Let me quote from one of many letters written to me from South Kensington, all charged with a strangely arresting amalgam of hope, despair, defiance, cravings for imaginative sympathy, lofty ideals, and throbbing with a prodigious passion of life. Each and every one was a challenge and a protest. Surely there never was a half-dead man more alive. It was shortly after war broke out that he wrote this letter:
The reason why the article ‘The Joy of Life’ has not been sent you is because it is not finished …. My mood just now is scarcely fitted for the completion of an essay with such a title. I am like to ask sullenly, ‘What the devil’s the good?’ I have already drawn out of my inside big ropy entrails, all hot and steaming, and you say ‘Very nice,’ or ‘effectively expressed,’ and Austin Harrison says he is ‘too full up.’ Damn his eyes! Damn everything! Hall Caine, poor man, said once that a most terrible thing had happened to him. He sat in a railway carriage opposite a young woman reading a book written ‘in his life’s blood,’ and she kept looking up listlessly to see the names of the stations. ‘The Joy of Life,’ my friend, in the completed state will make people sit up perhaps. So I think as I write it. But perhaps, perhaps, perhaps. It has been like the birth of a child to me. I’ve been walking about ‘in the family way’. The other essay was a relief to be able to bring forth. Both are self-revelations …. My journal is full of them, and one day when, as is probable, I have predeceased you, you will find much of B. F. C. in it almost as he appears to His Maker. It is a study in the nude, with no appeal to the highly pemmicanised intellect of such a being as — —, but there is meaty stuff in it, raw, red, or underdone.
It is curious to me how satisfied we all are with wholly inadequate opinions and ideas as to the character and nature of our friends. For example, I have a rough-and-ready estimate of yourself which has casually grown up over a series of years. But I don’t really feel very satisfied that I know you, and most folk wouldn’t care if they didn’t. They want neither to understand nor to be understood. They walk about life as at a mask ball, content to remain unknown and unrealised by the consciousness of any single human being. A man can live with his wife all his days and never be known to her — particularly if they are in love. And the extraordinary thing to me is that they don’t wish to understand each other. They accept each other’s current coin without question. That seems to me to be uncanny — to be lolling about in the arms of someone who is virtually a stranger to you.
Not only ourselves, but everything is bound about with innumerable concentric walls of impenetrable armour. I long to pull them down, to tear down all the curtains, screens, and dividing partitions, to walk about with my clothes off, to make a large ventral incision and expose my heart. I am sick of being tied up in flesh and clothes, hemmed in by walls, by prosies, deceits. I want to pull people by the nose and be brutally candid. I want everyone to know, to be told everything. It annoys me to find someone who doesn’t realise some horrible actuality like cancer or murder, or who has not heard of R. L. S., or like an infamous man I met the other day who was not sufficiently alive to know that it was Amundsen not Scott (as he nonchalantly assumed) who got to the Pole first …
You ask for my dyspepsia in a way which, my dear, good lad, I cannot resist. Well, it has been bad, damned bad. There you are! I have been in hell without the energy to lift up mine eyes. The first twenty-five years of my life have chased me up and down the keyboard. I have been to the top and to the bottom, very happy and very miserable. But don’t think I am whining — I prefer a life which is a hunt, and an adventure rather than a study in still life. If you suffer, Balzac said proudly, at least you live. If I were suddenly assured of wealth and health, long to live, I should have to walk about cutting other people’s throats so as to reintroduce the element of excitement. At this present moment I am feeling so full of joie de vivre that a summons to depart coming now would exasperate me into fury. I should die cursing like an intoxicated trooper. It seems unthinkable — if life were the sheer wall of a precipice, I should stick to it by force of attraction!
You shall see in the ‘Joy of Life’ how much I have grown to love it. There is a little beast which draws its life to start with rather precariously attached to a crab. But gradually it sends out filaments which burrow in and penetrate every fibre of its host so that to separate host and parasite means a grievous rupture. I have become attached in the same way, but not to a crab!
Life is extraordinarily distracting. At times Zoology melts away from my purview. Gradually, I shouldn’t be at all surprised if other interests burrow in under my foundations (laid in Zoology) and the whole superstructure collapse. If I go to a sculpture gallery, the continued study of entomology appears impossible — I will be a sculptor. If I go to the opera, then I am going to take up music seriously. Or if I get a new beast (an extraordinary new form of bird parasite brought back by the New Guinea Expedition, old sport! phew!) nothing else can interest me on earth, I think. But something does, and with a wrench I turn away presently to fresh pastures. Life is a series of wrenches, I tremble for the fixity of my purposes; and as you know so well, I am an ambitious man, and my purposes are very dear to me. You see what a trembling, colour-changing, invertebrate, jelly-fish of a brother you have … But you are the man I look to …
Whatever kind of man Barbellion may have been he certainly was not a jelly-fish. Any or all of these sentiments might have come red-hot from his diary, and they are absolutely typical of the delightfully stimulating and provocative letters which he loved to write, and could write better than any man I have ever known. He was as greedy as a shark for life in the raw, for the whole of life. He longed to capture and comprehend the entire universe, and would never have been content with less. ‘I could swallow landscapes,’ he says, ‘and swill down sunsets, or grapple the whole earth to me with hoops of steel, but the world is so impassive, silent, secret’. He despised his body because it impeded his pursuit of the elusive uncapturable. And while he pursued Fate, Fate followed close on his heels. In London he grew slowly and steadily worse. Doctors tinkered with him, and he tinkered himself with their ineffectual nostrums. But at last, after he had complained one day of partial blindness and of loss of power in his right arm, I persuaded him, on the advice of a wisely suspicious young physician, to see a first-class nerve specialist. This man quickly discovered the secret of his complex and never-ending symptoms. Without revealing the truth to Barbellion, he told me that he was a doomed man, in the grip of a horrible and obscure disease of which I had never heard. Disseminated sclerosis was the name which the specialist gave to it; and its effect, produced apparently by a microbe that attacks certain cells of the spinal cord, is to destroy in the course of a few years — or in some cases many years — every function of the body, killing its victim by degrees in a slow, ruthless process of disintegration.
The specialist was strongly of the opinion that the truth should not be told my brother. ‘If we do so’, he said, ‘we shall assuredly kick him down the hill far more quickly than he will travel if we keep him hopeful by treating the symptoms from time to time as they arise’. Barbellion, then, was told he was not ‘up to standard’, that he had been working too hard, was in need of a prolonged rest, and could be restored to health only by means of a long course of careful and regular treatment. The fact disposes of the criticism of a few unfriendly reviewers who, without reading the Journal closely enough to disarm their indignation, accused Barbellion of a selfish and despicable act in getting married when he knew himself to be dying from an incurable malady. Whether I was right or wrong in accepting the medical man’s advice, I do not regret the course I took. Barbellion, in a moment of overwhelming despair at the tragedy of his life, and the calamity it had brought upon his wife and child, afterwards cried out in protest against my deception — based as it was on expert judgment, and inspired solely by an affectionate desire to shield him from acute distress in the remaining period of his life after I had been told that he might live five, ten, fifteen years lon
ger. Yet, reviewing all the circumstances, I realise that I could have come to no other decision even if I might have foreseen all that was to follow. Let it be clearly understood that the devoted woman to whom he became engaged was at once made aware of his actual condition, and after consultation with her family and an interview with the doctor, who left her under no misapprehension as to the facts, she calmly and courageously chose to link her fate with that of Barbellion. How by a curious and dramatic accident Barbellion shortly after his marriage discovered the truth about himself, and kept it for a time from his wife in the belief that she did not know, is related with unconscious pathos in the Journal.
Barbellion was married in September, 1915. In July, 1917, he was compelled to resign his appointment at the South Kensington Museum. His life came to an end on October 22, 1919, in the quaint old country cottage at Gerrard’s Cross, Buckinghamshire, where for many months he had lain like a wraith, tenderly ministered to in his utter weakness by those who loved him. His age was thirty-one. He was glad to die. ‘Life,’ to use a phrase he was fond of repeating, ‘pursued him like a fury’ to the end; but as he lingered on, weary and helpless, he was increasingly haunted by the fear of becoming a grave burden to his family. The publication of the Journal and the sympathetic reception it met with from the press and public were sources of profound comfort to his restless soul, yearning as he had yearned from childhood to find friendly listeners to the beating of his heart, fiercely panting for a large-hearted response to his self-revealing, half-wistful, half-defiant appeal to the comprehension of all humanity. ‘The kindness almost everybody has shown the Journal, and the fact that so many have understood its meaning’, he said to me shortly before he died, ‘have entirely changed my outlook. My horizon has cleared, my thoughts are tinged with sweetness, and I am content’. Earlier than this he had written: ‘During the past twelve months I have undergone an upheaval, and the whole bias of my life has gone across from the intellectual to the ethical. I know that Goodness is the chief thing’.
He did not accomplish a tithe of what he had planned to do, but in the extent and character of his output he achieved by sheer force of willpower, supported by an invincible ambition and an incessant intellectual industry that laughed his ill-health in the face, more than seemed possible to those of us who knew the nature of the disorder against which he fought with undying courage every day of his life. It is scarcely surprising that there have been diverse estimates of his character and capacities, some wise and penetrating, many imperfect and wide of the mark. It is not for me to try to do more than correct a few crude or glaringly false impressions of the kind of man Barbellion was. Others must judge of the quality of his genius and of his place in life and literature. But I can speak of Barbellion as the man I knew him to be. He was not the egotist, pure and simple, naked and complete, that he sometimes accused himself of being and is supposed by numerous critics and readers of the Journal to have been.
His portrait of himself was neither consummate nor, as Mr Shanks well says, ‘immutable’. ‘In the nude’, declared Barbellion, more than once, with an air of blunt finality. Yes, but only as he imagined himself to look in the nude.
He was forever peering at himself from changing angles, and he was never quite sure that the point of view of the moment was the true one. Incontinently curious about himself, he was never certain about the real Barbellion. One day he was ‘so much specialised protoplasm’; another day he was Alexander with the world at his feet; and then he was a lonely boy pining for a few intimate friends. His sensations at once puzzled and fascinated him.
I am apparently [he said] a triple personality: (1) The respectable youth; (2) the foul-mouthed commentator and critic; (3) the real but unknown I.
Many times he tried thus to docket his manifold personality in distinguishable departments. It was a hopeless task. ‘Respectability’ was the last word to apply to him. Foul-mouthed he never was, unless a man is foul-mouthed who calls a thing by its true name and will not cover it with a sham or a substitute. In his talks with me he was as ‘abandoned’ in his frankness as in the Journal; and the longer I knew him the more I admired the boldness of his vision; the unimpeachable honesty and therefore the essential purity of his mind.
His habit of self-introspection and his mordant descriptions of his countless symptoms were not the ‘inward notes’ or the weak outpourings of a hypochondriac. His whole bearing and his attitude to life in general were quite uncharacteristic of the hypochondriac as that type of person is commonly depicted and understood. It should be remembered that his symptoms were real symptoms and as depressing as they were painful, and his disease a terribly real disease which affected from the beginning almost every organ of his body. Though he was rarely miserable he had something to be miserable about, and the accepted definition of a hypochondriac is that of one whose morbid state of mind is produced by a constitutional melancholy for which there is no palpable cause. He scarcely ever spoke of his dyspepsia, his muscular tremors, his palpitations of the heart, and all the other physical disturbances which beset him from day to day, except with a certain wry humour; and while it is true that he would discuss his condition with the air of an enthusiastic anatomist who had just been contemplating some unusually interesting corpus vile, he talked of it only when directly questioned about it, or to explain why a piece of work that he was anxious to finish had been interrupted or delayed. He had a kind of disgust for his own emaciated appearance, arising, not improbably, from his æsthetic admiration for the human form in its highest development. On one occasion, when we were spending a quiet holiday together at a little Breton fishing village, I had some difficulty in persuading him to bathe in the sea on account of his objection to exposing his figure to the view of passers-by. The only thing that might be considered in the least morbid in his point of view with regard to his health was a fixed and absolutely erroneous belief that his weakness was hereditary. His parents were both over sixty when they died from illnesses each of which had a definitely traceable cause. Though the other members of the family enjoyed exceptionally good health, he continued to the last to suspect that we were all physically decadent, and nothing could shake his conviction that my particular complaint was heart disease, regardless of the fact frequently pointed out to him that in the Army I had been passed A1 with monotonous regularity.
Mr Wells has referred to him as ‘an egotistical young naturalist’; in the same allusion, however, he reiterated the fundamental truth that ‘we are all egotists within the limits of our power of expression’. Barbellion was intensely interested in himself, but he was also intensely interested in other people. He had not that egotistical imagination of the purely self-centred man which looks inward all the time because nothing outside the province of his own self-consciousness concerns him. He had an objective interest in himself, an outcome of the peculiar faculty which he divulged in the first of the two letters already quoted of looking at human beings, even his own mother, objectively. He described and explained himself so persistently and so thoroughly because he had an obviously better opportunity of studying himself with nice precision and attentive care than he had for the study of other people. He regarded himself quite openly and quite naturally as a human specimen to be examined, classified and dissected, and he did his work with the detailed skill and the truthful approach of a scientific investigator. The ‘limits of his power of expression’ being far beyond those of the average man, he was able to give a picture of himself that lives on account of its simple and daring candour. He is not afraid to be frank in giving expression to a thought merely because it may be an unpleasant or a selfish thought. If a shadowy doubt assails him, or an outré criticism presents itself about a beloved friend, he sets it down; if he feels a sensuous joy in bathing in the sea and loves to look upon his ‘pink skin’, or derives a catlike satisfaction from rolling a cigarette between his fingers; if he thinks he sees a meanness in his own heart, or catches himself out in some questionable or unworthy piece of conduct,
however trivial, the diary receives its faithful record. The dissimilarity between Barbellion and other persons is that, while those of us who have not been blessed or cursed with the temperament of an ox frequently experience these queer spontaneous promptings about common things and about ourselves and our fellow-creatures that come we know not how or why, so far from dragging the half-formed thought into the light of open confession and giving it definite shape, we avert our gaze as from an evil thing, or return to it in secret and stealth. It is scarcely possible, one imagines, to read Barbellion honestly without realising that he says in plain, forceful language what the rest of us often think but have not the nerve to say aloud either to others or to ourselves.
Resolute courage was the regnant quality of Barbellion’s character. There was no issue he was afraid to face. The more it frightened him the more grimly he held on. Ineffaceable curiosity and the force of his will were a formidable combination. He saw everything in focus, with clear and steady eye. He penetrated the heart of a book with unerring instinct, as Balzac tore out the secret of a woman’s heart. It was hopeless to attempt to deceive him with a sophistry or a platitude. His sense of justice was deep and strong. While he loved disputation for its own sake, no form of mental recreation making a stronger appeal to his vivid intelligence than a set battle in dialectics, he rarely missed the essential argument, which he commonly handled with solid mastery and generally with a wealth of convincing illustrations. He was a captivating companion; easy, humorous, and suggestive in his talk over a wide range of subjects, and knowing something new or piquant about every bramble bush, every bird, every beetle that he passed or that flitted or crept across his path. Anyone less like a self-tormentor, a malade imaginaire, a man with a laugh on the wrong side of his mouth could not be imagined. It would be using a weak expression to say that he was cheerful. He was so acutely alive to the imperious charm of the world in which he lived that a fit of depression, caused usually by some obstinate symptom of ill-health, which foiled his plans and fretted his temper, would melt away at a touch. The cry of a peewit, a gleam of sunshine on the hill, a phrase from a Beethoven Symphony, a line out of Francis Thompson (whose gorgeous verse inflamed his senses to a white heat of enjoyment), or a warm note of human sympathy, would transform him at once into another being. He yearned for the fellowship of sympathy, and rejoiced exceedingly when he seemed to find it. He had a real capacity for friendship, and his affections, when once they were engaged, were deep and abiding; but he could be impishly provoking to an acquaintance, and he suffered fools without gladness or much self-restraint. His judgments of men and women whom he met casually or infrequently were not to be relied upon. He was as impulsive as a woman of Barcelona, and the life-history of some harmless creature newly introduced would be created promptly on such inadequate data as a fortuitous remark, an odd gesture, or a sweating hand. His nature, I believe, is less readily to be explained by his so-called egotism than by his super-sensitiveness to the world about him and the beings in it. He bathed in the sea of life in a perpetual ecstasy, and sometimes it was an ecstasy of pain that made him call out upon God and all the gods, and the devils as well. One of the truest things I have heard said about him was said the other day by an accomplished critic who had never met him, but who had read his Journal with a seeing eye. ‘It seems to me,’ he remarked, ‘that Barbellion was a man with a skin too few’. A wise saying to which Barbellion himself would have been the first to give his appreciative assent.
The Journal of a Disappointed Man Page 40