Barbellionblog

Time lures me forward. But I’ve dug my heels in awaiting those two old tortoises, Chatto and Windus.

Another cobweb: an illustrated book of miscellanies called The World of Wonders in our ancient bookcase at home alongside Eliza Cook’s poems, Howitt’s Visits to Remarkable Places, an immense green volume of Hogarth’s drawings, a Dictionary of Dates, Roget’s Thesaurus, etc. I remember distinctly the pictures of the Man in the Iron Mask, freak tubers, and carrots like human heads in a row across a page, snow crystals, Indian jugglers, two Amazons of heroic girth carrying swords, striding along sands; the swords were curved, and one lady was much stouter than the other. I used to stare at these pictures before I could read, and invented my own legends. I always thought the potatoes and carrots were a species of savage, and many pictures I can recall, but do not know what they represent even now.

A letter from H. G. Wells. My book, he says, interested him personally as he once ‘tried hard’ to get into the B.M. (in Flower’s time), but failed. ‘I don’t think I should have found it very suitable.’ No! He would have promptly finished on the gallows for murdering the keeper.

‘While all alone
Watching the loophole’s spark
Lie I, with life all dark,
Feet tethered, hands fettered
Fast to the stone.
The grim walls, square lettered
With prisoned men’s groan,
Still strain the banner poles,
Through the wind’s song;
Westward the banner rolls
Over my wrong.’

For all C.O.’s and paralytics (selected by E——).

Mother (she liked me to call her Moth. Hubbard, Lepidopterous Hubbard, and she used to sign her letters Hubbard) had a pretty custom, which she hated anyone to detect, of putting every letter she wrote to us when stamped, directed and sealed, into her Bible for a minute or two, ostensibly to sanctify the sealing up.

Memories like these lurk in corners of my dismantled brain like cobwebs. I fetch them down with a pen for a mop.

I’ve had such a dear and beautiful letter from H—— this morning.

Here is Hector Berlioz in his amazing Memoirs writing to a friend for forgiveness for causing him anxiety: ‘But you know how my life fluctuates. One day, calm, dreary, rhythmical; the next, bored, nerve-torn, snappy and surly as a mangy dog; vicious as a thousand devils, sick of life and ready to end it, were it not for the frenzied happiness that draws ever nearer, for the odd destiny that I feel is mine; for my staunch friends; for music, and lastly for curiosity. My life is a story that interests me greatly.’ This verfluchte curiosity! I could botanise over my own grave, attentively examine the maggots out of my own brain.

I am getting rapidly worse. One misery adds itself to another as I explore the course of this hideous disease.

The first peep of the chick: among the publishers’ announcements in The Times: ‘The Journal of a Disappointed Man, a genuine confession of thwarted ambition and disillusionment.’

Am reading another of James Joyce’s — Ulysses — running serially in that exotic periodical, The Little Review, which announces on its cover that it makes ‘no compromise with the public taste.’ Ulysses is an interesting development. Damn! it’s all my idea, the technique I projected. According to the reviews, Dorothy Richardson’s Tunnel is a novel in the same manner — intensive, netting in words the continuous flow of consciousness and semi-consciousness. Of course the novelists are behind the naturalists in the recording of minutiæ: Edmund Selous and Julian Huxley and others have set down the life of some species of bird in exhaustive detail — every flip of the tail, every peck preceding the grand drama of courtship and mating. But this queer comparison lies between these naturalists and novelists like William de Morgan rather than Joyce.

These sobbing words bring a catch in my breath and tears to my eyes. Dear Shelley, I, too, have suffered.

1. Ambition.
2. Reflections on Death.
3. Intellectual Curiosity.
4. Self Consciousness.
5. Self Introspection.
6. Zest of Living.

I wonder if any reviewer will bring out these points:

My confessions are shameless. I confess, but do not repent. The fact is, my confessions are prompted, not by ethical motives, but intellectual. The confessions are to me the interesting records of a self-investigator.

If I live to read the review notices, I shall probably criticise them. I shall be criticising the criticisms of my life, putting the reviewers right, a long lean hand stretching out at them from the tomb. I shall play the part of boomerang, and ‘cop’ them one unexpectedly. There will be a newspaper discussion: Is Barbellion dead? And I shall answer by a letter to the Editor:

‘DEAR SIR,

‘Yes, I am dead. I killed myself off at the end of my book, because it was high time. Your reviewer is incorrect in saying I died of creeping paralysis. It was of another kindred but different disease.

‘P.S.—It may interest your readers to know that I am not yet buried.’

Or,

‘DEAR SIR,

‘There is an inaccuracy in your reviewer’s statement. I was not in the Secret Service. It should have been the Civil Service, of which I was a member up to within eighteen months of my decease.’

Or,

‘DEAR SIR,

‘I should be glad if you would correct the impression generated by one of your correspondents that Barbellion is the name of an evil spirit appearing on Walpurgis night. As a matter of fact, my forbears were simple folk — tallow chandlers in B——.’

I thirst, I thirst for a little music — to replenish my jaded spirit. It is difficult to keep one’s soul alive in such an atmosphere.

A little easier in mind. Posted proofs of my Journal to R——. Am much perturbed. Will he shrink from me, or merely tolerate me as a poor wretched manikin? I fear it will not bring me any increase of affection from anyone, and some ——

A load of sadness settled on me this afternoon. As I lay resting down in bed, for no reason I can discover, the memory of the evening prayers my mother taught me flashed over my mind, and because steeped in memory seemed very beautiful. Here they are:

Then the Lord’s Prayer. Then:

Then I hopped into bed and was asleep in a moment.

I went on mechanically saying these prayers when I was grown to a big boy, and subconsciously felt that the first verses were quite unsuitable. But I never had, like some, an instinct for prayer. I don’t suppose I ever prayed, only raced through some rhymed requests learnt by rote!

I can remember very clearly the topography these addresses to the Almighty assumed in my brain. Thus:

A. I began here in a horizontal direction with ‘Gentle Jesus,’ the successive verses being so many hurdles to leap over. Then I turned abruptly to the left and ran up a tall, narrow, squiggly piece like a pagoda — the Paternoster (B) finishing off with the tail-piece ©, the single verse of 4 lines.

I never had till recently any religious sense at all. I was a little sceptic before I knew it. With no one to direct me, I had a nose for agnostic literature, and when I found Haeckel and Hume I whooped with satisfaction. ‘I thought so,’ I said to myself.

‘Beautiful,’ did I say? Why, no. Sottish doggerel. The pathos of an innocent child repeating it!

The doctor came to-day and recommended petroleum. All right. He is a decent sort and knows his business. Am feeling muzzy. Horas non numero nisi serenas. This should make us nineteen-nineteeners smile!

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.

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.

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 bitter 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 becomes 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.

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.

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.

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 —

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.

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.’