I'm Dying Laughing: The Humourist

by Christina Stead

  Emily put it back again, ‘Stephen! You’re ruining the music!’

  Monsieur Valais said, ‘But it isn’t music! It’s roaring like Niagara.’

  Emily smiled at this praise, ‘Well, now you can see what we can do for volume.’

  They had to sit through till the end of the record. Common protest stopped Emily from playing another Beethoven. One woman said, ‘Oh, I feel as if I’d been under a railway bridge.’

  Ledane spoke with slow patronage, ‘Naturally, here in the war, you had to tone your radios down so low that you’re not adapted to modern systems any more. It must take a long time to get over that kind of inhibition. It’s fear of the Germans.’

  Emily said roguishly, ‘Well, we have some Macky (Maquis) songs too. Do you want to hear them?’

  They hesitated. She put on ‘Le Chant des Partisans’, the principal song which even they knew; and this too she played as loudly as she could.

  Madame Valais said, ‘It’s a good thing you have no neighbours.’ She smiled bravely however; and when the record was taken off, she said it was well done, ‘Really, one can’t help feeling something.’

  When they had gone, about ten, and the place was cleared up, Emily said, ‘Faugh! What sleepy-heads! Still, I think it was a splendid success. One of the two or three best dinners I ever ate in my life. I wish I had a recording, a dictaphone of all that was said tonight. We could send it to dear Anna to prove that we’ve bitten off a large hunk of the upper crust. Say, how did we break into Cold War Society?’

  Stephen was sitting down, worn out. ‘What stinkers! In a half-starved city we spend what we haven’t earned and we rifle the black market, too, to feed a pack of wolves, bastards, dogs, villains—phew! Why can’t we invite some honest guys? I loathe entertaining people I despise. I grudge every bite. Smile, smirk: “you don’t say so”. Draw them out viciously and dishonestly like a spy because you can’t write the evening off, after spending so much money—“I’m finding out how the other half lives,” you think. You don’t fool them. They eat and wait. One misstep and they’ll have us dissected. Old Valais has an inkling now. We look like fools and we’re living like rakes. We passed the offices of L’Humaniti on the way down from the station the other day. Why didn’t we, if we had to give a dinner party, drop in and ask twenty of the fellows there in for a feed? What we stuffed down these collabo gullets would have fed twenty honest, starved men.’

  Emily pouted. ‘Oh, I hate the way you denigrate and belittle. We can’t live in a charmed circle, swopping slogans in a tower of glass, through which we see the rest of humanity making strange gestures we don’t understand. They are just living; but we don’t know the signs. Oh, don’t grouse. It was wonderful. Poetic. I’m able to live up to your family now. I know it. The Howards in Paris, famous for their French cooking. Yippee! We’ll hang out the flags and have one last grand gala for Uncle Maurice when he comes, and then to work. Am I happy, Stephen! In Paris, all we want, our heart’s desire; and we’ll ask the twenty starving from L’Humaniti if it will soothe you; all this and communism too.’

  She paused. The night was quiet. An old cart was going past, cloppity-clop, rattle and squeal, drawn by an old horse. She shivered.

  ‘How sinister! Isn’t it still here!’

  ‘This quarter is famous for its silence, the Grenelle quarter—’

  She said, ‘H’m, now it’s going back again. Is it parading in front of our house?’

  It stopped and then went on. She said in a low voice, ‘Jesus! Tumbrils! Maybe the Resistance watches those people we had here tonight?’

  Stephen said, ‘You’re superstitious and over-tired. Get to bed. You read too much Dickens as a child.’

  Emily said, ‘Yeah—but the French revolution really took place. I guess I understand why some Americans are camping on the Lake of Geneva, Swiss side; no tumbrils. It’s an awful thought that we are here like mayflies on a volcano.’

  ‘Go to bed.’

  Emily slept soon, but started from her bed in a fright. What horror had she dreamed, something drawing around the corner, something leggy and material? ‘Stephen! Stephen!’ He comforted her and in the morning she could only remember that something horrible had happened.

  She said, telling Stephen about her dreams, ‘And yet I feel calmer. I’ve slipped out of something. Now there’s nothing but work ahead. We’ve taken on the responsibility of three miserable babies. Work is called for. Productive years and maybe forgetfulness. Heigh-ho!’

  Stephen looked gloomily into his cup of coffee, said nothing.

  ‘Is anything wrong, darling?’

  He shook his head and grunted. She continued impetuously, ‘Ah, America was like being in a hospital with an operation hanging over you. Everything with sense, reason, is subordinated to physical fear and agony. Or it’s blotted out, you’re down to the animal level and you think with desperation of either the next meal, or next injection or next nurse, or next hour, or even next survival. Here, life goes on. It’s amazing when you think what they’ve been through. Shows man can survive. It heartens me. It seems to say, “You can survive”. In USA those last few months everything has been down to LCD, will we survive, will we go to jail, can we ever escape the Terror in time?’

  ‘Ah, the hell with it,’ cried Stephen.

  ‘What’s the matter? I knew something was wrong.’

  ‘Listen to the servants quarrelling! America had at least one thing, it had Paolo and Maria-Gloria. My real friends. Here I have no friend, they don’t understand me. They gloat over me behind my back and they probably hate us because we’re rich Americans, trying to steal their country from under their feet for some miserable handout and Shylocking them all over the place. I hate it here. I hate being hated.’

  ‘They’re fawning on us.’

  ‘I’m not Louis XVI. I haven’t a deer-park. I don’t want fawns.’

  ‘Is it headache?’

  ‘No, pocket-ache. Our finances are kaput. We’ve almost emptied out our bank account. Our son and daughter are sitting there—they’ll never starve and yet we’re keeping them while their percentages and their premiums and the value of their stocks go up. And what little we have, we waste feeding those who don’t need it.’

  Emily said, ‘I know. I was thinking of you, Stephen. We have to see that you have an honourable and satisfying career over here.’

  ‘With my French? If I didn’t learn with a governess and at Princeton, will I learn it from Madame Suzanne Gagneux? And Madame Suzanne, we already learn, was in the Resistance, another Resistance type like Wauters. What are we doing living in the peace and plenty they won? I hate it. And Europe is just a war-waste anyhow. The next party you give to these goddamn lice I’m going to speak my mind.’

  ‘Look, I heard you and that bank official, Johnny Ledane, gently sneering at vulgar Americans who come to Europe for business. We didn’t. I laughed to myself for I thought, that isn’t us. I’m starting right off with my Journal of Europe 1948 and I’m going to make every patch of waste evening fertile, so it doesn’t bother me. Yesterday evening will pay a profit yet.’

  ‘$700 expenses for $500 return—our usual economy.’

  ‘Oh, let me work without gibing. The bailiffs voice hearkens.’

  ‘You mean calls. It’s all very well for you. The Case of the Racing Typewriter. My work’s long and slow and then I’m only regurgitating pre-digested stuff. I put it in acceptable prose and I hope people will call it my point of view. Pouah! Why am I here? Running away like a cur!’

  ‘What does it benefit the human race if you sit in jail?’

  ‘Am I here for the human race? I’d like to believe it.’

  ‘Well, Stephen, I must go. I’ve all the meals to order for the week. That’s the way they do things here. Fernande told me, Then I must start work at 10 o’clock sharp. Today!’

  Stephen stood up, ‘Yes, what an egotist you are! Think of me! Think of something for me to write! Start me off. That’s all I ask. I’m despicable but I
want to work too.’

  Emily came up to him and said gently, ‘Oh, dear. I wish I were a good wife to you. I wish I weren’t getting so hearty and fat. But I’m so afraid of Fernande, the porter and Marie-Jo, that they’ll leave us together or singly, and we’ll have to go back to canned hamburgers, pork and beans, that I daren’t give up eating. I must diet, Stephen and then I’ll be more human, I’ll suffer agonies, just like other people. Why don’t you keep a Journal?’

  ‘I’m damned if I’ll write down all the small beer of my life. I go along with you every day and you see everything as large as life and twice as natural. You see what I don’t see; things that never were on land or sea and you make it real. I’m stunned, abashed, melancholy, every evening to see what you’ve been seeing all day and I’ve been there and haven’t seen one-hundredth; I haven’t seen it at all.’

  Emily burst out laughing, ‘Oh, that comes from being a journalist. I had to see things or I didn’t eat.’

  ‘It comes from genius and I’m not one,’ said Stephen, in a low tone.

  ‘Oh, hash me hash! What bunk!’

  ‘Would you say I was a genius?’ asked Stephen, in a low tone, looking at her sarcastically and in the eye.

  ‘Of course you are. You’re the only real talent in the family. I’m nothing but a shameful scribbler for the mamma magazines. I’m ashamed when I think of you my darling, the only real writer. I don’t care what I write either, as long as you have time to think things through and get things down on paper. It’s only the question of finance. Oh, things are so complicated. Here you are, one of the best men alive, an angel, no one knows it as I do, and you’ve got to be tortured this way about earning a mean living, while thousands and millions of people are on government payrolls. I wish you were, just to ease your mind. What about the UNO?’

  ‘I won’t do that; that’s flat.’

  ‘Well, go to the Sorbonne.’

  ‘You can see me tottering along waving my hickory stick, old grand-pappy in the students’ demonstrations! Ep-ep-ep! Our comrade St-st-stalin!’Emily burst out laughing: ‘Well, I wouldn’t give a damn. I’d start in at forty or fifty if I wanted to; I always wanted to study medicine. Why in the Soviet Union granddams and grandpappies are starting to learn to read at seventy.’

  ‘This isn’t the Soviet Union. This is highly sophisticated Paree.’

  Emily was tracing invisible designs on the tablecloth, ‘Well, look, think it over. Take a nice walk to the Invalides or the Seine. I’ve got to get my work started. It’s like dry rot if you put it off from day to day. You think, do I know how to write at all?’

  ‘All right! Send me out to play. Don’t think about me!’

  ‘Don’t be a donkey, dear. Write a book! Like me!’ She laughed. ‘OK. Let me rot! What book? I’m sick of my dull books that bore everyone and that everyone sells as soon as he’s read it. I see them at the second-hand dealers.’

  ‘Oh, go and Micawber for the morning, Stephen. Do help me out.’ He shouted disconsolately, ‘I am Micawbering. I’m here in Paris on a Micawber errand. Maybe I’ll write fiction and end up by shooting myself.’ Emily was going downstairs. He leaned over the stairs and shouted,

  ‘Don’t buy anything. Let’s live on the leftovers.’

  14 COMRADE VITTORIO

  EMILY TRIED TO FIT in American habits with French family eating. Fernande said that for economy, and with the queueing, it was better to arrange things a week ahead and grands diners had no part in this schedule. Christy and his tutor had a tray lunch, so did Stephen. Emily did not eat when working, taking only black coffee until cocktail-time or even dinner.

  She told Fernande, ‘It makes me feel a beast, une bite, not to cook for my dear ones myself. May say impossible.’

  At first she accepted Fernande’s suggestions. Enough bones to make stock for several soups for the week, bean, peasant, village, housewife, vermicelli, tomato, onion. She drew up a large menu for each day of the week. Fernande said it was a fine menu for a high-class boarding house. Emily cut it down. Fernande approved: ‘It is a good, modest menu for a family.’ Emily took it to Stephen, who said it was a fine menu for a large hotel but not for them. Stephen was still aggrieved over the small attention paid to his destiny and the large interest taken in Fernande, her opinions and her kitchen.

  ‘Get things to stretch the food,’ he shouted. He told how he and his brother and sister had been brought up. ‘We’re living like the American army, with garbage cans overflowing with roast turkey, steaks and pork-chops.’ At his home Father asked each one, starting with Mother, ‘Will you have fish soup or cabbage soup? Then, ‘Will you have a slice of roast beef or shoulder of mutton or stuffed veal?’ as the case was. ‘Mother asked, “Will you have creamed turnips, boiled potatoes, sauce?” as the case was. Anyone who hesitated even a moment, lost his rights. If we hesitated we had no appetite.’

  ‘That’s why you’re dyspeptic now.’

  ‘In England in the old public schools they let the brats eat out of a trencher in which they have sardines, stew, bread and blancmange.’

  ‘That accounts for the graveyard look of Englishmen.’

  ‘Our kids have to have discipline and some austerity. I want them to be like youngsters from a rich family, not kids who wolf every mouthful because they think it may be their last.’

  Emily said, ‘I despise the way your family eats. Leaving half a plate, not touching the lobster mousse because they just haven’t the appetite, finding a plate of soup is enough tonight and taking a thin slice of mutton and nibbling the dessert, and just half a glass of the best Pommard.’

  ‘You’re simply greedy.’

  ‘So was Rabelais.’

  ‘I’ll bet. Shakespeare was dyspeptic’

  ‘OK, Shakespeare.’ She burst out laughing.

  ‘Now don’t run off. Stay here and worry with me. It fills up an empty life for me. Besides, we’ve got money. We’re living off our nest egg. I’ve got to get down on my rheumaticky knees and crawl to Anna. That will be my manly part in our economy.’

  ‘Well, do it, Stephen. They’ve got it. Why not?’

  She went upstairs, and they still shouted exchanges with each other till she shut the door. Then she took several pages of a long letter from her bottom drawer and put it in the typewriter. It was to ‘Dear Anna’ and began, ‘My darlings, it is now four days after the famous dinner party and I am a criminal writing to you but I must keep you up-to-date. After this, Wilkes melancholy, which is what I call my working-mood. We entertained at that dinner brilliant Cold War Society. With my French teacher, who was in the Resistance, I am studying André Malraux and de Gaulle. Just fancy, they are no longer kosher. Stephen is miserable with dismal wails about the budget and indeed it took us more than we thought to settle down. But I think he will be all right with a little intellectual and political vie sociale. He must find the right friends; then he will cheer up. He is miserably unhappy, a martyr because we are feeding social-democrats and ex and not so ex-collabos. Why do we meet them, when we come abroad, dear Anna, as you know, to preserve our revolutionary honour? Well, that is life, as Stephen says. And then no doubt if there had been no social-democracy, no doubt the communists would have invented it. Joke, eh …?’

  She kept writing just as she thought and as she and Stephen talked to each other. Then she put away her unfinished letter and went on with her work.

  Meanwhile, Stephen had told Fernande not to send lunch in: he would be out for lunch.

  He studied the city map, packed a satchel with some of his writings and evidences of former standing and good faith and walked from the rue de Bellechasse all the distance to the room of the Central Committee of the French Communist Party in the rue Lafayette. There he asked to be received by some member of the committee. His card, with a carefully written inscription in French, was taken in; and then he was invited to see a man who, though friendly, was watchful. Stephen’s French failed him but he tried to say that he had come to France with his family and wished
to work for the Party in any capacity, to work as a volunteer in any way, as an outside contributor till they got to know him. He had the good fortune to be in the office when there came in a celebrated Italian communist, who spoke five or six languages well, among them English. Stephen caught the name as ‘Vittorio, our well-known comrade Vittorio.’ He was unknown to Stephen.

  Vittorio was a middle-sized man, soft-bodied, with thinning, sandy hair, surprisingly ugly, ugly as a seamed, sunburned claypatch, and that was his colouring. He had been gashed twice over the side of the face, past the ear to the jaw and from the brow to the jaw on the same side, cutting the eye which was now a blind blue and turned upwards. When he opened his thick, light-red lips, he showed a magnificent set of large creamy teeth. It almost seemed that there were too many of them; in some parts of the jaw they were set double; but they appeared in a beaming, affectionate, charming smile. Vittorio’s fleshy face lighted up with an expression of love and he came forward and held out to Stephen a large hand. He limped slightly, one shoulder had been injured and he was partly deaf; he shouted.

  ‘How ugly,’ thought Stephen. But Vittorio seemed unconscious of his appearance. He came to Stephen with eager friendship, generous confidence. He told Stephen again who he was; he was cultural director in one of the largest Italian cities. The Party there was now housed in a magnificent old palace, three sides of a courtyard, and the workers and Party workers climbed the carved stairs where formerly gloomy, sour and wicked landowners had climbed. He said enthusiastically, ‘You must come and see it. It’ll cheer your heart up. You must come and see me.’

  He knew all about the Howards, mentioned the names of their books; and when Stephen said deprecatingly that he feared they were in bad odour now with the American comrades, Vittorio only laughed enthusiastically, waved his hand and shouted, ‘That’s of no importance. You came to us. Talk to me about America.’

  He bent his head forward as Stephen spoke and listened attentively. Stephen became more and more explicit. The other man in the room, young, strong, dark, with an ironic smile, also listened and took notes. When Stephen stopped, the other man said, ‘I’m making a speech tomorrow evening and I will use some of these details.’