I'm Dying Laughing: The Humourist

by Christina Stead

  Stephen was astonished, flattered at being believed; he felt like a messenger from a far land. He said, ‘I’ll write some articles for you if you like. I have someone who would translate them.’ He meant Madame Suzanne.

  ‘This will come later, we will see,’ said Vittoria, cheerily.

  Then he said they must meet again, they must fix it now; and thus it happened that Stephen himself fixed the date for the next dinner party.

  Vittorio said he was sorry that leading members of the committee were not there then, but Stephen would meet them soon.

  Stephen walked home swinging his satchel, stopped to gaze lengthily at the beauty of the Champs-Elysees, the Tuileries, the Louvre, the Seine. He was speaking to Emily in his mind, ‘And you were the one who was beating the breast the other night, because you had brought me abroad. I am being fulfilled, I’m going to be justified. If this is the way we’re received, then they’re getting ready to sink the American Party.’

  He drank in the mild, cool spring air, was grateful, felt younger and more mature.

  ‘A man is less apprehensive than a woman, who sees corpses hanging from every bough. You take a decisive step and all the phantoms fade. Emily will be happy for me.’

  He ate his lunch in a small restaurant at the corner of the rue du Bac and on the quay, was surprised at the prices but found the cooking very good. He walked back to the house in happy mood. Emily was to be seen next to the window upstairs. She peered at him with his satchel, waved, and went back to her machine.

  She was not writing a chapter of her book at this moment, nor even a ‘pork-chops’ boy-meets-girl story. She was writing a sketch, something amusing that had happened to her, the history of a really fat person who, though always dieting, keeps getting fatter; one who, alas and of course, loves to eat. She had run away from home, left school at fourteen, got a job and attended night-school. At the same time she wanted to take up dancing to meet boys. She had been valedictorian, voted the one most likely to succeed. A snap in the school paper showed her with her mouth open, a bright, malicious wrinkle to her mouth, her eyes sparkling, a lock of hair streaming down one cheek, folds of adolescent fat around her short solid neck and chin. Making her speech, prepared beforehand, she had not stuck to the text but had gone on, laughing, joking, carrying the school with her for nearly an hour, and with everyone then getting more restive she became imperious. At last someone spoke. She turned and shouted, ‘I am Sir Oracle and when I speak, let no dog bark!’ It had no success: no one knew it. Fired by this, she had prolonged her speech. In the end, she caught the eye of a boy she admired, saw his sneer, blushed and stopped. Like many another ambitious, gifted and healthy girl, her first love was a mean second-rater, a crawling careerist who kept referring to his unworthiness, only to get help and climb another half-inch higher. She only knew this later.

  ‘And all because she was fat,’ she now wrote, telling this story.

  While writing this she had had another idea and made a few notes on it before she gave up for the day. She also meant to work at least one hour on her next funny chapter. She knew she was wasting time, financially speaking, and yet she took such full joy in trying one thing and another. ‘I like a full quiver.’

  But this afternoon, Stephen kept shouting, ‘You’ve done enough, come down, come down, you don’t know when to stop.’

  At last she came down, protesting. Stephen told her all that had happened. They were excited, charmed by Vittorio’s friendly advances. What did it mean? That they had friends in the USA who had written? That Vittorio had written to the American Party and found out their situation and now from his European viewpoint, sympathized with them? For if it meant that they were forgiven, no, that their cause was taken up by the Italian and French Parties, that these repudiated the position of the American Party and were anxious for ammunition to pounce on and set right the political and theoretical errors not to say crimes of the American Party, and were ready to pursue farther the path opened up by Jacques Duclos, then it might mean that the Howards were in a way supported even by the Kremlin and that in the end the thunders of the Kremlin would be directed against, would even demolish those in University Place who had led them to shame, disgrace. Stephen was so joyful and Emily so proud of him, Emily so triumphant and Stephen in such a gay teasing mood that they decided to leave the children, the work and even Suzanne’s lessons and go out for dinner to a very dear, very ‘rayshershay’ place they knew, Véfour. Madame Suzanne had been in the house since ten o’clock. They went to explain to her that they would take the afternoon off.

  But Madame Suzanne knew Vittorio very well, by name, reputation and by sight. And what wonders she told them of him! In the first place, before the troubles in Europe, he had been a society lawyer, sought after by all the society men and women for their difficulties. He had charmed endless women. ‘Charmed! Charmed women!’ Stephen almost shouted.

  Madame Suzanne nodded her head. ‘Oh, yes, I assure you. He was very seductive. I don’t mean he created scandals. Women fell in love with him. He had an enormous practice out of it. And he himself is an odd type. He used to fall violently in love and go through agonies for the beautiful women he met. To love and be loved by Vittorio was an adventure every society woman wanted. Or most wanted.’

  ‘Women loved him?’ said Stephen, still astonished.

  ‘Of course, he has changed, he is dreadfully disfigured. But women still love him. He can still charm and win them. He had been married four times.’

  ‘I don’t understand it. But then I never did know what women wanted,’ said Stephen.

  And she told them much more about him. How brave he was, how, once convinced, he had dropped his fashionable practice, joined the Party and done their legal work, organized their cultural work, how good his memory was, infallible, freakish, how he sacrificed himself, how he was sought after by the police, what he had done in the Resistance, how he had been caught and put into a camp, where he was ill-treated. Much more. The Howards were entranced by their capture, their new friend. They must have him at the house as soon as possible, and they began to discuss with Madame Suzanne or as she now already was, Suzanne, what sort of people they could invite who would not hurt the feelings of this hero. She said she knew many such people; she could easily fix up a congruous party for them. They went out for their walk enraptured. They sat on a café terrace later, took a taxi to Véfour in the Palais-Royal and liked it so much that from then on they called it their Véfour, ‘our dear Véfour’.

  Emily was delighted with the character of their new friend. It was pleasant to know that such a hero, a man so highly regarded all over Europe, had once been a man of Stephen’s own background. Emily said, ‘At last you are vindicated! Now you realise that what you did had meaning and worth. You really fought for freedom and theoretical purity. I always believed in you, Stephen. I let you down at times and wished you had not touched the theoretical questions, but now I see you were right, we have not only got out of the whole mess, but with clean hands. Oh, I am so happy and proud! Oh, my dear, dear husband! You are really wonderful. I’m deleerious, this is the new life. God bless Vittorio and Jacques Duclos and all the people here. I am so enchanted and excited. It proves this wasn’t just an escape. It always hurt me bitterly that they called us escapists and Bohemian adventurers. I was discouraged and now I’m in a dream-world of glorious joy. Oh, what a gamble! It seemed like a gamble, worse, a delusion; but even for us it’s worked out perfectly. Oh, what a cave of Adullam we escaped from. And to come straight into the arms of the Party here—in Paris, the loveliest city in the world; and I have everything straight at last, and am happy.’

  Stephen said with a proud, repressed smile, ‘I wouldn’t be so enthusiastic about it until we can check up. A few facts won’t hurt us. But you, Emily, don’t need facts to work on, only enthusiasm. However, I feel a lot better. He’s in such a high position in the Party that he couldn’t, wouldn’t visit us unless he thought we were clean. He couldn’t do it for hi
s own reputation! No need for us to be hangdog any more, though. What a smack in the nose for the old die-hards of University Place.’

  He became silent. His wife said hastily, ‘We’re celebrating, darling. Don’t start to fret.’

  But his face had clouded over. He said, ‘They were my friends. I know them. They’re really all right. I hate them to call me what they do call me, a goddamn bastard, an apostate, a Benedict Arnold—I left my country and my Party. They are right.’

  ‘Oh, don’t groan like a Jew in the subway.’

  This was a family joke with them. Stephen said, ‘And yet he had a right to groan. It’s the ones who don’t groan who are wrong. Six millions, many more, put to fire and sword and bullet and torn by dogs and buried alive—he is right to groan and so are we.’

  The next day they ate out as well. They went to the Museum of Modern Art, one of the finest buildings of modern times, in pure, perpendicular marble, unspotted and airy, an angelic gate where they saw old paintings, new copper, ceramics, a 1910 revival and the strangely beautiful tapestries of Lurçat, living as blood in a sunlit flask, with the thought of a tree, glowing in its pattern of life into the austere and innocent web. There was a lot of walking to do, and many steps and few exhibits. France of the artists was just lifting its splendid head from the Nazi night. On this day, the sun shone, the Seine flowed as brightly as any young river, the sky was blue and the trees along the rue de New-York were in small leaf. Emily skipped along with the daintiness of the fat, on her small high-heels.

  ‘We have spring in New York but it isn’t like this, wine and food and spirit. There they suddenly push down a funnel over the city and that’s it, spring, wilting and burning.’

  Stephen was opposed to the list of guests she and Suzanne had drawn up for Vittorio.

  ‘I don’t feel at home with social workers, French teachers, sombre or slap-happy Resistance types and all that crew. Can’t we have a little fun? He’s a very entertaining man. He’s polished, thank God.’

  ‘But they would have something to talk about!’

  ‘Bunkum,’ said Stephen.

  But in the end he had to yield. He himself wanted to have some good Party talk with Party leaders and now he was to have his own servant, a dull but good woman, a pedestrian heroine, Suzanne, at his side.

  ‘But you like Mernie Wauters!’

  Stephen cheered up. Emily explained, ‘We’ll have to have a right circle and a left circle. We need both.’

  ‘Yes, I need people. I don’t believe the brain flourishes in isolation. I’m no hermit nor masturbating thinker. Thinking is social.’

  ‘What about Darwin?’

  ‘Oh, he’s English. They are never the same. And that’s horse-and-buggy. The Soviet thinkers and scientists are proud and glad to think socially in a laboratory and for the State. These old countries need socialism to wipe off all that smear of solitary thinking, which is just the ornament of a class state. But in the USA, as in Russia, we think socially. We have a lot in common.’

  Emily said, ‘That’s very true. I wish we could work in Russia or Yugo or somewhere over the border. It’s hard to keep on fighting for what you know are the merest ABCs. I do hate to yes-ma’am a lot of snobberines here. Why don’t we come out with it? They do. I guess we’re in a mixed world. That’s why we must have a right circle and a left circle. I don’t want to cut myself off any more as we did in the USA. I want to live in the whole world.’

  The people they invited were delighted to come, ‘to spend an evening with Vittorio, with Vittorio more than with us, nobodies, American theoretical ignoramuses.’

  ‘What do we care? We’ve got hold of a real person,’ said Emily.

  ‘But it’s our soup they’re eating.’

  ‘Those are the risks of entertaining,’ said Emily.

  ‘When in Rome burn the candle at both ends,’ said Stephen.

  The preparations took up a lot of time: the expense would be no less than for previous parties. Stephen groaned, ‘Who got me into this? How do you know he doesn’t like a cup of coffee? If he’s a real communist who spent years in the Resistance and in concentration camps, he’ll be glad of a baked bean or a lamb chop grilled over a campfire.’

  ‘Stephen, don’t be so miserly.’

  ‘Well, we represent the American relief for wilting Europe.’

  Emily said, ‘Besides, I know from Suzanne that Vittorio is a very good cook; and even when he is living in one room with kitchenette in a closet, he gets up elaborate dishes and invites gourmet company.’

  ‘Well, your admirer will get enough to eat here, with that menu.’

  ‘My admirer? He’s never heard of me.’

  ‘Yes, he has. He’s heard of you. He’s a one-man encyclopaedia. He’ll probably come here armed with more facts about you and your books than I ever knew. He told me he particularly admired The Wilkes-Barre Chronicle, he’s convinced you’ll be a great serious writer and he thinks you’re a great humorist too.’

  Emily had a sunny smile, ‘Did he? Oh, I wish I’d done that hunger-march better! It should have been better. It’s just cheap journalism.’

  ‘You did it nine times before it went to the printer. You’re a great writer.’

  ‘No, I’m not. Not in the hunger-march. And here’s a man who knows much more than hunger-marches. Well, well. Stephen, I sent off three chapters of my funny books this afternoon and I ought to get five hundred dollars apiece; and maybe a movie bite. I think they’re medium-funny.’

  ‘They’re uproarious. You ought to hold out for a better price. Listen, why don’t you write travel articles, show all the society we meet, make it funny as we see it next day at breakfast. We could travel more, see more, it would keep paying for itself. We’ll make a go of it. I don’t really worry about you. I scold and worry and beat the breast and insult you—it’s only superstition! I don’t think it’s right to tempt fate.’

  ‘Why can’t we live like dear Maurice? When I think of the lovely dreamy mornings we spent last week with him here, just talking at the breakfast table, blissful—’

  ‘None of us working,’ put in Stephen.

  ‘Ah, my dearest, to think that compared with the meanest continental or English schoolboy, I’m an old woman of the wilds, a hairy ape, an ignorant buzzard who can scarcely write her own name. Oh, I must study to keep up even with my own right-wing guests whom I so deeply despise. America, my own: what have you done to me?’

  She went on merrily, unable to stop, cheered beyond limit by the news that her books were admired by Vittorio, once the darling of the best-cushioned, best-dowried, best-titled, Catholic society, a man of dangerous charm, guile and success in any world he chose. She ended sighing, ‘Ah, my dearest, these weeks are the nicest things that have happened to us in years and years. Goddamn it, in Europe communists and relatives don’t have to be all tattletale grey, spots of gloom, festering mildew and unbarbered sextons intoning anathema and looking out for the bottle of scotch. Europe and I agree about everything. Here they calmly survey their own downgoing, the advent of the Red Terror with reasonable fortitude, resignation or reasonable fight. Whereas God knows we come from a country of writhing, groaning, torment. Reeling and writhing, what the tortoise taught us.’

  The next day they took their usual three-hour French lesson after lunch with Suzanne. She lunched with them and during lunch they spoke English; but after that they worked very hard, like college students.

  Suzanne had been teaching them for some weeks and after being surprised by their whirling life, their expenses and their domestic brawling, she had come to understand them. She said to them now, in French, ‘You know when Mademoiselle de la Roche asked me to give you lessons, I hesitated. You seemed so strange to me and I could not make out whether you were real radicals or the shallowest of parlour pinks. But now I understand better; and if I have taught you, you have taught me.’

  She laughed harshly and went on, ‘We are so many. You can imagine, I got to know a good many people du
ring the occupation. I had many surprises. The people who betrayed were not the ones you would have guessed; the people who took in Jewish babies and Jewish refugees, political refugees, who ran the real risks, were not the ones you would have predicted. Your own reactions were not what you would have thought. And there were so many factors of nationality, training, personality, family situation, love and fright that you can hardly trust yourself, let alone anyone else. And you must take chances with strangers. But you come through and others come though. I do not know if the same people would come through again; or if I would come through again. And so I have no prejudices, or very few. I’m very anxious only to know more people. I could never have guessed at the existence of people like you.’

  Emily who had worked hard at her tenses, understood and was very pleased with this speech,

  ‘What do you think of us now, dear Suzanne?’

  Madame Gagneux laughed, ‘You know, I am not really French. I am Belgian. We’re a mixed and weighty people. Weighty in bad and good senses. You’ve heard from me of l’espritbelge, the Belgian approach, that means heavy, taking things wrongly, misunderstanding French, it means a crass approach. I can’t help being Belgian; I don’t mind it. I think we’re different, we’re more medieval, we’re lustier, we joke more in a genial, kermis way, the primitive market-day peasant and farmer way, we see things as ludicrous and coarse rather than otherwise. And we’re not good psychologists for nowadays, so I leave that aside. You are very Belgian, Madame Howard; and your husband, Mr Howard, does not like me much I know.’

  She said this without flattery and without resentment.

  Emily fluttered, ‘I think the only reason for that is that you’re our teacher and so his role with you is a humble one, that of learner, of a tot. Oh, we’re not linguists. I work, I’m full of French, I have my lesson, I do my writing and by six in the evening I can’t think of the French for tomato juice. Alas! You may be Belgian but you’re a linguist.’