Being Here

by Marie Darrieussecq

  It is the early years of the German naturist, physical-culture movement. In 1904 My System, gym exercises by Lieutenant Müller, becomes an instant bestseller.15 The Greek ideal of beauty. Fifteen minutes of exercises, naked, every morning: these ‘fresh-air baths’ become very popular. The Prince of Wales and Kafka are devotees, as well as Paula. Some pretty drawings by her husband show her at her exercises: naked, shapely and lively. She encourages her younger sister Herma to enrol at the gym, and not to overindulge her penchant for reading.

  Two highlights from this holiday in Fischerhude: Paula’s bed collapses; Paula and Heinrich Vogeler have a violent argument. That’s all I know about it.

  Autumn 1904—silence. Intermittent letters and no journal entries. Paula complains that she has not painted anything worthwhile.

  In a photograph, taken in the winter of 1904, she is sitting in her studio on a couch upholstered in fleur de lys, the couch that often appears in her paintings and that inspired princely daydreams in Rilke. Next to her stands a portrait of a farm woman and her child. On the ground is a bucket and a coal shovel. The only nod to decoration on Paula’s dark thick dress are the lace cuffs to match a collar fastened with a cameo brooch.

  Paula looks like a character out of Buddenbrooks by Thomas Mann, her Northern European contemporary. One of those serious young women, raised in the fresh air of the Baltic, Protestant, bourgeois and melancholic.

  I try to see where her strength resides. She is staring into space. Open and thoughtful. It is the photograph of a woman who paints, alone, whose paintings are not seen.

  The same year Rilke writes to a young poet:

  Someday (and even now, especially in the countries of Northern Europe, trustworthy signs are already speaking and shining), someday there will be girls and women whose name will no longer mean the mere opposite of the male, but something in itself, something that makes one think not of any complement and limit, but only of life and reality: the female human being.16

  She is casting about for forms, stirring, kneading. A baby asleep in a red rug. A little girl in a straw hat. An old woman in a black veil.

  Raw material from which would emerge here an angle, there a look. A close-up of a baby at the breast. Naked young girls. Cats in the arms of young girls. Cabbages and ceramics. A merry-go-round. A cow. A few landscapes.

  From her raw material she pulls out edges and lines. It’s as if she were erasing her paintings day after day in order to pour them back into raw material again, in order to extract from her blocks of colour the texture and shape of the world.

  But the form is slack and she is going around in circles. She feels lonely. She misses Paris, her Paris. Life at Worpswede seems to be made of ‘purely inner experiences’. She needs the beauty of the city, its bustle, its excitement. Otto has not yet given her permission, but she will leave anyway.

  On the night of 14 February 1905, ‘a certain Paula Modersohn’, as she wrote cheerily to her sister Herma, is on the train to Paris, in a grey jacket and riding hat. Herma earns her living as a governess in the 16th arrondissement. The two sisters are delighted to see each other again. A deep sisterly love, a special love, as seen in their letters, blossoms from this point on.

  Otto is anxious about his wife leaving. And funds are low. That winter he barely sold two canvases.

  The first letter Paula writes to him is full of joy and half in French:

  In Aix-la-Chapelle

  I am your belle

  From Herbesthal I send

  Kisses without end

  From Verviers

  Another kiss by courier

  From Liège to Namur

  I think of the aunts and their clamour.

  In Charleroy

  I think of Grandma’s joy,

  Paris, I adore

  I look forward as never before.

  I am yours again

  Your little Parisienne

  With her round hat furled

  She’s off to see the world

  With a grey hat

  Not a worry at that.

  I am in Paris. Finally. But I have not yet seen our little Herma despite my telegram, and I don’t have my pretty little room on the rue Cassette, the one with the view of the garden. Tomorrow we shall see about that. Now I think I shall have a good nap. A thousand kisses for the three of you. Your P.

  From February 16 to 19, three letters in a row to Otto. Her tone is much more dejected. The room in rue Cassette, the quiet one with the tree, is rented out. Her new room is a tiny ‘cage’, a ‘prison’ opposite a wall. Her morale is affected to the point where, in a daze of apathy, she doesn’t go out anymore. A day in the country with Herma restores her spirits. She moves to a room on the sixth floor at 65 rue Madame, with a view over a garden and out onto the sky. A four-poster bed, table and chairs, a fireplace, a balcony with two French windows, forty-five francs a month. This time she enrols in the morning classes at the Académie Julian, so she can visit museums afterwards. She thinks the students paint the same way they did a hundred years ago. A Russian girl asks her if she really sees the world as she paints it. The people are astonishing; there is even a Polish girl who dresses and behaves like a man. And others who are too coquettish and insufferable.

  In the street, people turn and laugh at her: it’s her grey hat. The shopkeepers point at her. A cabman makes fun of her. A doorman calls her an anarchist. She has to run to Bon Marché to equip herself with headgear that is more Parisian. She can’t get hold of potatoes anywhere: instead, it’s bread, always bread. Her mother is in Worpswede to look after Elsbeth and sends her a bouquet of snowdrops. There’s a flurry of letters back and forth between Paris and the village. On the wall at the Académie Colarossi, she sees some graffiti: ‘I love Clara.’ She is certain it’s Rilke’s handwriting. It would be fun if Otto could come for the Carnaval de Paris. She attends a production of Victor Hugo’s Hernani—how on earth could people have defended this ‘impossibly pompous’ play? The French are ‘intoxicated by their own language’. The bill from the butcher? What bill from the butcher? There must be an error. He must definitely not pay the bill before she gets back!

  Otto’s mother dies suddenly. She asks if he wants her to come back. He just has to say the word and she’ll take the next train. All the same, he shouldn’t give up on his trip to Paris. There are so many things she would like to show him. It’s wonderful here! She has made friends with Cottet, she sees Zuloaga, she’s been to lots of exhibitions. Rembrandt’s etchings at the Bibliothèque Nationale. Maillol’s sculptures. Van Gogh. And Matisse, how marvellous, and Seurat at the Salon de Paris. Pointillism is in fashion—what an eccentric style! She has discovered the Nabis painters, including Maurice Denis, whom she has been to visit. And soon there’ll be the Carnaval. This time he really does have to come.

  Otto buries his mother; Paula tells him about her walks in the Bois de Boulogne with Herma and ‘our two Bulgarian men’, fellow students. Otto looks after his ‘devastated’ old father; Paula returns after a ‘very funny’ day in the Jardin du Luxembourg with her escort, who is dark-haired, handsome, intelligent, but who eats garlic, and spits. The drawing classes finish this week: she is really sad. But what a spring! The Parisians have brought out their straw boaters. In Meudon, the peach trees are in flower. And the Folies Bergère! Everyone in the city is kissing each other; they need to be in love. Otto must come! ‘Au revoir, mon chéri, mon coucou, as all the girls in love say here…I am all yours. Your loving little wife.’

  Otto arrives.

  Otto’s journal: ‘March 29 to April 7. Travelled to Paris with Milly, Heinrich Vogeler, Martha and Marie Vogeler. We all stayed at Paula’s hotel (rue Madame). We saw the Gauguins at Fayet’s, and Buffalo Bill. The trip was not pleasant.’

  Back to Worpswede. Once he’s around his canals, Otto is in a less sombre mood (he stayed silent for the whole week in Paris). He agrees that trips are necessary, and understands that Paula finds their life monotonous. In his journal he recaps all the ways she
has enriched his life: physical exercise, ‘air bathing’, midnight walks, ice-skating outings, imagination, youth.

  In any case, Paula has decided: from now on, she will spend every winter in Paris. No more gloom, fog and muddy cold in Worpswede. She prepares for another trip, and confesses to her mother that she has secretly put aside fifty marks. She asks Carl Hauptmann to lend her four hundred marks ‘for someone else’ and not to tell Otto. (Before long, Hauptmann and his wife write her off as ‘frivolous and heartless’.) And again it’s her mother to whom she confesses that she has ‘a strong desire to experience something else’. And that she feels broody when she looks at babies.

  Otto has sold a few canvases, which allows them to make a few short trips—to Hamburg, Dresden and Berlin—and to go to the theatre in Bremen to hear Wagner. In December 1905, the couple returns to the Hauptmanns in the Sudetenland; they meet the sociologist Werner Sombart and admire the mountains in the snow. Yes, Otto is making an effort.

  This is how her paintings are produced: from daily life, from winter heading into spring. Still lifes. A self-portrait in a straw hat, powerful, but as if unfinished. A lot of little girls portrayed by Paula in the same enigmatic pose, their tulip-shaped fingers on a flower that is not there. The utter seriousness of childhood. Little girls learn soon enough that the world does not belong to them.

  And Clara has come back to Worpswede. Despite everything, she remains Paula’s best friend. Paula paints her in a white dress, a rose in her hand, her head at an angle, serious. A Paula Becker pose, filling the canvas, solemn without being pompous, serious, and beautiful.

  And then a self-portrait with irises. It is a tipping point, a perfect moment. Pure simplicity: this is me, these are the irises. See: this is what I am, in colours and in two dimensions, mysterious and composed.

  Paula is about to turn thirty. The picture is green, orange, black and iris-blue. Dark eyes, an intense shade of purple, Her skin and hair are orange. The dress and the background are green. The painting is an island halfway between her and Gauguin, whose travel journal, Noa Noa, she is reading. The beads in the necklace are the same shape and colour as her eyes. Her mouth is slightly open, her gaze anxious; she is exhaling, breathing, she is going to speak.

  From now on Paula often wears amber in her self-portraits. Are they presents, or did she buy these necklaces? Amber from Nordic Europe—Baltic, Russian and Viking. Yellow amber, fossilised pine resin, ancient sap at her neck. ‘Tears of the gods’ according to Ovid, memory stones in which thousand-year-old insects are fixed. Amber is warm to the touch, unlike glass.

  ‘I think I am living very intensely in the present.’ Otto, in his diary:

  A great gift for colour—but unpainterly and harsh…She admires primitive pictures, which is very bad for her—she should be looking at artistic paintings. She wants to unite colour and form—out of the question the way she does it…Women will not easily achieve something proper. Frau Rilke, for example, for her there is only one thing and its name is Rodin.

  Paula’s journal comes to a halt.17 There will only be letters from now on. When she writes, it is often because circumstances have prevented her from painting; she talks about missing it, about the urge to paint. She makes gentle fun of vain Vogeler who grumbles when his paintings go off for sale. Paula, none of whose paintings sell, writes that ‘art, like prosperity and perennial birth, is heading only for the future’.

  The paintings exist. They are sufficient unto themselves. She does not say much about them. She rarely speaks about her art. After the death of her friend, Clara alludes to this silence: ‘Perhaps it was impossible for her to articulate those things clearly—the experience was perhaps so incommunicable that her only way to express it was to transform it into her work.’ And anyway: how do you write paintings? You can describe their features, their shapes, the contrasting colours. You can express an opinion, criticise them. You can provide an historical perspective and put them in context. But write them? There is a huge gap between the words and the images. Dreams and projections arise from the faultline. These are the years when Monet, in Giverny, begins his Nymphéas series, bridges over water and floating plants, light.

  For Paula’s thirtieth birthday, her mother, Mathilde, writes her a splendid letter, an account full of passion and fury, the chronicle of the birth of Minna Hermine Paula Becker on 5 February 1876 in Dresden.

  It is a letter from one woman to another thirty years after the event. A letter from mother to daughter, in a world without men—the Big Secret letter.

  That night, Woldemar Becker is away: the Elbe River, filled with melting icefields, overflows. In the storm, the mountains disgorge uprooted forests. Everywhere is flooded; the new railway tracks might be washed away. This time, after being present for his wife’s two earlier deliveries, he leaves her and she gives birth all alone, struggling with an incomptetent, half-witted midwife.

  Minna Hermine Paula arrives in the world nevertheless. The twenty-three-year-old Mathilde is in bed nursing her ‘little hummingbird’, the rain battering the windows, the oil lamp sputtering in its container of water. The enormous old midwife wants to heat up some coffee for herself; she spills the alcohol from the portable stove and sets fire to the place: Paula’s mother describes the flames, and the witch midwife—coughing and hissing Jesus’s name—who can think of nothing better to do than throw everything onto the bed. So it is the young woman who has just given birth who has to douse the flames. It takes the robust Mathilde six months to recover from this epic birth: fevers, swollen breasts, infections. But, no matter, her little hummingbird is celebrating thirty years of life today.

  V

  Thirty. Like Nora in A Doll’s House, Paula leaves everything, house and husband, for something else, for the unknown.

  Her journal, 24 February 1906: ‘I left Otto Modersohn and I’m poised between my old life and my new life. I wonder what the new life will be like… Whatever must be will be.’

  For a few days now, she has been carrying the things she will need to the Brünjes’ studio. She confides in Rilke. Could he lay his hands on a bed base, an easel, and a table and a chair that are not too ugly? She will go back to rue Cassette. She doesn’t know how to sign off:

  I’m not Modersohn and I’m not Paula Becker

  anymore either.

  I am

  Me,

  And I hope to become Me more and more.

  At the same time, Herma writes to their mother saying how pleased she is that Paula, for once, is by ‘dear Otto’s’ side for his birthday, and has stopped gallivanting round Paris for good.

  Urbane as ever, generous as he often is, Rilke puts himself at Paula’s service. ‘I am grateful that you have allowed me into your new life…Know that I am happy for you and share in your happiness. Your servant, Rainer Maria Rilke.’ He tries to source money to help her. He lends her a hundred francs, and speaks to the banker and patron Karl von der Heydt: ‘I was profoundly surprised to find Modersohn’s wife in the throes of a deeply personal transformation: she paints—in a very spontaneous and direct way—subjects that, while still in the “Worpswede” style, could not be perceived or interpreted by anyone other than her.’ And he buys a painting from her, the little child with the fat cheeks like large drops. It is the first painting she has sold in her life.

  Paula moves out from the room in rue Cassette, which proves too expensive, and finds a studio at 15 avenue du Maine. The studio is still there today, even though the district of Montparnasse has been comprehensively rebuilt. Rilke did not end up dealing with Paula’s furniture needs; indeed, he had already left Paris, in one of his customary quick moves. Fortunately one of the Bulgarians is around: he knocks together a table and some shelves that she covers with colourful material. Herma describes it all to their mother in a tone of forced cheeriness. Paula, on the other hand, thinks Herma is depressed.

  At first, Paula’s letters to Otto are distant and sad; she speaks about other things. And a bit about the Bulgarians, making it
clear that they are not around. Then, after the avalanche of his tearful and insistent letters, she tries to convince him that their separation is inevitable.

  And could he go to her studio and send her six of her better nudes, so that she can enrol at the Beaux-Arts? He’ll find the drawings in the large red portfolio hanging on the door. Could he roll them up in a cylinder and post them to her new address, with a label marked ‘No Commercial Value’, to avoid customs charges? And she must have left her passport papers at the studio as well; she needs them to enrol. Failing that, a marriage certificate will do. Oh yes, and the anatomy book she left on the bookshelf. And also, she has no more money. Is it still all right if he sends her some? Thank you very much. All the buds are ready to blossom in Paris. Thank you to Elsbeth for her pretty embroidery. Fond wishes.

  In a desperate effort, Otto quotes from his old letters, his love letters to her. And tells her about their garden, where the yellow flowers are blooming. Spring is on its way.

  Dear Otto,

  How I loved you…But I cannot come to you now. I cannot do it. And I do not want to meet you in any other place. And I do not want any child from you at all; not now.

  She has made up her mind. She had to. He is suffering, she is suffering, but she must live and work. And once more she tells him all about Paris. And Brittany: the huge expanse of sea only a ten-hour train trip away, the apple trees, the sunshine, the warmth and the roses, Mont Saint-Michel and the omelettes at La Mère Poulard restaurant. She sends him a postcard of the rock sculptures at Rothéneuf, which these days would qualify as Art Brut. She thanks him for financing her trip, and for last month’s two hundred marks, which allowed her to pay her rent and her settling-in expenses. But, if he feels obliged to help her, why doesn’t he just send her two hundred and twenty marks on the fifteenth of every month without her always having to ask him.