I'm Dying Laughing (11 page)

‘Do you mean died?’

‘No, no, good heavens. I mean went away to New York and stayed there.’

Giles smiled, ‘I’d go and live with Grandma, and Grandma would take Olivia back and Uncle Maurice likes me too: he has money and he has no children. He could pay for my education and put me into business.’

Emily was shocked, surprised, and hid a laugh, ‘Jee-hosaphat, wouldn’t you cry for Mother?’

‘Oh, yes, I’d cry; but what good would it do? Where would you be? I could telephone you. I could take the plane and come on my birthday.’

Emily smiled, ‘H’m, very true, my child, but you oughtn’t to say those things to parents.’

‘I thought about it when you were sick.’

Emily laughed, ‘Go to sleep, Giles. I oughtn’t to have waked you up. What were you dreaming about?’

‘I dreamed a black lamb came and lay down beside me in bed. It seemed so real,’ and his eyes filled with tears.

Emily’s eyes filled with tears. ‘Go to sleep, my darling, and then the black lamb will come back.’

‘Oh, no, it will be something else; it’s always something else.’

‘Then a white peacock,’ she said impatiently, covering him up and rising from the side of the bed. She rarely dreamed. She felt uneasy when she did, as if the dream were a portent, even a threat.

She stood in one part of the room biting her lip. Supposing she did get a place for herself in the east and write? She would have to provide for them. All Stephen had was his quarterly allowance from Dear Anna and they thought of it as a windfall; they always went and spent it at once. Stephen did not know how to save, would never consider it. Dear Anna might help him, but then Anna would insist on taking two of the children, Olivia and Christy. Emily was not going to let Anna have the children, and nor Stephen either.

There tumbled into her mind details from several best-selling books of the humorous housewifely kind and the family kind which accidentally, she held, had been successes. She knew that they appealed to the ‘mamma public’. She must do something along those lines. She saw the books as poorly written, vain, cosy, dull, ignorant and pitiably lacking in self-criticism, as were their readers. They did not know the elements of writing. ‘Neither do I; I’m qualified!’ Those writers do not repeat themselves; she could. Almost all, it seemed to her, since the success of her book
Uncle Henry
, had stolen little things from her, a detail here and there only—they were vetted only for flagrant plagiary. She murmured, ‘Oh, there ought to be a way of proving the colour of plagiary. Then I could collect from them, thus making—’ she smiled with joyous venom—‘thus making yet more from poor overworked Uncle Henry. Why not? They’re by-products.’

Uncle Henry was hers. She had invented him. At least, he had been her Uncle Henry—her mother’s. He was a new feature in American humour. Perhaps after a lifetime of bashing it out on the typewriter, she would be remembered for Uncle Henry, as the author of
Pinocchio—
what was his name?—Collodí—Pinocchio had been given a statue; and Tyl Eulenspiegel—didn’t the author get the idea from an old book he picked up on the bookstalls? There was a statue to Tyl. Too bad then if all that was left of me was a statue of Uncle Henry. Such is life. If the Uncle Henry vein went on yielding, she would one day get enough, she would triumph solemnly, sullenly with a loud roar of victory, with golden divine contempt for—

‘Emily!’

‘I’m packing!’

In James Thurber—in—this and that—she saw faint shades of herself. American humour based on the American dilemma, based on, what you want most, you’ll never have, but the plastic makeshift—ha-ha-ha! She laughed, biting her lip and allowing a dimple to appear on each side of her mouth. Her mouth twitched, her eyelids fluttered. How really successful and triumphant she was! Small-town girl—she had left her impression on the language, on the nation, on the USA, a great nation of humorists. Emily Wilkes Howard, Emily Wilkes, as herself, the Humorist—‘Or—let’s see—’ She began to ruminate.

‘Emily, come down.’

‘I’ll be right down.’

‘Are you taking those damn pills?’

‘No. Leave me be, goddamn it.’

Meanwhile, she said to herself, I need success for another reason. I really can’t give Stephen and the family an ultimatum until I’ve cash in hand.
I don’t need you, you need me.
The fact, the heavy-loaded truth is, that with each book, I’ve unconsciously prayed for a success, not for crass commercial reasons. I can always eat. But to get rid of Stephen. Let him go back to Mamma or find another woman to support him.

At this she frowned and kicked the dressing-table, looked at her son and frowned. ‘They say there’s no good prison and no bad love. This is a prison and he loves me; figure it out. What a dilemma!’

‘Emily! Emily!’

A proud smile arched Emily’s lips and eyebrows. She did not answer. Stephen came running upstairs, panted at the top and stood there a moment, catching his breath. Then he said nastily, ‘How many of those damn pills have you taken? You’re a drug addict. For pete’s sake come downstairs. The coffee’s there and Axel Oates has arrived.’

She pouted, smiling, ‘I had a good idea for a story, that’s all.’

‘Come on down and stop crapping around.’

She said, ‘The fact is, I was thinking of your quarterly cheque. Every time it comes, though it’s only $3,000, we start living inside the rainbow. What creatures born for joy! And when it’s gone, we’re back in the subcellar with the toads—faugh—living for money! But money is joy!’ He had started to go down but now came back to the head of the stairs, clasped his hands and looked pathetically at her. She laughed quietly and said to him, using a phrase from his German governess, ‘I’ll put in an appearance.’

Emily pranced into the living-room, all coloured solid flesh, like a circus horse and, on top, her fair hair full of man-made curls, with pink ribbons in them, like a ballerina on a circus horse. Said she, running to Axel Oates, ‘Darling, thank God. Oh, why didn’t you come to dinner on Sunday? I should have telephoned you. This week was wasted. I feel so lousy and low; I have so little time and that wasted, when it’s you, Axel, I should be listening to. Jesus Q. I’ve been in a low state and Stephen says it’s because I’m dieting too much. But I haven’t his elegant storklike physique. I eat like a cormorant, an elephant, a pelican, otherwise I can’t think, I’m famished and he has the divine figure of—a—’

‘You said it, stork,’ said Stephen.

‘Are you dieting again?’ said Axel, who had to diet too. He was a middle-sized, thickset, fair man, with long limbs. He was a rebel journalist, who had been through wars in Europe. He ran a little weekly of his own, bought by journalists and intellectuals and financed by himself. He had published a few books and had come to Hollywood to make money to run his weekly,
Evidence.

Said Stephen, ‘Dieting! At the end of a splurge, as now, she lives on black coffee and benzedrine, if that’s all it is. Then she groans all night because she’s starving and gets up and roams the kitchen. Has breakdowns and hysterics and says she’s going to leave me and curses out the Party; says we’re creatures of straw used to light the forest fires, she’s a denizen not of the new world but the world of bourgeois corruption; she’s hopelessly frustrated. And I have to live through it all.’

Emily exclaimed, ‘Oy-oy, what am I to do, Axel? I’ve the figure and avoirdupois of the Child of Moby Dick. I am down with sinus. Damn my short, stuffy nose. I had that operation five weeks ago—five minutes it would last, said the Doc. He cut a nerve leading to my eye or ear or brains and all I’ve got is fire up there. I feel as if a sledge-hammer is whacking away all day and night on all these bits of anatomy—and I look so rosy or peony, not to say like a sugar pig. And then, oh, jiminy, I started eating too much the week before, on the theory that I work better. Your theory, Stephen, don’t deny it—stand up like a man. So I ate butter, sweet corn, potatoes, mashed with cream-butter-onions, cheese, baked like a cake, delicious, yum-yum, brie creamed with butter and spread on porterhouse. I read about it and that’s what started me off, then, a glad, glorious, grand week with whipped cream on strawberry shortcake, cheese with pie and cream; Viennese coffee, flaky pastry made by me with a secret wrinkle of my own, not to mention the banana split when passing, but not by, the drugstore downtown, nutbread, sherry flip—I I thought, all right, this is my week. Oh, what the heck, why can’t those who like to eat eat and those who like Stephen are astringent—’

‘Ascetic,’ called out Stephen.

‘I like astringent better, it sounds stringier. What a world! And on top of everything, this Olivia plot.’

Axel sympathetic, began to smile, ‘How goes the plot?’

‘It thickens,’ said Emily, ‘like night in the rooky wood. Now Christy’s grandparents are trying to prise him off us. Inspired by press revelations about Olivia, Mamma and us I suppose they thought there was a good chance of Christy marrying the Howard safe deposit vault—’

Stephen checked them by saying, ‘You know we were given Christopher by his father Jake—Jake Potter, after my sister Brenda died. Jake had a breakdown, was in hospital for weeks, came out, a nervous wreck, was downing two quarts of whisky and gin a day—said so; and agreed with us that he wasn’t a fit guardian for his boy; so he signed him away into our care. So Christy is with us. He’s a problem; a moody sort of boy, like his parents.’

‘Oh, he’s sensitive and ruminates about all this, that’s all. He’s growing up,’ said Emily, ‘and this world is hard to understand.’

‘So now you have four children, that’s a big burden,’ said Axel.

‘Oh, what joy, what blessedness!’ sang out Emily. ‘Even though we must keep our noses to the grindstone.’

She stopped prancing, poured herself a drink and said, ‘But Axel, what is your news? What about the big party? Fancy you a star of Big-time Society in the Seven Suburbs! Oh, what an event! Groucho never gave us so much as a nod; and we’re much better—h’m, well, evidently, we’re not. Tell us Axel!’

Axel told what happened.

Mervyn Spice, a Hollywood agent and talent scout who was a political radical and knew of Axel’s reputation on the East Coast and in Europe, had paid Axel’s fare to Hollywood, as a speculation, believing that he could place him and that he would make big money; even though Hollywood in 1944-5 was far from as radical as it had been, because of the fear of investigation running through the studios.

But the agent was disappointed. ‘Everyone tells me that guy is a genius, but I don’t see nothin’; I never heered him say anything I like,’ so the agent said; and it was quoted about, laughed at, and Emily laughed in glee, though she did think Axel was a genius.

‘Come on, Axel, tell us, tell us—’ she now said, with a brilliant, sarcastic, joyful expression. ‘And how is the script coming along?’

‘Well,’ said Axel, ‘the
magnum dopus
is now being revised and I am grooming myself for another week of decision, which I am sure will be two weeks. I thought the story was a mere movie stunt, but a glorious swindler is a great subject; and McTeague made, according to unanimous opinion here, the one great picture turned out of Hollywood in the silent days. It was the favourite of Erich von Stroheim, who directed it under the name of ‘Greed’. But for George Graham Rice, I must write in the apparatus of the woman versus rival feature.’

Emily listened, her eyes sparkling. ‘But the Party.’

‘Yes, Groucho called up; I couldn’t believe it.’

‘Why not?’ said Emily.

‘You don’t know,’ said Stephen: ‘very peculiar rumours preceded you out here. For instance that the Party had made the move, and that you were sent to set us right out here.’

‘What bullshit,’ said Axel, but he was pleased: ‘to the Party I’m a maverick, a copperhead.’

‘This is the land of Cockaigne, remember,’ said Stephen, ‘but even I believed it. I thought they had taken thought. Everyone was waiting for you to speak.’

Axel smiled, then said, ‘If they thought what I said last night was a message from the Party—they didn’t! Last night at Groucho’s I had a discussion with the most touted and best-paid writer in Hollywood, none other than super-odious Lucius Lewin. That man has a stench as deep as a sewer trench. He declared that all writers were better off as writers and did better than others after they had gone through the great experience of Hollywood. The old Paris street girl’s reply on a cafe terrasse, “Oui, quand on fait l’amour pour de l’argent, même, mais l’on y donne tout de même toute son ardeur, on apprend mieux son métier. On se respecte parce que l’on assure le bonheur d’une famille inconnue.” “If you are enthusiastic about the stories you have to write here,” said the great Lucius, “then you know how to shape anything else better.” I said, “Bogus stories, fallible psychology, the inevitable twist—it’s good for everyone? The introspective, the painters of man and nature, rare understandings between man and man, or historical analysts?”

‘Then Lucius said, “The individual writer is leaving the scene: or he must adapt. If Shakespeare were alive today, he’d be in Hollywood. Hollywood isn’t the cause of writers’ failures. Look at Sherwood Anderson; he disdained movies and he poohed out about forty-six. Men have their menopause, we spend all our emotional capital when we are young; all we have left now at our age, are the dregs of emotion, but through experience we can turn it into what’s acceptable—raw emotion and raw writers are not suitable for public entertainment. So, make a good thing of it by selling out for $250,000 a year!”’

‘But Lucius isn’t a sell-out,’ said Stephen: ‘he’s a business. That’s all he can do; make
schmattes
and sell them, in Huckster Alley.’

‘Lucius was the hope of Broadway when young,’ said Axel. ‘Then Lucius said, “What’s the use anyway? The age of literature is over. As the sciences grow and our perceptions become more exact, our type of writing will become extinct—the vague, poetic, symbolic will die; it is amateur, ignorant.” “No,” said I, “the rise of science, by releasing a million unknown facets will increase the range of literature beyond the present, our tools will be so many more. All the numbskulls shouted that photography would antiquate painting; and look now!” This was met by silence from the Bone-tired Champion, King of Hollywood, in his rusty side-slipping crown. Then, next cliché. He said, “What’s the use anyway? We live in an age of danger. Those ages have never produced great literature.”’