I'm Dying Laughing: The Humourist

by Christina Stead

  Emily said, ‘I don’t get it, Godfrey. Are you unhappy or unrepressed or something? Why are you going to this Dr Glumpf-glumpf? I think it’s unhealthy.’

  ‘Godfrey adopted the two children so that he wouldn’t be able to leave me and he still wanted to leave me afterwards; so he went again to the psychoanalyst; for he says I represent his ideal,’ said Millian looking at them and patting Godfrey on the arm. Godfrey put down his drink, which he had only sipped, came behind her chair and kissed her several times in the hair.

  Emily shrugged her shoulders. ‘Say, listen, folks! I’m damned if I’m going to a psychoanalyst if I split first; if I’m not smart enough to figure what’s wrong with me, I’d better die. I know a psycho in New York, he’s a friend of Stephen’s. He says he never psychs artists or writers: they get it out of their system the simple way. I’m with him. What’s all this worrying about your psyches? I don’t think it’s Marxian. I don’t. I don’t see how it helps the working class. I bet working mothers don’t run to a fakir every time their three-year-old gets a cold. No such fun. They give an aspirin and if little Annie dies, they are prostrate and next year they have another. It’s boogoy—it’s anti-Marxian.’

  ‘I think so too,’ said Stephen.

  Godfrey called out, ‘Emily! Stephen! How can you say psychoanalysis is anti-Marxian?’ James Holinshed became serious for a moment, ‘Why, Godfrey’s cure is the most celebrated cure on the West Coast. Dr Stumpf made his fame out here with Godfrey’s cure. The stars and the directors go to him now.’

  Emily began to laugh good-naturedly, ‘Well, as long as I know Godfrey’s cured. But what did he have wrong? He seems the same to me. Maybe I’m short-sighted or something.’

  ‘I’m afraid human nature is a little different from the superficial grimaces of a cardboard comedy,’ said Millian.

  ‘Ouch, what a push in the puss, Millian!’ said Stephen.

  Emily flushed, ‘You mean I write for the Post, well, what’s wrong with that? What does the Party say? My book Johnny Appleseed offended les belles dames sans merci, the uppercrust, the good ladies and gentlemen on the central committee, because no good man ever looked twice at an extramarital woman if he was married already, if he belonged to the socialist movement. His mind is set on higher things. And do I even say this blasphemy? I imply it. And by jiminy if I’d made you the hero, Godfrey, I wouldn’t even have implied. And it’s you who have to go to Dr Glumpf-glumpf to get exorcised! Oh, ho, ho! Oh, ho, ho! But I’m in good standing. I’m a good Party member because I’m a funny writer, writing funny family stuff for the Post or the Kallikak News because that way I make good money and help the workers’ cause. But the Party and you, too, Godfrey, and all the rest of you here, you don’t like my serious writing which is about and for the working class, because each worker and each Party member shall be the husband of one wife. Thus saith Holy Writ.’

  ‘And please leave my wife out of this,’ said Stephen scowling. He unbuttoned his suspenders and hung them carefully under his coat on the chair. He then sat cross-legged in his chair, ran his hand through his hair and smiled gaily.

  Godfrey said in a cautious low tone, ‘We were all very disappointed in you out here; but then later we understood. We had all seen great changes in you.’

  ‘Stephen, I’d like you to look at a manuscript I have,’ said James Holinshed in a diplomatic aside which changed the conversation.

  Bowles came in, serious now, ‘Yes, we’d like your opinion, Stephen. I think James has done a very fine piece of work, it’s about the social status of the progressive intellectuals just preceding and after Pearl Harbor. Pearl Harbor was, of course, a qualitative change. Jim shows the radical movement fought the reactionary tendencies in America, the various streams of thought, the idiosyncrasies—that’s his poetic approach—I make no comment; and how they all united for the war effort, for the one front against fascism. He begins with his idealistic and even petty-bourgeois postured youth in eastern towns—he even had a project, resurrecting the memories of the dead towns along the fall line—nothing could be more reactionary and socially useless—how he met socialist and communist groups in New York, how he chose between them, by the force of ideologies and circumstances; and how after fighting in what might have seemed a bywater he found that this bywater joined the general stream of mankind, flowing towards progress on the day of Pearl Harbor. The general background is Persimmon Glen. He does the rest by flashbacks. The last scene is Persimmon Glen, formerly lighted by the headlights of cars and the floodlights from private houses; now lighted only by his torch as he goes up it in his blacked-out car, in uniform, a man working for his country, which is united with Russia and all progressive countries in the fight for democracy. I’d like your opinion of it. Moffat Byrd thinks it’s the best progressive novel we’ve turned out here. We were under pressure here. We face the Pacific. It might have been us. We haven’t had a really outstanding left writer. I think Holinshed fills the gap.’

  Said Emily, ‘Well, by golly, Godfrey, you yourself are supposed to be a leading left writer, leaving out others present. What do you mean? No left writers? That’s an insult to the whole outfit here.’

  Godfrey flushed slightly, ‘I say so and I think so. I think Jim is beginning to fill the gap.’

  ‘The thought does you honour, God,’ said Stephen.

  Holinshed pursued, ‘But I want your honest opinion, leaving all this preamble aside. Moffat Byrd and others have seen it and think it has the right line but I want real outside opinions. I consider a work of art is social, it should be submitted to the people.’

  ‘The people thank you,’ said Stephen.

  ‘Stephen,’ said Emily flushing, making a grimace and draining her glass.

  Vera Holinshed said, ‘Let me freshen your drinks.’

  ‘That’s Vera’s painting up there over the chimney,’ said Godfrey.

  ‘Is it really? Why, it’s wonderful. What is it? Where did you find those huts?’ cried Emily.

  ‘In North Africa,’ said Vera, in an undertone, glancing at the picture and away.

  ‘When were you in North Africa?’

  ‘Oh, you know Vera was married before to Bathurst Pemm,’ said Jim.

  ‘What?’ Emily checked herself and looked at the picture. ‘You were both painters—’ She glanced at Stephen and continued, ‘It’s wonderful, Vera.’

  Stephen said in an amusing manner, ‘I knew Bathurst years ago, when I was hanging out with the Trotskyists and he was a rough-and-ready artist from the streets and had just chucked his job in lithography for people’s art. I didn’t know you then, Vera.’

  Vera said, ‘I was there though. I was doing a social welfare job and painting weekends.’

  Jim said, ‘Bathurst and Vera grew up together, same street on the East Side. It was one of those things. But Bath wasn’t her first love. It wasn’t as unconscious as that. She really picked Bath out of the bunch as a comer; and she kept him for a couple, for five years and she paid for the trip to North Africa—didn’t you, Vee? I forget the whole route—Spain. Looked wonderful in his one-man show. Vera made Bathurst; so of course he left her.’

  ‘But that’s really fine art,’ said Emily, choking over her drink and waving at the mantelpiece.

  Jim replied, ‘Oh, Vee’s an artist, but it’s the way with women—kids, progressive schools to be paid for, orange juice, all-night baby-sitting—I don’t know what it’s all for, but it’s necessary for women; otherwise they have repressions. If women don’t have children, their art’s cramped and if they do, they don’t have art. So men have the art. Fair enough.’

  Emily looked at him angrily, ‘I take that amiss, Jim. Damn it, that’s an outright stuffed shirt viewpoint; so you get it straight all the time, eh? I can beat any man alive, I bet, in my writing, and children and house and all. I think it makes a woman an artist, it doesn’t hinder her. If she’s hindered it’s her own fault; she or her husband doesn’t want her to win. Stephen has always helped me and it’s because
of him I can have a full life and I believe in marriage and children for women and art, too. I think it’s possible for a woman to be a wife and mother and woman and artist and success and social worker and anything else you please in 1945.’

  Emily sighed, ‘I don’t say it isn’t the goddamnedest problem, but it’s no more a problem than being a wage-earner in a factory with kids at home, or a working mother or an unmarried mother, or a deserted mother, or the winner of a beauty contest in Dayton, Ohio, who comes out to Hollywood to conquer the box office and spends the rest of her life hash-chucking in a hash-house for other failures. I grant it’s terrible to be a success in literature and the movie trade along with being a wife and mother, but it’s not so terrible I can’t stand it.’

  ‘Very prettily said; the voice of Pomegranate Glen,’ said Stephen. There was a silence. Everyone was thinking that Pomegranate Glen was in better style than Persimmon Glen, they wondered if Stephen intended a crack.

  Emily was flushed. She simpered at Stephen, ‘All right. I’m right. Millian and Vera and I ought to know.’

  At this moment the Japanese manservant announced dinner.

  ‘Thank you, Katsuri,’ said Vera.

  They went to the table. The dining-room opened out of the living-room and was a long, wide room lined with glass shelves and glass cupboards let into the wall and filled with ornaments. Some were toys made by the children, in wax, straw and wood. There were parts of an old French dinner service, some Bohemian glass. The polished refectory table was decorated with lace mats, with monogrammed china, plain and cut glass and four hand-painted candlesticks. They had a light dinner, grapefruit in ice, chicken with potato croquettes, peas, salad and ice-cream, hot freshmade southern popovers, served in a linen serviette.

  ‘I love these,’ said Emily, taking three at once and looking hungrily at the wartime butter ration, which she did not touch. They drank some white California wine. Emily remarked, ‘Um, um, this is a nice dinner, Vera, wonderful chicken, yum-yum. Is Katsuri your cook? Stephen’s dream is to have a Japanese butler and maid. So far what we have is two Portuguese. They seem to use up a lot of laundry. We pay $400 a month for the pair, plus laundry, bed and board; it seems a lot but I suppose it’s worth it.’

  Stephen frowned, ‘When I was a youth and getting psychological mumps, my best friend was our Japanese butler Nakai and I know from experience a butler can be a friend. I’ll get one yet. If they think he’s a spy they can come and investigate me. Nakai taught me to make flower arrangements. I know that’s degenerate. My sister Florence despised me; “Just like Stephen,” she said, “he would!” They expected from me the effete, wasteful, useless, pretty touch.’

  Stephen smiled to himself and twined his legs round the legs of the chair. He speared a piece of chicken and swallowed it invisibly.

  Vera said, ‘Heavens, well you’ve got to pay high out here and in wartime.’

  Stephen said, looking round, ‘Worth it, worth it. It makes me happy and when I’m happy I’m paternal. I don’t nag at my wife and children. If the poor only knew about Japanese butlers there’d be no divorce in working-class families.’

  Vera, who was sitting at one end of the table, looked at Stephen in surprise and after a moment smiled. He smiled at her and biting into a piece of roll, showed his even white teeth; his curly fair hair shone its gilt threads in the candle-light. James Holinshed sat at the other end of the refectory table. He laughed, softly.

  ‘There are other cures—for not nagging at the wife.’

  ‘Marry a dumb husband,’ said Stephen.

  Emily laughed, ‘My mother before she died, told me to marry a Jew! She said Jews make the best husbands. I don’t know what it meant in her life, of course; probably—some—‘

  ‘Probably some Jew,’ said Stephen.

  Emily laughed, ‘She was right, though, Stephen. When I was reporting for the Kallikak News there was a sort of Jewish quarter in Kallikak, not a ghetto exactly, but where the Jews lived. I used to look in there on Friday nights. You could tell because they had a seven-branched candlestick either on the windowsill or on the table or sideboard and the most surprising houses had that candlestick.’

  ‘Judas Maccabaeus and his six sons, it’s the Manorah, that’s the meaning of it,’ said Godfrey.

  Emily broke in, her eyes glowing, ‘I always looked in.’

  She leaned back in her chair, to free her body from the table and free her arms. She began to declaim, ‘There’s no people on earth so lovely in their family life, the children love their parents and honour them, there’s none of our American goddamn it, get off the earth, old has-beens, attitude; and the parents love the children and spend their lives on them; and for the mother, the father is not only the father of her children—’

  ‘—and the uncle of her nephews—’ murmured Stephen.

  Angrily she cried, ‘Stephen! But the crown and glory of the house. And he’s not just a breadwinner, bringing home the bacon—’ Godfrey sat up, made a gesture, but said nothing.

  ‘—but he’s an honour to her and, if he goes, the whole house falls down, she breaks her heart and the children cry round her knees.’

  ‘A man I went to college with now has a job; he’s stationed at the Canadian Pacific Terminal in Montreal picking up the fleeing Jewish fathers from the States. He’s in league with a waiter in the first kosher restaurant around the corner.’ said Stephen.

  Vera laughed and eyed him gaily. Jim smiled, and Godfrey said gloomily, ‘Stephen, I don’t think that could be proved and should it be said? I think that in a time like this, of united national effort against fascism—’

  Emily did not tolerate this, but continued briskly, ‘It’s a sin to forget the death anniversary of the father or mother. There’s a firm of merchants of woollens in New York City, Fourth Avenue, that have a light on before their father’s picture, day and night, the whole year round. You can go along any time of night, any holiday and see it. That’s a parent cult that is very touching. It’s preserved them in poverty, it’s tied them to each other, the parents had something to work for, not just a kick in the pants. There’s no family as united as a Jewish family. You ought to see them at Rosh Hashonah and Yom Kippur—’

  Stephen laughed. Godfrey looked gloomier still.

  ‘You should see the joy on their faces, their faces shining as they all sit round the table and laugh. The father wears a black cap, the mother wears a white cap and a collar and calls her husband “Jacob my crown, Jacob my little bird”—Stephen, my crown, my king—’ she said turning to him, with tears in her eyes, very flushed and smiling—‘doesn’t it sound wonderful? And so surely the growing up of those children is the father’s and mother’s reward?’

  Now Emily’s eyes were sparkling and her lips twitching with suppressed merriment, ‘Try to find me a picture like that in an Irish family or an American family, where everyone’s trying to squeeze the last nickel out of the old man because he’s an old-timer anyway and if he had any heart, he’d die and let them have the insurance to get through college; and where Ma’s weeping her eyes out at Clark Gable and thinking how Tommy Firefly III nearly proposed to her at Junior Prom in the Year 1899 and how—’

  ‘Emily!’ said Stephen loudly.

  ‘You shut up a minute, Stephen,’ said Emily gathering speed; but after a few moments, Stephen broke in again.

  ‘As long as Emily hasn’t seen it, she can describe it in detail. What Emily saw, she experienced through the window of a bungalow while she was racing past in a racing two-seater to get a fire-story from a pal she had on the payroll at the Kallikak firehouse.’

  Emily said angrily, ‘You are a liar, Stephen: I did see those things.’

  ‘Sure you saw them.’

  Stephen grinned at Millian who was sitting beside him, ‘Emily had to work so hard and so long for the Kallikak News rag and the Halifax Weekly and the New York Evening Crimes that she got into the way of seeing things. She had to see things or she didn’t hold her job, and believe me
Emily is the best seer the other side of the Rockies.’

  ‘That’s true,’ said Emily.

  ‘I know it’s true.’ said Stephen.

  Jim Holinshed, who with various grimaces had been toying with his ice-cream spoon, was making signs to the servant to fill the glasses, bring coffee; and now continued in a gentle voice a conversation he had begun before.

  ‘Vera has her memories and I tell her nightcap tales of the days of yore.’

  He smiled at his wife with lowered eyelids, his face forward and his pretty hand poised over the lace mat. He murmured clearly, ‘I believe I have a son in Denmark, so I have been told, and I went to see him some years ago. Heidi’s married and the boy doesn’t look like me, though his name is James, quite an elegant name in Denmark. That was when I went to Paris, just before the war; Vera and I were married, but Vera let me go. A girl-friend of mine from other days was crossing on the same boat and Vera and I thought it would be a good thing if I were to test our marriage; for I’d always felt—had a yen, you might say, unlovely expression—been attracted by this girl physically. I didn’t tell Vee about the girl at the time, well, not this particular girl, unnecessary to cause useless mental stress and insecurity without good reason. If we clicked, I thought I could tell Vera later, after we’d tested it. Well, I was justified. We didn’t click. She was quite a bitch. I found out—where babies come from—of course—and thought I was caught; but she turned out to be a four-alarm bitch. She landed in Paris with some professor she’d picked up on the boat. She was a—very pretty girl and had real physical charms—for others as well as for me; and she was no virgin, even before I met her.’ He paused and smiled round the table with an air of boyish grace and saluted his wife delicately, with his lifted glass. He laughed, ‘Vera won, didn’t you Vera? This—dame—’ (every time he used a vulgar expression, he did it with a refined, amused air as if conceding himself courteously to popular taste) ‘this sweet little rounded blonde tigress—got typhoid. The professor quit and she had me tied so that I ran round Paris looking after her, might have caught it myself—didn’t think of Vera and the children, or if I did, I thought Vee’d had a man before and she’ll get one again, if she’s good enough. And I knew I had enough life insurance for the kid—my kid if the pregnancy comes through; and there are the war bonds—plenty of them. So I thought, if she recovers, I leave the goddamn—bitch. And if she dies, I’ll die too, of love. Just to show it can happen here. She got better. I followed her to Berlin where she had a man to look up—and there she turned out to be—more of a bitch than before. In the meantime, I wasn’t frustrated, by any means—but even I finally told her I was going to check out and I did, in good order. I took the first train that came along—to Hamburg and there took a boat to Denmark to see if it was true about my boy James. Heidi was a nice girl too. I left her in the lurch; but you know what women are, they’re tenacious. Coming along the quay I found a girl and I was so fed up, I asked her to come along. I took her along. I asked her her name, “Regina,” she said; the queen. So I took the little queen along. I forgot the Berlin nuisance right away and when I got into Copenhagen I was quite embarrassed, for I didn’t want to go and see Heidi and her child any more. But I took the little queen along and I told Heidi, “This is my wife”. Heidi put us up too; for a couple of weeks. It was really amusing, the girls playing against each other and neither knowing everything. In the meantime, I was writing to Vee, telling her everything. That’s what’s good about us, I tell Vee everything. You see marriage—after a few years—had begun to drag me down. Vee had been married before and she was quite motherly about it. You understood, didn’t you, Vee?’