I'm Dying Laughing: The Humourist

by Christina Stead

  ‘Oh, shit!’ said Stephen.

  ‘I’m not laughing. I know it’s like shouting, “What is Truth?” in the middle of a cocktail party; that is to say a business meeting of two-thousand-dollar-a-week men, or political mahogany-heads who think a writer is there to write slogans. We get into money habits and we forget the tremendous responsibility a writer has to tell the truth—’

  ‘I don’t know what you’re getting at, and I’ve a headache,’ said Stephen getting up and putting the coffee-grounds into newspaper and then into the garbage-can.

  ‘Stephen, what are you doing? You know in Los Angeles you can’t put coffee-grounds into the garbage: they won’t collect it.’

  Stephen reached into the can and brought back the packet, ‘Hell, and there’s still that wartime ordinance against incinerators that might make smoke signals. Are we crazy? Well, I guess.’

  Emily went on in a low tone, ‘I know that you don’t think so much of my talent and I know—’ (her voice became firm) ‘—I know that your esteemed confrères on the Washington Liberator don’t think my views matter a cent because first I’m a woman and they’re ex-Cedar boobs; and next I’m just a comic writer, let me stick to my last joke; but I’ve been through the mill—oy! what an expression—but I mean, I do know the writing trade. I think a writer has a tremendous responsibility to tell the truth and tell it with all the skill and ability and experience—he has—to rise above himself—not like I’m doing, Stephen, going down to the sod-digging level of my grandfather. To be better than he was for the sake of others. That’s a funny thing, but every night I wake up and I think, I want to be better than I am by nature. To be a writer in an age when the truth will set us free—means to be a writer of the truth; or to be an utter, utter, decadent damned soul.’ She put her head on her arms on the table and cried.

  At this Stephen turned round and shouted uneasily, ‘For God’s sake, that’s enough drama. You don’t have to act out your soul-dramas in the kitchen do you? You’ve probably woken up all the children and Olivia is going to write a letter home to Grandma tomorrow about how we fight and Florence will put that in her report to the court. Jesus, the scenes you make! Anyone would think you thought human beings were good, kind, decent, generous and the friend of someone.’

  ‘I do think so—I really think so,’ sobbed Emily.

  ‘Well, that’s fine. Write that for the weeklies and we’ll really make a living. I’m going to bed, Emily. I’ve got a stomach attack and I’ve got to rest.’ He pushed the swing door.

  ‘Take your medicine and I’ll be in in a minute,’ said Emily, partly raising her head from her arms and looking after the door still swinging. She slouched there a moment and then raised her head. Stephen had left some coffee-grounds on the tiled floor. Emily got a pail and washed the floor there, washed out the pail and stood it to dry. Then she washed the drying rack again, smelled the dishrag, soaked it in vinegar and boiled it and hung it to dry. She sniffed. The kitchen smelled of various cleaning agents. She looked happy. She lit a cigarette and sat down at the table with an ashtray and a long drink. The cat hurled itself against the kitchen door. The locked door rattled. The cat rushed through the grass and with a bound landed on the kitchen windowsill. She saw its phosphorescent wild eyes through the glass. She heard Manoel and Eva moving in the room overhead.

  Stephen shouted, ‘Come to bed!’

  The cat crouched on the windowsill staring in. She turned off the light and, after tidying the rooms, went up to the bedroom. Stephen was already in bed, groaning faintly. She looked at him.

  ‘Goddamnit, don’t hover,’ he cried.

  She tapped a new cigarette on the table.

  ‘Don’t do that,’ groaned the sufferer.

  She grimaced to herself in the mirror. She put a swansdown jacket over her nightdress and opened a book. ‘Don’t wear that tickling thing!’

  She put on another bedjacket and got into bed with a glass of water and her reading lamp, two tubes of different pills, a pen, a notebook and a box of face-tissues. This room had windows on two sides, one set facing the hill rising in the back. The cat threw itself against these windows and, after several leaps, managed to settle on the windowsill. It stared in. Emily drew the curtains.

  ‘Open the curtains. You know I can’t sleep unless I can see the sky.’ She opened the curtains, took her pills and put out the light. The long night of pain and restlessness began. It seemed to her the cat was part of it. She got up and banged the window till the cat went away. ‘What are you doing?’

  ‘I hate cats. I’d have them all killed,’ said Emily.

  ‘I thought you liked them because they killed birds.’

  ‘We could kill all the birds ourselves. Send out a plane to spray the woods with DDT. What use are they?’

  ‘They kill the insects.’

  ‘You wouldn’t have insects with DDT.’

  ‘Leave them all alone.’

  ‘What use is all this trash in the modern world? Let’s get rid of them and organize the world. They don’t belong to anyone, they don’t like anyone—they’re marauders. They eat our food. City people are sentimental. They think milk grows in containers. Farmers don’t like birds. They eat the food they grow.’

  ‘Go to sleep.’

  ‘The world belongs to man or to animals, doesn’t it? It’s them or us. Look at the roaches, thousands or millions of years old. We’re inefficient. We’re letting them and all the other pests and the snakes and the flying snakes—’

  ‘What flying snakes?’

  ‘Birds are flying snakes. It shows it in the Natural History Museum. Get rid of them and you can do fertilization with a spray. Spray from a plane. Let’s get rid of the old-fashioned world. We want the world for ourselves. We’re growing at such a rate there won’t be enough for us if we let them maraud and rob and steal. I’m a farmer’s daughter—’

  ‘Go to sleep.’

  ‘I can’t bear to think of our garden and our place on the river at home and our wood-lot full of these creeping things that we could destroy. What’s the matter with us? Why don’t we—’

  ‘Go to sleep.’

  But Emily went on fretting for a while about the laws and measures against the free-living part of the world, those who spoke with other tongues than ours, who hissed, chirped, rattled, scuttled, flew, slid.

  8 BACK EAST

  THE NEXT MORNING A parcel containing a bound typescript was delivered at their house before breakfast. It was for Stephen. He opened it at breakfast and found it was Byrd’s ‘homework, a necessary job to get things straight’, the essay on America’s new task in Europe, that he had promised to Stephen the night before.

  With it was a pleasant, cajoling, almost humble letter from Moffat Byrd, ten or twelve hand-written lines asking Stephen’s opinion ‘on this rough draft’. He said, ‘The discussion yesterday evening did me good; I made some alterations before I went to bed and strengthened the tone of the argument. I know your plain dealing and will value any comment at all you have to make. We all believe in autocriticism, we all make mistakes. You are among friends and I, like all the others, value your opinion, coming as it does from a comrade devoted to Party and country.’

  Stephen was deeply pleased. To conceal his pride and pleasure, he fluttered the pages, smacking his lips with contempt, but with a glowing face, said a few words and then, packing the typescript neatly by him, he confessed that he was glad.

  ‘Perhaps after all, Byrd was ashamed of the comedy of last night. I will take him at his word. I will read it thoroughly and make a sincere criticism. Up to now these deep thinkers have not seen fit to consult me. But they know who I am. You caught that, about how they thought of us, when we came out first; that they thought the Party had sent us as censors, scrutineers, to straighten them up. Byrd will get a scrupulous—’ he began to smile; ‘Byrd will get a petty, titivating, meticulous, nitpicking, fine-comb report.’

  He looked merry and stretched in his chair.

  Emily was
at the other end of the rectangular breakfast table, which was set by some windows; in front of her were a number of letters, mostly answers from her correspondents.

  ‘If you do anything but flatter the brute, you’re sunk. Elementary my dear Watson. It’s the oldest rule in the book.’

  Stephen spoke petulantly, ‘Say what you will, Byrd is a man of real quality. He’s Party leader in the studios, he’s highest paid scriptwriter and he’s no yesman. I see what it is—he’s trying to prove that it is economically necessary for us and for the Europeans to accept American industrial organisation, until Europe rises from the ruins and is ready for its own pattern. To undertake a revolution now on the Russian pattern, after such a disaster, would be a disaster to the revolution itself. Take France—there is nothing to seize. Revolution must seize a going concern or seize a state in the making, not a heap of ruins.’

  ‘In Russia, they did.’

  ‘Let’s not be primitive socialists. It is no longer 1917. It is a good idea for America to protect and nurture the diseased, famished nations till they can look after themselves and find their own way out.’

  ‘Uh-huh,’ said Emily, reading.

  ‘Well, it gives me a real chance to defend my views and show them where they are mistaken. They are asking me for an opinion. And you can just see it, Emily—if my views are accepted or even partly compatible, if he invites me over for a talk and I can put it over, the other Party boys will follow tamely enough, you know that. It is my big chance to be acknowledged, to get in with the top boys; and once I’m accepted here, I’ll have the prestige of being a leader here, when we go back to New York.’

  ‘Hollywood prestige! Alackaday! They think the Hollywood boys are a lot of merry andrews, jack-o’-lanterns, harlequins; plain nuts. Besides, it’s a trap. You don’t see it and he doesn’t mean it—maybe. And maybe he does. If he squashes you, no more chance of getting on the central committee.’

  But Stephen took no notice. He set to work and in three days he had prepared a long commentary and criticism of Byrd’s paper. He read it to Emily, who agreed with the ideas, but said it had no chance.

  ‘This paper of his is going to be published over his name. The local Party’s thirsting for it so they can drink another full cup of obedience. He’s advertised it in all our set. The studio faithful are waiting for it; and he’s going to print your ideas? What he wants is to get you on paper. He’ll show it around and say at last he has proof, a statement under your own signature, that’s you’re a traitor to the Party and to America, first to him.’

  Stephen said, ‘You don’t know how men think. There’s another sort of fellowship. Men really want to have a sympathetic, intelligent consultation when they’re framing a new policy statement. It’s necessary. All prime ministers, all presidents, all heads of corporations do it. It’s also good Party doctrine, criticism by colleagues and equals. It shows, Emmie, it pays to stick it out. In the end you get your chance. Appearances sometimes to the contrary, the Party is a democratic institution and Jay is not our enemy; he’s our colleague and he’s a loyal Party man.’

  He was jubilant at the work done. It was a bright morning. The breakfast-room overlooked a short paved terrace, a grass slope, running down to other slopes and then to the canyon. Emily was good-tempered, too. She had received two fan-letters, one from a woman in Seattle and one from an American roadworker who went to the evening class she taught, in downtown Los Angeles.

  She laughed and conceded, ‘Perhaps you’re right. This fighting for a living is bad.’

  She began to laugh, ‘See what I’ve got for my next lecture downtown:

  “They have created a social life based upon pitiless rivalry of interests, which instead of excluding, actually completes itself, when these same interests require it, by a ferocious group solidarity … on fête days, they exercise themselves in trials of strength; pride, emulation, interest and boasting are mingled and confounded, the rivalry is more bitter in proportion as the rivals are better known to each other: conflicts multiply, lawsuits succeed one another.”

  ‘That’s from La Terre du Voleur by a certain M. Tammsaare, about some miserable backward community. It’s us. I cut it out of a book about denunciation and denouncers: awful subject, but very domestic under Hitler and under us.’

  ‘Where are the lawsuits?’ he asked contemptuously.

  ‘Aren’t you afraid of people writing in to the Party about your being a traitor to them; and to the FBI about your being a traitor to the country?’ She shrieked with laughter: ‘This way the iron maiden, that way the guillotine.’

  He got up to pack up the typescript and commentary, saying negligently, ‘I suppose there’s some reason why a humorist has to see life as Grand Guignol.’

  ‘Yes, it’s the struggle. But struggle is life, as someone said. However I know I’m wrong to get suspicious and sardonic. There’s more good in the world than we think.’

  ‘This will be a turning-point, I feel it,’ said Stephen comforting her. ‘To think of our holding out heads up again and having, as well as good faith, which is a ticket to the gallows, good odour.’

  He took his car out and delivered the package to Moffat Byrd’s house. Byrd, a punctual hard-working man, was at the studios.

  But it was only, it seemed, a leader’s conciliatory gesture. Byrd wrote back that night saying that he had allowed Stephen to read this as yet private paper, to get his reactions, for he, Byrd, had not been able to accept the idea that Stephen ‘and his spouse’ were in such complete disagreement with the Party. The Party said that American aid was necessary for broken Europe, the Party’s chief said that cartels were not an evil of capitalism, but at the moment actually necessary for the health of society, that cartels were a form of socialism, a new form and that would pass into another socialism. How could Emily and Stephen quarrel with the Party on all its fundamental views, formed not idly, but in the crucible of war, in the fight against fascism (Stephen having written that cartels, American industrial capitalism, the control of one country by another, were a form of colonialism and opposed to all Marxian doctrine)? How could the Howards form a fragmentation of two, and still claim the respect, loyalty and comradeship of the Party members? Byrd’s views were the accepted views and he had been so shocked by the ‘wavering, crumbling Howard viewpoint’, another form of Trotskyism, puerile incendiarism and little better than provocation, that he was going to take counsel about them. The country, the Party in the lead, and along with it, its elected leaders, was going ahead to set up a new regime in Europe, where all the past had gone down the drain, America, the best organized society in the world, was gallantly and generously about to rebuild her allies—and the Howards, playing at revolution, sticking to a few texts out of context, like Biblical students with ‘God is Love’ on their walls, refusing to look at the world about them, wanted the Party to follow them. They were right, millions of other Americans were wrong, the Party was wrong. What could happen to them? They could only become outcasts with no function, unless they saw the abyss opening before them.

  ‘My God, I thought the function of the Party was revolution,’ said Stephen; ‘I have been wrong. Goddamn the comfortable temporizers. I’ll stick to it, if it kills me.’

  But he did not sleep at night and he suffered more and more from his indigestion and his teeth.

  Emily still had two scripts going round; and now Stephen wanted her to get into the studios as a regular writer with a good weekly wage, such as Godfrey Bowles or Moffat Byrd had.

  She ridiculed it. ‘If I’m one of a regular team with one of those offices like a bee in a cell, I’ll have to give them my work for say $2,000 a week—I won’t get $5,000 to begin with; and so for $104,000 a year I’ll give away work that’s worth $160,000 even in a bad year. You’re not allowed to free-lance.’

  ‘But we’ll have a regular income. I wouldn’t cry at getting $104,000 a year.’

  ‘You’re giving up a goldmine for a pension.’

  But they were har
d-up and presently Olivia’s custody case was coming up; they would have to show their earnings. With regret, shame, but hiding her feelings, Emily went to see an agent who had already been interested in her, Walter Simpson; she had also been approached by Bergman, an agent with a good string of writers in the studios, all of them leftists as was Bergman; but she avoided him.

  ‘I want a good job,’ she said; ‘I don’t want to wear the CP brand; I want a job on merits; you get more.’

  Walter Simpson, a handsome, stalwart Englishman who had once been in the paper business, took her round to studio after studio. Cocktail parties were given for her; they all watched her; all thought she would be a success. Some of ‘the greats’ came up to her lunch-table in the canteen, talked and smiled: they were seen with her, for them an act of charity and promise. For some reason she was not accepted. The dinner invitations fell off, stopped. It was explained in this way: she talked too much, she was too bright. She would go in to a producer or director, interest him, charm him until a contract seemed certain; and then the sale (of her person and talent) did not take place. She was sorry and glad. She did not want to work in the studios. All her money was made on plays, books and independent scripts, all free-lancing. With any luck, and putting in the hard work she always did, she could hope to make very large sums outside the studios; whilst inside, her income would be limited. The contract offered by the studios was, in reality, a peonage contract, and therefore illegal, though no one challenged it. The contract Stephen had hoped for was a seven-year contract, under which every moment of her life belonged to the studios. They would pay for all her time, twenty-four hours a day and 365 days a year; so that, in theory at least, if she did any independent writing while there, it was theirs.

  One day Emily was called to the studio to see the secretary, a strange, long-headed man who looked as if his head had been cast in two pieces, in two metals, silver and bronze and the pieces carefully but not reassuringly put together. He was a hated and ridiculed man; ridiculed out of hate and fear—he had great power, throughout the studio; he was the hatchet man. He had an odd manner, mild, courteous, strained, not at all brutal and nasty as she had heard. He asked her about her projects, her books; then said quietly that writers of her sort should go to New York and write their successful plays and books and come out with them on quite a different sort of contract, to see them through the studios, when they were bought.