I'm Dying Laughing (22 page)

‘I don’t give a goddamn for Hollywood. It’s my family. I’ve a kid worth ten million dollars; I’m not going to lose her or let Florence laugh at me.’

Emily quieted down and poured out the coffee.

‘I want to do work I believe in, honest work,’ she said sitting down.

‘Florence is chortling because they say you’re on the road to Trotskyism and your honest book is frowned upon. It doesn’t even sell to reds and who else would look at it?’

Emily said, with that strange merry twitching of the mouth, ‘But the letters I get from workers. Isn’t that what we’re for? I mean Stalin says “The writer has a function: he’s an architect of souls.”’

‘Pah! Not in the USA. The best he can do in the USA is to make money and communicate in some smaller or more picayune way. We’re Americans. We must try and make do with that. My family and kids are millionaires and that’s the highest ideal this country has: so let’s stick to what we have and breathe life into that mud: Man.’

‘That’s a good expression,’ said Emily smiling at him. She drank her coffee at a gulp and poured out more.

‘You won’t sleep,’ said Stephen angrily.

‘I’m going mad with headache and ’flu and I don’t know, maybe even rickets, with working and never getting out for a break except in a nightclub with our agent, Charlie Goldhammer, or a mantrap called a dinner invitation in these parts,’ said Emily laughing. ‘So if I have a few cups of coffee and can think and think, I’m better for a moment. Let me be.’

Stephen said, ‘I’m getting an ulcer and I’m going to be sick for a week after this. The misery I went through tonight with all those jackals howling. I’m not taking their side. Let you put enough money aside and I say you take a year of freedom and write any funereal working-class crap you like.’

‘Jesus, Stephen, I don’t think it’s crap. I sweat when I read those letters from workers who read my book. You know what it costs; $3.50. They either got their club to put it up or they got someone to buy it; and they worry about it: they send me advice. It’s the happiest and best moment of my life, except when I had the baby.’

She began to sob loudly.

‘Oh, shit,’ said Stephen between his teeth.

She shouted, ‘All right, all right, you write for the middle class, you’ve never had one letter from a worker. Because what you’re writing, whether you know it or not, is university tracts. It’s good. I know it’s better than mine, anyway as a contribution to knowledge; and you’re a library scholar. But it isn’t enough. We ought to give people something to live for. I had that remark from a whole group of workers in Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania.’

‘A whole group of shits in the land of Cockaigne. Maybe they’re kidding you. It wouldn’t surprise me, after the Party attack. A come-on to get you to write off one of your well-known effusions, in which you will really put your foot in it and they can show us the door.’

She said suddenly laughing, ‘Look, this evening’s attack. In the first place, it wasn’t. I don’t believe they’re going to really attack one of their prize moneymakers, a Broadway success. They just want me, like you, to keep on writing belly-laughs and so make them money. I understand it, OK. And then their fright and scorn of my serious writing—it has a sort of basis. It’s a hangover from Wobbly days, when culture was spit on as bourgeois. I knew that and that’s why I first wrote the labour book,
The Wilkes-Barre Chronicle.
I made it as reportage with statistics and police incidents to appeal to the Wobbly in them. And then there’s something else that frightens them. You’ve got more of it, Stephen, because of your background and having spent a year at the Sorbonne and because you’re not a deep-dyed tarpits New Yorker and that is, gosh, that’s why I’m so attracted to you, Stephen; that is, I think communists should be renaissance men and women, not just fanatics or dreary committee-people or rabbinical post-graduates. To make a new world, requires men and women—of catholic interests—of a rich—and deep—knowledge of all sorts of things.’

‘That lets us out,’ said Stephen.

She paused but went on with greater vigour, ‘You think there are historical jobs and then there are easy quick sideshows to get in the luridly, pruriently curious and the applause and guffaws and in any case the dimes: and that is what I can do. That’s not an insult. You don’t know the business. It’s shit but not quick. It’s taking as much of my lifetime to write cheap, easy shit as to write a good book.’

Stephen said, ‘Well, I’m not allowed to say anything. I just have to keep quiet here. I have opinions too, but I can’t open my mouth. I’m jumped on and it looks as though I’m a louse. I’m employing my wife to write shit so that I can read in libraries. I have nothing to say. I’m not allowed to open my mouth.’

Emily put her head on her hands and immediately looked up, ‘Oh, heavens, who can fight with you? It’s the electric chair. Little Ikey makes chalk-marks on the sidewalk; in two days he’s a gangster; he ends up in the electric chair. Oh!’ She writhed between laughter and helpless hysteria. ‘Oh, you won’t listen to what I mean. There’s no getting round you. Oh, you drive me crazy.’

‘I don’t notice it. I don’t see you crying,’ said Stephen.

Emily sighed noisily, ‘I’m dying laughing. That means something to me, not just a joke, Stephen. You don’t know what I mean.’

‘Well, what do you mean?’

‘I lay awake enough nights to know what I mean. I lie awake and try to find out what I’m going crazy for: what the struggle is for.’

‘Well, what is it for?’ asked Stephen.

She sighed, her pink face turned towards him. Her hair had come down on one side, out of the ribbon: the other side was bunched up in spikes and curls. She looked like a Holbein woman. Stephen looked. His face changed. He laughed.

‘What’s the use? You’re laughing at me,’ she said.

‘I’m not.’

‘Yes, you are.’

‘I’m laughing at you because I love you. There’s no one just like you. I’m laughing with joy because I was so clever, out of all my family of high-minded or dead-headed shnooks, to pick a woman original and with genius and who would not listen to my sour-pickle line of talk and believe it.’

She smiled, ‘We love each other, that’s true. Look, this Hollywood game is not good for marriage. We’re always shrieking at each other and when not battling about effective clinches in the script, by golly, we’re making unrecorded scenes offstage. A dead loss. Let’s quit the gamble of salaried literature. It’s the same as shooting craps for a living.’

‘That’s life. I don’t want a sheltered existence. I want to destroy my enemies in the family and outside with the terrible acid of success and melt them to bone-dust and with your help I can do it.’

‘If we don’t tell the truth, what’s our function? We’re just fancy icing on the oatcake.’

‘Oh, shit!’ said Stephen.

‘I’m not laughing. I know it’s like shouting, “What is Truth?” in the middle of a cocktail party; that is to say a business meeting of two-thousand-dollar-a-week men, or political mahogany-heads who think a writer is there to write slogans. We get into money habits and we forget the tremendous responsibility a writer has to tell the truth—’

‘I don’t know what you’re getting at, and I’ve a headache,’ said Stephen getting up and putting the coffee-grounds into newspaper and then into the garbage-can.

‘Stephen, what are you doing? You know in Los Angeles you can’t put coffee-grounds into the garbage: they won’t collect it.’

Stephen reached into the can and brought back the packet, ‘Hell, and there’s still that wartime ordinance against incinerators that might make smoke signals. Are we crazy? Well, I guess.’

Emily went on in a low tone, ‘I know that you don’t think so much of my talent and I know—’ (her voice became firm) ‘—I know that your esteemed confrères on the Washington
Liberator
don’t think my views matter a cent because first I’m a woman and they’re ex-Cedar boobs; and next I’m just a comic writer, let me stick to my last joke; but I’ve been through the mill—oy! what an expression—but I mean, I do know the writing trade. I think a writer
has
a tremendous responsibility to tell the truth and tell it with all the skill and ability and experience—he has—to rise above himself—not like I’m doing, Stephen, going down to the sod-digging level of my grandfather. To be better than he was for the sake of others. That’s a funny thing, but every night I wake up and I think, I want to be better than I am by nature. To be a writer in an age when the truth will set us free—means to be a writer of the truth; or to be an utter, utter, decadent damned soul.’ She put her head on her arms on the table and cried.

At this Stephen turned round and shouted uneasily, ‘For God’s sake, that’s enough drama. You don’t have to act out your soul-dramas in the kitchen do you? You’ve probably woken up all the children and Olivia is going to write a letter home to Grandma tomorrow about how we fight and Florence will put that in her report to the court. Jesus, the scenes you make! Anyone would think you thought human beings were good, kind, decent, generous and the friend of someone.’

‘I do think so—I really think so,’ sobbed Emily.

‘Well, that’s fine. Write that for the weeklies and we’ll really make a living. I’m going to bed, Emily. I’ve got a stomach attack and I’ve got to rest.’ He pushed the swing door.

‘Take your medicine and I’ll be in in a minute,’ said Emily, partly raising her head from her arms and looking after the door still swinging. She slouched there a moment and then raised her head. Stephen had left some coffee-grounds on the tiled floor. Emily got a pail and washed the floor there, washed out the pail and stood it to dry. Then she washed the drying rack again, smelled the dishrag, soaked it in vinegar and boiled it and hung it to dry. She sniffed. The kitchen smelled of various cleaning agents. She looked happy. She lit a cigarette and sat down at the table with an ashtray and a long drink. The cat hurled itself against the kitchen door. The locked door rattled. The cat rushed through the grass and with a bound landed on the kitchen windowsill. She saw its phosphorescent wild eyes through the glass. She heard Manoel and Eva moving in the room overhead.

Stephen shouted, ‘Come to bed!’

The cat crouched on the windowsill staring in. She turned off the light and, after tidying the rooms, went up to the bedroom. Stephen was already in bed, groaning faintly. She looked at him.

‘Goddamnit, don’t hover,’ he cried.

She tapped a new cigarette on the table.

‘Don’t do that,’ groaned the sufferer.

She grimaced to herself in the mirror. She put a swansdown jacket over her nightdress and opened a book. ‘Don’t wear that tickling thing!’

She put on another bedjacket and got into bed with a glass of water and her reading lamp, two tubes of different pills, a pen, a notebook and a box of face-tissues. This room had windows on two sides, one set facing the hill rising in the back. The cat threw itself against these windows and, after several leaps, managed to settle on the windowsill. It stared in. Emily drew the curtains.

‘Open the curtains. You know I can’t sleep unless I can see the sky.’ She opened the curtains, took her pills and put out the light. The long night of pain and restlessness began. It seemed to her the cat was part of it. She got up and banged the window till the cat went away. ‘What are you doing?’

‘I hate cats. I’d have them all killed,’ said Emily.

‘I thought you liked them because they killed birds.’

‘We could kill all the birds ourselves. Send out a plane to spray the woods with DDT. What use are they?’

‘They kill the insects.’

‘You wouldn’t have insects with DDT.’

‘Leave them all alone.’

‘What use is all this trash in the modern world? Let’s get rid of them and organize the world. They don’t belong to anyone, they don’t like anyone—they’re marauders. They eat our food. City people are sentimental. They think milk grows in containers. Farmers don’t like birds. They eat the food they grow.’

‘Go to sleep.’

‘The world belongs to man or to animals, doesn’t it? It’s them or us. Look at the roaches, thousands or millions of years old. We’re inefficient. We’re letting them and all the other pests and the snakes and the flying snakes—’

‘What flying snakes?’

‘Birds are flying snakes. It shows it in the Natural History Museum. Get rid of them and you can do fertilization with a spray. Spray from a plane. Let’s get rid of the old-fashioned world. We want the world for ourselves. We’re growing at such a rate there won’t be enough for us if we let them maraud and rob and steal. I’m a farmer’s daughter—’

‘Go to sleep.’

‘I can’t bear to think of our garden and our place on the river at home and our wood-lot full of these creeping things that we could destroy. What’s the matter with us? Why don’t we—’

‘Go to sleep.’

But Emily went on fretting for a while about the laws and measures against the free-living part of the world, those who spoke with other tongues than ours, who hissed, chirped, rattled, scuttled, flew, slid.

T
HE NEXT MORNING A
parcel containing a bound typescript was delivered at their house before breakfast. It was for Stephen. He opened it at breakfast and found it was Byrd’s ‘homework, a necessary job to get things straight’, the essay on America’s new task in Europe, that he had promised to Stephen the night before.

With it was a pleasant, cajoling, almost humble letter from Moffat Byrd, ten or twelve hand-written lines asking Stephen’s opinion ‘on this rough draft’. He said, ‘The discussion yesterday evening did me good; I made some alterations before I went to bed and strengthened the tone of the argument. I know your plain dealing and will value any comment at all you have to make. We all believe in autocriticism, we all make mistakes. You are among friends and I, like all the others, value your opinion, coming as it does from a comrade devoted to Party and country.’

Stephen was deeply pleased. To conceal his pride and pleasure, he fluttered the pages, smacking his lips with contempt, but with a glowing face, said a few words and then, packing the typescript neatly by him, he confessed that he was glad.