I'm Dying Laughing

by Christina Stead

  The young men at the long table were idling over their fruit and Emily saw the young man with the cloth cap she had met on deck, the cap now off; he had thick, curly hair, dark-brown with grey threads.

  The bride waved a spoon at the waiter, caught his eye and held up the bread-basket. When he came, Emily put two dollars into his hand and asked him to give them their coffee at a little table on the other side. From there they were able to look at the party of men, mostly young. Facing them at one side of the table, was a tall curly-haired, graceful man, in his thirties, who was talking in a nervous, scoffing yet deprecating manner.

  ‘The proletarian writing we’re turning out is opportunist, a despairing shriek against the boot that may tread us under, just as essentially pessimist as Maxim Gorki. Our middle-class radicals are a hodge-podge, just anyone with a high school education who’s been tossed out of the career machinery—and a few misfits like me, who feel guilty. There’s a new society over the way—our chins are pointing eagerly; our ears hear a new song—this could be a seedtime in the USA—but it’s slow.’

  ‘It’s the hand-outs,’ said someone: ‘in old Russia they didn’t have relief. Relief and pensions and WPA stand in the way of revolution.’

  ‘Can’t let them die on their broken asses,’ said another.

  ‘Hunger doesn’t produce revolution,’ said another, ‘or the world would have been revoluting since clan society broke down.’

  ‘It produced it in Russia,’ said Emily to Mrs Cullen; and she could not help calling out to the man, ‘What does produce it then?’ Cloth Cap turned and grinned at her.

  Mrs Cullen said in an energetic whisper, impressed, ‘That’s Tom Barrie, the famous proletarian writer—do you know him?’

  A man they called Walden, a gross fellow, middle-aged in worn, expensive college casuals, said something about the long radical tradition in American writing, ‘the polemical and didactic and patriotic—like Edward Everett Hale’s tear-jerking fiction The Man Without A Country—’

  ‘But there’s a terrible feeling around that we haven’t a country, for country is family, job and dinner—and who has them?’ a voice said.

  The dark, graceful young man had been using a goose-quill toothpick neatly. He put it down and said,

  ‘Hold it, Walden, that Hale story is true; it’s true for me. Why must people always prove there was no King Arthur, no Robin Hood, no Paul Bunyan, no Casey Jones—for me that story is true. It haunts me. It haunts Americans. Even yesterday when I came up the gangplank, I thought, What if I never came back to my country again!’

  Tom Barrie was grumbling amiably, ‘I read a story about the day the sun did not rise. People cleaned their teeth, started their cars, got on the George Washington Bridge, but the sun didn’t come up and they went on into the perpetual cold and dark to sell shares and insurance. Gee!’ he laughed and shuddered, ‘Scary!’

  They began to leave their chairs and go on deck. Emily and Mrs Cullen followed them.

  ‘I had better talk to my cabin-mate,’ said Emily. ‘Will you come along?’

  Mrs Cullen wanted to go and get into conversation with the interesting men. ‘Why don’t you come too?’

  Emily was bashful.

  She asked Mrs Browne if she could drag her chair alongside her.

  ‘If you like.’

  ‘Do you want to be alone?’

  ‘What difference does it make? Everyone is always alone.’

  Emily brought up her deckchair. She said, ‘We’re lucky. It’s a real sunny day. Grand blue sky.’

  ‘Do you think it’s grand? I should have thought a writer would find that staring sea and washed-out sky very uninteresting. A painter I know claimed that there were twelve colours in the ordinary blue sky we were looking at somewhere—it was in the Bagatelle Gardens outside Paris. One colour, I told him: I told him he had to believe that there were twelve, some sort of fiction, so that he could go on painting. But I know that all art is based on a convention, a fiction between the artist and his public’

  Emily, much surprised, said, ‘Well, I’m fascinated. But who started it?’

  Mrs Browne looked ahead of her, over the ship’s keel—they were aft and almost under the covered deck. She said, ‘It may have a social use. Look at all these artists and writers employed now by the Government. Those artists are glad to have a weekly cheque and they do what they are told to do. They never wanted to starve in Greenwich Village, trying to get ideas that would sell. They’re glad to get into organised society. Fantasy has no social value.’

  ‘Well, that’s terrific,’ said Emily ‘but just the same, society prizes its artists: it doesn’t want them to go and bake bricks. There’s Shostakovich for example: he’s original and he’s also accepted at home and abroad; and what about Paul Robeson’s singing? That’s not a convention. Everyone recognises he’s a great.’

  ‘Artists like that are an accident,’ said Mrs Browne, ‘society is organised without any relation to them: and could go on without them. They’re not necessary. You can’t base a theory on accidents.’

  ‘But if they see ahead? If they belong to a convention not yet made?’

  ‘That is impossible,’ said Mrs Browne firmly, ‘no one invents anything: it is there, made by the people; there is no room for individuals—an artist should interpret.’

  ‘You’re a socialist?’ said Emily, quite fuddled by the woman.

  Yes. Mrs Browne, born in America, was of Russian parentage and was for the Russian revolution; always had been since the great day in 1917 when the news came over and people like her parents rushed out into the streets and cried, ‘Fonya Ganuf, Fonya Ganuf is done for!’ Fonya Ganuf, she explained, was the word in the old country, Russia, for the detested Russian State: Fonya, a diminutive for ‘Ivan’, Ganuf ‘the thief’. Yes, they had all been forced to be rebels, even revolutionists of a sort, their conditions in Russia were too hard.

  She was going to Paris for a few days and was to wait for her husband, Walter Browne, now working in a small private bank in London. He would take a vacation and join her in Paris. Mrs Browne slowly tore off fragments of ideas, all of them segments of iron, ready for use on the barricades. Yet she seemed stodgy, conservative, prudish. Perhaps she was not; perhaps that was a Russian manner. She and her husband, she said, saw through the New Deal, a palliative. Franklin Delano Roosevelt, hailed as saviour, was the friend of big business, though Wall Street frowned on him. Wall Street could not sit at table with a friend who talked democracy and admitted that big business had mismanaged. Such talk encouraged discontent, doubt, criticism.

  ‘So you and your husband are socialists—?’

  No, no: they were leftists—after a moment, she said, ‘Communists; we’re both communists.’

  Emily was shaken; and looked sideways at her companion. Now the thick, pale, almond lids dropped over her dark eyes, the long lashes rested on her pale cheeks. She may have been feigning sleep to end the conversation, once she had given her downright views. Perhaps she hated to talk; but the machinery was somehow set in motion against the will? Emily turned to her book, but the wind blew, the sun shone, voices drifted about; and she was drowsy.

  She went to look for the man from her home town. Jean-Marie was there. He had no deckchair and was leaning against the rail. They went to the bar. She said she felt guilty about her brother Arnold and Betty. Perhaps if it had been only her savings, they could have had the money; but she could not give them her prize-money.

  ‘Prize what for?’

  ‘Well, it’s a wonder I got it. I write anything. I was shocked to find out how easily you can write for and against. It destroys your morals, also your ideas of truth and morality. But once I got started on this idea I had, I got quite hectic. I stayed up at night. It was an essay on Mark Twain and the American dilemma; I called it that.’

  ‘What is the American dilemma?’ he quizzed her.

  ‘Well, as I see it, it’s that you want to be free and break new ground, speak your mind, fear no
man, have the neighbours acknowledge that you’re a good man; and at the same time you want to be a success, make money, join the country club, get the votes and kick the other man in the teeth and off the ladder. You believe sincerely in Washington, Jefferson, Lincoln; and also know you’ll get your nose bloodied if not worse, if you don’t believe in Rockefeller, Mellon, General Motors and Sears Roebuck. An earthquake in your own small brain. To believe, Send the homeless … I lift my lamp beside the golden door! and to know in your bones that; the door is gold. We’re Americans, we can’t fail, some sort of covered wagon will get us through; yet we see lean and tattered misery, the banks failed, businesses taken over, dust-storms which used to be farms bowling along the roads covering the corpses of crows and men; and we despair, despair. Where to turn? For people used to turn to us. There ought to be an answer. We came over in rowboats and founded the USA, we beat the old inhabitants into the dust, we won the West, and now we starve. It isn’t right. Despair, despair. There’s the rich man’s table firmly planted with its golden legs right in our corn and oil and steel highways; and all we get are musty crumbs.

  ‘We’re worried. France was voted Most Backward Country and they had a revolution; then Russia got the leather medal, Most Backward Country, and they had a revolution. But we were always Most Forward Country and look at us. It’s a hell of a dilemma. So maybe we are headed for a revolution; but who wants that? It’s sickening for Americans to be living on handouts, when we’re the world’s richest country and believe in the survival of the fittest. None of it makes sense; and that’s our dilemma. We won and we won and we’ve lost and there’s no reason for it. The American dilemma is the essence of America.’

  ‘Do you believe that?’ he said.

  ‘Oh, my, yes, one step inside the golden door and there’s a trap door, you fall right to the bottom of Deadman’s Gulch. But why? Why? We have two shovels in our hands, right for digging gold, left for digging graves. And it has always been so. We’re miserable people, leanfaced, dismal Uncle Sams. Isn’t our history all struggle, all terror, all bloodshed; and at the same time, all hooraying, all success? America the Golden. The dark and bloody ground, I think is our subtitle. A nation of brothers, Cain and Abel, the Fats and Thins, lined up against each other—civil war at the factory gates; and yet—we do believe in equality, fraternity. I guess we think we do. We welcomed with open hands the hungry foreigner, to join the sons of opportunity, and yet we meet the invader from the next county with guns at the county line. Move on, you Red!’ Then she began to laugh, ‘I’ve found out in my travels that when the small town bosses say, “Our workers are incited by foreigners”, they mean New Yorkers. That’s a united nation for you. Oh, well—fooey. Live and let live; if we only could.’

  ‘What a pessimist,’ he said laughing. ‘I’m a humorist: humorists are always pessimists. They’re reactionaries: because they see that every golden cloud has a black lining; so why get a stomach ulcer?’

  ‘And that’s the story of our time—you believe that?’ he said more seriously.

  ‘I believe in everything. Everything’s true. I don’t believe things and they turn out to be true. I believe things and it’s something put out by the chain-gang press. So now I believe in everything. I know I’m the sort that always falls; but better to be a sucker than a sourpuss. But I long, oh, how I truly long, Jean-Marie, to get things into focus. I’m nearly twenty-five. I have a feeling about this year—Fate! Kismet! Nemesis! My number coming up.’

  ‘For that have another drink!’

  ‘Yes, let’s. Oh, Jesus Q., but it’s a puzzle. Yet do you know we’re so communal, Americans, I sort of believe socialism must be our destiny. Do you know that Eugene V. Debs, a railroad fireman, a socialist, polled one million votes for President in 1920, and everyone thought the robber barons were going to have to cede their fortresses. So they offered up Sacco and Vanzetti, I guess. Circuses if no bread.’

  ‘What’ll you drink? Martini? I’ll buy a bottle and make my own; they don’t get it dry enough.’

  ‘I’m not much of a drinker. Anything.’

  When he returned with two glasses and two bottles, she said, ‘I wish you’d tell me what to read. This is my chance away from the sludge-mills to catch up a bit. I couldn’t learn anything in college. I was working at night. Now I write informative articles about subjects I’ve never given a minute’s thought to. Woe, woe! I make a living and it’s not an honourable one.’

  ‘Make it some other way.’

  ‘You don’t think I can? I can play the piano, sing a bit, I did an act with a boy, went around. But I wanted to be a writer. Maybe I could go to Hollywood and be a gagman. What an ambition! Alas, poor Yorick. Just another skull in the charnel house, at a time when skulls come very cheap. Our life doesn’t bear thinking of, does it, Jean-Marie? A flash and then join the majority.’

  ‘Every man who says, “Why struggle? Look up there! The stars are millions of years old,” turns out to be a crook; he has his eye on your pocket.’

  ‘Ah, something starts up in my soul when I hear those sibylline words,’ said Emily laughing and quaffing; ‘as well as everything else, I guess I’m a crook too. Nothing inhuman is alien to me.’

  The next day she wore cream slacks, a pink and white sweater striped horizontally, and her white jacket with a pink neckcloth, knotted to one side. In the outfit she looked larger, rosier, younger. Her hair she had tied on top so that the long curling strands, windblown and dust-coloured, fell over her cheeks and neck.

  The deckchairs were set out, but differently. Mrs Browne was sitting in the shelter of the sports lounge and seemed not to see her. In the cabin before breakfast she had said to Emily, ‘Because we’re cabin-mates you don’t have to keep me company. I’m a lonely person and used to it. My husband is like you, gregarious. To me such people are dependent.’

  ‘OK,’ said Emily. That’s the lesson for today, she said to herself. She did not know whether Mrs Browne, who spoke only once a day, thought these things out during her silent hours, or whether she had a few texts to run her life by.

  Emily sat in her chair in the sun beside a man who turned out to be a Romanian and reading Henry James in Romanian.

  How wonderfully exciting the world is! You just have to travel.

  ‘I haven’t even read Henry James in the original,’ said Emily; and though he was polite and even gay, she felt the man lost interest in her.

  The sun shone, the breeze tickled and after trying to memorize a few sentences of The Rights of Man by Thomas Paine, a book everyone was then reading, and her copy given her at the boat by her brother, she became restless and went to look for Jean-Marie.

  ‘Honest contempt, bad temper, is what I want—hometalk! No melancholy damnation as with Mrs Browne, no chewed-over headlines as with Mrs Cullen.’

  She found him. Presently they went to the bar lounge. The lounge, so early, with views each side of the sunny sea, full of blue-green ditches with top frostings of foam, had a fresh innocent air. The floor was clean, the chairs and tables neat. They sat on one of the long benches waiting for the bar to open.

  ‘The sailor’s snug harbour,’ said she. Jean-Marie got them to turn down the loudspeaker diffusing a popular tune, which Emily began to hum.

  ‘What was it you did? A college act?’ he said.

  ‘Better than that. I’ll show you. They’ll get up a concert and you’ll see I’m really good.’

  She had a newspaper, he had a big book in German, which he was reading, though he understood German poorly. After an hour or so, some of the Americans from the New Dealers’ table came in and sat on the other side of the lounge. Jean-Marie knew the names of all of them.

  ‘They’re a delegation from the American Writers’ Congress, going to the Paris Congress.’

  ‘And who is he? The—uh—that scion with the curly blond hair, the tall one?’

  ‘Stephen Howard. Does a column for the Washington Liberator, written some studies of labour problems, union leaders, use of g
oons and labour spies; all the details; learned it at Mummy’s knee.’

  ‘His mother’s a socialist?’

  Jean-Marie laughed to himself.

  ‘I like his style,’ said Emily.

  ‘Go over and introduce yourself. You’re a writer.’

  She wouldn’t, but became merry to attract Howard’s attention. McRoy got her another drink, with a calculating look; he wanted to make her drunk, to see what she would do.

  ‘Come on, let’s have your story. More about the dilemma,’ he said.

  It had now become a joke with them.

  ‘We’ve got so far ahead of the rest of the world that one-third of us are dropping in our tracks from hunger. Now we suddenly for the first time think about ourselves. We didn’t have a system like other people, we were a covered wagon hiking towards Golconda. Now we’re suddenly looking at people who have systems—the laughable British, the licentious French, the ragged Russians. What can they do for us? We wish we had a system. It’s side-splitting. We’re a side-splitting people.’

  ‘No, you haven’t explained about your essay on Twain.’

  ‘Well, I started in with that sour, ferocious, bloodcurling little gem about the Boxer Rebellion, at which time we had our Bible students in China too. Some were killed. You know, To the Person Sitting in Darkness.’

  She was talking to him, but facing the group across the lounge and talking loudly. He looked down into his drink, with a pleased expression. They were talking; she was matching them. His marvellous lively eyes, man and animal in one, were looking at her through the eyebrows, as through underbrush.

  ‘The missionaries compelled the Chinese to pay for the murders and fined them thirteen times the amount of the indemnity; and the newspaper paragraph about it said, “This money will be used for the propagation of the gospel.” It’s rich. And some other missionaries—Catholics,’ she said with that frontal attack instinctive with debaters, for he had been a Catholic, ‘collected not only the indemnities, but a Chinese head for every American head. It sizzles. It burns holes in the paper. Well, that’s the bitter truth, the savagery of life which staggers you, keeps you rooted to the spot and your outcries stop your breath; and yet it is wildly out of line with all our ideals, humanity, peace, brotherly love, do unto others, until you laugh, shout, you understand your own simplicity and wickedness and denseness and greed—that’s American humour. It’s better than Daumier with lumpen-proletariat gargoyles gaping. You listen to any Hollywood dialogue in a modern film and you’ll hear such a mash of good sense, brashness, earthy wit, impudence—that’s American wisdom, that’s our humour. It’s not les bons mots and le raffiné,’ she said (with a strong home accent), ‘it’s not hissing the double entendre through thin lips, it’s not like Punch, hitting with a flour-filled sock, no hit, no mark; it bites to the bone; it’s not like satire which is just needling someone you’re afraid to touch; American humour is another way of seeing the truth; and what a vision! It isn’t giggles or smut, it isn’t anecdotes about baby-sitters and chars and Uncle Brown’s habits; it is homespun, godlike truth stalking in from the plains and the tall timber, coonskin and deerhide, with a gun to disturb our little home comforts.’