It was James Joyce’s Portrait of the Artist – a book which the mob will take fifty years to discover, but having once discovered it will again neglect.
It was cold enough to freeze a brass monkey. I had had some diary to post up. The diary seemed to lose all interest and attraction. It was a sore temptation, but I decided to be a Stoic, and wrote till eleven-thirty, though my hands were blue and my nose ran.
Then I read Joyce. An amazing book. Just the book I intended to write – had started it, in fact, when the crash came. He gives the flow of the boy’s consciousness – rather the trickle of one thing after another – almost as well as Bashkirtseff. I have never read anything so extraordinary as the latter’s pages wherein she plumbs to the bottom and the dregs of current consciousness. Her brain runs synchronously with her pen. She eviscerates her current thoughts and records them exactly with a current pen.
It is difficult to do. I’ve tried it in this Journal and failed. I am trying it now, but it’s not coming very easily. What I like is Joyce’s candour and verisimilitude. I have tried that, but it’s no good. The publishers rejected two splendid entries about prostitutes and other stuff. That is why I think, in truth, 100,000 copies will not be sold. My diary is too unpleasant for popularity. It is my passion for taking folk by the nose and giving them a wigging, my fierce contempt for every kind of complacency. Stephen Daedalus. Butler started the fashion with Edward Pontifex. Then there is Wells’ George Ponderevo. Pontifex is a good name.
On the wall in front of me is a pattern of ivy-leaves. In odd moments of listlessness I am always counting them: there are 30 perpendicular rows with 47 leaves in each row – that’s 1,410 leaves in all. You’d never think there were so many, to look at the wall. I know to nausea that there are 40 little panes of glass in the window on my left – really only 39, as one is broken and stopped with cardboard. There are 7 bars (5 thin and 2 thick) in the back of the wooden chair. There were 17 degrees of frost this morning, and I have to stop constantly to wipe my nose and warm my hands on a water-bottle. There is also a water-bottle at my feet. KLIM – that is MILK backwards – printed on a wooden box I use as a book-rest and now lying upside down. YLIAD SWEN – this is the Daily News backwards. I am for ever reading it backwards as it lies about on my bed upside down. Then there are faces on the morris-patterned curtain and in the fire. I saw a face like this last night. It was like me, but with a big hole excavated in the top of the skull, carrying red-hot coals and giving off a black smoke. The face was coal-black, too. I might have been some evil genie stoking the fires of hell.
Heavens! I wish I could discuss James Joyce with someone. I must write to R—.
‘DEAR OLD LAD,
‘Have you ever read James Joyce? Literature, my boy; the most vivid book, living, obviously autobiographical, candid, such realism, beauty of style. Am so pleased I have found him out! I am quite exultant. He is one of us!’
Our sukie is an old copper one, and sings sometimes in splendid imitation of an orchestra tuning up. I can hear very clearly the oboes and violins. It makes me thirsty.
My hand has gone too cold and stiff to write more.
My Canary
The jacket is put over his cage at nightfall, and all night he roosts on a table close to my bed. When I wake in the silence of the night, it is difficult to believe that close to me there is a little heart incessantly pumping hot red blood. I have a sense of companionship at the thought. For I, too, silent, concealed in my bed, possess a heart pumping incessantly, though not so fast. I, too, am an animal, little bird, and we must both die.
A Gasconade
I owe neither a knee nor a bare gramercy to any man. All that I did, I did by my own initiative. To this sweeping assertion I make one exception – R—, if for no other reason than that he taught me to love music.
February 13.
I had a letter from H. G. Wells this morning. He says: ‘You will have seen my Preface by this time.’ (I haven’t.) ‘Prefaces always devastate relationships. But I hope you didn’t think it too horrible. I had to play up to your standard of frankness.’ I knew he would be rude. But I’m afire to see what he says.
I am going to be quite fond of this old Nanny. She is always cheerful and ready to do any mortal thing for me. Across the frightful abyss that separates our two several existences I throw this thin line of attachment and appreciation.
The difference between a highly developed human – say, like Meredith – and his housemaid is greater than the difference between the highest ape and the housemaid.
February 16.
The publishers this morning sent me a proof of Mr Wells’ Introduction. It is excellent, and not rude at all. I devoured it with avidity – can’t you see me? The book won’t be ready till about the end of March.
The Bankruptcy of Imagination
Mr Lloyd George, at the Peace Conference, said that he was persuaded to the League of Nations idea when recently he saw in France the innumerable graves of the fallen covering acres.
Perpend. The statement is worth considering. Note that it is at the end of the war he is speaking, that it is the number of graves he is moved by, and that what moves him to realise the horrors of war is the graves of dead men. What was Mr Lloyd George’s imagination doing before he went to France and saw the graves? Would it help on the League, think you, if someone took his child by the hand and showed him all the acres of all the graves in Europe; or all the mutilated in the hospitals when their wounds are being dressed; or all the asylums when the madmen are having their morning rave; or all the St Dunstan’s in the world; or all the dying and dead babies?
The war has beggared the imagination. If a woman loses five sons, she is not smitten five times as much as if she lost only one. All suffering has limits beyond which the heart is insensible. We are no more appalled at the death of ten million men than at that of ten thousand, or, indeed, if it be under our eyes, ten or one. It is a fact that we are forgetting the war already – those who weren’t in it. Skating, dancing, political squabbles are all the go – pigs over their pannage. If a woman has lost a son, compensations are manifold – e.g., some gewgaw from the King’s hands at Buckingham Palace. What the son thought or suffered no one knows, because he’s dead. If he survives he wants to remain dumb, or lacks capacity to express his thought about the hell and damnation of war. If he had such a capacity, his hearers would lack the imaginative sympathy to be scalded by his boiling ink.
In this week’s Times Literary Supplement is a cringing review of a rotten book, Notebooks of a Spinster Lady – obviously a nob – say, an earl’s daughter. True, the reviewer deferentially refers to some of the stories as old, but hastens to explain that all he means is old to him. In the same issue is another snobbish review on the life of Meredith, excellent according to other reviewers. It is headed ‘Small Talk about George Meredith’ – from which one knows what to expect. The reviewer knew Meredith personally, and explains with delightful naïveté that the reason why Meredith would not go to see his first wife on her death-bed, though she asked him to come, was his sensitive horror of death-bed scenes. As for Meredith being ashamed of being a tailor’s son, the idea is scouted. Yet, he was, and I hate him for it.
February 17.
Reading the Introduction was like reading my own obituary notice. It rather moved me. All day yesterday I buzzed over it like a famished bee. Streaks of it at intervals would shoot through my mind. I weighed sentences, measured them, tested them. I was curious over ‘a certain thread of unpremeditated and exquisite beauty that runs through the story this diary tells’. Lord in heaven, what is it?
Mr Wells is sympathetic and almost too generous. Characteristically he concentrates on me as a biologist, whereas I like to look at myself posthumously as a writer.
He is a good fellow, and I am most grateful and most pleased.
It’s milder to-day, and the chaffinches are sweetly singing outside my window.
Nurse said to me after breakfast:
‘We
ll, what are you going to do?’
I replied apologetically:
‘Oh, writing, I suppose.’
‘This everlasting writing.’ She shrugged her shoulders, and I felt it was most unsociable in me not to satisfy her curiosity.
February 15.
Legs
B.: (to Nurse stepping on his toes): ‘Seemingly either my feet or yours are very large.’
N.: ‘Oh, but you see it’s my legs are so short. I can’t step across easily. It will be all right if you go to Eastbourne. Nurse — has long legs.’
B.: ‘But what’s the use of her long legs if she can’t get a house?’
N.: ‘Aunt Hobart’s legs were so bent up that though she was six feet long, her coffin was only four feet.’
B.: ‘Why were Aunt Hobart’s legs bent up?’
N.: ‘Rheumatism. She was buried at the same time as her grand-daughter.’
B.: ‘But her legs were not bent up?’
N.: ‘Oh, no. Bessie was only sixteen, and died of scarlet fever.’
The Water Ousel’s Song
A Memory
I leaned over the parapet of an old stone bridge covered with great, old, branching, woody tangles of ivy, and leading from an oak wood across a stream into a meadow. I leaned over the parapet, and gazed long at the rushing water below. ‘I will look,’ I said, ‘as if I am never going to see this picture again.’ And so I looked, and now I am glad I looked like that, for the memory of the picture in every detail comes back, and indeed has never left me.
Along each bank margin grew a row of alders, and in the bed of the river were scattered great slabs of rock jutting out of the water, and spotted white with the droppings of water ousels and kingfishers that loved to pause on them. A great body of swift, strong and silent water came sweeping down to the falls, then dropping over in a solid green bar into a cauldron of roaring, hissing liquid below, churning the surface waters into soapy foam of purest white – the white of the summer cloud and the water ousel’s breast. Outside the foam-belt the water of this salmon pool ripples away gently in oily eddies and circles. After the rough passage over the falls, some of the water rests awhile in little recesses on the periphery of the pool. But gradually it works round into the current which, like the wake of a steamer, cuts diametrically across the pool, and swishes everything – leaves, twigs, dead insects – on to the hurtling shallows. ‘Watch how the vault of water first bends unbroken in pure polished velocity over the arching rocks at the brow of the cataract covering them with a dome of crystal, twenty feet thick, so swift that its motion is unseen, except when a foam globe from above darts over it like a fallen star.’
This is from Ruskin’s description of the Falls of Schaffhausen. But note that it is equally applicable to my little falls – if we banish the phantom Size.
It may be only sour grapes for my part, but –
‘Why go gallivanting
With the nations round?
Leave to Robert Browning
Beggars, fleas, and vines –
Leave to mournful Ruskin
Popish Apennines.
Where’s the mighty credit
In admiring Alps?
Any goose sees glory
In their snowy scalps.’
A water ousel alighted on a boulder and bowed to me. He and his little white shirt-front, continually bobbing, were like a concert-room artist acknowledging the plaudits of an enthusiastic audience. I was pleased with him, but his excess of ecstasy at sight of me made my own pleasure seem dull and lethargic.
Then he hopped a little higher on to the stump of an alder, and being twilight now, and the day’s food hunt over, he poured out his quivering soul in an ecstasy of song. Like a solo violin with orchestra accompaniment, it blended in harmony with the voluminous sound of the water, now rising above it, now overwhelmed by it. Then, as if suddenly shy and nervous of his self-revelation, the little bird gave one or two short bobs, and flew swiftly away upstream. Such spiritual ecstasy made me feel very poor indeed in soul, and I went home with a sense of humiliation.
February 20.
My beloved wife spent the night here, then returned to Brighton. ‘Do you feel my heart on my lips?’ ‘Dear, I love you’, and her tears trickled on to my beard.
Two poor grief-stricken things. She shook with the anguish of the moment, withdrew, and again flung herself on my breast. I sat motionless in my chair. Ah! my God! how I longed to be able to stand and pick up, press to me, and hide away in the shelter of strong arms that sweet, dear, fluttering spirit. It is cruel – cruel to her and cruel to me. I thought my heart must break. There comes a time when evil circumstances squeeze you out of this world. There is no longer any room. Oh! Why did she marry me? They ought not to have let her do it.
February 21.
I sometimes fancy I am not weaned from life even now. Pictures in the paper make me agonise. Oh, for a little happiness for her and me together, just a short respite. What agony it is to have a darling woman fling herself into your arms, press you to her dear bosom and ask you desperately to try to get well, when you know it is hopeless. She knows it is hopeless, yet every now and then … She pictures me in a study in her flat (all her own), walking on two sticks. And already the tendons of my right leg are drawing in permanently.
I am not weaned because my curiosity is not dead. When I think of dying, I am tantalised to know all that will happen after. I want to be at my funeral, and see who’s there and if they are very sorry, who sheds a friendly tear, what sort of service, etc. Oh! I wish I were dead and forgotten.
February 22.
Mr Wells, in his Preface, refers to my watching bats in a cave (they were deserted manganese mine borings) and the evening flights of starlings, which were described in separate articles I sent him. Herewith is my adventure among the bats. A first-class field naturalist who has made some remarkable studies in the habits of that elusive and little known animal the mole, said to me at the conclusion of his investigations: ‘Yes, I have lived two years with the mole, and have arrived only on the fringe of the subject.’ He was a melancholy fellow and too absorbed in his studies even to shave his face of a morning. I arrived only on the outside of the fringe in my study of the habits of the Greater Horseshoe Bat, but I got a lot of enjoyment out of the risky adventure of exploring the disused mines. The wooden struts were rotten, and the walls and roofs of the galleries had fallen in here and there. So we had sometimes to crawl on hands and knees to get past. All the borings were covered with a red slime, so we wore engineers’ overalls, which by the time we had finished changed from blue to red, speckled with grease dropping from our candles. Occasionally, in turning a corner, a sudden draught would blow the candles out, and in one rather lofty boring we were stopped by deep water, and, boy-like, meditated the necessity of removing clothes and swimming on with candles fastened on our foreheads. One boring opened into the side of a hill by a small, insignificant, and almost invisible hole at the bottom of a steep slide. We slid down with a rope, and once inside the little hole at the bottom, found a big passage with a narrow-gauge line and abandoned truck – great excitement! Another entrance to the mines was by way of a shaft no bigger than an ordinary man-hole in a drain pipe, its mouth being overgrown with brambles. We fixed a rope round the trunk of a tree, and went down, hand over hand. We crawled along a narrow passage – three of us, leaving no one at the top to guard the rope – and at intervals espied our game, hanging to the roof by the hind legs. We boxed three altogether, gently unfixing the hind legs, and laying the little creatures in a tin carefully lined with wool. The Horseshoe Bat is the strangest sight in the world to come upon in a dark cave hanging upside down from the roof like an enormous chrysalis in shape. For when roosting, this bat puts its two thin hind legs and feet very close together, making a single delicate pedicle, and wraps its body entirely in its wings, head and ears included. When disturbed, it gently draws itself up a little by bending its legs. When thoroughly awakened, it unfolds its wings and beco
mes a picture of trembling animation: the head is raised, and it looks at you nervously with its little beady dark, glittering eyes, the large ears all the while vibrating as swiftly as a tuning-fork. These with the grotesque and mysterious leaf-like growth around its nose – not to mention the centrepiece that stands out like a door-knocker – make a remarkable vision by candle-light in a dark cave.
February 23.
Despite the unfathomable ennui and creeping slowness of the hours in the living through of each day, the days of the past month or two, by reason of their dull sameness, seem, when viewed in retrospect, like the telegraph poles on a railway journey. And always rolling through my head is the accompaniment of some tune – Shepherd Fennel’s Dance, Funeral Marches.
I want to hear Berlioz’s Requiem. Poor Berlioz! How I sympathise with you.
February 25.
Am feeling rather queer these last few days, and am full of forebodings. Dear E—’s struggles harrow me, and worst of all, I anticipated this as from December, 1915. When I showed my terrible gloom then, one person laughed gaily. Too much imagination – the ability to foresee in detail and preconstruct – is a curse. For I have lived through all this time before; yet the actual loses none of its poignancy.
The Journal of a Disappointed Man Page 36