I'm Dying Laughing: The Humourist

by Christina Stead

  Emily said, ‘Manoel, your best friend, let in a stray cat that dirtied up the floor and it licked germs all over the baking dish. I pay four hundred dollars a month to your friend and your friend’s wife, and have to do all the housework twice a week, while they go to town to bank their savings, but at night the kitchen’s like a pigsty.’

  ‘Don’t talk to me about money,’ screamed Stephen.

  ‘Why not? Don’t we live for it? Isn’t it our be-all and end-all? Money! I hate the word! The damn people in New York look at me with a sort of crappy patronizing regard, because I write for money; at the same time, they don’t give a damn for my two serious books. I’m Emily Wilkes the famous writer, because I had a box-office success on Broadway and they tell me, leave that serious stuff alone, it’s out of date, muckrakers are dead, leave the labour problems to the deep thinkers, you go ahead and write comedy so we can panhandle more dough for our causes. Everyone to his trade: yours is to make money. And you, Stephen, instead of standing by me, you only want me to write for money, more and more money, too.’

  Said Stephen, ‘How do you live without money? Do you expect to live off my family?’

  Emily howled, ‘Oh, that is the absolutely final last limit of horror: that makes the evening totally complete. Oh, how can you speak like that to me of all people! What has your rich family done for us? And doesn’t it despise me, because I work? I’m classed with the ditch-diggers; and I don’t mind. And at the same time that I am keeping this whole goddamn circus going, you speak—’ She began to pant and wring her hands, ‘you speak of money to me, you make me live for it, when I hate it, I swear to you, Stephen, I hate it. I’m known as a money writer, but there’s nothing I hate and despise, and know—’

  There was a deeper tone and with a faint ironic smile looking him in the face, she said after a slight pause, ‘There’s nothing I know more than money. I’ve never given a damn for money. I can make money. I’ll borrow it or steal it if I want to. No one has a conscience about it—’

  She burst out laughing in an agonized way, and leaned on the table, ‘—but I don’t do it. I work like a lowdown Chinese coolie, much much harder than your friend Manoel and Holinshed’s friend Katsuri and I’m writing this grade B and not even good grade B, cheesy, smalltown stuff—for you, for us, for Manoel and Eva and our millionaire kids. God! I’m certainly a success. Wilkes-Barre girl makes bad. That’s what I’ve come to. I wish we were back in New York or Chicago. Chicago is gentler than this dump.’

  She turned to him with a noble resentment and vision, ‘Stephen, you’ll never starve! We’ve done these stories, some of them have sold and I have got a great reputation for selling. But you know—and in fact all Hollywood knows—otherwise, they wouldn’t have dared attack me tonight, you know, they wouldn’t, you know these bastards—that I’ve got two stories circulating and at present neither has sold and it frightens me to death. When they started in on us, I knew they knew we hadn’t sold. You say about money. But I’m frightened to death, blasted, done for, withered up. Oh, I know I sound baffled and upset. I am dreadfully miserable, Stephen. You are my best friend; isn’t a husband a best and only friend? But how dreadfully the son of a rich family you are! You don’t even understand my misery, my agony, my hysteria. I know it’s hysteria, but it’s me; it’s the only way I can live—the Wilkes way of life and death.

  ‘Look, Stephen, I know your work requires a decent standard of life and we can’t keep the kids without a show of money. How right you are really! I am just all money. But think of my wasted weeks and I’m really raring to go. I want to work on a decent piece of work even if the back-room boys laugh at the poor humorist trying to go highbrow. I know damn well, Stephen, they take you for a real highbrow and good reason to; but why, for this reason, are we obliged to live beyond our means in a hellhole where everyone is tearing his neighbour’s skin off his back as he hauls him down to hell with him?’

  She stopped and came up close to her husband and said in a tense voice, lifting her fists, her blue eyes shining with passion, ‘I am not as bad as they make me out to be, I mean, my work makes me out to be. This story I’m doing, Stephen, on which I have got a retainer and I have to do, is the most degrading thing I’ve ever done; including all the years I worked on scandal stories and gossip columns and night-court reports for the small-town newspapers—it’s so cheap! Jesus! I gag. I wake up at night in a sweat and think, “Is this me?” And I want to give up everything to write good literature for the working class. They need it and I can do it and I’m going to. What is the good of being a rebel at heart? And you think, they think that I’m like them, I care for money! This dreck! No wonder they pay you so much money. They ought to. For spewing filth in public they ought to pay you money. And we ourselves don’t say, “Throw it in the ashcan”, we say, “It’s the new art.” And we know. And what now? I write it. And this other thing hasn’t sold and I wake up in a sweat at night because the trash hasn’t sold. Stephen, think of my wasted life!’

  There was silence for a while. Stephen looked sick. His eyes were shut. He at last exclaimed painfully, ‘If I’m ever allowed to say anything! How do I like the insult that I throw in my own face, that I’m living on you as a parasite? Aren’t I allowed to defend myself or is it only you? I’m trying to do a good job for the working-class movement for us both. Where would I be without this work?’

  Emily shrugged her shoulders and hissed, ‘Phtish!’

  ‘Don’t hiss like a snake at me. If you’re paying your doit to capitalism, surely I have a right to try to earn it back, the shame, I mean, by doing good work. And I can’t do good work away from people. People have a message for me. I can’t think away from people. Maybe, that means I can’t think. Maybe, it means I’m just hanging around stealing and composing their ideas into a crazy quilt that’s only acceptable because it’s current scraps. Well, I can’t help it: That’s me, as you say.’

  Emily made another odd sound.

  He continued, ‘Don’t hiss at me. I know what you think of me; and goddamn it I’m going on just the same, drearily without meaning, but I’m going to do something on theoretical lines because if I didn’t I’d die. You’ve got some bee in your bonnet, you’ve got to do serious work, too. When it’s quite clear to everyone but yourself that you’re a humorist and just that.’

  ‘That’s what it seems to you,’ Emily groaned.

  ‘This idea of writing serious work, it isn’t you. You got it in school and thus far I agree with our friend, the New Yorkers, Easterners are Bohemians, they’re playing around; they all want to write their novel or their play. Here at least you’re in the centre of mass writing. You’re in a different business. Forget about the great American novel. Why should you write it more than another? Forget it, I tell you. You can make money. So make money. When we make enough money, we’ll go away, OK, goddamnit, we’ll go away and rot in some one-pump town, and you’ll write your great novel. But why you with your smart horse-sense should do it, beats me. Still, all I ask is that you make money first and let’s have some security and peace; and then we’ll see about the novel. The idea’s not you and not yours though. You’re not a social satirist, or a big time rain-in-the-face. You see things otherwise. You say your say in your own humane way and luckily for us it’s a selling way and we don’t have to starve in a shanty, while you’re revolving the novel of the century.’

  Emily sat down at the table and looked across at Stephen, who was sitting in a large armchair. He had thrown his shoes and then his socks across the room.

  She said, ‘You simply don’t see how cheap is this life we’re living.’

  ‘All right, I apologize, I have the cheapness of my forefathers, without their ability to turn it into business success.’

  ‘Oh, shut up. Don’t I love you and understand you? I wake up at night and think and think. I don’t get enough sleep.’

  ‘You’d get more sleep if you didn’t take those pills.’

  She began to laugh, ‘What a stup
idity is a woman’s life, those true women and mothers Godfrey was mewing about. Didn’t you gag yourself at his bold words? I know you do. You screech at me but then you go and hide your head in the library out of shame for us both.’

  But Stephen began shrieking at her, ‘You make me mad: shut up! Do you think I’m so thick-skinned? And what are we to do? The Party is out to get me, God knows why; and here you go around making things more difficult for me. That attack was on me, not on you: Godfrey doesn’t know it. They think you’re a side-show already and instead of hanging your head and listening to the great man, the great stone faces of the Party, you argue back. I blushed for you tonight. Why can’t you let Moffat Byrd act the little tin Jesus and have his say. Suppose it is the line that Lenin said Rockefeller was progressive! Suppose he did say it? Suppose for once you’re wrong, the wisdom of the lumberjacks is cockeyed and American cannibalism-capitalism is progressive. Suppose the Russian system is a leap and we’re going round the easy way! Here I’ve come out, upped stakes in the east, come out here in a keenly competitive market where everyone’s watching every move and we’ve committed the unpardonable sin of really making big money as free-lances, which no one said anyone could; but the goddamn Howards did it and that’s why they’ve got it in for us—and so they’re trying to get us out on Party lines—’

  ‘Stephen! Stephen!’ shrieked Emily.

  ‘OK. Sacrilege! But you know it and I know it. So instead of bowing the head and keeping in with the boys, you’re sassing them all the evening and asking them about primitive socialism. Primitive socialism is just about as useful as primitive methodism in the war of the worlds. That’s all over. OK. I’m not going to give up the Party or the boys’ favour, because if I didn’t have that, I’d have nothing. I must have their esteem. I gave up my family, its money and its esteem. I must have something.’

  Emily said, ‘Then it’s like religion or a desperate love affair, akin to waving the stars and stripes at the end of a Broadway flop, it’s a neck-saving, soul-saving device. I’m not looking to anyone to save me. Why? Because I’ve got my two fists, just like any Irish worker or bohunk back in the rolling mills. I’m sorry you were converted to socialism. Now you feel that there’s no ground under your feet. And so, though you hate and despise Browderism and you were always against it in the east, now you’re as mild as a ewe-lamb. It’s the Party boys or me.’

  ‘You’ve put it in a nutshell: the boys or you. I’m not going to fight with the boys. I didn’t go through all that just to be hoofed out on my ear by a lousy lot of opportunists that I know the inner smell of. I’m going to stick around till they acknowledge either I’m right or I’m so sticky with piety and holiness that they’ll have to keep me on even if it turns their stomachs.’

  Emily’s broad chest was heaving and her cheeks were red. Her eyes sparkled and a tic continually lifted her mouth as if she were smiling ironically. Her tears dried up. She thoughtlessly began to make some coffee and laid out cups and plates, on a clean cloth. While the coffee was heating, she turned to her husband with a smile, ‘I’m prepared to fight Hollywood: why not you?’

  ‘I don’t give a goddamn for Hollywood. It’s my family. I’ve a kid worth ten million dollars; I’m not going to lose her or let Florence laugh at me.’

  Emily quieted down and poured out the coffee.

  ‘I want to do work I believe in, honest work,’ she said sitting down.

  ‘Florence is chortling because they say you’re on the road to Trotskyism and your honest book is frowned upon. It doesn’t even sell to reds and who else would look at it?’

  Emily said, with that strange merry twitching of the mouth, ‘But the letters I get from workers. Isn’t that what we’re for? I mean Stalin says “The writer has a function: he’s an architect of souls.”’

  ‘Pah! Not in the USA. The best he can do in the USA is to make money and communicate in some smaller or more picayune way. We’re Americans. We must try and make do with that. My family and kids are millionaires and that’s the highest ideal this country has: so let’s stick to what we have and breathe life into that mud: Man.’

  ‘That’s a good expression,’ said Emily smiling at him. She drank her coffee at a gulp and poured out more.

  ‘You won’t sleep,’ said Stephen angrily.

  ‘I’m going mad with headache and ’flu and I don’t know, maybe even rickets, with working and never getting out for a break except in a nightclub with our agent, Charlie Goldhammer, or a mantrap called a dinner invitation in these parts,’ said Emily laughing. ‘So if I have a few cups of coffee and can think and think, I’m better for a moment. Let me be.’

  Stephen said, ‘I’m getting an ulcer and I’m going to be sick for a week after this. The misery I went through tonight with all those jackals howling. I’m not taking their side. Let you put enough money aside and I say you take a year of freedom and write any funereal working-class crap you like.’

  ‘Jesus, Stephen, I don’t think it’s crap. I sweat when I read those letters from workers who read my book. You know what it costs; $3.50. They either got their club to put it up or they got someone to buy it; and they worry about it: they send me advice. It’s the happiest and best moment of my life, except when I had the baby.’

  She began to sob loudly.

  ‘Oh, shit,’ said Stephen between his teeth.

  She shouted, ‘All right, all right, you write for the middle class, you’ve never had one letter from a worker. Because what you’re writing, whether you know it or not, is university tracts. It’s good. I know it’s better than mine, anyway as a contribution to knowledge; and you’re a library scholar. But it isn’t enough. We ought to give people something to live for. I had that remark from a whole group of workers in Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania.’

  ‘A whole group of shits in the land of Cockaigne. Maybe they’re kidding you. It wouldn’t surprise me, after the Party attack. A come-on to get you to write off one of your well-known effusions, in which you will really put your foot in it and they can show us the door.’

  She said suddenly laughing, ‘Look, this evening’s attack. In the first place, it wasn’t. I don’t believe they’re going to really attack one of their prize moneymakers, a Broadway success. They just want me, like you, to keep on writing belly-laughs and so make them money. I understand it, OK. And then their fright and scorn of my serious writing—it has a sort of basis. It’s a hangover from Wobbly days, when culture was spit on as bourgeois. I knew that and that’s why I first wrote the labour book, The Wilkes-Barre Chronicle. I made it as reportage with statistics and police incidents to appeal to the Wobbly in them. And then there’s something else that frightens them. You’ve got more of it, Stephen, because of your background and having spent a year at the Sorbonne and because you’re not a deep-dyed tarpits New Yorker and that is, gosh, that’s why I’m so attracted to you, Stephen; that is, I think communists should be renaissance men and women, not just fanatics or dreary committee-people or rabbinical post-graduates. To make a new world, requires men and women—of catholic interests—of a rich—and deep—knowledge of all sorts of things.’

  ‘That lets us out,’ said Stephen.

  She paused but went on with greater vigour, ‘You think there are historical jobs and then there are easy quick sideshows to get in the luridly, pruriently curious and the applause and guffaws and in any case the dimes: and that is what I can do. That’s not an insult. You don’t know the business. It’s shit but not quick. It’s taking as much of my lifetime to write cheap, easy shit as to write a good book.’

  Stephen said, ‘Well, I’m not allowed to say anything. I just have to keep quiet here. I have opinions too, but I can’t open my mouth. I’m jumped on and it looks as though I’m a louse. I’m employing my wife to write shit so that I can read in libraries. I have nothing to say. I’m not allowed to open my mouth.’

  Emily put her head on her hands and immediately looked up, ‘Oh, heavens, who can fight with you? It’s the electric chair. Litt
le Ikey makes chalk-marks on the sidewalk; in two days he’s a gangster; he ends up in the electric chair. Oh!’ She writhed between laughter and helpless hysteria. ‘Oh, you won’t listen to what I mean. There’s no getting round you. Oh, you drive me crazy.’

  ‘I don’t notice it. I don’t see you crying,’ said Stephen.

  Emily sighed noisily, ‘I’m dying laughing. That means something to me, not just a joke, Stephen. You don’t know what I mean.’

  ‘Well, what do you mean?’

  ‘I lay awake enough nights to know what I mean. I lie awake and try to find out what I’m going crazy for: what the struggle is for.’

  ‘Well, what is it for?’ asked Stephen.

  She sighed, her pink face turned towards him. Her hair had come down on one side, out of the ribbon: the other side was bunched up in spikes and curls. She looked like a Holbein woman. Stephen looked. His face changed. He laughed.

  ‘What’s the use? You’re laughing at me,’ she said.

  ‘I’m not.’

  ‘Yes, you are.’

  ‘I’m laughing at you because I love you. There’s no one just like you. I’m laughing with joy because I was so clever, out of all my family of high-minded or dead-headed shnooks, to pick a woman original and with genius and who would not listen to my sour-pickle line of talk and believe it.’

  She smiled, ‘We love each other, that’s true. Look, this Hollywood game is not good for marriage. We’re always shrieking at each other and when not battling about effective clinches in the script, by golly, we’re making unrecorded scenes offstage. A dead loss. Let’s quit the gamble of salaried literature. It’s the same as shooting craps for a living.’

  ‘That’s life. I don’t want a sheltered existence. I want to destroy my enemies in the family and outside with the terrible acid of success and melt them to bone-dust and with your help I can do it.’

  ‘If we don’t tell the truth, what’s our function? We’re just fancy icing on the oatcake.’