Stranger Shores: Essays 1986-1999

by J. M. Coetzee

  II

  Born in 1875 in Prague, third city of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, Rilke loathed Austria and all it stood for, and escaped as soon as he could. In part this was a reaction to the miserable childhood years he spent in military schools. But there were wider reasons too for his sense of alienation. Like much of the German-speaking minority in the imperial province of Bohemia, the Rilkes – who liked to think they were descended from an ancient noble family, the Rülkes, but were in fact not – lived on hostile terms with the native population; yet they were estranged from their cultural fatherland. Rilke himself was brought up to look down on Czechs.

  His feelings toward Germany, where he spent intermittent spells as a young man, were no warmer. After his marriage in 1901 he moved to France and, aside from the war years, when he was trapped in the territories of the Central Powers by the fact of his nationality, never returned.

  The attractions of a non-German identity were strong. After visits to Russia in 1899 and 1900 Rilke tried earnestly to learn and even to write in Russian. Back home he acted the Russophile for a while, affecting a Russian peasant blouse and pretending to speak only broken German. Then, after the First World War and his move to Switzerland, he tried to remake himself as a French writer, keeping up to date with developments in Paris, cultivating contacts with French writers, particularly Paul Valéry, courting the French literary press, even switching to French in his speech and correspondence. In his last years, between the completion of the Duino Elegies in 1922 and his death from leukemia in 1926, he wrote more in French than in German.

  This shift of allegiance did not pass unnoticed in Germany. In the nationalistic German press he was attacked as a cultural renegade. His defence was that he was merely being ‘a good European’. In fact Rilke had no developed idea of what it meant to be a European. He did not wish to be an Austrian or a German or, for that matter, a Czech in the postwar state of Czechoslovakia (though for a while he was forced to travel on a Czech passport). As a young man he liked to say he was heimatlos, homeless, without a country. He even asserted a right to decide his own origin. ‘We are born, so to speak, provisionally, it doesn’t matter where; it is only gradually that we compose, within ourselves, our true place of origin, so that we may be born there retrospectively.’3 There is no reason to think that being a good European meant much more to Rilke than being heimatlos, except that it had a more positive spin to it.

  In Rilke’s Europe, England had no place. One of his affectations was to pretend to have no English. Even hearing the language spoken, he said, got on his nerves. The truth is that at the commercial college he briefly attended at the age of sixteen he took English as a subject (grade: Satisfactory). He even produced, with the aid of a friend, a translation into German of Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s ‘Sonnets from the Portuguese’. He had a gift for languages: besides his near perfect French, he had a good command of Russian, Danish and Italian, and more than a little Swedish and Spanish.

  If England was not part of Europe, America was beyond the pale. America stood for the mechanisation of life and the flood of mass-produced objects that Rilke came to loathe. This emerges most explicitly in a 1925 letter to his Polish translator, one of many letters in which he expounded to correspondents the message of the Duino Elegies (Erich Heller called these letters ‘the bad prose side of the good poetry’).4

  ‘We are the bees of the invisible,’ writes Rilke. ‘Tremulously we gather in the honey of the visible to store up in the great golden hive of the Invisible.’ In the old days, the days before mass production,

  hardly a thing was not a vessel in which our grandparents found human sentiment inhering, or in which they did not, in their turn, store up an additional hoard of human sentiment. But now empty, indifferent things come surging down upon us, across from America, mere semblances of things, mere dummies of life . . . A house in the American sense, an American apple or one of their vines, have nothing whatsoever in common with the house, the fruit, the grapes, into which the hopes and pensiveness of our forefathers have been transfused . . . We are perhaps the last who have known such things. On us rests the responsibility to preserve not only their memory . . . but also their human and laral value (‘laral’ in the sense of household deities).5

  Here Rilke has his seventh and ninth Elegies particularly in mind. I quote, in the Kinnell/Liebmann translation – Gass’s version understresses Rilke’s historical argument – a key passage.

  Nowhere, Beloved, will there be world but within. Our

  lives pass in transforming. Into less and less,

  the external dwindles. Where once an enduring house was,

  a contrived structure proposes itself, at odds with everything,

  completely conceptual, as if it still stood in the brain.

  The modern age builds enormous reservoirs of power, formless

  as the tensing stress it extracts from everything.

  It doesn’t know temples any more. These heart’s squanderings

  we hoard up more secretly. Yes, where a thing survives,

  something once venerated, served, knelt before⎯⎯,

  it bears itself, unchanged, into the unseen. (pp. 119–21)

  As a critique of the capitalist-industrial dynamic and the mental habits that go with it, this is, by the time of the 1920s, neither novel nor particularly interesting. It comes out of the reading of Carlyle, Nietzsche, Ruskin, Pater and Jacob Burckhardt that Rilke did when, as a young man, he was most deeply under the influence of Lou Andreas-Salomé; it is of a piece with his youthful enthusiasms for Russia as the home of true spirituality and for quattrocento Florence. As a programme for preserving old Europe from the simulacra (the ‘dummies of life’) that come surging in from America, it offers nothing practical. It is only when the Rilkean project of rescuing the world by the act of absorbing and transforming it (Verwandlung or, in Gass’s coinage, ‘withinwarding’) is dramatised in the speaking voice that it begins to come alive. Here is Elegy 9, whose urgency Gass’s translation captures well:

  Are we, perhaps, here just to utter: house,

  bridge, fountain, gate, jug, fruit tree, window —

  at most: column, tower . . . but to utter them, remember,

  to speak in a way which the named never dreamed

  they could be? . . .

  These things whose life

  Is a constant leaving, they know when you praise them.

  Transient, they trust us, the most transient, to come

  to their rescue; they wish us to alter them utterly,

  within our invisible hearts, into – so endlessly – us!

  Whoever we may finally be.

  You earthly things – is this not what you want,

  to arise invisible in us? Is not your dream

  to be one day invisible? Earth! – things! – invisible!

  What, if not this deep translation, is your ardent aim?

  Earth, my loved one, I will. (Gass, pp. 214–15)

  Through a sacred or sacramental form of speech, the elemental things that share our earthly journey – house, bridge – cease to be distinguishable from their names, are brought into the heart, transformed (translated) into ourselves and given a transient salvation. (The transience of that promised salvation is what turns even this ecstatic poem into an elegy.)

  III

  As biographer, Gass treats his subject with a breeziness of style that aims at the epigrammatic and continually runs the risk of oversimplification. Gass has a gift for the snappy phrase; his insights into Rilke are often mordantly accurate; but a side effect is to convey an attitude toward Rilke that is perhaps unintended: that, compared with William Gass, Rilke was a bit of a fool, a bit of a booby.

  ‘With a romantic naiveté for which we may feel some nostalgia now,’ Gass writes,

  Rilke struggled his entire life to be a poet – not a pure poet, but purely a poet – because he felt, against good advice and much experience to the contrary, that poetry could only be written by one who w
as already a poet: and a poet was above ordinary life . . .; the true poet dwelt in a realm devoted entirely to the spirit (yes, Rilke had ‘realms’ in which he ‘dwelt’); the true poet was always ‘on the job’; the true poet never hankered for a flagon of wine or a leg of mutton or a leg of lady either (women were ‘the Muse’, to be courted through the post); nor did the true poet mop floors or dandle babies or masturbate or follow the horses or use the john; the true poet was an agent of transfiguration whose sole function was the almost magical movement of matter into mind. (pp. 23–4)

  The rhetorical effect of a paragraph like this is so skilfully achieved, the barbs so artfully chosen, that to protest against its unfairness, its exaggerations and half-truths, is futile. Gass has little respect for Rilke the daimon-driven Poet, whom he finds juvenile, pretentious and hypocritically self-serving. He is impatient with the Romantic cult of genius to which Rilke so unquestioningly subscribed. Rilke’s snobbery, his dandyism (‘Mr Fastidious,’ Gass calls him), and what one can only call a certain oiliness of manner, are further black marks against him. (p. 142)

  There have been artists before Rilke who neglected their families, courted wealthy patrons, seduced and abandoned women. What makes Rilke so vulnerable to attack is that he not only adhered to a doctrine that excuses all sins except those against Art, but took this doctrine seriously. If there is one thing above all about Rilke that invites Gass the satirist’s ridicule, it is his humourlessness, his lack of a saving sense of irony.

  Yet even if we share Gass’s feelings, uncomfortable questions remain. How was it possible for such a poseur to write poetry that still – clearly – touches us and moves us? The Duino Elegies were, for the most part, written in two brief creative bursts, in 1912 and 1922. ‘A nameless storm, a hurricane in the spirit,’ Rilke called the second spell.6 Are the Elegies – which, if we include the story or myth of their composition, are surely the great poem of our age about being called as a poet – imaginable in the absence of the notion of an artistic destiny? Could the vatic poetry of the Elegies have come into existence without the theory and (imperfect) practice of the vatic life that preceded them?

  Gass treats Rilke’s recurrent pattern of wooing women, arousing their interest, then withdrawing, as evidence of timorousness, a quest for a mother rather than a lover, a failure to grow up. It was a syndrome Rilke was thoroughly aware of. In the years (roughly 1902–10) when he was most deeply under the influence first of Rodin (for whom he worked as secretary-apprentice), then of Cézanne, he justified his refusal of commitments as a renunciation demanded by his art: emptying himself, breaking all ties, even ties of love, was a necessary purification before he could see the world with fresh eyes. Later he would look back with nostalgia on the year of acute isolation, 1907, during which he composed his New Poems. ‘I expected nothing and nobody and the whole world streamed towards me as an ever greater task which I answered clearly and surely.’ He quoted Beethoven: ‘I have no friend. I must live by myself alone. But I am aware that in my art God is closer to me than to all others.’7

  In his poetry he developed a theory of essential gestures, archetypal movements of the body—soul, among which the gesture of withdrawal had a central place and a complex meaning, simultaneously blessing and denying. ‘There is nothing I understand better in the life of the gods than the moment when they withdraw themselves,’ he wrote in a letter; he described himself as ‘a place where giving and taking back have often been almost one and the same thing’.8

  The withdrawal of the gods from our modern world is one of the great themes of Hölderlin, whom Rilke began to read seriously in 1915 and whose example made the later Duino Elegies possible. Withdrawal in all its aspects is thus close to the heart of Rilke as man and poet. We are well advised not to psychologise it too hastily, treating it as a mere manifestation of some deeper cause.

  In a passage important enough to quote in full, Gass effectively responds to the concerns I raise, and to the overriding question of what he actually thinks of Rilke when he is not occupied in making jibes at his expense. Here Gass drops the satirical manner, trying to judge Rilke evenhandedly, according full weight to the mystery of the relation between Rilke the poet and Rilke the man, namely, that out of levels of insecurity and coldness of heart which, in anyone else, might have spelled a stunted emotional life, there could grow a body of work that included, if not great love poetry, great poetry about love.

  He hid inside The Poet he eventually became, both secure there and scared, empty and fulfilled; the inspired author of the Duino Elegies, sensitive, insightful, gifted nearly beyond compare; a man with many devoted and distant friends, many extraordinary though frequently fatuous enthusiasms, but still a lonely unloving homeless boy as well . . . enjoying a self-pity there were rarely buckets enough to contain; yet with a persistence in the pursuit of his goals, a courage, which overcame weakness and worry and made them into poems . . . no . . . into lyrics that love, however pure or passionate or sacrificial, could never have achieved by itself . . . lines only frailty, terror, emotional duplicity even, could accomplish – the consequence of an honesty bitter about the weaknesses from which it took its strength. (pp. 31–2)

  Aside from the cliché of the lonely boy, this is well and generously said, facing up to the issues that the passage quoted earlier found it convenient to evade, and at the end – ‘an honesty bitter about the weaknesses from which it took its strength’ – getting very nearly to the heart of the Rilkean labyrinth.

  IV

  One of the secondary aims of Reading Rilke is to rescue some of the women who crossed Rilke’s path from going down in history as just that – women in a famous man’s life, minor characters. Lou Salomé does not really need Gass’s intercession, since her stature as an intellectual in her own right is now widely recognised. But the excursus on the painter Paula Modersohn Becker (1876–1907) with which Gass prefaces his translation of ‘Requiem for a Friend’, the poem Rilke wrote after Becker’s death, is welcome.

  Paula Becker, whom Rilke had met at the artists’ colony of Worpswede in 1900, died in the aftermath of childbirth. Gass suggests that the ‘Requiem’ originates in feelings of guilt in Rilke, partly for failing to support Becker in her effort to strike out and make a life for herself as an artist, partly because his own attitudes to women, the family, and marriage (he was married to her onetime close friend Clara Westhoff) would not bear close scrutiny, partly for what women in general have to suffer at the hands of men.

  Doubtless Gass is right about Rilke. Doubtless, when put to the test, Rilke and Becker’s artist husband Otto Modersohn were not as enlightened, as far ahead of the times, as they pretended to be. But it is a pity that the case for Becker has to be made at the expense of Rilke (who, when all is said and done, played no great part in her life), and has to depend on such wild generalisations as the following:

  Most women in Rilke’s day, unless they were barren or rich, were married off early and sent into a life of loveless broodmaring that led, after an interval that demonstrated their decency, to the bearing, the nursing, the raising, and the burying of children – six, eight, ten – losing their health and figure in the bargain, as well as any chance of achievement. (p. 118)

  At a deeper level, Gass asks why Rilke was so often moved to write by the death of young women (the creative burst in 1922 that brought forth the later Duino Elegies was sparked by the reading of the diary of a girl who had died at the age of nineteen). He suggests that Rilke was working out guilt over the death of the sister who died before he was born: ‘A girl had to die to make room in the world for him.’ (p. 107) This piece of speculation is of less interest than what Rilke himself has to say on the subject of his dead sister: that he had a sense of her alive within him. Reaching the sister within him became part of his maturation, an attempt to face and accept his own narcissism and turn it into a positive force.

  V

  At the centre of Gass’s book is a chapter devoted to close scrutiny of the various Engli
sh versions of the Elegies and the Sonnets to Orpheus. Here his aim is less to produce a ranking of Rilke’s translators than to explain and illustrate the rationale behind his own versions. His commentary on the rival translations is acute yet fair. However, given that his rivals must be mute while he alone gets to state his case, the outcome is predictable. Gass, ‘a jackal who comes along after the kill’, (p. 76) as he calls himself, wins every time, though three of his rivals get respectful mention: J.B. Leishman, whose translations, going back to the 1930s, have proved surprisingly durable, André Poulin Jr., and Stephen Mitchell.9

  Sensibly, Gass treats literary translation as a craft rather than an art, with nothing so grand as a general theory behind it. To translate a poem, says Gass, is to resign oneself to the loss of a certain quantum of meaning. The question, with each poem, is what must be held on to at all costs, what may be allowed to go. Using a short poem by Hölderlin as a specimen, Gass, careful as a watchmaker, takes apart versions by two of the finest translators of German poetry today, Christopher Middleton and Michael Hamburger, approving or questioning each word-choice, weighing the movement of each line. Being no coward, he offers a competing version of his own, which, though very good, is not, to my ear, and for all Gass’s persuasiveness, better than Hamburger’s.

  What the translator of Hölderlin is trying to achieve, Gass suggests, is ‘the poem Hölderlin would have written had he been English’. (p. 52) As the formulation of an ideal, this simply will not do. A human language is not a neutral code like a computer language. To ‘be English’ is to be embedded in the English language and the English language’s way of seeing the world. If Hölderlin had ‘been English’ in any sense, he could not but have written a different poem. What Middleton and Hamburger and Gass himself give us, in their various ways, is something less ambitious than the poem a hypothetical English Hölderlin might have written: three poems in English based on a common source, poems as good as their authors can make them but – to a reader with access to both German and English – not, finally, as rich as Hölderlin’s.