I'm Dying Laughing: The Humourist

by Christina Stead

‘Some school. You know that’s a lie, Giles,’ said his mother.

  ‘Well, I don’t see how Russia is on the side of the workers and on my side. I think it looks as if everyone is against us.’

  ‘How true! But why are your little boyfriends, Giorgi and Alessandro and Louis and so on so very scared, eh? Why are the pants scared off them, so they’re worried night and day about losing their race-horses? Eh? They’re scared, aren’t they?’

  Giles burst out laughing, ‘Well, yes, they’re scared, they’re certainly scared. Haw-haw. Oh, boy! Are they scared!’

  ‘They’re scared our side is going to win. And it is.’

  ‘Say, Daddy, when all the factories are taken away from them, I don’t suppose we could get a factory, eh? I know how to drive an automobile already, so maybe I could get one to drive.’

  They burst into a babel of talk, laughing and commenting on the opportunism of children. But Giles was thoughtful, his eyes on the wall. ‘Well, I wish I knew who would win. If I knew, I’d know what to do.’

  ‘He’ll survive; even in the dark ages.’

  ‘I wish I knew what to do,’ said Stephen.

  ‘He’s a dream baby,’ said Emily, leading him off to bed.

  ‘He’s very thoughtful,’ said Violet.

  19 THE STRUGGLE FOR CHRISTY

  EMILY HAD WRITTEN TO Christy’s family, Grandma, Maurice and even to Florence in her exaggerated humble tone, that Christy, in spite of all her efforts, was hopeless at his studies.

  ‘He could not even be a steam-fitter, whatever that is.’ She had given Christy into the care of Suzanne and two tutors but even now he was thinking of going to Munich to music festivals, with girls; he did not care at all about studies. She had written these letters when he left her, in suffering, though she let her pain appear as disparagement and blame.

  Two days after he returned, Stephen received from his mother a letter referring distantly to letters received, and saying, that it was evident that Stephen and Emily were not fit to bring up Christy; they had themselves retired. He was a sensitive, unusual boy who needed special understanding and that if his water-colours were at present poor and did not fit him for entry to the Beaux-Arts it was because he had been forced furiously and without intelligence. Christy was the kind that grows slowly and solidly. Anna had long been sure that a boy with the loving, delicate and thoughtful nature of Christy could not thrive in ‘that domestic climate’; they were unsuitable as guardians and Anna intended to provide him with a setting of repose, calm and dignity, ‘above all quiet’.

  Stephen read this letter at breakfast and, beside himself, shouted out, ‘What letters are these? What have you written, you goddam drivelling idiot? Losing me a boy I’ve worked for for years.’

  Emily shut the door on Stephen, but she was overwhelmed. She wrote a note to Violet and asked the porter to take a taxi and deliver it to the Trefougars.

  ‘Cold winds blast the miserable house, horror whines in the rooms, the servants are trembling, they listen, rejoicing, I am sure, and yet frightened, and they keep to the basement and my whole life is going to pieces. Stephen does not love me, but Christy and Christy’s family. I am nothing. He would throw me into the street today for Christy’s money.’

  In the afternoon, Violet came to see her, and Stephen, haggard, sick, had to greet her with an almost suffocated courtesy and let her go up to Emily. Violet imagined that Emily was out of the cordial sustaining drugs that kept her working and cheerful, and she had brought some of her own. ‘I was on to Dr Kley; I will get some for you, and bring them to you tomorrow. I know how it is. Not a word!’ She kissed her and went, talking genteelly to Stephen on the way out. The next day she came again, with drugs from Dr Kley for which she had paid, Emily having money difficulties at that moment with Stephen in the house; and soon she left again.

  When she had gone Emily took as much of the drug as she thought would give her a long sleep or even carry her over the border into death. One of the servants found her, and called Suzanne, Stephen being absent; Suzanne came, brought a doctor and between them they brought her round.

  ‘Don’t tell him, don’t tell,’ she begged; Suzanne promised not to tell and went downstairs urging the doctor to be silent.

  ‘Have you any more of that?’ the doctor asked her.

  ‘Oh, no, I get it from a friend and that is the last. I meant to end it all and so I took all I had,’ she said; though she had more.

  She struggled downstairs and only just in time, for Stephen was crossing the courtyard. On the console table where they put the letters, Emily found another letter to Stephen from his mother about Christy. She tore it open, skimmed it. The short letter consisted only of reproaches and threats:

  ‘You took the child from us but only to torture him, make him a spy and an unintelligent person. You complain of his letters to me; but you have made him what he is. He can’t go to you, he is afraid of Emily, he says so, and so he must write to me. Who else can he go to? I shall see to it that you have no more to do with him. He is too important as a person to be twisted in this way. I am quite satisfied however with his present living conditions. When I come over in December, I will see what I want to do with him; but I am extremely displeased with you, I am in fact angry. I see that you can never keep your word but let all kinds of selfish and outside interests interfere with the boy’s good development and happiness. I have decided against bringing Fairfield with me in December, since it is most likely that I will take Christy back with me to the States when I go in January.’

  Emily, worn out by her illness and these evil letters, took to her bed. She would lie in bed for an hour or so, but then get up and go to her typewriter, where once more she worked on a story she thought would sell, on outlines and on what she now called ‘the Marie-Antoinette book’; though she was still only lining it up to present to Stephen, to get his opinion. In between hours of cruel battle and insult, shouts and yells, the two would sit down and discuss their moneymaking plans, in writing.

  Emily had to give Stephen the letter from his mother. She explained that she had opened it because of her anxiety and she mourned bitterly, ‘How can anyone say such dreadful things, such lies? Anna doesn’t mean to lie. I never knew her to lie, but those are lies. I love the boy. I never did anything for my own interest, only for his. He’s as much to me as Giles. I have awful thoughts about him, about us, Stephen. I am so unhappy. You know I am not a weeper and wailer and gnasher; but I have never known such cruel unhappiness as now. Every letter we get, every visitor even, every telephone call is black, miserable, negative; each one seems to spell doom. I sometimes feel I should never have taken the child of another woman. I feel as if they are right to reproach me. Yes, I didn’t tell, but I often felt that. I did it for you, too. But I was not sure it was right. My God! But out of my love for Christy and you I struggled against it. I do understand Christy; they’re wrong. I’ve brooded over him and worked till the sweat poured down all over me, like a showerbath, worrying and helping him and teaching him—don’t you believe I love him, don’t they? No, they all think and you think too that it’s sordid, venal; it’s only greed. But I love him. I know very well he’s not like others, he’s different from us, perhaps like you, but sensitive, another rate of growth, another sensibility; strange, and beautiful, all the corruption and innocence that makes adolescence so fascinating and makes us long for our lost corruption. We are too dull and formalist. Just at this difficult time, they are going to take him back again. He’ll never learn anything now. He’ll always be a half-grown boy, never quite out of his shell. Oh, Stephen, I wonder if you understand the child-man he is, the strange unique thing, a true individual. If I could tell you what I feel about him—it’s almost poetry, because I see the child in the man, and what an exquisite creature of fable that is, more than a thing half-goat and half-man. If you were to know the truth, Stephen. If you could understand my deep passionate love for Christy, you would talk to your mother and convince her that Christy never could h
ave a more tender, devoted mother than I am. And I know how to shed the mother for the sister, and friend.’

  ‘That’s just talk. What I know is that Christy has gone and $500 monthly has marched out of the house with him.’

  Blue papers began to come in, bills, debts, summonses. Stephen went over the accounts with Emily. Repairs, cleaning, laundry were not done at home; most of their personal and house linen was too fine to send to an ordinary laundry and had to go to specialists who did fine work. Emily had lent $200 to Violet, she said, and sent $1,000 to some communist friends in New York who feared investigations and were about to quit the country for Mexico. Thus she explained the calls on their bank account. In reality the money had gone to Dr Kley.

  ‘It’s little enough, and it salves a little of our consciences,’ she said firmly, when Stephen stared at her angrily.

  They had to put aside $1,000 for Anna’s visit; and everything had to be thoroughly gone into and set right if possible, for Anna had threatened to investigate their situation. She had never pressed them about the extra quarter’s allowance she had given them on their departure.

  ‘But that is the last, the very last cent you will ever see out of her. She’d come and visit us in debtors’ prison, look through the bars and push the scene away into her thinking cap, for future reference; that’s all she’d do. She can’t understand animals like us. To her we are not human.’

  Emily went to work again, struggling against her illness, despair and vice, her loneliness and Stephen’s insults. She always felt she could make money; but he was beginning to lose faith in her. At present he refused to even consider the Marie-Antoinette project.

  ‘I have no time to do the research. It has to have something original and it would take too much consultation now. I have to get a job. If I am working when Anna comes, I can face her, point at my prospects.’

  But though he tried and consulted all his friends, what could he do? He was not a toughened journalist, with hard work behind him and a name. Someone held out hopes of a job in Eastern Germany; but he thought that with this his passport would be cancelled; and he would be in his nightmare, ‘the man without a country.’ He refused to consider a Marshall Plan job.

  ‘No cold war job! I won’t go on record as working against the Soviet Union. They’ll be indicting me as a spy next.’

  All this time in their own country the political investigation, the so-called ‘witch-hunting’ was getting worse, they had no hope of returning there, unless willing to face investigation; and at the same time through their madcap life and wild talk they were alienating foreign communists; indeed now that they looked back at their life in Paris they groaned and saw that the communist party had taken no interest in them; that only Vittorio, and Wauters, and Suzanne, a few good-natured Resistants had taken them up.

  Stephen said in a fit of despair, ‘We used to be intimate with Browder and Company and here we have not once been invited to meet Jacques Duclos. We’re out of it. They’ve humiliated us. I have no luck. I’ve had no luck since I came abroad. I’ve written to the heads of all the European Parties offering my services. I received one or two cold answers, mostly none. Perhaps some of the letters were opened or did not get there. But no man was ever in a more miserable situation. And they’re right. What can I do? I’m not a worker. I can’t work with workers. At what? They don’t want me. There are enough of them. They wouldn’t know what to do with me if I went crawling on my hands and knees, salt water pouring from my eyes. I don’t speak their kind of English or American or French or anything. I can’t think like them. Their sufferings upset me and I can’t do anything about it. I don’t really believe that if I see five people starving to death on a minimum salary in one room in a slum in the suburbs that I can do anything now or ever by writing a squib about housing. That cuts me out. I’m on the sidelines. The question is what can I do on the sidelines? For us it’s just spectator sports, the whole damn social idea.’

  ‘We are being persecuted,’ said Emily.

  ‘Yes, we are being persecuted over here too. Some of our friends must have got in their jack-knives, via the mails.’

  ‘Oh, how can we live through this life of madness and pain? We’re on a desert island, everyone sees our flag of distress and everyone says, “Drop dead”’, said Emily.

  Emily, with her illness and her multifarious works, had not yet finished a Mrs Middletown book she was working on; and editors were slow to answer about work she had sent in.

  ‘Our reputation’s muddy, no one knows where we stand,’ said Emily. ‘They only want a letter from us.’

  Stephen grumbled, ‘You know I will not write that letter. Too bad. I will not say that I’ve given up, denied the Party. I always hear a voice saying, Before the cock crows, you will, Peter; and so I’m damned if they’ll ever get me to. I’ll starve first.’

  ‘Oh, why are you so slow and unsure—what does it matter what you tell them? You are a brave and true man; I know it and you know it. It is for them, the blind and deaf and stupid, but the ones who give us bread. Before the slaves revolt haven’t they the ideas that they revolt with? But when Massa says, “Are you a good man, Sammy?” Sammy says “Yes”; though tomorrow he’s going into the house to get them.’

  ‘I’m not a brave and true man; I’m a man in doubt and misery. And I’m not a slave. This epoch is full of suffering for us all. No one wants what I can do, the people don’t want my services, my mother despises me and has taken my son from me. My life is in collapse. If I had any true and brave manhood, I’d cut my throat.’

  ‘And leave me?’

  ‘Oh, you’d get Vittorio or someone else.’

  ‘Oh, Stephen—you don’t love me. You’re throwing me to the wolves. You’re selfish. Like all melancholics you’re a soul-murderer. You’re killing my heart, my only hope.’

  ‘And you’re Tyl Eulenspiegel. You die today and get up fresh as paint tomorrow.’

  ‘That’s heartless. You’re shuffling off your responsibility to me as a husband and friend. I’ve always said to myself that you were that, a friend. You’re not. I’m dismally alone. My heart is howling.’

  They had a savage scene; and they went to separate beds, the first time they had done so.

  The next morning a packet arrived for Stephen, from his mother. In it he found a sheaf of letters written by Emily to various members of the family and sent on to Anna when she began asking for news of them. These letters revealed Emily’s irresponsible prattling, robbing Peter to pay Paul in flattery, her insolent jeering at them all, her feelings for leftists and radicals wherever she went, apparently genuine, and their relations with communists and Resistants abroad. In some, to show Stephen’s determination to get a job, she had even detailed his recent letters to ‘heads of Parties’.

  ‘Why did you tell them all that?’ he said, terribly angry.

  ‘I don’t know Stephen, I wanted to show our good faith. Oh, I know it’s a weakness; but I like to trust people. They’re your people. Why should they do things like this to us?’

  ‘You have brought all these misfortunes on me—Christy’s going, Anna’s anger. Why are our affairs of interest to everyone? Why can’t you leave our miserable confusion and absurdity in a decent obscurity?’

  ‘We are not private people. We never have been private people, even before we were married. We had made our way, separately, before that and after we were married, we never left the footlights. What we do is, unfortunately, of interest to too many people. Who but us left the Party in the headlines of the metropolitan press? Rather than be misrepresented I’d say what I think in a symbolic representational truth, I’ll mislead them, I’ll put it any way, or at any rate, what is suited to their understandings. We’re not going down the drain for the Howards. Let them burst!’

  ‘Yes, we lie to them. All right! But you have a different lie for each one and lined up in front of the footlights as you say, they make a motley collection of grinning death’s-heads. And listen to what you have push
ed into Anna’s head. She thinks there’s going to be a revolution here and that Christy, that very precious youth, must go to Switzerland where he can prepare for the Sorbonne; otherwise dear old tattered England, where they will prepare him for Oxford or Cambridge. … This comes of your buttering Anna and telling her what a genius Christy is. But we know, no matter what we say in public, that Christy is too far behind and that he is too mediocre ever to get into any of the brain-shops. We must stick to the idea that the best and surest place for him is the Sorbonne. I think it’s a dream; but we must stick to it. Christy’s the dream-boy of the Howards. We must play this carefully. More—Anna is going to call the tutors and Suzanne together when she comes here and find out what Christy has done.’

  ‘Oh, Jehosaphat!’ said Emily, startled.

  ‘We’ll immediately call the tutors and Suzanne in secret conclave. You talk to Suzanne and get them together as soon as you can. We must tell them not to discourage the dope, too. Otherwise that will be in the next mail to Anna.’

  That day lessons were cancelled for Christy and there came to the house, Suzanne, Monsieur Jean-Claude, who taught Latin and ancient history, and Monsieur Laroche who taught mathematics. Suzanne interpreted and Stephen and Emily put the questions.

  Emily said, ‘Monsieur Laroche, you know that your pessimistic and unfair report on Christy a few months ago upset us so much that we were obliged to report to his grandmother, who had just arrived in Paris to see to his studies. I am sure you have changed your mind by this.’

  Stephen said, ‘We want to know how far the boy has got. What grade is he in compared with a French boy of his age?’

  Monsieur Laroche said, ‘It is no use disguising the truth. The boy is too far behind to catch up and his brain is not active enough to catch up even if he had seven more years to study.’

  Emily said firmly, ‘I don’t believe this, I refuse to. The boy is different from you and me, a special, delicate, sensitive intellect. I know how to teach him, but although I can study hard, he has already got ahead of me in Latin. He can work hard, but he is dreamy, he must be forced; and as he has an excellent, yes, superb, a remarkable memory, he must learn it all by heart, every word of grammar and the textbooks entirely by heart.’