Reading Rilke

by William H. Gass

  For five weeks Rilke lived quietly among creative people. Worpswede’s simplicities, its communal dedication, its serenity, enchanted him. Here he met his future wife as well as the painter Paula Becker, whom he fancied first. Rilke kept a diary during this time, as he had in Florence at Lou’s behest. Paula appears in it as “the blond painter.” Poetic fragments and prose sketches fill its pages. These pieces often couple roses with sex in a commonplace way, and with death in an ominous one. Paula’s eyes are soft and warm as opening roses, he writes. Light glistens in them as from the tips and breasts of bent petals.

  Blooms, as Rilke knew, are all business; they exist for butterflies and bees, but only incidentally for us, for whom flowers are fortuitous. Autumn’s hues are even more serendipital; the function of the leaves has been fulfilled, so they are discarded, they are finished, and their colors are the result of useless residues. The beauty of the world happens only in our eye; even the allure of women is as utilitarian as a wagon’s wheel. The Worpswede light, the way the countryside’s colors glow even on a dim wet evening, the festive stars and the warm windows of distant farms, the comforting purl of a stream: those are the purest accidents. So when one of us turns aside from living in order to admire life; when a rose petal is allowed to cool an eyelid; when a line of charcoal depicts the inviting length of a thigh; we are no longer going in nature’s direction but contrary to it. What was never meant for us becomes ours entirely; what never had a use is suddenly all we need. Gradually, what Rilke’s Russian adventure had appeared to teach him—how to live in harmony with nature, so appealing to the poet—would prove itself impossible for the poem.

  Rilke returned to Berlin and to a Lou who had already sent him back like a bad bottle. “I wish he’d go away,” she confessed to her journal. Rilke’s spirit is willing: he writes to Clara every day. He plans a third trip to Russia. But his several journalistic projects, designed to bring in a few marks, are not panning out, and his accounts are empty. He meets Gerhart Hauptmann and attends a rehearsal of Michael Kramer, which impresses him. Rilke found distraction in the theater, as he frequently succeeded in doing during his early days, though his gifts were not suited to it. He was fascinated—in my terms—by the fake camaraderie of casts during the hubbub of rehearsals, by a play’s forceful and immediate impact on its audience, the way an actor’s voice could elevate the most puerile of feelings, the crude simplicities of theatrical scene setting, the art’s unapologetic melodramatic formulas. Another distraction: the blond painter visits and is tantalizing, although she will soon inform the poet of her impending marriage to Otto Modersohn, while being saddened herself by his own news, some weeks later, that he intends to marry “the dark-haired sculptress.” Clara? Lou Salomé is appalled. She then writes what biographers like to call her “Last Appeal.” Rilke’s depressions are symptoms of a sickness; his sicknesses make her sick as well; he is not to write or try to see her again; she releases him in order to release herself.

  The connection between Rilke and his mother/lover was a long time breaking, but his Worpswede friendships were quick-silvery and had as many degrees as a thermometer. The rapidity with which these relations were secured can be accounted for, in part, by the cruise ship atmosphere such colonies create, but principally by the way Rilke seems simply to have thrown himself into the air and cried, “Catch!”

  Clara Westhoff caught him; a cottage caught him; domesticity seemed to swaddle him, and protect him with its warmth. Love is always dreamed before it is performed, and Rilke imagined himself in soft lamplight standing before his stove preparing a simple supper for his beloved—perhaps a vegetable, he writes her, perhaps a bit of porridge. He envisions a dish of honey gleaming on the table, butter pale as ivory, a long narrow platter of Westphalian ham “larded with strips of white fat like an evening sky banded by clouds,” and wheat-colored tea in glasses, too, all standing on a Russian cloth. Huge lemons, reddish tangerines, silver saucers, are invited, and then long-stemmed roses, of course, to complete this picture of quiet unanxious sensuality. We need not describe the layer of boring chores, the clutter of mismated china, sticky pots, and soiled silver, annoying habits and nervous tics, which will cloud the rich cloth when reality arrives; and the bellowing of the baby, her repeated poops, the sighs of reproach, the pure passages of self-pity which will carom from one small room to another before disappearing out the door—a poor smell seeking to improve itself by flight and dissipation.

  He possesses his wife. How? By trying to make her life (as he endeavored to make his) into a sacred rite. Her friends observe it: how he has enthralled her. Whereas she first encompasses and then possesses the child. On the other hand, when the couple appears in public, the large and robust Clara seems to have her little Rilke beneath her arm (a few wrote) like a pet pooch. Routines take over. How in the world can three live as one?… in the same space with a pouty face, in the humorless boudoir, the barren pantry? Clara concentrates on Rilke, and her concentration compacts him. He feels himself growing hard, rind-like, remorseless.

  Ich liebe dich. No sentence pronounced by a judge could be more threatening. It means that you are about to receive a gift you may not want. It means that someone is making it very easy for you to injure them—if they are not making it inevitable—and in that way controlling your behavior. It means that someone wants you as an adjunct to their life. It means that they can survive, like mistletoe or moss, only on the side where the rib was removed. It means that one way or other they intend to own you. “Let me give you a hug. I have a hundred arms.” So has Siva.

  Alongside the life of recurrent symbols, then—the rose and the mirror, the simple peasant and the simply plain—one might set down that of the lover and letter writer, a man drawn to women like a bee who, heavy with their honey, soon returns to his hive; or one might remark Rilke’s career as a social climber, as the accomplished cultivator of those who may prove to be of some assistance to Art—occasionally artists, critics, editors, and poets, but generally people of wealth, position, and comfortable estates; or take note of the life of “the inspired one,” who is attacked by the Muse from time to time the way storms lash rocky coasts—the same shores where the tides rise—with sudden stiff onslaughts of both poetry and prose. Above all, for the biographer, Rilke is the traveler who passes through places the way others pass their years.

  With a romantic naiveté for which we may feel some nostalgia now, and out of a precocity for personality as well as verse, 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 was already a poet: and a poet was above ordinary life (Villiers de L’Isle-Adam’s famous quip, “As for living, we shall have our servants do that for us,” described his attitude perfectly); 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.

  Rilke was eventually very convincing in his chosen role. This testimony, which I take from Edmond Jaloux, could be multiplied.

  When I began talking with Rilke it seemed to me that it was the first time that I talked with a poet. I mean to say that all the other poets I have known, however great they were, were poets only in their minds; outside their work they lived in the same world as I, with the same creatures … but when Rilke began to talk he introduced me to a world that was his own and into which I could enter only by some sort of miracle.9

  His poetic persona may have played well even in front of the French, but Rilke was only intermittently sure of his success. Facial hair, for instance, was a problem. His fat
her had mutton-chops and a full mustache. Rilke’s beard always looked young, as if it hadn’t quite arrived yet, and his mustache tried to outdo itself, eventually drooping in a vaguely oriental manner. By the First World War it had lidded his mouth in the fashion of his eyes. During the years which followed, the beard disappeared, and the mustache gradually shortened itself. One could say he was wearing something conventional by the time he took up residence at Muzot, in Switzerland. But he kept the spirit well covered: long coat, hat, tie, vest, the shiny tips of his shoes showing beneath trousers bearing exclamatory creases.

  The course of life was consequently marked and marred by weakness, by giving in, by disappointment, as he ate, loved, schemed for advancement, groveled for money or employment, worried about a roof over his head, while trying to keep that head in the good clouds where it belonged. There were periods for Rilke when the world seemed to want him, and he acquiesced. But friends and lovers held him, like a restive balloon, near the earth; possessions were possessive, families were like closing fists; even historic cities, sunny seaside towns, famous spas, full of charm and bent on seduction, could pull the poet into their routines, dull the eye with undesirable familiarity, and, most of all, like the whole range of ordinary things, lay claim on his time, contrive to obligate him, do him in with “duties.” Money may have meant freedom, but making money was slavery. Rilke felt that everyone whose help he sought, and he had to seek help often, had been a witness to his humiliation, and so had a share in shame’s hold on his sleeve—a humiliation all the more inwardly onerous if that hold had been born in nothing more than a handshake.

  However, life wasn’t something the poet was simply to flee from, as if it were a grave dug out of trivial routines; it was to be closely approached—approached and accepted and praised. There was, first of all, the simple life itself, the peasant’s life, close to the earth, close to basic things, unspoiled by wealth and vice, unmannered and wholesome—and for Rilke the peasant’s form of cleansing poverty was to be found in Russia, where he had peered in upon it. If guilt gave Tolstoy the strength to lie about “the simple life,” Rilke found joyous justification in observing an existence already—by the strength of his bias—transformed for him, so that all he needed to do was describe it, since, in the peasant’s fortunate union of nature and spirit, body and soul were marvelously one. Rilke liked to display his allegiance to the simple life by eating greens and taking barefoot walks.

  On their two trips to Russia, Lou Salomé may have gotten something right, but Rilke was all romance, casting ahead of his every step his own dreams, into which he then strode with little satisfied cries of discovery. All of his weaknesses were awhirl: his adolescent mysticism, his wish for oneness (which evolved), his desire for a naiveté which would encompass an entire continent and keep it contained in the Middle Ages.

  Poverty eventually disillusioned Rilke about poverty, but he blamed Paris for this knowledge. City poverty was horrible and crippling; country poverty remained ennobling, and its asceticism energizing. Nevertheless, Rilke preferred to stay in the best hotels and visit expensive spas. Where he’d make a meal of fruit. Solitude was the only satisfactory creative state, but communes were wonderful, standing for a common commitment: to help one another simplify life while satisfying social needs in the most acceptable way within a community of similar souls laboring for similar results. But one’s fellows married (hadn’t he?) and found themselves with family responsibilities (hadn’t he?). They consequently turned bourgeois as certainly as souring milk; soon they only dreamt their dreams, if they entertained them at all; they became jealous, competitive, disappointed, done for, and no longer helpful to Rilke’s career or a significant part of Rilke’s definition of himself.

  Vissi d’arte, vissi d’amore. We all feel the tug of opposing obligations, contrary desires. Rilke understood his well enough to make virtues of them. More than one poem will tell us to treat the wave of greeting as one of farewell. Rilke sent signs of his ardor safely through the post, although the passions his letters provoked were not without their hazardous consequences. Did he not tell embracing lovers to “throw the emptiness out of their arms to broaden the spaces we breathe”?—hardly an encouragement to those hungering to have him. Considering Rilke’s affair with the pianist Magda von Hattingberg (whom Rilke renamed, as was his suspicious habit, “Benvenuta”), which a flurry of envelopes fanned into flames, Ralph Freedman writes: “Their life together fell into a pattern that many of Rilke’s serious relationships with women would follow, beginning with sensitive caring, tender endearments, small sophisticated gifts, and an almost domestic tranquillity, before distancing set in.”10 After having convinced himself of the sincerity and depth of his feelings, the poet would overwhelm his victim with words so powerfully put together there was no resisting them. These were no longer effusions from feelings more imaginary than real, but lines linked by a thought, a music, tough as steel. Kannst du dir den denken, dass ich Jahre so—ein Fremder unter Fremden fahre, und nun endlich nimmst Du mich nach Haus. “Can you understand how much I’ve wandered, a stranger in a world of strangers, and now at last you take me home?” This is nearly irresistible. Nor does Magda manage to keep him down on the farm. Home is not where Rilke’s heart is.

  How I have felt it, that nameless state called parting,

  and how I feel it still: a dark, sharp, heartless

  Something that displays, holds out with unapparent hands,

  a perfect union to us, while tearing it in two.

  With what wide-open eyes I’ve watched whatever

  was, while calling to me, loosening its hold,

  remaining on the road behind as though all womankind,

  yet small and white and nothing more than this:

  a waving which has blown the hair beyond its brow,

  a slight, continuous flutter—scarcely now

  explicable: perhaps the tremor of a plum-tree

  and the bough a startled cuckoo has set free.11

  It is the poet’s purpose to put the world into words, and, in that way, hold it steady for us. The poet can write of love, too, in a similarly immortalizing fashion. But love alters its lovers even as they love, so that their love is also altered and the next kiss comes from a different mouth and is pressed to a different breast. In this cruel yet courageous passage from “The Second Elegy,” Rilke interrogates our passions:

  Lovers, satisfied by one another, I am asking you

  about us. You embrace, but where’s the proof?

  Look, sometimes it happens that my hands grow to know

  one another, or that my weary face seeks their shelter.

  This yields me a slender sensation. But who dares to believe he exists because of that?

  You, though, who, from one another’s passion,

  grow until, quite overcome, you plead: “No more …”

  you, who, beneath one another’s groping, swell

  with juice like the grapes of a vintage year;

  you, who may go like a bud into another’s blossoming:

  I am asking you about us. I know

  you touch so blissfully because your touch survives such bliss,

  because just below your finger’s end you feel the tip of pure duration.

  So you expect eternity to entwine itself in your embrace.

  And yet, when you have dealt with your fear of that first look,

  the longing, later, at the window, and your first turn

  about the garden together: lovers, are you any longer what you were?

  When you lift yourselves up to one another’s lips—chalice to chalice—

  and slip wine into wine like an added flavor: oh, how strangely

  soon is each drinker’s disappearance from the ceremony.

  Rilke and Clara would go fifty-fifty on expenses, but the poet had no money and small hope. His books weren’t selling. By letter, he begged this acquaintance, that friend, this editor, that institution. Little was forthcoming—a small loan, a part-tim
e task. He began to write reviews for a Bremen newspaper, but few of his efforts to find such work turned into even opportunities. He was commissioned to write on Worpswede and on Rodin—windfalls of puny fruit. And his play, Daily Living—what an ironic title—had flopped as his own daily life had, at its opening in Berlin.

  Their lives passed from Clara’s confinement to his … and then to their union. Neither felt fulfilled, nor any longer saw the promise of it. To Paula, Clara complained that she once could get on her bike and simply ride away, her belongings in a backpack, leaving one life for another.

  Rilke and his wife set one another free, then, freeing their infant at the same time by leaving her, blanket and basket, in the rushes of a relative. In Paris, where Rilke goes to write about Rodin, he will learn about another kind of love—that of the artist for his work; and about another kind of life—one in which women are merely sources of relaxation, servants, or sometimes models; he will learn of an existence utterly devoted to things—things observed, things made, things preserved; but what will strike him first is the streets and people of Paris itself, and his profound sense of estrangement from them—of disgust, loneliness, fear, despair; so that death is the topic which will pursue his pen.

  Death because Paris appears to be full of hospitals, full of poor ill weak people, homeless beggars, dirt and decay. Full of city smells and city noise. The poet is no longer in the country, where there are only winds and birds. The Paris streets slowly suck him in, so that as he walks alongside them, he increasingly belongs to their flushing gutters, their screeching trams and human outcries; he leans, like others lost, against their dirty defaced walls. This is how The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge, one of literature’s great novels, begins, oozing like some wound might from the pages of his letters to Clara, who has not yet joined him. Begins with death and goes slowly on as if death will never end.