Bruce Frederick Cummings (1889–1919), who wrote under the pseudonym W. N. P. Barbellion, was a self-taught naturalist, the son of a journalist from Barnstaple, Devon. At the age of 22, in competition with university-trained candidates, he won a place on the staff of the Natural History Museum, South Kensington, where he worked on lice. By this time, though he did not realize it, he was already suffering from multiple sclerosis. His Journal of a Disappointed Man, published in the year of his death, records his passionate thirst for life and charts the progress of his disease.
How I hate the man who talks about the ‘brute creation’, with an ugly emphasis on brute. Only Christians are capable of it. As for me, I am proud of my close kinship with other animals. I take a jealous pride in my Simian ancestry. I like to think that I was once a magnificent hairy fellow living in the trees and that my frame has come down through geological time via sea jelly and worms and Amphioxus, Fish, Dinosaurs, and Apes. Who would exchange these for the pallid couple in the Garden of Eden? …
Palæontology has its comfortable words too. I have revelled in my littleness and irresponsibility. It has relieved me of the harassing desire to live, I feel content to live dangerously, indifferent to my fate; I have discovered I am a fly, that we are all flies, that nothing matters. It’s a great load off my life, for I don’t mind being such a micro-organism – to me the honour is sufficient of belonging to the universe – such a great universe, so grand a scheme of things. Not even Death can rob me of that honour. For nothing can alter the fact that I have lived; I have been I, if for ever so short a time. And when I am dead, the matter-which composes my body is indestructible – and eternal, so that come what may to my ‘Soul’, my dust will always be going on, each separate atom of me playing its separate part – I shall still have some sort of a finger in the Pie. When I am dead, you can boil me, burn me, drown me, scatter me – but you cannot destroy me: my little atoms would merely deride such heavy vengeance. Death can do no more than kill you …
I probably know more about Lice than was ever before stored together within the compass of a single human mind! I know the Greek for Louse, the Latin, the French, the German, the Italian. I can reel off all the best remedies for Pediculosis [infestation with lice]: I am acquainted with the measures adopted for dealing with a nuisance in the field by the German Imperial Board of Health, by the British R.A.M.C., by the armies of the Russians, the French, the Austrians, the Italians. I know its life history and structure, how many eggs it lays and how often, the anatomy of its brain and stomach and the physiology of all its little parts. I have even pursued the Louse into ancient literature and have read old medical treatises about it, as, for example, the De Phthiriasi of Gilbert de Frankenau. Mucius the lawgiver died of this disease, so also did the Dictator Sylla, Antiochus Epiphanes, the Emperor Maximilian, the philosopher Pherecydes, Philip II of Spain, the fugitive Ennius, Callisthenes, Alcman and many other distinguished people including the Emperor Arnauld in 899. In 955, the Bishop of Noyon had to be sewn up in a leather sack before he could be buried. (See Des Insectes reputés venimeux, par M. Amoureux Fils, Doctor of Medicine in the University of Montpellier, Paris, 1789.) In Mexico and Peru, a poll-tax of Lice was exacted and bags of these treasures were found in the Palace of Montezuma (see Bingley, Animal Biog., first edition, iii). In the United Service Magazine for 1842 (clix, 169) is an account of the wreck of the Wager, a vessel found adrift, the crew in dire straits and Captain Cheap lying on the deck – ‘like an ant-hill’.
So that as an ancient writer puts it, ‘you must own that for the quelling of human pride and to pull down the high conceits of mortal man, this most loathesome of all maladies (Pediculosis) has been the inheritance of the rich, the wise, the noble and the mighty – poets, philosophers, prelates, princes, Kings and Emperors’.
In his well-known Bridgewater Treatise, the Rev. Dr Kirby, the Father of English Entomology, asked: ‘Can we believe that man in his pristine state of glory and beauty and dignity could be the receptacle of prey so loathsome as these unclean and disgusting creatures?’ (Vol. I, p. 13). He therefore dated their creation after the Fall.
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 pill boxes with little bits of muslin stretched across the open end thro’ 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.
In this fashion he has bred hundreds from the egg upwards and even hybridized the two different species!
In the enfranchised mind of the scientific naturalist, the usual feelings of repugnance simply do not exist. Curiosity conquers prejudice …
I am over 6 feet high and as thin as a skeleton; every bone in my body, even the neck vertebrae, creak at odd intervals when I move. So that I am not only a skeleton but a badly articulated one to boot. If to this is coupled the fact of the creeping paralysis, you have the complete horror. Even as I sit and write, millions of bacteria are gnawing away my precious spinal cord, and if you put your ear to my back the sound of the gnawing I dare say could be heard …
As, for all practical purposes, I have done with life, and my own existence is often a burden to me and is like to become a burden also to others, I wish I possessed the wherewithal to end it at my will. With two or three tabloids in my waistcoat pocket, and my secret locked in my heart, how serenely I would move about among my friends and fellows, conscious that at some specially selected moment – at midnight or high noon – just when the spirit moved me, I could quietly slip out to sea on this Great Adventure. It would be well to be able to control this: the time, the place, and the manner of one’s exit. For what disturbs me in particular is how I shall conduct myself; I am afraid lest I become afraid, it is a fear of fear. By means of my tabloids, I could arrange my death in an artistic setting, say underneath a big tree on a summer’s day, with an open Homer in my hand, or more appropriately, a magnifying glass and Miall and Denny’s Cockroach. It would be stage-managing my own demise and surely the last thing in self-conscious elegance! …
We discuss post mortem affairs quite genially and without restraint. It is the contempt bred of familiarity, I suppose, Eleanor [his wife] says widows’ weeds have been so vulgarised by the war widows that she won’t go into deep mourning. ‘But you’ll wear just one weed or two for me?’ I plead, and then we laugh …
I become dreadfully emaciated. This morning, before getting off the bed I lifted my leg and gazed wistfully along all its length. My flabby gastrocnemius [calf muscle] swung suspended from the tibia like a gondola from a Zeppelin. I touched it gently with the tip of my index finger and it oscillated …
My bedroom is on the ground floor as I cannot mount the stairs. But the other day when they were all out, I determined to clamber upstairs if possible, and search in the bedrooms for a half-bottle of laudanum, which Mrs — told me she found the other day in a box, a relic of the time when — had to take it to relieve pain.
I got off the bed on to the floor and crawled around on hands and knees to the door, where I knelt up straight, reached the handle and turned it. Then I crawled across the hall to the foot of the stairs, where I sat down on the bottom step and rested. It is a short flight of only 12 steps and I soon reached the top by sitting down on each and raising myself up to the next one with my hands.
Arrived at the top, I quickly decided on the most likely room to reach first, and painfully crawled along the passage and thro’ the bathroom by the easiest route to the small door – there are two. The handles of all the doors in the house are fixed some way up above the middle, so that only by kneeling with a straight back could I reach them from the floor. This door in addition was at the top of a high but narrow step, and I had to climb on to this, balance myself carefully, and then carefully pull myself up towards the handle by means of a towel hung on the handle. After three attempts I reached the handle and found the door locked on the inside.
I collapsed on the floor and could have cried. I lay on the floor of the bathroom resting with head on my arm, then set my teeth and crawled around the passage along two sides of a square, up three more steps to the other door which I opened and then entered. I had only examined two drawers containing only clothes, when a key turned in the front door lock and Eleanor entered with — and gave her usual whistle.
I closed the drawers and crawled out of the room in time to hear Eleanor say in a startled voice to her mother: ‘Who’s that upstairs?’ I whistled, and said that being bored I had come up to see the cot: which passed at that time all right.
Next morning my darling asked me why I went upstairs. I did not answer, and I think she knows.
I am getting ill again, and can scarcely hold the pen. So good-bye Journal – only for a time perhaps.
Source: W. N. P. Barbellion, Journal of a Disappointed Man, London, Chatto & Windus, 1919.