She sobbed, struggled, strangled, shouted, screamed with laughter, strong, immense laughter, it seemed, not hysterical, the great roaring of big lungs and a strong heart.
Stephen turned on the light and sat up. Her face was crimson, tears poured out of her eyes. Her bosom heaved convulsively. He said, 'Stop it! You'll have convulsions. Stop. Stop it!' He slapped her.
She stopped, still heaving, and sat up to glare ferociously at him, 'Don't you dare touch me. I'll kill you.'
Stephen Howard is a walking contradiction: a rich Communist. He has inherited his wealth from his mother, or perhaps only the prestige of wealth, given the tightness of her purse strings, and yet he wears the contradiction on his sleeve. It has made him both an intellectual and a hothead, that is, a writer. On a transatlantic crossing, he meets Emily Wilkes, a spirited young fellow traveler who grew up poor in Arkansas and has scraped her way to a journalistic career. Stephen is a scarecrow, sour and bony, like Cassius; Emily is fat and full of life, yet they complement each other perfectly. They are married immediately.
I'm Dying Laughing is the last book in a small challenge I set for myself to read Australian writers. But unlike those others, Stead seems never to write about Australia; her settings are cosmopolitan. I'm Dying Laughing follows Stephen and Emily from Los Angeles to Connecticut to France, where they run to escape the Puritanical American Communist Party, who cannot stand the way the Howards court heterodoxy whenever they run their mouths. One of the best set-pieces in the novel is an early chapter where the Howards' putative friends host a dinner party as a pretext for reading a soon-to-be-published denunciation of the couple, even going so far as to say they plan on petitioning the court against the Howards' custody of their daughter Olivia. I'm Dying Laughing is about what it was like to be a Communist intellectual in the post-war period, a label riddled with its own contradictions and doubly endangered--first by Party disciplinarians and then by the scourge of McCarthyism.
Most of the novel follows the couple in France, where they settle with their four children. In France Stephen and Emily court the friendship of continental Communists and former members of the French Resistance, and yet are hyper-aware of their own hypocrisy: they are unable to live within their means, spending like capitalists and talking like Communists. They are true believers, but unable to even consider what it might look like to turn talk into action. You never know how you'll react when the crisis hits and the fascists come to power, one Resistant tells them, but such is the dilemma of the post-war American Communists: prosperity means they'll never have to put their values into practice. Stephen goes in and out of favor as a writer of polemics; Emily has far more success as a humorist, writing Mencken- or Thurber-style novels with mutedly radial politics.
Emily longs to write a serious novel, but humor and bombast are her only natural modes. She is a voluminous talker--something like 95% of this novel is dialogue, dialogue, dialogue--and prone to flights of chatter that issue from her before her thoughts are complete, and we get to see her change her mind over and over in real time:
I don't want to live this way in the bright lights, going to the gilded palaces, unable to tolerate a waiter who's been eating sour cabbage, or a waitress who hasn't washed, unable to bear a hotel if the manager doesn't scrape to me, suffering if my girl doesn't change her dress twice a day. I don't want to be like that. I am like that. Why? Because I see the funny side, I'm a wise guy. I've got the angles. I know the score. How despicable! Money's filthy. It is filthy, Stephen. Don't look down your nose. And when you think that my humour, which is me, I admit, is really the way I see things, laugh at everyone, sneer at everyone's troubles -- I really am cruel. I often wake up in the night, Stephen, to think out what I am. I'm like a doll with two faces glued together. They used to have those. I disliked them. One back, one front.
In the three novels of Stead's I've read since since The Man Who Loved Children, Emily strikes me as the closest thing to the outrageous Sam Pollitt in that novel: like Sam, her eccentricities put her beyond reason and beyond accommodation. She is incisive, a skilled wordsmith, but prone to strange and unshakeable beliefs: one of the complaints made by the American Party hacks who ambush her is that she "thinks all birds are snakes." (She does think this, and says so repeatedly, probably misunderstanding the fact that all birds are descended from dinosaurs--while snakes are not.)
Stephen, too, is outrageous, but Emily's outrageousness outpaces and overwhelms him. One of the few moments that get close to the dysfunctional family horror of The Man Who Loved Children comes when Emily, having caused a miserable Stephen to temporarily flee, begins to obsess--romantically and/or sexually, I'm not sure which--over her adopted son, Christy. Only Stead could write a scene like that, where the dream of the nuclear family turns itself inside out, and becomes grotesque melodrama. Other people try, I guess, but nobody really does it like her. Nobody captures the way such horrors emerge, without or noticing, from the commonplaces of love and family.
The Man Who Loved Children is like watching a bunch of people on a train headed toward a crash everyone but the conductor can see coming. I'm Dying Laughing is also a tragedy, ineluctably led toward bloodshed, but it's not quite the same. It's more like a party you can't leave, a party where everyone's just a little too drunk, and you know it's only a matter of time before somebody does something to bring the good feelings to an end.
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