I'm Dying Laughing (6 page)

The American Constitutions were to Liberty what a grammar is to language.

Freedom has been hunted around the globe; reason was considered rebellion. But such is the irresistible nature of truth, that all it asks and all it wants is the liberty of appearing. The sun needs no inscription to distinguish him from darkness and no sooner did the American governments display themselves to the world than despotism felt a shock.

‘Oh, great! I must change too. I must write that truth,’ she said aloud. She was glad now that she had discovered her ignorance. She wanted to be by herself until she could learn a few of the things that were ABC to the people she had just met and that were known to all artists in rebellion, all people who had been stirred up, in search of a better fate for mankind. It seemed strange to her now, looking back, that in the USA everyone was not on the march. Wasn’t it obvious that the system had failed? It was; and yet what had she been doing? She had lived from minute to minute, without an idea. She would go to the meetings—one day soon. She was shy about pushing herself into what she called the
crème de la crème,
she was not fit for it. She saw now that Stephen Howard’s remark about Normandy was just a joke. What was odd about it was the way it had struck to the heart.

P
ARIS, JUNE 1935

F
OR A WHILE EMILY’S
home was the little hotel in the rue St Benoît and she trotted the streets around, the rue Jacob, rue de Fuerstenberg, rue de l’Abbaye, rue Bonaparte. At eight o’clock in the evening they got there, after thick rain and the sun had shone, the streets, drying rapidly, were glassy. There was an old house at the end of the rue St-Benoit with four windows in the attic displaying pots of greenery, and the front of this house, anciently whitened, was patchy, part age, part wet, and next was Number 40 over which was the sign
Ébénisterie,
cabinet-work. Houses in various heights, various whites blotted out part of the washed blue sky, a
terrasse
with wooden tubs—the clouds lifting still, the air fresh, someone washing a floorcloth in the gutter, streaming with clear water released from the hydrant; and in all these old houses, people sitting in small places taking the air, but modestly, no elbowing, no outcries. Opposite the old Abbaye, before the police station, was an interior with the plaster bust of a young girl, a little Greuze, some bronzes. She was at the commissariat, frankly studying it, when a man, a painter in studio gear, stopped the three policemen going on duty, saying, ‘Have you seen—?’ and later in the distance she saw the same painter in the street, anxious, nervous, shaking his hands together: and then, passing a restaurant, there he was, walking along the counter towards the table at the end where six policemen were having supper with six half-bottles of wine. The painter said to the man behind the counter, ‘Can no one tell me where it is?’ He said to the policemen, ‘Can no one tell me where it is?’ How sad.

The houses opposite the hotel were very old. There were little stores boarded up and poor laundries, restaurants dismal in the mixed tail-end of the rue de l’Université. She walked around bursting with joy. ‘It is, it is, it is!’ Down on the quays, where the bookcases were now shut, there was clear evening light, the smoke of the
Sansonnet
tug on the Seine, the line of trees on the Quai de Louvre. ‘It is here, I am here, life, new life.’ When she returned to the hotel, they said there was ‘un monsieur’ waiting for her. There he was looking out through the lace curtains of the dark sitting room; Howard had come for her.

‘How did you know?’ she asked.

‘You said the rue St.-Benoît.’

He took her to dinner. They walked across the river through the courts of the Louvre to a small dark restaurant in the Palais-Royal, the famous Véfour. ‘Uncle Maurice comes here.’

He had arranged for her to join the American group at the conference, as a ‘private observer’ like himself, so that she could go to all the sessions with them.

‘But we won’t go to all. You’ll see Paris, too.’

She became part of the American group. When Stephen did not call for her, she went to the congress herself, sitting near the front of the auditorium. She could write it up when she got back. One afternoon, it was hot. The Russian writers, sober and straitlaced, were on all the afternoon reading their forty-page dissertations, either in Russian or in translation. She noticed the American writers gathering at the side and signalling to her. But she remained in her seat. Then she saw them laughing, and in a moment Stephen had come down the aisle and leaned over her,

‘Come along, we’re playing hookey.’

They had their photographs taken in an ante-room, then Walden and Barrie and Stephen and Emily marched off along the Seine. Walden and Barrie were going to the Right Bank, Emily and Stephen turned left, went up the boulevard St-Michel and sat down in a café.

‘I knew your feet were tired,’ said he; ‘I know you by now. In a little while, when you’re rested, we’ll take a taxi to the Ile-de-la-Cité—it’s only a couple of minutes.’

‘Oh, that little island in the river that tags along after Notre-Dame?’

He said, ‘I’ve an uncle lives there, Uncle Maurice. He’s an old bachelor, an aesthete, a do-nothing and I’m like him. Or I should be if it weren’t that a hellgrammite bit me once and I’ve been biting my luck ever since.’

‘What’s a hellgrammite?’

‘A bug you use for fishing.’

‘A hellgrammite bit you?’

‘Yes, it really did. But I meant, one day I found out my family uses labour spies, goons, strike-breakers, the lurid lot. Someone told me, reproached me at Princeton. I didn’t believe it. I went and found out. I wrote a book about it. I’ll give it to you. A pamphlet it is—
Labor
Spies.’

‘What did the Howards say to the book?’

‘It was brought out by the left press and under a pseudonym—you know, Justin Clark, I told you. I knew Mother read it, for she had a quiet talk with me about all the good the Howards have done the country. She is very proud of their services to the country. Men on strike are undermining that good. She didn’t put it in those words.’

‘She didn’t mind?’

‘I’m her favourite son—the only one that is. I only mean to say, I’m really another Uncle Maurice and she is thankful I am not. He went to the Sorbonne—so did I for a year. He collects—all sorts of oddities, delicious objects that I like and admire. It took me years to understand him, for it seemed boyish to me—collecting. He goes to concerts just like me, has a faithful friend or two he loves—just a happy Howard.’

‘It’s such a beautiful way to live, the way you live: all with different personalities, leaving each other alone and admiring each other. A united family. I do love it. It’s like a picture gallery somewhere in Italy—all the portraits, elegantly drawn by some master of the day—tray raffinay. A friendly master—a court painter—not a hater of the rich. Till now, I never knew the rich were decent.’

He laughed, ‘I don’t think Anna thinks so; she knows too much, but she is a good woman; she won’t give her class away.’

In the taxi he said,

‘I’ve been thinking about you, Emily, thinking a lot.’

‘I’m not sure I’m glad. I don’t stand thinking about.’

‘I think you do. Do I stand thinking about?’

‘Oh, you—you’re the first honest-to-god scion I’ve met, on my own. My Cousin Laura met a few. You’ll meet her when we get back—that is, if you don’t drop me at the foot of the gangplank. But I’ve never called her men by their first names.’

‘Are you engaged to someone back home—or, I mean, got a steady?’

‘Oh, no—someone I dropped or who dropped me. Partly I came away to let some fresh air blow through me. It would have been ten dollars in my pocket if he’d never been born. Oh, I told you about him—B. D.’

‘So, the post is vacant, isn’t it?’

‘Oh, stop kidding, Stephen: it still hurts.’

‘You don’t love him, do you?’

‘Oh, no—you’re full of love, you’re sending out a beam and someone gets in the way and you think it’s him; it’s you lighting him up.’

‘Then let the beam shine on me! Have me!’

She looked at him; she began a tremulous smile,

‘I suppose this is what they do in your mauve, decayed circles. Laura would understand, I guess.’

‘I don’t care about Laura. I don’t like her.’

‘You don’t know her: every man falls for her.’

‘You’re not like other women,’ he said.

‘I know better than to ask how. And what about the rich witch you’re all but engaged to? And that respectable, highborn cousin with the moolah—in England?’

‘I’ll write to your parents if you like.’

‘My mother died long ago. I had a stepmother. My father’s a pillar of small town society, makes ovens. I have a brother Arnold, who is younger and married and prolific. You better write to me. If you write to them, they’ll think their living’s gone. Besides, what do you want to write for? To find out if I’m married? Or been in jail or am a dangerous red or have debts?’

‘To tell them we’re going to get married.’

‘Oh, golly—my goodness. That’s what happens to Laura.’

‘Oh, down with Laura—whoever she is.’ They got out of the taxi at the church of St-Louis-en-l’Ile and walked down the narrow high-banked street.

‘Am I walking? I must be floating,’ she said. ‘How did we get here?’

He looked down at her, touched. She looked up, ‘You look really beautiful here; it suits your El Greco face.’

‘You can’t tell a man he’s beautiful,’ he said.

‘I can. The first time I looked at you, the light from the ocean was shining on your face, while you were speaking at table: and you had a toothpick in your hand. I thought, What a saintly face!’

‘God forbid.’

‘An El Greco saint, I saw later—those long folds and lemony look.’

He laughed, was pleased. ‘There is some distant Spaniard in my family. You may see a little of him in Uncle Maurice. You’ll understand him and he’ll understand you. He lives in a spindling reflected light from all the windows in his museum of a home; but he understands people, he never interferes, never criticises, always knows what to do to help—if he likes you. A sort of Cousin Pons, too.’ He had to explain that.

She exclaimed, ‘Oh, my, oh, my, my neglected education. Oh, will I have to sit up all night on the kitchen chair, trying to catch up with you and your sister Florence and sister Brenda and Uncle Maurice?’

‘Shut up,’ he said in an undertone ‘and here we are.’

She usually spent half a day sightseeing, half a day at the congress. She arrived at its doors each day very elated—from the faubourg St-Antoine, from the Luxembourg, from the Ste-Chapelle—what a city, what people, and here in the hall, what freedom lovers; ‘the Hall of Fame on roller-skates from all points of the compass,’ she said.

Programmes, meetings, subcommittees, reports, lunches, dinners given by the Americans to foreign writers, and by others to them, the great reception at the Opéra with the
Garde Républicaine
in full dress, boots, Roman helmets, plumes, brass, straps, lining the staircase. Passing them, irregular clouds of visitors in simple clothing, street dress, the garments they wore in their rooms, at artists’ parties, people whose faces shone or looked away diffidently at the shine of the brasses and arms; gauds put out by the gallant French Republic, where literature is always honoured—for the shy, awkward, touchy, nondescript but acutely observant citizens of the Republic of Letters.

Tom Barrie made a speech. The shambling, flask-faced workman appeared on the planks while the photographers crowded between legs and desks. He said, ‘Our writers must learn that the working class which has created a great civilization in the Soviet Union is capable of creating a similar civilization in our own countries. The working class has heroism, intelligence, courage. We must never forget that a class which has such depths of creative power deserves only the best literature we can give.’

Louis Aragon, the French writer, said, ‘I returned from the Soviet Union and I was no longer the same man. However, there remained a thousand bonds, fine as a spider’s web for me to break. That I have had the strength to break them, is, I know, due to practical work, to the social work which was carried on by the proletariat of my country.’

‘I am floating, Stephen, I am floating. Now I am glad I am a scribbler. There is a future. Tom Barrie is right; France sheds light on everything. We have a future.’

‘Wait; plenty is to come.’

The embassies received them. In their dress of poor relations, they were announced by servants in black clothes and gloves, all the artisans of typewriter and pen, the unknown, the known, all named: ‘Monsieur André£ Gide, Madam Anna Seghers, Monsieur Thomas Mann, Monsieur Forster, Monsieur Thomas Barrie, Monsieur Kantorowicz … Henri Barbusse, Romain Rolland, Martin Nexoe, Ilya Ehrenburg, Aldous Huxley, Julien Benda—Monsieur Stephen Howard, Mademoiselle Wilkes—Bonjour, Monsieur l’Ambassadeur, bonjour, Madame l’Ambassadrice.’

‘Oof!’

Then sitting round the big rooms under portraits in oil, chatting with the hosts, getting to the big tables on which were the largest dishes of food they had ever seen, silver boats and coracles used no doubt by Jupiter guzzling in heaven; but at the Russian Embassy used to hold caviar.

Several times she promised to meet one or other of them, the Americans; and she did go with Tom Barrie to a room he shared with an English writer; but sat shy and uneasy in a chair while the two men flirted with an English girl and a French girl from the congress.

‘I can make any man lustful just by looking in his eyes,’ stated the English girl, who was plain, long-nosed and big-eyed.

‘Try me,’ said Tom Barrie.

She sat opposite to him on the twin cot and glared.

‘Pah!’ he cried suddenly, jumping off the bed.

‘Try me,’ said Pax, the English writer.

She twisted round to face him; and after a minute, he fell back on the bed, legs and arms in the air, laughing, ‘It works, yes, it works.’ The French girl meanwhile was having a bath, for there was no bath in her room at her little hotel, and it appeared that she did this every day, for her toilet things were arranged in the bathroom.