I'm Dying Laughing (12 page)

‘Oh, what a dying dog,’ said Emily. ‘But he can still tear out the seat of your pants.’

‘“Like,” I said,’ continued Axel, ‘“the England of Elizabeth, always on the cliff-edge, about to slip into the sea; the Athens of Pericles. Think of the tremendous writings that emerged in the age of reason following upon Newton, Descartes, Bacon, Locke: think of Diderot, Voltaire, the
Encyclopaedia;
and how all literature was influenced by the scientists and the French revolution. What are you saying, man?” “Well,” says Lewin, “it must soak in. The political obsession of our age means there will be no literature for a century.” Everything showed his dread of age and decline: that he knows he has spent his small mental capital and has nothing to show for it.’

‘Such men are time-servers,’ said Stephen. ‘He has never helped a fellow-writer. That is why he says there are no writers.’

‘To him Groucho said, “Meatballs”,’ said Axel. ‘And I asked Lucius whether he understood that politics is a specific form of strain between men in which both sides play for the realization of vital impulses; and that these passions, these conflicts are the essence of drama, the stuff of new literature. Shelley thought so, too. “Shelley was a horse’s ass, he believed in mankind, the shit,” were the memorable words of the defunct genius of the American stage. After which I annihilated the decaying pontiff of the studios, showed up his rottenness and contradictions pitilessly, showed that everything he said confuted previous statements whose implications he had never begun to understand. I built up a case for literature and said he was defending his own pitiable defeat.’

‘He countered very feebly. “Well, my medium, the theatre, is dead. The Stage Hands’ Union did it.” “No,” said I, “the tsarist silence in the studios has done it. You can say nothing tragic or humane; you’re King of Hollywood because you’re selling moth-eaten old clothes and that’s all they can take at present.” “Oh, hell,” said he, “a good drunk is better than all this crap.” The conversation smashed him. Groucho told me this morning that this guy has walked all round Hollywood owning that he was smashed, and he is out. As everyone detests him from bosses to errand boys, I did no harm.’

‘He will smash you,’ said Emily.

‘For all that, he is the god of clever, decent men here, like Nunnally Johnson and Gene Fowler, his former associates,’ said Stephen.

‘But only journalistic types,’ said Emily.

‘We’re all journalists, every man jack,’ said Axel laughing. This was true, so they all laughed.

‘The party was strange at Groucho’s,’ said Axel, laughing as he improvised. ‘It shows that the commies are a chosen people. It was full of typical apolitical Hollywood celebros and the Beany-Simon test would show their mental age as pre-embryonic. They gather round the piano and sing ditties for which the police raided the feeble-minded home in the days of William McKinley. So, from now on, I stick to folks like you and others at whose homes I meet people at once charming, friendly, humane and reasonably wide awake. Groucho said in parting from me after dinner, “Goodbye, Mr Oates, you cost me a pretty penny tonight”.’

‘With love and kisses from the Anti-Lucius League,’ said Stephen.

‘I bet he meant it,’ said Emily: ‘Lucius will think Groucho got him into a trap to show him up.’

‘He wouldn’t: I wouldn’t,’ said Axel: ‘and who can hurt Groucho? He has us all in the hollow of his hand.’

‘H’m. Stephen, pour us some drinks.’

‘Axel doesn’t drink.’

‘But I do—if I can’t eat.’

Stephen said, ‘Yes, Emily wants to leave me and Earl Browder together. It’s the dieting. If I say, “It’s a bread and butter life,” she gets up and walks to the icebox. If I say, “The union have no ideals, they just fight for pork chops,” she starts to drool.’

Now she said, ‘The bread and better life. I’m going to New York tomorrow.’

‘To see your publishers?’

‘To get out of this smoky and flamy abyss. That’s why I eat so much.’

Stephen ran Axel to his little downtown hotel in the car; and Emily, taking a drink with her, went upstairs to pack. When he returned Emily said, ‘That settles it. When did Lucius Lewin attend a party we went to? We’re second-class citizens here. And Lewin’s star is setting: he actually said Axel beat him. He must be on the slide; after playing so close and neat. Pooah! I am not going to stay in this pitiful suburb of six-car clapboard palaces and browbeaten male Scheherazades, suffering insult, injury, envy, backslaps and horselaughs.’

‘I cancelled your reservation,’ said Stephen.

‘Then I’m getting another one,’ and she telephoned the air company at once.

When Stephen came up to bed, she told him she had her reservation for the next day. Then she said, with a queer gay grimace, ‘Axel is finished: he won’t get any work here. You must say, “It’s the art of the masses”; or else, “I’m a punk, and my god I wish I were honest”; but you can’t show them why they’re cheap and nasty.’

Stephen said, ‘Axel has to speak his mind. That’s his life.’

‘He can’t do it here. He’d better go back to New York.’

‘The town here is full of his admirers,’ objected Stephen.

‘But if it’s MGM or Axel, it will be MGM. He won’t get work here. I know them. Why is he here? Because he wants to be a punk too.’

‘He wants to get money to support his magazine.’

‘I’m a whore because I want to keep my dear old mother. Fooey.’

Before it was time to leave for the airport next day, Stephen took the car out. Emily telephoned for a taxi. But Stephen returned with a jewelcase, in the velvet lining of which lay a deep amethyst necklace from Russia. Emily loved stones in yellow, green and purple.

She was dressing and sat before her looking-glass in a linen slip with a square-cut neck embroidered in small scallops; and a bronze silk dressing-gown, fallen round her hips; her hair was disordered, pushed back in spikes. Arranged on her rosy, solid bosom, set in the low bodice of white embroidery, the gems looked superb. Seeing her comical, robust fairness in the glass and Stephen beside her in pale blue, pliant, placating, absorbed, she began to laugh with tears in her eyes.

‘Oh, Stephen, it’s so beautiful and it’s such a filthy insult, to think you can buy a writer’s soul with money.’

Stephen said, ‘Don’t let Browder and such bagatelles separate us, Emily. What can I do without you? I know you can live without me.’

She sat thrown back in the dressing-chair, looking at the necklace and her grotesque fair face. ‘By golly, I look like a Polish peasant dressing as a countess,’ she said laughing, her blue eyes bright and flushed, lucent, wet. ‘I look like any kind of peasant, I’m so goddamn earthy, no wonder I fell for a silk-stocking. I like to hear you talking to waiters in icy tones, “This Graves is not cool enough, wait-ah!”’

‘I do not say “waitah”.’

‘The prince and the pauper.’ She began to take off the necklace, tugging impatiently at the catch. ‘Help me with it, Stephen,’ she continued in a hearty, husky tone, ‘it’s lovely, I love it, but get thee behind me, Satan. I guess you don’t know me after all. Hasn’t any woman ever told you it’s a damned insult to try to buy a woman’s affections with Russian crown jewels and a fur coat? Is—our—whole—future,’ she continued, breaking into sobs, ‘to—be—built—on my selling out my belief in the future of the world for some gewgaws of Tsarist Russia? It’s a symbol, all right. I guess that’s the kind of women you’ve known though.’

‘Oh, Lord!’

‘Of course, your mother and your sister are like that; they believe in Cincinnatus labouring the earth with a golden plough share. And what is the harvest? The corn is gold. The country’s rich and right. Why Dear Anna, your mother, would think it the hoith of foine morals intoirely to give up dirty radicalism and wear a clean fortune round your neck. I don’t say sister Florence. Florence is not all lucre. She’d pawn it at once for a hundred cases of Bourbon—‘

‘I got this from Florence. I’ve got to pay her for it, somehow.’

Take it back. It’s for her sort,’ said Emily decisively pushing it along the table. ‘I like it; but after you saying you’d divorce me if I didn’t believe in the American way of life—‘

‘I did not!’ he shouted.

‘American exceptionalism! What else is it? And you’d leave me for not believing in Hollywood, the art of the masses; do you think you can buy me back with a stick of candy? I don’t think you could have done that to me, even as a child. The only thing you could buy me with then was affection. I loved people. They didn’t love back.’

‘I didn’t mean to hurt your feelings; I don’t seem to do anything right. So I’ve lost you!’

‘Will you give up your belief that revolutionary Marxism is right; and consent to be led by the nose by the quiet men from nowhere (Earl Browder) all for an amethyst necklace?’ said Emily loudly and scornfully; and throwing the box with the thing in it on to the carpet, where she kicked it away. ‘Pooah! What triviality! Is that what you think of me, Emily Wilkes? You can buy me with a string of beads? When I whore, I’ll whore for plenty, for the whole works. They’ll have to come to me with the whole world wrapped up in their arms! And with the Bible too and the whole of revolutionary history, man’s struggle too, and say: “Debs says you can, and you can prove it by the Haymarket Martyrs, the crimes of Cripple Creek; lynched labour organisers led to it and Sacco and Vanzetti died for it.” Manoel! Is the car ready? Put my bags into it. Drive me to the airport. Stephen, I’ve left everything arranged; the children’s diets, their dentists’ appointments, when to change their clothes; everything; I’ve paid all the bills, I was up all night. Now, this is final. You can divorce me if you like.’

‘Forgive me, Emily,’ said Stephen.

‘I don’t forgive you. I’m goddamn mad and I’m going to stay mad.’

But Stephen ordered Manoel out of the car, got in himself; and while he was driving Emily to the airport, he talked her round. In tears, quite overwhelmed with shame, Emily was brought back to the house. They spent the day together talking over many things quietly and sincerely; kisses and endearments were exchanged in the vegetable garden, down by the shore, behind the trees that screened the barbecue, by the children’s swing, in the dark of the garage and while they were spraying the vines with DDT against the Japanese beetle.

Not far off, Manoel and Maria, in their rest house, could be heard talking and laughing; once they screeched with laughter. Two or three times Emily ran to the children, who were being kept together by the English governess named Thistledown. Emily hugged them all, kissed the eldest, their adopted child Leonard, in the dark curls that fell over his pale narrow forehead. ‘Oh, my darling,’ she said to them once, ‘if you only knew what a mother you have! You’d do better with a snake, a Gila monster, than an earthworm like me. Oh, Miss Thistledown, I’m a poor weak woman without character.’ She hugged the governess. ‘Let me kiss you,’ she said, pressing her wet round cheeks, rough and warm as fruit, to the middle-aged woman’s thin face. ‘You English are all so strong, you’re just and strong. My God,’ she said, turning away, and aloud, ‘if my fighting forefathers heard that blather! I’m fat with the buttering and the licking afterwards.’

At dinner, Emily made the crêpes suzette as planned. She was wearing rings, a hair-jewel and bracelets. She was flushed and her tongue wagged frenziedly. ‘Oh, if only we were Jewish,’ she cried; ‘we’d stick together. What a beautiful family life the Jews have, so close-woven; and they make more of blood than we do. It’s beautiful, that tree of life with all its branches, under the mantle of all its leaves. Oh, how lucky you are, Lennie, to have had a Jewish father. If only I had Jewish blood I’d make you happy. I’d have the art of keeping the fire in the hearth forever. I used to go down to the Jewish quarter as a child and just stare in, glare in hungrily through their windows on Friday nights, when they had their candles in the windows! Oh, how tender it was, how touching and true! The family is the heart of man; how can you tear it open?’

Stephen listened, smiling, grinning: ‘Christopher’s father, my brother-in-law, Jake Potter, was a nasty little man! Family life is poison. I’m sure Miss Thistledown and Manoel think they’re having a season in hell. Read what Plato said about the family!’

‘Plato was a homosexual!’ declared Emily. ‘Stephen, listen to what I say! Family love is the only true selfless love; it’s natural communism. That is the origin of our feeling for communism: to each according to his needs, from each according to his capacity; and everything is arranged naturally, without codes and without policing. Manoel, why don’t you bring in the coffee? This coffee is not like we get at your sister Florence’s. But of course, there’s only one liquid that means anything to her—‘

‘Stop it!’

But she did not stop and held them at table while she discussed Stephen’s family and their money habits, for a long time. Christopher’s grand-uncle had dieted himself to death, being a miser; having apportioned his estate among his children to escape death duties and family hatred, he found them all sitting like buzzards around his semi-starved person to tear the pemmican from his bones. Stephen’s mother, Stephen’s sisters, the rich girl the family wanted Stephen to marry—

Miss Thistledown, embarrassed, half rose from her chair. ‘Stay where you are!’ roared Emily, ‘I haven’t finished speaking. You’re the children’s guardian. If I leave, you’ll be their mother! You may as well know what’s in them!’ At last, with an imperial gesture, she dismissed them, the children to their homework or beds; and when they had sung the Giles song, she said to Stephen, ‘Let’s go to the movies; I have a need to sit in the dark with you.’

They went downtown. At night, they went to bed but did not sleep. In the film, the word ‘fascist’ was used and Stephen exulted, ‘There you are! Hollywood is not all poison. Reaction is on the way out, when the radical writers in the studios can put over their ideas like that.’

‘Oh, poohpooh,’ said Emily: ‘people don’t even know what it means. It went by in a second! Who heard it but politicomaniacs like us?’

And with this one word, the bitter wound opened again.

‘I shall be ill if you don’t let me sleep,’ said Stephen. ‘Last night too—‘