The Journal of a Disappointed Man

by W. N. P. Barbellion

  A further difference between the present book and its two predecessors is that both the Journal and Enjoying Life were prepared by himself for publication, though the latter appeared after his death, whereas A Last Diary was still in manuscript when he died. He left carefully written instructions as to the details of publication, and he was extremely anxious that there should be no ‘bowdlerising’ of any part of the text. He desired that at the end should be written ‘The rest is silence’. Nearly the whole of the diary is in his own handwriting, which in the last entries became a scarcely legible scrawl, though in moments of exceptional physical weakness he dictated to his wife and sister. Up to the last his mind retained its extraordinary strength and vigour. His eyes never lost their curiously pathetic look of questioning ‘liveness’. In that feeble form — ‘a badly articulated skeleton’ he had called himself long before — his eyes were indeed the only feature left by which those who loved him could still keep recognition of his physical presence. His body was a gaunt, white framework of skin and bone, enclosing a spirit still so passionately alive that it threatened to burst asunder the frail bonds that imprisoned it. I think those who read the diary will agree that while it is mellower and more delicate in tone it shows no sign of mental deterioration or of any decline in the quality and texture of his thoughts, certainly no failure in the power of literary expression. The very last long entry, written the day before he laid down his pen to write no more, is a little masterpiece of joyous description, in which with the exact knowledge of the zoologist and the subtle sense of the artist, he gives reasons why ‘the brightest thing in the world is a Ctenophor in a glass jar standing in the sun’. Mr Edward Shanks, in an essay of singular understanding, has quoted this particular entry, a flashing remembrance of earlier days, as a characteristic example of those ‘exquisite descriptions of landscapes and living things which grow more vivid and more moving as the end approaches’. The appreciation written by Mr Shanks appeared in March of the present year in the London Mercury, which also published in successive numbers other extracts from the diary that is now given in extenso. With the help of my brother, H. R. Cummings, who has been responsible for most of the work involved in preparing the manuscript for the press, I have made a few verbal changes and corrections; and certain passages have been omitted which, now that Barbellion’s identity is established, seem to refer too openly and too intimately to persons still alive. Otherwise the entries appear exactly as they were made.

  In recent months I have been asked by various persons, many of whom I do not know and have never seen, but who have been profoundly interested in the personality of Barbellion, to write a ‘straightforward’ account of his life. Some of these correspondents seem to imagine that it holds a strange mystery not disclosed in the frank story of the Journal, while others suspect that the events of his career, as he recorded them, are a judicious blend of truth and fiction. I can only say as emphatically as possible that there is no mystery of any sort, and that the facts of his life are in close accordance with his own narrative. Obviously the disconnected diary form must be incomplete, and in some respects puzzling; and clearly he selected for treatment in a book those entries of fact which were appropriate to the scheme of his journal. They were chosen, as I have already indicated, from a great mass of material that accumulated from week to week over a period of about fifteen years. But they are neither invented nor deliberately coloured to suit his purpose. When he spoke of himself he spoke the truth as far as he knew it; when he spoke of others he spoke the truth as far as he knew it; when he spoke of actual events they had happened as nearly as possible as he related them.

  The accounts of his career, published at the time of his death last year, were accurate in their general outline. Bruce Frederick Cummings (Barbellion’s real name) was born at the little town of Barnstaple in North Devon, on September 7, 1889. He was the youngest of a family of six — three boys and three girls. His father was a journalist who had achieved no mean reputation, local though it was, as a pungent political writer, and had created for himself what must have been, even in those days, a peculiar position for the district representative of a country newspaper. He was a shrewd but kindly judge of men; he had a quick wit, a facile pen, and an unusual charm of manner that made him a popular figure everywhere. In fact, in the area covered by his activities he exercised in his prime a personal influence unique of its kind, and such as would be scarcely possible under modern conditions of newspaper work. Though they had little in common temperamentally, there always existed a strong tie of affection between my father and Barbellion, and I believe there is to be found among the latter’s still unexamined literary remains a sympathetic sketch of the personality of John Cummings. In his infancy Barbellion nearly died from an attack of pneumonia, and from that early illness, one is inclined to think, his subsequent ill-health originated. He was a puny, undersized child, nervously shy, with a tiny white face and large brown melancholy eyes. He was so frail that he was rather unduly coddled, and was kept at home beyond the age at which the rest of us had been sent to school. I taught him in my father’s office-study to read and write, as well as the rudiments of English history and English literature, and a little Latin. Up to the age of nine, when he started to attend a large private school in the town, he was slow of apprehension, but of an inquiring mind, and he rarely forgot what he had once learnt. He was nearly twelve years old before his faculties began to develop, and they developed rapidly. He revealed an aptitude for mathematics, and a really surprising gift of composition; some of his school essays, both in style and manner, and in the precocity of their thought, might almost have been written by a mature man of letters. The headmaster of the school, who had been a Somersetshire County cricketer, and whose educational outlook was dominated by his sense of the value of sports and games, was a little disconcerted by this strange, shy boy and his queer and precise knowledge of out-of-the-way things, but he had the acumen to recognise his abilities and to predict for him a brilliant future. He read all kinds of books, from Kingsley to Carlyle, with an insatiable appetite. It was about this time, too, that he began those long tramps into the countryside, over the hills to watch the staghounds meet, and along the broad river marshes, that provided the beginnings and the foundation of the diary habit, which became in time the very breath of his inner life. He loved the open air, and all that the open air meant. After hours of absence, we knew not where, he would return glowing with happy excitement at some adventure with a friendly fisherman, or at the identification of a rare bird. Even now the wonder of the world was gripping him in its bewitching spell. In later days he expressed its power over him in words such as these, with many variations:

  Like a beautiful and terrible mistress, the world holds me its devoted slave. She flouts me, but I love her still. She is cruel, but still I love her. My love for her is a guilty love — for the voluptuous curves of the Devonshire moors, for the bland benignity of the sun smiling alike on the just and on the unjust, for the sea which washes in a beautiful shell or a corpse with the same meditative indifference.

  In these early years, I remember, the diary took the outward form of an old exercise book, neatly labelled and numbered, and it reflected all his observations on nature. The records, some of which were reproduced from time to time in The Zoologist, were valuable not only in their careful exactitude, but for their breadth of suggestion, and that inquiring spirit into the why of things which proved him to be no mere classifier or reporter. They were the outcome of long vigils of concentrated watching. I have known him to stay for two or three hours at a stretch in one tense position, silently noting the torpid movements of half a dozen bats withdrawn from some disused mine and kept for experiments in the little drawing-room that was more like a laboratory than a place to sit in. He probably knew more about North Devon and the wild creatures that inhabited its wide spaces than any living person. Sometimes he was accompanied on his journeys, which occupied most of his spare time and the greater part of the weekends,
by two or three boisterously high-spirited acquaintances of his own age, who, though leagues removed from him in character and outlook, seemed to find a mysterious charm in his companionship, and whose solemn respect for his natural history lore he cunningly made use of by employing them to search for specimens under his guidance and direction.

  When he was fourteen years of age his fixed determination to become a naturalist by profession was accepted by all of us as a settled thing. My father, whose income was at this time reduced through illness by about half, generously encouraged him in his ambition by giving him more pocket money than any of his brothers and sisters had received in palmier days, in order that he might add to his rapidly increasing library of costly books on zoology and biology; and by allowing him such freedom of movement as can rarely fall to the lot of a small boy in an ordinary middle-class home. Here let me say that after the publication of his Journal, Barbellion himself expressed regret at having here and there in the book unconsciously conveyed the impression that in the home of his childhood and youth he received little practical help and sympathy in the pursuit of his great quest. The exact contrary was, in fact, the case; and when in 1910, owing to my father’s second, and this time complete, breakdown Barbellion had to decline the offer of a small appointment at the Plymouth Marine Laboratory, the blow was not less bitter to his parents than to himself. At that time he was the only son at home. He had been allowed a great amount of leisure for study; but now, as one of two young reporters on my father’s staff, he was compelled for the time being to carry a responsibility which he feared and detested. But the opportunity for which he had passionately worked and impatiently waited was not long in coming. In the following year, in open competition with men from the Universities who had been specially coached for the examination, he won his way by his own exertions to the staff of the Natural History Museum at South Kensington.

  Probably the happiest period of his life was that of his late youth up to the time of my father’s collapse. He was in somewhat better health than in his childhood; the joy of living intoxicated his being; he was able to saunter at his own free will over his beloved hills and dales; he was beginning to feel his strength and to shape his knowledge; and before him stretched a bright vista of vague, alluring, infinite possibilities. And at this time, apart from the diary, he was trying his hand at writing, and revelling in that delicious experience of youth — putting to proof his newly awakened powers. I have in my possession scores of early letters that testify eloquently to his ability to perceive, to think, and to write. Here is a letter which, at the age of seventeen, he wrote to my brother Harry. It seems to me remarkable for the vigour and clearness with which he was able to set down his reflections on a dark and difficult point of philosophy, and interesting because it shows how already his mind was occupied with the mystery of himself.

  I am writing really [he says] to discuss ‘Myself’ with you. I am particularly interested in it [an article on ‘Myself’ written by Harry] because it differs so entirely from my own feelings. I am a mendicant friar. It is so difficult to see what one really believes, as distinct from what one feels; but for myself I can see only too distinctly the world without my own insignificant self, after death or before birth.

  There is one power which I have to an unusual extent developed, so I think, and that is the faculty of divesting my thoughts of all subjectivity. I can see myself as so much specialised protoplasm. Sometimes I almost think that in thus divesting the mind of particulars I seize the universal and for a short but vivid moment look through the veil at ‘the thing itself.’ I really cannot make myself clear without a great deal of care, and I hope you will not misunderstand me.

  But, to diverge somewhat, it was only the other day that suddenly, when I was not expecting it, I saw mother’s face in an objective way. I saw and looked on it as a stranger who had never seen her; and mind you, there is a good deal of difference between these two points of view. I never realised until that moment that we look on those whom we know so well in the light and shade of the knowledge we have gained before ….

  The natural conclusion of these observations I take to be that we never know how anthropomorphic our views may really be. (Somebody else has said this somewhere, but I don’t know who. Huxley?) I am naturally sceptical of all sciences and systems of philosophy. Science, of course, deals with the experienced universe, and cannot possibly ever reach ultimate truth. In philosophy I am always haunted by the suspicion that, if we only knew, we are not anywhere near being able to make even a rough guess at the truth.

  Throw a dog a bone. I’ll take it that the dog, if it is an intelligent one, discusses the bone thoroughly. It discovers the natural law of the bone — that it satisfies hunger and provides happiness, and it forms a scientific theory (intelligent dog, mind you) to explain this inseparable correlative phenomenon. It says: ‘The world is probably to be considered as an immense mechanism of separate bone-throwing machines, worked by an unknown creature. Bone is necessary to the dog existence as it is the ineffable vital essence of Divine Love in which we live, move, and have our being. This is so, because it has been proved by experiment that in the absence of bone-throwers, dogs have been known to die.’

  Of course you laugh. But why not? I cannot help thinking that we may very well be as much in the dark as the dogs. Our philosophy may be incorrect in respect of the Universe, Reality, and God as the dog’s philosophy is in respect of the simple process of digestion and the accompanying physiological changes.

  If I could drop my anchor behind a rock of certainty I should be greatly relieved, but who can convince a man if he cannot convince himself?

  To sum up, what I think is that we — i.e., each one of us separately — are exceedingly unimportant wisps, little bits of body, mind, and spirit, but that in the whole, as humanity, we are a great immortal organism of real import if we could see behind the veil. In other words I regard individuals as ineffectual units, but the mass as a spiritual power. The old philosophical idea that the world was a big animal had an element of truth in it.

  It was only by the skin of his teeth that Barbellion passed the doctors after getting through the scientific examination for the South Kensington post. He was suffering from chronic dyspepsia, he was more than six feet in height, and as thin as a rake, and he looked like a typical consumptive. The medical gentlemen solemnly shook their heads, but after scrutinising him with as much care as if he were one of his own museum specimens they could discover no organic defect, and their inability to ‘classify’ him no doubt saved Barbellion from what would have been the most dreadful disappointment of his life. His appearance, notwithstanding his emaciation, was striking. His great height, causing him to stoop slightly, produced an air and attitude of studiousness peculiar to himself. A head of noble proportions was crowned by a thick mass of soft, brown hair tumbling carelessly about his brow. Deep-set, lustrous eyes, wide apart and aglow with eager life, lighted up a pale, sharply pointed countenance with an indescribable vividness of expression. His nose, once straight and shapely, owing to an accident was irregular in its contour, but by no means unpleasing in its irregularity, for it imparted a kind of rugged friendliness to the whole face; and he had a curious habit in moments of animation of visibly dilating the nostrils, as if unable to contain his excitement. His mouth was large, firm, yet mobile, and his chin like a rock. He had a musical voice, which he used without effort, and when he spoke, especially when he chose to let himself go on any subject that had aroused his interest, the energetic play of his features, the vital intensity which he threw into every expression, had an irresistible effect of compulsion upon his friends. His hands were strong and sensitive, with a remarkable fineness of touch very useful to him in the laboratory, and it was always a pleasure to watch them at work upon a delicate dissection. His hands and arms were much more active members than his legs. In conversation he tried in vain to control a lifelong and amusing habit of throwing them out and beating the air violently to emphasise a point
in argument. But he moved and walked languidly, like a tired man, as indeed he was. He was continuously unwell — ‘chronically sub-normal’ was how he once described his condition to me, half playfully. He had lost forever that sense of abounding physical wellbeing which gives zest to living and strength to endure. But he has discussed his own symptoms in the Journal with a force and ironic humour that I have not the capacity or the will to imitate. I will say no more than that those who were closest to him remember with wondering admiration the magnificent struggle which he maintained against his illness and its effect upon his work. His attacks of depression he kept almost invariably to himself. In the presence of others he was full of high courage, engrossed in his plans for the future, strong in the determination not to be mastered by physical weakness. ‘I am not going to be beaten’ he declared after one very bad bout, ‘if I develop all the diseases in the doctor’s index. I mean to do what I have set out to do if it has to be done in a bath-chair’. His willpower was enormous, unconquerable. Again and again he spurred himself on to work with an appalling expenditure of nervous energy, when an ordinary man might have flung up his hands and resigned himself to passive despair.