The Journal of a Disappointed Man

by W. N. P. Barbellion

  And behind all, behind every sight and every other sound, is the sound of the great sea, the all-powerful creator of the dunes, who in a single evening (for a thousand ages are but an evening in his calculations) could sweep them away or sweep up another area of sand and marram grass as big. One church is already obliterated. That was yesterday. To-morrow, maybe, the village further inland will have vanished too.

  That is the secret of the fascination of the dunes. Superficially, all seems dead and dull. Reflection brings the deeper understanding of myriad forms of life, creeping, running, springing, burrowing – of noisy, screaming, struggling life, dominated by the august, secular movements of the great sea.

  Sometimes, towards the end of the afternoon, I would grow tired, the brilliance would become garish. Then, leaving the thyme, the eyebright, the wild pansies, the viper’s bugloss (in clusters), an occasional teazle, after boxing every sort of insect and every sort of plant that I had not collected before (the birds’ eggs I had long ago swept into my cabinet), I would hurry out to the shore, take off my clothes, and be rebaptised in the sea. A hundred yards’ run up the cool sands and back, and I was dry, and dallied awhile in the sand-hills before putting on my shirt that smelled of stale sweat.

  It was so good to divest myself of particularities that clung like the burrs on my stockings, and plunge into the universality of the sea! Subconsciously that was my motive and the cause of my delight.

  April 16.

  I am still miserable, especially on E—’s account, that dear brave woman. But I have undergone a change. My whole soul is sweetened by the love of those near and dear to me, and by the sympathy of those reading my book.

  April 21.

  Nurse was cutting my beard, and handed me the mirror to report progress. ‘The right moustache,’ I said critically, ‘seems to droop down a lot.’ She twisted up the left between finger and thumb, and then in a flash, before I had time to scream, damped her finger with her tongue, and gave a powerful screw to the right!

  April 22.

  Beauty

  Under the lens of scientific analysis, natural beauty disappears. The emotion of beauty and the spirit of analysis and dissection cannot exist contemporaneously. The sunset becomes waves of light impinging on atmospheric dust; the most beautiful pearl, the encysted itch of a mollusc.

  And not natural beauty alone, but all beauty – all the furniture of earth, and all the choir of heaven at the intellect’s beck must shed their beautiful vestments, although their aureoles in the interim shall remain safe in the keeping of man’s soul. For just as man’s scientific analysis destroys beauty, so his synthetic art creates it, and man creates beauty, Nature supplying the raw materials.

  Nature is the clay, man the potter. Everyone feeling the emotion of beauty becomes a creative artist. If the world were as ugly as sin, the artist would recreate it beautiful in the image of his own beautiful spirit, just as Frank Brangwyn and Joseph Pennell are actually now doing with those industrial hideousnesses. But man’s generous nature, because there is beauty in his own heart, naïvely assumes its possession by others, and so projects it into Nature. But he sees in her only the truth and goodness that are in himself. Natural beauty is everyone’s mirror.

  Similarly, as I believe, man creates the world itself after his own mind. Consult the humanists, in whose system of philosophy I have a profound intuitive belief.

  Certainly there are many times when Nature, by pure accident, having other aims than our delight, produces the finished article. Helen of Troy, I suppose, required no emendation from the artist’s hand. Nor does the Watersmeet, Lynton. Occasionally a human drama completes itself perfectly in five acts, observing all the unities.

  It may be claimed by the moralists that there must be some very definite inherent direction in Nature’s processes towards the light of beauty, if in the ordinary course of producing, say, a blue flower to attract insects, a thing of rare beauty at the same time emerges therefrom. But this is putting the cart before the horse. For man’s own ideas of beauty are necessarily based on the forms and colour he finds in Nature, the only world he knows. So that we may say roughly that for our purposes we love blue flowers, for instance, because bees first loved them! The bees were the original artists who created and educated our taste – they and the blue sky above us, that is. As a fact it is impossible to imagine the physical world ‘as ugly as sin’ – unless at the same time you imagine man’s soul as being ‘as ugly as sin’. You can imagine the world different – e.g., with fewer forms and colours, say uniformly flat and brown, a desert. But that would mean that, not only art would be poorer, but man himself as such would cease to exist. Instead we should have evolved as glorified sand.

  Art has to take its cue from Nature, though Nature, whatever its chance form in any sort of planet, would always be emended by Art provided man were the same, because Mind is above Matter, Art above Nature.

  April 25.

  My beloved’s birthday.

  April 26.

  Here is the nucleus of a sordid newspaper tragedy. I sleep on the ground floor in the front. Nurse sleeps at the back, upstairs. She is very deaf and I am helpless. Her father and mother both died of heart failure. One sister has heart disease and another heart weakness. Her heart too is weak, and my electric bell won’t ring. If it did, she can only hear it when awake. We live alone, and each morning I endure suspense till I hear her coming down the stairs.

  Overheard in the World Outside

  In the road, en passant.

  A Patrician’s Voice: I was staying at Lord Burnham’s place over the week-end. Very jolly.

  Second Voice: I can never understand why he … (They passed.)

  Two countrymen meeting in the road. I cannot see them, but quite well know how they have drawn up like railway engines standing on their metals, one on the right side and the other on the left of the road, converse a moment across the intervening middle space:

  ‘How is it then?’

  ‘Oh, pretty middling.’

  ‘They ’aven’t shot your dog yet then, I see’ (rabies reported in the district).

  ‘I’ll watch it.’

  And they steam slowly onwards.

  April 28.

  Yes, there are compensations. Few can appreciate a sunny morning and a blackbird’s contralto from the walnut-tree.

  The ‘happy and comfortable’ like to hear about the compensations. They always thought things were never so bad as they seem. ‘You must pull your socks up and make the best of things.’ But you shouldn’t have the impudence to tell him so.

  Last night, a blizzard, a gale!

  April 29.

  Having cast my bread upon the waters, it amuses me to find it returning with the calculable exactitude of a tidal movement – e.g., in my Journal I stroked Public Opinion and it now purrs to the tune of two and half pages of review: the Saturday Review I cursed with bell, book, and candle and – voilà! they mangle me in their turn.

  For the most part the reviewers say what I have told them to say in the book. One writes that it is a remarkable book. I told him it was. Another says I am a conceited prig. I have said as much more than once. A third hints at the writer’s inherent madness. I queried the same possibility. It is amusing to see the flat contradictions. There is no sort of unanimity of opinion about any part of my complex character. One says a genius, another not a genius; witty – dull; vivacious – dismal; intolerably sad – happy; lewd – finicky; ‘quiet humour’ – ‘wild and vivacious wit’. As a whole, I am surprised and delighted with the extraordinary kindness and sympathy meted out to it, more than I deserve or it deserves, while one or two critics, with power that amazes, penetrate to the wretched Barbellion’s core. To Mr Massingham I feel I can only murmur, ‘Too kind, too kind’, like the aged Florence Nightingale when they came to present her with the O.M. But what sympathetic understanding! Compare one man who said I was a social climber; another that I was ‘finicky’ on sexual matters (Ha! ha! ha! pardon my homeric laught
er); another – or was it the same? – that I shrank from life – yes, shrank! Give me more life, to parody Goethe: I have shouted thus for years. Poor old reviewers! Friends and relatives say I have not drawn my real self. But that’s because I’ve taken my clothes off and they can’t recognise me stark! The book is a self-portrait in the nude.

  May 1.

  What a sad, intractable world! Will human love and goodness ever overcome it?

  May 2.

  I long to see my little daughter again. Yet I fear it horribly, I am ashamed to meet her gaze. She will be frightened at me. Better she should have no memory of me at all to take through life.

  May 16.

  On the 14th at 2 p.m. a well-appointed ambulance took me to a nursing home at Eastbourne, where I arrived at 7 p.m., exhausted but cheerful. It was like being raised from the dead. We travelled via Acton and Ealing and Shepherd’s Bush, where we turned down H— road past my old rooms, across Kensington Road, and down Warwick Gardens, where one dark November night E— and I plighted our troth beneath a lamp-post. We passed the lamp-post! Then to West Cromwell Road, to Fulham, Wandsworth, Tooting, to Tunbridge Wells, where at four-thirty we drew up at an inn and a servant-maid put a tray of tea and cakes on the bench beside me, and I ate and smoked while the driver in the road compared notes with the landlord on war adventures.

  ‘Where were you then?’

  ‘Messines.’

  ‘Ah! I didn’t go so far north as that.’

  It was so hot, I lay on my couch with my rugs, etc., off. But the street boys were so curious over my pyjama suit, I pulled the blinds. Then they moved round and looked in through the door. Nurse closed it. They moved round to the other side, so Nurse drew those blinds too. Then they capered off.

  After that across Crowborough Forest, the car running at an even pace uphill and down. I lay happy and triumphant, and watched the country speeding by. We passed picnic parties – someone should have given them a warning and an exhortation; a dreadful thing for them, thought I, if they are not aware fully of their magnificent good fortune. The sky was cloudless. It was an amusing thing to me to feel so happy. Then I became displeased at my mood, on E—’s account, as I recollected the picture of her and baby in the road waving me goodbye.

  May 17.

  This egotism business: the Journal is more egoism than egotism, especially the latter part. And ought not Meredith to have called it ‘The Egotist’?

  May 18.

  In the Journal I can see now that I made myself out worse than I am, or was. I even took a morbid pleasure in intimating my depravity – self-mortification. If I had spoken out more plainly I should have escaped all this censure. The reviewers are only too ready to take me at my word, which is but natural. I don’t think on the whole my portrait of myself does myself justice.

  A beautiful morning. At the bottom of my bed two French windows open out on to the garden, where a blackbird is singing me something more than well. It is a magnificent flute obbligato to the tune in my heart going ‘thub-dup’ ‘thub-dup’ wildly as if I were a youth again in first love. He shouted out his song in the evening, the very moment I arrived here. What fine spirits these blackbirds are! I listen to him and my withered carcase soaks up his song with a sighing sound, like a dry sponge taking up water.

  May 20.

  Pompa Mortis

  If I could please myself, I should have my coffin made and kept under my bed. Then if I should die they could just pull the old box out and put me in it. It is the orthodox pompa mortis that makes death so ugly and terrible. I like the idea of William Morris, who was taken to the cemetery in an old farm-cart.

  Ludicrous Impotence

  I often laugh loud at the struggles of Nurse with my perfectly ludicrous, impotent body. If you saw us, you would certainly believe in a personal devil; but when you saw what a devil he is, you would also see in him a most fantastic clown. My right leg is almost completely anæsthetised – curious experience this. You could poke the fire with it, and I shouldn’t feel anything out of the way. I could easily emulate Cranmer’s stoical behaviour. It is so dead that if you put my body out in the sun, the flies in error would come and lay their eggs on me. Yes, Satan was the first and chiefest of Pantaloons. Everyone who desires to possess a complete knowledge of the world should read Duhamel, Latzko, Barbusse, and consult the illustrations in a textbook of tropical medicine.

  The Idealist

  The ultimate detection of a few bad faults in a good man most unfairly discounts his goodness in the idealist’s judgment. For the idealist can be a stern, implacable taskmaster. So a few good points unexpectedly coming to light in a bad man are enough to make the ever sanguine idealists forget the fellow’s general badness. For the man of ideals must snatch at a straw. This is not justice, but it’s human nature.

  Those Nurses Again

  Nurse No. 1 (helping her colleague to put away her books, examining a lapful): ‘Ah, French novels! Tum-ti-tum-tum!’

  Nurse No. 2 (scandalised): ‘French classics!’

  Nurse No. 1: ‘Oh, I beg your pardon – I thought they were French novels.’

  May 22.

  The reviewers say I am introspective – they mean self-introspective. I am really both.

  May 24.

  My legs have to be tied down to the bed with a rope. A little girl staying here lends me her skipping rope.

  The Peace Treaty

  After those bright hopes of last autumn Justice will be done only when all power is vested in the people. Every liberal-minded man must feel the shame of it.

  This is the end. I am not going to keep a diary any more.

  June 1.

  The Brightest Thing in the World

  Rupert Brooke said the brightest thing in the world was a leaf with the sun shining on it. God pity his ignorance! The brightest thing in the world is a Ctenophor in a glass jar standing in the sun. This is a bit of a secret, for no one knows about it save only the naturalist. I had a new sponge the other day and it smelt of the sea till I had soaked it. But what a vista that smell opened up! – rock pools, gobies, blennies, anemones (crassicorn, dahlia – oh! I forget). And at the end of my little excursion into memory I came upon the morning when I put some sanded, opaque bits of jelly, lying on the rim of the sea into a glass collecting jar, and to my amazement and delight they turned into Ctenophors – alive, swimming, and iridescent! You must imagine a tiny soap bubble about the size of a filbert with four series of plates or combs arranged regularly on the soap bubble from its north to its south pole, and flashing spasmodically in unison as they beat the water.

  June 3.

  To-morrow I go to another nursing home.

  The rest is silence.

  The Life and Character of Barbellion

  by A. J. Cummings

  The opening entry in A Last Diary was made on March 21, 1918; the closing sentence was written on June 3, 1919. In The Journal of a Disappointed Man the record ended on October 21, 1917, with the one word, ‘Self-disgust’. An important difference between the first diary and that now published lies in the fact that the first embodies a carefully selected series of extracts from twenty post-quarto volumes of manuscript in which Barbellion had recorded his thoughts and his observations from the age of thirteen without any clearly defined intention, except towards the end of his life, of discovering them to any but one or two of his intimate friends. He often hinted to me that some parts of his diary would ‘make good reading’ if they could be printed in essay form, and I think he then had in mind chiefly those passages which supplied the inspiration of Enjoying Life, the volume of essays that revealed him more distinctively in the character of ‘a naturalist and a man of letters’. Still, the diary was primarily written for himself. It was his means of self-expression, the secret chamber of his soul into which no other person, however deep in his love and confidence, might penetrate. More than once I asked him to let me look at those parts which he thought suitable for publication, but shyly he turned aside the suggestion with t
he remark: ‘Some day, perhaps, but not now’. All I ever saw was a part of the first essay in Enjoying Life, and an account of his wanderings ‘in a spirit of burning exultation’ over the great stretch of sandy ‘burrows’ at the estuary of that beautiful Devonshire river, the Taw, where in long days of solitude he first taught himself with the zeal and patience of the born naturalist the ways of birds and fish and insects, and learnt to love the sweet harmony of the sunlight and the flowers; where, too, as a mere boy he first meditated upon the mysteries of life and death.

  The earlier Journal, then, was, generally speaking, spontaneous, not calculated for effect, a part of himself. He wrote down instinctively and by habit his inmost thoughts, his lightest impression of the doings of the day, a careless jest that amused him, an irritating encounter with a foolish or a stupid person, something newly seen in the structure of a bird’s wing, a sunset effect. It was only on rare occasions that he deliberately experimented with forms of expression. But I cannot help thinking that the diary contained in the present volume, though in one sense equally a part of himself, has a somewhat different quality. It appears to bear internal evidence of having been written with an eye to the reader because of his settled intention that it should be published in a book. He has drawn upon the memories of his youth for many of the most interesting passages. He has smoothed the rough edges of his style with the loving care of an author anticipating criticism, and anxious to do his best. Whether the last diary will be found less attractive on that account is not for me to say. The circumstances in which it was written explain the difference, if, as I suppose, it is easy to detect. In the earlier period covered by A Last Diary the original Journal was actually in the press; in the later period it had been published and received with general goodwill. Barbellion certainly did not expect to live to see the Journal in print, and that is why he inserted at the end its single false entry, ‘Barbellion died on December 31’ — 1917. A few of the later reviewers, whose sense of propriety was offended by this ‘twisting of the truth for the sake of an artistic finish’, rebuked him for the trick played upon his readers. But he refused to take the rebuke seriously. ‘The fact is’, he said with a whimsical smile, ‘no man dare remain alive after writing such a book’.