The Journal of a Disappointed Man

evening we sit by the fire and enjoy the beautiful sweet-smelling wood-smoke, and the open hearth with its big iron bar carrying pothook 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 threepenny 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—October 20

Miserable.

October 21

Self-disgust.

[Barbellion died on December 31.]

Endnotes

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 June 30, 1911. ↩

10. See entry for November 27, 1915. ↩

11. “I could eat all the elephants of Hindustan and pick my teeth with the Spire of Strasbourg Cathedral.”

    1917. I think after three years of Armageddon I feel quite ready to go back to top hats and civilisation. ↩

12. See January 2nd, 1915. ↩

13. 1917. I am now editing my own Journal⁠—bowdlerising my own book! ↩

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

15. What a popinjay!⁠—1917. ↩

16. Fortunately⁠—for me.⁠—1916. ↩

17. 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.⁠ ⁠…” ↩

18. Cf. 1916, November 6. ↩

19. Cf. Burns’s poem “On a Louse.” ↩

20. See Des Insectes reputés venimeux, par M. Amoureux Fils, Doctor of Medicine in the University of Montpellier, Paris, 1789. ↩

21. See Bingley, Animal Biog., first edition, iii. ↩

22. clix, 169. ↩

23. Vol. I, p. 13. ↩

24. 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? ↩

25. So it proved. See September 26 et seq. ↩

26. In La Recherche de l’Absolu (Balzac). ↩

27. See September 3 (next entry), “A Jolt,” and September 24 (infra). ↩

28. On Sept. 29th, on the Doctor’s advice I went away by the sea alone, my nerves being all unstrung. For an account of the miseries of this journey, see Dec. 12th infra. ↩

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

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

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

32. John Wesley rewrote his journals from entries in rough draft. ↩

33. 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. ↩

34. The Egoist explains himself again. ↩

35. Writing difficult to decipher. ↩

Colophon

The Journal of a Disappointed Man
was published in 1919 by
W. N. P. Barbellion.

This