I'm Dying Laughing: The Humourist

by Christina Stead

  Emily did not laugh. She said coldly, ‘There is a problem. Your sister Florence wouldn’t know you if you ratted on the movement, and goodbye Christy. We’ve trained him to be a sincere, soulful red too; and Christy’s a sticker. He has a sort of damp, honest character like mould and mildew. When things are bad and old and damp he sticks and grows to it. So for him too, we can’t turn.’

  She sat down and read, weighing every word of the letters before her. She said, ‘There’s no doubt, it’s conform or go hungry. The usual freedom of the individual: free to think and starve.’

  Stephen cried out in a high, imperious voice, ‘This upsets my calculations. I’d already counted in the money for those three pieces and, as for the serial, we’ve already spent that money; and in my accounts I made it appear to Anna that we’d had it.’

  ‘I guess we had a right to count in the serial,’ said Emily almost to herself. She was biting her lip, in her mind revising the serial.

  She did not listen to Stephen, who went on raving, ‘And that goddamn skunk, our agent, what is he doing? We write, cable; nothing happens. Out of sight, out of mind. The New York manner; if you can’t telephone and bawl hell out of him, he doesn’t give a damn. He’s still raking in percentages of Henry, There’s An Angel and Mr and Mrs Middletown so why should he get into a mess with our goddamn red writings? Don’t we know any better, he thinks?’

  Emily said thoughtfully, ‘Well, there’s nothing for it. I must rewrite it.’

  ‘Bring down the copy. We’ll go over it tonight and see when we can send it off.’

  For taxation purposes, Stephen appeared as joint author with Emily of her money-making writings; and he worked hard with her on revisions. Emily suddenly laughed, ‘There’s no doubt it’s the depths of crime to spend your days writing a thing which doesn’t sell anyway, commercial filth, which isn’t even bad enough or good enough. Oh-ho-ho. What a fool I am! The fool of time, who died of hunger though she lived for crime. I guess the lives of all crooks, except when they climb into government, are short, nasty, brutish, eh?’ Stephen snarled, ‘I’m not feeling funny. All my calculations are out. I cut a fair figure with Anna because of this serial. We’ll have to mail off your new set of stories this week.’

  Emily protested that she could not. She had been working on a new idea that she felt was not only very good but would sell; it was in her best style. Stephen raved and then asked, what was the new idea? She eagerly told him, ‘The Sorrows of a Really Fat Person like Me, only fatter if possible. And who can’t really weep about it, who has to laugh; and then sometimes wants to crawl in somewhere and hide herself. She’s afraid she’ll never get married. She always misses the bus going to work, because she can’t run, but she provides entertainment for the bus passengers. At work, it occurs to no one that she might be sensitive; fat people are so jolly. Then I’d bring in my mother who was so tiny and was deeply shocked and offended at my appearance; and the dieting, pills, forced athletics, how I love to eat; picture of me sneaking away to eat. Temptations to be a fat woman in a circus and really eat all I want. Morbid thoughts; over-eating is a substitute for sex, or something else. Counter thoughts; but I feel fine when I eat and I don’t mind sex, I like it. How I was always attracted to living skeletons, like you, Stephen, so refined it seemed to me to be only a question of days perhaps, so thin, so ethereal. Oh, that this too too solid flesh would melt. Only not a chance. H’m! Eh? It doesn’t sound good put that way. But I’ve got a couple of really funny sketches. Do you think it would go? USA is crazy about diets. I could put in some diets. USA is crazy about recipes, hints. Put in some of them, eh? I’ve got one episode, it’s a pippin, I think. Of course, it’s back home in Arkansas. You might call me a regional writer, ho-ho! There are three enormously fat people there who live over the hill. I’m morbidly attracted and often go and gaze through the fence to see them. They’ve got high hedges, never saw that before in Arkansas. No one sees them. Once a month they go shopping, but in general the food’s delivered in a truck; and they grow stuff too. I thought a lot about those people. They consoled me and frightened me. And I thought, But they don’t earn. I suppose you have to be fatter still to earn a living in a circus. I used to go to see the fat ladies in circuses and they made me sick. They had a special truck for one on the railroad. They just hooked her on and she sprawled all over a car as big as a coaltruck, without the sides. Then, me showing my infant pictures. Me at twelve, in a silk frock, about ten yards of material in it and three double chins, and an immense horse-tail of fair hair reaching below my large buttocks. H’m. And then my joy! Wha-at! I got a boy to look at me. I became his slave out of sheer gratitude. When I caught a husband I thought the whole of the Wilkes family must be staggered at the news. My revenge for all my humiliations. And then the misconceptions of a fat girl. I thought all women were pretty fat, until I found out they were pregnant. You can put that it. And then of course I was pushed aside; Flossie’s child. Send Flossie’s child outside. I had a fear of hurting myself, having to have an operation. The surgeon would never be able to find the place; they used to kid me that way. When I used to be at my aunt’s place, they’d send me outside when the others were eating. Gee, how hungry I was. “You look as if you’re always stuffing.” I couldn’t say I ate the same amounts; I really ate much more. I stole of course—’

  She sighed. ‘How else could I get enough to eat? We never had enough at home. Mother had a birdlike appetite and she didn’t feed me enough on account of my figure. She was deeply ashamed of me. When people shouted, “What legs!” some mothers would have been proud, a prize pig, but mother was so refined Heigh-ho! Well, there’s plenty and it’s damn funny too. And now it’s the same. Special clothes. I have to have a dressmaker come in. Skirts that can be run along a patent band, taxi-skirts with several whistle stops, double-breasted blouses. Well, I prefer to live in a dressing-gown or a butcher’s smock.’

  She laughed, ‘Oh, my, sometimes I have fun. These glorious splurges, this mad eating, those glorious feasts that I say are for Anna, for Vittorio—and the week later, when I find I’ve put on twenty pounds at least. Oh, my! And the reduction wrinkles, getting old, no more satiny skin, ugly one way or another, oh, my, oh, life, life! What are you! A Gargantua that was allowed to eat and spend his life groaning, his belly ached only from emptiness and wind. Rabelais was the only man who understood me. He’s dull and reported to be vulgar; but you can’t high-hat the classics, you can just say they’re dull. But they’re real! Well, the episode—And then my dream to have a lovely little girl, a perfect doll. I hope I haven’t deformed Olivia. Oh, well—’

  She laughed, blinked her fair lashed eyes, ‘Some gruesome, funny details. All sorts of superstitions. That fat is associated with madness. I was proud and afraid. Well, they were thinking of diabetes. Diabetes was a word I heard from my cradle. Then they could strip blubber off me like a whale, Moby Dick had a horrid fascination, I hated the book. A man died in the town horribly by burning himself to death with an alcohol stove. They said, I’d have made a lot of good fat if that had happened to me. My God, the brutality, the bestiality of people, of your own folks, the savagery—family humour is bestial and savage and that’s the real humour, too, the kind the people like and I wouldn’t dare write.

  ‘Then, that I’d never marry, of course, that was an axiom. How could I get a job, mother used to wail. They showed me pictures of those captive balloons they used in Mardi Gras—me again! Ha-ha-ha. I got one for a birthday card. Ha-ha-ha! Though it is funny. People’s humour really is funny. One of my uncles was very much insulted by my looks. One of my aunts said that fat women could never have babies like other women. And me eating—oh, my, the legend of the family! Flossie’s child; the whale. I learned dancing, I made up my mind not to be left on the shelf. Mother began to pity me and got a local dressmaker to run me up a creation of my own; I bought the materials. It was pretty. I still think so—but not for me. Something suitable for an elfin child, powder-blue chiffon over powder-blue
silk, with black chenille rings and sprays. I made the design up myself. It was really lovely of mother. And I sat the whole evening through in the dancing-class social and at last the dancing teacher, a woman, danced with me. And my Cousin Laura of course, who had some little brandy-brown outfit, ugly, had plenty of boys. Then, of course, I proposed to a boy: that was four years later. I was still running around in things that appealed to my rich taste—little bits of cotton goods, that appealed, designed like French wallpaper, Chinese roses mixed with birds and lattices. I had one yellow one I loved, yellow-ochre-and-claret-coloured linen. It was handsome but I never had the patience to finish it and I wore it till it dropped to pieces, with the tacking threads around part of it. After that, I lost patience, with le classique and went back to large roses on white georgette. H’m. A galleon in full sail, some boy called me. Kaleidoscope Annie. Look At All Those Roses! The time I got into my aunt’s cement fountain to drown myself and the water overflowed and the fishes came out on the grass. There they lay gasping and heaving. A lot of them died and some frogs hopped about. Another crime. Ha-ha-ha! The fishes and I were gasping and heaving our last. I was about to go to heaven with a lot of small fish. I stuck my head into a fishbowl once before that to suck the water. Couldn’t get my head out. I had crazy tastes. I liked the soft, brackish, weedy taste. That’s why fish like it! The fish pools of Heshbon, I guess, were like that. I couldn’t get my head out. I nearly passed out for good that time. They could hardly crack the fishbowl over my face. They pulled all my hair out first and me after it. I was terrified taking bus-rides! Supposing there was an accident and the doors would not open? The others could get out through the windows, not me. And then the shame—practically always taking the seats of two people. I used to pay double-fare very often, not to have the shame. Heigh-ho. Some troubles, eh? And billed as lazy and greedy when I didn’t have the dough most times to eat a full lunch; and I worked my head off, ten times as much as the thin rails I admired and who sneered at me and went off hoofing and spooning. Hard hard the cat world. Well, and I’ve got a gorgeous episode, it’s the central episode, I think. So far at any rate. I climb into an apple tree, romantically, to look at the next door boy; down it comes, the whole tree, with a crash! I liked to be a hoyden, too. I had fears of suffocating, getting into some little hole in a cellar or dirt-trench, or under some planks and dying there. I used to read those accidents that were always happening to boys, with absolute terror. I thought of practising yoga so that I could hold my breath like fakirs do, for a week. I was terrified of being locked in a room. How soon would I die of the H20?’

  ‘What H20?’

  ‘The bad air.’

  ‘CO2, you mean, you die of.’

  ‘That’s it. Mother used to say, “Stop it! Go put your head in a bag!” It haunted me. It stifled me. Well, the gorgeous, funny episode I think will put the book across, is this. There was a girl called Ida Nass—’

  She began to giggle, ‘W-w-would you b-believe th-that? A g-girl c-c-c—oh, he-he-he, c-ca-he-he-he, c-ca—ho-ho-ho. Ida I-oph-oh-oh, I ha-ca-caN’

  ‘You’re just a schoolgirl,’ said Stephen smiling.

  She said emphatically, ‘Ida Nass and another girl called—oh-he-he-he, C-c-Car-Carlotta Katz, o-ho-ho, he-he-he, Ida-na-na-nass and Car-l-l-lot—oh-ho-hohunh-hunh-it’s funny. Ida Nass and Carlotta Katz. Ha-ha-ha!’

  She threw herself on the sofa and laughed helplessly.

  ‘For God’s sake, stop giggling,’ shouted Stephen, laughing.

  ‘There was one called Hed-oh-oh-oh, oh dear, oh, dear, I’m dying. Help me, Ste-ph-phen. I can’t he-help it. Oh, dear, I’m dying. I’ll die; oh-oh-oh! There was one called-ha-ha-ha-ha, Hedda, Hedda! There! Hedda-Hedda-Meyer! Oh-ho-ho!’ She rolled on her belly. ‘Oh-ho-ho, I’ll die, I’ll die.’

  The boys and Suzanne Gagneux came in, hearing this uproar, looked at Emily, looked at Stephen and started to laugh. She saw them, waved her hand, cried, ‘I was telling P—pa-pa-pa—oh—about a girl I knew called, Oh, called—Hedda Meyer—oh, dear, dear!—Christy,’ she said in a feeble voice, ‘Help me up, darling!’

  The children were laughing but Christy sympathetically helped her to sit up. ‘Oh, Lord, Lord,’ she kept saying, taking breaths, ‘Oh, Lord, I nearly died laughing.’

  The boys were very interested, ‘What’s the joke? Tell us! What’s going on?’

  ‘Oh, nothing, only about a girl I knew called—ho!’

  ‘Emily!’ said Stephen.

  Suzanne looked at Emily.

  ‘Suzanne!’ cried Emily opening her arms. ‘Come here. Oh, I have such a pain with laughing.’

  ‘What is it?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ said the boys.

  ‘A girl at school called Ida Nass,’ she said suddenly.

  The boys giggled.

  ‘Ida Nass!’ said Suzanne.

  ‘And Carlotta Katz.’

  The boys shrieked with laughter. The teacher seemed surprised. Emily cooled off and said, ‘I was telling Stephen about a side-splitting episode in my new book I’ve conceived and which is going to be terrific, my darlings. Oh, this will be the one. I never felt better. I believe I can get $8,000 out of them for it just on outline.’

  She had recovered and seemed very much in form.

  ‘What’s the episode?’ enquired Christy, fascinated by so much money for an outline.

  Stephen said, ‘That’s enough. I don’t know what it is. Go and wash your hands for lunch.’

  Emily pressed her breast, ‘Oh, what a pang! I suppose you really could die laughing, Suzanne? It’s an awful rolling spasm, you’re out of control, but madly happy, inhumanly happy, you feel as if you’ll go over the edge of the precipice in another minute, and at the same time, delicious, strange, only you. You feel as if now you’ve escaped, it’s you and you’re dying because it’s you. I suppose you could go into convulsions? Oh, I think it was because I was just talking about my physical sufferings as a fat girl and I was given over entirely to remembering my sufferings physical, so very physical. And the body gets up like an immense giant and grabs me and balances me over the cliff, threatening to toss me over. Oh, heigh-ho, nothing in my life compares with my physical feelings. How often are we physical in life, Suzanne? A hot bath? Pouah! A childbirth, well, yes, it is. Sex? I mean compared with what I felt just then? I wanted to love, Suzanne, I madly wanted to love but I wanted it to be like that. But it can’t be. And that’s an intellectual for you. I guess I know how coal-heavers feel on Saturday night.’

  They were very merry at lunch. Christy declared he had a friend in the States called Nass T. Fall; and so forth. They exhausted themselves with laughter and after lunch Stephen turned gloomy, felt ill and retired to his study. He asked Christy to come to his study with him and, before this, said dismally to Emily, ‘I’m afraid I’ll have to revise my calculations.’

  To Christy he said, when the door was closed, ‘What’s the idea of writing tales about us to your grandmother?’

  17 TRIPS

  AFTER TWO HOURS’ WORK, Emily felt the humour dying out of her. She turned and looked out the window. A fine Paris evening hung over the roofs. The streets were dark except for the lights at their corner. People went home early in those days. Emily thought about the households all over Paris beginning to pull themselves together from war privations; people were still coming back from the concentration camps, from abroad. The first foreigners like themselves were settling in. Real money was beginning to flow more freely, the cabaret and restaurant life was as high as ever and even more shameless. But you still saw queues, and every restaurant, classified by category, was obliged to put up and serve a minimum menu for the poorest clients. You could get cakes at most shops on certain days only. People would still say, ‘Do you know there are spiced cakes at the little shop on the way to St-Lazarre?’ And yet the terror, the frenzy, the heartache, misery and nervous tension, the dread of the future which they had felt at home in America was gone. They had come to a starved and beaten continent, brav
ely expecting the worst. They were living, except for the shortages of milk and coal, better than they had at home.

  At that time they expected revolution in Paris. The spirit of the resistance was still strong, so, of course, was the spirit of collaboration, active or passive. It was still uncertain which would win. Vittorio, full of hope, had felt strongly, until April 18, that the people would win in his country. The Belgians were as ever, torn by their national conflicts, but England where the class feeling had taken a big blow, they said, from the years of suffering in common, might be headed for a new life; and France—she was almost certainly ready for the final struggle. In America they had simply given up the struggle. Emily muttered to herself, ‘Not-in-our-time revolutionists, like us.’

  She looked down at what she had been writing, took it out of the typewriter.

  ‘Worthless.’ Like the people she was writing about, ‘Not-in-our-time revolutionists, on-and-off revolutionists, keep the deep-freeze safe revolutionists.’

  ‘But we’re still marred by the Civil War. We can’t go through that again. We must escape! We’ve had more than a colour photograph, a demonstration by others of what it’s like.’

  If only it were all done, gone by. But the Europeans who had been through it all were much more cheerful and hopeful. They were making plans again.

  She muttered, ‘Because it’s over I suppose. Maybe we’re like women before they have the baby. Perhaps in two or three years here, we too will achieve the calm, the long view, the tranquillity, even the culture. What’s wrong with the American mind is a raging barbarous fear behind the super-finish. Here the middle class is ruined forever—and it’s a question of let’s face it.’

  At these words, she felt very tired, afraid and helpless. But where else was there to go? Italy? Where the sanguinary class-battle, Vittorio thought, might come up again, even after the setback of April 18, bought, they said, by American money. But why go where Americans were hated? Switzerland? A sanitarium no living and healthy soul could endure. England—starving to death and no prospect of betterment; England going down, never again to appear as a great nation. Belgium? Belgium was a consideration. Everyone said the food there was much better and the black market was better than France. But who went to Belgium? Spain? No, no. They could have gone to the Cote d’Azure, some pleasant, wealthy or not so wealthy resort village on the sea; but Stephen, like all big-city men, was terrified that he’d lose his mental activity there, he’d be out of the mainstream. The mainstream carried him along like a chip of wood, but he loved the movement.