I'm Dying Laughing: The Humourist

by Christina Stead

  The Howards, meanwhile, took Giles with them to view small houses at Fontainebleau; Fontenay-aux-Roses, a suburb; a villa at St-Germain-en-Laye. They considered villas on the Cote d’Azur, near Menton and Cap d’Antibes, Juan-les-Pins (‘we would save the expense of holidays’), they thought of buying a house near Montparnasse: and near the War Ministry and elsewhere. At Fontainebleau was a complete house for a million francs, suitable, but cold, dark, furnished in a style fifty years old, and with a bleak garden back and front, not yet awake to spring, perhaps never awakening to spring. Yet it was near the magnificent forest and the frozen ponds, trees blue and grey and green rising slowly in the distance. Near the Arc de Triomphe they found a large six-room apartment kept by the concierge for an American tenant who had not come back; and in Neuilly, a little house in a garden belonging to a woman who had got it from a lover and who had gone to live in the south forever, disgusted, frightened; a woman who had been a Pétainiste and collaborator and now feared the people of Paris.

  Emily said, ‘Again the tumbrils. She’s afraid!’

  They began French lessons and yet could not make out the headlines, and the headlines were on the wrong pages. They disliked the make-up, found the information obscure, the presentation grandfatherly, the local passions absurd. They tried to participate, but they remained, they were as yet, tourists. In the end they took all the newspapers written in English and began to spend more peaceful mornings as they scanned them.

  They severely criticized the French. But Stephen said, ‘This remains capitalism. It is in its way as good a capitalism as ours, perhaps better. I don’t know what would survive in Oshkosh and Painted Post after an invasion, after we were stripped of everything. Here at least there have survived the thick walls of villas, the polished floors and the engravings of Louis XVIII. After all, all the world is capitalism but one experiment in the East—’

  Emily exclaimed, ‘Experiment! If all the world was in its dotage and there was one young person alive, we would say, an experiment in living. And after all, too, the USA is for Europeans still an experiment. Especially for the sour old English. It’s a point of view, it’s arguable, too. And let’s not backbite the boys who stayed at home. Someone has to stay at home. A country is made up of people who stay at home. We can’t all run before the storm. One ought to like one’s country, even with its faults. I feel quite guilty. What the hell! Who kept France alive? Not those who ran but those who stayed, collabos and Pétainistes and all, they stayed. They stayed through the long night; and the refugees were out wandering in another night.’

  Stephen sighed, ‘I wonder what we are doing really wandering round the dead suburbs of a devastated foreign city whose wars we didn’t fight, sorrows we didn’t suffer, whose cemeteries we aren’t going to fill? I’m here to eat their groceries, I’m not here, for one thing, to eat off their sorrows, or hurrah for the revolutions they make in blood and despair. We’re bastards. We’re lowdown bastards. I feel like a louse.’

  They were at this moment crossing the Seine. It was night and the Seine, from recent rains, was a plump broad satin flood with long trails of red and white coming down to them from the Pont-Neuf. It was cold. There were miserable people about. The taxi-driver, who had cursed them in bad Russian French, the thin ragged porters at the station, the people hanging around outside the station to pick up fifty devalued francs for finding them a taxi, the scarecrows with nowhere to sleep, depressed them.

  Stephen went on, ‘Are we any better than the Germans, coming here like a master-race, full of money, eating like swine, with schemes for their improvement which happen to suit ourselves?’

  Said Emily, ‘We make our money somewhere else and spend it here. The fifty francs we gave that man was to the good.’

  Stephen wrung his hands and shrieked, ‘But I don’t want to see it. I’m a coward as well as a parasite. At home, I don’t see the poor. I’m used to my country. It’s perfect. I don’t see what’s wrong. I live there in a blue daze.’

  Emily asked harshly, ‘What are you going back to? To prison, contempt and sneers—because you couldn’t make a go of it abroad either? Every one of our old friends is an enemy now. We’re just as lonely there as we are here; only that here it is they who said the American Party was wrong; people have opinions like us here. Listen, Stephen, you’ll learn French and get in with the heads of the Party here; and if not here, we’ll go somewhere where you can get in with them, to England or somewhere, we’ll go to the east if you like, anywhere, so that you can feel yourself fulfilled. You’ve got to, Stephen. Otherwise, I’d feel guilty at having dragged you abroad.’

  Stephen replied, ‘Oh, you didn’t drag me. If I’d had any serious objection I wouldn’t have gone. But where are we going? What’s our aim? You’re full and I’m empty. Wherever you go, you’ve got a full cargo; but even at home and rusting in the old harbour I’m empty. But you expect to find empty hulls in an old weedy harbour. There are plenty rusting away there and no one knows whether they didn’t in the time of their youth bring in full freights and get a great name for heroically battling the storms. If we had only thought of that—a greening, rusting old harbour and waiting for our old age, till no one knew our names any more.’

  Emily said after a time, ‘Gosh, I’ll never be able to forgive myself if I’ve brought you abroad and you don’t find yourself here. But let’s find a home and we’ll settle in, you’ll work and I’ll work and you’ll have responsibilities, a future, you’ll find the Party again. You’re tired. You’re not used to being without a home. I am. I wouldn’t give a damn if I had no home. But you would and so would the children.’

  Stephen said, gently, ‘I’m grousing again. I’m not fair. If only we could get a house! I feel like cutting my throat when each evening brings the hotel bed and the children backfiring next door.’

  Emily burst out laughing. Later, when they were sitting on a cafe terrace, she sighed, ‘These unwanted houses make me feel all the terror and the horror of the years. I begin really to hate the Germans and I’m afraid of them, too. All those outhouses and fences and all these attics have seen such fear, hideous terror of death, hunger; the dusty boards of a stage of such misery! I’ve never felt such terror. Europe is all fear. We have a budding terror, we have a youthful inquisition, we have the lynch spirit, hale and healthy, and we’ve had to run, but we haven’t got this feeling of the blood running cold in old, vacant rooms, these haunted holes in history, through each of which a man or woman fell, shot, starved, self-murdered in despair. And each man is history, you can’t talk about history; we are history, each thudding heart. Oh, my! Oh, I can hardly stand it! What they have been through! And they’re so quiet—the very way they stand in queues for their food breaks my heart. I used to get furious with the old-time French who quarrelled about everything; but now, this sweet people, who are fair about seats in trains and buses, move their luggage on the rack, move over for you, never quarrel with the post-office clerks, it’s dreadful. Because they know they aren’t any more La Grande Nation; and the English, too, know they’re finished. Their histories are written down to the last word. Oh, God, oh, God, I suffer so terribly. The Americans had trouble, but they aren’t blasted. I hope we never are. I hope I never see America like this. Oh, God, I hope it lasts fifty or seventy years, more, capitalism, I mean, even if it is brutal and fascist, not to see such blasted souls, the sweetness of defeat!’

  ‘I think we ought to see the destruction of Europe. After all we came here to learn something, too. No good shutting your eyes and praying like a maiden aunt.’

  They found a telephone message at their hotel from one of their house agents. The proprietor, who had been in America, had returned and was willing, he thought, to rent them a large apartment in his private mansion in the rue de Varenne. The premium and the rent were high; but the agent thought they were sure to get it; their references in America were excellent.

  ‘My references in America would push me out the window if they knew we were spending
so much money,’ said Stephen gloomily.

  Emily jubilated, ‘Thank heaven for the break. I have to celebrate. Let’s drop the kids and eat something splendid.’

  They took a taxi accordingly to the Touriste d’Argent. Said Emily cheerfully to the head waiter who came up to speak in good English and assist them, ‘My husband, mong marry, is in a sick despair, Monsieur, because we cannot find a house to live in, our children are getting paler every day from hotel air and I’m very hungry. What can we eat?’

  In the end, Stephen played with shrimp rissoles and salad, while Emily, exhausted but happy, as she said, ate cress soup, Armorican lobster, roast duck, asparagus sauce mousseline, and ice-cream.

  She sighed as she supped the ice-cream, ‘What I’m costing you! But this is divine, worth ruin.’

  ‘I’m glad one of us can eat,’ said Stephen.

  When the head waiter came up to ask them if all was well, she said to him, ‘Yes, colossal, poétique, Monsieur. We ought to come here every day. Only I hope we won’t be so miserable every day. Imagine three miserable babes and the intense hell of—’

  ‘H’m, h’m,’ said Stephen.

  ‘—the intense and utter horror of hotel life. Are you a father, oong pear? You’ll understand what it’s like. It’s the revolting business, Monsieur, of watching them suffer and my husband suffering too. Their sense of security is—shot—to pieces. It isn’t the same for me. Oh, your grand, colossal, poetic food. Oh, dear’ (she turned to Stephen) ‘I guess we’re suffering in grandeur all right, like the old Romans when they feared a slave revolt.’

  ‘Stop talking,’ said Stephen, between his teeth.

  Emily laughed outright. People were listening, taking notice and smiling. Emily, rosy, very fat and sitting bolt upright, began laughing and said she couldn’t face the cruel world unless she had coffee, brandy and cigarettes. The waiter went for these.

  Said Stephen, despondently, ‘Oh, well, what does it matter if we go broke now or in a week from now? You and I will go hand in hand begging through the American colony.’

  Emily was laughing on and on, ‘Oh, I feel guilty. But what the heck! Eat, drink and be merry for tomorrow we live on bread and water. True, eh? Howard menu: financial soup, poor fish, plenty of beef, hot corn, candy on the pill, drink of Lethe and start over.’

  ‘A New England boiled dinner,’ said Stephen.

  Emily said irritably, ‘As long as I can keep on turning out hot corn in Europe.’

  ‘Don’t call it corn. It’s your way of seeing things. Some comedians spend their lives yearning to play Hamlet. They’d make him funny too. They couldn’t help it. You’re a funny Hamlet. Be satisfied. It’s you.’

  Emily was insulted. ‘Then why is so much I think of hangman humour? Why do I hate to write it?’

  ‘You don’t. You have to be solemn in order to laugh at them after. All humorists are gloomy, cruel bastards. But at least they’re not dull. They have both worlds. They see the sinister truth and they can laugh.’

  Emily said, ‘H’m. Laugh, clown, laugh. How is it that the masterpieces of the world are all gloomy—tragedies, no less?’

  Stephen was irritated, ‘Because they all belong to the bad old world, which was black. You’re a real American, the new world. For Christ’s sake, if I thought you were going to turn arty in Europe, I’d go back on the next boat.’

  ‘What about Melville and Hawthorne and Poe, eh?’ said Emily sadly, looking down at her small muscular hands.

  ‘Oh, don’t keep dragging up those boneyard types. That was another age—’

  Emily said, ‘And besides the wench is dead. I don’t want to live this way in the bright lights, going to the gilded palaces, unable to tolerate a waiter who’s been eating sour cabbage, or a waitress who hasn’t washed, unable to bear a hotel if the manager doesn’t scrape to me, suffering if my girl doesn’t change her dress twice a day. I don’t want to be like that. I am like that. Why? Because I see the funny side, I’m a wise guy. I’ve got the angles. I know the score. How despicable! Money’s filthy. It is filthy, Stephen. Don’t look down your nose. And when you think that my humour, which is me, I admit, is really the way I see things, laugh at everyone, sneer at everyone’s troubles—I really am cruel. I often wake up in the night, Stephen, to think out what I am. I’m like a doll with two faces glued together. They used to have those. I disliked them. One back, one front. Mark Twain wrote some terribly unfeeling, heartless pieces. After all, to write The Man Who Corrupted Hadleyburg, you have to have a really hard heart, you have to be a cynic. Whereas a natural tragic dramatist is always weeping for humanity. And here I am, supposed to write for the proletariat, or at least be a friend of the people, and I can’t live except this way, moneybags or what’s just as good, enormous debts.

  I’ll give you two quotes that hang heavy on my heart. Someone was making up an anthology and wrote to Jack London to ask him for something, anything lying around, some little piece. He wrote back and said he hadn’t written an honest word in twenty years. Damon Runyon—’

  ‘Who’s he, after all?’ said Stephen irritably. He was very tired and he felt himself attacked obscurely.

  ‘That’s it, isn’t it? Who’s he? He wrote a review of his own works. I copied it from Time, August 1, 1949. “By saying something with a half-boob air … he gets ideas out of his system on the wrongs of this world which indicate that he must have been a great rebel at heart, but lacking moral courage. He was a hired Hessian of the typewriter … I tell you, Runyon had subtlety but it is the considered opinion of this reviewer that it is a great pity the guy did not remain a rebel out and out, even at the cost of a good position at the feed trough.” Runyon on Runyon. The Hired Rebel. My life too, eh? Pretty.’

  Emily began to bawl, cough, hiccup, sob. After a while she calmed down and said, ‘Yet to be in Paris is a sort of achievement. I guess I could be happy just to live here.’

  Stephen said, quietly, ‘I feel like a heel.’

  ‘Oh, it’s this total hell of hotel life. I feel so despairing at times. We’re not used to feeling like homeless dogs. I’m glad we quit America, if there’s a way out, just the same. There always is a way out.’ She said, with a shudder, signalling the waiter, ‘If we’d stayed here, all the frightfulness, the calvary, that would have been ahead! I should never have done any more work in my life and I should have joined, we should have joined that long list of martyrs, so many names on the list you can’t remember them, just a hunger for anonymity and death. If you want it and are ready for it. But it’s failure. The object of life is to live, to survive. After all, those here are the resisters, the martyrs, the victims aren’t here any more! The next generation comes from those who survive! I can’t go out like a light. I like the life of the mind; but life is real, actual, factual, tangible, life is children and making a go of it. It isn’t being crucified. Of all the crucified ones in this world, millions and millions, I shudder to think of it, only one got any following, the others have no names. I can’t love the humble and desperate. I can live though, my own way, anywhere I guess. Oh, how selfish! I should be thinking about you; I have no psyche, no nerves compared with you. Your sufferings are as real as their bombings and their barbed wire.’

  ‘Oh, bunk! Let’s take a walk.’ But he had cheered up; and they went walking and talking happily, tired, but unaware of the miles in the fine evening, calm blue light and quiet streets.

  Stephen named the streets they passed in the darkness. They discussed strange lights they had seen, here on a river at sunset, elsewhere with the trees and clouds blowing, a silver pass of wind in gardens, roughened waves, the reflection of sunrise on children’s faces. And somehow it came up again, the life of art and the monied life; the old debate and as always, no resolution.

  But by three the next afternoon, they had rented the part-furnished house in the rue de Varenne. They instructed the moving and storage company, rang agencies for servants, ordered two taxis for the next day, found black market coal, got in cleaners and
went to buy enough linen for the first week. When the costs mounted and Stephen had an acute attack of mental and physical pain at the big sums to pay out, Emily said, ‘What does it matter? This linen is real linen, not deodorized pre-shrunk, previtalized, superduperquality, all-American easy-sleeping cotton, guards your loveliness the night through; it’s just plain linen that will last a lifetime.’

  They took a taxi to the hotel with a load consisting of four double sheets of the largest dimensions, one dozen single sheets, two dozen square linen pillow-slips, all solidly hemstitched, one dozen bath towels and a few other things. The children stared. Emily said, ‘When you get married, Olivia, I’m going to see you have old-fashioned fixings, we’re going to right away start a hope-chest filled with things like this.’

  ‘It’s stiff,’ said Christy, thoughtfully examining the goods.

  ‘It’s like iron, it will last twenty years,’ cried Emily.

  ‘Well, I guess Europe has some things left,’ said Giles.

  ‘Ah, my loves, your troubles are over; ours are just beginning. This has made a whale of a hole in the cash-in-hand and Mamong has to write three books, one cheap-as-dirt to sell, one humorous for the record and one good, for honour’s sake; and maybe two boy-meets-girl scripts before the others.’

  ‘Maybe nothing but boy-meets-girl with all this junk,’ said Stephen.

  Emily went on heartily, ‘French for us all, tutors and schools for Christy and Olivia and a sort of miscegenation school for Giles.’

  ‘A what?’ said Stephen.

  ‘Miscegenation, school that takes all nationalities.’

  Stephen lifted his eyebrows and shrugged, ‘As long as you keep these epithets within the walls of this room. It means mixed-race, like the bi-coloured python rocksnake, or a striped child, half chocolate, half cream.’

  They had a fierce argument on this and Christy produced his ever-present dictionary. Emily would not yield.

  ‘I don’t care. In a humorous or allusive way I’m right. And never mind, we’re going to learn real French. Giles is probably the only one who will pick up ler Frongsay and Mama and Papa will be known as the Silent Sioux! Hooray. Put out the flags. Run up the skull-and-crossbones. We’re on the high seas at last and fortune is but a stone’s throw around the corner.’