I'm Dying Laughing

by Christina Stead

  Stephen and his mother had a very disagreeable time, although Stephen put himself out to be pleasant, feeling that his renunciation of communism must be rewarded by a loan or some other arrangement. Anna reproached him with everything he had ever done, his delicate, clever, spiteful essays in economics and about the monied, which he had written at Princeton; his refusal of a fine girl whose father was a member of the New York Stock Exchange, and of other girls; his behaviour about Christy and Florence; his marrying an eccentric from Arkansas, whose grandfather had been a Pennsylvania coal-miner; whose mother a house-cleaner before she married; herself now losing her grip, not making anything like the money they had made in Hollywood and on Broadway; their noisy affair with the Party; their flight to Europe, so described by the papers; and their present situation. They were attempting to keep Christy to themselves, to chisel a small part of his income, with the vague if unfounded hope of getting a loan or help later on. Emily’s manners and many other things came up for discussion.

  Stephen admitted he was beaten in the search for a living, and was reasonably pleasant. He walked about the room, put his shoes on and off and only retired to his bedroom when his headaches or his belly-aches became too severe.

  He returned to Paris, to his wife, miserable, sick and doubtful. Anna was torturing him, she doubted his recantation; he was so shoddy, unreliable. Might he not go back to the radicals as soon as he had her money and she was in America?

  ‘I had to give an absolute, formal, signed guarantee that I would never see any of them again. She’s right too, according to her view. She’s lending me money. What sort of a risk am I?’

  ‘She’s lending you money? Oh, joy!’

  ‘Wait! She brought up all the committees of enquiry, and asked me if I am going to let the family name come up again, endangering the whole family. What with Florence and myself, you and Christy, it will look as if we are all reds. Uncle Maurice gave money to Spain, someone else went quixotically to Russia and wrote a book—what sort of a family is it? She insisted upon a definite promise and—more! A public recantation in the American press—but I put it to her, we can’t do that. It’s too soon. Raise the dust as holier-than-thou anti-Browder communists and four years later we’ve made the well-known turn. Besides, I told her, we would have to wait for the next station.’

  ‘Next station?’

  ‘On the renegades’ train,’ he said, looking down.

  ‘Renegades!’

  ‘She was partly convinced, but prefers us to make the turn now. Who cares what communists think? But I refused. So no money till I’ve talked it over with you and I give her a date and a speech.’

  ‘Oh, damn it all, we’re going to be blacklisted and hated and despised, so what difference does it make? Let’s get off at any station or none—at 87th Street! If we remain communists in reality, in our hearts, what difference does it make? They’ll say we’re not communists but bohemians, compromisers, splitters and traitors. They’ll be comparatively pleased with us, if we say so ourselves. Don’t leave them in confusion: give them a bone to chew on. I want to be in the clear. You see where your compromising gets us?’

  ‘No, I won’t do it. It’s my life. Otherwise, life is death.’

  ‘But the money? If Anna doesn’t give it, we’re sunk.’

  ‘I know Anna better than you. If we’re patient and we’re good boys, she’ll come round. Don’t go writing your letters to her. She hates them. The set she moves in don’t write letters.’

  Emily cried with conviction, ‘Oh, I won’t. The situation is dynamite.’

  However, as soon as Stephen left to go over to Christy’s rooms, Emily hurried upstairs and, after taking some fortifying pills, she sat down and wrote a plaintive, humble letter to Anna in which she said they had sown their wild oats and were willing, very willing, joyful, to agree to anything she so reasonably asked. She had perhaps led Stephen astray herself and she saw things much clearer now. She loved Anna and would do anything to please her.

  Just before Anna returned to the States, Emily gave a grand dinner for her at the house, inviting the Trefougars, Mernie and Fleur Wauters, Suzanne, who had a charming smile and could sing and listened attentively to everyone; and a number of others. First she had a cocktail party to which thirty-five people were asked, including Emily’s literary agents and friends of theirs from London, some new French friend, a writer, Uncle Maurice and William; and after this came the dinner of twelve. Stephen had had conversation with his mother and Maurice during the party and at the dinner.

  Emily surprised them all by standing up excitedly, with her glass and crying, ‘To dear Anna, to dear Mother, who has made a new life possible for us.’

  They drank and in answer to their enquiring, amused glances, she then gave another toast, ‘To Stephen, my dear husband, who for so many years has lived the life of the mind for which he has paid such a heavy toll without ever being allowed inside the gate—that is the gate of his needs and desires. Ah, I don’t mean that, Stephen, it was no payment; it was an accident, a catastrophe that came. You take a railroad ticket, you pay and get the ride; on the way a tree falls across the line, there is a landslide. That is, our climate has abruptly, catastrophically changed. Perhaps happily in the end. Perhaps tragically. But we must face it as you face a railroad accident, glad you didn’t end up dismembered. Stephen had found an avenue for his work, he was honoured for his honesty and noble endeavour; then even they came to regard it as quixotic. It was scorned and dangerous to the rest of the world. For us at that moment those people, now strangers meant warmth, human security, a future for our children. Yes, a home for our children, our ideas and our work. And we were cast out of that home. Ah, the depth of Stephen’s isolation, misery. Rejected by those for whom we had given so much, estranged from our own world of ideas and feelings, we couldn’t belong to any other; not in honour, and honour is Stephen’s rarest, noblest trait. We remedied our immediate sufferings, if you like, by coming to Europe and were sustained by the challenge of a new life, new language, problems, friends, culture. But we have been pursued by those we sacrificed ourselves for and those who once represented our ideal. Ah, me! We lost Stephen’s hope of finding a new and yet old manner of dedication and work. I say Stephen, for though I was by his side always and throughout this tragedy, yet it is Stephen who has lost most, suffered the deepest wounds, been more cruelly rejected, been more painfully isolated from what he loved and those he loved; and I mean by this, dear Anna and those close to him in his family. My work, such as it is, alas, in this moment, my work which is not my work—well this toast is not to me—I could go on working in the pork-chops basement. Stephen could not. His work was always and, as we hoped, always would have been in the future for one thing only, pure, inevitable, honourable and satisfying. And all, all rejected! All, all lost! All hated. What injustice! Well, I don’t want to mention that. Man goes forth to labour etc. And so our Stephen, noble and great man, has sustained in the last six months—no avenue, no hope, no job—such tortures as few men sustain, because it became every day more clear that he had no hope of work—’

  ‘Emily! Emily!’ said Stephen.

  ‘Real work, Stephen. Seemingly not for the rest of your life. Stephen cannot work for black reaction. Dear Anna and all our friends knew that. And he is not permitted to write for his own side. Little by little in the last six months he has lost hope of working at all, ever. What despair! To have honesty, this precious jewel rejected and hated by all; and by those who talk of it most. And we needed money! Needed it desperately! And again he had no work! The effects of all this upon a man like our Stephen anyone can imagine.’

  ‘Emily, please!’ said Stephen, looking at her. Anna looked at her with hatred. Emily noticed both and seemed to enjoy their disorder.

  ‘What can that do to a man’s psyche? We have all heard very often and now I was fated to see it. How my heart sank! It often seemed to me that never had a man more suffered from the blows of fate and injustice more hopelessly! F
or how could he extricate himself from the trap he had somehow fallen into?’

  ‘Become a stockbroker,’ said Stephen grinning sourly.

  ‘Ah, could you, at your age?’ she said combatively.

  She emptied her glass. She said laughing, ‘I forgot. To Stephen!’ She filled, drank and sat down, her face flushed.

  Anna, she could see, was very angry and wounded. Stephen, once it was over, was cool enough. Austin Humphreys, a tall, dark, fleshy man, an English consul from a small consulate, was smiling at her with curiosity and the Trefougars were talking eagerly with Douglas Dolittle, a visitor, a tall, heavy, fair Englishman, who preferred country life, but for some reason had just started a small publishing business in the rue de Seine. Both had been brought to fill out Anna’s party respectably and Stephen had hopes of going in with Dolittle.

  It was a respectable company in fact. Mrs Humphreys, named Fabia, was a nervous, upper-middle-class Englishwoman, about thirty-two. They, in a yawning, offhand way, complained of their poverty, their debts, while at the same time inviting the Howards to their home in Chelsea and to the charming little rented house in the seaside town where Austin was consul. They even offered to sublet their house in Chelsea to the Howards; and in any case such houses could be got near them, for five or seven years or longer. The difficulties were maids, governesses, schools. No one had any money. Some of London’s most famous women scrubbed their own floors, others took in foreign girls, who worked for pocket money. Maids if got, would hardly stay and then there was the insurance; the foreign girls gave themselves airs, many of them were graduates. It was difficult. If both members of a couple worked, there was barely enough to eat and wear utility clothing, once school fees and children’s clothing were paid for. And then the summer holidays! What a nightmare! The only time they ate, however, was then, on a rare trip to Paris, Normandy, Brussels, even. Indeed the women looked as if they had a thin time. A change of government they thought would help; others believed that England had gone too far down a long decline.

  ‘My father used to say that we would end up like the Romans and the Spaniards. It does seem to be the penalty of Empire,’ said Fabia Humphreys.

  After coffee they moved away from the room and conversation became general. Emily was interested in the conversation, exactly her own troubles.

  ‘We are all bankrupt, not one of us but is head over ears in debt,’ said one of the English women. It was a sympathetic company, defeated, chic and humane. Yet they wanted the Howards to go to London and settle, just as the Brussels friends wanted them to go there. It would be easier in either capital it seemed. And why not Geneva, said another? No fear of war, money safe and tight and even tax alleviations for foreigners. Switzerland was free as the air; for the right people, of course.

  After dinner Emily tried to speak French and found it had nearly all gone. Stephen was speaking English to the Humphreyses, Dolittles and Trefougars. He said to Emily when she complained about her French, ‘And I say, thank God, what a relief! I have not one word of French left and I wish I never had to use it again. Why must I feel guilty not to speak the French language? They don’t speak mine. What freedom from a galling restraint. Always to be babbling like a child of three.’

  Emily, after brandy, when they were standing about, found herself talking with great animation to Austin Humphreys. He complimented her: she was a dramatic speaker: no wonder she had had a Broadway success. Emily grimaced, ‘You remind me of a film I saw. A girl wanted to go on the stage and recited Lady Macbeth’s speech. The talent-scout said she would make a wonderful comic. Well, that’s me. Medea in my heart and what comes out of my typewriter is the funny-mediocre.’

  Humphreys was amused and kept detailing her rosy, plump but haggard clown’s face, her merry smile, the curly, untidy hair, the fat-ringed neck, her excited, active, fat body. She had again become very fat and was wearing a handsome black silk suit with a skirt that folded round the waist. Emily told Humphreys, ‘I am very, very happy, deleerious, simply floating! If you only knew! These last few months in Paris Stephen has been simply sick with despair.’

  ‘Why, though?’

  ‘Because he was treated as an outcast and his whole life, so gracious, so noble, so beautifully, effortlessly right, so dedicated, was lost. He had burnt his bridges and found himself in a howling wilderness.’

  ‘I thought they published those articles of his you showed me?’

  ‘Ah, yes, they did! How like them! A cent of encouragement, a dollar of contempt. It means nothing. And Stephen must keep his family; work, work, work. He wanted creation and to relearn. I worked and his adopted son was rich and he getting poorer and lonelier; he was in a torment that does not bear thinking about.’

  Fabia said impatiently, ‘But really why should he care? He’ll come into money, he’s got this quarterly allowance and you are used to making money. I think he’s quite well off. I wish we were as well off.’ She laughed selfishly and impatiently.

  Emily, who of course had already explained all the family circumstances to her guests, said, ‘Ah, he has a sensitive and deeply and often-wounded spirit. And when the last days came, our bitter hour, just before dear Anna reached us, and he went round all Paris begging for work, a final, humiliating, desperate effort to find work that he could do, honourable work, he came home desperate. I feared for him. He felt it was the end; that he had lost his dignity as a man, as a father of sons, as a husband to me. He said we would never respect him again; he was finished. He could go on no longer.’

  ‘Well, I suppose he was in the dumps all right,’ said Humphreys, looking at Emily with interest.

  Fabia, though bored, liked Emily too. She said, ‘But I gathered it was all right now. What happened?’

  Emily smiled gloriously. She almost trumpeted, taking a swipe at her glass, half-full of brandy, ‘In this darkest hour, when he was so endlessly searching, he quite suddenly touched on the idea of going into a private news service or a talent agency in literature and through a chance introduction he heard of Douglas Dolittle. Dolittle is a friend of Johnny Trefougar. Stephen was broken by the many, many hopeless interviews and, more in fear than despair, he wrote to Dolittle. How unlikely it seemed!’

  She called, ‘Douglas, oh, come here, dear Douglas.’

  Dolittle turned round slowly, looking at them with his foggily-lighted eyes; then he smiled and came towards them. Emily emptied her glass, gave it to Humphreys to fill, reached up and kissed Douglas Dolittle on the cheek, put her arms round him, hugged him, laughing excitedly and then put her arm through his and, when Humphreys came up, through his.

  ‘It happened that Douglas also knows Dale, one of Stephen’s cousins. We wrote to Dale. Dale wrote to Douglas and did a thing so beautiful for Stephen, that I feel I shall be forever touched with joy, when I hear or think of the very words human being and cousin.’

  She said hastily, ‘And Dale had absolutely no axe to grind, nor did Douglas, nor Johnny Trefougar. Douglas was tied up but he moved heaven and earth for Stephen, a man he hardly knew. And so Stephen is going to get this chance in Paris after all; not only because of his essential talent and passion and vision; but because of his profound knowledge of literature, his taste; and above all, his force and instinct. And what a combination it will be.’

  She looked brightly into Dolittle’s face.

  ‘What a combination it will be! Douglas is interested in ideas, he is a hunter of genius pursuing genius. Dolittle and Howard, the future Gaudeamus Press. I assure you that the day before yesterday when all was settled and the conversation between Anna and Douglas and Stephen had been held and Stephen came home with an immense bouquet of roses and this silver bracelet and said, “My darling, it’s to be,” I burst into a howl and sobs, I fell down on the floor and it took Christy darling and Stephen and Marie-Jo to raise me. They put me on the couch and were lovely to me and I don’t think I ever spent a more delicious, deleerious, strangely beautiful evening in my life. Oh, real life, a destiny! The relief! Wha
t pure, beautiful, perfect, floating grace and ease. If that could last forever, that feeling of Elysium! I felt almost as when Giles, my own child was born.’

  She bore them over to Anna and put her arm in Anna’s. Anna covered her first recoil but remained stiff. Emily carolled, ‘Anna made all this possible for us, for she said she would lend us the money, without a word of asking, without a hint, with the simplicity of a fine heart, out of sympathy, intuition, generosity, tremendous, fine generosity. Anna made all this happiness and perfection possible. But I think, Anna, your confidence in him and in us did more than all in these blissful three days to buoy Stephen up. If Anna believes in me, Stephen said, that is a new world, the world is orchestrated at last, it is new and too good almost to be true. But true it is,’ she said, hugging Anna’s arm, ‘that is the meaning of mother and son, of mother’s love, son’s love. As we mothers know. So we enter upon a new chapter of our lives and may this one be a lovely, lovesome, joyful one. We have blessed our good fortune in you, Anna dear, how many times, and so often spoken of how we love you. Dear Douglas, and Dale, sweet, dear Cousin Dale, who realized at once, seeing Stephen’s desperate needs, his soul needs, his genius and his exact situation in time and place, what it was necessary to do—and did it!’

  Anna withdrew her arm.

  Emily turned round, her bosom bursting the seams in the new tailored suit, raised her rosy cheek, rosier still in the black dress, ‘And Anna really cured him of despair and complete breakdown. She changed the world. It’s all over, the blackness; it’s all glorious and new, the morning of our lives, the rosy dawn. Ah, I’m incoherent, absolutely, I know.’