Dictionary of National Biography, 1927 supplement/Cummings, Bruce Frederick
CUMMINGS, BRUCE FREDERICK (1889–1919), diarist and biologist, more generally known by the pseudonym W. N. P. Barbellion (the initial letters concealing the bravado of Wilhelm Nero Pilate), was born at Barnstaple, Devon, 7 September 1889, the sixth and youngest child of John Cummings, a member of the staff of the Devon and Exeter Gazette, by his wife, Maria Elizabeth Richards. His interest in natural science awoke about his twelfth year, and shortly afterwards he began to keep a journal. In 1911, self-taught, and having already contributed in his spare time to The Countryside, The Zoologist, and other journals, he won in open competition a post at the Natural History Museum, South Kensington. His health, however, began to fail, with the result that he turned his attention more and more upon his journal and himself, and, while contributing to such scientific periodicals as the Proceedings of the Zoological Society, the Journal of Botany, and Science Progress, began to write articles of a more general nature. In 1915 he married Miss Eleanor Benger. But his disease, disseminated sclerosis, the nature of which had not been disclosed to him, though it had been revealed to his wife before their marriage, steadily gained ground, and in 1917 he was compelled to resign his museum appointment. He died at Gerrard’s Cross, Buckinghamshire, 22 October 1919, leaving a widow and one daughter.
Cummings’s fame will rest upon the record of his life, The Journal of a Disappointed Man, consisting of extracts from his voluminous diaries (1903–1917) edited by himself and published in March 1919. It presents the picture of a sensitive, courageous, critical personality, ambitious and greedy of life, but thwarted by limited opportunity and persistent ill-health; the style is exceptionally nervous and vivid; and the outlook, tragic and humorous in turn, is characterized by a scientific and intellectual objectivity that raises Barbellion to the rank of the great diarists; ‘A self-portrait in the nude’ was his own description. Two posthumous books followed. Enjoying Life and Other Literary Remains (published November 1919), which he himself passed for press, contains several essays too long for the Journal, and other papers on literary and scientific subjects; and A Last Diary (published 1920), a pendant to the Journal, is important chiefly for showing how in his last months the bias of his life, to use his own words, had ‘gone across from the intellectual to the ethical’.
[The works cited; preface to A Last Diary (The Life and Character of Barbellion, by his brother, Arthur J. Cummings); private information.]