Vivian

by Christina Hesselholdt

  ‘Vivian is a fascinating, ingeniously constructed piece of documentary fiction. The novel’s short sections illuminate Vivian Maier in brilliant flashes without ever dispelling her singular mystery.’

  — Adam Foulds, author of Dream Sequence

  ‘Christina Hesselholdt transposes one of the greatest enigmas of twentieth century photography, Vivian Maier, with a synaesthetic delicacy. Part eerie acapella of confessions, part hoarder’s clippings come to life, Hesselholdt’s exceptional work on the life of Vivian Maier is as rare and roguish as the artist herself.’

  — Yelena Moskovich, author of Virtuoso

  Praise for Companions

  ‘Hesselholdt’s most penetrating insights into the texture of lived experience come in moments of vivid imagery and unexpected humor, which bridge the weight of biography and the lightness of an instant. … those who find connections among these disparate moments will be rewarded with a rare and fragile experience: a rediscovery of the strength of narrative bonds, impossible to dissolve and difficult to forget.’

  — Alexandra Kleeman, New York Times

  ‘An affecting homage to, and a high-spirited literary dissection of, Woolf’s book The Waves … Companions, translated with care and élan by Paul Russell Garrett, is not at all a gloomy work. Hesselholdt’s touch is light, even mocking, as much as her subject matter is grave. There is a dancing intelligence roaming free here, darting back and forth among ideas and sensations. Her novel is a deceptively nonchalant defence of modernism and a work of pure animation.’

  — Catherine Taylor, Financial Times

  VIVIAN

  CHRISTINA HESSELHOLDT

  Translated by

  PAUL RUSSELL GARRETT

  ‘Have you the Heart in your Breast– Sir

  – is it set like mine – a little to the left –’

  — Emily Dickinson

  Contents

  Title Page

  Epigraph

  Vivian

  Credits

  About the Author

  Copyright

  Narrator (that’s me clattering about… when I lift the lid to see if the characters have come to the boil).

  One fine day, the fourth Thursday of November 1929, before the family had been separated, the turkey had just come out of the oven and was resting on the kitchen counter. Maria, who was from the country and could make herself sound like a turkey when she wanted to, made a gobbling sound over the turkey to amuse her husband Charles and her daughter Vivian and her son Charles (also known as Carl) and perhaps also her in-laws who had arrived with Carl because he lived with them, and the ludicrousness of the turkey increased with each impression. They were immigrants and the observance of all that this festive occasion dictated, from cranberry sauce to pumpkin pie, was a way of clinging to America, for them that big turkey was America… That day there was a knock at the front door of the Maier household: it was Julius Hauser, the short and normally so meticulous brother of Vivian’s paternal grandmother, a man who was in the habit of bringing his slippers with him in a paper bag to guard against the cold floors, but for whom things had obviously gone awry. ‘Fill the tub,’ Charles Maier shouted to his wife Maria Jaussaud Maier (Jaussaud, her French maiden name, had from the time she got married functioned as a middle name and now stood shuddering after advancing to the front ranks). ‘You’re not setting foot in the living room till you’re clean, Hauser,’ Charles said to Julius. Vivian could see that her father did not want to touch him, and searched for a clean spot on his jacket where he could take hold, but there was no clean spot, and with a look of disgust (upper lip drawn back towards the nose as his mouth stretched) he grabbed Hauser’s soiled collar with two fingers (soiled with vomit and dirt from the sidwewalk, onto which he had keeled over in his drunken state, and likely spent the night – it was a miracle he was not hurt) and dragged him towards the kitchen where Vivian’s mother was boiling some water. They shut the kitchen door but after a little while, Vivian eased the door handle down and pushed the door open a crack. She saw: Julius sitting in the zinc bathtub, her father scrubbing his back, her mother washing his clothes in a pot on the stove as a stray sleeve attempted a wave but was forced back down. The kitchen was steamy and smelled of boiled intestines, and Julius’ face and upper body had a reddish tint. Vivian knew that he was or had been a butcher (at a hotel, maybe that just meant he was the one responsible for the meat, but she didn’t think about that, she was only three years old) and that’s why she didn’t like him. She could have sworn that only her one eye was visible through the crack, the one eye that she forced to keep watching and watching as Julius was scrubbed in the large tub, but Julius Hauser suddenly saw that eye through the crack and shouted: ‘Do come in, my little girl!’, at which point her mother turned away from the stove with the dripping spoon and her father whacked Hauser over the head with the bath brush, shouting at him in German, calling him a scoundrel.

  When Charles Maier struck him with the brush a second time, Hauser stood up in the tub and nearly slipped, grasping at thin air in the cramped kitchen, and precisely how it happened nobody managed to see, but the turkey fell into the tub with him. ‘Do you need scrubbing too?’ he shouted, and forced the large golden crown down between his legs (and here you are invited to picture the scene in that Fellini film, I can’t remember what it’s called, where a group of boys catch a group of chickens and then screw them or pretend to screw them, each boy with a flapping chicken pressed against the groin, and the flapping wings look like propellers that drive the boys’ bodies forward), but then Charles hit him again, and he drew the turkey from the depths and handed it to Maria. She stood at the ready with a towel and accepted it like a child emerging from the waves that had to be towelled down, as all disdain gave way to solicitude, the thought of the Great Depression ever-present – it was a colossally expensive turkey.

  All the same, Julius Hauser was not allowed to join them in the dining room even though he was now perfectly clean, and Vivian did not want any turkey because it had been between the butcher’s legs, where she had seen some shrivelled skin dangling when he stood up in the tub, but her mother, born 11 May 1897 in the French Alps, told Vivian Dorothea Therese Maier, born 1926 in New York City, that it had been washed and that Vivian had to eat it, but Karl (in America, Charles) Wilhelm von Maier, born in Austria in 1892, seized the opportunity to pick a quarrel and said that she didn’t have to – ‘It just leaves more for us.’ A little later he told Maria for the umpteenth time in their marriage that she had no clue as to what a man was, alluding here to the fact that she had never had a father, since her father, Nicolas Baille as he was called, had run off to America, where he became a herder somewhere out west, after getting Maria’s sixteen-year-old mother pregnant when he was only seventeen himself. To which Maria replied: ‘And in allowing my birthday to become my wedding day, I allowed one accident to grow into the other.’

  The quarrel that day gave Charles Maier an excuse to drink, and as Julius Hauser was scrubbed up and sitting on a chair in the kitchen anyway, Charles enlisted him as a drinking companion. Shortly thereafter, Julius Hauser was drunk again and together they struck up old Austro-Hungarian drinking songs while the rest of the family (which besides Maria and Vivian and her older brother by six years, included Charles’ parents and their daughter Alma and her husband, Josef Korsunsky from Kiev, a Manhattan silk trader and proprietor of the Colony Silk Shop, now going by the name Joseph Corsan, and Vivian’s maternal grandmother, a celebrated French chef who worked at all the grand households, was also there; the guests, all immigrants, were all hard-working, even those of an advanced age) arrived during the quarrel to join them for turkey dinner – it was just as crowded in the living room as it is in this paragraph, but now the entire cast has been, if
not introduced, then at least mentioned, hopefully none forgotten. And there they all sat, around the dining table, listening to their father, son, husband, brother, son-in-law, Charles Maier, getting drunker and drunker in the kitchen. His parents and Maria’s mother gave one Austro-Hungarian and French sigh after the other and gesticulated mechanically, agreeing that this bold-as-a-butcher’s dog Austrian and French cat should never have married. By meticulously criticizing and pillorying only their own child and never the other’s, the two grandmothers managed to develop a lifelong friendship, in spite of the family’s madness.

  ‘I have no desire to ever see that drunkard again in my life,’ Maria Hauser von Maier said of her son. ‘He is a worthless individual.’

  ‘My daughter is indolent and malicious,’ Eugénie Jaussaud replied.

  ‘But Carl and Vivian…’ Maria Hauser said.

  ‘Yes, for them I would fight like a lion,’ Eugénie said.

  The following day Maria left Charles for the umpteenth time, leaving the name Maier behind. She left her son with the in-laws, with whom he had already lived for several years, having first done a spell at a children’s home, taken out of harm’s way of his parents’ violent quarrels.

  ‘They didn’t want me,’ he later said of his parents. ‘The only thing they gave me plenty of was names.’

  From an early age he was led down the path of name-bewilderment, for he was baptized not once but twice, thanks to the inability of his Catholic mother and Lutheran father to reach an agreement about anything whatsoever. First baptized Charles Maurice Maier (and into the bargain his mother entered filius naturalis – that is, born out of wedlock, even though he was born nine and a half months into their marriage – in the baptismal record), he was then baptized Karl William Maier. From then on the French side of the family referred to him as Charles and the Austrian side of the family as Carl, which was, to put it rather crudely, enough to make you schizophrenic, a diagnosis he did in fact receive at some point late in the 1950s, by which point he had long been calling himself ‘John William Henry Jaussaud (Karl Maier),’ the American, French and German captured in solidarity.

  The most surprising thing about Viv’s baptism (she was only baptized once) was that her mother suddenly gave herself a new middle name on the baptismal record. She called herself Justin, as though she wanted to imply that she’d had Viv with a Mister or Monsieur Justin. But if you compare brother and sister they have (in profile) the same sharp, upturned nose and slightly receding chin. There is a windswept look to them. A gust (or a hand) seems to have brushed over their features too roughly.

  Maria took Vivian with her when she left. She said there was no room for two children in the apartment where she had taken lodgings with the portrait photographer Jeanne Bertrand on the sixth floor of 720 St Mary’s Street… but it was not very far from the in-laws’ home, just a short walk away through St Mary’s Park.

  Narrator

  And now a great leap forward to 1968.

  Mr Rice

  On the way to the train station to pick her up, I came to think about my childhood nannies and felt a lovely sensation pass through my body of being enveloped by arms and barms, of someone who only wished the best for me bending over to pick me up and embrace me. I had not yet met Vivian Maier – Sarah had interviewed her alone. This time we wanted to be sure of making the right choice, and she had also made an awfully good impression on Sarah (despite mostly being interested in whether there was an express service from our place into town), and she had only just moved in with us (I was still away on a business trip) when her father died and she left to attend the funeral.

  Narrator

  The platform emptied, options disappeared, and only she remained, six feet tall and slender as a reed, just off the train from New York City, practically no luggage, and Mr Rice’s sweet dreams (of a curvaceous nanny in a short, flouncy dress and possibly an apron, constantly within reach, like an incandescent lamp, better yet, an open fire in the room next to Ellen’s but Ellen would be asleep or playing in the garden, and he had long arms, no matter where the nanny was in the house, his hands sprung up, up her thigh and around her buttocks, and there’s an arm jolly well poking up by her neckline, wherever did that come from) faded out.

  Mr Rice

  I wouldn’t say I had to tilt my head back to look her in the eyes, but very nearly, and after having been immersed in boyhood memories, I was confused by the fact that she was taller than me (as though I was still a little boy).

  ‘May I offer my condolences,’ I said, and went to meet her with an outstretched hand. Her height made me automatically expect a grip that left a lasting impression but her handshake was cautious and clammy. ‘Vivian Maier,’ she said, ‘just call me Viv.’ It sounded flighty, like someone who was gone before you knew it – Viv, and she was gone. She had hardly any luggage – at the time, mind you; there sure was plenty later – a valise and a purse over her shoulder, and a box camera strapped around her neck hanging at navel height, a Rolleiflex, I had always wanted one like that. We got into the car, and as we drove, we talked about what we saw. She had been working in Chicago since ’56. We had replied to her ad in the Chicago Tribune.

  Narrator

  As early as the late forties she had been to Chicago to visit her brother Carl at a mental hospital. When his grandmothers died, he completely fell apart. It took him an hour to eat the apple she had brought him. He was severely debilitated by his medication. When he got up from the chair and followed Viv to the locked door, he moved in fits and starts. The only thing he said was, ‘I’m so dirty.’

  Mr Rice

  A little way ahead lay a horse in the gutter with its head in a pool of blood; she rolled down the window and took a picture of it. I guess it had been bound for the slaughterhouse when the tailgate flew open, the horse fell out and struck the road at full tilt. Thus it had avoided the stockyards. And then it had just been left there, in the blink of an eye made uneatable, unusable. With its big dead eye staring at a pool of its own blood. A horse-drawn carriage went past, and the horse did not so much as send it a sidelong glance – admittedly it did have blinders on, but it must have been able to smell the dead horse. However, it was indifferent and remained so, a proper city horse. I remembered reading at some point that you can’t get a horse to drink from a bucket that had once held blood, which was an oddly inexact piece of information, because at some point the bucket must have stopped smelling of blood.

  ‘My first photograph in Chicago today.’

  It was Sunday and there wasn’t very much traffic. Every time she went to take a photograph, I slowed down or came to a complete stop. She appreciated that. She worked like lightning and was very assured. It goes without saying that to a certain extent you see your surroundings anew when you are with a newcomer and even more so with someone snapping away so eagerly. Would I have noticed the old lady standing in the middle of her narrow, short plot of land, squeezed in between apartment buildings, once a garden, now a repository for old windows and other scrap, the ground completely bare except for a couple of dying shrubs? It got me thinking about how the garden might have looked before she got so old. About how everything that you have so diligently maintained can wind up as a dumping ground, without you being able to do anything other than grab your cane and drag yourself out into the degeneration and just stand watching it decay further. Here I happened to think about Sarah and her obsession with her garden. I think she is too young to spend so much time on it. I associate gardening with a later stage of life. My mother was older when she started to parade her roses, having long since lost her own bloom. Or would I have noticed the hoarding in front of another apartment building that was constructed of nothing but doors, a fence of doors, some of them with knobs still on, so that they were invariably viewed as entrances and made the fence look like the set of a comedy, where the protagonist is always disappearing through another door just as his pursuants reappear on stage.

  ‘The Kodak Girl,’ I said to her.<
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  Narrator

  Here he was referring to the series of women and girls who had since the late nineteenth century been used to advertise Kodak, thus illustrating that Kodak cameras were so easy to use that even women could work them, and pandering to the female user of Kodak, who was depicted free as a bird in the wild, camera strapped around her neck, capturing her own version of reality, soon identifying pre-existing Kodak moments, simultaneously contributing to women’s liberation from the confinement of the home and giving them the chance to roam freely in nature without the protection of a male companion, because the fact is, in the majority of the advertisements with annually alternating Kodak Girls, she is alone.

  Maybe the adverts had not been sufficient, because in an article in Popular Photography entitled, ‘Are Woman Allergic to Photography?’ the following invitation can be read: ‘Ladies, take yourselves out of exile and make friends with your camera! There is a world out there waiting for the eye of the camera woman.’

  Mr Rice

  ‘No, the Rolleiflex Person,’ Viv replied.

  ‘I look forward to seeing the pictures you’ve just taken.’

  She replied that she did not always have them developed because it was too expensive.

  ‘And besides, I have seen them,’ she said, tapping the box camera, ‘down here.’

  ‘Why don’t you just develop them yourself?’