A more recent affair I had with the AmericanForum,which delighted me by publishing my article, but did not pay—tho' the Editor went out of his way to write that "payment was on publication." I did not venture to remonstrate as I had another article on the stocks which they also printed without paying me. In spite of uniform failure, my literary ambition has never flagged.[2]I have for years past received my rejected MSS. back from every conceivable kind of periodical, fromPunchto theHibbert Journal. At one time I used to file their rejection forms and meditated writing a facetious essay on them. But I decided they were too monotonously similar. My custom was when the ordinary avenues to literary fame had failed me—the half-crown Reviews and the sixpenny Weeklies—to seek out at a library some obscure publication—a Parish Magazine or the local paper—anything was grabbed as a last chance. On one of these occasions I discovered theWestminster Reviewand immediately plied them with a manuscript and the usual polite note. After six weeks,having no reply, I wrote again and waited for another six weeks. My second remonstrance met with a similar fate, so I went into the city to interview the publishers, and to demand my manuscript back. The manager was out, and I was asked to call again. After waiting about for some time, I left my card, took my departure and decided I would write. The same evening I told the publishers that the anonymous editor would neither print my article nor return it. Would they kindly give me his name and address so that I could write personally. After some delay they replied that although it was not the custom to disclose the editor's name, the following address would find her. She was a lady living in Richmond Row, Shepherd's Bush. I wrote to her at once and received no answer. Meanwhile, I had observed that no further issues of the review had appeared on the bookstalls, and the book-sellers were unable to give me any information. I wrote again to the address—this time a playful and facetious letter in which I said I did not propose to take the matter into court, but if it would save her any trouble I would call for the MS. as I lived only a few minutes' walk distant. I received no answer. I was busy at the time and kept putting off executing my firm purpose of visiting the good lady until one evening as I was casually reading theStarcoming home in the 'bus, I read an account of how some charitably disposed woman had recently visited the Hammersmith Workhouse and removed to her own home a poor soul who was once the friend of George Eliot, George Henry Lewes, and other well-known literary persons of the sixties and had, until it ceased publication a few months before, edited the once notableWestminster Review.
Recently, however, there has been evidence of a more benevolent attitude towards me on the part of London editors. A certain magnificent quarterly has published one or two of my essays, and one of these called forth two pages of quotation and flattering comment inPublic Opinion, which thrill me to the marrow. I fear, however, the flood-tide has come too late.
If this achievement impressed me it did not seem to impress anyone else. A—— regarded it as a joke and laughed incredulously when someone told him of "P.O.'s" eulogy. You see I am still his foolish little brother. I am secretly very nettled too because E—— treated the whole matter very indifferently. She did not even take the trouble to read the paper's critique, and tho' she volunteered to buy several copies to send to friends, she never remembered to do so, and the whole affair has passed out of her mind.
Now a pleasant paragraph that appeared in the press noticing some drawings of a friend of her friend, she read twice and marched off to Francesca with it in great glee. Another successful young person got his photo into the picture papers—a man we know only by hearsay, and yet it impressed her until I recalled, what strange to say she had quite forgotten, how the photographers wished to publish her own photograph in the picture papers at the time of our marriage. But she scornfully refused. (And so did I.)
But what a queer woman!... [And I, too, a queer man, drunken with wormwood and gall.]
August6.
E—— and I were very modern in our courtship. Our candour was mutual and complete—parents and relatives would be shocked and staggered if they knew.... You see I am a biologist and we are both freethinkers.Voilà!... I hate all reticence and concealment.... There is a good deal of that ass, Gregers Werle, in my nature.
August7.
My Gastrocnemius
I become dreadfully emaciated. This morning, before getting off the bed I lifted my leg and gazed wistfully along all its length. My flabbygastrocnemiusswung suspended from thetibialike a gondola from a Zeppelin. I touched it gently with the tip of my index finger and it oscillated.
August17.
My beloved wife comes home this evening after a short, much needed holiday.
August27.
My gratuity has turned out to be unexpectedly small. I hoped at least for one year's salary. And the horrible thing is I might live for several years longer! No one was ever more enthusiastic for death than I am at this moment. I hate this world with its war, and I bitterly regret I never managed to buy laudanum in time. There are only E—— and dear R—— and one or two others—the rest of the people I know I hateen bloc. If only I could get at them. I hate to have to leave them to themselves without getting my own back.
August31.
My darling sweetheart, you ask me why I love you. I do not know. All I know is that Idolove you, and beyond measure. Why doyoulove me—surely a more inscrutable problem. You do not know. No one ever knows. "The heart has its reasons which the reason knows not of." We love in obedience to a powerful gravitation of our beings, and then try to explain it by recapitulating one another's characters just as a man forms his opinions first and then thinks out reasons in support.
What delights me is to recall that our love hasevolved.It did not suddenly spring into existence like some beautiful sprite. It developed slowly to perfection—it was forged in the white heat of our experiences. That is why it will always remain.
September1.
Your love, darling, impregnates my heart, touches it into calm, strongly beating life so that when I am with you, I forget I am a dying man. It is too difficult to believe that when we die true love like ours disappears with our bodies. My own experience makes me feel that humanlove is the earnest after death of a great reunion of souls in God who is love. When as a boy I was bending the knee to Haeckel, the saying, "God is Love," scarcely interested me. I am wiser now. You must not think I am still anything but an infidel (as the churchmen say),—I should hate not to be taken for an infidel—and you must not be surprised that an embittered, angry, hateful person like myself should believe in a Gospel of Love. I am embittered because an intense desire to love has in many instances[3]been baulked by my own idealising yet also analytical mind. I have wanted to love men blindly, yet I am always finding them out, and the disappointment chills the heart. Hence my malice and venom: which, dear, do not misconstrue. I am as greedy as an Octopus, ready out of love to take the whole world into my inside—that seat of the affections!—but I am also as sensitive as an Octopus, and quickly retract my arms into the rocky, impregnable recess where I live.
September2.
But am I dying? I have no presentiments—no conviction—like the people you read of in books. Am I, after all, in love? "I dote yet doubt; suspect yet strongly love." It is all a matter of degree. Beside Abélard and Héloïse, our love may be just glassy affection. It is a great and difficult question to decide. I love no one else but E——, that, at least, is a certainty, and I have never loved anyone more.
September3.
My bedroom is on the ground floor as I cannot mount the stairs. But the other day when they were all out, I determined to clamber upstairs if possible, and search in the bedrooms for a half bottle of laudanum, which Mrs. —— told me she found the other day in a box—a relic of the time when —— had to take it to relieve pain.
I got off the bed on to the floor and crawled around onhands and knees to the door, where I knelt up straight, reached the handle and turned it. Then I crawled across the hall to the foot of the stairs, where I sat down on the bottom step and rested. It is a short flight of only 12 steps and I soon reached the top by sitting down on each and raising myself up to the next one with my hands.
Arrived at the top, I quickly decided on the most likely room to search first, and painfully crawled along the passage and thro' the bathroom by the easiest route to the small door—there are two. The handles of all the doors in the house are fixed some way up above the middle, so that only by kneeling with a straight back could I reach them from the floor. This door in addition was at the top of a high but narrow step, and I had to climb on to this, balance myself carefully, and then carefully pull myself up towards the handle by means of a towel hung on the handle. After three attempts I reached the handle and found the door locked on the inside.
I collapsed on the floor and could have cried. I lay on the floor of the bathroom resting with head on my arm, then set my teeth and crawled around the passage along two sides of a square, up three more steps to the other door which I opened and then entered. I had only examined two drawers containing only clothes, when a key turned in the front door lock and E—— entered with —— and gave her usual whistle.
I closed the drawers and crawled out of the room in time to hear E—— say in a startled voice to her mother: "Who's that upstairs?" I whistled, and said that being bored I had come up to see the cot: which passed at that time all right.
Next morning my darling asked me why I went upstairs. I did not answer, and I think she knows.
September4.
I am getting ill again, and can scarcely hold the pen. So good-bye Journal—only for a time perhaps.
Have read this blessed old Journal out to E——. It required some courage, and I boggled at one or two bits and left them out.
September5.
Leap-frog
Some girls up the road spent a very wet Sunday morning playing leap-frog in their pyjamas around the tennis lawn. It makes me envious. To think I never thought of doing that! and now it is too late. They wore purple pyjamas too. I once hugged myself with pride for undressing in a cave by the sea and bathing in the pouring rain, but that seems tame in comparison.
Liebestod
A perfect autumn morning—cool, fine and still. What sweet music a horse and cart make trundling slowly along a country road on a quiet morning! I listened to it in a happy mood of abstraction as it rolled on further and further away. I put my head out of the window so as to hear it up to the very last, until a Robin's notes relieved the nervous tension and helped me to resign myself to my loss. The incident reminded me of the Liebestod in "Tristan," with the Robin taking the part of the harp.
For days past my emotions have been undergoing kaleidoscopic changes, not only from day to day but from hour to hour. For ten minutes at a time I am happy or miserable, or revengeful, venomous, loving, generous, noble, angry, or murderous—you could measure them with a stop-watch. Hell's phantoms course across my chest. If I could lie on this bed as quiet and stony as an effigy on a tomb! But a moment ago I had a sharp spasm at the sudden thought that never, never, never again should I walk thro' the path-fields to the uplands.
September7.
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.
September29.
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.[4]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.
September30.
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.
October1.
The immediate future horrifies me.
October2.
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.
October3.
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.
October6.
In fits of maudlin self-compassion I try to visualise Belgium, Armenia, Serbia, etc., and usually cure myself thereby.
October12.
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.
October14to20.
Miserable.
October21.
Self-disgust.
FINIS.
[Barbellion died on December 31.]
[1]John Wesleyrewrotehis journals from entries in rough draft.
[1]John Wesleyrewrotehis journals from entries in rough draft.
[2]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.
[2]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.
[3]The Egoist explains himself again.
[3]The Egoist explains himself again.
[4]Writing difficult to decipher.
[4]Writing difficult to decipher.
PART I: AT HOME
Rambles and bathes,2,3,4,9,11,20,37,45,46,48,49Natural History and Zoology,9,12,13,20,29Leaves school,10Newspaper reporting,17,19Ambition,8,10,13,26,29Calf-love,8,12,23,28The Wesleyan Minister Microscopist,18Conversation with Prof. Herdman,46Ill-health,10,24,25,35,42,48(Jul. 31)Heart attacks,33,36On Death,33,38,43,44Sits for British Museum exam.,29Failure,30,31,32Appointment to Laboratory at Plymouth,32Everything "ghostly, unreal, enigmatic,"29,33Self-consciousness,27,40The Poppy,43Appointment resigned and his father's illness,34His father's death,50,51Success and appointment to B.M.,55A youthful Passion,56,57
PART II: IN LONDON
Disillusionment,59,61,93,94,132,178,185Life in a boarding-house,63,78,79,94,99,107Ambition,71,73,109An affair in a taxicab,75Self-disgust,77In love,78,96,107Conversations: (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,59,62,69,72,74,100,107,110,114,134-5,153,156On Death,62,63,84,88Heart attacks,71,72,120,122Nervous breakdown,80,81,82Meets an old love,86,87Holidays: (a) at C——, by the sea in North ——,65,66,67(b) at home,82(c) in Brittany and on Dartmoor (riding a pony),97Life in rooms,102,107,108,114,138,148,149,153His brother,121,206Discussions on marriage,123,124In his sitting-room,162The fascination of London,74,142-145(a) Petticoat Lane,163(b) Rotten Row,176Goes to concerts,127,161,172A lovers' quarrel,126He struggles with himself,135,137,138Engaged,150,158Fears his inconstancy,159,185Self-analysis,167et seq.,182,183Day-dreams: Life a dream,178,179,188The War,182Holidays: (a) on a Buckinghamshire farm,191-205(b) at the Lakes,215-217Should a husband keep a private journal?210Marriage,205,209,215
PART III: MARRIAGE
Zeppelin raid and influenza,222Living in the country,223,227,228Reads his doctor's certificate after visit to recruiting-office,225,238Self-disgust,223,224,225,247,250(nude),267Mental agony,226,227Conversations: with R.,229with Scarabees,230,239,243Halcyon days,233,235,238A natural idiot climbs a stile on uplands,240Tension,250,252The War,237(Jutland),242,247,248,249Another nervous breakdown,253How E. knew all the time,255,256Self-compassion,251,304Home ill,257("in the doldrums"),259,265Returns to work,278Ill again,285From an invalid's view-point,292,293(by his bedroom window)Post-mortem affairs,291Resigns appointment,294,299Self-consciousness and self-dramatization,255,265,267A badly articulated skeleton,274Cold weather in January,276,277,278On Death,275,283,286,291His phosphorescent Journals,291Morphia and laudanum,280,300Great misery,303,305