You can search all history and fiction for an ambition more powerful than mine and not find it. No, not Napoleon, nor Wilhelm II, nor Keats. No, I am not proud of it, not at all. The wonder is that I remain sane, the possessed of such a demon. I am sane or I could not make fun of it as I do. Ah! my God! it is a ridiculous weakness, but the leopard cannot change his spots, and I feel just as hopelessly spotty as a leopard.
January 28.
‘The rest is silence’ – I should like this inscribed at the end of this garrulous Journal, an inscription for the base of my self-erected monument.
January 30.
Rowbotham, the Modern Homer
The Human Epic; The Twelfth Epic Poem of the World; The Story of the Universe and Prehistoric Man; The Vanished Continent in the Atlantic; The Ice Age; The Anemones, Corals, and Population of the Primeval Ocean (‘These latter cantos have been made the subject of interesting lectures’ – The Bard); Other Epics by Rowbotham, the Modern Homer; God and the Devil; The Swiss Lake Dwellers; The Epic of the Empire; London; Charlemagne. Each Epic 2s. 6d. Foyle, 121, Charing Cross Road.
Who is ‘The Bard’? What a safe remark to make about the anemones and corals! Who is Rowbotham? I wish someone would lecture to me on him. What are the ‘other epics of the world’? The twelfth has the suggestion of quack verse sold as a green liquid from a four-wheeled vehicle at a country fair. But I can’t run to 2s. 6d., though I ache to read and know you, O Rowbotham! Rowbotham, the late Mr Homer, I suppose. Say, though, who is this Rowbotham?
Snow lies on the ground outside. All the morning it was too dark in my vault to read. Even had it been light, my eyesight had become temporarily too deranged for me to see the print. Had my eyes been all right, it was so cold that I had to keep my hands under the bedclothes.
All the afternoon I dozed. In the evening I sat by the fire and read Urn-burial. During the day, at long intervals, Nanny comes in, and I shout out fatuities – e.g., ‘Still snowing’, or ‘Colder than ever.’
There are some days when I give up, surrender voluntarily every earthly desire, when every thread binding me to life is cut. I long to be free, and hack and cut in a frenzy – frenzies in which I curse and swear out loud to myself, alternating with fits of terrible apathy, when I am indifferent to everything and everybody, when the petty routine of my existence, washing, eating, and sitting out, goes on and carries me along with it mechanically. And I wonder all the time why on earth I trouble about it. I look at human life and human affairs with inhuman detachment, yet not from the side of the angels. I am neither one thing nor the other, neither dead nor alive, a nondescript creature in a No-Man’s Land, and, like all who keep a middle course, not claimed with any enthusiasm by either side. The living must be tired of me, and the dead don’t seem eager for my reception. Yet I must go somewhere, and by heavens! I will not choose willingly, God knows, the bare heath of this world. The bare bodkin is an alluring symbol to lonely paralytics, meaning liberty, fraternity, peace. Ever since I came into it, I have felt an alien in this life – a refugee by reason of some pre-natal extradiction. I always felt alien to my father and mother. I was different from them. I knew and was conscious of the detachment. They seemed the children and I was a very old man. My father’s youth, which continued to flower past middle-age and in the midst of adversity and terrible affliction, and his courage and happiness of soul I admired greatly. But we were very far from one another. I was proud and irritable. My mother I loved, and she loved us all with an instant love and tenderness such as I have never seen in any mother since. I did not realise this at the time, alas! Her love helped to wear her out. She never parted from me for however short a period without tears – tears certainly of weakness – especially later, of sheer inability to stand steady any longer against the buffetings of a hard lot. But we had little in common. I was a queer duckling, self-willed and determined at the water’s edge, heedless of her frantic ‘clucks’. Dear soul! ‘If you behave so,’ she would warn me sorrowfully, ‘no one, you know, will like you when you go out into the world.’ ‘I don’t care,’ I would answer. ‘I don’t want them to like me. I shan’t like them. Theirs would be the greater loss.’ Ours was a family – not uncommon I imagine, at any time – in which the parents were under the tolerant surveillance and patronage of the children.
I was a little alien among my school-fellows. I knew I was different, and accepted my ostracism as a quite natural consequence. I never played games with them, but after afternoon school hurried home, gobbled down an early tea (prepared for me in the kitchen by Martha), and went off on a long solitary ramble till nightfall (and later sometimes), through orchards of very old crooked trees; the air reeking of garlic or humming with the scoldings of tits whose nests I was after in the holes in trees; through gorse-covered thickets, over streams, in woods, disturbing the game – I went across country, avoiding lanes, roads, and footpaths as if they were God-forsaken.
I never entered into any intimacy with my masters. They and the boys regarded me quizzically with a menacing ‘Now then, Barbellion, where are you sloping off to?’ I would flush, and parry with them with ‘I’ve got to be home early to-night.’ It was a lie. I knew it was a lie. They knew it was a lie. But I presented such an invertebrate, sloppy, characterless exterior, that no one felt curious enough to probe further into my way of life. And I was content to leave it at that.
It was the same in London. I was alien to my colleagues and led a private life, totally outside their imaginings. Among them only R., dear fellow, has ventured to approach my life, and seek a communion with me. And I can’t believe he has suffered any hurt. I am not a live wire. Now at all events my power station is dismantled, my career a cinder-path. I wish I could think that others who have come near me are similarly immune. My wife and child seem at a remote distance from me. Strange to say, I am calmer in mind when they are away, as now. Would that they could go on with their lives as if I had never been. E— is a dear woman. I love her, and she, I hope, loves me a little. She is my wife, and it is my child, and my dreamy ineffectual existence, poised between earth and heaven, cannot annul the physical contact. They may be dream figures, but I created them, and am responsible. Forgive me, forgive me, and try to think well of me. I am weak, and this great universe is a bully. This disease has weakened the fibre of my life. Existence blows me about anywhere. I am possessed by any idle devil who cares to take me, give me a shake, and pass on: forebodings and evil visions, imaginary pictures of horrible accidents, cataclysms, fears – fears that the earth may drop into the sun.
February 3.
Suffering does not only insulate. It drops its victim on an island in an ocean desert where he sees men as distant ships passing. I not only feel alone, but very far away from you all. But what is my suffering? Not physical pain. I have none. Pain brings clusters of one’s fellows – a toothache is intelligible. But when I say I am grown tired of myself, have outlived myself, am unseasonable and ‘mopy’ like a doomed swallow in November, it is something that requires a John Galsworthy to understand. The world to me is but a dream or mock show; and we all therein but Pantalones and Anticks to my severe contemplations. This used to be a transitory impression that amused my curiosity. But it hurts and bewilders now that it has become the permanent complexion on my daily existence, when I long for real persons and real things. Tinsel and pictures are melancholy substitutes to anyone heart-hungry for the touch of real hands, and the sound of real voices. Acute mental pain at intervals seizes me with pincers and casts me helpless into the whirlpool – it may be E—’s despair, or the failure to find a home for me to go to. But these are spasms of reality, the momentary opening and closing of a shutter on Life. As soon as they are over, I at once relapse into the dull monotone of misery and picture-show.
I have not left my room since November 11th. I eat well, sleep well, am in possession of all my higher faculties – those for feeling and thinking. But I can’t get out.
I think sometimes folk do not come to see me bec
ause I am such a gruesome object. It is not pleasant to feel you are gruesome. I have outstayed my welcome. I know everyone will be relieved to hear of my death – no doubt for my sake, as they will eagerly point out, but also for their own sake, as I believe. Yet now and then in selfish and ignoble moods, I, being an egotist, fancy I would like some loving hands to clutch at me, in a blind, ineffectual effort to save me in any condition if only alive.
February 4.
The last part of yesterday’s entry was maudlin tosh – entirely foreign to my nature. I hereby cancel it.
The Day’s Life
I woke at seven, when my desk, the Japanese print on the wall, the wooden chair with my basin on it, the chest of drawers were emerging out of a grey obscurity. I had tetanuses of my legs (which alternately shot out straight and contracted up to my chin) till eight-thirty, when Nanny came in and drew the blinds, letting in a foggy light. It is bitterly cold. I hear noises in the kitchen – a dull mewing sound (this is the tap being turned on), then a scrape, scrape (she is buttering my toast).
Then breakfast arrives (two pieces of toast and two cups of tea), for which I am set up in bed with pillows. Through the window on my left I can see the branch of a walnut-tree and beyond, a laurel. The little squares of ancient glass are so loosely fixed in the leads (one is broken and covered over with a piece of cardboard) that the draught pours through and sometimes makes wind enough to blow out my match for a cigarette. As I eat comes a heavy scrunch, scrunch, right up the front door, which is only a few feet away from me, concealed behind a curtain. It is the postman, who puts the letters in the porch, gives a resounding knock, and goes away again. As I smoke my cigarette there is another scrunch, scrunch, but this one goes round to the back door. There is a hammering on the door (they all know Nanny is deaf) and I hear a rough, throaty voice, saying, ‘Nearly copped him that time’, and Nanny replying, ‘Yes, ’tis cold this morning.’ It is the newspaper man, who always shies half a brick at a rat that haunts our garden.
While reading the Daily News I hear every now and then a distant rattle, which comes nearer, increases to a roar and passes off again in a furious rattle of sound – it is a motorcar along the Oxford Road. Then I hear the clock at the Manor strike twelve, sparrows chattering, or a scolding tit in the garden.
Presently a smell of dinner comes through from the kitchen, and while it cooks, N— comes in with the hot water and helps me to wash. All the afternoon I sleep or doze. At four-thirty I get up, by a little careful arrangement get into my wheeled chair, and am taken to the fireside. My legs having shot out in a tetanus meanwhile, they have to be bent up before I can climb into my armchair. As soon as I have tricked myself into the chair they shoot out again, and have to be bent up, and feet placed on the hot bottle.
Then tea! N— sits opposite – a short, fat little woman, who always on all occasions wears large black boots, which she says are necessary on account of her varicose veins. Her white apron above the waist is decorated with an embroidered design – a large red ‘O’ with green leaves around it. She always eats with her mouth open, otherwise, I suspect, she has discovered the noise of her mastication drowns every other sound.
After tea I read Gogol. After supper, Gogol. Then, my eyes aching, I stop and gaze into the fire. Nanny reads me a lot of funny stories out of Answers. I listen with a set smile, still gazing into the fire. I do not mind in the least, for to me it is all a mock show. Then came a biographical study of Charlie Chaplin – his early struggles, his present tastes and habits, what his Japanese chauffeur said of him (in the pidgin English of a Chinaman), his favourite holiday retreat, how he reads voraciously and always carries with him when he travels a trunk full of books (ah! my God, it did not give their titles!), etc. There was a ridiculous likeness in all this to a ‘critique’ of, say, George Moore in the Bookman. It aroused my slumbering brain. It interested me. (N— was absorbed.) This flashlight into a strange new world where the life, thoughts, habits of Mr Chaplin were of transcendent interest recalled me to reality. I had been floating in a luxury of dream. Now I flouted Circe, and struggled back into full possession of my personality. I was tickled, amused, amazed.
Then N— read me a series of informative snippets: how to make your lamp burn brighter (by putting a spoonful of sugar in the oil-well); how black beetles were not really beetles at all; how Alfred Noyes was a great poet; what a red bargee meant; what a Blue Peter signified.
At this my gorge rose at last. In the tones of a puff-breasted pedagogue addressing a small boy, I said: ‘Oh, don’t you know the famous line of R. L. S. about climbing into a sea-going ship when the Blue Peter is floating aloft?’
Now this was a contemptible piece of pride, for I only wanted to demonstrate to this scabby old bean that I knew all about a Blue Peter, and it was like her cheek to suppose I didn’t. I experience the same irritation when she explains to me how to go from Paddington to Victoria, or where the British Museum is. Of a truth I am no dream figure then. The veritable W. N. P. B. shows his bristling pelage from every opening in the wires of the cage.
How petty! Intellectual pride has been the bane of my life. Yet I must be fair to myself. Who, I should like to know, has received greater incentive to this vice? Have not inferior types all my life choked me, bound me, romped over me? But what a beautifully geometrical Nemesis it all is! Here I am in the last scene of the last act, the ruthless, arrogant intellectual, spending the last days of his ruined life alone, in the close companionship of an uneducated village woman who reads Answers.
February 8.
100,000 copies of Marie Bashkirtseff’s Journal were sold in America alone. If 100,000 copies of my book are sold, that will mean £5,000 for E—. Then I have a second volume for posthumous publication, the remainder of my diary from March, 1918, to the end, under the sensational and catchpenny title of The Diary of a Dying Man, beginning with Sir Thomas Browne’s ‘We are in the power of no calamity while Death is in our own’, and finishing up with Hamlet’s last worst words: ‘The rest is silence.’ Another £5,000, eh? and E— a rich woman? Time will show.
The Icons
Every man has his own icon. Secreted in the closet of each man’s breast is an icon, the image of himself, concealed from view with elaborate care, treated invariably with great respect by means of which the Ego, being self-conscious, sees itself in relation to the rest of mankind, measures itself therewith, and in accordance with which it acts and moves and subsists. In the self-righteous man’s bosom, it is a molten image of a little potentate who can do no wrong. In the egoist’s, an idol loved and worshipped by almost all men, addressed with solemnity and reverence, and cast in an immutable brazen form. Only the truth-seeker preserves his image in clay-covered, damp rags – a working hypothesis.
A man towards his icon is like the tenderness and secretiveness of a little bird towards its nest, which does not know you have discovered its heart’s treasure. For everyone knows the lineaments of your image and talks about them to everyone else save you, and no one dare refer to his own – it is bad form – so that in spite of the gossip and criticism that swirl around each one’s personality, a man remains sound-tight and insulated.
The human comedy begins at the thought of the ludicrous unlikeness, in many cases, of the treasured image to the real person – as much verisimilitude about it as, say, about a bust by Gaudier-Brzeska.
Heavens! what a toy-shop it will be at the Last Day, when all our little effigies are taken from their cupboards, unwrapped and ranged along beside us, shivering and nude. In that day how few will be able to say that they ever cried ‘God be merciful to me, a sinner’, or ‘a fool’, or ‘a humbug’.
The human tragedy begins as soon as one feels how often a man’s life is ruined by simple reason of this disparity between the image and the real – the image (or the man’s mistaken idea of himself) like an ignis fatuus leading him through devious paths into the morass of failure, or worse, of sheer laughing-stock silliness. The moral is γνῶθι σεαυτ�
�ν.
(My dear chap, quoting Greek at your time of life!)
February 11.
At 9 a.m. I heard the garden gate being forced open (it was frozen to the post) and the postman’s welcome footsteps up the path. He dropped a parcel on the porch seat, knocked and went away again. I could not get at my parcel, though I was only a few feet away from it. So I lay and reflected what it might be. Surely not the book ordered at Bumpus’s? Too soon. H—’s promised cigarettes? It sounded too heavy. My own book? An early advance copy? Perhaps.
Nanny came in and settled it. It was the book from B—’s. I was so interested I let her go away without cutting the string. I struggled, but could not tear off the cover, and had to sit with the book on my lap, wondering. She came in to light the fire, and I asked for a knife. She picked the parcel up, took it to the kitchen, and brought the book back opened. I did not like this. I like opening my own parcels.
The Journal of a Disappointed Man Page 35