I'm Dying Laughing: The Humourist Read online

  She became hilarious. The men glanced at each other.

  She went on, ‘You know, there are 200,000 pounds of copper sheeting in her?’

  The men at once turned to the statue.

  ‘And her mouth, like mine, is three feet wide!’

  The men stared silently, but the statue was left behind. Then they began again, to each other, ‘You know Ross and McKinley? They went down four years ago, January of 1931. Ross is still around, has a little business, junk store, on Second Avenue. McKinley is on relief, living in a flophouse in Harlem. He owed—’

  They turned and strolled forward.

  She said to herself, ‘Oh, well, everyone’s got a lot on their minds, I guess; the days of the locust.’

  She went below for her white spring jacket. She was in a two-berth cabin and there was her sharer, sitting on the bed with whisky in a tooth-glass. It was the dark woman with the bobbed hair, from the deck. There was a gilded steamer basket standing on the shelf near Emily’s bunk.

  Emily said, ‘Help yourself. It’s from the office. What’s your name? Mine’s Emily Wilkes.’

  The woman coughed and looked at her darkly.

  ‘Well, if we’re cabin-mates, I’d better know your moniker,’ Emily said.

  Now the woman said in her soft voice with the Irish intonation of old New York, ‘Mrs Browne, Mrs Walter Browne, the Browne spelled with an e.’

  ‘Is this your first trip to Europe, Mrs Browne?’

  The woman finished her drink and washed out the glass. No answer.

  ‘H’m, well, excuse me. My first trip, except to Staten Island, Arbutus Beach, to study the spot marked X; and once, when I took the ferry from Seattle to Port Angeles on a stormy day of strike, my life in my hands.’

  On the way up, she thought, ‘Good company, I see! Talkative; verbal diarrhea. They probably figured me out and put me in with Signora Sphinx, so I can learn to be refahned before I get to Europe.’

  Warm now, though there was a fresh breeze, she walked round the deck.

  Aft, lounging on a grey-painted locker, was a large man, shirt open to the waist, showing his long, sparsely hairy body. He was fair, a big face with large, open blue eyes, the eyes of a child. This big man saw her, smiled, began shaking with laughter. ‘Who is that?’ She knew him. She walked all round the deck and came back. He was there, but looking tired, his cheeks creased and fallen. His muscular arms burst out of the short sleeves; he had a big putty nose. ‘I know him!’ Five years before—a troublesome student in Seattle, shouting with students at a long table in the canteen, putting them all down, roaring with argument, sitting by himself, moody, dirty, drunk and with his books before him. As she trotted past, he looked at her purple slippers. ‘He does remember! He remembers that after moving to his table, called the Circus, attracted by the circus, I started asking sappy questions. I got the attention of one Bellamy Dark, a “mediocre academic drudge” he said. Modest lad, thought I; and did not know it was an informed analysis. I went after this drudge, named Woodworm and deserted this one named Fireball. It was a chit’s cowardice. I figured I couldn’t rope in Fireball, I guess. Well—B. Dark is one of the reasons I’m going to Europe; to wipe out the shame. And lo, here is Fireball! Is it a reward, is it Fate? I wish I knew. Forget it girl. You’re sure to lose.’ She was always making mistakes—she had an impulsive nature.

  ‘Hi! You’re from Seattle,’ she said.

  ‘Yup. Just been there to see my father-in-law.’

  ‘What’s your name? I remember you. You fought fist-fights with three of the faculty; two for Sacco and Vanzetti, one for Karl Marx. Then you left.’

  ‘I got a job as a stevedore. Then I became a sailor.’

  ‘That was a big general fist-fight that Sacco-Vanzetti event. Even I at last knocked on doors for the shoemaker and the fishman versus the United States. Even Mussolini, to get down to the dregs, was obliged to tell Italy and the world, “I did everything humanly possible to save Sacco and Vanzetti.” It was our first international trial. I mean Judge Thayer tried them, another word for the bum’s rush, in this instance, and then the world tried us. The first but not the last, no doubt. Dreadful. Why was it? Why do we do it? They burned the American flag in Tokyo and Johannesburg. Thomas Mann and John Galsworthy and other worthies said, “Sacco and Vanzetti are our blood brothers.” If there’s one thing we know, it’s how to get the banner headlines.

  ‘The USA was in the usual red scare; people being rounded up and deported. In the 1790s it was the French who were the dangerous reds we had to round up and expel,’ said he.

  ‘Why are we such scaredy-cats?’

  ‘Come and have a drink,’ he said, pushing himself up. She remembered more about him now. Most of the girls had avoided him, though he was a magnificent animal; because he roared, went on benders, didn’t shave, didn’t dance and would come towering in, full of drink, smiling strangely, separate, threatening, ready to smash-hit, or shout rough laughter, or topple. Drunk or sober, he argued and fought. He was going to London for his Ph.D.

  ‘Why London? Plenty of Ph.Ds. at home.’

  ‘I like it where it’s tougher. And I’ve got to talk to someone.’

  ‘What about?’

  He did not tell her then. His father-in-law was paying the minimum sum for the trip. His wife, Sue, who was at home in Seattle at present, studying for her MA, still believed he could make a good professor: but if not, they’d separate and she’d teach. When he said this, he grinned like a good-humoured lion.

  She told him the home facts. Her father was a small inventor and manufacturer. He made boilers, stoves, ovens, heaters. He had invented a few things, especially noted the Wilkes Boiler. She had brought her brother Arnold from Seattle to New York, unemployed, to get a job she had found for him.

  ‘What did he do?’ She hesitated.

  ‘He was on … WPA.’

  ‘Good.’

  She laughed, ‘I hope it’s good. He was in a small PR agency. He helped the other hucksters stuff the holes of reputations with flannel. You know, Imperial Caesar, alas, poor Yorick. Ugh, I hate and fear the name. I always felt I was poor Yorick. I am always concealing from myself that I am poor Yorick. Besides, Hamlet was poor Yorick. Clown at court; what future but a naked skull?’

  He snarled, ‘Who knows who’s Hamlet? Hamlet’s anyone. He’s all moods, any moods. He’s a wind-and-water adolescent. It’s a phase of youth I don’t like. I was through it by fifteen. I was a Catholic, a choirboy. Then I changed.’

  She heeded the belligerent tone and said hastily, ‘My father remarried and I was mostly brought up by my granny, at least ideologically. She was a battling old lady who subscribed to the Clarion and heard Elizabeth Gurley Flynn when she first went out west. I got all my history of the West from her and I’ve always had an abject, cringing admiration for the Wobblies. They admitted life was really tough: you can’t flatter it.’

  ‘Faugh!’

  ‘Faugh yourself. Grandma loved a Wob, that kept her straight, though I guess she was straight. I saw him at last; “my dear Tom”, she called him, “my dear young man.” He was a tall, straight man, seventy, no stoop, long head, bushy black hair, footballer’s neck and shoulders, with big slow feet, just like Lincoln, glasses on his small blue eyes, big shapely hands, and a wonderful laugh, like all the glasses in a glass-blower’s ringing downscale. He was masculine, ugly, you might say; yet I somehow thought he must look like his mother. He said he looked like his father. “I’m the only one of the boys that does,” he said: “my mother had a faithful weekend visitor.” That floored me for a while. Grandma loved him all her life. Ah, me. Living Man, she called him: or Deep River. I don’t know why.’

  ‘Deep River is the Ohio. It’s a freedom song for the Negroes.’

  Emily said, ‘I bet secretly I’m looking for one like him. Girlish first impressions.’

  The man looked restless, surly. She said, ‘What’s your name? I’ve forgotten.’

  It was Jean-Marie McRoy, a mixture
, French-Canadian, Scots, and yes, part Russian.

  ‘You look Russian. When I saw you lolling on that box, I said to myself, “He’s resting from running up the Potemkin Staircase.” Or was it down?’

  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 Wars
aw, 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.’