July 26, 2025 • 21 mins
Dive into the captivating final journal entries of British naturalist Bruce Frederick Cummings. This poignant narrative stretches from March 1918 to June 1919, a tumultuous period that saw the end of WWI. It’s a book that follows the successful publication of Cummings previous journal, The Journal of a Disappointed Man. In this more concise volume, Cummings offers his contemplative reflections on the end of the war, tinged with the realization that while the world celebrated peace, he was grappling with failing health. His body may have been succumbing to multiple sclerosis, but his emotional and intellectual clarity remained until the end. This journal is not only a vibrant historical document but also a profoundly moving and poetic piece of personal literature. - Summary by Adam Whybray
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
Section five are a last diary by W. N. P. Barbellian.
This is LibriVox recording. All LibriVox recordings are in the
public domain. For more information or to volunteer, please visit
LibriVox dot or February third, nineteen nineteen. Suffering does not
(00:26):
only insulate, It drops its victim on an island in
the ocean desert, where he sees men as distant ships passing.
I not only feel alone, but very far away from
you all. For what is my suffering? Not physical pain?
I have none. Pain brings clusters of one's fellows. The
(00:49):
toothache is intelligible for when I say I am grown
tired of myself, have outlived myself, am unseasonable. When MOPI
like a doomed swallow in November, it is something that
requires a John Gulsworthy to understand. The world to me
is but a dream or mock show, and we all
(01:13):
therein but pantalones and antics to my severe contemplations. This
used to be a transitory impression that amused my curiosity,
but it hurts and bewilders now that it has become
the permanent complexion of my daily existence. My long for
real persons and real things, tinsel and pictures and melancholy
(01:38):
substitutes to anyone heart hungry for the touch of real
hands and the sound of real voices. Acute mental pain
at intervalms seizes me with pincers and casts me helpless
into the whirlpool. It may be easy to spare or
the failure to find a home for me to go to,
But these are spasms of reality, the momentary opening and
(02:02):
closing of a shutter on life. As soon as they
are over, I want to relapse into the dull monotone
of misery and picture show. I've not left my room
since November eleventh. I eat well, sleep well, I mean,
in possession of all my higher faculties, those for feeling
(02:24):
and thinking. But I can't go out. I think sometimes
folk do not come to see me because I am
such a gruesome object. It's not pleasant to feel you
are gruesome. I've outstayed my welcome. I know everyone will
be relieved to hear of my death, no doubt for
(02:46):
my sake, as they will eagerly point out, but also
for their own sake, as I believe. Yet now and then,
in selfish and ignoble moods, I being an egotist fancy.
I'd like some loving hands to clutch at me in
a blind, ineffectual effort to save me in any condition,
(03:07):
if only alive. February fourth, nineteen nineteen. The last part
of yesterday's entry was maudlin tosh, entirely foreign to my nature.
I hereby cancel it the day's life. I woke at
seven when my desk, the Japanese print on the wall,
(03:29):
the wooden chair of my basin on it, the chest
of drawers were emerging out of a gray obscurity. I
had cattanuses of my legs, which ultimately shot out straight
and contracted up to my chin chill. Eight thirty when
Nanny came in and drew the blinds, letting in a
foggy light. It is bitterly cold. I hear noises in
(03:53):
the kitchen, A dull, mewing sound. This is the tap
being turned on. Then a scrape grape. She is buttering
my toast. Then breakfast drives two pieces of toast and
two cups of tea, for which I'm set up in
bed with pillows. Through the window on my left I
can see the branch of a walnut tree, and beyond
(04:15):
a laurel. The little squares of ancient glass are so
loosely fixed in the lead one is broken and open
the cardboard that the draft pours through and sometimes makes
wind enough to blow out my match for a cigarette.
As I eat, comes a heavy scrunch scrunch ride up
(04:37):
the front door, which is only a few feet away
from me and sealed behind a curtain. It is the
postman who puts the letters in the porch, gives her
a sounding knock, and goes away again. As I smoke
my cigarette, there is another scrunch scrunch, but this one
goes round to the back door. There is a hammering
(04:58):
on the door. They all know Nanny is deaf, and
I hear a rough, froty voice saying nearly cocked in
this time, and Nanny replying, yes, tis cold this morning.
This is the newspaper man who always shies half a
brick at a rat that haunts our garden. While reading
(05:20):
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. There's
a motor car along the Oxford Road. Then I hear
the clock. At the man I strike twelve sparrows chattering,
or a scolding kit in the garden. Presently a smell
(05:42):
of dinner comes through from the kitchen, and while it cooks,
N comes in with the hot water and helps me
to wash. All the afternoon I sleep or doze. At
four thirty I get up by a little careful arrangement
to get into my wheelchair and am taken to the fireside,
my legs having shot out in a tetanus. Meanwhile, they
(06:05):
have to be bent up before I can climb into
my arm chair. 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 little woman
who always, on all occasions wears large black boots, which
(06:26):
she says unnecessary on account of her barricose 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.
(06:49):
After Tea I read Gogol after supper Gogol. Then my
eye is aching. I stop and gaze into the fire.
Nanny reads me a lot of funny stories out of answers.
I listened with a set smile, still gazing into the fire.
(07:09):
I do not mind in the least, for to me
it is alway a mock show. Then came a biographical
study of Charlie Chaplin, his early struggles, his present tastes
and habits. What is Japanese chauffeur said of him in
the Pigeon English of a Chinaman, his favorite holiday retreat.
How he reads voraciously and always carries with him when
(07:31):
he travels a trunk full of books. Ah, my God
did not give their titles, et cetera. There was a
ridiculous likeness in all this to a critique of say
George Moore in the Bookman. It aroused my slumbering brain.
It interested me. En was absorbed. Thishs flashlight into a
(07:56):
strange new world where the life, thoughts, habits of mister
Chaplin were of transcendent interest, recalled me to reality. I've
been floating in a luxury of green. Now I flouted
circle and struggled back into full possession of my personality.
I was tickled, amused, amazed. Then N read me a
(08:19):
series of informative snippets. How to make your lamp burn
brighter by putting a spoonful of sugar in the oil well,
How black beetles not really beatles at all, How Alfred
Noise was a great poet. What a red bargee meant,
what a blue peter signified? At this my gorge rose
(08:42):
at last in the tones of a puff breasted pedagogue.
Addressing a small boy, I said, oh, don't you know
the famous line of R. L s about climbing into
a sea going ship when the blue peter is floating aloft.
Now this was a contempt or piece of pride, for
I only wanted to demonstrate to this gabby old bean
(09:04):
that I knew all about a blue peter, and it
was like her cheek to suppose I didn't. I experienced
the same irritation when she explained to me how to
go from Paddington to Victoria, or where the British Museum is.
Of a truth, I am no dream figure. Then the
(09:25):
veritable WNPB shows his bristling plage from every opening in
the wires of the cage. How petty intellectual pride has
been the bane of my life. Yet I must be
fair to myself. Who I should like to know has
(09:46):
received greater incentive to this vice? Have not inferior types
all my life choked me, bound me, romped over me.
But what a beautifully geometrical nemesis it all is. Here
I am in the last scene of the last act,
(10:06):
the ruthless, arrogant intellectual spending the last days of his
ruined life alone niclose companionship of an uneducated village woman
who reads answers. February eighth, nineteen nineteen, one hundred thousand
(10:27):
copies of Mary Bakasef's journal were sold in America alone.
If one hundred thousand copies of my book are sold,
that will mean five thousand for e Then I have
a second volume for post termus publication, the remainder of
(10:48):
my diary from March nineteen eighteen to the end, under
the sensational and catchpenny title of The Diary of a
Dying Man, beginning with Sir Thomas Brown's we are in
the power of no calamity while death is in our own,
and finishing up with Hamlet's Last worst words. The rest
(11:09):
is silence another five thousand day, and he a rich woman.
Timill show the icons. Every man has his own icon.
(11:29):
Secreted in the closet of each man's breast is an icon,
the image of himself, concealed from view with elaborate care,
treated invariably with great respect, by means of which the ego,
being self conscious, sees itself in relation to the rest
of mankind, measures itself therewith and in accordance with which
(11:49):
it acts and moves and subsists. In the self righteous
man's bosom, it is a molten image of a little
potentate who can do no wrong. In the egoists an idol,
loved and worshiped by almost all men, addressed with solemnity
and reverence, and cast in an immutable, brazen form. Only
(12:13):
the truth seeker preserves his image in clay covered damp rags.
A working hypothesis, a man towards his icon is like
the tenderness and secretiveness of a little bird towards its nest,
which does not know you have discovered its heart's treasure.
(12:36):
For everyone knows the liniments of your image and talks
about them to everyone else, save you and no one
dare refer to his own it is bad form, so
that in spite of the gossip and criticism that swirls
around each one's personality, a man remains sound tight and insulated.
(12:57):
The human comedy begins at the thought of the ludicrous unlikeness,
in many cases, of the treasured image to the real person,
as much very similitude about it, as say about the
bust by gordea Zerka. Heavens, what a toy shop will
(13:17):
be at the last day, when all our little effigies
are taken from their cupboards and wrapped and ranked along
beside us, shivering and nude. In that day, how few
will be able to say that they ever cried God
be merciful to me, a sinner, or a fool or
(13:38):
a humbug. The human tragedy begins as soon as one
feels how often a man's life is ruined by simple
reason of this disparity between the image and the real.
The image, or the man's mistaken idea of himself, like
an ignis fatus, leading him through duvious paths into the
(14:03):
morass of failure, or worse of sheer laughing stocks silliness.
The moral is Genofice Devron, my dear chap, quoting Greek
at your time of Life, February eleventh, nineteen nineteen. At
(14:24):
nine 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
(14:45):
not the book ordered at Vampas'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 Bees. I was so interested I let her
(15:06):
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, wandering. 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
(15:31):
Portrait of the Artist, a book which the mob will
take fifty years to discover, but having once discovered it,
will again neglect. It was cold enough to freeze a
brass monkey. I had had some diary to post up.
The diary seemed to lose all interest in attraction. It
was a sore temptation, but I decided to be a
(15:52):
stoic and wrote till eleven thirty, though my hands were
blue and my nose ran. Then I read Joyce, an
amazing book, just the book I intended to write, had
started it in fact, when the crash came. He gives
the flow of the boy's consciousness, rather than the trickle
of one thing after another, almost as well as baskisef.
(16:17):
I have never read anything so extraordinary as the latter's pages,
wherein she plums to the bottom and the dregs of
current consciousness. Her brain runs synchronously with her pen. She
eviscerates her current thoughts and records them exactly with a
current pen. It is difficult to do. I've tried it
(16:41):
in this journal and failed. I'm trying it now, but
is not coming very easily. What I like is Joyce's
candor and for similitude. I have tried that, but it's
no good. The publishers rejected two splendid entries about prostitutes
(17:02):
and other stuff. This is why I think, in truth
one hundred thousand copies will not be sold. My diary
is too unpleasant for popularity. It is my passion for
taking folk by the nose and giving them a wigging,
my fierce contempt for every kind of complacency. Stephen Devaless
(17:25):
Butler started a fashion with Edward Pontifex. Then there as
wells as George Ponderivo pont defects is a good name.
On the wall in front of me is a pattern
of ivy leaves. In odd moments of listlessness, I'm always
counting them. There are thirty perpendicular rows, with forty seven
leaves in each row. That's one thousand, four hundred and
(17:49):
ten leaves in all. You never think there are so many.
To look at the wall, I know to nausea that
there are forty little panes of glass in the window
on my left, only thirty nine, as well as broken
stopped with cardboard. There are seven bars, five thin and
two thick in the back of the wooden chair. There
(18:10):
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 climb that is milk backwards printed
on a wooden box I used as a book rest,
and now lying upside down. Yiliad spen. This is the
(18:35):
daily news backwards. I am for ever reading it backwards
as it lies about my bed upside down. Then there
are faces on the Morris patterned curtain, and in the fire.
I saw a face like this last night. It was
like me with a big hole excavated in the top
of the skull, carrying red hot holes and giving off
(18:58):
black smoke. The face was cold, black too. I might
have been some evil genie stoking the fires of hell heavens.
I wish I could discuss James Joyce with someone I
must write to. Ah dear old lad, have you ever
read James joyce literature? My boy, the most vivid book living,
(19:20):
obviously odd, biographical, candid, such realism, beauty of style. AM
so pleased to found him out, and am quite exultant
he is one of us. Ah Suki is an old
copper one and sings sometimes in splendid imitation of an
orchestra tuning up. I near very clearly the oboes and violins.
(19:45):
It makes me thirsty. My hand has gone too cold
and stiff to write more. My canary the jacket is
put over his cage at nightfall, and all night he
roosts so on a table close to my bed. When
I wake in the silence of the night, it is
difficult to believe that close to me there is a
(20:07):
little heart incessantly pumping hot red blood. I have a
sense of companionship at the thought, for I, too, silent,
concealed in my bed, possess a heart pumping incessantly, though
not so fast. I too, am an animal, little bird,
and we must both die a gasconade. I owe neither
(20:32):
a knee nor a bare gramercy to any man. All
that I did I did by my own initiative. To
this weaving assertion, I make one exception, ah, if for
no other reason than that he taught me to love music.
The end of section five of a last diary by W. N. P.
(20:57):
Barbellian
Section five are a last diary by W. N. P. Barbellian.
This is LibriVox recording. All LibriVox recordings are in the
public domain. For more information or to volunteer, please visit
LibriVox dot or February third, nineteen nineteen. Suffering does not
(00:26):
only insulate, It drops its victim on an island in
the ocean desert, where he sees men as distant ships passing.
I not only feel alone, but very far away from
you all. For what is my suffering? Not physical pain?
I have none. Pain brings clusters of one's fellows. The
(00:49):
toothache is intelligible for when I say I am grown
tired of myself, have outlived myself, am unseasonable. When MOPI
like a doomed swallow in November, it is something that
requires a John Gulsworthy to understand. The world to me
is but a dream or mock show, and we all
(01:13):
therein but pantalones and antics to my severe contemplations. This
used to be a transitory impression that amused my curiosity,
but it hurts and bewilders now that it has become
the permanent complexion of my daily existence. My long for
real persons and real things, tinsel and pictures and melancholy
(01:38):
substitutes to anyone heart hungry for the touch of real
hands and the sound of real voices. Acute mental pain
at intervalms seizes me with pincers and casts me helpless
into the whirlpool. It may be easy to spare or
the failure to find a home for me to go to,
But these are spasms of reality, the momentary opening and
(02:02):
closing of a shutter on life. As soon as they
are over, I want to relapse into the dull monotone
of misery and picture show. I've not left my room
since November eleventh. I eat well, sleep well, I mean,
in possession of all my higher faculties, those for feeling
(02:24):
and thinking. But I can't go out. I think sometimes
folk do not come to see me because I am
such a gruesome object. It's not pleasant to feel you
are gruesome. I've outstayed my welcome. I know everyone will
be relieved to hear of my death, no doubt for
(02:46):
my sake, as they will eagerly point out, but also
for their own sake, as I believe. Yet now and then,
in selfish and ignoble moods, I being an egotist fancy.
I'd like some loving hands to clutch at me in
a blind, ineffectual effort to save me in any condition,
(03:07):
if only alive. February fourth, nineteen nineteen. The last part
of yesterday's entry was maudlin tosh, entirely foreign to my nature.
I hereby cancel it the day's life. I woke at
seven when my desk, the Japanese print on the wall,
(03:29):
the wooden chair of my basin on it, the chest
of drawers were emerging out of a gray obscurity. I
had cattanuses of my legs, which ultimately shot out straight
and contracted up to my chin chill. Eight thirty when
Nanny came in and drew the blinds, letting in a
foggy light. It is bitterly cold. I hear noises in
(03:53):
the kitchen, A dull, mewing sound. This is the tap
being turned on. Then a scrape grape. She is buttering
my toast. Then breakfast drives two pieces of toast and
two cups of tea, for which I'm set up in
bed with pillows. Through the window on my left I
can see the branch of a walnut tree, and beyond
(04:15):
a laurel. The little squares of ancient glass are so
loosely fixed in the lead one is broken and open
the cardboard that the draft pours through and sometimes makes
wind enough to blow out my match for a cigarette.
As I eat, comes a heavy scrunch scrunch ride up
(04:37):
the front door, which is only a few feet away
from me and sealed behind a curtain. It is the
postman who puts the letters in the porch, gives her
a sounding knock, and goes away again. As I smoke
my cigarette, there is another scrunch scrunch, but this one
goes round to the back door. There is a hammering
(04:58):
on the door. They all know Nanny is deaf, and
I hear a rough, froty voice saying nearly cocked in
this time, and Nanny replying, yes, tis cold this morning.
This is the newspaper man who always shies half a
brick at a rat that haunts our garden. While reading
(05:20):
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. There's
a motor car along the Oxford Road. Then I hear
the clock. At the man I strike twelve sparrows chattering,
or a scolding kit in the garden. Presently a smell
(05:42):
of dinner comes through from the kitchen, and while it cooks,
N comes in with the hot water and helps me
to wash. All the afternoon I sleep or doze. At
four thirty I get up by a little careful arrangement
to get into my wheelchair and am taken to the fireside,
my legs having shot out in a tetanus. Meanwhile, they
(06:05):
have to be bent up before I can climb into
my arm chair. 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 little woman
who always, on all occasions wears large black boots, which
(06:26):
she says unnecessary on account of her barricose 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.
(06:49):
After Tea I read Gogol after supper Gogol. Then my
eye is aching. I stop and gaze into the fire.
Nanny reads me a lot of funny stories out of answers.
I listened with a set smile, still gazing into the fire.
(07:09):
I do not mind in the least, for to me
it is alway a mock show. Then came a biographical
study of Charlie Chaplin, his early struggles, his present tastes
and habits. What is Japanese chauffeur said of him in
the Pigeon English of a Chinaman, his favorite holiday retreat.
How he reads voraciously and always carries with him when
(07:31):
he travels a trunk full of books. Ah, my God
did not give their titles, et cetera. There was a
ridiculous likeness in all this to a critique of say
George Moore in the Bookman. It aroused my slumbering brain.
It interested me. En was absorbed. Thishs flashlight into a
(07:56):
strange new world where the life, thoughts, habits of mister
Chaplin were of transcendent interest, recalled me to reality. I've
been floating in a luxury of green. Now I flouted
circle and struggled back into full possession of my personality.
I was tickled, amused, amazed. Then N read me a
(08:19):
series of informative snippets. How to make your lamp burn
brighter by putting a spoonful of sugar in the oil well,
How black beetles not really beatles at all, How Alfred
Noise was a great poet. What a red bargee meant,
what a blue peter signified? At this my gorge rose
(08:42):
at last in the tones of a puff breasted pedagogue.
Addressing a small boy, I said, oh, don't you know
the famous line of R. L s about climbing into
a sea going ship when the blue peter is floating aloft.
Now this was a contempt or piece of pride, for
I only wanted to demonstrate to this gabby old bean
(09:04):
that I knew all about a blue peter, and it
was like her cheek to suppose I didn't. I experienced
the same irritation when she explained to me how to
go from Paddington to Victoria, or where the British Museum is.
Of a truth, I am no dream figure. Then the
(09:25):
veritable WNPB shows his bristling plage from every opening in
the wires of the cage. How petty intellectual pride has
been the bane of my life. Yet I must be
fair to myself. Who I should like to know has
(09:46):
received greater incentive to this vice? Have not inferior types
all my life choked me, bound me, romped over me.
But what a beautifully geometrical nemesis it all is. Here
I am in the last scene of the last act,
(10:06):
the ruthless, arrogant intellectual spending the last days of his
ruined life alone niclose companionship of an uneducated village woman
who reads answers. February eighth, nineteen nineteen, one hundred thousand
(10:27):
copies of Mary Bakasef's journal were sold in America alone.
If one hundred thousand copies of my book are sold,
that will mean five thousand for e Then I have
a second volume for post termus publication, the remainder of
(10:48):
my diary from March nineteen eighteen to the end, under
the sensational and catchpenny title of The Diary of a
Dying Man, beginning with Sir Thomas Brown's we are in
the power of no calamity while death is in our own,
and finishing up with Hamlet's Last worst words. The rest
(11:09):
is silence another five thousand day, and he a rich woman.
Timill show the icons. Every man has his own icon.
(11:29):
Secreted in the closet of each man's breast is an icon,
the image of himself, concealed from view with elaborate care,
treated invariably with great respect, by means of which the ego,
being self conscious, sees itself in relation to the rest
of mankind, measures itself therewith and in accordance with which
(11:49):
it acts and moves and subsists. In the self righteous
man's bosom, it is a molten image of a little
potentate who can do no wrong. In the egoists an idol,
loved and worshiped by almost all men, addressed with solemnity
and reverence, and cast in an immutable, brazen form. Only
(12:13):
the truth seeker preserves his image in clay covered damp rags.
A working hypothesis, a man towards his icon is like
the tenderness and secretiveness of a little bird towards its nest,
which does not know you have discovered its heart's treasure.
(12:36):
For everyone knows the liniments of your image and talks
about them to everyone else, save you and no one
dare refer to his own it is bad form, so
that in spite of the gossip and criticism that swirls
around each one's personality, a man remains sound tight and insulated.
(12:57):
The human comedy begins at the thought of the ludicrous unlikeness,
in many cases, of the treasured image to the real person,
as much very similitude about it, as say about the
bust by gordea Zerka. Heavens, what a toy shop will
(13:17):
be at the last day, when all our little effigies
are taken from their cupboards and wrapped and ranked along
beside us, shivering and nude. In that day, how few
will be able to say that they ever cried God
be merciful to me, a sinner, or a fool or
(13:38):
a humbug. The human tragedy begins as soon as one
feels how often a man's life is ruined by simple
reason of this disparity between the image and the real.
The image, or the man's mistaken idea of himself, like
an ignis fatus, leading him through duvious paths into the
(14:03):
morass of failure, or worse of sheer laughing stocks silliness.
The moral is Genofice Devron, my dear chap, quoting Greek
at your time of Life, February eleventh, nineteen nineteen. At
(14:24):
nine 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
(14:45):
not the book ordered at Vampas'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 Bees. I was so interested I let her
(15:06):
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, wandering. 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
(15:31):
Portrait of the Artist, a book which the mob will
take fifty years to discover, but having once discovered it,
will again neglect. It was cold enough to freeze a
brass monkey. I had had some diary to post up.
The diary seemed to lose all interest in attraction. It
was a sore temptation, but I decided to be a
(15:52):
stoic and wrote till eleven thirty, though my hands were
blue and my nose ran. Then I read Joyce, an
amazing book, just the book I intended to write, had
started it in fact, when the crash came. He gives
the flow of the boy's consciousness, rather than the trickle
of one thing after another, almost as well as baskisef.
(16:17):
I have never read anything so extraordinary as the latter's pages,
wherein she plums to the bottom and the dregs of
current consciousness. Her brain runs synchronously with her pen. She
eviscerates her current thoughts and records them exactly with a
current pen. It is difficult to do. I've tried it
(16:41):
in this journal and failed. I'm trying it now, but
is not coming very easily. What I like is Joyce's
candor and for similitude. I have tried that, but it's
no good. The publishers rejected two splendid entries about prostitutes
(17:02):
and other stuff. This is why I think, in truth
one hundred thousand copies will not be sold. My diary
is too unpleasant for popularity. It is my passion for
taking folk by the nose and giving them a wigging,
my fierce contempt for every kind of complacency. Stephen Devaless
(17:25):
Butler started a fashion with Edward Pontifex. Then there as
wells as George Ponderivo pont defects is a good name.
On the wall in front of me is a pattern
of ivy leaves. In odd moments of listlessness, I'm always
counting them. There are thirty perpendicular rows, with forty seven
leaves in each row. That's one thousand, four hundred and
(17:49):
ten leaves in all. You never think there are so many.
To look at the wall, I know to nausea that
there are forty little panes of glass in the window
on my left, only thirty nine, as well as broken
stopped with cardboard. There are seven bars, five thin and
two thick in the back of the wooden chair. There
(18:10):
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 climb that is milk backwards printed
on a wooden box I used as a book rest,
and now lying upside down. Yiliad spen. This is the
(18:35):
daily news backwards. I am for ever reading it backwards
as it lies about my bed upside down. Then there
are faces on the Morris patterned curtain, and in the fire.
I saw a face like this last night. It was
like me with a big hole excavated in the top
of the skull, carrying red hot holes and giving off
(18:58):
black smoke. The face was cold, black too. I might
have been some evil genie stoking the fires of hell heavens.
I wish I could discuss James Joyce with someone I
must write to. Ah dear old lad, have you ever
read James joyce literature? My boy, the most vivid book living,
(19:20):
obviously odd, biographical, candid, such realism, beauty of style. AM
so pleased to found him out, and am quite exultant
he is one of us. Ah Suki is an old
copper one and sings sometimes in splendid imitation of an
orchestra tuning up. I near very clearly the oboes and violins.
(19:45):
It makes me thirsty. My hand has gone too cold
and stiff to write more. My canary the jacket is
put over his cage at nightfall, and all night he
roosts so on a table close to my bed. When
I wake in the silence of the night, it is
difficult to believe that close to me there is a
(20:07):
little heart incessantly pumping hot red blood. I have a
sense of companionship at the thought, for I, too, silent,
concealed in my bed, possess a heart pumping incessantly, though
not so fast. I too, am an animal, little bird,
and we must both die a gasconade. I owe neither
(20:32):
a knee nor a bare gramercy to any man. All
that I did I did by my own initiative. To
this weaving assertion, I make one exception, ah, if for
no other reason than that he taught me to love music.
The end of section five of a last diary by W. N. P.
(20:57):
Barbellian
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