I'm Dying Laughing (17 page)

Emily turned red and began to shout. ‘What about my political books? What about
The Wilkes-Barre Chronicle?
What about
Johnny Appleseed?
Why are my serious books not mentioned?’

Vera said painfully, lowering her eyes and raising them appealingly, ‘They didn’t sell. They didn’t communicate.’

Emily was shouting, ‘Three times a week, I get letters from miners and seamen and such non-executives of the Party saying that my books, my serious books, put fresh heart into them; and before they felt the struggle was too hard but now I’ve given them fresh hope and a fresh wind has blown through their lives. I can show you these unsolicited testimonials to the value of my books and my communication. Why, I had letters this week from a group in Wilkes-Barre saying that everyone there was arguing about Johnny Appleseed. They said he wasn’t a symbol but a real worker; a miner said he was a miner and an ironworker said he was an ironworker he knew. What about that? Aren’t you just a bunch of intellectuals yourselves?’

At this moment, James Holinshed with a smile around the eyes in his pale smooth face, stood in the doorway. Emily saw him but went on to say, ‘Who cares about the purity of a bookworm in a heap of gold? I think that’s wasting time and the time of local X of the Printers’ Union. What’s the apotheosis of this bookworm? It takes all Pearl Harbor to make him the fireman he meant to be as a boy. Well, so did the grocer’s lad, didn’t he? Or, to put it in the terms of your industrial, not handmade epoch, the cashier at the superstores? Or didn’t he? Do the intellectuals in Hollywood join a separate branch? The writers’ branch of fighting progressives in Hollywood is by long miles separate, isn’t it, from the vulgar Mexican worker downtown?’

‘Labour unionism is based on the division of labour,’ said Vera.

James Holinshed came smoothly into the room, ‘Oh, we’re segregated. Let’s all get together. The Moffat Byrds are here. Katsuri’s handing out drinks. Clare Byrd has reeled on to her favourite sofa: she’s got a yellow dinner dress on and she’s just spilled her drink down the front and she’s hiccuping from pure embarrassment. Byrd’s waiting for you, Emily. We consider you are two of the leading intellectuals here and you’ve kept us up at night; you’re a maverick; or else it’s your simple innocence from Wilkes-Barre, Penn? Was that my book you were castigating? We’re intellectuals and they don’t want us to corrupt the honest Mexican worker of Los Angeles. First with our money; then with our ideas.’

Emily said, ‘That’s wrong. We might teach them something; or they might teach us something.’ Holinshed said, ‘I know, that’s often discussed; but we see no way out. Our subscriptions are so much larger, to all causes; we have cars; we do so much more, we have more time, more influence. We have connections all over the country. We’d overwhelm, discourage and then drive out the ordinary worker.’

‘In flat words, we’re rich and he’s poor. What good can come of it? Pooah!’ said Emily. She flounced out, nearly fell down the three steps leading to the dropped living-room, where the guests were. Standing on the bottom step a moment to wrench at her shoe, she heard the two behind her whispering.

‘What about the letter? When is Godfrey reading that?’

Holinshed said, ‘That’s later. Byrd is very anxious to speak. She’s making deviationist speeches every time she opens her mouth. It’s a very serious thing.’

Emily sailed down into the room and looked gaily and impertinently at Jay Moffat Byrd, the political leader of the rich progressive writers of the studios. The screen writers were organised into a professional guild apart from the guilds of the pulp-writers, photographers, actors and stagehands and others. This gave them a corporate interest and a curious, conscious self-interest which she had never met before.

She changed her mind about him when she looked into the large, dark, fleshy face of Jay Moffat Byrd. She was afraid of him, not because of his strict ideas, nor his political and studio position, but because she was in the presence of a quality she did not understand and shrank from. He was in the highest moneymaking market of any writer in Hollywood; he was a ‘faithful Party Communist’ as they said. His explanations, however unexpected, of political happenings and the changes of political line, and however difficult to follow and explain, were accepted; and his political incubations, his views of the other world, the non-Hollywood world, were at least always seriously discussed; though by no means slavishly followed. There were a few, though, well-paid writers, like Godfrey Bowles (called by the Howards in private ‘God’ or ‘Godfrey the Good’), who abdicated and asked Byrd for guidance. These were few, but strong. At the same time, there were barely any who went so far as Emily in thinking that serious mistakes of policy had been made by the American progressives, out of thoughtless patriotism perhaps and by the American Labour Movement, during this wartime crisis of opinion: few who thought so; fewer who said so.

T
HE WOMEN SAT ABOUT
among the men, saying very little, huddling in groups and talking quietly about their children, well-dressed, modern, polite and most somewhat drunk; and the men, also drunk, took many postures, horsing on the backs and arms of chairs, striding up and down, leaning on the windowsills, on the high mantel of the bogus fireplace. As they passed, the women drew in their feet; except for Clara Byrd, lounging now on a large brocade sofa, dressed, since she had spoiled her dress, in a borrowed white and red wrapper and red mules, her strong arms bare, her hair loosed on each side and her bright blue eyes starting from her head. Clara Byrd and Emily were boldly drunk.

Every time Emily took a drink, Stephen, who was sipping brandy, gave her an angry glance and said, ‘Emily, quit drinking,’ or ‘You’ve had enough.’

Mrs Byrd was left alone and the mood of the party was dull, but restless.

Stephen had taken a dislike to a newcomer, Everett Maine, the son of millionaires who owned property near Central Park in New York. He had joined the Party and been disinherited. He was working, rolling barrels in a brewery. He had been expected to dinner but was late because a jalopy which he had bought for twenty dollars had broken down at a street turning. He would have to get up early to walk to work the next day. He was a fair, tall, good-looking man, and appealingly, with something of Stephen’s own manner, described his parents’ ways. In the private suite at the top of the apartment house they owned, were hints and glints of gold; a gold-plated toilet seat,
goldwasser
in the bar, a banknote in
trompe-l’oeil
in the lounge, ‘maybe so that some guest will break her fingernails trying to pick it off the wall.’ They insisted on his coming for Sunday dinner and Christmas.

‘If I did that I could even join the Party.’ But he had refused.

Stephen didn’t respect pettish ways with parents.

‘What are we fighting for if not good housing, central heating, free entertainment, peace, prosperity, the cocooning of all from the cradle to the grave? I never met a communist yet who wasn’t fighting for a bourgeois way of life for himself, his family and the rest of mankind. He just varies the full-belly Utopia to suit his tastes.’

He was acid. He could not endure another like himself; he hated himself; and he was trying to provoke Everett.

Everett said, ‘You can’t buy the revolution. It’s just bourgeois American to think you can buy everything. You can’t buy people: not all the people, all the time.’

‘You can try,’ said Stephen laughing.

‘Yes, how about giving it a try, buying the revolution? Enlist some tender-eyed Midas,’ said Jack Smole, a writer.

‘I consider you’ve let the revolution down and ought to be censured for giving up your family money; you could have given it to the Party,’ said Jay Moffat Byrd.

‘So you too think you can buy it,’ said Everett disdainfully. ‘Is that Marxist or just MGM? A plot for Robert Taylor?’

Fair, small-faced, forty-year-old playwright, doing well as a screenwriter, Jack Smole continued, ‘Everything can be bought and why not? As soon as you know there is value you put a price on it. The thing is to recognise all values. Money’s only a means of exchange; what you get for it is your business. Here we’ve reduced all values to one. That’s going to simplify things for us later on. You can take out the money and substitute the value ticket. The revolution’s made; and no one hurt.’

‘Supposing there were someone, a nation, rich enough to buy out Hollywood and the monopolists of America and he were a communist, wouldn’t he be right to buy them out, tell them to go play hoops and hand it over to the workers—or the Russians?’ said another writer, Bob Beauclerk.

Byrd, a heavy dark man in dark clothes, rose and moved his armchair, towards the centre of the room. A silence of consent followed.

He said, ‘Stephen, would you move over next to Emily? We want to talk to you.’

‘What is this?’ said Stephen. He moved beside Emily. Emily was bubbling over with mirth, talking furiously, and had not noticed Byrd’s portentous move.

Stephen said, ‘Put down your glass, Emily. You’re higher than a kite.’

She put down her glass, her face swam at them. Jack Smole crossed over, put his face close to hers and said, ‘We’ve all discussed your book
Johnny Appleseed
as a screen possibility and we feel we can’t do anything with it out here. We’ve changed our minds. We feel you made a mistake writing it.’

This was said in a considerate but determined tone. Emily stopped laughing and stared.

Byrd cleared his throat, moved his chair a little to face them directly and said, ‘This has all been discussed and we want you to know how we feel. Our feeling is unanimous. It is with some regret that we have decided to speak to you. But for some time, since 1942 in fact, when Stephen was roving reporter to the
Western Weekly,
he was observed by some to oppose the policy of national unity pursued by socialists throughout the world, a unity embracing all, including capitalist elements who sought victory over the Axis. In a series of articles he wrote, which the editors of the
Western Weekly
rejected in their original form—we have taken the trouble to have this confirmed—Stephen attempted to narrow this policy and to develop an approach which would have divided the anti-Axis forces and disrupted the war effort. The Howards, both, in divers articles have described as reformist what we term progressive, and call all reference to pro-Roosevelt forces “reformist illusions”. They have demanded the casting away of the present political structure of the Party and the formation of a class-conscious Labour Party. Now is not the time for any such trial and error tactics.’

This was delivered in a final solemn tone. The guests, except Stephen and Emily, sat in a tense quiet, their eyes fixed on the rug, or on the pair they had already judged. Only Mrs Byrd, sprawled on the brocade sofa, a magnificent body, a gay, inflamed face, paid no attention. She got up now and went to the drinks-table to fill her glass. The convention among them was to take no notice of Mrs Byrd’s behaviour.

She returned, joy in her face, tipsily treading, and sat down without spilling a drop.

‘This is a straightening-out, I take it, and you are the treble-dated crow to sing the requiem over two dead souls,’ said Emily.

‘Emily,’ said Stephen.

Byrd emphatically continued, ‘All of us, reading your articles and hearing Emily’s lectures, have reached the conclusion that you have a consistent plan; that you are attacking the basic lines that we defend, slandering the leadership, taking up the position of petty-bourgeois pseudo-radicalism and maintaining sympathetic contacts with anti-socialist forces outside our ranks. There has been a consistent campaign of destructive, factional attacks.’

He paused and everyone sat in silence. Stephen looked at Emily. Byrd said, ‘We have refrained until now from making public our views, in the hope that the passing of time and the grave national and international problems confronting the American people and its socialist patriots would cause Stephen and Emily to abandon their puerile leftism and place the fight for peace, democracy and socialism above personal pique and petty individualism. Instead, they have developed their ultra-left posturing into an approach to domestic and foreign affairs which is in conflict with that of socialists fighting for peace and unity in this and other countries. No, Emily and Stephen, we know your value; and your loss would be a great loss to the movement and to us all; for you are fellow-workers, good fighters and valued acquaintances, where you are not friends. We want you, therefore, to consider that this is not a warning or an admonition, not a preaching, but an exhortation, a friendly gesture, to make you reconsider all that you have written and said in a, perhaps, intemperate, ill-considered personal way; and asking you to reconsider and to make amends. It would be thought a good thing if this were in the form of a signed document which could be circulated. All this has caused us much heart-burning, much regret, and it would make us all feel better. It is the time now. You have enough influence to influence others. It would be a pity for us to lose that influence. Outside our movement, what influence can you have? I ask you very seriously to consider your position and this most grave conjecture, which is perhaps the most serious in your lives.’

He finished and the silent audience, like only half-living things, retired into themselves with quiet and greedy satisfaction, was yet appalled at what was going on, at the awfulness of it, at the fates of two people they could see, being suspended like that, by a hair, at two people hanging in the air by a thread. They relaxed slightly.

‘May I leave my seat, please?’ said Emily, getting up and going to the drinks table. ‘Katsuri, I need a good one, a stinger.’

‘That was the wrong thing to do,’ said Stephen, ‘to get us here on a pretext and then turn it into a trial with the judgment and sentence all arranged. That was a lousy thing to do. Lead us on and put us on the mat.’

‘We want you to know we are all your friends; and if you are with us, you would not want us to hide things of this nature from you. Of course, you are on our side, or we would not trouble to give you this chance. You see we think we know what has changed you. We understand why you have taken this diversionist road.’