They had a drink in a fashionable hotel. The cafés, now that they looked at them, were worn, dirty, spiritless, there was hardly any electricity, no cleaning, few customers,and those customers shabby. Some cafés were already shut at the dinner hour. This Paris was not for them.
“And yet all this is irrelevant, isn’t it?” said Emily.
“How?”
“There’s Paris behind the scenes, marching, embattled, tired, hungry, resentful with a long, long memory. They’ve eaten crow and they won’t forgive it. The proud French! I love them. They don’t squeal, but they remember. I wouldn’t like to be on the dark tablets of their memory. Paris the wonderful, the Venus, the Astarte.”
But neither of them could walk as they used to. Stephen still had a cane and little strength. Emily, still roly-poly, was not strong either. Perhaps she had not eaten enough, or she had worked too hard.
“I’m getting hungry, and we’re near Les Halles. Dale told us about a splendid little restaurant.” They walked by the law courts, the gendarmerie, the flower markets, the Châtelet and the Hôtel de Ville.
“Here Blanqui stood that day, here people’s heads rolled in the gutter, people smothered in their own blood. You can’t live in Paris and be like we are and not be red, can you?”
Stephen said, “No, lots of people have tried to go back on their life history, their perceptions and their dedication; and you can’t do it, tragedy or annihilation follows. They were scarred for life, there was a burning mark on their foreheads. You can’t go back. You passed the signpost and there’s no turning back.”
“You frighten me. What do you mean? How cool it’s getting.”
“We were dedicated,” he said. He showed her a little plaque surrounded by humble bouquets, and some field flowers in a homemade bouquet on which was a handwritten card which said:
Ici est tombé pour le Patrie et pour le Libération de Paris—
Stephen said, “Come on!” But Emily was crying openily, suffocated with tears. She gasped, “I can’t speak, it’s so touching. It’s real. Oh Stephen, I wish we could have done that and be no more; no more harassments.”
People were passing them, going home from work, poor Frenchmen in cloth sandals, toil-stained trousers, with sunk faces, tired eyes, a desperate expression. They walked on and Emily said, “You see, Paris stands no nonsense. It says, Here it is, the truth is evident, And passer-by, the truth of your life is evident.”
—Christina Stead, I’m Dying Laughing: The Humourist
I must read this book.
@ Siren: Indeed. I actually did the counter-intuitive thing and read this before reading one of your favorites, “The Man Who Loved Children,” and I have to admit it’ll likely be a while now before I get to “Children” because as great as “I’m Dying Laughing” is—and it really is great—its galvanic force is such that a reader doesn’t necessarily want to follow it with another large dose of what Stead has to offer. It’s one of those books whose ostensible flaws are the keys to its greatness; reading it feels less like reading a novel than it does being tossed into the messy lives of these messy humans. “She [composes her narrative] like a blind man throwing paint against a wall,” Angela Carter says in an appreciation of Stead that serves as an afterword to this edition. Indeed to that, also; and it’s a good thing Stead never tried a non-linear narrative! But, yes, this is powerful in a way that I’ve never quite come across before.
You sure were waiting for someone to notice the novel in your photos at the beach; instead, the Silver Surfer deflected all the attention…
I hadn’t heard about Stead before. I’m still waiting for Amazon to deliver ‘Wittgenstein’s mistress’.
The Man Who Loved Children is also a bit messy; Randall Jarrell’s famous line that “a novel is a piece of prose of some length with something wrong with it” comes from his intro to TMWLC. The opening chapters use this family’s highly weird form of private language and it takes a great deal of getting used to. But my god, the cumulative power of that book. It’s one of those novels where you vividly remember not just the book and the passages you loved, but the effect it had on you while you were reading it. The day after I finished it, I went on a date with an older Englishman I’d been seeing and made the mistake of trying to describe the impact of the final few chapters. Got so wound up I had to excuse myself to the ladies’ room. He was uptight even by older-English-guy standards, was extremely taken aback by my inability to describe a novel without sobbing, and I’m sure my lack of self-control was part of why we only lasted a couple more dates. No matter, the novel was a lot more worthwhile than he was…
I was intrigued about her after reading Franzen’s essay in the Times a few weeks ago. And since I can get both for $2 on Amazon (excl. shipping), how can I not bite? Thanks.