She washed her hands of Daddy sometime between Famine Queen and The Sleeping Peacock. Her film debut in The Spectres of Mare Nubium is charming, if you go for the cute kid shtick. During the famous ballroom sequence where the decadent dowager Clarena Schirm is beset with the ghosts of her victims, Severin can be seen picking at the pearls on her bonnet and rubbing at her makeup. The legend goes that when the great man tried to stick eyeshadow on his girl and convince her to pretend to be a Schirm relation while a hungry shade—a young Maud Locksley, no less—swooped down upon the innocent child, she looked up exasperatedly and said, “Papa. This is silly! I want only to be myself!”
And so she would be, only herself, forever and always. As soon as she could work the crank on a camera by her lonesome, she set about recording “the really real and actual world” (age seven) or “the genuine and righteous world of the true tale” (age twenty-one) and declaring her father’s beloved ghosts and devils “a load of double-exposure drivel.” Her second documentary, The Famine Queen of Phobos, brought that blasted little colony’s food riots to harsh light and earned her a Lumière medal, a prize Papa would never get his paws on. Maybe that was it. She told the truth once or twice, and she told it with a bleeding head and a broken arm: Old Mummy Earth is a mean drunk, and she doesn’t look after her babies too well.
When asked if his daughter’s fury in the face of fiction ever got to him, Unck smiled in his raffish, canine way and said, “The lens, my good man, does not discriminate between the real and the unreal.”
Of her final film, The Radiant Car Thy Sparrows Drew, only four sequences remain. They’re all badly damaged. Everybody copies them, cuts them up and spits them out again into endless anaemic tell-all docs I wouldn’t wipe my feet on. The originals continue to putrefy in some museum in Chicago. More people than you’d think go there to watch them rot. I did. It was comforting. You plonked your head against the cool wall on a soft pink Midwestern evening that seems impossible when you’re freezing to death on Uranus. She flashes before your eyes: a sprite, a fairy at the end of a long, dark tunnel, smiling, waving, crawling into the mouth of the cannon capsule with the ease of a natural performer.
Sometimes folk recognize me, even this far out, from the old newsreels, though I never gave interviews and the lawyers haven’t let anybody show my face since ’51. I don’t like looking at myself on-screen. It’s what you call existentially upsetting: I am here and I am there. But I can’t chase down all the images of myself.
Here’s the short of it: A handful of people survived Unck’s Venus expedition, and I’m one of them. I don’t remember everything, and not everything I remember is important. My life, my life proper, began when a woman with short black hair and a leather aviator’s cap and coat crouched down in front of me and asked my name. The lost boy, the turning boy. I came back, and she didn’t.
Don’t think I’ve forgiven myself for that.
Now I watch. I’ve watched everything. I can’t stop watching. Waiting for the docs to show me just a little of her face; show her laughing; show her when she was a child, her arms stretched up, asking her father to lift her onto his shoulders, away from the chaos of adult feet and canes and slippers dancing to Mickey Hull’s latest ’dustrial-Charleston rag. Show me anything of hers. I’m as bad as any of them, begging to stare at her corpse for just one more moment—or, if not her corpse, the places where she once stood and stands no more. Tell me, invisible voice-over, voice of god and memory, tell me everything I already know. Tell me my life.
But her face was a slow poison to me. I knew it, I knew it, and I tucked in anyway, starving for her narrow, monkish, poreless cheeks, her eyes huge and sly and as black as her hair.
I can’t even say her name. She doesn’t have a name. She is she. She is her. She possesses the pronoun so completely that no one else can touch it. There is only one her in the great stinking gas giant of my heart, fifty feet high. She is a giantess. I am no one. Well, not “no one.” I am Anchises St. John. But I am no one’s him.
Do you know what she does first in Self-Portrait? She smiles. She fucking smiles. And then she laughs. A sweet, wry little self-deprecating laugh. Like she’s embarrassed to be taking up so much space in the shot. Like she has stage fright. But she wasn’t. She didn’t. Nothing embarrassed her. Maybe she had stage fright when her ma first put a tit in her mouth, but never a day since. Offstage fright, maybe. She never knew what to do with herself if the camera wasn’t running. But the laugh says she’s embarrassed. The smile tells us she has butterflies. Oh, isn’t it a funny damn racket, to be in the flickies? Who, me? This old thing? I’m so nervous! Who needs a drink?
I haven’t earned anything yet.
Come find me in two years.
Her smile yawns up over me, black and white and enormous—and I knew, as only a man who’s stared at it until he ralphed into his own lap can know—entirely fake. It’s a good one, though. One of my favourites of hers. Full of the feral thrill that surrounded All Things Venus back then. People couldn’t get enough of that shitty little burg—the one world that made all the others possible. But it’s their smile, not hers. Look at her, look at her, don’t you see? She’s going to Venus. She smiles like people smile when they’re obsessed with Venus. It’s a smile like a trailer for the real thing.
But no, it’s too soon for that. I was drunk. I hadn’t slept in three days. When I think of her I see all her movies, all her faces, at the same time. Stacked up into orbit. But you can’t see what I see. I see the Venus smile, but it’s not there yet. This one’s a baby version of that nine-thousand-watt grin. It’s Face #212: Intrepid Girl Reporter. She hadn’t been to Venus yet. Venus always felt so obvious, she told me under the hot, wet stars of Adonis, when she didn’t think I could hear her. In Self-Portrait with Saturn, Venus was four movies and nine years away. Up there, she’s just a kid. Twenty-one. Sleeps like a dragonfly so she never misses a thing. Lovers like a revolving door. Drinks like she’s allergic to water. She’s barely a person yet. The girl in that decrepit print with a cigarette burn in the middle of her forehead like the mark of Cain and film scratches all down her cheeks doesn’t even know that Self-Portrait will be a hit. Better than a hit. It’ll make her name. Her name. Not her old man’s.
These’re things I know about her. These’re things everyone knows about her. It’s not fair that I should know as much as anyone who cares to pick up a magazine. I should know more. I should know it all. But you begin where you begin, and hope—even if hope is a pickpocket with both fists full—to go, somehow, further and higher.