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: A Last Diary
Part 3.1 The Days' s Life
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).
Then breakfast arrives (two pieces of toast and two cups of tea), for which I am set up in bed with pillows. Through the window on my left I can see the branch of a walnut-tree and beyond, a laurel. The little squares on ancient glass are so loosely fixed in the leads (one is broken and covered over with a piece of cardboard) that the draught pours through and sometimes makes wind enough to blow out my match for a cigarette. As I eat comes a heavy scrunch, scrunch, right up the front door, which is only a few feet away from me, concealed behind a curtain. It is the postman, who puts the letters in the porch, gives a resounding knock, and goes away again. As I smoke my cigarette there is another scrunch, scrunch, but this one goes round to the back door (they all know Nanny is deaf) and I hear a rough, throaty voice, saying, 'Nearly copped him that time,' and Nanny replying, 'Yes, 'tis cold this morning.' It is the newspaper man, who always shies half a brick at a rat that haunts our garden.
While reading the Daily News I hear every now and then a distant rattle, which comes nearer, increases to a roar and passes off again in a furious rattle of sound - it is a motor-car along the
Presently a smell of dinner comes through from the kitchen, and while it cooks, N. comes in with the hot water bottle and helps me to wash. All the afternoon I sleep or doze. At four-thirty I get up, by a little careful arrangement get into my wheeled chair, and am taken to the fireside. My legs having shot out in a tetanus meanwhile, they have to be bent up before I can climb into my armchair. As soon as I have tricked myself into the chair they shoot out again, and have to be bent up, and feet placed on the hot bottle.
Then tea! N. sits opposite - a short, fat woman, who always on all occasions wears large black boots, which she says are necessary on account of her varicose veins. Her white apron above the waist is decorated with an embroidered design - a large red 'O' with green leaves around it. She always eats with her mouth open, otherwise, I suspect, she has discovered the noise of her mastication drowns every other sound.
After tea I read Gogol. After supper, Gogol. Then, my eyes aching, I stop and gaze into the fire.
Richmond H. Hellyar writes in his biography, 'Barbellion can be looked upon from an impersonal point of view as a very pronounced breakaway from tradition, - is the extreme reaction against the mental conservatism and self-satisfaction that we still bear as a legacy from the Victorians.' We can read these passages from A Last Diary in the light of this rupture with Victorian tradition. Barbellion, now having resigned his position at The British Museum because of ill health, spends his days in a small cottage at Gerrard's Cross in Buckinghamshire. His entries from this period, written, as Barbellion's brother notes, 'in his own handwriting, which in the last entries became a scarcely legible scrawl,' read in the voice of a proto-Beckett, severely contained in both house and body, detailing the minutiae of a day before dying.
Barbellion:
February 8th, 1919. - On the walls in front of me is a pattern of ivy-leaves. In odd moments of listlessness I am always counting them: there are 30 perpendicular rows with 47 leaves in each row - that's 1,410 leaves in all. You'd never think there were so many, to look at the wall. I know to nausea that there are 40 little panes of glass in the window on my left - really only 39, as one is broken and stopped with cardboard. There are 7 bars (5 thin and 2 thick) in the back of the wooden chair. There were seventeen degrees of frost this morning, and I have to stop constantly to wipe my nose and warm my hands on a water-bottle. There is also a water-bottle at my feet. KLIM - that is MILK backwards - printed on a wooden box I use as a book-rest and now lying upside down. YLIAD SWEN - this is the Daily News backwards. I am for ever reading it backwards as it lies on my bed upside down.
Increasingly, the last entries ruminate on memories, apparently insignificant, as if his mind has turned inward for objects of study. Do I exaggerate if I suggest that Barbellion here antecedes Marcel Proust? A distinct Proustlike air hangs around these short passages, produced as they were in a kind of sealed room, inklings of the result of a scientist's scrutiny applied to the past's unfolding, not to discover beauty as much as to create it of memory's material, of chance arisings of the past in the present.
Barbellion:
March 18th, 1919. - Mother 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.
March 21st, 1919. - Another cobweb: an illustrated book of miscellanies called The World of Wonders in our ancient bookcase... 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.
The more elaborate the memory, the more it approaches his final revelations - not of how the human merges with nature, but of how, in fleeting episodes, with memory as conduit, the human mind escapes itself into the realm of nature: a collapse, and a marriage.
Barbellion:
January 23rd, 1919. - Birds' eggs were another electrifying factor in my youth. I can remember tramping to and fro all one warm June afternoon over a bracken-covered sandy waste, searching for a nightjar's eggs. H. and I quartered out on the ground systematically, till presently, after two hours' search, the hen goat-sucker flipped up at my feet and fluttered away like a big moth across the silvery bracken out of sight. Lying before me on the ground were two long, grey eggs, marbled like pebbles. I turned away from this intoxicating vision, flicking my fingers as if I had been bitten. Then I turned, approached slowly, and gloated.
It was just such an effect on me as a girl's beautiful face used to make - equally tantalising and out of reach. I stared, fingered them, put one to my lips. Then it was over. I had to leave them, and an equal thrill at goat-suckers' eggs could never return again.
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