Barbellionblog

What friends we were! The mutual sympathy between us was complete, so that our intercommunication was telegraphic in its brevity, frequently telepathic and wordless, yet all-sufficing. He had an extraordinary faculty for apt quotations: he loved Admiral Buzza, Mr Middleton, and similar cronies. Shakespeare was a never-failing reservoir. Together we passed along the street to our rendezvous, coats flapping, hands waving, tongues wagging, two slim youths, bespectacled, shoulders bent, bright-eyed.

We used to lunch at Gloucester Road, sometimes in Soho, and in the summer in Kensington Gardens. Our luncheon talks were wild and flippant. It was in the evenings after dinner at his rooms or at mine that we conversed seriously far into the stilly night, serious and earnest as only youth can be. During the course of a year our discussions must have several times passed in stellar transit through the whole zodiac of intellectual, moral, and social arcs. God! how we talked! I took charge of metaphysics and literature ; R—— of art and sociology.

His room and mine at the British Museum were near one another on opposite sides of the same corridor, and one of my vivid memories of those days is R—— coming in the course of the morning, gently opening my door, stealing in and advancing slowly up towards my table on tip-toe, eyebrows raised as far as he could possibly get them right up under his scalp, arms down straight at the sides, hands raised at the wrists and performing continuous circular movements outwards while he softly whistled some beautiful melody we’d heard the night before. I would drop my dissections, turn and ask ‘How does that piece go that starts ——?’ (I whistled a fragment.)

At lunch-time, whoever was first ready would visit the other’s room, and should the occupant’s head be still bent over his work, the same kind of remark was regularly made: ‘Come, come! I don’t like to see this absorption in the trivial round. Remember the man with the muckrake. The sun shines: be heliotropic. Let gallows gape for dog, let man go free.’

Our intimacy nettled some of our colleagues. ‘What are you two conspirators up to?’ (R—— in a black billycock, and I in a brown one, were tête-à-tête in the corridor.) ‘Discussing the modern drama’ (said to annoy, of course).

‘Damon and Pythias,’ sneered one, and we laughed aloud.

We carried our youth like a flag through those dusty galleries, and our warm friendship was a ringing challenge to all those frosty pows.

I love my hair to be combed — it makes one realise what an avenue for self-expression was closed when man lost his tail. I bitterly regret the loss of my tail; I love the benison of hot water for my urticating hands; the tick-tack of our cottage clock; a cigarette — many cigarettes; letters — these are all my pleasures; pills, the air-cushion, hot bottle, a cramped leg straightened — these are my reliefs; sleep — this my refuge.

Now that I have spurred my hippogriff to the journey’s end, now that I have wreaked my will on that very obtuse gentleman, my Lord Destiny, who failed to take due measure of his man, now as soon as I have freed myself from the hard cocoon of my environment, and can sweeten and soothe my warped frame with a little of the delicious honey of kindly recognition, I can rest in the sun a while, soak up the warmth and sweetness into this tortured spirit and crave everyone’s pardon before the end comes. For I know that the Journal will mean horror to some. I realise that a strong-minded man would by instinct keep his sufferings to himself — the Englishman above all — (but I doubt if I am an Englishman really. My true home I guess is further east). I have been recklessly self-willed and inconsiderate, and I have no sort of excuse except the most unprecedented provocation. I have been in the grip of more than one strong passion, and my moral strength has been insufficient to struggle with them and throw them off. I have been overcome, and the publication of my Journal is really the signal of my defeat.

Ah, but it takes a terrific lot of energy to set about putting one’s moral house in order! It is too late, and I am too weakened. You must take me as I am and remember that with a longer life, just as I might have done better things intellectually, so also morally. Give me your love if you can. I love you all, and because I love you comfort my self-despondency with the thought that there must be some grain of goodness in me overlaid.

Having stabbed my arm and signed the contract, now when the clock strikes, I’d like to stay:

But I asked for it, have got it — and to the full — and must fulfil my undertaking. My feelings see-saw. To-day I want to live in Hell’s despite. The day before yesterday I had my back to the wall in a feat of sheer endurance.

I’ve won! This morning at 9 a.m. the book arrived. C. and W. thoughtfully left the pages to be cut, so I’ve been enjoying the exquisite pleasure of cutting the pages of my own book. And nothing’s happened. No earthquake, no thunder and lightning, no omen in a black sky. In fact, the sun is shining. Publication next week.

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.