What is a life?

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 1.3 (What is a life?)

Barbellion:

A Small Red Viper

June 1st, 1908. - I walked out to the famous Valley of Rocks which Southey described as the ribs of the old Earth poking through. At the bottom of one of the hills saw a snake, a Red Viper. Put my foot on him quickly so that he couldn't get away and then recognized him as a specimen of what I consider to be the fourth species of British Serpent - Vipera rubra. The difficulty was to know how to secure him. This species is more ferocious than the ordinary Vipera bera, and I did not like the idea of putting my hand down to seize him by the neck. I stood for some time with my foot so firmly pressed down on its back that my leg ached and I began to wonder if I had been bitten. I held on and presently hailed a baker's cart coming along the road. The man got out and ran across the grass to where I stood. I showed him what I had beneath my boot and he produced a piece of string which I fastened around the snake's tail and so gently hauled the little brute up. It already appeared moribund, but I squashed its head on the grass with my heel to make certain. After parting with the baker, to whom all thanks be given, I remember that Adders are tenacious of life and so I continue to carry him at string's length and occasionally wallop him against a stone. As he was lifeless I wrapped him in paper and put him in my pocket - though to make assurance doubly sure I left the string on and let its end hang out over my pocket. So home by a two hours' railway journey with the adder in the pocket of my overcoat and the overcoat on the rack over my head. Settled down to the reading of a book on Spinoza's Ethics. At home it proved to be quite alive, and, on being pulled out by the string, coiled up on the drawing-room floor and hissed in a fury, to my infinite surprise.

The subject of this talk has become two lives. Consequently, it revolves around two deaths. These two deaths, it would seem, could not be more different: one distant, removed by history, anticipated by the subject, documented, detailed, lingering. I can look at it with a clinical eye. The other death so recent, so close, and so unanticipated, that I am still swept along by its vacuum. I have little sense of what to say about it or why or how. Regarding the first death, I proceed according to plan. Regarding the second, I follow intuition. Such intuition leads me to start this part with A Small Red Viper, although it derives from the story of the first death, and here applies somehow to the second. I don't understand how. Because of the phrase tenacious of life, or because of Spinoza's Ethics, or because of the pocket of an overcoat. George wore an overcoat at times. I don't know. I proceed not knowing. The first death is the one that I write. The second death writes me. This talk is an artificial balance between the two.

Richmond H. Hellyar gives us the following biographical note in his 1926 book.

W.N.P. Barbellion, the pen name of Bruce Frederick Cummings, was born in Barnstaple, North Devon, on September 7th, 1889, son of John Cummings, a journalist and political writer in the town. In infancy he nearly died from an attack of pneumonia. It is to this that his brother, Mr. Arthur Cummings, is inclined to ascribe much of his later ill-health. A small, under-sized child, he did not start school at the usual age, but was taught the rudiments of his education privately by his brother. At the age of nine he attended a large private school in the town, but did not shine during the early part of his school career, expending most of his interest and energy in the pursuit of his hobby of natural history. Later, however, his faculties began to develop, and in his final period at school he made surprising mental advances. His father, in spite of reduced circumstances, allowed him many advantages and helped him in considerably furthering his biological researches. In 1910, however, owing to his father's ill-health, there came his first disappointment: he was forced to give up the idea of an appointment at the Plymouth Marine Biological Station, after working extremely hard and for a long time to obtain it. Somewhere about this time he entered journalism, as a reporter under his father, little as he liked it. In 1911 he gained a great personal triumph in passing an Examination entitling him to join the staff of the Natural History Museum at South Kensington. He immediately gave up his journalistic post and left soon after for London. He was ill when he entered the Museum and had some difficulty in passing the doctors. Illness, indeed, was from now a persistent factor in his life. He was married in September, 1915, and had one child, a girl. In July, 1917, ill-health forced him to resign his position at the Museum. He realized now that he was a dying man; and the 'Last Diary' covers the period between this date and his death on October 22nd, 1919, at Gerrard's Cross in Buckinghamshire, in a small cottage where he lived since his resignation. His age when he died was thirty.

Hellyar's biographical sketch lacks the description of Barbellion's illness, or how he discovered it. Determined to enlist in 1915, Barbellion first visited his own doctor, who gave him a sealed report to show to the military doctor. The military doctor, however, instantly rejected Barbellion after listening to his heartbeat. Walking home from the recruiting office, disappointed, Barbellion remembered the sealed doctor's report. He opened it, and discovered his doctor had forbid the army's acceptance of Barbellion, as he had been secretly diagnosed with the obscure fatal condition. Barbellion's brother described it. 'Disseminated sclerosis was the name which the specialist gave to it; and its effect, produced apparently by a microbe that attacks certain cells of the spinal cord, is to destroy in the course of a few years - or in some cases many years - every function of the body, killing its victim by degrees in a slow, ruthless process of disintegration.' In his introduction to Alphonse Daudet's In the Land of Pain, Julian Barnes comments on Daudet's similar manifestation of symptoms: locomotor ataxia, the progressive inability to control one's movements. Daudet, when caught in a frenzied bought of locomotor ataxia, his leg hopelessly out of control, reminded himself of a knife-grinder. (The comparison may be lost on some modern readers: until a few decades ago, itinerant knife-grinders would trundle the streets with circular stones mounted on wheeled carriers; to make his stone revolve at a speed sufficient to sharpen your knives and shears, the grinder would pump frantically up and down on a pedal.)

When I kept the parts of the portrait of Barbellion that I had written, I also kept the outline, three large parts, each made up of three small parts. This structure remains. But the blanks have all been filled, the unwritten parts have been written in. The death of a friend has overtaken them.

The subject of this talk has become two lives. Consequently, it revolves around two deaths. These two deaths, it would seem, could not be more different, but the occurrence of the second has by chance brought the two lives together within the frame of this talk. It has produced an unlikely impulse. Forgive me for following where it leads. At the moment I have no choice. It is how I say goodbye.

What is a life, after all? Not life, but a life: a pure transcendent plane of immanence, beyond good and evil, a life is both general and absolutely singular; a life is at play between life and death, flickering between habitation and liberation - the brightest thing in the world.

Or maybe I simply mean to say this: what William Faulkner once said, a quote George would have appreciated, 'The past is never dead. It's not even past.'