“This man is my devoted friend and truth to tell I get on with him better than I do with most people. I like his gamey flavour, his utter absence of self-consciousness and his doggy loyalty to myself. He may be depraved in his habits, coarse in his language, boorish in his manners, ludicrous in the wrongness of his views, but I like him just because he is so hopeless. If he only dabbled in vice, if he had pale, watery ideas about current literature, if he were genteel, I should quarrel.”
The entries that show Barbellion's attitude toward what may be called the minor activities of social life are illuminating. These are the latest activities to be acquired and, in a way, testify to or set forth the individual's development or limitations.
Companionship with one's fellows is necessary to the mental health of man, and it is of prime necessity that he should secure their good opinion. The loss of esteem and the knowledge that he is reprobated and held in contempt and aversion causes a stress that invariably has its baneful effect, particularly upon a sensitive, self-conscious youth.
Barbellion was the type of individual who sits in ready judgment on his fellows, and oftentimes his judgment was violently prejudiced. He had little community feeling. As a youngster he was ostracised by his school fellows because he was different, and he felt alien. He never played games with them, but went off on long solitary rambles after school hours. Nor did he form intimacies with his masters.
“I presented such an invertebrate, sloppy, characterless exterior that no one felt curious enough to probe further into my ways of life. It was the same in London. I was alien to my colleagues. Among them only R. has ventured to approach my life and seek a communion with me. My wife and child seem at a remote distance from me.”
In another connection he says,
“A day spent among my fellows goads me to a frenzy by the evening. I am no longer fit for human companionship. People string me up to concert pitch. I develop suspicions of one that he is prying, or of another that he patronises. Others make me horribly anxious to stand well in their eyes and horribly curious to know what they think of me. Others I hate and loathe for no particular reason. There is a man I am acquainted with concerning whom I know nothing at all. I should like to smash his face in. I don't know why.”
Barbellion retained many infantile traits in his adult years and these were displayed in his attitude and conduct toward people.
At twenty-six he said,
“I have grown so ridiculously hypercritical and fastidious that I will refuse a man's invitation to dinner because he has watery blue eyes, or hate him for a mannerism or an impediment or affectation in his speech. Some poor devil who has not heard of Turner or Debussy or Dostoievsky I gird at with the arrogance of a knowledgeable youth of seventeen.... I suffer from such a savage amour propre that I fear to enter the lists with a man I dislike on account of the mental anguish I should suffer if he worsted me. I am therefore bottled up so tight—both my hates and loves ... if only I had the moral courage to play my part in life—to take the stage and be myself, to enjoy the delightful sensation of making my presence felt, instead of this vapourish mumming. To me self-expression is a necessity of life, and what cannot be expressed one way must be expressed in another. When colossal egotism is driven underground, whether by a steely surface environment or an unworkable temperament or, as in my case, by both, you get a truly remarkable pain—the pain one might say of continuously unsuccessful attempts at parturition.”