my room, and I was standing on my head as stiff as a ferule. ‘You may observe,’ I should say, ‘I am standing upside down – would you turn me round?’ ‘With pleasure’, is her invariable reply to every request I proffer.
December 23.
Victory at Christmas
It is strange to hear all this thunderous tread of victory, peace, and Christmas rejoicings above ground, all muffled by the earth, yet quite audible. They have not buried me deep enough. Here in this vault all is unchanged. It is bad for me, for, as to-day, a faint tremor passes along my palsied limbs – a tremor of lust – lust of life, a desire to be up and mingling in the crowd, to be soaked up by it, to feel a sense of all mankind flooding the heart, and strong masculine youth pulsing at the wrists. I can think of nothing more ennobling than the sense of power, unity, and manhood that comes to one in a sea of humanity, all animated by the same motive – to be sweeping folk off their feet and to be swept off oneself; that is to be man, not merely Mr Brown.
Christmas Day.
Death
Surely, I muse, a man cannot be accounted a failure who succeeds at last in calling in all his idle desires and wandering motives, and with utter restfulness concentrating his life on the benison of Death. I am happy to think that, like a pilot hard aport, Death is ready at a signal to conduct me over this moaning bar to still deep waters. After four years of war, life has grown cheap and ugly, and Death – how desirable and sweet! Youth now is in love with Death, and many are heavy-hearted because Death flouts their affection – the maimed, halt, and blind. How terrible if Life had no end!
With how splendid a zest the young men flung themselves on Death – like passionate lovers! A magnificent slaughter – for indifference to Life is the noblest form of unselfishness, and unselfishness is the highest virtue.
Victurosque Dei celant ut vivere durent, Felix esse mori. Lucan, with Sir Thomas Browne’s rendering:
‘We’re all deluded, vainly searching ways
To make us happy by the length of days;
For cunningly, to make’s protract this breath,
The gods conceal the happiness of death.’
This mood, not permanent, but recurring constantly, equals the happiness and comfort of the drowning man when he sinks for the third time. A profound compassion for my dear ones and friends, and all humanity left on the shore of this world struggling, fills my heart. I want to say genially and persuasively to them as my last testament: Why not die? What loneliness under the stars! It is only bland, unreflecting eupepsia that leads poets to dithyrambs about the heavenly bodies, and to call them all by beautiful names. Diana! Yet the moon is a menace and a terrible object-lesson. Despite Blanco White, it were well if the night had never revealed the stars to us. Suppose a man with the swiftness of light touring through the darkness and cold of this great universe. He would pass through innumerable solar systems and discover plenty of pellets (like this earth, each surging with waves of struggling life, like worms in carrion). And he would tour onwards like this for ever and ever. There would be no end to it, and always he would be discovering more hot suns, more cold and blasted moons, and more pellets, and each pellet would be in an internal fatuous dance of revolutions, the life on it blind and ignorant of all other life outside its own atmosphere.
But out of this cul-de-sac there is one glorious escape – Death, a way out of Time and space. As long as we go on living, we are as stupid and as caged as these dancing rats with diseased semicircular canals that incessantly run round and round in circles. But if we be induced to remain in this cul-de-sac, there is always an alleviative in communication and communion with our fellows. Men need each other badly in this world. The stars are crushing, but mankind in the mass is even above the stars – how far above, Death may show, perhaps to our surprise.
But if I go on, I shall come round to the conviction that life is beer and skittles. Cheerio! … This is not written in despair – ‘despair is a weakening of faith, hope in God’. But I am tired and in need of relief. Death tantalises my curiosity, and sometimes I feel I could kill myself just to satisfy it. But I agree that Death, save as the only solution, is merely a funk-hole.
Boxing Day.
James Joyce is my man (in the Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man). Here is a writer who tells the truth about himself. It is almost impossible to tell the truth. In this journal I have tried, but I have not succeeded. I have set down a good deal, but I cannot tell it. Truth of self has to be left by the psychology-miner at the bottom of his boring. Perhaps fifty or a hundred years hence Posterity may be told, but Contemporary will never know. See how soldiers deliberately, from a mistaken sense of charity or decency, conceal the horrors of this war. Publishers and Government aid and abet them. Yet a good cinema film of all the worst and most filthy and disgusting side of the war – everyone squeamish and dainty-minded to attend under State compulsion to have their necks scroffed, their sensitive nose-tips pitched into it, and their rest on lawny couches disturbed for a month after – would do as much to prevent future wars as any League of Nations.
It is easy to reconcile oneself to man’s sorrows by shutting the eyes to them. But there is no satisfaction in so easy a victory. How many people have been jerry-building their faith and creed all their lives by this method! One breath of truth and honest self-dealing would blow the structure down like a house of cards. The optimist and believer must bear in mind such things as the C.C.S. described by M. Duhamel, or this from M. Latzko’s Men in Battle:
‘The captain raised himself a little, and saw the ground and a broad dark shadow that Weixler cast. Blood? He was bleeding? Or what? Surely that was blood. It couldn’t be anything but blood. And yet it stretched out so peculiarly, and drew itself up like a thin thread to Weixler, up to where his hand pressed his body as though he wanted to pull up the roots that bound him to the earth.
‘The captain had to see. He pulled his head farther out from under the mound – and uttered a hoarse cry, a cry of infinite horror. The wretched man was dragging his entrails behind him.’
The reviewer suggests that the book should be read by school-children in every school in the world! I should like to take it (
and I hope it is large and heavy) and bring it down on the heads of the heartless, unimaginative mob, who would then have to look at it, if only to see what it was that cracked down on their skulls so heavily.
Certainly Joyce has chosen the easier method of transferring his truth of self to a fictional character, thus avoiding recognition. I have failed in the method urged by Tolstoi in the diary of his youth: ‘Would it not be better to say’ (he asks), ‘ “This is the kind of man I am; if you do not like me, I am sorry, but God made me so”? … Let every man show just what he is, and then what has been weak and laughable in him will become so no longer.’ Tolstoi himself did not live up to this. He confessed to his diary, but he kept his diary to himself. Some of my weaknesses I publish, and no doubt you say at once ‘self-advertisement’. I agree more or less, but believe egotism is a diagnosis nearer the mark. I do not aspire to Tolstoi’s ethical motives. Mine are intellectual. I am the scientific investigator of myself, and if the published researches bring me into notice, I am not averse from it, though interest in my work comes first.
Did not Sir Thomas Browne say ever so long ago: ‘We carry within us the wonders we seek without us; there is all Africa and her prodigies in us …’?
1919
January 1.
My dear Arthur! – if it’s a boy, call him Andrew Chatto Windus. Then perhaps the firm will give him a royalty when he is published at the font.
My life here has quite changed its orientation. I am no longer an intellectual snob. If I were, E— and I would have parted ere now. I never liked to take her to the B.M. (in my petty way) because there all the values are intellectual.
I write this by candlelight in bed. In the room above E— is in bed with ’flu. We have had days of cold rain, and just now it drips drearily off the roof, and the wind blows drearily in gusts round the cottage as if tired of blowing, and as if blowing prospects were nothing to be roaring about.
Wilson
President Wilson in my hero. I worship him. I could ask him to stamp across my prostrate body to save getting his feet wet in a puddle. But I know nothing about him save what I read in the Nation, and I don’t want to. Supposing I discovered traits …? I have had enough of disenchantment to last me a lifetime. If he is not the greatest figure in modern history, then there’s no money in Wall Street.
January 3.
She taxes me with indifference, says my sympathy is cold. By God! this is hard to bear. But she is so desperate, she is lunging out right and left at all. I fear for her mental balance. What’s going to happen to us? Why does everyone seem to have forsaken us? Ah! it is almost too hard for me to bear. And I can’t break down. I am like ice. I can’t melt. I had a presentiment of evil awaiting us about now. I don’t know why, unless long experience of it produces a nose for it, so that I can smell it in advance.
January 4.
I have talked of being in love with one’s own ruin, Bashkirtseff of liking to suffer, to be in despair. Light, frivolous talk. At the most, such moods are only short lulls between the spasms of agony of suffering; one longs to be free of them as of acute physical pain, to be unconscious. I look forward to night, to darkness, rest, and sleep. I sleep well between twelve and six and then watch the dawn, from black (and the owl’s hoot) to grey (and the barncock’s crow) to white (and the blackbirds’ whistle). The oak beam on my ceiling, the Japanese print on the wall come slowly into view, and I dread them. I dread the day with my whole soul. Each dawn is hopeless. Yes, it is true, they have not buried me deep enough. I don’t think I am buried at all. They have not even taken me down from the tree. And my wife they are just nailing up. I can never forget, wherever I may be, in Heaven or Hell, her figure in dressing-gown and shawl drawn up erect – but swaying because she is so weak – before me at the fireside (she had just been bending over me and kissing me, hot cheeks and hot tears that mingled and bound us together to that moment for ever), her head tilted towards the ceiling, and her poor face looking so ill and screwed up as she half-whispered: ‘Oh, God! it’s so hopeless.’ I think that picture is impressed even on the four walls of the room, its memory is photographed on the air to haunt those who may live here in the time to come. I said: ‘Fight it out, dear. Don’t give in. I believe in a personal devil. The human spirit is unconquerable. You’ll come through if you fight.’ It was but a few weeks ago that she came home one evening, dug out from a drawer her beautiful dance dress, got into it, and did a pas seul for my pleasure round the little cottage room. That ogre Fate was drawing out her golden wing and mocking her loss of liberty. Ah! the times we intended to have together!
January 8.
I lie stiff and contorted till Nurse arrives at nine-thirty. She straightens me out and bolsters me up. Breakfast at nine. Cigarettes while I listen with ravenous ears for the postman. No letter for me, then plop right down into the depth among the weeds and goblins of the deep sea for an hour. There usually is no letter for me.
My chief discovery in sickness and misfortune is the callousness of people to our case – not from hard-heartedness (everyone is kind), but from absence of sympathetic imagination. People don’t know the horrors and they can’t imagine them – perhaps they are unimaginable. You will notice how suicides time and again in farewell notes to their closest and dearest have the same refrain, ‘I don’t believe even you can realise all I suffer.’ Poor devil! of course not. Beyond a certain point, suffering must be borne alone, and so must extreme joy. Ah! we are lonely barks.
January 13.
All the postman brought me to-day was an income-tax form!
Last night: Nurse (having put me back to bed): ‘Shall I shut up your legs?’
B.: ‘No, thank you. They’ve been bent up all the evening, and it’s a relief to have them out straight.’
Later: B.: ‘Before you go you might uncross my legs.’
(She pulls bed-clothes back, seizes my feet, one in each hand, and forces them apart, chanting humorously: ‘Any scissors to grind?’ As I have pointed out to her, the sartorius muscle, being on the inside of the thigh and stronger than the others, has the effect of crossing my legs when a tetanic spasm occurs.)
N.: ‘There, good-night.’
B.: ‘And a good-night to you.’
N.: ‘I’ll come in first thing in the morning.’
(Exit.)
I lie on my back and rest awhile. Then I force myself on to the left side by putting my right arm over the left side of the bed beneath the wood-work and pulling (my right arm is stronger than any of the other limbs). To-night, Nurse had not placed me in the middle of the bed (I was too much over on the right side), so even my long arm could not reach down beneath the woodwork on the left. I cursed Nanny for a scabby old bean, struggled, and at last got over on my left side. The next thing was to get my legs bent up – now out as stiff and straight as ferules. When lying on the left side I long ago found out that it is useless to get my right leg up first, as it only shoots out again when I come to grapple with the left. So I put my right arm down, seized the left leg just above the knee and pulled! The first result is always a violent spasm in the legs and back. But I hang on and presently it dies away, and the leg begins to move upward a little. Last night Nanny uncrossed my legs, but was not careful to separate them. Consequently, knee stuck side by side to knee, and foot to foot, as if glued, and I found, in pulling at my left, I had the stubborn live weight of both to lift up. I would get them part way, then by a careless movement of the hand on a ticklish spot both would shoot out again. So on for an hour – my only relief to curse Nanny.
And thus, any time, any week, these last eighteen months. But I have faith and hope and love in spite of all. I forgive even Nanny!
January 19.
The situation is eased. E— is at Brighton for a change, and has P— with her (she came up from Wales with the nurse after seven months’ visit). But I am heartsore and unhappy.
January 20.
If I were to sum up my life in one word I should say suffocation. R— has be
en my one blow-hole. Now I look forward to a little oxygen when my Journal is published! I am delighted and horrified at the same time. What will my relatives say? ’Twill be the surprise of their lives. I regard it as a revanche. The world has always gagged and suppressed me – now I turn and hit it in the belly.
January 22.
Am now lodging alone under one roof with Nanny! Makes me think of some of Sterne’s adventures in the Sentimental Journey, only I must shut my eyes very tight to see the likeness and imagine very hard. This is a selection from last night’s conversation (remember she is deaf, old, and obstinate; she hates to be instructed or corrected; hence her ignorance and general incapacity):
Ornithology
N.: ‘I think a sparrow out at the back has young birds, by the way she carries off the food.’
B.: ‘It’s too early for young sparrows. A sparrow is too worldly wise to encumber himself with a young family in January, or in February or March for that matter.’
N.: ‘I’ve seen young sparrows in March.’
B.: ‘Why didn’t you write to the papers about it?’
N.: ‘There wasn’t so much writing to the papers in my days. But there were things I could have written about. Young plovers, for example, I used to catch and hold in my lap. You know the plover? It’s called the lapwing sometimes; only a few young at a time—’
The Journal of a Disappointed Man Page 33