I'm Dying Laughing: The Humourist

by Christina Stead

  The houses opposite the hotel were very old. There were little stores boarded up and poor laundries, restaurants dismal in the mixed tail-end of the rue de l’Université. She walked around bursting with joy. ‘It is, it is, it is!’ Down on the quays, where the bookcases were now shut, there was clear evening light, the smoke of the Sansonnet tug on the Seine, the line of trees on the Quai de Louvre. ‘It is here, I am here, life, new life.’ When she returned to the hotel, they said there was ‘un monsieur’ waiting for her. There he was looking out through the lace curtains of the dark sitting room; Howard had come for her.

  ‘How did you know?’ she asked.

  ‘You said the rue St.-Benoît.’

  He took her to dinner. They walked across the river through the courts of the Louvre to a small dark restaurant in the Palais-Royal, the famous Véfour. ‘Uncle Maurice comes here.’

  He had arranged for her to join the American group at the conference, as a ‘private observer’ like himself, so that she could go to all the sessions with them.

  ‘But we won’t go to all. You’ll see Paris, too.’

  She became part of the American group. When Stephen did not call for her, she went to the congress herself, sitting near the front of the auditorium. She could write it up when she got back. One afternoon, it was hot. The Russian writers, sober and straitlaced, were on all the afternoon reading their forty-page dissertations, either in Russian or in translation. She noticed the American writers gathering at the side and signalling to her. But she remained in her seat. Then she saw them laughing, and in a moment Stephen had come down the aisle and leaned over her,

  ‘Come along, we’re playing hookey.’

  They had their photographs taken in an ante-room, then Walden and Barrie and Stephen and Emily marched off along the Seine. Walden and Barrie were going to the Right Bank, Emily and Stephen turned left, went up the boulevard St-Michel and sat down in a café.

  ‘I knew your feet were tired,’ said he; ‘I know you by now. In a little while, when you’re rested, we’ll take a taxi to the Ile-de-la-Cité—it’s only a couple of minutes.’

  ‘Oh, that little island in the river that tags along after Notre-Dame?’

  He said, ‘I’ve an uncle lives there, Uncle Maurice. He’s an old bachelor, an aesthete, a do-nothing and I’m like him. Or I should be if it weren’t that a hellgrammite bit me once and I’ve been biting my luck ever since.’

  ‘What’s a hellgrammite?’

  ‘A bug you use for fishing.’

  ‘A hellgrammite bit you?’

  ‘Yes, it really did. But I meant, one day I found out my family uses labour spies, goons, strike-breakers, the lurid lot. Someone told me, reproached me at Princeton. I didn’t believe it. I went and found out. I wrote a book about it. I’ll give it to you. A pamphlet it is—Labor Spies.’

  ‘What did the Howards say to the book?’

  ‘It was brought out by the left press and under a pseudonym—you know, Justin Clark, I told you. I knew Mother read it, for she had a quiet talk with me about all the good the Howards have done the country. She is very proud of their services to the country. Men on strike are undermining that good. She didn’t put it in those words.’

  ‘She didn’t mind?’

  ‘I’m her favourite son—the only one that is. I only mean to say, I’m really another Uncle Maurice and she is thankful I am not. He went to the Sorbonne—so did I for a year. He collects—all sorts of oddities, delicious objects that I like and admire. It took me years to understand him, for it seemed boyish to me—collecting. He goes to concerts just like me, has a faithful friend or two he loves—just a happy Howard.’

  ‘It’s such a beautiful way to live, the way you live: all with different personalities, leaving each other alone and admiring each other. A united family. I do love it. It’s like a picture gallery somewhere in Italy—all the portraits, elegantly drawn by some master of the day—tray raffinay. A friendly master—a court painter—not a hater of the rich. Till now, I never knew the rich were decent.’

  He laughed, ‘I don’t think Anna thinks so; she knows too much, but she is a good woman; she won’t give her class away.’

  In the taxi he said,

  ‘I’ve been thinking about you, Emily, thinking a lot.’

  ‘I’m not sure I’m glad. I don’t stand thinking about.’

  ‘I think you do. Do I stand thinking about?’

  ‘Oh, you—you’re the first honest-to-god scion I’ve met, on my own. My Cousin Laura met a few. You’ll meet her when we get back—that is, if you don’t drop me at the foot of the gangplank. But I’ve never called her men by their first names.’

  ‘Are you engaged to someone back home—or, I mean, got a steady?’

  ‘Oh, no—someone I dropped or who dropped me. Partly I came away to let some fresh air blow through me. It would have been ten dollars in my pocket if he’d never been born. Oh, I told you about him—B. D.’

  ‘So, the post is vacant, isn’t it?’

  ‘Oh, stop kidding, Stephen: it still hurts.’

  ‘You don’t love him, do you?’

  ‘Oh, no—you’re full of love, you’re sending out a beam and someone gets in the way and you think it’s him; it’s you lighting him up.’

  ‘Then let the beam shine on me! Have me!’

  She looked at him; she began a tremulous smile,

  ‘I suppose this is what they do in your mauve, decayed circles. Laura would understand, I guess.’

  ‘I don’t care about Laura. I don’t like her.’

  ‘You don’t know her: every man falls for her.’

  ‘You’re not like other women,’ he said.

  ‘I know better than to ask how. And what about the rich witch you’re all but engaged to? And that respectable, highborn cousin with the moolah—in England?’

  ‘I’ll write to your parents if you like.’

  ‘My mother died long ago. I had a stepmother. My father’s a pillar of small town society, makes ovens. I have a brother Arnold, who is younger and married and prolific. You better write to me. If you write to them, they’ll think their living’s gone. Besides, what do you want to write for? To find out if I’m married? Or been in jail or am a dangerous red or have debts?’

  ‘To tell them we’re going to get married.’

  ‘Oh, golly—my goodness. That’s what happens to Laura.’

  ‘Oh, down with Laura—whoever she is.’ They got out of the taxi at the church of St-Louis-en-l’Ile and walked down the narrow high-banked street.

  ‘Am I walking? I must be floating,’ she said. ‘How did we get here?’

  He looked down at her, touched. She looked up, ‘You look really beautiful here; it suits your El Greco face.’

  ‘You can’t tell a man he’s beautiful,’ he said.

  ‘I can. The first time I looked at you, the light from the ocean was shining on your face, while you were speaking at table: and you had a toothpick in your hand. I thought, What a saintly face!’

  ‘God forbid.’

  ‘An El Greco saint, I saw later—those long folds and lemony look.’

  He laughed, was pleased. ‘There is some distant Spaniard in my family. You may see a little of him in Uncle Maurice. You’ll understand him and he’ll understand you. He lives in a spindling reflected light from all the windows in his museum of a home; but he understands people, he never interferes, never criticises, always knows what to do to help—if he likes you. A sort of Cousin Pons, too.’ He had to explain that.

  She exclaimed, ‘Oh, my, oh, my, my neglected education. Oh, will I have to sit up all night on the kitchen chair, trying to catch up with you and your sister Florence and sister Brenda and Uncle Maurice?’

  ‘Shut up,’ he said in an undertone ‘and here we are.’

  She usually spent half a day sightseeing, half a day at the congress. She arrived at its doors each day very elated—from the faubourg St-Antoine, from the Luxembourg, from the Ste-Chapelle—what a city, what people, and
here in the hall, what freedom lovers; ‘the Hall of Fame on roller-skates from all points of the compass,’ she said.

  Programmes, meetings, subcommittees, reports, lunches, dinners given by the Americans to foreign writers, and by others to them, the great reception at the Opéra with the Garde Républicaine in full dress, boots, Roman helmets, plumes, brass, straps, lining the staircase. Passing them, irregular clouds of visitors in simple clothing, street dress, the garments they wore in their rooms, at artists’ parties, people whose faces shone or looked away diffidently at the shine of the brasses and arms; gauds put out by the gallant French Republic, where literature is always honoured—for the shy, awkward, touchy, nondescript but acutely observant citizens of the Republic of Letters.

  Tom Barrie made a speech. The shambling, flask-faced workman appeared on the planks while the photographers crowded between legs and desks. He said, ‘Our writers must learn that the working class which has created a great civilization in the Soviet Union is capable of creating a similar civilization in our own countries. The working class has heroism, intelligence, courage. We must never forget that a class which has such depths of creative power deserves only the best literature we can give.’

  Louis Aragon, the French writer, said, ‘I returned from the Soviet Union and I was no longer the same man. However, there remained a thousand bonds, fine as a spider’s web for me to break. That I have had the strength to break them, is, I know, due to practical work, to the social work which was carried on by the proletariat of my country.’

  ‘I am floating, Stephen, I am floating. Now I am glad I am a scribbler. There is a future. Tom Barrie is right; France sheds light on everything. We have a future.’

  ‘Wait; plenty is to come.’

  The embassies received them. In their dress of poor relations, they were announced by servants in black clothes and gloves, all the artisans of typewriter and pen, the unknown, the known, all named: ‘Monsieur André£ Gide, Madam Anna Seghers, Monsieur Thomas Mann, Monsieur Forster, Monsieur Thomas Barrie, Monsieur Kantorowicz … Henri Barbusse, Romain Rolland, Martin Nexoe, Ilya Ehrenburg, Aldous Huxley, Julien Benda—Monsieur Stephen Howard, Mademoiselle Wilkes—Bonjour, Monsieur l’Ambassadeur, bonjour, Madame l’Ambassadrice.’

  ‘Oof!’

  Then sitting round the big rooms under portraits in oil, chatting with the hosts, getting to the big tables on which were the largest dishes of food they had ever seen, silver boats and coracles used no doubt by Jupiter guzzling in heaven; but at the Russian Embassy used to hold caviar.

  Several times she promised to meet one or other of them, the Americans; and she did go with Tom Barrie to a room he shared with an English writer; but sat shy and uneasy in a chair while the two men flirted with an English girl and a French girl from the congress.

  ‘I can make any man lustful just by looking in his eyes,’ stated the English girl, who was plain, long-nosed and big-eyed.

  ‘Try me,’ said Tom Barrie.

  She sat opposite to him on the twin cot and glared.

  ‘Pah!’ he cried suddenly, jumping off the bed.

  ‘Try me,’ said Pax, the English writer.

  She twisted round to face him; and after a minute, he fell back on the bed, legs and arms in the air, laughing, ‘It works, yes, it works.’ The French girl meanwhile was having a bath, for there was no bath in her room at her little hotel, and it appeared that she did this every day, for her toilet things were arranged in the bathroom.

  ‘Well, comrades—’ said Emily, diffidently and with a flush, ‘I think I’ll get back to my hotel.’ They let her go.

  Others she left standing at the door of the hall. One serious journalist from Chicago made quite a face as she hurried past him, engrossed in Howard’s words; his lineaments crashed together; he turned dark with disgrace.

  ‘Now, he’s going to hate me. Oh, jiminy,’ she said to Stephen, ‘I’m like B. D. Given a chance we’ll all teasers and cheats.’

  ‘Forget him. We’re going to lunch.’

  She sighed, ‘If you knew the lift I get being with you. Life is a battlefield, but not a field of honour. Here at least, we are all on a field of honour.’

  Stephen said, ‘Every writer worth his salt begins by some notion of revolt. He wants to show people that the labels are wrong; and then there’s the contagion. Writers don’t write about themselves—they need others. The others—the all-important.’

  ‘Ah!’ she said. ‘The baffling, puzzling, beloved others. If we could just for half an hour get inside someone else and be someone else, we’d swipe the laurels. If it didn’t kill us. Maybe, it would be the fatal bolt, strike you dead.’

  He said, ‘Most writers, even if doing pulp and potboilers—are forced at least once or twice in their lives to say what they see before their own eyes—they wake up one morning and say, “The emperor has no clothes, and I’ve got to tell people that.”’

  ‘But this lot here are the best, they say nothing but the truth and they are trying to change the world. Oh, I can hardly bear it, it is so thrilling, noble, grand,’ said Emily. ‘What have I been doing all my life? Pulping and potboiling. Every morning I said, “The emperor has no clothes”; but I said, “But the paper runs clothing ads and they won’t let me print that.” How shameful! You don’t know what it is, Stephen. I feel punchdrunk and ethereal too—free. I’m dizzy. I can scarcely breathe. Anything can happen now. To be with the crème de la crème, me, the family misfit.’

  Things did get better for her, as he said. Howard took her to Langer, to restaurants in the Bois, to Véfour, to La Pérouse, to the Vert Galant, places big and small, with cooking exquisite—‘exquis’ she kept saying—rare, provincial, homestyle. They ate also anywhere, in bistros and cafés, just flopping down laughing, having a drink, saying, ‘We’ll eat here, why not?’ Talking, talking. He took her again to see his uncle, Maurice Howard.

  ‘Oh, I love you Uncle Maurice, you are so modayray,’ she said. Emily was immoderate. She found that she was a gourmet; but she was too greedy, she wanted to try everything and when she looked at a menu in a good place, not merely to know the meaning of the names but to try them all. She was so eager, delightedly gay, spontaneous, so tumultuously full of joy and folly—and with it, sharp, discerning, salty.

  Stephen was satisfied. When he went back to his hotel he would laugh at her enthusiasm, smile, and tears might come to his eyes. The girls he had known knew the right things to say and eat; they enjoyed themselves, too, but they suffered from the respectability of the rich; especially if they shared his political views.

  At the end of a week in which they saw each other every day and ate together at least once a day, they were thought of together; so that any group in a restaurant expecting them, left two places side by side for them. Stephen said on a Friday, when he was taking her home, ‘I have sent a cable to Mother about the girl she wants me to marry.’

  ‘Oh!’

  ‘I said it was no use. I wrote a letter to Mother at the same time and one to the girl telling them I have made up my mind.’

  ‘Mm.’

  ‘If you will have me, I will have you.’

  There was a pause. He continued, ‘Let’s go back on the same boat. We can come to Paris later, not for a honeymoon, because I have work to do as soon as I get back; but next year.’

  He stopped and turned to her, his eyes full with his resolution.

  She was too startled to be shaken; she thought he should have asked her before writing home. Still, there it was. He was still looking at her, waiting for something.

  ‘All right.’

  ‘I made up my mind a few days ago,’ he said.

  When did I make up my mind? she said to herself, in annoyance.

  Then he said, ‘I want to explain why. We are going to work together. This is a time between worlds. You could sink into pessimism if you did not have a plan. Roosevelt entered the White House with a plan, that is why he can still make out: no one else has one. Roosevelt, when he entered the White
House at a time when fourteen million Americans were starving, and the “tide of destitution rising” as someone said, did not promise reform, a new order, he promised revival for the business community.’

  ‘Well,’ she said, ‘he promised a more abundant life, he promised the forgotten man that he would be brought to the national table—’

  ‘Yes, Lazarus. There isn’t just a forgotten man, but a forgotten nation, grudgingly kept alive. So the scene is set for total breakdown or some sort of social plan. We never had a common man’s social plan before. The Constitution, though the refuge of our liberties, is secretly used in favour of the rich. Though its general rhetoric means the poor can use it too. Relief is not a social plan, it’s a few sandbags against the flood. Everyone knows relief isn’t the way to run a nation and make the human tree burst with flower and fruit.’

  Then he said, ‘That occurred to me because I worked for a while in the orchards in California as casual labour. No different from what you know or expect. And those “miserables” don’t want to revolt—just one red-eyed man in a thousand—because revolt is even worse. They’ve had enough of fighting, black eyes, broken noses, thugs, sheriffs, and all to get rags, beans and something mud-coloured in a tin mug. The only reason they throw rocks at the overseer is to get into jail. Rather eat crow than bite the dust.

  ‘The thing is they don’t go any more for social sunrise ideas. Here we’ve got five or six, the League for Social Justice formed by Father Coughlin, politically dubious; the End Poverty in California clubs of Upton Sinclair, a coffee house dream; Dr Townsend’s clubs for old age pensioners; there’s the Share the Wealth Clubs of senator Huey Long—all vote-catchers; and two left political parties, the Farmer-Labor Party in Minnesota and the Progressives of Wisconsin. They don’t fit into our political history. There’s the Communist Party which has the backing of international experience, a great connection overseas and a plan—but people don’t want revolution. There all you can buy is trouble, misery and daily bouts with the police, only too glad to earn their pay with steel and tear gas. “I want a job! Take this you bastard!” And he gets it in the teeth. It’s a frightful cosmic joke. If you have a full belly. It’s either a faceless future or some trained brute plugging you in the guts. All these people here, our colleagues, know it; but the people who get slugged don’t know what it’s for, can’t talk, can’t write.’