Backlisted - The Journal of a Disappointed Man by W.N.P. Barbellion

Episode Date: April 26, 2020

W.N.P Barbellion's The Journal of a Disappointed Man, first published in 1919, is the subject of this episode of Backlisted. Joining John and Andy to discuss this remarkable book are novelist Claire Fuller and nature writer Will Atkins. In addition, John has been reading The Oxford Companion to Food by Alan Davidson while Andy talks about Nikita Lalwani's new novel You People.Timings: (may differ due to variable advert length)10'44 - The Oxford Companion to Food by Alan Davidson14'59 - You People by Nikita Lalwani 20'21 - The Journal of a Disappointed Man by W.N.P Barbellion* To purchase any of the books mentioned in this episode please visit our bookshop at uk.bookshop.org/shop/backlisted where all profits help to sustain this podcast and UK independent bookshops.* For information about everything mentioned in this episode visit www.backlisted.fm*If you'd like to support the show, listen without adverts, receive the show early and with extra bonus fortnightly episodes, become a Patreon at www.patreon.com/backlisted Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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Dine-in only until 11am. Yes, it's the rambly bit at the beginning of the thing. You know, we're all five weeks into lockdown now. This has been a long week. Yeah, a very long week. I keep expecting the weeks to get better. Do you? Yeah, I don't know why.

It's just my optimistic nature, Andy. But of course they don't. Of course. Of course they don't. Of course they don't. My pessimistic nature suggests otherwise. I'm not pining for nature. I've got woods in one direction and the sea in another direction. I'm very, very lucky, right?

But I'm pining for an art gallery. I don't want to look at any more nature. I want to look at some man-made triumphs, please. You're sick of the spring. I am! It's not the same online, is it, all those pictures? It really isn't. It's not the same as in real life.

It's like these attempts to have kind of social gatherings online I find very unconvincing, I have to say. I don't know, lots of people kind of you know asking other people if they can hear them and drinking wine with sort of rictus grins and pretending it's all fine which it kind of isn't really it's like a it's like a publisher's party by any other name yeah at least you get to fix your own wine, I suppose. That is true. So I recorded, I'm trying to do my bit for society and inspired by Randy Newman's social distancing song. I recorded this last week and lock-listed patrons

got to hear this last week, but we thought it might be nice for everyone to hear it. Wash your hands, don't touch your face. Wash your hands, don't touch your face. Wash your hands, don't touch your face. Wash your hands and please stay safe. That's beautiful. It's gorgeous, Andy. It's beautiful. It's gorgeous, Andy.

It's gorgeous. It gets better each time I hear it. So that's the backlist of film music when I change the words. But I was so enthused by that and also by reading Craig Brown's new book, which is about the Beatles. Can you imagine a book that I would enjoy more than a massive 600-page book by Craig Brown about the beatles there is literally no book that had designed during a lockdown as well it's just brilliant funny we're going to talk about it on another episode but inspired by that i have recorded another social distancing song but this time uh it's a Beatles related song,

but I've changed the words. Win or lose, sink or swim. One thing is certain we'll never give in From me to you Heart to heart We all stand apart Brilliant. Very good.

Brilliant. Well, and the episode hasn't even started properly great um shall we crack on no i've done a whole album and i'd like i'd like you to sit there and listen to it there probably is an album worth isn't there must be loads of very very good songs about not being able to touch i'm in the middle of writing an email to my publisher saying now the reason i'm too i'm so late with my book is twofold one the global calamity and two i'm recording an album of social distancing lyrics of beatles cover versions and spin-offs is that okay with you i'm sure they'll be fine. Of course, they'll be fine. You'll have to release it in the next three weeks.

Oh, yes. It's like all great pop music, Claire. It captures a moment and then it's gone. Yes, three weeks, obviously. Obviously, everything will be fine in three weeks. We have to believe. Good. Let's go.

Okay. Hello and welcome to Backlisted, the podcast that gives new life to old books. Today, you find us in South Kensington, meandering on our way from the Natural History Museum to the Albert Hall to see a Beethoven symphony performed. But we're in no hurry, distracted by the faces and the clothes of almost everyone we meet, fretting about the irregular beatings of our heart. everyone we meet, fretting about the irregular beatings of our heart. I'm John Mitchinson,

the publisher of Unbound, the platform where readers crowdfund the books they really want to read. And I'm Andy Miller, author of The Year of Reading Dangerously. And joining us today from the far corners of this United Kingdom are Claire Fuller. Hello Claire. Hello. Hello. Claire didn't start writing fiction until she was 40. Her first novel, Our Endless Numbered Days, won the 2015 Desmond Elliot Prize. Her second, Swimming Lessons, was shortlisted for the Encore Prize and her third, Bitter Orange, is longlisted for the International Dublin Literary Award. Congratulations on that. listed for the International Dublin Literary Award. Congratulations on that. Yes, but there are

something like 156 novels long listed for that award. It's brilliant. I didn't know that. Well, good luck. Good luck. Publishers love that prize for that very reason

because the odds are slightly better of getting long listed than most but it's still an achievement and a wonderful prize no it's a brilliant achievement claire also writes flash fiction and short stories and many have been shortlisted in competitions she's won the bbc opening lines short story competition and the royal academy pin drop prize her fourth novel unsettled ground will be published in 2021 and in addition to being a wonderful writer i can tell you that claire is a good egg i do not award egg status that's true good eggery Lightly. You do not dispense it. Claire is a beacon of good humour and common sense.

Oh, thank you. We're also joined today by Will Atkins. Welcome back, Will. Hello, Andy. Welcome back. Hello, Will. Hello, Will. I should have said hello, Andy and Claire and everyone else. Thank you, thank you. Will is the

author of The Moor about England's moorlands and The Immeasurable World, a travel book about the world's deserts which won last year's Stanford Dolman Travel Book of the Year awards. Congratulations. He also writes for The Guardian, the FT, Harper's and Granter. This is his second appearance on Backlisted. He joined us last year for our episode on Great Expectations by Charles Dickens, where one of my happiest memories is the look on his face when we played him excerpts from Mike Reed's musical adaptation of Great Expectations, sung by Darren Day. He didn't really expect that's the way things were going to go. It was an unforgettable moment for me.

But he too is a good egg. Thank you. So we have two good eggs joining us today. John and I are both curate's eggs, I decided. I should hope so. Speaking both curate's eggs, I decided. I should hope so. Speaking of curate's eggs, the book they have chosen for us to discuss today is one close to your heart, Andy, this one, The Journal of a Disappointed Man by W.N.P. Barbellion, published in 1919 by Chatter and Windus. Barbellion being the pseudonym of the writer and naturalist Bruce

Frederick Cummings. Yes, I absolutely love this book. As long-time listeners will know, it's been on the podcast. It's been mentioned on the podcast several times. It might even have been mentioned on the very first episode of Backlisted all those years ago. You had it as your pinned tweet, a quote from this book, for a long time. Maybe there yes i did have that i had that passage pinned as a tweet i mean we're all quite highly strung at the moment aren't we i was going to read it out later i will read it out later but it's like one of my favorite things not just from this book but from any book it's like a combination of a yell of rage at the sky and a mission statement and an idea of how to create you know how to be an aesthetic person how to approach your art and all those things look let's be honest this is the highlight of my week and year and on some

level i we've engineered all of that listed so we could do this book on that no no pressure everyone no but this is this really is one of my favorite books and so before we start and and before i ask john what he's been reading this week i just want to say i just want to ask my friend john mitchinson did you enjoy it i absolutely loved it it was i it's one of those books it suddenly now kind of swum into the if I ever think about journals or diaries or essential texts that you would want to give to somebody about the difficult process of moving out of childhood into adulthood, I think this is as great a book on that subject that's ever been written. And the added, as we'll discuss, the added quality that it has of a man also in his early 20s having to having to

cope with illness and then the the onset of certain death makes it as just a unique text I would put it in the very close to the top of the of the best books I read in a very long time this is the third time I've read it and I went on and read the last diary as well, which we'll talk about. And I found it incredibly moving this time. Very, very moving. Context isn't a myth, is it? Who you are and where you are and what you're doing when you read a book. No.

And whether you've read it before or not read it before. I mean, so this, I found this very powerful. Thank you for engineering it, Andy. I mean, I trust your judgment, obviously, but this is something else, I think. But anyway. John. Yeah. John, anyway, come on. What have I trust your judgment, obviously, but this is something else, I think. But anyway. John. Yeah. John, anyway, come on.

What have I been reading? Don't hold out on me. What have you been reading this week? Well, I decided to share something that I read on an almost constant basis. It's my, I think maybe my favourite reference books, or one of my favourite reference books. It's the Oxford Companion to Food by Alan Davidson. It's a sort of touchstone book for me because it showed me that reference doesn't have to be written by panels of faceless kind of North American academics. It can still be the heroic work of one human being. In this case, Alan Davidson, who was a diplomat, a British diplomat for many years with a kind of fantastic reputation for being eccentric. diplomat for many years with a kind of fantastic reputation for being eccentric. He famously cancelled a banquet in Laos when he was the ambassador there because he'd heard there was a

species of the giant catfish that had never been seen, never been recorded by Western science, had been caught in the north of the country, the parbuk catfish. So he cancelled the reception, left everybody, went up north, and was away for about three weeks, found it, sent the stuff back to the Natural History Museum, of which more later, with what he considered to be the eight outstanding mysteries that were still unsolved about this fish. He was relieved of his post, but diplomacy's loss was uh gastronomy's gain because he went on to write the three of the i think three of the great books on on mediterranean seafood

um he was he was basically he'd made lots of notes about mediterranean seafood and he was put in touch with jill norman the editor of the legendary Penguin Cookery Library. And she commissioned him to turn that book into Mediterranean seafood. And then after that came Seafood of Southeast Asia and North Atlantic Seafood. But his magnum opus, which was commissioned by Oxford in 1976, it took him 22 years to write, is The Oxford Companion to Food. It starts with aardvark and it ends with zupper inglese every possible food stuff preparation of food there is not a single recipe in it he was that's the only rule he set himself he's just a glorious writer he has a wonderful humorous way of

disemboweling um what could be quite dry subjects like, you know, the sort of boiling point of fat and so on. He's wonderful. I'll read you two little tiny little bits so you get a bit of the feeling for it. On garlic, he said, to say that by the end of the 20th century, garlic had conquered the world would be something of an exaggeration. There are still ethnic and cultural groups, some in Britain and North America, for for example who view it with dislike and distrust who simply do not use it but it is coming close to complete penetration of the kitchens of the world and if folklore is correct its spread must be bringing ever closer the extinction of the vampire it's just it's just gorgeous to have that in a in a reference book um here he is on peas pudding a food stuff from my uh from my homeland up in the northeast and this is what he has to say about it

it has been suggested that the old nursery rhyme peas pudding hot peas pudding cold peas pudding in the pot nine days old referred not to the inevitable appearance of the dish at all meals but to the making of a fermented product like a semi semi-solid version of Indonesian tempeh or a primitive form of Japanese miso. Certainly, if the procedure and the rhyme were followed, boiling, cooling and leaving for nine days, microorganisms naturally present would have caused some kind of fermentation to take place. But unless some kind of starter had been used the most likely result would have been spoilage and there's another bit to find a little bit was him on cheeks he talks about cheeks and cheeks are included in stews pies and sausages because cheek muscles are exercised constantly

the meat needs to be tough and may need long cooking cod cheeks on the other hand are tender morsels perhaps because cod are not eating all the time and do not exercise their cheeks in making noises. It's one of my favourite books. Is it in print? Is it in print? Totally. I'm pleased to say not only is it a great book,

it's also a book that will, I think, be there forever and has been revised twice. Anyway, that's me. Andy, what have you been reading i've been reading a new novel by nikita lalwani now nikita has been a guest on backlist before she came on with her friend matt thorne to talk about something happened by joseph heller and in fact she's going to be with us next time uh matt and nikita are coming back to talk about The World According to Garp by John Irving. But I wanted to talk about Nikita's new novel now because I didn't want to embarrass her by talking about it in front of her next time.

I picked this up out of interest and politeness and i put it down utterly gripped by it i thought it was completely wonderful and um it's called you people uh it was published by viking um in that absolute perfect time to publish a novel three weeks ago so nikita has been working on this book for some time uh here it is it's arrived there are no bookshops open in currently in which you can buy it but there is an audio book it's available on kindle it's getting really great reviews and it's absolutely terrific. So if you want a novel which is gripping and funny and moving and tremendously well-observed, which for a novel set in a pizzeria in South London is quite a claim. But nonetheless, I just thought it was so, so enjoyable.

And it's a novel about a pizzeria that looks like any other italian restaurant but the chefs who make the pizzas and the people who work there are sri lankan and half the kitchen staff are illegal immigrants it's set about i think it's about 15 years ago and at the center is a character called tuli who is the proprietor of the restaurant and i'll read you a little bit just from the uh from quite early on um just to set the scene uh the character here nia is a waitress who works at the restaurant. In those days, they were all a bit in love with Thule, everyone who worked for him in the restaurant. They couldn't help it. Somehow it came with the territory, a solid admiration leavened with a kind of vulnerable, unrequited romance. Nia considered this oddity often.

She really did mean all of them. Male or female, front of house or in the kitchen, take your pick. The waiting staff, Ava from Spain, the gaggle of South Asian cooks, Shan, Rajan, Guna, Vasanthan, even a Shan, the clipped French Tamil guy who shared the lease with him, purveyor of crucial expertise from working at the Pizza Express. This is how they appeared to her, even though, or maybe because, Thule was so infuriating and endearing in equal measure. It wasn't just because they were beholden to him. You could argue that he had rescued everyone who was there from something or someone. But this was more to do with his manner, with his way of being.

Lovely, lovely. And actually what the novel is about, I think, is it's a novel about generosity of spirit generosity of spirit and a novel that believes in people whoever they are and wherever they come from and whatever they do and regular listeners to this podcast will appreciate that i haven't made that sound much like my sort of thing uh you know generosity of, it doesn't usually float my boat. But I just, you know, I really believe in books that, I really believe that you come to certain books when, or certain books find you when you need them, at the moment you need to read them. And as the message of You People by Nikita Lalwani

is fundamentally up with people that's what yeah i need to hear at the moment and i'm sure what we all need to hear so it's great and if you're gonna buy it buy it now but i'm about 50 pages in and i'm absolutely loving it so it's funny i had to do a um chair a transatlantic book group as you find yourself doing in these insane times on wednesday evening on bernardine everisto's novel girl woman other which i had to read i'd read it last year and had to reread it again and nikita's a bit like bernardine everisto in the same way that they make characters that that you immediately fall in love with they make it look very very simple to do it it isn't't. It's just such a gift. And the feeling of sort of life, as I say, 50 pages in,

you know that pizzeria. You know, it's so familiar. It's so part of all our experiences of South London. But the characters are so vivid, so strong. So I'd definitely finish it. But great, good choice. Now it's commercials. Two freshly cracked eggs any way you like them. Three strips of naturally smoked bacon and a side of toast.

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Hurry this $1 enrollment sale of Planet Fitness end July 18th. $49 annual fee applies. See Home Club for details. We're about to talk about The Journal of a Disappointed Man by W.M.P. Barbellion. He is one of the first examples of the voice of the 20th century. The voice of the discontented man, the young person, the person who is thinking intellectually and spiritually simultaneously and adolescence a kind of projected adolescence and you know i can find numerous examples of that let me ask our guests um will when did you first hear read that particular voice when did you first find WNP Barbellion?

It's quite clear. I clear this memory, actually, of when I first came across the book. I was living in, it's probably 20 years ago, I guess. I was living in Cardiff, and I found this little Sutton paperback of this book in Oxfam or Council Research or somewhere like that. of this book in Oxfam or Cancer Research or somewhere like that. And it had a picture of a young man in kind of flannels, lounging in a meadow with a butterfly net beside him. So kind of bucolic looking.

And I think the reason I was drawn to it was kind of partly that enticing title, but also the first line, which is January the 3rd, 1905, when he's a teenager. He writes, I'm writing an essay on the life history of insects and have abandoned the idea

of writing on how cats spend their time. I know! The frankness, the unliterariness, the childlike quality of that opening line, which I found seductive. But this book sat on my shelves i think probably for 10 years and then i for whatever reason probably the same reasons rediscovered it and for a period became kind of totally obsessed with it and i have a few copies just um you know covered in annotations and post-it notes and and exclamation marks written in the margins. And I mean, I think I have a habit of coming on to your show

and talking about books about which I attempted to write a book. And so I was on here about Great Expectations last year, and I started this aborted book about the landscapes of Great Expectations, which, you know, got nowhere. And likewise, I had this idea 10 years ago, writing a book about Barbellion, who was this extraordinary character. And then after probably a year of sort of piecemeal sporadic research, realised actually somebody's already written the definitive biography

of Barbellion, and that's Barbellion. Yeah. written there the definitive biography of barbellion and that's that's barbellion yeah as you were saying andy it's the kind of but you you come back to and and i've like you i've been reading it in this this um strange era of illness and incarceration where we're living through. And yeah, it's profoundly moving, as it always is, but particularly now. So, Will, you mentioned the title. I think the title is the first example of the genius of the book.

I don't want to read any books that aren't called The Journal of a Disappointed Man. It's the best possible title, isn't it uh if you respond to the title you're going to love the book if you if you understand the slightly eeyore-ish humor at work claire when did you first uh discover the journal of a disappointed man well it was definitely through Backlisted and your recommendation. Hooray! Yay!

But whether that was the first episode, you know, or the first episode combined with Twitter, because how long has Backlisted been going? Four years. Four years, okay. So I must have heard about it and then bought it and I read it in January last year, so January 2019, and I absolutely loved it.

And I keep track of the books that I read on Goodreads and I write just a mini kind of little review really for myself just to remind myself what I've read. And then at the end of the year I do kind of my top ten reads of the year and the journal A Disappointed of my top 10 reads of the year and the journal of a disappointed man was in there of course but I just also want to read you just the very start of that of the review from goodreads that I wrote because it just kind of sums it all up for me so I wrote I can't remember the last book where I underlined as many lines or laughed as much or cried, actually cried, quiet rolling tears while my husband slept beside me in bed.

It's so moving, so funny. He's just such a real character. And when I finished, I felt bereft. I really felt like I had lost him. And then I read it again. So I've read it a second time. And that was really interesting because I spotted so much more stuff and it was quite interesting to see about the edits

because he had edited it himself. So the decisions he had made, I was kind of more aware of those the second time. That was very interesting. Because it's an autobiographical journal i'm just going to read out the biography that's on the back of this vintage penguin edition of the journal of a disappointed man because it's interesting the there is a blurb which is quite good on the inside cover, but the life is the blurb really, to some extent. So I'm going to read out the life first. WNP Barbellion was born in 1889. That's not his

real name though, is it? His real name is Bruce Frederick Cummings. And he chose the name WNP Barbellion. Barbellion was the name of a chain of sweet shops near the Natural History Museum in South Kensington. I just love that. It's so great. And WNP stands for Wilhelm Nero Pilot. The names, in his words, are history's three greatest failures. Kaiser Wilhelm, the Emperor Nero and Pontius Pilate.

He wrote to his brother on Christmas Day 1917 to his brother Hal, and he's just chosen the name Barbellion with which the book will be published. He knows it's going to be published.

And he wrote to his brother, WNP Barbellion! I think it is appropriately inflated and therefore extremely suitable! And that is a real Barbellion thing, which we'll talk about. You know, the idea of a kind of very knowing inflation of self-dramatizing persona, which is based on his actual persona, but isn't him. Anyway, his father was a newspaper reporter in a West country town, unable to afford him any other education than that offered to a local

private school. It was for this reason that the boy, although showing a remarkable interest in natural history, was apprenticed to his father as a reporter at the age of 16. He detested newspaper work and managed to find a job at the Marine Laboratory Plymouth for £60 a year, but had to throw it up when his father's illness left him responsible for his family. He persevered in his spare time studies finally being offered a post at the South Kensington Natural History Museum in 1912. His health, never robust, grew steadily worse until he was told he had only a few years to live. It was under this sentence that he struggled with his biological work, that he married and that he completed this book. He died on the 31st

of December 1919. John, what are some of the subjects of this book? What is this book about? Well, this book is about being inside somebody's head, first and foremost. I mean, it's full of incident. He starts in Devon working for his father, as it were, kind of fitting his natural history, his naturalist kind of stuff around that work, and as you said, hating it. He then makes the huge move to London, and he spends a lot of time in London on his own, flirting with attractive women, of time in London on his own, flirting with attractive women, going to concerts. One of the incidental pleasures of this book is he writes really wonderfully about music. I think he goes to a lot of concerts at the Albert Hall. There are sort of two narratives. There's a narrative of his

development as a writer, and then there is the narrative of illness. Even before he gets diagnosed in 1915 with multiple sclerosis, there's a sense of him being doomed, of his illness, this panic about his heart, that the sense, I've never had the more visceral sense of what it must be like to be inside a body that isn't working properly. And this causes him deep angst and anxiety about his future. Out of this comes a kind of a sort of antic melancholy. But he is so Hamlet-like as well, that kind of, he amuses himself in order to distract himself from the kind of looming sense of his own mortality. And while his work, you know, he's very funny about his work on lice. Once he gets to London, that's really where the kind of

the book takes off. On March the 10th, 1919, in his journal, he wrote the following analysis of the Journal of a Disappointed Man. And Claire, I'm going to come to you after I read this out. Maybe you would find something to read us which illustrates one of these points. So this is the author's analysis of his own work after he'd written it. And these are the topics that he thinks the book is about. One, ambition. Two two reflections on death three intellectual curiosity four self-consciousness five self-introspection six zest of living. Seven, humour.

Eight, shamelessness. And he goes on to say, my confessions are shameless. I confess, but I do not repent. The fact is my confessions are prompted not by ethical motives, but intellectual. The confessions are to me the interesting records of a self investigator that's so good do you think he successfully sums up his work well that's a lot of stuff to take in so yes probably he's definitely an investigator and has amazing skills of observation i think the thing that's

absolutely fascinating is for a book which is tremendously knowingly self-conscious he even knows that that self-consciousness is his theme yeah yeah yeah is a topic of the book right it's dolls within dolls this book it's trying to find a moment of truth, package it for the reader, then reflect upon the way it's been packaged for the reader, then see the negative of that package as well, and then reflect back on that. Now, that sounds awful, except it's that wonderful ebbing and flowing of personality

that comes off the page. And like you were saying, he's got such a brilliant eye. He can turn it on lice or himself or other people. Did you have an example, Claire? I have a really good lice example. Go, go. We love the lice. We love the lice. I love the lice. This is really short. So the other day, a member of the staff of the Lister Institute called to see me on a lousy matter and presently drew some live lice from his waistcoat pocket for me to see.

They were contained in pillboxes with little bits of muslin stretched across the open end, through which the lice could thrust their little hypodermic needles when placed near the skin. He feeds them by putting these boxes into a specially constructed belt, and at night ties the belt around his waist, and all night sleeps in Elysium. He is not married. That's exactly right, though. That's that kind of brilliant mixture of the eye and the humour. Yeah, yeah.

He really knows how to place a line, doesn't he? You know, at the end of that, that comment is just so utterly perfect. You can't not laugh aloud when you've when you read that you just what you were saying too about the editing is a and going back to your list andy zest for living which is um which is such a key thing in the book but here he is in the same year 1914 june the 30th there are books which are dinosaurs and it's interesting, dinosaur doesn't have the same connotation in 1914 as it does now. For him, this was just something that was big and magnificent. There are books which are dinosaurs. Sir Walter Riley's History of the World, Gibbon's

Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. There are men who are dinosaurs. Balzac completing his human comedy. Napoleon, Roosevelt. I like them all. I like express trains and motor lorries. I enjoy watching an iron girder swinging in the air or great cubes of ice caught up between iron pincers. I must always stop and watch these things. I like everything that is swift or immense. London, lightning, popo catapetal. I enjoy the smell of tar, of coal, of fried fish, of a brass band playing a list rhapsody. And why should these foolish mainage shout women's rights just because they burn down a church? All bonfires are delectable. Civilisation and top hats bore me. My own life is like a tame rabbit's. I had a long tail to lash it in feline rage. I would return to nature. I could almost return to chaos.

There are times when I feel so dour, I would wreck the universe if I could. And then in brackets, he says, I could eat all the elephants of Hindustan and pick my teeth with the spire of Strasbourg Cathedral. 1917. After three years of Armageddon, I feel quite ready to go back to top hats and civilisation. It's so him.

He has this brilliant flourish and then he says, actually, it was bullshit. After three years of war, I'd go back to Civilisation. But I mean, it's amazing, right? Listeners, why are you even still listening to this? Why haven't you paused it? Why haven't you paused it? And go and buy

the book because it's such a brilliant book. Every single thing that you're hearing, the whole book is as good as this right it is not like will we just heard claire reading an improbably uh revelatory and amusing passage about lice barbellion i think you know you you said to me before we recorded that one of the things that really appeals to you is he's a nature writer, but he's not sentimental, is he? He doesn't have sentimentality in him. I don't think it's a kind of characteristic he possesses. There's an entry towards the beginning of the journal, and he writes, it's best for a man to try to be both poet and naturalist not to be too much of a naturalist and so overlook the beauty of things or too much of a poet and so

fail to understand them or even perceive those hidden beauties only revealed by close observation so I think he he understood the kind of diversity of ways of understanding the natural world uh and and his own condition for that matter and i don't think he had very much patience with the idea of nature as a place one goes to as one might go to a church for kind of solace but at the same time i mean i i i live near a a bit of heathland and i was out there the other day and and on a blazing blue sky spring day and surrounded by this blazing yellow gorse and and it does feel like a gift sometimes and i think barbellion is wonderful at kind of conveying And I think Barbellion is wonderful at kind of conveying both his fascination for the natural world as a scientist, but also this kind of effort he makes to articulate the sheer kind of wonder and joy of being in the natural world.

I'll read a short bit from an August entry, I think, again, fairly early on. So when he was still living in Devon before he went to London. And he writes, it's very hot, so went to S, wherever S may be, and bathed in the salmon pool, stretched myself out in the water, delighted to find that I had at last got to the very heart of the countryside. I was not just watching from the outside on the bank. I was in it and plunging in it too, up to my armpits. What did I care about the British Museum or zoology then? All but the last enemy and object of conquest I had overcome. For the moment, perhaps even death himself was under the heel. I was immortal. In that minute, I was always prostrate in the stream,

sunk deep in the bosom of old Mother Earth who cannot die. And so it's kind of over the top and exclamatory, but it's so characteristic of his honesty and this kind of vein of pure love that stretches through this book. That vein of pure love, yes. Yes, I agree. So when The Journal of a Disappointed Man was first published in 1919, it was a great success.

It was widely reviewed and there was a follow-up volume. And then after Barbellina died, there was another another volume and it's sort of come and gone from the public consciousness ever since but it was mentioned by edwardson aubin in his novel some hope and i've actually i've read this passage out uh before on backlisted but it's so good that i thought we could hear it again, but this time read by somebody who can actually read. This is Alex Jennings. Oh, brilliant reading. From his reading of the Patrick Melrose novels.

Patrick arrived downstairs before Johnny and ordered a glass of Perrier at the bar. Two middle-aged couples sat together at a nearby table. Patrick took his drink over to a small book-lined alcove in the corner of the room. Scanning the shelves, his eye fell on a volume called The Journal of a Disappointed Man, and next to it a second volume called More Journals of a Disappointed Man,

and finally, by the same author, a third volume entitled Enjoying Life. How could a man who had made such a promising start to his career have ended up writing a book called Enjoying Life? Patrick took the offending volume from the shelf and read the first sentence that he saw. Verily, the flight of a gull is as magnificent as the Andes. Verily, murmured Patrick. Hi.

Hello, Johnny, said Patrick, looking up from the page. I just found a book called Enjoying Life. Intriguing, said Johnny, sitting down on the other side of the alcove. I'm going to take it to my room and read it tomorrow. It might save my life. Mind you, I don't know why people get so fixated on happiness, which always eludes them, when there are so many other invigorating experiences available, like rage, jealousy, disgust, and so forth. Don't you want to be happy? Asked Johnny.

Well, when you put it like that. Smiled Patrick. Oh. So good. Yeah, so good. Alex Jennings, please read everything. Alex Jennings, please read the journal at this point. God, he would be good. He would be so good.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. Claire, you said when you read it, you underlined bits and you laughed and you cried. What were the sorts of thing that really grabbed you? There's so much poignancy and pathos without but but without losing his sense of humour. There's a way he looks at women and young young women. And I love how he looks at the young. There's an Irish woman he sees at a concert, and even though she's with another man, he thinks there's some attraction between them. And he follows her and then actually tries to put an ad in the paper to find her. And the paper

rejects it in case he's a white slave trader. All that kind of stuff. Often how he looks, I think, at older women, he's a little bit derogatory. They often have fat legs or bandy legs or they coo too much at babies. But all that still, you know, I wasn't offended. It made me laugh. And actually, I had to keep reminding myself this man is 25 or whatever age and unattached you know I kept forgetting that this he was in his 20s which is you know also kind of amazing but so there's a couple of bits I want to read out because as his health declines some of his observations change because he's no longer out in the world he can't see the people. And as he becomes bedbound, he then describes either what he remembers, and still that is so utterly vivid, amazingly vivid, just from memory,

or he describes what he can see out of his window. And then kind of in his final days, he can only describe the sounds of what goes past the window. So, you know, just that decline in what he sees is so moving. So the first bit I want to read is just his observation of a woman on a bus, which is also funny as well. So it's on a bus the other day, a woman with a baby sat opposite. The baby bawled and the woman at once began to unlace herself, exposing a large red udder, which she swung into the baby's face. The infant, however, continued to cry and the

woman said, come on, there's a good boy. If you don't, I shall give it to the gentleman opposite. And there's one more line. Do I look ill-nourished? One more line. Do I look ill-nourished? Oh, it's brilliant. Oh, it's just brilliant. And then just kind of skipping forward a long way, 1917, I think he's 27. A perfect autumn morning, cool, fine and still. What sweet music a horse and cart make,

trundling slowly along a country road on a quiet morning i listened to it in a happy mood of abstraction as it rolled on further and further away i put my head out of the window so as to hear it up to the very last until a robin's notes relieved the nervous tension and helped me to resign myself to my loss just great stuff yeah yeah i i think one of the things about the book actually um is how well constructed it is it's it to be able to get these various types of entry to work together in a in it is incredibly artful and we know that indeed he left lots of stuff out to create the book that he wanted to create. I mean, as I found as a, you know,

as someone who's written memoir, I find his attitude to memoir totally extraordinary. He was a great admirer of the Russian writer, Mary Bashkirtsev. He felt when he read Mary Bashkirtsev that that was speaking to him. And I feel a bit about Barbellion as he seems to have felt about Mary Bashkirtsev,

that there's something in the way. John, you've said I had this. This is what I had pinned to my Twitter. Yeah, read that. It's beautiful. This was an entry in june 1916 i toss these pages in the faces of timid furtive respectable people and say there that's me you may like it or lump it but it's. And I challenge you to follow suit, to flash the searchlight of your self-consciousness into every remotest corner of your life and invite everybody's inspection.

Be candid. Be honest. Break down the partitions of your cubicle. Come out of your burrow, little worm. As we are all such worms, we should at least be honest worms. Glorious. I've got the hair on my arm standing up on end, actually, while I read that.

You know, the thing about the book is we were talking though it's a book about the impossibility of knowing oneself in the round, of knowing oneself whole, but that as a writer one can fail gloriously in the attempt to do it. You know, it's a way of approaching the subject of the self in the hope that taken as a whole it will add up into a human being. I think the attempt is entirely successful. When you get near the end of the last diary, I mean, I know it's a cliché to say it's almost unreadable.

I find it almost unreadable. Do you not think, I mean, I don't know what you feel, Will, as the disease really takes hold of him. It's a painful book to read. Of course, painful because of his own kind of agony and the rawness of his confrontation with himself and with his predicament, but also simply because of the kind of the laser-like precision

with which he describes life and the inevitability of his death, but death generally and the. And the natural world. Yes. And the violence of the natural world and the human world and despair and confinement. And a disappointed man, but for me, above all, he's a frustrated man because he has some extraordinary achievements, not least this book, in his life.

And yet he's perpetually frustrated, and particularly towards the end, because this experience, which is so central to his character in his life, which is being in nature, being in that pool in the woods that I read about earlier on, for example, he's denied him.

And so, as you were saying, Claire, this sense of him being successively, month by month, year by year, withdrawn from the world and in the end just hearing birdsong. Yeah. Of course, there's extraordinary tragedy to that, but there's a kind of deathliness to this book from the very outset, even before Zil.

Definitely. I wonder how much of that was in the editing because, you know, how much of it's obviously hindsight, you know, he was editing knowing he was really near the end. So how much of that was kept in for us to discover, very cleverly for us to discover, I thought that was great. He knows what he's doing. I mean, you're right, I think, Andy, when you say the comprehension,

but there's a beautiful bit very near the end where he says, in this journal, my pen is a delicate needle point, tracing out a graph of temperament so as to show its daily fluctuations, grave and gay, up and down, lamentation and revelry, self-love and self-disgust. You get here all my thoughts and opinions, always irresponsible and often contradictory or mutually exclusive, all my moods and vapors, all the varying reactions to the environment of this jelly, which is I, which is that wonderful thing. It's still the scientist, still looking at himself as a sort of an experiment. I mean, that's the thing.

He's dissecting himself as he's, and that's almost what makes it so moving. He doesn't want to hide the worst of himself. It is the most remarkable book. Claire, I felt on this go round that one of the things that creates the sense that Will was talking about, which is of not just of one life lived, that Will was talking about, which is of not just of one life lived, but actually there's a universal sense in which we are seeing everybody's life passing at speed before our eyes in this book. One of the reasons for that is he gets better as a writer as the book goes on.

as a writer, as the book goes on. You know, there's a very interesting coming together of his diagnosis and his talent in 1917 is what I felt on this go round. Definitely, definitely he improves. But then he's also growing up. You know, he's 13 when he starts the diary. One would hope that you're a better writer at 29 than at 13. But his reflections on life and death and how that is universal are wonderful. And as a reader, it does make you, every time I put the book down,

I was reflecting how that affected me or the people around me and also what's going on at the moment in the world. So let me ask both our guests. In his introduction, H.G. Wells refers to a thread of beauty which runs through the book and says that any sensitive reader will have spotted it, so there's no need for him to identify it. And then after Barbellion reads that, he records in his journey that he doesn't know what H.G. Wells is talking about.

And I wondered, well, I've got a theory of what i think the thread of beauty is but i wondered if anyone else has got a uh what is the thread of beauty in this book to which wells is referring does anyone want to have a fear try a theory will i mean you were referring it's love love is the thing that you it's yeah i mean i guess it's it's the thread of beauty it's his it's him it's his character it's his it's his courage it's not it's not the natural world for all those kind of um detailed knowledgeable scholarly sometimes descriptions of of the natural world whether it's the countryside where he grew up in Devon around Barnstable or, you know, a Laos.

There's not that kind of lush Laurentian descriptive prose about nature, partly because he knows it so well. He knows what he's writing about in such detail. Yeah, I think the the beauty is is in him and actually I I was just thinking about I mean everything at the moment everything we read everything we watch every work of art has this this heightened resonance somehow and every book I hear about new book I hear about is a book for these times but I was thinking about, I mean, reading this particular book at this moment and particularly looking at the entries for Spring, for example, I found very powerful.

I wondered as well, Claire, whether this thread of beauty might refer to, I mean, one of the stories told in between the lines of the book is that of Barbellion's wife. Eleanor, yeah. Yeah, perhaps, you know, love of other people, love of women. I did really enjoy the way that his love for Eleanor, his wife, really kind of crept up on him, didn't it? Yes.

I thought that was very beautiful, that thread. But I don't know if it would be that because somehow that starts somewhere halfway through, I think, Eleanor comes on the scene. There's a lady, a woman whose initial is M, that he's desperately in love with at the beginning when he's just a teenager, I think. But that thread of beauty, yeah, maybe it is love of people and connections with people. And then his love for Eleanor and his love for his child was so poignant because he

felt like he really kept her at bay for a long time. And I thought, how could you not love your child? And then it just became so apparent that he was deliberately trying not to love her for her sake and for his, because that was just so difficult for him. That was very moving. But but then also, as Will said, maybe maybe it's the thread of beauty is courage, the courage to keep writing right up to the end and recording all of it, all of it in all its awfulness and its loveliness, maybe. I'm sure we've all enjoyed being gamed by HG Wells. Who knows? All these threads. Okay, so, of course, no discussion of the Journal of a Disappointed Man would be complete without mentioning the chroniclers of contemporary disappointment, thosebellions in song half man half biscuit

many half man half biscuit lyrics deal with the disappointing nature of everyday life backlisted listeners will of course be familiar with the song baguette dilemma for the booker prize guy uh um but i thought i would share with you the my uh listeners uh contributed to this the top five countdown of disappointing half man half biscuit songs uh so at number five the light at the end of the tunnel is an oncoming train. Actually, a line from a Robert Lowell poem. At number four, Westwood Ho, massive letdown. At number three, the classic All I Want for Christmas is a Ducla Prague away kit. At number two, the half man, half biscuit song,

The Lark Descending. at number two the half man half biscuit song the lark descended and that means that number one from half man half biscuit song national shite day there's a man with a mullet going mad with a mallet in millets now that now that is a line that is a line that could have come out of barbellion but there is that punk there is that punk defiance in him right to the end isn't it you pity me i pity you i pity you with your stupid normal little life look what i've done i've got a wife and a baby and i'm still going and i love it it's it is the most energizing exciting inspiring book to read i i mean i speak as a reader and a personally as a writer on this there's this incredible bit near the end of his life where the book has been uh published and he's read his own reviews do you remember this april the 29th 1919 he says half and cut having cast my bread upon the waters it amuses me to

find it returning with the calculable exactitude of a tidal movement for example in my journal i stroked public opinion and now it purrs to the tune of two and a half pages of review the saturday review i cursed with bell book and candle and voila, they mangle me in their turn. Here we go. This is the sort of response to everyone here who's ever been reviewed will know this is how you should approach your reviews, right? For the most part, the reviewers say what I have told them to say in the book. One writes that it is a remarkable book. I told him it was. Another says that I am a conceited prig. I have said as much more than once. A third hints at the writer's inherent madness. I queried the same possibility. It is amusing to see the flat contradictions. There is no sort of unanimity of opinion about any part of my complex character. One says a genius, another not a genius. Witty, dull, vivacious, dismal, intolerably sad, happy, lewd, finicky, quiet humour humor wild and vivacious wit

poor old reviewers friends and relatives say i have not drawn my real self but that's because i've taken my clothes off and they can't recognize me stark this book this book is a self-portrait in the nude. Brilliant. You know, that is what you want. You want to rage against not just the dying of the light, but all these people queuing up to tell you who you are and what you

are that you already told them that they wouldn't know if you hadn't given them a clue. Yeah. I do think that for all that kind of punky angst and that conceited priggishness that he talks about, there's also that strand of real vulnerability and boyishness. And you're reminded, or, I am at least frequently that

he's, he is, he's a young man and, um, I don't always believe him. And at the same time, I don't think he always wants us to believe him. There's a, there's a, there's a kind of, there's an adolescent quality to, to the way he expresses his anger sometimes, which for all the kind of his verbal sophistication is sometimes quite transparent, I think. And it's one of the reasons that the book is so moving and so tender, I think, is that you can sometimes see through it. Yeah. And Will, you're so right. And he doesn't leave it out.

That's the thing thing he has that adolescent thing what matters to the adolescent is the is the need to be right in the moment yeah right so when he's saying it in the diary what matters to him is expressing the truth of the moment imposing it upon the reader and then the next entry he'll say something like oh i've changed my mind yeah yeah it does exactly always don't it's glorious yeah all that publishing stuff i i mean i agree with all that but so wonderful to see that we have the same hang-ups about reviews and about stuff coming late and you're just waiting for the postman for your proofs to come come on and then he gets he gets the letter from hg wells

saying i hope you like the preface before the publisher has even sent in the preface oh i loved all that i could could just relate to all of that. Yeah, yeah. And there, Barbellion-like, we must end it prematurely. Thank you to Claire and William for helping us find luster in this amazing literary artefact, to Nicky Birch for enabling us to meet in five different locations but sound like we're in the same room, to Unbound for keeping the faith and buying us ice creams during the interval. I'm going to double down on that thanks to Nicky. Nicky is keeping the wheels on this particular rickety car at the moment.

And the thing is, I voted for you as an independent candidate, Nick. Oh, we're laughing at our own in-jokes. It's the sign of an excellent episode. We got no choice. I got no choice. Sorry. I got no choice i got no choice sorry i got no choice you can download all 109 episodes plus follow links clips and suggestions for further

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