A beer at the Wild Side and the intersection of two books that have found me

Speaking of books that have found me recently, one them was Thomas Mallon’s book about published journals, A Book of One’s Own. I skimmed the whole thing, decided to read it carefully, and got about fifty pages into it before Sixpence House found me. So it was with great happiness that I discovered a brief convergence of these two books on page 95 of Sixpence House, as I sat in a far corner of the back patio of Wild Side West, sipping at a beer, reading, and resting my feet for an hour before making the 25-minute walk home from work.

There is some basic human need to read through other people’s journals; otherwise, why would they leave them in unlocked desks? Sitting brazenly in the bottom of a drawer, barely hidden beneath a ream of paper, a stapler, and a Trapper Keeper? That, at least, was my reasoning as a teenager. But now, as an adult, it is unseemly to go rooting about in people’s desks, under their mattresses, and on their upper closet shelves — I must settle for published journals. I’m sorting through the rest of the fiction and essay section today at Booth’s, and a number of the misfiled books are journals by British writers. One in particular catches my eye: The Journal of a Disappointed Man, by W.P. Barbellion. How can you not open a book with that title? For I once came across a book in a library titled Recollections of a Happy Life; it was about a century old, and it had never been checked out. You may wish to infer something from this.

Indeed you may. It’s interesting that Collins happened to come across that particular journal, the one from the Disappointed Man; I came across it too last year, online (follow the links on this page to read it for free), and it’s even possible that Collins himself led me to it via his blog, though I no longer remember the details. Barbellion was a talented naturalist, and a prodigy, who died at the age of thirty from MS (which lately claimed Tony Judt and still hasn’t claimed Stephen Hawking). I read and skimmed much of it one sleepless night last fall and thought about linking to it on the Rumpus, before finally concluding that it was too depressing to be a general item on the blog.

But the reading wasn’t depressing for me personally. Barbellion’s notes to posterity (for he did, obviously, keep a journal with future readers in mind) was a useful corrective to the feelings I was having at the time, of being out of step with where I “should” be in life. I felt as though I’d gotten a late start with my writing, that though I was 32, all my peers were 25, and I was regretting having missed out on the previous seven years in San Francisco. Barbellion’s frustration at being kept from his genuine passions by illness, followed by his early death, which arrived before he could achieve anything of consequence — well, that temporarily stopped me from indulging in that nonsense about having lost time. For a while I felt lucky to be alive at all.

For Barbellion had attempted to enlist in the army when World War One broke out, and his physician had sent him with a letter to present to the enlisting officer. The officer rejected him after a glance, and on the train back Barbellion opened the letter to see what it said. To his shock, he read the diagnosis that his doctor had kept from him, and he learned that he had five years to live. This he learned at the age of twenty-five. From that moment on his journals acquired an intensity that is hard to describe, except by saying that at times, he seems to himself to be the only person in the entire world who is paying attention to the wonder of existence. Take for example this entry of February 7, 1917, two years before his death, to which he gives a title:

Chinese Lanterns

The other morning as I dressed, I could see the sun like a large yellow moon rising on a world, stiff, stark, its contours merely indicated beneath a winding-sheet of snow. Further around the horizon was another moon — the full moon itself — yellow likewise, but setting. It was the strangest picture I ever saw. I might well have been upon another planet; I could not have been more surprised even at a whole ring of yellow satellites arranged at regular intervals all around the horizon.

In the evening of the same day, I drove home from the Station in a little governess-cart, over a snow-clogged road. The cautious little pony picked out her way so carefully in little strides — pat-pat-pat — wherever it was slippery, and the Landlord of the Inn sat opposite me extolling all the clever little creature’s merits. It was dusk, and for some reason of the atmosphere the scraps of cloud appeared as blue sky and the blue sky as cloud, beneath which the full moon like a great Chinese lantern hung suspended so low down it seemed to touch the trees and hills. How have folk been able to ‘carry on’ in a world so utterly strange as this one during the past few days! I marvel that beneath such moons and suns, the peoples of the world have not ceased for a while from the petty business of war during at least a few of our dancing revolutions around this furnace of a star. One of these days I should not be surprised if this fascinated earth did not fall into it like a moth into a candle. And where would our Great War be then?

So I flipped to the pages in Mallon’s book that contend with the Disappointed Man. Initially he seems somewhat dismissive of Barbellion, because often enough, as Mallon observes, “there is no room in [his] world for anyone but himself.” Mallon goes on to ask: “what are his daytime work as a naturalist and his nighttime recumbency as an invalid compared to the huge energies forever being stanched inside him?” But Mallon ultimately concludes as follows:

He didn’t want the world his way; he wanted the world to have him his. So he wrote his ludicrously moving journals, never unaware of their crazy bravura. Few people read them anymore, but that cannot undo his improbable accomplishment. In a genre to which it is impossible to ascribe formulas and standards, he forces one to render a judgment — namely, that his is the greatest diary a man has written.

Some praise, that!

Last night I watched Red Desert, a sub-par effort by Antonioni, whose main attraction was the prospect of staring at Monica Vitti’s face for two hours. But more on that another day, as this entry is already too long.

posted: 10 August 11
under: Open Folio