I'm Dying Laughing (3 page)

He liked that. He said his rich father-in-law, a lumber man, didn’t think much of him.

‘He says I have no imagination, no personality. That means I don’t make money and don’t want to. Sue thinks so too, my wife. She’s stuck by me so far. She likes me, but she wants me to shine on campus, the big popular man: heads turn when I come in, sush-sush murmur, bald heads and spectacles shine with approval, they clap—the bear with the heart of a mouse. To hell with it. I tried it. I try anything. I got drunk and ducked—’

He had published an essay on population, well received except by one professor in England—the name? Growl, growl. The first thing he was going to do was to go to Cambridge to seek out this professor. He had already sent him a four-page letter requesting him to issue a recantation of his review of the book, already printed in a learned journal.

‘I don’t know what you think? Was it the right thing to do? Or should I just take it?’

‘Go and punch his nose,’ she said.

‘No, I’ll go and show him his ignorance and question his scholarship. He’s well-known as a Marxist. I’m going there first thing, won’t even get a room in London first. Talk to Mann first.’

‘Man?’

‘Aloysius Mann!’ he called out, staring at her for her ignorance. ‘Population theory!’

‘What are you going to do for your Ph.D?’

After a pause, he grinned,

‘The two departments.’

‘Eh?’

‘Marxian economics. Producer goods and consumer goods.’

‘Well, that’s Greek to me. I’ve been to an American high school and college; ergo, I know nothing. My dad was a business crank; made ovens, patented the Wilkes Oven and believed in self-government in industry, that meant free enterprise by company rules; government run by business advisers; no government interference. The Utopia of businessmen—and he thought the USA could be. My uncle worked for the Eastern Railroad and Lumber Company. He was a self-respecting worker, that means no fighter; and basically he agreed with Dad. Sure, to hell with the boss; but the unions interfered with a man’s freedom; so good nigger just the same. He was a veteran from 1919 and they were a bit leery of the men who came back from Europe in 1918. They thought they might have caught a light case of ideas; and ideas are anarchistic. That’s why they formed the Elmers. Uncle was one. Then he got caught in the crossfire of a street-battle in Centralia, Armistice Day, 1919, marching with the veterans. My grandma always said we would pay for it—the crude inhuman brutality: sacking the IWW hall—fighting, making a victim, cutting off his genitals, hanging him—then getting in harmless women and making the jail a bawdyhouse; and then there’s the romantic story of the law man who never got over it, got a neurosis. Not sturdy enough to be one of us hundred-percenters. I wrote a play about it, thought WPA might put it on. I said “inhuman”. Why? It’s human, it’s what we do on Saturday afternoons. Didn’t they hang Frank Little at Butte, Montana, in 1917, the same idea, hanged him from a railroad trestle. Merry, eh? We’re a side-splitting set. It gives you confidence in sharks. Do you want to write a selling story? Man, softbodied, brave man against those devils of the deep. Sharks don’t march down the current, and form in vigilante groups to tear up other sharks. I hope we don’t find soft, gentle jellies of our ilk anywhere else in space, progressive ones who’ve got a few centuries ahead of us in blood-letting and soul-freezing. Even tigers, well, don’t trust my zoology, I learned it in the yellow press, tigers get on their hind legs and claw in a man-to-man duel; but we fight in a mob, get all the fun and then, “I wasn’t there, Mac.” I’m not saying just men; women, too, hide behind the twitched curtain, then rush out when there’s a mob of fifty hellcats. That’s in Zola, do you remember? Do you think we’ll change some day? Will we have a Winter Palace or a Potemkin Staircase? Or blackhat, whitehat till the last President? It’s fixed, I guess—leave us to heaven. There’s nothing else to do.’

He was looking at her,

‘What did you say your name was?’

She told him. What was she going to do over there?

‘My God! I’m going to see. I’m just one hundred and one per cent hayseed and ignoramus, the big, brainless American wonder from Hix-in-the-Stix. They’ve got so much culture over there they throw it away like, Uncle said, we threw away beefsteaks and turkeys in the garbage cans at Christmas around Camp Upton. I’m hoping to eat out of their garbage cans. Unless there’s a sentry.’

‘Eh?’

‘They used to post guards around Camp Upton to see the natives didn’t pillage the garbage cans.’

He laughed. ‘Sure, sure.’ He got two more drinks. He liked her. Later, he said he’d see her in the afternoon, if she wanted to come around. When she went down to her cabin to leave her coat for lunch, she felt elated. Her place was at a small table with three others, between two portholes. There was a honeymoon couple from Toledo, Ohio, and an eager, polite old woman from Riga, Latvia, who had been living around New York and Chicago for forty years. She was a plump, small woman, dressed in black silk sprinkled with pink roses. She was sturdy, friendly, like all Riga people. The bridegroom was a big, fair youth; the bride about seventeen, short, stout, fair and a great eater, going through all the courses at all meals, cramming the contents of her plates down her throat. Before she left the table, she swept the heap of rolls from the bread-basket into her handbag. The second day, she brought a plastic beach-bag and into this she put all the butter, bread, fruit and other things left after the meal. People looked from neighbouring tables. The bride was unconcerned, too busy, though the bridegroom flushed and spoke a word which made her laugh.

Emily said to her, ‘Good for you! The fish don’t need it.’

But the young couple did not even answer direct questions. They stared at each other, rolled their eyes, laughed. Emily introduced herself, ‘I’m a journalist, write for the papers; this is my first trip to Europe; yours, too, I guess.’

The couple stared at each other, went on eating, didn’t turn to her. Mrs Cullen had been in Riga in 1919, seeing her family and was there at the time of the naval battle. She had got out of the city and become a nurse for the soldiers; she had travelled through the country, gone to Georgia, gone to Petrograd, which became shortly after, Leningrad.

‘What was it like?’

‘The roads and villages and ruins were full of wretched wanderers, uprooted. Soldiers starved and froze. In Petrograd and Moscow you could see some night-life and middle-class people with hidden reserves, who gave parties, with the blinds drawn. The remains of a class, hoping for the best. Europe collapsed in 1919; the USA took ten years to catch up and now the USA looks a bit like Russia then—not so bad though. Roosevelt is saving them from that. He’s a wonderful man—the best they have had since Abraham Lincoln.’

‘But his class hate him.’

‘They don’t like his handouts. It costs them.’

Emily was dissatisfied. ‘Golly, yes, but how did it happen? Why does it happen? The USA is a rich country; it’s been plundered only by us. Nobody invades us. We’re not exhausted by wars and landowners spending the bone-dust of serfs at Nice and Monte Carlo. We’re worrying about farm surpluses! We’re full of minerals, lumber, rivers—workers, steel mills, cattle—pigs, corn—how can it be worth nothing? How are we poor? How can we be rich, rich, rich—and then suddenly a stock market crash and overnight we’re poor, poor, dying in our tracks? Then what is rich and what is poor? We made money out of the First World War: it helped us out of a depression. We’re on top; and then—bang! Back into a worse depression. I feel lousy too, turning my back on all those soup kitchens and tar-paper shacks. I feel lousy leaving my brother and sister-in-law to scratch a living and me living the life of Riley. But, this is my only chance. I want to get as far as I can, see Warsaw, Leningrad, as well as Rome and Paris; I want to see Sofia and Belgrade—all, all—my favourite story used to be “The Seven League Boots”. Heigh-ho! And I can’t help feeling life is great and good and wonderful. I know it isn’t. I’d like to be a John Reed—an Axel Oates, seeing history. I’m fed up with fires and police courts and ruin. Eastward-ho for a real life.’

‘You ought to go to Russia, see the first revolution since the French!’

‘And the American,’ said Emily. ‘But they always starved in Russia; it was an old-fashioned system: it couldn’t last in the twentieth century. Working fields by slaves and serfs is uneconomic. Well, we always had a lot of poverty and people on the roads, but not like now, better: people taking a dry crust in their teeth and a covered wagon on their backs and setting off into the mosquito-shrouded plains. Always looking beyond their noses. But now what’s frightening is that the ones who sickened on the way, the failures, the shallow-lying corpses have turned into Underground rot, little soaks of black misery, that have shot up into the air and are falling down all over us. We, the hope of the world—think what we look like now! Rah! Rah! Rah! Woe, Woe, Woe! Other countries have history; we have nothing but contradictions. We haven’t even got a system; or if we have, no one knows what it is. American get-ahead, that’s the only system we know: and now that no one’s getting ahead, not even the magnates, we’re like a lost dog, howling and looking for a hole. We can’t remember that, other people have systems; we don’t know what it is. So here we are on our backs with our legs in the air waiting for someone to turn us over. And the only man who looks like doing it is Roosevelt. Is that a national philosophy? But we’re full of political philosophy! We started out, like no other nation, with a philosophy, a constitution—a cartload of furniture to fix our little grey home in the west. But the landlord, know as Wolf, is knocking at the door, and even he is going to be hungry, tonight. No, I won’t think about it till I get home again.’

But she was watching the long table on the other side of the dining saloon. Mrs Cullen noticed it and said eagerly, ‘Let’s get to know them, eh? Someone to talk to. Someone you can walk round the deck with. They’re New Dealers, I know; I heard them.’

The young men at the long table were idling over their fruit and Emily saw the young man with the cloth cap she had met on deck, the cap now off; he had thick, curly hair, dark-brown with grey threads.

The bride waved a spoon at the waiter, caught his eye and held up the bread-basket. When he came, Emily put two dollars into his hand and asked him to give them their coffee at a little table on the other side. From there they were able to look at the party of men, mostly young. Facing them at one side of the table, was a tall curly-haired, graceful man, in his thirties, who was talking in a nervous, scoffing yet deprecating manner.

‘The proletarian writing we’re turning out is opportunist, a despairing shriek against the boot that may tread us under, just as essentially pessimist as Maxim Gorki. Our middle-class radicals are a hodge-podge, just anyone with a high school education who’s been tossed out of the career machinery—and a few misfits like me, who feel guilty. There’s a new society over the way—our chins are pointing eagerly; our ears hear a new song—this could be a seedtime in the USA—but it’s slow.’

‘It’s the hand-outs,’ said someone: ‘in old Russia they didn’t have relief. Relief and pensions and WPA stand in the way of revolution.’

‘Can’t let them die on their broken asses,’ said another.

‘Hunger doesn’t produce revolution,’ said another, ‘or the world would have been revoluting since clan society broke down.’

‘It produced it in Russia,’ said Emily to Mrs Cullen; and she could not help calling out to the man, ‘What does produce it then?’ Cloth Cap turned and grinned at her.

Mrs Cullen said in an energetic whisper, impressed, ‘That’s Tom Barrie, the famous proletarian writer—do you know him?’

A man they called Walden, a gross fellow, middle-aged in worn, expensive college casuals, said something about the long radical tradition in American writing, ‘the polemical and didactic and patriotic—like Edward Everett Hale’s tear-jerking fiction
The Man Without A Country
—’

‘But there’s a terrible feeling around that we haven’t a country, for country is family, job and dinner—and who has them?’ a voice said.

The dark, graceful young man had been using a goose-quill toothpick neatly. He put it down and said,

‘Hold it, Walden, that Hale story is true; it’s true for me. Why must people always prove there was no King Arthur, no Robin Hood, no Paul Bunyan, no Casey Jones—for me that story is true. It haunts me. It haunts Americans. Even yesterday when I came up the gangplank, I thought, What if I never came back to my country again!’

Tom Barrie was grumbling amiably, ‘I read a story about the day the sun did not rise. People cleaned their teeth, started their cars, got on the George Washington Bridge, but the sun didn’t come up and they went on into the perpetual cold and dark to sell shares and insurance. Gee!’ he laughed and shuddered, ‘Scary!’

They began to leave their chairs and go on deck. Emily and Mrs Cullen followed them.

‘I had better talk to my cabin-mate,’ said Emily. ‘Will you come along?’

Mrs Cullen wanted to go and get into conversation with the interesting men. ‘Why don’t you come too?’

Emily was bashful.

She asked Mrs Browne if she could drag her chair alongside her.

‘If you like.’

‘Do you want to be alone?’

‘What difference does it make? Everyone is always alone.’

Emily brought up her deckchair. She said, ‘We’re lucky. It’s a real sunny day. Grand blue sky.’

‘Do you think it’s grand? I should have thought a writer would find that staring sea and washed-out sky very uninteresting. A painter I know claimed that there were twelve colours in the ordinary blue sky we were looking at somewhere—it was in the Bagatelle Gardens outside Paris. One colour, I told him: I told him he had to believe that there were twelve, some sort of fiction, so that he could go on painting. But I know that all art is based on a convention, a fiction between the artist and his public’

Emily, much surprised, said, ‘Well, I’m fascinated. But who started it?’

Mrs Browne looked ahead of her, over the ship’s keel—they were aft and almost under the covered deck. She said, ‘It may have a social use. Look at all these artists and writers employed now by the Government. Those artists are glad to have a weekly cheque and they do what they are told to do. They never wanted to starve in Greenwich Village, trying to get ideas that would sell. They’re glad to get into organised society. Fantasy has no social value.’