I'm Dying Laughing (69 page)

‘Ah, yes, he is to the manner born,’ said Emily.

‘That means I’m used to firing cannon when they empty bumpers,’ said Stephen crossly.

‘What do you mean?’

Stephen did not answer but continued, ‘And then I’m cynical, corrupt and rotten and sentimental enough to be able to pick out successes, I really believe. After all, in all these years, I was Emily’s censor; streamliner, corrupter. I knew what would go down. She never wrote a word she wanted to. She wrote what I said was good. I eliminated all that was tragic, heavy, thoughtful, true, even the ghost of an idea from her books; at least, I tried to, not always succeeding. But I was always right. Every time an idea has sneaked in under the canvas, that book has been a failure. Only Emily had a codlin-moth in her apple; and it’s bad, for it started at the core and ate its way out. She wants also to be a great writer.’

Stephen sent off” Emily’s letter and one of his own, proposing to set up a literary agency in Paris. They continued meanwhile to discuss with Suzanne the project of Stephen’s going into business in Paris, London and later New York; and perhaps getting a job even with Tauchnitz or another house in Leipzig.

‘If they would have me, I could go to the
east,
and start a firm publishing paperback leftist best sellers there.’

‘But I thought you had left the left?’ said Suzanne gaily.

‘The twig was bent early. I can never desert Mr Micawber; or I hope not to,’ said Stephen, with more hope in him than had been for a long time.

‘You are very amusing, you really are. It is extraordinary how you both always have to succeed. You are real Americans,’ said Suzanne laughing.

‘Is that so unusual?’

‘Yes, it is rather unusual.’

A
NNA SOON REPLIED. HER
sister in Alexandria was ill and she had decided to come to Paris, take Stephen along with her to Egypt to see their relatives there. On the way they would discuss Stephen’s future. She would not bring Fairfield till the spring. During the next three days, with intervals of storm and anxiety, they discussed this new turn. Stephen said that Anna hesitated to give them money, when she saw that they were still the rakes they had become fully in their Hollywood and Connecticut days; but she still wanted to help him. In Alexandria she had a sister, Palmira, a widow and Palmira’s son, Hector. Hector was very rich from his father’s estate, he was a keen businessman, supported art and the theatre. There was an uncle too, a very good businessman, and a brilliant girl, Hector’s sister, Jean, beautiful, about thirty-three, divorced, and another interesting fortune in the family to marry. ‘Anna’s getting ready to drop the Arkansas has-been,’ said Emily.

Stephen and his mother had a very disagreeable time, although Stephen put himself out to be pleasant, feeling that his renunciation of communism must be rewarded by a loan or some other arrangement. Anna reproached him with everything he had ever done, his delicate, clever, spiteful essays in economics and about the monied, which he had written at Princeton; his refusal of a fine girl whose father was a member of the New York Stock Exchange, and of other girls; his behaviour about Christy and Florence; his marrying an eccentric from Arkansas, whose grandfather had been a Pennsylvania coal-miner; whose mother a house-cleaner before she married; herself now losing her grip, not making anything like the money they had made in Hollywood and on Broadway; their noisy affair with the Party; their flight to Europe, so described by the papers; and their present situation. They were attempting to keep Christy to themselves, to chisel a small part of his income, with the vague if unfounded hope of getting a loan or help later on. Emily’s manners and many other things came up for discussion.

Stephen admitted he was beaten in the search for a living, and was reasonably pleasant. He walked about the room, put his shoes on and off and only retired to his bedroom when his headaches or his belly-aches became too severe.

He returned to Paris, to his wife, miserable, sick and doubtful. Anna was torturing him, she doubted his recantation; he was so shoddy, unreliable. Might he not go back to the radicals as soon as he had her money and she was in America?

‘I had to give an absolute, formal, signed guarantee that I would never see any of them again. She’s right too, according to her view. She’s lending me money. What sort of a risk am I?’

‘She’s lending you money? Oh, joy!’

‘Wait! She brought up all the committees of enquiry, and asked me if I am going to let the family name come up again, endangering the whole family. What with Florence and myself, you and Christy, it will look as if we are all reds. Uncle Maurice gave money to Spain, someone else went quixotically to Russia and wrote a book—what sort of a family is it? She insisted upon a definite promise and—more! A public recantation in the American press—but I put it to her, we can’t do that. It’s too soon. Raise the dust as holier-than-thou anti-Browder communists and four years later we’ve made the well-known turn. Besides, I told her, we would have to wait for the next station.’

‘Next station?’

‘On the renegades’ train,’ he said, looking down.

‘Renegades!’

‘She was partly convinced, but prefers us to make the turn now. Who cares what communists think? But I refused. So no money till I’ve talked it over with you and I give her a date and a speech.’

‘Oh, damn it all, we’re going to be blacklisted and hated and despised, so what difference does it make? Let’s get off at any station or none—at 87th Street! If we remain communists in reality, in our hearts, what difference does it make? They’ll say we’re not communists but bohemians, compromisers, splitters and traitors. They’ll be comparatively pleased with us, if we say so ourselves. Don’t leave them in confusion: give them a bone to chew on. I want to be in the clear. You see where your compromising gets us?’

‘No, I won’t do it. It’s my life. Otherwise, life is death.’

‘But the money? If Anna doesn’t give it, we’re sunk.’

‘I know Anna better than you. If we’re patient and we’re good boys, she’ll come round. Don’t go writing your letters to her. She hates them. The set she moves in don’t write letters.’

Emily cried with conviction, ‘Oh, I won’t. The situation is dynamite.’

However, as soon as Stephen left to go over to Christy’s rooms, Emily hurried upstairs and, after taking some fortifying pills, she sat down and wrote a plaintive, humble letter to Anna in which she said they had sown their wild oats and were willing, very willing, joyful, to agree to anything she so reasonably asked. She had perhaps led Stephen astray herself and she saw things much clearer now. She loved Anna and would do anything to please her.

Just before Anna returned to the States, Emily gave a grand dinner for her at the house, inviting the Trefougars, Mernie and Fleur Wauters, Suzanne, who had a charming smile and could sing and listened attentively to everyone; and a number of others. First she had a cocktail party to which thirty-five people were asked, including Emily’s literary agents and friends of theirs from London, some new French friend, a writer, Uncle Maurice and William; and after this came the dinner of twelve. Stephen had had conversation with his mother and Maurice during the party and at the dinner.

Emily surprised them all by standing up excitedly, with her glass and crying, ‘To dear Anna, to dear Mother, who has made a new life possible for us.’

They drank and in answer to their enquiring, amused glances, she then gave another toast, ‘To Stephen, my dear husband, who for so many years has lived the life of the mind for which he has paid such a heavy toll without ever being allowed inside the gate—that is the gate of his needs and desires. Ah, I don’t mean that, Stephen, it was no payment; it was an accident, a catastrophe that came. You take a railroad ticket, you pay and get the ride; on the way a tree falls across the line, there is a landslide. That is, our climate has abruptly, catastrophically changed. Perhaps happily in the end. Perhaps tragically. But we must face it as you face a railroad accident, glad you didn’t end up dismembered. Stephen had found an avenue for his work, he was honoured for his honesty and noble endeavour; then even they came to regard it as quixotic. It was scorned and dangerous to the rest of the world. For us at that moment those people, now strangers meant warmth, human security, a future for our children. Yes, a home for our children, our ideas and our work. And we were cast out of that home. Ah, the depth of Stephen’s isolation, misery. Rejected by those for whom we had given so much, estranged from our own world of ideas and feelings, we couldn’t belong to any other; not in honour, and honour is Stephen’s rarest, noblest trait. We remedied our immediate sufferings, if you like, by coming to Europe and were sustained by the challenge of a new life, new language, problems, friends, culture. But we have been pursued by those we sacrificed ourselves for and those who once represented our ideal. Ah, me! We lost Stephen’s hope of finding a new and yet old manner of dedication and work. I say Stephen, for though I was by his side always and throughout this tragedy, yet it is Stephen who has lost most, suffered the deepest wounds, been more cruelly rejected, been more painfully isolated from what he loved and those he loved; and I mean by this, dear Anna and those close to him in his family. My work, such as it is, alas, in this moment, my work which is not my work—well this toast is not to me—I could go on working in the pork-chops basement. Stephen could not. His work was always and, as we hoped, always would have been in the future for one thing only, pure, inevitable, honourable and satisfying. And all, all rejected! All, all lost! All hated. What injustice! Well, I don’t want to mention that. Man goes forth to labour etc. And so our Stephen, noble and great man, has sustained in the last six months—no avenue, no hope, no job—such tortures as few men sustain, because it became every day more clear that he had no hope of work—’

‘Emily! Emily!’ said Stephen.

‘Real work, Stephen. Seemingly not for the rest of your life. Stephen cannot work for black reaction. Dear Anna and all our friends knew that. And he is not permitted to write for his own side. Little by little in the last six months he has lost hope of working at all, ever. What despair! To have honesty, this precious jewel rejected and hated by all; and by those who talk of it most. And we needed money! Needed it desperately! And again he had no work! The effects of all this upon a man like our Stephen anyone can imagine.’

‘Emily, please!’ said Stephen, looking at her. Anna looked at her with hatred. Emily noticed both and seemed to enjoy their disorder.

‘What can that do to a man’s psyche? We have all heard very often and now I was fated to see it. How my heart sank! It often seemed to me that never had a man more suffered from the blows of fate and injustice more hopelessly! For how could he extricate himself from the trap he had somehow fallen into?’

‘Become a stockbroker,’ said Stephen grinning sourly.

‘Ah, could you, at your age?’ she said combatively.

She emptied her glass. She said laughing, ‘I forgot. To Stephen!’ She filled, drank and sat down, her face flushed.

Anna, she could see, was very angry and wounded. Stephen, once it was over, was cool enough. Austin Humphreys, a tall, dark, fleshy man, an English consul from a small consulate, was smiling at her with curiosity and the Trefougars were talking eagerly with Douglas Dolittle, a visitor, a tall, heavy, fair Englishman, who preferred country life, but for some reason had just started a small publishing business in the rue de Seine. Both had been brought to fill out Anna’s party respectably and Stephen had hopes of going in with Dolittle.

It was a respectable company in fact. Mrs Humphreys, named Fabia, was a nervous, upper-middle-class Englishwoman, about thirty-two. They, in a yawning, offhand way, complained of their poverty, their debts, while at the same time inviting the Howards to their home in Chelsea and to the charming little rented house in the seaside town where Austin was consul. They even offered to sublet their house in Chelsea to the Howards; and in any case such houses could be got near them, for five or seven years or longer. The difficulties were maids, governesses, schools. No one had any money. Some of London’s most famous women scrubbed their own floors, others took in foreign girls, who worked for pocket money. Maids if got, would hardly stay and then there was the insurance; the foreign girls gave themselves airs, many of them were graduates. It was difficult. If both members of a couple worked, there was barely enough to eat and wear utility clothing, once school fees and children’s clothing were paid for. And then the summer holidays! What a nightmare! The only time they ate, however, was then, on a rare trip to Paris, Normandy, Brussels, even. Indeed the women looked as if they had a thin time. A change of government they thought would help; others believed that England had gone too far down a long decline.

‘My father used to say that we would end up like the Romans and the Spaniards. It does seem to be the penalty of Empire,’ said Fabia Humphreys.

After coffee they moved away from the room and conversation became general. Emily was interested in the conversation, exactly her own troubles.

‘We are all bankrupt, not one of us but is head over ears in debt,’ said one of the English women. It was a sympathetic company, defeated, chic and humane. Yet they wanted the Howards to go to London and settle, just as the Brussels friends wanted them to go there. It would be easier in either capital it seemed. And why not Geneva, said another? No fear of war, money safe and tight and even tax alleviations for foreigners. Switzerland was free as the air; for the right people, of course.

After dinner Emily tried to speak French and found it had nearly all gone. Stephen was speaking English to the Humphreyses, Dolittles and Trefougars. He said to Emily when she complained about her French, ‘And I say, thank God, what a relief! I have not one word of French left and I wish I never had to use it again. Why must I feel guilty not to speak the French language? They don’t speak mine. What freedom from a galling restraint. Always to be babbling like a child of three.’