I'm Dying Laughing (45 page)

He said all this cheerfully, speaking of things known, to people who knew them. ‘You must always keep in mind, not the horrors, the barbarities, the inexpressible savagery, and not the sadism and madness, but the meaning of this system—unmitigated stupid barbarous plunder. To plunder the earth and mankind while giving no return. A system without a future but bad and bitter for the enslaved, the overrun.

‘Perhaps my knowledge of languages, perhaps, of course, my society connections—I managed to survive long enough, two or three years, that is, to graduate as an examiner in the machine-shop, for which I got a few more calories daily, though not sufficient. Then I was sent to the office; I got a little more. There were some from my class, who had eaten as well as I, who, because of their physical constitutions, faded away like wax in the fire before this conscientious malnutrition. It was luck. I was not then a member of the Party. The notion that I was of no use to anyone and that my profession was really superfluous came home to me.’

He laughed equably. ‘My father wanted me to be a lawyer: I became one. I’d wanted to be something else, but I did not want to upset my father. And because I hated criminal law, I stuck to society cases, harmless enough I thought. But of no value to society, harmless—’ he laughed gloriously; ‘now you see I have reformed. The intellectual always feels semi-skilled, as Madame Howard says. And people think that of him too. Unless he is active in society too. And so we have the Renaissance man.’

Stephen had listened to this with discontent and gloom, though he nodded his head.

‘You’ve had doomsday. We haven’t had ours. Have we got to go through that too? Is it necessary? Capitalism they say is revolutionary.’

Emily said enthusiastically, ‘Yes, in America during the Browder backward step, this was said; but they did not say that capitalism had been revolutionary and now is not. On the contrary. It is in the sense that it is rushing headlong to a world-wide catastrophe, it is still revolutionary in the most fantastic anarchist or nihilist sense. I understand that. Not to know the USA is not to know the most extraordinary problem that capitalism has ever presented to the world and its worst obstacle to progress.’

Stephen waved his hand, Emily rolled her eyes roguishly. Madame Wauters cried out, Mernie changed his seat at once but carried on, ‘The economies in Poland, Czechoslovakia and Yugoslavia are of three distinct kinds with three distinct approaches to the socialist future. I foresee a development of the Yugoslav State directly into socialism. No wonder Mademoiselle de la Roche hates Marshal Tito and Yugoslavia. Yugoslav capitalism was always of a semi-colonial nature. The fight against the Germans was a fight against the only capitalist class that then existed in Yugoslavia.’

He went on for a long time. He had travelled a good deal since the end of the occupation for his business in leather, met all kinds of people; especially businessmen who had no opinions or opposed opinions but all of whom wanted to do business.

‘The businessman is the first healer after war,’ said he.

‘You should have worn your sweater, I saw you shiver,’ said Madame Wauters drily. Emily rushed to get a cardigan, which Mernie tranquilly arranged over his shoulders, looking at his wife enquiringly.

‘That is not the same,’ said she displeased.

Mernie continued, ‘Oh, Tito is a magnificent intellectual, a great, true genius of Marxist development, one of those accidents of history. How is it that epochs produce the men they require, we say? Not always, but now this is so. There is genius everywhere in the new democracies. History produces when it must.’

Vittorio said stoutly, ‘Well, that sounds like superstition. What the people needed has been produced over and over again, because the genius was there all along. The legend of the mute, inglorious Miltons and the Einsteins lost in the cow-pastures is true. The new socialist countries are like young men and women who feel this unexpended genius being put to use. What is sadder for a writer, say, than to find his genius being distorted, enslaved, for him to have to write for criminals, warmongers, cynics and real murderers, or for the most venal, ignorant and corrupt of men, men who run or permit the running of houses of ill fame, who build atom bombs and such things. He knows all the time what he is doing and that it is a double suicide of himself and his talent, his joy and his future all in one—he weeps all the time in his heart, dust falls in his brain and he is dead long before they bury him, because his cynical masters know his price—a low one! A low one for human genius! Whereas the socialist writers are known everywhere, published everywhere, honoured everywhere, they write even better and they are recognized as good men, working for the common good, fertilizing the earth and risking not one bit of their talent or genius or poetry. This is happiness, this is heaven. And where the people themselves are educated and have a future to themselves, horizon-wide, not secreted with a narrow few, there comes a harvest of genius. Now why that is, is clear. They believe and know that though they must struggle, they will conquer nature, themselves and their individual weakness; this is man understanding the universe; this is the new world, the seed time of genius, not only what we need, but what they need for themselves, for one, for all.’

And they went on and on, men who have lived through history and understood what they were living through. Emily thought it was a wonderful evening. Stephen was very tired; and suddenly Mernie Wauters sneezed.

‘Aren’t you warm enough, Mernie?’ said his wife and sprang up to examine the windows, stood about the room and said, ‘Decidedly, there is a draught here.’

Emily hurried out to get a warm drink for Monsieur Wauters; and in the meantime told Fernande and the butler to bring in glasses for whisky and port, which she had been told to offer after dinner, with herb teas of various kinds. Madame Wauters specified linden tea: Emily had none.

‘People always have linden tea,’ remarked Madame Wauters.

Mernie, in good form, was raving about Czechoslovakia, something wholly new in Marxist history. His dark, long eyes were the colour of chestnut buds; they shone.

‘A Czech businessman I know, faced with the horrid but practical fact that he has no future in the so-called west, is willing to ally himself with the inevitable power. The Czech capitalists are in no sense romantics as the Poles are; and our French friends of the other night, so foolishly royalist, are dreaming; and even the Americans about China, the British in Greece—the British are old-fashioned romantics in this, wishing to reestablish monarchy for the sake of the thing; and yet realist enough to hold on to Franco and other dictators, where the planting of a royal sprout would bring about social upheaval.’

Stephen said, ‘This is fascinating. It’s a new world to study and digest.’

‘Oh, Stephen we must do a book together about it:
Inside the New Democracies,
all the stages on the road to socialism, all the turnoffs, all the milestones, until you get to the one that says,
No Turning Back.
Oh, what a shudder! I’d like to stand on that road and look up at that signpost.
From here no way back.
What would be my real feelings? I mean, without romance, without hazy illusions, without the idea that one day if it didn’t suit I could go back to the USA? It’s a fearful idea. For us all, socialism, even Russian Marxist socialism is a somewhat Utopian dream; but there—at the dread signpost—’

She laughed.

‘Dread!’ Vittorio said, laughing.

‘No turning back is always dread. Oh, many hearts must hesitate. And think of the terrors you must pass through—the misery, starvation, torture, the countless awful deaths, perhaps our whole generation will have passed before we even catch sight of the new world! We will die on the road! And our children—they’ll be lost in the Dismal Swamp! Oh, what dread to turn from a world we know well to one we don’t know.’

‘I don’t feel this,’ said Madame Wauters, looking at the door to see if the hot drink was coming for Mernie.

‘Oh, but I understand,’ said Mernie.

Emily said, ‘Oh, I understand, too. It is like the first time I was pregnant and meant to have the baby—which was lost on the way. Oh, Lord, the sweat and terror! I saw myself right at the bottom of a mine and away up a little daylight, the size of a nickel and I had to climb up that weak ladder, up slowly and painfully and as I got to the top the walls pinched me and I felt I would die of the labour and lack of breath, suffocated. Oh, dear! Because, to think—you must lose all you have—your children too—all they’re used to, bit by bit, strip-jack-naked, throw away all you own and the things you love, even the books you’ve written which aren’t worthy—all in the writhing coffee-and-blood-coloured rivers that snake through the Dismal Swamp, and at last arrive naked as newborns in—another man’s world. For they will have built it and we will be Rip Van Winkles, old-timers, horse-and-buggy cracker-barrel socialists. Do you know, just before we left, we were coming out of a big meeting of the party, with a dance to it. Some youngsters were taking the air on the sidewalk, they said our names and looked behind for their friends. “All the squares are coming out,” they said.’

Stephen said, ‘You never told me; the bastards! I’d have gone and knocked their heads together.’

Vittorio laughed, ‘My daughter is a very pretty girl and she is twenty-four. She is very annoyed now, for she finds that there are beautiful girls of sixteen and seventeen everywhere.’

Emily said, ‘Well, it would be like going through the ruins of the world. And what is strange is they all behave so differently and have different arguments. You say, it’s very curious, the Yugoslavs have simply expropriated all foreign and domestic capital on the bland pretext that it was German—I understand it. But my God, think of the night simply coming down on an entire class like that. It’s volcanic, it’s an eruption that cuts off everything, vineyards, backgardens, fishing-nets and towers. And two thousand years after, they discover us, mummies crouching in the cellars—chained, yes, chained to our long-gone ideas.’

Stephen handed Vittorio a drink and said with grace, but earnestly, ‘The reason I’m an amateur, although I hope I make sense politically, is that I wasn’t ever trained to do anything and I don’t know anything. I guess that even to know all about machine-tools, or how the cells divide in plants and animals makes you suddenly much more of a Marxist and a better thinker. I’m an old Party journalist, I’ve met everyone, I was worthy until—’ he stopped and went on ‘but I have the feeling I’m faking. How well I understand your giving up your profession! And yet you had one! It was a hard and noble one and you were a great success in it and yet you felt yourself worse off than a mechanic. It’s too late for me to learn anything. I thought of going to night-school during the war with all the other has-beens, but I felt it was useless.’

Vittorio said, ‘Why not teach? Give courses on the American economy, which you say, and I believe, is so hard for outsiders to understand.’

Emily was enthusiastic. They argued about this for some time; but in the end, with Stephen looking more cheerful, the Wauters and Madame Suzanne thought they might organize a group of sympathetic middle-class people, students and perhaps writers, for Stephen.

Before the guests left they gave two invitations. The Howards were to go to the Wauters’ home for dinner in a week or ten days; and they were to go to Vittorio’s room for dinner the following Saturday. He had only one gas burner he said, but he was experienced with it and would stew them a chicken. He thought he could get one from a friend in the country.

Stephen said, ‘We feel very low and blue about using the black market so much. But the youngsters would feel the change too much and we too have to work. We can’t waste time adapting ourselves.’

Suzanne said, ‘Where is the sense in starving for principle if you can eat?’

Stephen for the first time was delighted with her. He shook her hand. She apologized for not having them. She lived alone in a very small room and was not a good cook. She meantime promised to find an artist to give Christy lessons in water-colour painting.

‘You see I am like Fernande: I always know someone.’

The whole company was taken to see Christy’s water-colours, sailing-boats on a windy afternoon on a blue sea, a little cabin in a springtime wood, a corner of a wood with fields and distant mountains; poor but sensitive work. Christy seemed ashamed, but Emily raved about it and the guests were more than polite.

When they had gone, Christy said to Emily,

‘Mother, you should not have shown my sketches, really. I know how bad I am.’

Emily exclaimed, hugging him, ‘Oh, what junk! You’ve got real genius; a perfect eye. How many colours are there is an ordinary blue sky, remember, Christy, I told you the other day?’

He hesitated, looking at her bashfully, ‘You said, eleven, fifteen perhaps. But I don’t see that many.’

‘Eleven! Isn’t that wonderful! That’s absolutely right. Oh, Christy doesn’t that prove it to you? Only an artist can see such things, a whole palette in a plain blue sky, which is only washing blue to the ordinary jerk.’

She lectured him for ten minutes on his own aesthetic sense, what his teachers had said about him, what his future might be. He could go to the Beaux-Arts, to Rome, he might be the
Prix de
Rome, who knew? With the chances he had and his wonderful, delicate, original talent and the perfect eye for colour! When the child had gone to bed, the couple sat up a little later discussing the evening happily. They interpreted the meaning of phrases, topics, attitudes, the co-operative friendliness of the guests. They believed that it meant that not only these but the whole central committee of the French Party was friendly disposed to them, that Vittorio had just been sent to test them and that seeing their decency, their loyalty to the Soviet Union and to Marxism, they would be invited to work and speak for the Party, secret emissaries but approaching the plenipotentiary. They embraced and looked youthfully into each other’s face.

Stephen said, ‘I’m glad we came! Oh, to be human beings again; and not enemies of the people!’