Reading Rilke

by William H. Gass

  wie mird das Fernste manchmal hilft: in mir.

  That in mir, placed as it is at the end of both line and poem (and creating, for any English version, an intolerable awkwardness), suspends the entire text behind the colon, and makes (as is customary with Rilke) the poem even more deeply personal.

  Paula Becker’s ghost remained at large to trouble the poet despite his poem’s pleas. A selection from Paula’s journals had been assembled by her brother, Kurt, and published in a magazine, Güldenkammer, in 1913. Rilke had read these pieces and was sufficiently impressed to suggest to their editor that all of Paula’s manuscripts should be made available. We should not cry out, “Lo, and behold,” when, in the autumn of 1916, Paula’s mother sent a packet of her daughter’s journals and letters to Rilke, requesting that he edit them and see to their publication, because people were always sending such intimacies to him, and would again. Rilke had written his own Florence and Schmargendorf diaries for Lou Salomé’s eyes. The practice was common.

  On this occasion, however, after a delay that extends to the day after Christmas, and in a lengthy letter which squirms like a worm, Rilke refuses Frau Becker’s request, and repeatedly insists that these letters and journals (picked over and selected by the family to be sure) do not do Paula Becker’s achievement justice, because most of them reflect her earlier views and the level of her early work, whereas the painting she did in her final Paris period, which establishes and defines her genius, is inadequately reflected by the written materials that Rilke has in hand.

  Whenever one evokes the name of Paula Becker, one has implicitly to assert that in the power of her later work she produced an extraordinarily personal style, and one will never come closer to this “personal” essence than by realizing that it resides in that most astonishing tension between validity and grace. For precisely in the middle, between a validity already remote from her and a newly entered state of liveliness, already grown modest, there stands and endures her pure, free, sacrificial achievement.6

  These sentences are stuffed with phrases of postponement and evasion, just as the entire letter is. Yet Rilke may have been right. There is no better hiding place than behind the truth. Who will part that drape?

  When the publisher Anton Kippenberg accepts the editorial task that Rilke has refused, the poet writes, opposing the project for the same reasons he has earlier advanced: that such a volume would tarnish rather than enhance her reputation: “It may simply be that her final years were too short to permit any articulation whatsoever alongside the breathless progress of her art …”7

  What is most distant sometimes helps. Many years later, when the critic Hermann Pongs, in a questionnaire about the Elegies which became a major source for their understanding, asked Rilke for his impression of Paula Becker’s late paintings, he shamefully answered, “I last saw Paula Modersohn in Paris in 1906 and knew little of the work she was doing then or later—work I don’t know to this day.”8

  If guilt can write a great poem, it’s been accomplished here, for Rilke also brought his own wife to bed with child. That had to be borne upon him—his resemblance to Modersohn. He did so despite the fact that he felt (somewhat inconsistently) that children supplanted in women the need for creativity. Clara survived her pregnancy, yet soon had the burden of a baby and another’s life to manage all alone … yes, alas, since her husband, having become bourgeois, as Paula was to, and having succumbed to custom, as Paula would (even if Clara had begged—as, later, Modersohn must have—for a child) … had then—against all the poet’s aims and principles—inseminated the woman he said he loved, the artist he claimed to admire, thus endangering her life (as Modersohn would Paula’s) … and again, when finally, attempting to escape the consequences of that crime, he finds he faces yet others—principally the couple’s joint entrapment in common life—he selfishly flees his new family, seeks refuge in Rodin, suffers as a substitute the poverties of Paris … yes … well … alas … but these were actions and attitudes which redoubled his guilt, troubled his conscience, and disturbed his sleep, because the poet’s very real very sordid very ordinary weaknesses were always threatening to appear before the fair public figure of the Poet Personified, take its place, and, as he said he feared Paula’s journals would, disgrace the work of a life.

  Under her changed and straitened circumstances Clara could only hope to continue with her sculpture. But hope is the lone evil those evils left behind when they popped out of Pandora’s box. For how much of Clara’s imitation of her husband—leaving her child as he had both of them—must the husband accept responsibility, having set the tone and led the way?

  Toward Paula, too, at the end, the poet had been ambivalent, unhelpful, distant—quadrupling the counts against him. As with most apparitions, guilt is the ghost that walks within the “Requiem.” Whenever a poem of Rilke’s seems to admonish its reader, openly with “You must change your life,” or tacitly, through the poem’s example, we can be certain that Rilke himself has failed the charge.

  REQUIEM FOR A FRIEND

  I’ve had my dead, and I let them go

  and was surprised to see them so consoled,

  so soon at home in being dead, so right,

  so unlike their reputation. Only you,

  you come back, brush by me, move about,

  bump into something that will betray

  your presence with a sound. Oh, don’t take

  from me what I was slowly learning. You’re mistaken

  if you feel homesick for anything here.

  We alter all of it; whatever we perceive

  is instantly reflected from ourselves,

  and is no longer there.

  I thought you were farther off. It bothers

  me that you should stray and come this way,

  you who managed more transformation than any other woman.

  That we were frightened by your death—no …

  that your harsh death darkly interrupted us,

  dividing what-had-been from what-would-be:

  this is our concern; coming to terms with it

  will accompany all our tasks.

  But that you too were frightened, and even now

  tremble with terror when terror has no cause;

  that you are giving up some of your eternity

  to return here, friend, here again,

  where nothing yet is; that, half-hearted

  and confused by your first encounter with Totality,

  you did not follow the unfolding of infinite natures,

  as once you grasped earthly things;

  that, from the circle that received you,

  the stubborn pull of some past discontent

  has dragged you back into calibrated time—

  this starts me from sleep like the break-in of a thief.

  If I could say that you only come out of your

  abundant kindness, that because you are so sure

  and self-possessed you can wander childlike here and there,

  unaware of any risk from harmful places—

  but no: you’re beseeching. That’s what chills me

  to the bone and cuts me like a saw.

  A grim rebuke, borne to me by your ghost,

  might weigh on me at night when I withdraw

  into my lungs, my guts,

  into the emptied chambers of my heart—

  such a protest would not be as grotesque

  as this pleading is. What do you want?

  Tell me, should I travel? Did you leave some

  Thing behind that runs after you now in vain?

  Should I set out for a country you never saw,

  though it was the other half of all you knew?

  I shall sail its rivers, search its earth, and ask

  about its oldest customs, speaking with women in their doorways,

  and watching when they call their children home.

  I shall see how they wrap their world around them

  when they work the fields and graze
their meadows.

  I shall ask to be brought before their king,

  and bribe the priests to take me to their temple,

  so I may prostrate myself before their most powerful idol,

  and have them leave me there, after latching the gates.

  But then, when I have learned enough,

  I shall simply watch the animals until

  something of their serenity slowly

  seeps into my limbs; I shall see myself

  held deep inside their eyes until gradually,

  calmly, indifferently, I’m released.

  I shall have gardeners recite to me

  the many flowers so I can bring back

  in the pots of their proper names

  some trace of a hundred scents.

  And I shall buy fruits, too, fruits in whose juice

  a country’s earth will rise to join its sky.

  For fruit you understood: ripe fruits.

  You set them out in bowls before you,

  and on a scale of colors weighed their worth.

  You saw women, too, as fruit; children as well,

  since they grew the shapes of their existence

  as if from a seed inside.

  And finally you saw yourself so—as a fruit.

  Peeling from your clothes, you brought

  your nakedness before a mirror,

  and waded in up to your gaze, which stayed wide-eyed,

  in front, and did not say: I’m that; no: this is.

  You looked with such a lack of curiosity,

  so impersonally and with the poverty of the pure,

  you weren’t attracted even by yourself: now holy.

  I’d like to keep you where you put yourself—

  in the deeps of the mirror, away from the world.

  Why have you come in this different way?

  Why do you deny yourself? Why do you want

  to make me think that in the amber beads

  you wore in your portrait there was still

  a heaviness of the sort that can’t survive

  in the serenity of peaceful pictures? Why does

  your posture seem to show an evil omen?

  What makes you read the contours of your body

  like lines on the palm of a hand,

  so that I cannot see them otherwise than Fate?

  Come into the candlelight. I’m not afraid

  to look the dead in the face. When they come back

  they have a right, as much as other things,

  to the hospitality of our gaze.

  Come; we’ll be together silent for a while.

  Look at this rose on my writing desk:

  isn’t the light around it just as shy

  as that which shines around you? It too has no business here.

  It ought to have bloomed or perished in the garden

  out there quite apart from me,

  yet here it is, unaware of my awareness.

  Don’t be frightened if I finally understand,

  for—oh!—I feel it rising in me; I can do nothing else,

  I must grasp and grant it, even if I die in doing so.

  I must concede that you are here.

  Just as a blind man touches something,

  I feel your Fate, although I cannot name it.

  Let us grieve together that someone

  withdrew you from your mirror. Can you still cry?

  You can’t. Long ago you turned the strength and abundance of your tears

  into a richly ripe gaze, and were transforming

  everything vital that was flowing in you

  into a more powerful reality—

  rising and circling, poised but wild.

  Then chance drew you back, utmost chance

  drew you back from the last step needed to advance,

  back into a world where the body’s blood rules.

  Not all of you at once, but bit by bit;

  but when, around these bits, the world,

  like pus around a wound, grew,

  then you needed the whole self you no longer had,

  and, against the rules, broke yourself further, fell into painful fragments,

  as you had to, because you so needed you.

  Then, bearing yourself away, you grubbed

  from your nightwarm heartsoil the green seeds

  from which your death was meant to sprout:

  yours, your own death, the proper outcome of your life.

  And you ate, you ate the kernels of your own death

  as you would eat any grain, ate them all,

  to find an aftertaste of sweetness

  you hadn’t expected, lurking, a sweetness on your lips,

  you: who inside the sensations of your senses

  were so sweet already.

  Ah … let us lament. Do you know with what hesitation,

  what reluctance, your blood, when you called it back,

  gave up its commitment to an incomparable circulation?

  how confused it became when asked to take up

  once again the restricted circuits of the body?

  how, full of mistrust and astonishment, it flowed

  into the placenta again, exhausted suddenly

  from the long journey home?

  You drove it on, you pushed it ahead,

  you dragged it to the hearth like a herd to be sacrificed,

  and wanted it, despite all that, to be happy.

  Finally you conquered: it was happy;

  it showed a flag and surrendered. You believed,

  because you’d got used to those other measures,

  that it would remain only for a time.

  But now you were in time, and time is long.

  And time goes on, and time adds up, and time

  is like a relapse after a lengthy illness.

  How short your life seems if you now compare it

  with the hours you sat before your overflowing art

  and its overflowing future, diverting their course

  to stir the seed that would become your child,

  and, once again, your Fate. A bitter business.

  Labor exceeding strength. Yet you performed it.

  Day after day you dragged yourself to the loom

  and pulled out its lovely work and rewove

  its threads into another pattern.

  And still had energy enough for a celebration.

  When it was done you wanted to be rewarded,

  like children who’ve drunk the bittersweet tea

  that was supposed to make them well.

  So you rewarded yourself, since you were still

  so far away from everyone, even after this, that no one

  could have guessed what reward would please.

  But you knew. You sat up in your childbed

  to confront a mirror that gave back everything.

  Now that image was all of you, out there,

  inside was mere deception, the sweet deceit

  of every woman who tries a smile while

  she puts on her jewelry and combs her hair.

  And so you died as women used to die,

  died in your own warm house,

  died the old-fashioned death of childbearing women

  who try to close themselves again but cannot do it,

  because that darkness that they also bore

  comes back again and bullies its way in like a callous lover.

  Even so, shouldn’t someone have rounded up

  a few wailing-women. Women who will weep for money,

  and if well paid will howl for you all night,

  when otherwise all is quiet.

  Customs! We haven’t nearly enough customs.

  All gone and out of use.

  So that’s what you had to come back for:

  the mourning that was omitted. Do you hear mine?

  I should like to clothe you in my cries,

  cover the sharp shatters of your death,

  and tug till the
cloth is all in rags, so my poor words

  would have to shuffle around

  shivering in the tatters of their sound—

  as if lamentation were enough. But now I accuse:

  not the one who withdrew you from yourself

  (I cannot find him hereabouts, he looks like all the others),

  but through him I accuse … I accuse all men.

  If, from somewhere deep inside me,

  there were to arise a childlife I hadn’t been aware of,

  perhaps the purest childness of my childhood,

  I wouldn’t want to know it. Without looking,

  I’d make an angel of it, hurl it into the front row

  of those weeping angels who remember God.

  For this sort of suffering has gone on long enough;

  and no one’s learned to bear it; it’s too hard for us,

  the insane suffering of spurious love

  that, upheld by the precepts of custom,

  calls itself Right and prospers from the Wrong.

  Where is the man with the rights of such possession,

  who can control what cannot even possess itself,

  but will now and then happily catch hold,

  only to toss itself away again like a child’s ball?

  As little as a captain can keep the carved Nike

  facing forward from his ship’s prow

  when the inner lightness of her divinity

  whisks her away on a wave of wind;

  so little can one of us call back the woman

  who, now no longer heeding us, sets forth

  on the wire-thin strip of her existence

  without a misstep, as if by a miracle—

  unless our pleasure and profession is to wrong.

  For this is wrong, if anything is wrong:

  not to increase the freedom of a love

  with all the inner freedom one can muster.

  We have, where we love, only this:

  we must allow each other to grow great, because diminishing

  comes easily to us and doesn’t need to be learned.

  Are you still there? In what corner are you?

  You understood so much, you did so much;

  You passed through life as open as daybreak.

  Women suffer; loving is lonely;

  and artists in their work sometimes sense,

  where they love, the need for transmutation.

  You began both; both live in that

  which fame distorts by taking it away.

  Oh, you were far from all fame. You were