I'm Dying Laughing: The Humourist

by Christina Stead

  She jumped out of bed, opened a small drawer in the dressing table, and he at once snapped, ‘What are you doing? Taking some of those damn pills?’

  ‘I’ve got to calm down. How can I work tomorrow? And I’ve got a lecture in the evening.’

  ‘What lecture?’

  ‘Adult education.’

  ‘That’s it, that’s it! Your whole life is filled with giving, doing, I’m nothing but a barnacle on the wheel of progress.’

  She jumped back into bed and kissed him furiously, all over face, neck, hair, chest, arms. Then, she lay back and began to reason. ‘This life doesn’t suit you, Stevie. It’s a gambling, race-course crazy life for touts and bums, not for you. You’re a scholar and should live in peace. This double or nothing, boom or bust scares you and nauseates you. Your attitude towards money, so different from mine, is disturbed in this mad Hollywood carnival. You respect money. You shouldn’t. Fancy respecting the filthy reeking stuff. I don’t respect it. To me it’s not part of a highly organized respectable society, the just reward of pioneering valour; nor a medal pinned on the virtuous starched bosom. To me there’s just as much virtue in skid row, or as little. Moneymaking is gangdom, grab or someone else will. Of course, you’re right too. It’s the high established church of our great land. Lincoln said, “As a nation of freemen we must live through all time, or die by suicide.” Suicide! Oh, God! A great nation cutting its throat! Could it really happen? As long as the razor is of gold and the noose of amethyst—‘

  ‘A country can’t die,’ said Stephen indignantly. ‘We can, the poor lice on its hide, but thank God the country can’t die. If I thought it could, I’d die of empty horror. Do you know the story that has haunted me since I was a boy? The Man Without a Country.’

  ‘But that’s bamboozle.’

  ‘I think I can even understand the cranks and crooks who are put out of Russia and write lies for bread. They want to be noticed; they’re Russians too. It’s the infant screaming for its mother.’

  ‘Don’t waste your sympathy,’ she said drily.

  ‘I suppose it’s envy too,’ he conceded. ‘They’re best sellers; though it’s a nasty, mean way to make a fortune, running down your country. I know you don’t believe I am as good as that. I couldn’t write a book that would sell, in any terms. So I ought to be out earning a living and giving you the chance you want.’

  ‘I wish I could,’ said Emily, thoughtfully and gently. Then she began to fire up, ‘I’d like to write a book about the revolutionary movement, the way I see it and what’s wrong with it. Here we have the greatest organization for socialism in the western world. Look at the size of the labour union movement! A state within the state. When it says, “Go”, we go; when it says, “Stop”, we stop. Organized millions of conscious workers: what would the early socialists have said to that? The millennium! Though, it’s not. But isn’t it a great big poster saying, “It can be done!” Or is it already too late? Are there too many labour opportunists, too many finks and goons? I’d like to write this book. I’m dumb enough to think it would be good. But who would print it? We would all of us end up in the railroad wreck and not a single finger lifted to take the engine off our neck.’

  ‘You could do it,’ said Stephen without force; ‘but you’d get nowhere. I ought to build fires under your ambition. It only shows the kind of punk I am. But I’m representative. You could have me for one of the characters; a clay figure covered with the fine patina of soft living, a radical, arguing man, busy with top secrets and who’s who in Washington, soft-shoeing in the antechambers of the lobbies of Congress, a radical dandy, dispensing the amenities of another caste, paying his way into the labour movement, following a boyish dream; take the underdog along with you to the White House; heel, sir, heel: misinterpreting everything to suit the silk-lined dream and with laughable ineffectiveness exhorting a stone-deaf working class out of the blind alley of pork-chop opportunism to lead them down the blind alley of rigid righteousness. For what have we to offer them? Something we don’t believe in ourselves; socialist austerity and puritan-ism for the better building of steel mills.’

  ‘I wouldn’t see it that way,’ said Emily slowly. ‘This would be a cruel book. I wouldn’t spend much time on theoretical errors or an analysis of our peculiar applications of theory; but I’d try to put a finger on essential human weaknesses; the ignorance and self-indulgence that has led us into Bohemia. On that score, there’s plenty to say. Ought we all to live well, have our children in private schools, training them for the gude braid claith I ought to say how everything becomes its opposite not only outside the besieged fortress but in: how we misinterpret the mission of America, the position in the unions, ourselves; and what our lives are, that are going so far astray. We sneer at Utopian communities; but we are trying to live in Utopia.’

  ‘It might be an epitaph of American socialism: I’d like to see it,’ sang out Stephen.

  ‘No, no! It would be for the real rebels, the real labour movement, against all vampires who take all that’s best in the world, even the name of the most sacred causes and use them for promotion; shepherds killing and eating the lambs. That’s it. Socialism can’t die! Don’t we believe that? But it can die—suffocated, here! By us! That’s horrible.’

  ‘It’s horrible; especially when we’re in it up to our necks,’ said Stephen restlessly: ‘if I had to be born in these days, why not a Russian, where it’s all settled?’

  ‘Why not a Yugoslav, a Frenchman, anyone but us? Yes. The world’s going to be implacable towards us, Stephen. Let’s face it. There’s going to be a lot of stuff in between; but that time, the day before yesterday, was IT, die Ende, Schluss, Fini. I keep seeing the weirdest thing dancing before my eyes—like a dagger, like a cup of poison: choose fair maid, but both are death; ha-ha! Gromyko round the big table, eyes straight ahead, shoulders back, jaws grim, pad-pad, round and round, silent, but brain radiating what we all felt only too damn well: “If there’s a war you can’t win!” Oh, God! And we have to be on the wrong side in the bad time coming! To be in America, to like America, to want to be an American and to be wrong, to be martyred by Americans—because by golly, how the Americans love to make martyrs! They make them wholesale, they never notice. Every few years some innocents have to be offered up on our altar, the giant footstool before the infinite altar of the brass-faced philistine god. I know my people; I’m from deep America. What did Lincoln say in that address before the young men’s Lyceum in Springfield, 1838: “till dead men were seen literally dangling from the boughs of trees upon every roadside and in numbers almost sufficient to rival the native Spanish moss of the country as a drapery of the forest.” I read that often as a child and I trembled. Later I thought, things have improved since then. But I now know they haven’t. Can you see us as martyrs, Stephen? I’m not made for that. I don’t believe in it.’

  ‘Neither do I,’ said Stephen, ‘but it happens. Every day someone’s name is called and he is conscripted into the army of blood.’

  ‘I don’t like to be a martyr, I won’t be a martyr. I don’t want to be on the wrong side. I wasn’t born for that. How short life is! And what about the children? Oh, my, my! For them, one can’t be on the wrong side: and yet we have to choose. What’s the right side? I mean morally, and in terms of our natural lives? Oh, Lord! We can be torn to pieces. I won’t give up the kids; and your mother and Florence will drag Olivia and Christy from us like lightning; and Giles and Lennie will be homeless. They’d have every right to grab them if we became outcasts, outlaws with the community riding us on a rail and throwing stones through our windows. They’re taking the children from guilty communist parents, “communist” meaning guilty. The court would be enquiring into our bank accounts and laundry baskets; and Grandma and Florence would be seen white as snow, for guzzling is not considered wrong in this country—‘

  ‘Oh, for Pete’s sake!’

  ‘All right, Stephen,’ she said, furious; ‘you know you want to keep the children!’
>
  ‘Yes, I didn’t want them, but now I do. I love them and I need Olivia’s money.’

  ‘You can’t touch it: her mother left it in trust,’ she said.

  ‘I can charge her for keep and education and foreign travel: you always do it with rich children; and we can travel maybe. I can influence her, I hope. Imagine, two tots in my household will be millionaires; and I’m a poor man. Life hoaxed me.’

  ‘If they were settled, our hands would be free,’ said Emily without joy. She sighed, ‘It’s the damnedest thing! But I won’t let them go. And besides, with us they’ll escape the tumbrils!’

  ‘What tumbrils?’ he said testily.

  She sighed, ‘Oh, well, if we weren’t socialists, I suppose agenbite of inwit would make heroes of us anyway. We’d have to start out and join Daniel’s glorious little band marching to extinction. Ugh! But that would finish us with your family. Now, we can contend with Dear Anna and all our dear lucre-men, that communism was a youthful jag, “our Spanish civil war phase”, as the renegade hath it; and they can see it as an enthusiasm we’re too decent to abandon. But, start in now and it would be crystal clear that we’re middle-aged delinquents, not mad but bad. Yet we can’t abandon and join those other bastards whose names are writ in shapes of crap.’

  Stephen lay rigid and was silent. She became silent too. They went to sleep.

  Emily rose early, ordered the food for the day, and, taking a tray of black coffee up to her little room, she began on one of her scripts, a story with humour and pathos about a freckleface in the big city. She worked hard through the day, drove down to the village to buy some bottled French sauces and herbs from a specialist, visited a workman’s coffee-stall, the owner of which was a political friend, and hurried back to make over her UNO article into lecture notes for the evening.

  In the evening she drove to downtown Los Angeles and in a small hall addressed forty to fifty people, among them Mexicans and Negroes, giving her impressions of the San Francisco Conference. Emily spoke in public as she spoke in private. On the platform, she was earnest and incisive and also rollicking and fatly funny. At the end she said, ‘A man I know in the Middle West had someone in City Hall tip him off about condemned houses; he rented them out privately as flophouses for whores and bums. He showed me a few and he used to recite John Donne to me—“But since that I, must dye at last, ’tis best, to use myself in jest”.’ An ambulance-chaser I knew in my newspaper days used to sit outside the emergency waiting-room and read me William Blake. The first I ever heard of either poet! The way I collected my education, my high school having no use for same! Ha-ha! Very funny! I’m dying laughing. Imagine I have to go to work now, parsing and pluperfects, in my old age! Well, to the point, friends! I see you there and I am here and I see something ahead. The choice will come, the choice has come. Perhaps you don’t see it clearly yet; but one day it will be as obvious as the cop’s club and you will weep by tear gas, because it is then too late to choose. Some of you will be in jail, some will be silent with the silence that grows over a man like fungus; and some will be successes and able to appear anywhere in broad daylight. The choice is already taken out of our hands. Well, anyhow, this is the way William Blake puts it in one of his cloudy epics and I’m damned if I can remember anything else but this; and I’m damned remembering this, anyway, maybe. It goes:

  But Palambron called down a Great Solemn Assembly …

  That he who will not defend Truth, may be compelled to

  Defend a Lie, that he may be snared and caught and taken.’

  After a pause, there was acclamation. She was forty minutes getting away from the meeting afterwards, for she talked with anyone who wanted to talk with her. Stephen was waiting for her in the car. She got in and they drove uptown. She remained silent.

  ‘Did you wow them?’ he asked.

  ‘Were you in the hall?’

  ‘No, I was sitting in the car.’

  She grumbled, ‘I recited to them a quote from William Blake.’ She repeated it. ‘They probably thought Palambron was an Indian chief,’ she said, laughing. The laughing turned into uncontrollable sobbing.

  5 THE HOLINSHED PARTY

  SOON AFTER THE HOWARDS gave their house-warming party they received an invitation in return from James Holinshed to dine at his house in the next gully, Persimmon Glen. Holinshed, like Stephen, was said to have money from his family. It was to be a small dinner party, just for them, the Bowleses, and the Moffat Byrds. Others would drop in later. This was very gratifying.

  On a Saturday, about five in the afternoon, the Howards, in their new dark-blue car, climbed Persimmon Glen and found the Holinshed house where it was perched on a table cliff, with very little ground, neatly arranged by Japanese gardeners. There were observation windows, a sun porch, rockeries, a steep flagged path, terraces, and a pretty drying yard up in the air above the roofs, on another table cliff. The Howards were in their best mood, Emily bubbling gaiety, Stephen with his smooth, slightly invalid walk and unexpressed smile, giving his wife a feeling of discreet alertness, satisfied satire. Though a delicately pale man, he glowed in repose, with ease and achievement.

  The large living-room was attractively disordered, with chairs, divans, cushions and children’s toys spread about. Paintings hung on the walls. They found Godfrey and Millian Bowles and the Holinsheds talking.

  ‘What will you have to drink?’ said Holinshed.

  Godfrey Bowles said, ‘Let’s have some fun, let’s drink. You must drink, Millian,’ he continued to his wife and, in succeeding chatter, it turned out that Millian drank only milk and orange juice on account of the children, but that this once she would have a martini cocktail.

  Said Emily, ‘Why on account of the children? They’re not here.’ Millian smiled to Godfrey; and answered, ‘We don’t want our children to feel we have a life they can’t participate in. It’s enough of a trauma that we must explain to them later that they’re adopted. We don’t want them to begin feeling insecure now.’

  ‘Just the same there are lots of things they can’t participate in—yet,’ said Stephen.

  Emily said in an undertone, though with a smile, ‘I believe in toughening the children. Only I don’t do it. Why should the children be taught they’re the same as we are? They’ll soon find out it’s a lie. Wait till they meet the world.’

  ‘We’re hoping it won’t be the same world.’ said Godfrey.

  ‘What—in fifteen years or so?’ asked Stephen.

  ‘I don’t know that you see things as we do,’ said Godfrey smiling.

  Emily exclaimed, ‘Look here, Godfrey, I have at present four children. I guess I see the problem as well as you do. I have to take their temperatures and get their breakfasts and get them to school.’

  Godfrey and Millian became serious.

  The Japanese manservant Katsuri came in with the drinks. Millian took the cocktail, the others took scotch and soda. James Holinshed held his drink up to the light; Vera, his wife, looked down at hers sadly.

  Godfrey said, ‘Well, that’s the heart of the question, Emily, these children and the trauma of change and insecurity in their present background. Yours have come from more to less security, especially your house-guests Olivia and Christopher. Ours—are being given the only opportunity that could ever come their way. Their parents were poor.’

  ‘Come on, what’s your argument?’ said Emily, waving her glass.

  ‘Godfrey—later, not now,’ said Millian.

  Stephen took off his jacket and hung it on the back of his chair. He said, ‘Millian—what is this “later, not now”? I did not come here to discuss children. I came here for a rest from children. But just to get this straight, let me say that my house-guest, as you put it, is my own daughter Olivia, whom I am planning to take back from my sister, and we got Christopher from my crazy brother-in-law Jacob Potter who is a drunk, a night-owl, a wastrel, who loses his driver’s licence and doesn’t know his name; and even before he mashed my sister in the wastelands one moon
y eve, their marriage was on the rocks. And on the rocks is the subtitle too, of the life of Florence, my other dear sister, who is childless and claims I should give her my only daughter, because Bertram Baldwin is looking for himself elsewhere.’

  ‘Your brother-in-law Baldwin was struggling towards integration,’ said Godfrey.

  ‘My brother-in-law Baldwin by a freak will was worth five million dollars. And he couldn’t be integrated with that. I could. And before the court I objected to my sister bringing up my daughter Olivia, who is now twelve, hence or not hence, as you will, on the verge of pubescence, in a night-court atmosphere.’

  Emily burst out laughing. The others looked grave and prudish.

  Godfrey said, ‘Let’s discuss this later; let’s have some fun now.’

  Stephen said, ‘I don’t want to discuss it. Leave my family out of it.’

  Emily laughed; the Holinsheds laughed too. They also had adopted children.

  Godfrey laughed formally and sipped his drink. Millian had established herself in an armchair, where she sat relaxed and with a quiet smile. Godfrey moved his chair closer to hers and patted her arm: she responded with a warm smile. She was a rather plain, soft woman in a black dress, about fifteen years older than her husband. Godfrey was strongly built, sombrely dark, pleasing and with a curious manner of looking not at the people present, but offstage, just as if he were on a stage playing a part.

  Millian said comfortably, ‘Godfrey’s contention was, to the psychoanalyst, that he never was frustrated; he liked being the way he was when he was a child and whatever he wanted to do, he did; without ever infringing the nursery laws. You see, we thought it better to know where we stood before we adopted the children. The psychoanalyst simply laughed at Godfrey, and said he showed a double frustration; there was not even a normal reaction and Godfrey was too anxious to prove he was normal. That is not at all normal. Godfrey told Dr Stumpf that he’d always been loved at home; he’d had everything he ever wrote printed in private editions and his parents circulated them to all their friends. You see, his father being a writer, they did not want Godfrey to feel underprivileged and inferior about his own writing. Godfrey played with boys and girls alike; he’d never had any infantile curiosity or doubts or fears about sex. Dr Stumpf asked him why, in that case, he had married a woman twelve years older than himself. I’m fifteen years older than Godfrey; but out of gallantry, which you might call a repression or inhibition, I suppose, he told Dr Stumpf twelve. Godfrey has an obvious Oedipus complex, I suppose; but so far we have not found out why.’