The Journal of a Disappointed Man

By W. N. P. BARBELLION, with an Introduction by H. G. Wells. New York: George H. Doran Company. 1919. l2mo, viii+312 pp. $2.00.

BECAUSE we must think of the great contemporary writers in terms of themselves, and contemplate their books as steps in their maturing visions of a life which we too share, we may be said to look too hard for autobiographies in all their works. Thus volume after volume we dissect and stuff, and mount in our Conrad, our Bennett, our Shaw, or our Wells collection. We are interested in exactly identifying the specimen; we hardly conceive of a novel or a play as alive.

Here, then, is an odd thing,not a novel at all, perhaps; not by any famous man, apparently, — The Journal of a Disappointed Man, by W. N. P. Barbellion. Who ever heard of him? But H. G. Wells wrote the introduction, and it must be worth perusing. Here is apparently our chance for a genuine reaction on a book as a living organism.

It is alive with the very flame of modernity. ‘The War is searching out everyone, concentrating a beam of inquisitive light upon everyone’s mind and character, and publishing it for all the world to see. And the consequence to many honest folk has been a keen personal disappointment. We ignoble persons had thought we were better than we really are. We scarcely anticipated that the’ War was going to discover for us our emotions so despicably small by comparison, or our hearts so riddled with selfish motives.’ ‘We are like a nest of frightened ants when someone lifts a stone. That is the world just now.’

Like a pallid weevil in a nut, this young man, hating war and exempt from it physically, passes struggling amid the mystery and tears of things, through a few of our years just finished, to the foregone conclusion of his ‘assignation with death. He analyzes himself as ’apparently a triple personality: the respectable youth, the foul-mouthed commentator and critic, and the real but unknown 1. He is a naturalist, and his ambition is thwarted first by poverty and then, on the threshold of success, by broken health; he is a lover, and his happiness is delayed by uncertainty and dread of his own character, and then, after marriage, when he knows at last the perfect love and heroism of his wife, ended by early death.

‘“It is easy to be cynical,’someone admonished me. “Unfortunately it is,”1 said.’

It is the kind of book that lifts one out of one’s chair from moment to moment, impelling one to summon in a friend to hearken a message. ‘The cut-worm forgives the plough.’ ’I could eat all the elephants of Hindustan and pick my teeth with the spire of Strassburg Cathedral.’ ‘Some tilings are too solemn to be serious about.’ ’Legginess is bad enough in a woman, but bandy-legginess is impossible.’ ‘How I hate the man who talks about the “brute creation,”with an ugly emphasis on brute. Only Christians are capable of it. As for me, I am proud of my close kinship with other animals. I take a jealous pride in my Simian ancestry. I like to think that I was once a magnificent hairy fellow living in the trees, and that my frame has come down through geological time via sea-jelly and worms and Amphioxus, Fish, Dinosaurs, and Apex. Who would exchange these for the pallid couple in the Garden of Eden?’

If the reader is not sufficiently sure of the mark of Wells to recognize as no one else’s the satiricthrusts; the dialectic beneath the surface; the jests; the slightly alloyed golden thread of beauty with its startling novelty of detail; the ideas of sex, of God, of Christianity, of education, of War. of human ambitions, of life, death, and the hereafter; the materialism; the occasional sheer brazenness; the insistent frankness— if he does not see in this Journal the application to the individual young philosopher of the principles of The Undying Fire, he may turn his attention to small details and be soon content. He may observe that a paper torn up on page 225 is shown to a doctor on page 260. He may notice an almost mischievous playing with the reader and with the very structure of the journal. He may even detect unmistakably deliberate attempts at realism, or familiar public anecdotes recounted as personal experiences. He may attempt to unearth in old magazines the few stories and articles which the young man attributes to himself, and find in the Academy of August 7, 1909, ’A Fool and a Maid on Lundy Island,’ evidently by the same hand that wrote this book— but unsigned He may recall Boon as a similarly pseudonymous book. He may correlate the career of W. N. P. Barbellion with that of Mr. Wells, and say ’aut Wells, ant diabolm,’attributing to the mighty superjournalist this further manifestation of his Protean faculties.

But the book must not. be whitewashed. It is, in spots, disgusting. ‘It is only by accident that certain of our bodily functions are distasteful,’etc. ‘I observed that Miss — senior had been bathing her members, and that the bath, the empty, was covered inside with patches of — soap unutterably black! Oh! Miss —! The smell of Albert’s tobacco, together with that of his stockinged feet and his boots removed, was asphyxiating.’

This one vein of actuality in the comédie humaine we could readily spare - whatever Whitman may have done, or Balzac. Such passages make one feel that a great novelist may, perhaps, be ridding his spirit of some accumulation that has been held in check in works published under his own name.

Wells is a super-journalist. He is always infernally timely. We do not read his novels twice, yet they delight us. It is a fascinating thought that here he may have almost thrown his critics off the scent; but it is doubtful if he really intended more than to give them extra sport.

T. L. H.