The Brightest Thing in the World

The Brightest Thing in the World
A portrait of visionary naturalist W.N.P. Barbellion & tribute to historian and teacher George Roeder

by Matthew Goulish

Part 1: The Journal of a Disappointed Man

Part 1.1 (There is no part 1)

There is no part one. My plan has derailed. I intended to write about death, and death intervened.

My plan was this: to present a two-voiced portrait of W.N.P. Barbellion, the visionary naturalist. I would read the narration, the notes, my own commentary, from my vantage point in the year 2004. A guest would read the words of Barbellion, written in the early part of the 20th century. The presentation under the auspices of The Institute of Failure would be funny and sad and at times profound. Some of that plan still makes sense. Most of it does not. Most of it I have abandoned. Soon I will explain why. First, I will say more about my intentions, before their disruption.

I had intended this part, part one, to introduce you to the facts of Barbellion's life, his work, his writing, his detailed love of nature, his debilitating illness. Specifically, part 1.1, the part we are now in, would relate his earliest writing, from his first book, The Journal of a Disappointed Man. I would begin with his very first entry, one sentence long, written at the age of 13, in his childhood home of North Devon.

Barbellion:
January 3rd, 1903. - Am writing an essay on the life-history of insects and have abandoned the idea of writing on 'How Cats Spend their Time.'

Because of the first entry's shortness, I would include the second, written two weeks later.

Barbellion:

January 17th, 1903. - Went with L--- out catapult shooting. While walking down the main road saw a Goldfinch, but very indistinctly - it might not have been one. Had some wonderful shots at a tree creeper in the hedge about a foot away from me. While near a stream, L--- spotted what he thought to be some Wild Duck and brought one down, hitting it right on the head. He is a splendid shot. We discovered on examining it that it was not a Wild Duck at all but an ordinary domesticated hen. We ran away, and tonight L--- tells me he saw the Farmer enter the poulterer's shop with the dead bird in his hand.

This would have been the substance of part one. But there is no part one, because I began writing this presentation backwards. I don't know why. I wrote part 3, the last part, first. Part 3 derives from Barbellion's final book, which he titled A Last Diary. Part 3 details Barbellion's last days as he himself detailed them, at the age of 29, immobilized in a cottage in Buckinghamshire.

Barbellion:

February 4th, 1919. - I woke at seven, when my desk, the Japanese print on the wall, the wooden chair with my basin on it, the chest of drawers were emerging out of a grey obscurity. I had tetanus of my legs (which alternately shot out straight and contracted up to my chin) till eight-thirty, when Nanny came in and drew the blinds, letting in a foggy light. It is bitterly cold. I hear noises in the kitchen - a dull mewing sound (this is the tap being turned on), then a scrape, scrape (she is buttering my toast).

As I planned to begin part one with his first entry, so I planned to end part three with his last: a micro-essay titled The Brightest Thing in the World, a memory of Ctenophora, ribbed jellyfish, floating in a jar of water. I would use that title as a title for my portrait of Barbellion. That much I knew. That much made sense.

After finishing part 3, I moved on to part 2, describing the intervention of World War I, the Zeppelin raids on London, their trauma and deleterious effects on his health, his attempt to enlist, his discovery of his illness, his departure from The British Museum insect room, his engagement, his purchase of a wedding ring on the morning of September 10th, 1915, in bombed London. I intended to draw a parallel between war and disease, which I never managed to write. Instead, I began work on part 2 with a digression, attempting to calculate the cost of the wedding ring in pre-decimal British coins. Those passages - the sketchy depiction of the Zeppelin raid, the speculation on Victorian currency - are the only parts of part 2 I completed.

I had not yet begun part 1. That is why there is no part 1.

Now, these fragments - all of part 3, two-thirds of part 2, none of part 1 - these are all of my portrait of Barbellion that I will ever write. The reason is this. I intended to write about death, and death intervened.

The Brightest Thing in the World
A portrait of visionary naturalist W.N.P. Barbellion & tribute to historian and teacher George Roeder

by Matthew Goulish

Part 3.2: Portrait of the Artist as a Young Naturalist

Barbellion:

February 11th, 1919. - At 9 a.m. I heard the garden gate being forced open (it was frozen to the post) and the postman's welcome footsteps up the path. He dropped a parcel on the porch seat, knocked and went away again. I could not get at my parcel, though I was only a few feet away from it. So I lay and reflected what it might be. Surely not the book ordered at Bumpus's? Too soon. H.'s promised cigarettes? It sounded too heavy. My own book? An early advance copy? Perhaps.

Nanny came in and settled it. It was the book from B.'s. I was so interested I let her go away without cutting the string. I struggled, but could not tear off the cover, and had to sit with the book on my lap, wondering. She came in to light the fire, and I asked for a knife. She picked the parcel up, took it to the kitchen, and brought the book back opened. I did not like this. I like opening my own parcels.

It was James Joyce's Portrait of the Artist...

Immobilized in his Buckinghamshire cottage, Barbellion reads not only Joyce and Gogol, but also The Tunnel by Dorothy Richardson, and Joyce's Ulysses, serialized in The Little Review.

He seems to sense the significance of these early waves of modernism, commenting on the writing's continuous flow of consciounsness and semi-consciousness. He traces Joyce's contribution to the influences of Butler and H.G. Wells, and while excited by these literary achievements, he reserves his highest praise for the journals of the Russian painter Marie Bashkirtseff. Barbellion believes that Joyce captures the flow of consciousness 'almost as well as' Bashkirtseff, who died in 1884 at the age of 26. She wrote a personal diary of 102 volumes, of which the following is a brief excerpt.

Bashkirtseff:

Tuesday, 8 August (27 July, Russian style)

Petersburg acts upon me at night. I know nothing more superb than the Neva trimmed with lanterns contrasting with the moon and the deep blue, almost gray sky. The defects of houses, of pavements, of bridges are melted at night by the obliging shadows. The width of the wharfs stands out in all its majesty. The peak of the admiralty disappears in the sky and in the blue haze bordered by lights one sees the dome and the graceful shape of the cathedral of Issakie, that looks itself like a shadow or halo floating in the sky.

I would like to be here in winter.

Barbellion's literary interests were evident in London, in the early days of the onset of his disease, as in this passage from The Journal of a Disappointed Man concerning George Bernard Shaw.

Barbellion:

November 4th, 1914. - A lurid day. Suffering from the most horrible physical languor. Wrote the Doctor saying I was rapidly sliding down a steep place into the sea (like the swine I am). Could I see him?

Endured an hour's torture of indecision tonight asking myself whether I should go over to ask her to be my wife or should I go to the Fabian Society and hear Bernard Shaw. Kept putting off the decision even till after dinner. If I went to the flat, I must shave; to shave required hot water - the landlady had already cleared the table and was rapidly retreating. Something must be done and at once. I called the old thing back impulsively and ordered shaving water, consoling myself with the reflection that it was still unnecessary to decide; the hot water could be at hand in case the worst happened. If I decided on matrimony I could shave forthwith. Should I? (After dark I always shave in the sitting-room because of the better gaslight.)

Drank some coffee and next found myself slowly, mournfully putting on hat and coat. You can't shave in hat and coat so I concluded I had decided on Shaw. Slowly undid the front door latch and went off.

Shaw bored me. He is mid-Victorian. Sat beside a bulgy-eyed youth reading the Freethinker.

By 1919, in A Last Diary, he believes it is the naturalists who master the art.

Barbellion:

Of course the novelists are behind the naturalists in the recording of minutiae: Edmund Selous and Julian Huxley and others have set down the life of some species in exhaustive detail - every flip of the tail, every peck preceding the grand drama of courtship and mating.

He has now trained his naturalist's eye on his own deterioration. Curiosity conquers prejudice.

Barbellion:

March 16th, 1919. - I am getting rapidly worse. One misery adds itself to another as I explore the course of this hideous disease.

I have not had the time in this portrait to comment on his appreciation for music, passionate and almost obsessive to our present-day sensibilities. We must remind ourselves of the rare novelty of recorded music in 1919. No longer able to hear a live orchestra now that he has left London, he longs, in his state of immobility, for the music he loves.

Barbellion:

February 23rd, 1919. - 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 sympathize with you.

The Brightest Thing in the World
A portrait of visionary naturalist W.N.P. Barbellion & tribute to historian and teacher George Roeder

by Matthew Goulish

---

Part 3.3: The Brightest Thing in the World

In the end, the observer becomes the observed; the story becomes the telling of the story. Each bird nest, each specimen recollection - and his last is a vision not of an animal dissected, but of one springing to life miraculously out of sand, animated in a jar of water - each image unfolds an inner life, enriched and detailed by a nuanced knowledge of exteriority. His animals become animal spirits encircling his body's crucifixion. His last entry in A Last Diary reads simply as follows.

Barbellion:

June 3rd, 1919. -To-morrow I go to another nursing home.

But before that final footnote, he completed one last longer passage, which he titled The Brightest Thing in the World. Displaying to the end his irascible scholar's character, he offers the required rebuttal for an erroneous observation he has encountered in print. We first observed this quality in his early essay 'Curious Facts in the Geographical Distribution of British Newts', collected in Enjoying Life - and other Literary Remains. He prefaced that book with an epigram from Amiel: I love everything, and detest one thing only - the hopeless imprisonment of my being within a single arbitrary form... Now he devotes what he knows to be his final breath to setting the natural history record straight. The brightest thing in the world is not, as Rupert Brooke has claimed, a leaf in sunlight. It is a Ctenophora, a ribbed or combed jellyfish. Barbellion fixes his gaze on this obscure miniscule creature, whose name derives from the Greek for 'comb bearer,' and we see his naturalism achieve quiet transfiguration. What exhalation escapes the suffering human form? What angel of the light at last ascends? Only this: the jellyfish.

Barbellion:

The Brightest Thing in the World

June 1st, 1919. - Rupert Brooke said the brightest thing in the world was a leaf with the sun shining on it. God pity his ignorance! The brightest thing in the world is a Ctenophor in a glass jar standing in the sun. This is a bit of a secret, for no one knows about it save only the naturalist. I had a new sponge the other day and it smelt of the sea till I had soaked it. But what a vista that smell opened up! - rock pools, gobies, blennies, anemones (crassicorn, dahlia - oh! I forget). And at that moment of my little excursion into memory I came upon the morning when I put some sanded, opaque bits of jelly, lying on the rim of the sea into a glass collecting jar, and to my amazement and delight they turned into Ctenophors - alive, swimming, and iridescent! You must imagine a tiny soap bubble about the size of a filbert with four series of plates or combs arranged regularly on the soap bubble from its north to its south pole, and flashing spasmodically in unison as they beat the water.