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But there is something odd about
The People with the Dogs
, as if the dynamo of her energy, ill-supplied with the fuel of distaste, were flagging. She permits the Massines to be charming and even writes about them in a charming way, as if she herself has been moved by the beautiful promise of the Statue of Liberty, which always touches the heart no matter how often it is betrayed. There is nothing fraudulent about this novel, although, perhaps reyealingly, it is exceedingly carelessly written. It would be interesting to know whether an unpublished novel,
I'm Dying Laughing
, set during the period of the HUAC investigations, was written before or after
The People with the Dogs
. According to a recent Australian newspaper article, this novel remained unpublished because of subsequent tragedies in the lives of the people involved. Certainly
The People with the Dogs
may be softening up the reader for a blow which, in the end, was never delivered.

An internal logic of dialectical sequels connects all Stead's work in a single massive argument on the themes of sexual relations, economic relations, and politics. There has been scarcely any large-scale critical appraisal in the UK, to my knowledge, though at the moment more of her fiction is in print, here, than at any
single time before. If I were to choose an introductory motto for the collected works of Christina Stead, it would be, again, from Blake, from
The Marriage of Heaven and Hell
. It would be: ‘Without contraries is no progression. Attraction and repulsion, Reason and Energy, Love and Hate, are necessary to Human existence.' One might take this as a point to begin the exploration of this most undervalued of our contemporaries.

(1982)

Christina Stead completed the original manuscript of
I'm Dying Laughing
in 1966 and was urged to revise it, to clarify its background of politics in the US in the Forties. For the next ten years, she worried away at the novel until at last she bequeathed a mass of confused material to her literary trustee, R. G. Geering, with instructions to publish it after her death.

The Stead connoisseur will note that Mr Geering's editorial hand is evident in an internal consistency far from characteristic of the novelist in her later years.
I'm Dying Laughing
is a mess, but a tidy mess. Characters do not change their names and appearances from page to page; events do not occur in an entirely arbitrary manner. All the same, it has that chaotic sense of flux that makes reading Stead somehow unlike reading fiction, that makes reading her seem like plunging into the mess of life itself, learning things, crashing against the desperate strategies of survival.

Thematically, it belongs with the group of political novels she completed much earlier, in the Forties –
Letty Fox, Her Luck, A Little Tea, A Little Chat, The People with the Dogs
, novels about the life and times of the American Left.
I'm Dying Laughing
concludes this sequence; it is a kind of obituary.

I'm Dying Laughing
begins at a time that now seems scarcely credible, those far-off days when the Left was in fashion in the US. In those days, careerists joined the Party and the Party itself was a career. In 1935, Emily Wilkes and Stephen Howard meet, fall in love, and marry, to the strains of the Internationale.

They are superficially an odd couple. She, a big, gaudy, loquacious mid-Westerner with huge appetites and mighty laughter. He is the scion of an upper-crust East Coast family. He has abandoned his patrimony for the Party. The Howards' greatest
bond is the struggle. They love passionately, with a quality of
amour fou
that already suggests a tragic outcome.

Emily is a writer, and Stead makes us believe this comic, greedy, self-deceiving, self-dramatising woman might possess some kind of genius, although her husband spends a good deal of time attempting to convince her she has only the profitable fluency of a hack. This does not make the portrait of their marriage any less gripping; it is one of the happiest if most tempestuous marriages in literature, and destructive precisely to the degree of their mutual passion.

Stephen, however, is more an all-purpose Marxist intellectual. Emily ritually defers to Stephen's superiority in dialectics but it is she who rakes in the money. The Roosevelt years are ripe for her home-spun tales of small-town life.

By the end of the war, they are in Hollywood, hobnobbing with a Communist élite of script-writers and living high on the hog's back. They are already very partial to a place on the hog's back.

In his Preface, R. G. Geering observes that
I'm Dying Laughing
is ‘not a political novel in the manner of Koestler's
Darkness at Noon
or Orwell's
Nineteen Eighty-Four
'. Quite so. It is certainly not a novel about the bankruptcy of an ideology. Stead takes the validity of the ideology for granted. The world of her fiction is analysed as consistently from the left as Evelyn Waugh's world is described from the right. She gives her own characteristically bleak and sardonic account of the novel's protagonists: ‘At the same time they wanted to be on the side of the angels, good Communists, good people, and also to be very rich. Well, of course . . . they came to a bad end.'

But the side of the angels has its drawbacks. The first full-scale set piece in the novel is a trial – an informal one, conducted after a good dinner in a spirit of the most sanctimonious self-righteousness, by a cabal of Hollywood Communists. The Howards, it seems, have been judged deviationist. Especially roaring, ranting Emily, who is ‘making deviationist speeches every time she opens her mouth. It's a very serious thing'.

Their crimes are individualism. Bohemianism. They won't accept Party discipline. They are unreconstructed Marxist-Leninists and the ‘good party Communists' don't see why such disordered creatures should be permitted to take care of Stephen's
daughter by his first wife. Indeed, they are prepared to go to court to help contest his custody of the girl.

It is an extraordinary scene, a ‘trial without jury, entirely in the spirit of the mid-century and their society'. The Howards are subjected to what is virtually a moral crucifixion – ‘It was thought necessary by us all to get you here and be frank and clear,' they are told.

At this point, the Hollywood Communists have a great deal of power and do not even realise when they are abusing it. With hindsight, one knows all those gathered in the room will shortly face real trials of their own; it is one of Stead's singular achievements to make us understand fully some of the powerful bitternesses that came to flower in the days of HUAC.

But the Howards remain proudly unreconstructed. ‘Still on the train that started from the Finland Station,' as Stephen says, he is determined to stay on it until the end. They compile a litany of the sins of the Soviet Union, the 1923 Party purge, the expulsion of Trotsky, the labour camps. ‘And to think we're losing our shirts and our faces, standing up for such a nation, such betrayers of all that's dear to the romantic hearts of the parlour pinks,' says Emily. Then she damns herself: ‘Heigh-ho! History doesn't bear scrutiny.'

The Howards flee, not the Party but their country. Like the representatives of the Lost Generation immediately preceding them, they go to Paris. They set up a vast entourage of children, nannies, maids, cooks, governesses, and proceed to live the life of Riley although, in the aftermath of the Second World War, the necessities of life are scarce and luxuries virtually unobtainable. But the Howards live happily, lavishly, off the Black Market, financed by Emily's earnings. Slowly, the contradictions of their situation destroy them.

They meet former collaborators and former resistants and people whose experience under Fascism has driven them to despair. The Howards are at sea. Increasingly corrupted by money and the privileges it can buy in a poor country, they guitily discover they enjoy the company of the collaborators, their style, their fine food, rather better than the European comrades, with their dour air, their poverty, their patronage of typical little workers' bistros where the food wreaks havoc with Stephen's ulcer and on Emily's increasingly refined palate.

Emily gives herself over to gluttony; soon they are like Mr and Mrs Jack Spratt. Stephen querulous, dyspeptic, is increasingly given to shady practices with the money that has been settled on his daughter and the nephew whom they have adopted, for Emily's earning power is on the wane.

But still they spend, spend, spend, as news comes of the witch hunts at home. The leaders of the red élite that so berated them, those ‘pious, stiff-necked people', as Emily calls them, are now in prison; they pleaded the First Amendment, they refused to name names. Communism has fallen out of fashion with a vengeance in the US.

The European comrades, the governesses, and shabby businessmen who turn out to be great heroes of the Resistance, are not interested in living well, to which the Howards by now are fatally addicted although Emily's writing, like Communism, has gone out of fashion and their debts are piling up. Has the time come at last to get off that ‘slow train from Finland'?

Emily, half-mad with worry and balked ambition, gives in first, hoping that if she recants she will be forgiven and once more be rich and famous. Once she has done so, Stephen, heart and spirit broken, follows suit. Stead does not make a big issue of the scenes where the Howards name names, as if she cannot bear to linger on it.

Emily might have been able, out of her chronic Bohemianism, to patch herself together and go on, Stephen has nothing left to live for. That ‘bad end' their author has prepared for them is nigh.

(1987)

‘She just wiggled her fanny and all the French fell in love with her,' said Maria Jolas to Josephine Baker's biographer, Phyllis Rose. Maria Jolas, evidently still bewildered after all these years by the insouciant ease with which the washerwoman's daughter from St Louis, Missouri, conquered Paris in 1925.

But by all accounts that wiggle was an unprecedented event even in the uninhibited world of Parisian spectacle. Her posterior agitated as if it had a life of its own. Phyllis Rose theorises about it: ‘With Baker's triumph, the erotic gaze of a nation moved downward: she had uncovered a new region for desire.' Surely Ms Rose is being a little unfair; the French reputation for sexual sophistication may be exaggerated but the
habitués
of Montmartre cabaret
must
have seen a bare bum before.

And, of course, it wasn't as simple as that. Baker herself put her finger on the source of her attraction: ‘The white imagination sure is something when it comes to blacks,' she said. When Baker sailed the Atlantic in 1925 with a group of African-American artists, including Sidney Bechet, to take a little taste of show-stopping Harlem nightlife to Europe, she left behind nascent Broadway stardom as a comic dancer, an elastic-limbed, rubber-faced clown, grimacing, grinning, crossing her eyes, to find herself freshly incarnated as a sex-goddess without, it would seem, changing her act very much at all.

She even, although glammed up to the nines, continued crossing her eyes at odd moments: she must have felt it necessary to make her own ironic comment on herself to her audiences, so rapt and breathless was the Parisian reaction to the
Revue Négre
.
‘Their lips must have the taste of pickled watermelon, coconut, poisonous flowers, jungles and turquoise waters,' enthused one scribe.

Yes, of course there is an implicit racism behind that purple prose, but it is a better thing to be adored for one's difference than shunned for it and Phyllis Rose describes eloquently the extraordinary sense of liberation these black artists felt when they arrived in Europe. Life acquired a grand simplicity; any bar would serve them, and waiters said: ‘sir', and ‘madame'. They could check into any hotel they wanted. To use a public convenience did not provoke a race riot. Later on, in the US in the Fifties, Baker would battle valiantly in the Civil Rights Movement; in Paris in the Twenties, she allowed herself to enjoy being a girl. She was Cinderella, the papers said; all she need do now was try on the slipper and marry the prince.

As toothy, exuberant, not-precisely-pretty Josephine Baker grew into her new role of jungle queen, savage seductress and round Baudelairean Black Venus, she left off making faces. At night, she hit the town in Poiret frocks. She never married a prince but Georges Simenon always said he would have married her had he not been married already; then, staggering thought, she would have been, in a sense, Madame Maigret. She had plenty of other offers, too; Phyllis Rose does not drop many names, although she gives a teasing vignette of the architect Le Corbusier, whom Baker met on an ocean liner. ‘He and Josephine became great pals and he went to the ship's costume ball dressed as Josephine Baker, with darkened skin and a waistband of feathers.'

She acquired a pet, a leopard named Chiquita, ‘a male despite his name', who sported a diamond collar. (She had a Bardot-like passion for animals.) Chiquita went everywhere with her, her exquisite objective correlative; the French wanted her to be herself a jewelled panther and good humouredly she gave them what they wanted. Baring her breasts, she danced in the Folies Bergéres wearing a girdle of bananas and sealed her fame. From henceforth, this garment, which is, I think, unknown in any form of dress in any part of the world, which is purely the invention of a mildly prurient exoticism, would be associated with her.

In 1928, she danced in Berlin. Louise Brooks, there to film
Pandora's Box
for Pabst, and something of an expert in the methodology of exploited sexuality, saw her. When Josephine Baker
appeared, naked except for a girdle of bananas, it was precisely as Lulu's stage entrance was described by Wedekind: “They rage there as in a menagerie when the meat appears at the cage”.' Phyllis Rose doesn't record Brooks's observation, suggesting as it does that there was, perhaps, rather more raw eroticism about Baker's early performances than Rose lets on.