I'm Dying Laughing: The Humourist

by Christina Stead

  Emily did not argue: she heard her sentence and though this was exactly what she thought herself, she was dashed. She had lost the job; she never wanted the job; she had never wanted to be a studio hack, sitting in conferences, haggling over every word. This was what she did with Stephen, but for more money. She trotted through the large reception hall, down to her office, telephoned Stephen, left a message for him. Then she went back to the town centre by bus, looking indifferently at the wretched landscape and with the feelings of a man who must go home to wife and children and tell them he cannot pay for their bread at the end of the week.

  They were out of money, they had spent Stephen’s allowance, the lawyers looking after Olivia’s case had sent in a bill, doctors and dentists were unpaid. In her trouble she began to imagine conspiracies—already, she thought, Jay Moffat Byrd had given the word in the studios; it was through him that her last two scripts had been rejected.

  She telephoned Stephen from the bus terminal; the maid said he had already left to meet her. She stood there waiting for him, her heart dry and painful, tossing projects and arguments about in her fancy.

  When Stephen drew up in their second car, a little cream one, and opened the door for her to get in, she saw that he was perplexed, moody. She did not want to break the bad news till she got back home and had a drink; she could not bear his reproaches.

  ‘I called from the studio, but you were out.’

  He did not answer.

  ‘Anything wrong, Stephen? Olivia lost? Lennie sulky? What’s wrong?’

  ‘Byrd telephoned me to go over; he said it was critical, emergent.’

  ‘What is?’

  ‘Discussions are going on. Down with the Howards. If we don’t conform, they’ll oust us.’

  ‘We’ll fight them.’

  ‘I won’t. You can’t fight the ultimate, the final justice,’ said Stephen. ‘I’m going to put my pride in my pocket. If I lost the Party I’d have nothing. I wouldn’t know where to go, where to look. I can’t live without the Party. I’ve built my life, my philosophy, my affections, too, on it.’

  ‘We’ll fight them. They have no right to do this to an honest man like you. I’ll fight them. We’ll write them a manifesto, if we have to sit up all night. We’ll show them they’re wrong. Maybe it’ll take a week or more, but they won’t go through with this. This is Hollywood. Not New York. We’ll write to New York. This is the land of Cockaigne, the cave of Adullam. Here they don’t cut ice with the NY central committee. Who are they? Illusions, daymares, oases—’

  ‘Oh-oh,’ he sighed, not listening to her.

  ‘Not oases, that flapdoodle in the desert—and it comes from that white headachy plain—mirage, mirages,’ she shouted.

  ‘I’ve given my word to Jay to write him a letter retracting all my errors.’

  ‘You won’t.’

  ‘Yes, I will. I couldn’t bear to be put out of the Party. It’s my whole life. If that happened what has my life been for? I couldn’t have spent all these years for nothing.’

  ‘What about me? The children? What about your work—you’ve got your name on books.’

  ‘You know damn well,’ he said between his teeth, ‘that tomorrow morning, if I don’t do full penance, those books won’t be fit to line the garbage cans. No one will read them. No one in the Party and no one outside the Party will care about them. No one will stand by us. You and I will be alone, ridiculous naked people, one fat, one thin, under a thundercloud. You know what Thurber said about the man who left town under a cloud. That’ll be us tomorrow. Well, it won’t be. I’ve given in. I have got to be taken back into favour, I won’t let my work be destroyed. I’m not going to let them destroy me. We’ll stay here, be accepted, you’ll get a regular salary, no more of this huckstering; Byrd will help us, he said he would, if we listen to reason. It’s all settled.’

  ‘It’s not. I’m not wanted in the studio; I’m out. No job.’ His hands trembled on the wheel and he began talking in a high-pitched voice. How were they to face up to everything? They were ruined, no ground under their feet.

  It was a miserable evening, one of their worst; and yet with all this, they had to think about their appearance in court, the following week. They both had to fly east, with Olivia, to explain their way of living and their plans.

  In turmoil, Emily quickly made up her mind what to do. Their chances with Olivia were very good. Florence was in a nursing home; Anna was out in the Sinai Desert with Arthur. Either the case had come on before they expected it, or they had decided between themselves not to fight. This was likely, for they had strongly disapproved a headlined custody case.

  Emily let Stephen take Olivia to the zoo, though they both disliked animals, to the movies, to the museum; she herself was very busy; and when the day came for them to appear in court, she informed Stephen that she was going to say that they had decided Hollywood was a poor setting for the little girl and that they were moving east for her sake, bringing with them all their establishment, Lennie, Giles, of course, Christopher, the servants, the cars—

  ‘With my face, I can’t tell such lies,’ said Stephen.

  ‘Ah, but it’s not a lie: the house is bought, or spoken for. It’s a lovely old house in White Oak Shade Road, in New Canaan; it’s on a millstream, a house built round three sides of a square, with an orchard, a vegetable garden, a field; and I have bought a nanny goat for the children. We can give them goat’s milk. It’s healthy.’

  ‘Who’s going to milk the goat? How did you pay for the millstream? I don’t want to live in New Canaan.’

  ‘I sold the house in Beverly Hills.’

  ‘Sold it? What about my signature?’

  ‘I said it was forthcoming—you’ll airmail it.’

  Then she began to explain all her idea to him. In this way, they slipped out of the noose (as she said) prepared by Byrd, they got back to the old company who knew them. The West Coast had gone mad since Pearl Harbor, with ‘it might have been us’. What happened in New York the day of Pearl Harbor? People were upset. In Los Angeles the railroad terminal was crowded with people, ‘including some of our well-known friends’ with just paper parcels under their arms, anything to get out and go east. ‘That’s their state of mind, mass hysteria delivered with the milk and necessary for them to be able to write their absurd patriotic scripts. Easterners are saner. You won’t feel ill, your life wasted, your aims wobbling over here. Connecticut is calming; it’s also fashionable enough. And you’ll love it, Stephen; it’s a lovely old house, with bits built on, galleries, a balcony, a separate stone staircase going up to a wing with airy rooms—it’s genteel, tray raffeenay, a gentleman’s place—and all around are people you can talk to, there’s a couple of writers who’ve had a radio serial running for five years, right next door; and all about, New York radicals, that is to say, sensible, honed-down, adjusted radicals, not people out of The Cabinet of Dr Caligari.’

  He was attracted, though he refused to be consoled till he had been in to see some Party colleagues to whom he told his troubles on the Coast. In a mild, blurred indifference, they made him feel at home; and though he felt sure that an unfriendly description of him had reached them, by their noncommittal words, he also felt soothed by the feeling that though sincere they might be, those theatrical mavericks were scrutinized without love by the cold, clearcut, cut-and-dried ‘boys’ on the central committee.

  ‘There’s always been a suggestion that the central committee should be moved out to Chicago or Pittsburgh, away from the soft cosmopolitanism of New York. How glad I am it hasn’t happened. Here they soothe me because I’m just a poor, rough, Chicago type; Chicago they’d cut me down with a blunt axe.’

  They moved into the new house in New Canaan and, blithely and with the usual invigorating arguments, went about furnishing it to their taste, leaving it pleasantly airy, with plenty of room to move; and at once, to show Stephen that he was still persona grata with the Party, they set about entertaining the radical set. They were pleas
ed to find that their absence in Hollywood and the exaggerated stories of their moneymaking there gave them a warmer welcome here; it had also helped them that Olivia had been given to them by the court and that the sweetly obeisant little Christy was living with them too.

  ‘Are you happy, Stephen?’ said his energetic wife, the first morning at breakfast, as he sat with his paper, letters, cornflakes, toast and egg in the temporary breakfast-room. They had yet to sort out the rooms.

  ‘I could be,’ he said, ‘but all this commotion and the worry about whether Jim Burgess really meant it when he said I was with them just as I had always been—you know how he sits there, talking, not looking at you, chucking lumps of sugar into the sugar-bowl and then digging them out again and chucking them in again, so that it looks as if he doesn’t mean what he says—’

  ‘What a worrier. What will be, will be!’

  ‘I’ve always been afraid of that.’

  ‘Tut-tut. Listen, sweetheart, last night I was reading The Blithedale Romance—’

  ‘You had the light on all night.’

  ‘I didn’t. I have to catch up. I’m a leftist, and I don’t know anything. I have no backlog. I started to laugh—’

  ‘The bed was shaking; I thought you were crying.’

  ‘Listen. This is you, oh-ha-ha, don’t be mad at me, it’s so like. Listen:

  “In this predicament I seriously wished—selfish as it may appear—that the reformation of society had been postponed about half a century, or at all events, to such a date as should have put my intermeddling with it entirely out of the question … What in the name of common sense, had I to do with any better society than that I had always lived in … My dinner at the Albion where I had a hundred dishes at command … Was it better to hoe, to mow, to toil and moil amidst the accumulations of a barnyard; to be the chambermaid of two yoke of oxen and a dozen cows …”’

  ‘That’s me? It isn’t me at all. I don’t want a hundred dishes. I don’t want to milk the goat, that’s another matter. Did you ever milk a goat? You’ve got to throw her down and tie her legs! A bestial, repulsive slavery of a goat.’ After this outburst of amusing peevishness, he said thoughtfully, ‘It would have made no difference to me what time or place, I would always have been what I am. I know I am a gnat, a mayfly, I know I haven’t the stamina or coarseness of men who succeed, but I must be a revolutionary, not just a rebel; for me, it’s a kind of love, a better kind. I love you and the children, when the house is quiet and they’ve had their food, I love you most, but there is more; and it isn’t love of mankind, it is just love, but this Party and this movement is the body of that love for me. Not better—it’s not better to love the Party than you—you are two, strongly loved.’

  Emily looked at him markedly. ‘Stephen, Stephen! I don’t deserve you. But who really deserves their friend? I adore you. And, do you know, it’s not the first time, you are a saintly character, too.’

  ‘Oh, not that milky-watery picture.’

  ‘Oh, you are very different from me. King Cophetua and the beggar maid.’

  9 THE MAGIC REFUGEE

  THE DETERMINATION AND VIOLENCE of her nature called on Emily’s physical reserves; more than that, because she tended to obesity, she had to diet, though working hard. During the day she lived on black coffee, barbiturates and, in the evening, a good meal and wine, whisky and soda and liqueurs. She soon heard of a refugee doctor in Park Avenue, who had taken the name Doctor Park and who gave injections of the Bogomoletz serum, a Russian product which was said to prolong life, particularly if taken before the age of thirty-five, and Emily was just thirty-five; she had no time to lose.

  She persuaded a neighbour and friend of theirs, Ruth Oates, to go with her twice a week to get treatment from Dr Park. Axel Oates ran his own mimeographed weekly, called Evidence, full of rumours, tips and the secret news, which was bought by every bright journalist at home and abroad and by a good many left-leaning economists and others. His news was good and he said the things they wanted to say but could not; in other words, he had achieved the aim of many a gagged journalist. He had a small office in Eighteenth Street, in a loft: Ruth came in from New Canaan four days a week to do the considerable office-work. She was a husky, good-looking woman, thirty-five or so, who worked hard in their house and garden and at the day’s end liked to drink. Axel was a teetotaller. Ruth and Emily became very friendly. Ruth did not drink at all on her days in town. Emily now drank a good deal of whisky: she found she was able to—and, in fact, her manner when drunk differed little from her manner when sober. Stephen, with his delicate stomach, drank very little though he had a favourite cocktail which he served at the parties, which he called the Howard Bomb, a disagreeable, harsh, throat-twisting concoction which he had made up one night by pouring the ends of several bottles into the cocktail shaker. People would take it because it was like an explosion: then they went back to their usual tipple. Apart from this joke of his, Stephen frowned on drink in the daytime. Emily liked to drink now and took advantage of being alone in town to amuse herself in any way. Stephen refused to take the Bogomoletz treatment; ‘I’m too old,’ said he: ‘besides, who knows? Bogomoletz died at 57.’ He was very busy in the city, working with and for the Party; he never met Emily when she went into town twice a week for her guzzle at the fountain of youth, the Bogomoletz injections. Dr Park’s waiting-room was full. There were also people who wanted the treatment for their animals; but the supply of serum was limited. Emily talked with everyone in the waiting-room and came home full of the grotesque vanity of these peculiar people who wanted to live for ever, ‘not to mention their hound-dogs.’

  She and Stephen were soon invited to one of Dr Park’s ‘salons’ as he called them, there to meet some famous New York progressives, Jan Jones, who defended clients in labour victimisation, NAACP and civil liberties cases, lawyers for International Labor Defence and a popular radical psychoanalyst and his wife, a producer, speakers for the exiled Spanish Republicans and one or two, but very few, literary people.

  Every time they went home from one of these evenings, they laughed, jeered, compared views and were consoled; ‘How different from that intellectual coal bin Hollywood, everyone black, dreary and the same.’

  Before this Emily had never known doctors: she came from a family that avoided doctors because of the expense. Before her confinement she had not known the exotic, strange, magic world of medicine: she had not known the back-kitchen and disease-infatuated world of women who regard their own bodies uneasily and are district nurses for the family. She had heard in hospital, for the first time, woman-talk, dirty talk, superstitions like witchcraft, but perhaps, who knew, partly true. She had her baby Giles and with her usual enthusiasm, though her modesty was offended, she accepted it all with laughter, humour, malice, ridicule but without hatred—material, after all, for her future stories. It was not venal. She liked people. She swallowed down all the new woman’s world of aching, haunting fantasy and concern with the loins, the bowels, the digestion. She saw, for the first time, the brain as a wet, slippery, red palpitating animal inside her ‘thick peasant-shaped skull’ and she had suddenly appreciated the difficulty of living, breathing, surviving, the infinite possibilities of death.

  ‘It’s a wonder I’m alive,’ she breathed one day, thinking of all the accidents to children, their infant hazards, what she herself had narrowly escaped. She said to Stephen when he came to see her, ‘Here’s a ward full of women who have just side-stepped the potholes; and they have no foresight; they’re going to blunder along. Upstairs is a ward full of what they call “the screamers”, dying of incurable diseases, hideous, dirty—the nurses neglect them for good reason. I have no sympathy for them, Stephen. We must live: our children must live. I won’t die. As soon as I get out of here I’m going to make money in fistfuls so that I’ll have all the attention I need, all of us: so we’ll never end up in a public ward, not die among the screamers up there. They disgust me. I have no sympathy with suffering and death. If
we weren’t cruel, Stephen, we’d die.’

  ‘I elbowed diphtheria and suspected plague when I was a journalist. I was always in too much of a hurry and tripped and fell on my nose countless times. I turned a corner in a car dizzily on the ice and knocked down an old man hobbling along on a cane. The cane slipped—he slipped. Oh, it was funny. But I hated him lying there, looking like a bag of old trash. “Why not run him down,” I thought. Stephen, I never want to be old, withered, hideous. There is no dignity of old age or disease. I hate the stench of death, I hate death. There must come a time when we conquer death. What’s the point of tinkering with salves and bandages? Just to help us to be a cadaver in a mortuary. Life is such a wonder! How did it come about? I’m breathless thinking about it.’

  ‘When you’re through with this we’ll get you to a doctor to see why you’re breathless.’

  That is how she became interested in the doctor who offered her long life and good health. Her appointments interested her. Laughing and joking in her usual commotion, she told him her old ideas, extemporized others. The doctor sat quite still with his large dark eyes fixed on her. He had a young rosy face, though he was forty; he had thick chestnut hair. She saw his notes once when he was called away. It said, ‘Excitement, hysteria’. He had a pedantic, alien manner. He was ‘European’. She thought of his soft, rosy, round face; his type was new to her. She thought of his small mouth, his stubby, rather hairy hands with clean nails. He twiddled his thumbs and one thumbnail was bitten.