Can you Teixeira asks, 2.12.20, lend me that book by James Joyce (Portrait of the Artist), which you once wrote to me about? I see Barbellion praises it enthusiastically in the new diary.
Would you like me to lend you A Last Diary or have you bought it?
Your Uncle Joseph was in disgrace yesterday. We have a girl trio of musicians here, who play at tea-time and eke after dinner. The pianist reports that he said to her:
“I have been to Japan. I was very ill there and I found myself in the arms of a Japanese woman.”
To-day he stopped me in the road and said:
“I wish I could speak Dutch, sir, as well as you speak English. I once learnt a continental language, but I mustn’t speak it now. What it was” (throwing out his arms) “you can guess....”
I had read Barbellion’s two books without sharing Teixeira’s admiration for them, in part because I thought that a book of self-revelation so unreserved should only have been published posthumously, in part because it was incongruous—to use no stronger word—to find a man, who had aroused wide-spread compassion by what was taken to be the account of his last hours, reading with relish the sympathetic press notices which it brought him.
To this criticism Teixeira replies, 5.12.20:
Thank you for your two letters and the loan of James Joyce.... Barbellion I like and almost love—I should love him entirely but for a common strain in him that makes itself heard occasionally—but then I was taught very early in life to make every allowance for men of any genius, whereas you look for the public-school attitude towards all and sundry. Apart from this, B. seems to me to have borne almost unparalleled suffering with remarkable courage and to have shown a good deal of pluck besides in laying bare his soul in the midst of it all.
You see, if one cared to take the pains, one could make you detest pretty well everybody you know and like. For everybody has a mean, petty, shabby, cowardly side to him; and one has only to tell you of what the man in question chooses to keep concealed. B. chose to reveal it; that’s all about it....