One hundred years ago today, WNP Barbellion scrawled his final diary entry. “Self-disgust,” he wrote. Ravaged by multiple sclerosis at just 28, this one word was all he could manage, before his hand was too unsteady to go on. He had been recording his daily life – and, latterly, the daily encroachment of death – since his first entry when he was 15: “Am writing an essay on the life-history of insects and have abandoned for the time being the idea of writing on ‘How Cats Spend their Time’.” His diary would be published in 1919 as The Journal of a Disappointed Man, to wide acclaim but it is sadly little known nowadays.
Below that final “Self-disgust”, it is declared that Barbellion died just two months later, on 31 December 1917. In fact, Barbellion was the pseudonym of Bruce Cummings, who lived for another two years, long enough to see the Journal published, enjoy the adulation and write a follow-up; he actually died in October 1919, aged 30. This mistruth cast doubt on the Journal’s authorship, and some even speculated that it was the work of HG Wells, who had written its introduction. “I wish I was a quarter as clever as that,” Wells responded. “Barbellion is, of course, a pen name ... It is a genuine diary.”
To write a diary is to construct a version of life from myriad possibilities, a carefully selected sample, sliced to suit the diarist’s purpose — that is, to amuse and be amused. “I lie out of vanity,” Barbellion wrote, in a September 1916 entry. “And then I confess to lying – out of vanity too … Even this last reflection is written down with an excessive appreciation ... that it shall raise a smile.” After the Journal was published, he said: “No man dare remain alive after writing such a book.”
It’s not that Cummings disliked facts: he was a zoologist by training and had a day job classifying insects at the Natural History Museum. But he hid his inner life from colleagues, writing: “Surely no man’s existence was ever quite such a duplicity as mine.”
It was only when Cummings was peremptorily exempted from military service in 1915, aged 26, that he discovered he had multiple sclerosis (a diagnosis hitherto withheld from him). Cummings sensed his life would be cut short by the disease, that he could not live the future he had hope for, nor “convince others of what I might have done — had I lived”. He did something audacious instead: constructed his own doppelgänger, a wilder voice that refused to go quietly. Death became a new beginning, as Barbellion began to imagine himself as a spectral force, haunting his readers through the diaries. “As I become more static and moribund, they become more active and aggressive,” he wrote, envisaging his own words roaring by daytime and glowing “phosphorescent” at night, threatening to “blow up from spontaneous combustion like diseased gunpowder”.
The Journal hit me like an explosion when I first chanced upon it, around a decade ago, on a rack outside a secondhand bookshop. I’d not long been diagnosed with a degenerative eye condition and was still coming to terms with the prospect of diminishing sight. In Barbellion I found a companion in disappointment, and he has remained faithfully close at hand ever since. In this age of social media, self-help and mandatory happiness, compelled to show only our “best” selves — glossed, glib and filtered — it is a relief to be brought up short by someone unafraid to deal in the worst.
“I am dying,” he wrote on 12 October 1917, “but you are already a corpse. You have never really lived … Do you think I would exchange the communion with my own heart for the toy balloons of your silly conversation? ... Or my present tawdry life for yours as polished and neat as a new threepenny bit?”
Tell me, Barbellion.
“I would not.”
David Bradford is a writer and tweets as WNP Barbellion: @WNP_Barbellion. The Journal of a Disappointed Man is published as a Penguin Classic on 2 November.
This article was amended on 30 April 2022, to correct Barbellion’s age when he died.
