The Journal of a Disappointed Man

September 7.

My 28th birthday.

Dear old R – (the man I love above all others) has been in a military hospital for months. It is a great hardship to have our intercourse almost completely cut off.

Dear old Journal, I love you! Good-bye.

September 29.

I could never have believed so great misery compatible with sanity. Yet I am quite sane. How long I or any man can remain sane in this condition God knows… It is a consummate vengeance this inability to write.27 I cannot help but smile grimly at the astuteness of the thrust. To be sure, how cunning to deprive me of my one secret consolation! How amusing that in this agony of isolation such an aggressive egotist as I should have his last means of self-expression cut off. I am being slowly stifled.

Later. (In E.'s handwriting.)

Yesterday we shifted into a tiny cottage at half the rental of the other one, and situated about two miles further out from the village… A wholly ideal and beautiful little cottage you may say. But a "camouflaged" cottage. For in spite of the happiness of its exterior it contains just now two of the most dejected mortals even in this present sorrow-laden world.

September 30.

Last night, E – sitting on the bed by me, burst into tears. It was my fault. "I can stand a good deal but there must come a breaking point." Poor, poor girl, my heart aches for you.

I wept too, and it relieved us to cry. We blew our noses. "People who cry in novels," E – observed with detachment, "never blow their noses. They just weep." … But the thunder clouds soon come up again.

October 1.

The immediate future horrifies me.

October 2.

Poushkin (as we have named the cat) is coiled up on my bed, purring and quite happy. It does me good to see him.

But consider: A paralytic, a screaming infant, two women, a cat and a canary, shut up in a tiny cottage with no money, the war still on, and food always scarcer day by day. "Give us this day, our daily bread."

I want to be loved – above all, I want to love. My great danger is lest I grow maudlin and say petulantly, "Nobody loves me, nobody cares." I must have more courage and more confidence in other people's good-nature. Then I can love more freely.

October 3.

I am grateful to-day for some happy hours plucked triumphantly from under the very nose of Fate, and spent in the warm sun in the garden. They carried me out at 12, and I stayed till after tea-time. A Lark sang, but the Swallows – dear things – have gone. E – picked two Primroses. I sat by some Michaelmas Daisies and watched the Bees, Flies, and Butterflies.

October 6.

In fits of maudlin self-compassion I try to visualise Belgium, Armenia, Serbia, etc., and usually cure myself thereby.

October 12.

It is winter – no autumn this year. Of an evening we sit by the fire and enjoy the beautiful sweet-smelling wood-smoke, and the open hearth with its big iron bar carrying pot-hook and hanger. E – knits warm garments for the Baby, and I play Chopin, César-Franck hymns, Three Blind Mice (with variations) on a mouth-organ, called "The Angels' Choir," and made in Germany… You would pity me would you? I am lonely, penniless, paralysed, and just turned twenty-eight. But I snap my fingers in your face and with equal arrogance I pity you. I pity you your smooth-running good luck and the stagnant serenity of your mind. I prefer my own torment. I am dying, but you are already a corpse. You have never really lived. Your body has never been flayed into tingling life by hopeless desire to love, to know, to act, to achieve. I do not envy you your absorption in the petty cares of a commonplace existence.

Do you think I would exchange the communion with my own heart for the toy balloons of your silly conversation? Or my curiosity for your flickering interests? Or my despair for your comfortable Hope? Or my present tawdry life for yours as polished and neat as a new three-penny bit? I would not. I gather my mantle around me and I solemnly thank God that I am not as some other men are.

I am only twenty-eight, but I have telescoped into those few years a tolerably long life: I have loved and married, and have a family; I have wept and enjoyed; struggled and overcome, and when the hour comes I shall be content to die.

October 14 to 20.

Miserable.

October 21.

Self-disgust.

FINIS[Barbellion died on December 31.]

SYNOPSIS

PART I: AT HOME

Rambles and bathes, 2, 3, 4, 9, 11, 20, 37, 45, 46, 48, 49

Natural History and Zoology, 9, 12, 13, 20, 29

Leaves school, 10

Newspaper reporting, 17, 19

Ambition, 8, 10, 13, 26, 29

Calf-love, 8, 12, 23, 28

The Wesleyan Minister Microscopist, 18

Conversation with Prof. Herdman, 46

Ill-health, 10, 24, 25, 35, 42, 48 (Jul. 31)

Heart attacks, 33, 36

On Death, 33, 38, 43, 44

Sits for British Museum exam., 29

Failure, 30, 31, 32

Appointment to Laboratory at Plymouth, 32

Everything "ghostly, unreal, enigmatic," 29, 33

Self-consciousness, 27, 40

The Poppy, 43

Appointment resigned and his father's illness, 34

His father's death, 50, 51

Success and appointment to B.M., 55

A youthful Passion, 56, 57

PART II: IN LONDON

Disillusionment, 59, 61, 93, 94, 132, 178, 185

Life in a boarding-house, 63, 78, 79, 94, 99, 107

Ambition, 71, 73, 109

An affair in a taxicab, 75

Self-disgust, 77

In love, 78, 96, 107

Conversations: (a) with E., 65, 69, 70, 75, 76, 79, 95, 96, 99, 104, 151, 152

(b) with H., 82, 83

(c) with R., 131, 140, 141, 142, 154, 155, 165,

Ill-health, 59, 62, 69, 72, 74, 100, 107, 110, 114, 134-5, 153, 156

On Death, 62, 63, 84, 88

Heart attacks, 71, 72, 120, 122

Nervous breakdown, 80, 81, 82

Meets an old love, 86, 87

Holidays: (a) at C – , by the sea in North – , 65, 66, 67

(b) at home, 82

(c) in Brittany and on Dartmoor (riding a pony), 97

Life in rooms, 102, 107, 108, 114, 138, 148, 149, 153

His brother, 121, 206

Discussions on marriage, 123, 124

In his sitting-room, 162

The fascination of London, 74, 142-145

(a) Petticoat Lane, 163

(b) Rotten Row, 176

Goes to concerts, 127, 161, 172

A lovers' quarrel, 126

He struggles with himself, 135, 137, 138

Engaged, 150, 158

Fears his inconstancy, 159, 185

Self-analysis, 167 et seq., 182, 183

Day-dreams: Life a dream, 178, 179, 188

The War, 182

Holidays: (a) on a Buckinghamshire farm, 191-205

(b) at the Lakes, 215-217

Should a husband keep a private journal? 210

Marriage, 205, 209, 215

PART III: MARRIAGE

Zeppelin raid and influenza, 222

Living in the country, 223, 227, 228

Reads his doctor's certificate after visit to recruiting-office, 225, 238

Self-disgust, 223, 224, 225, 247, 250 (nude), 267

Mental agony, 226, 227

Conversations: with R., 229

with Scarabees, 230, 239, 243

Halcyon days, 233, 235, 238

A natural idiot climbs a stile on uplands, 240

Tension, 250, 252

The War, 237 (Jutland), 242, 247, 248, 249

Another nervous breakdown, 253

How E. knew all the time, 255, 256

Self-compassion, 251, 304

Home ill, 257 ("in the doldrums"), 259, 265

Returns to work, 278

Ill again, 285

From an invalid's view-point, 292, 293 (by his bedroom window)

Post-mortem affairs, 291

Resigns appointment, 294, 299

Self-consciousness and self-dramatization, 255, 265, 267

A badly articulated skeleton, 274

Cold weather in January, 276, 277, 278

On Death, 275, 283, 286, 291

His phosphorescent Journals, 291

Morphia and laudanum, 280, 300

Great misery, 303, 305

1

Up to 1911, the Journal is mainly devoted to records of observations in general Natural History and latterly in Zoology alone.

2

There are numerous drawings of dissections scattered through the Journal about this period.

3

He had spoken about me to the Museum authorities, and it was his influence which got me the nomination to sit for the examination.

4

In Byron's poem.

5

See entry for October 8, 1913.

6

Italics added 1917.

7

The paper was "Distant Orientation in Batrachia" – detailing experiments on the homing faculty in newts.

8

"The life of the Soul is different; there is nothing more changing, more varied, more restless … to describe the incidents of one hour would require an eternity." —Journal of Eugénie de Guérin.

9

See entry for November 27, 1915.

10

"I could eat all the elephants of Hindustan and pick my teeth with the Spire of Strassburg Cathedral."

11

See January 2nd, 1915.

12

1917. I am now editing my own Journal – bowdlerising my own book!

13

A method of collecting insects in winter by shaking moss over white paper.

14

1917. Cf. Sainte-Beuve's Essay on Maurice de Guérin: "Il aimait à se répandre et presque à se ramifier dans la Nature. Il a exprimé en mainte occasion cette sensation diffuse, errante; il y avait des jours ou, dans son amour ou calme, il enviait la vie forte et muette qui règne sons l'écorce des chênes; il rêvait à je ne sais quelle métamorphose en arbre…"

15

Cf. 1916, November 6.

16

Cf. Burns's poem "On a Louse."

17

The English Dialect Dictionary derives the word from Old French chiboule, and gives a reference to Piers Plowman. Why hasn't such an old and useful word become a part of the English language like others also brought over at the time of the Norman Conquest?

18

So it proved. See September 26 et seq.

19

In "La Recherche de l'Absolu" (Balzac).

20

See September 3 (next entry), "A Jolt," and September 24 (infra).

21

The handwriting is painfully laboured, very large across a page and so crooked as to be almost undecipherable in places.

22

This is from a letter written by the dying Keats in Naples to his friend Brown.

23

Contrast with it Wordsworth rotting at Rydal Mount or Swinburne at Putney.

24

John Wesley rewrote his journals from entries in rough draft.

25

I once received from an editor a very encouraging letter which gave me a great deal of pleasure and made me hope he was going to open the pages of his magazine to me. But three weeks after he committed suicide by jumping out of his bedroom window.

26

The Egoist explains himself again.

27

Writing difficult to decipher.