I'm Dying Laughing: The Humourist

by Christina Stead

  ‘Emily!’

  ‘I’m packing!’

  In James Thurber—in—this and that—she saw faint shades of herself. American humour based on the American dilemma, based on, what you want most, you’ll never have, but the plastic makeshift—ha-ha-ha! She laughed, biting her lip and allowing a dimple to appear on each side of her mouth. Her mouth twitched, her eyelids fluttered. How really successful and triumphant she was! Small-town girl—she had left her impression on the language, on the nation, on the USA, a great nation of humorists. Emily Wilkes Howard, Emily Wilkes, as herself, the Humorist—‘Or—let’s see—’ She began to ruminate.

  ‘Emily, come down.’

  ‘I’ll be right down.’

  ‘Are you taking those damn pills?’

  ‘No. Leave me be, goddamn it.’

  Meanwhile, she said to herself, I need success for another reason. I really can’t give Stephen and the family an ultimatum until I’ve cash in hand. I don’t need you, you need me. The fact, the heavy-loaded truth is, that with each book, I’ve unconsciously prayed for a success, not for crass commercial reasons. I can always eat. But to get rid of Stephen. Let him go back to Mamma or find another woman to support him.

  At this she frowned and kicked the dressing-table, looked at her son and frowned. ‘They say there’s no good prison and no bad love. This is a prison and he loves me; figure it out. What a dilemma!’

  ‘Emily! Emily!’

  A proud smile arched Emily’s lips and eyebrows. She did not answer. Stephen came running upstairs, panted at the top and stood there a moment, catching his breath. Then he said nastily, ‘How many of those damn pills have you taken? You’re a drug addict. For pete’s sake come downstairs. The coffee’s there and Axel Oates has arrived.’

  She pouted, smiling, ‘I had a good idea for a story, that’s all.’

  ‘Come on down and stop crapping around.’

  She said, ‘The fact is, I was thinking of your quarterly cheque. Every time it comes, though it’s only $3,000, we start living inside the rainbow. What creatures born for joy! And when it’s gone, we’re back in the subcellar with the toads—faugh—living for money! But money is joy!’ He had started to go down but now came back to the head of the stairs, clasped his hands and looked pathetically at her. She laughed quietly and said to him, using a phrase from his German governess, ‘I’ll put in an appearance.’

  Emily pranced into the living-room, all coloured solid flesh, like a circus horse and, on top, her fair hair full of man-made curls, with pink ribbons in them, like a ballerina on a circus horse. Said she, running to Axel Oates, ‘Darling, thank God. Oh, why didn’t you come to dinner on Sunday? I should have telephoned you. This week was wasted. I feel so lousy and low; I have so little time and that wasted, when it’s you, Axel, I should be listening to. Jesus Q. I’ve been in a low state and Stephen says it’s because I’m dieting too much. But I haven’t his elegant storklike physique. I eat like a cormorant, an elephant, a pelican, otherwise I can’t think, I’m famished and he has the divine figure of—a—’

  ‘You said it, stork,’ said Stephen.

  ‘Are you dieting again?’ said Axel, who had to diet too. He was a middle-sized, thickset, fair man, with long limbs. He was a rebel journalist, who had been through wars in Europe. He ran a little weekly of his own, bought by journalists and intellectuals and financed by himself. He had published a few books and had come to Hollywood to make money to run his weekly, Evidence.

  Said Stephen, ‘Dieting! At the end of a splurge, as now, she lives on black coffee and benzedrine, if that’s all it is. Then she groans all night because she’s starving and gets up and roams the kitchen. Has breakdowns and hysterics and says she’s going to leave me and curses out the Party; says we’re creatures of straw used to light the forest fires, she’s a denizen not of the new world but the world of bourgeois corruption; she’s hopelessly frustrated. And I have to live through it all.’

  Emily exclaimed, ‘Oy-oy, what am I to do, Axel? I’ve the figure and avoirdupois of the Child of Moby Dick. I am down with sinus. Damn my short, stuffy nose. I had that operation five weeks ago—five minutes it would last, said the Doc. He cut a nerve leading to my eye or ear or brains and all I’ve got is fire up there. I feel as if a sledge-hammer is whacking away all day and night on all these bits of anatomy—and I look so rosy or peony, not to say like a sugar pig. And then, oh, jiminy, I started eating too much the week before, on the theory that I work better. Your theory, Stephen, don’t deny it—stand up like a man. So I ate butter, sweet corn, potatoes, mashed with cream-butter-onions, cheese, baked like a cake, delicious, yum-yum, brie creamed with butter and spread on porterhouse. I read about it and that’s what started me off, then, a glad, glorious, grand week with whipped cream on strawberry shortcake, cheese with pie and cream; Viennese coffee, flaky pastry made by me with a secret wrinkle of my own, not to mention the banana split when passing, but not by, the drugstore downtown, nutbread, sherry flip—I I thought, all right, this is my week. Oh, what the heck, why can’t those who like to eat eat and those who like Stephen are astringent—’

  ‘Ascetic,’ called out Stephen.

  ‘I like astringent better, it sounds stringier. What a world! And on top of everything, this Olivia plot.’

  Axel sympathetic, began to smile, ‘How goes the plot?’

  ‘It thickens,’ said Emily, ‘like night in the rooky wood. Now Christy’s grandparents are trying to prise him off us. Inspired by press revelations about Olivia, Mamma and us I suppose they thought there was a good chance of Christy marrying the Howard safe deposit vault—’

  Stephen checked them by saying, ‘You know we were given Christopher by his father Jake—Jake Potter, after my sister Brenda died. Jake had a breakdown, was in hospital for weeks, came out, a nervous wreck, was downing two quarts of whisky and gin a day—said so; and agreed with us that he wasn’t a fit guardian for his boy; so he signed him away into our care. So Christy is with us. He’s a problem; a moody sort of boy, like his parents.’

  ‘Oh, he’s sensitive and ruminates about all this, that’s all. He’s growing up,’ said Emily, ‘and this world is hard to understand.’

  ‘So now you have four children, that’s a big burden,’ said Axel.

  ‘Oh, what joy, what blessedness!’ sang out Emily. ‘Even though we must keep our noses to the grindstone.’

  She stopped prancing, poured herself a drink and said, ‘But Axel, what is your news? What about the big party? Fancy you a star of Big-time Society in the Seven Suburbs! Oh, what an event! Groucho never gave us so much as a nod; and we’re much better—h’m, well, evidently, we’re not. Tell us Axel!’

  Axel told what happened.

  Mervyn Spice, a Hollywood agent and talent scout who was a political radical and knew of Axel’s reputation on the East Coast and in Europe, had paid Axel’s fare to Hollywood, as a speculation, believing that he could place him and that he would make big money; even though Hollywood in 1944-5 was far from as radical as it had been, because of the fear of investigation running through the studios.

  But the agent was disappointed. ‘Everyone tells me that guy is a genius, but I don’t see nothin’; I never heered him say anything I like,’ so the agent said; and it was quoted about, laughed at, and Emily laughed in glee, though she did think Axel was a genius.

  ‘Come on, Axel, tell us, tell us—’ she now said, with a brilliant, sarcastic, joyful expression. ‘And how is the script coming along?’

  ‘Well,’ said Axel, ‘the magnum dopus is now being revised and I am grooming myself for another week of decision, which I am sure will be two weeks. I thought the story was a mere movie stunt, but a glorious swindler is a great subject; and McTeague made, according to unanimous opinion here, the one great picture turned out of Hollywood in the silent days. It was the favourite of Erich von Stroheim, who directed it under the name of ‘Greed’. But for George Graham Rice, I must write in the apparatus of the woman versus rival feature.’

/>   Emily listened, her eyes sparkling. ‘But the Party.’

  ‘Yes, Groucho called up; I couldn’t believe it.’

  ‘Why not?’ said Emily.

  ‘You don’t know,’ said Stephen: ‘very peculiar rumours preceded you out here. For instance that the Party had made the move, and that you were sent to set us right out here.’

  ‘What bullshit,’ said Axel, but he was pleased: ‘to the Party I’m a maverick, a copperhead.’

  ‘This is the land of Cockaigne, remember,’ said Stephen, ‘but even I believed it. I thought they had taken thought. Everyone was waiting for you to speak.’

  Axel smiled, then said, ‘If they thought what I said last night was a message from the Party—they didn’t! Last night at Groucho’s I had a discussion with the most touted and best-paid writer in Hollywood, none other than super-odious Lucius Lewin. That man has a stench as deep as a sewer trench. He declared that all writers were better off as writers and did better than others after they had gone through the great experience of Hollywood. The old Paris street girl’s reply on a cafe terrasse, “Oui, quand on fait l’amour pour de l’argent, même, mais l’on y donne tout de même toute son ardeur, on apprend mieux son métier. On se respecte parce que l’on assure le bonheur d’une famille inconnue.” “If you are enthusiastic about the stories you have to write here,” said the great Lucius, “then you know how to shape anything else better.” I said, “Bogus stories, fallible psychology, the inevitable twist—it’s good for everyone? The introspective, the painters of man and nature, rare understandings between man and man, or historical analysts?”

  ‘Then Lucius said, “The individual writer is leaving the scene: or he must adapt. If Shakespeare were alive today, he’d be in Hollywood. Hollywood isn’t the cause of writers’ failures. Look at Sherwood Anderson; he disdained movies and he poohed out about forty-six. Men have their menopause, we spend all our emotional capital when we are young; all we have left now at our age, are the dregs of emotion, but through experience we can turn it into what’s acceptable—raw emotion and raw writers are not suitable for public entertainment. So, make a good thing of it by selling out for $250,000 a year!”’

  ‘But Lucius isn’t a sell-out,’ said Stephen: ‘he’s a business. That’s all he can do; make schmattes and sell them, in Huckster Alley.’

  ‘Lucius was the hope of Broadway when young,’ said Axel. ‘Then Lucius said, “What’s the use anyway? The age of literature is over. As the sciences grow and our perceptions become more exact, our type of writing will become extinct—the vague, poetic, symbolic will die; it is amateur, ignorant.” “No,” said I, “the rise of science, by releasing a million unknown facets will increase the range of literature beyond the present, our tools will be so many more. All the numbskulls shouted that photography would antiquate painting; and look now!” This was met by silence from the Bone-tired Champion, King of Hollywood, in his rusty side-slipping crown. Then, next cliché. He said, “What’s the use anyway? We live in an age of danger. Those ages have never produced great literature.”’

  ‘Oh, what a dying dog,’ said Emily. ‘But he can still tear out the seat of your pants.’

  ‘“Like,” I said,’ continued Axel, ‘“the England of Elizabeth, always on the cliff-edge, about to slip into the sea; the Athens of Pericles. Think of the tremendous writings that emerged in the age of reason following upon Newton, Descartes, Bacon, Locke: think of Diderot, Voltaire, the Encyclopaedia; and how all literature was influenced by the scientists and the French revolution. What are you saying, man?” “Well,” says Lewin, “it must soak in. The political obsession of our age means there will be no literature for a century.” Everything showed his dread of age and decline: that he knows he has spent his small mental capital and has nothing to show for it.’

  ‘Such men are time-servers,’ said Stephen. ‘He has never helped a fellow-writer. That is why he says there are no writers.’

  ‘To him Groucho said, “Meatballs”,’ said Axel. ‘And I asked Lucius whether he understood that politics is a specific form of strain between men in which both sides play for the realization of vital impulses; and that these passions, these conflicts are the essence of drama, the stuff of new literature. Shelley thought so, too. “Shelley was a horse’s ass, he believed in mankind, the shit,” were the memorable words of the defunct genius of the American stage. After which I annihilated the decaying pontiff of the studios, showed up his rottenness and contradictions pitilessly, showed that everything he said confuted previous statements whose implications he had never begun to understand. I built up a case for literature and said he was defending his own pitiable defeat.’

  ‘He countered very feebly. “Well, my medium, the theatre, is dead. The Stage Hands’ Union did it.” “No,” said I, “the tsarist silence in the studios has done it. You can say nothing tragic or humane; you’re King of Hollywood because you’re selling moth-eaten old clothes and that’s all they can take at present.” “Oh, hell,” said he, “a good drunk is better than all this crap.” The conversation smashed him. Groucho told me this morning that this guy has walked all round Hollywood owning that he was smashed, and he is out. As everyone detests him from bosses to errand boys, I did no harm.’

  ‘He will smash you,’ said Emily.

  ‘For all that, he is the god of clever, decent men here, like Nunnally Johnson and Gene Fowler, his former associates,’ said Stephen.

  ‘But only journalistic types,’ said Emily.

  ‘We’re all journalists, every man jack,’ said Axel laughing. This was true, so they all laughed.

  ‘The party was strange at Groucho’s,’ said Axel, laughing as he improvised. ‘It shows that the commies are a chosen people. It was full of typical apolitical Hollywood celebros and the Beany-Simon test would show their mental age as pre-embryonic. They gather round the piano and sing ditties for which the police raided the feeble-minded home in the days of William McKinley. So, from now on, I stick to folks like you and others at whose homes I meet people at once charming, friendly, humane and reasonably wide awake. Groucho said in parting from me after dinner, “Goodbye, Mr Oates, you cost me a pretty penny tonight”.’

  ‘With love and kisses from the Anti-Lucius League,’ said Stephen.

  ‘I bet he meant it,’ said Emily: ‘Lucius will think Groucho got him into a trap to show him up.’

  ‘He wouldn’t: I wouldn’t,’ said Axel: ‘and who can hurt Groucho? He has us all in the hollow of his hand.’

  ‘H’m. Stephen, pour us some drinks.’

  ‘Axel doesn’t drink.’

  ‘But I do—if I can’t eat.’

  Stephen said, ‘Yes, Emily wants to leave me and Earl Browder together. It’s the dieting. If I say, “It’s a bread and butter life,” she gets up and walks to the icebox. If I say, “The union have no ideals, they just fight for pork chops,” she starts to drool.’

  Now she said, ‘The bread and better life. I’m going to New York tomorrow.’

  ‘To see your publishers?’

  ‘To get out of this smoky and flamy abyss. That’s why I eat so much.’

  Stephen ran Axel to his little downtown hotel in the car; and Emily, taking a drink with her, went upstairs to pack. When he returned Emily said, ‘That settles it. When did Lucius Lewin attend a party we went to? We’re second-class citizens here. And Lewin’s star is setting: he actually said Axel beat him. He must be on the slide; after playing so close and neat. Pooah! I am not going to stay in this pitiful suburb of six-car clapboard palaces and browbeaten male Scheherazades, suffering insult, injury, envy, backslaps and horselaughs.’

  ‘I cancelled your reservation,’ said Stephen.

  ‘Then I’m getting another one,’ and she telephoned the air company at once.

  When Stephen came up to bed, she told him she had her reservation for the next day. Then she said, with a queer gay grimace, ‘Axel is finished: he won’t get any work here. You must say, “It’s the art of the masses”; or else, “I�
�m a punk, and my god I wish I were honest”; but you can’t show them why they’re cheap and nasty.’

  Stephen said, ‘Axel has to speak his mind. That’s his life.’

  ‘He can’t do it here. He’d better go back to New York.’

  ‘The town here is full of his admirers,’ objected Stephen.

  ‘But if it’s MGM or Axel, it will be MGM. He won’t get work here. I know them. Why is he here? Because he wants to be a punk too.’

  ‘He wants to get money to support his magazine.’

  ‘I’m a whore because I want to keep my dear old mother. Fooey.’

  Before it was time to leave for the airport next day, Stephen took the car out. Emily telephoned for a taxi. But Stephen returned with a jewelcase, in the velvet lining of which lay a deep amethyst necklace from Russia. Emily loved stones in yellow, green and purple.

  She was dressing and sat before her looking-glass in a linen slip with a square-cut neck embroidered in small scallops; and a bronze silk dressing-gown, fallen round her hips; her hair was disordered, pushed back in spikes. Arranged on her rosy, solid bosom, set in the low bodice of white embroidery, the gems looked superb. Seeing her comical, robust fairness in the glass and Stephen beside her in pale blue, pliant, placating, absorbed, she began to laugh with tears in her eyes.

  ‘Oh, Stephen, it’s so beautiful and it’s such a filthy insult, to think you can buy a writer’s soul with money.’

  Stephen said, ‘Don’t let Browder and such bagatelles separate us, Emily. What can I do without you? I know you can live without me.’

  She sat thrown back in the dressing-chair, looking at the necklace and her grotesque fair face. ‘By golly, I look like a Polish peasant dressing as a countess,’ she said laughing, her blue eyes bright and flushed, lucent, wet. ‘I look like any kind of peasant, I’m so goddamn earthy, no wonder I fell for a silk-stocking. I like to hear you talking to waiters in icy tones, “This Graves is not cool enough, wait-ah!”’