A Temple of Texts: Essays

by William H. Gass

  There is so much more to be said about the mouth and its music, the pen and its pentameters, tone and temperament, as well as the small society of the sentence, but perhaps these few remarks may recommend to us the virtues of the soundless flute. In any case, we (readers and writers alike) should learn from every example that we have time for, but we shouldn’t try this kind of Melvillean mind leap at home. You will break things that belong to you.

  RILKE’S RODIN

  We can pretend to know precisely. At three o’clock on the Monday afternoon of September 1, 1902, bearing the appropriate petitions of entry, although he had arranged his visit in advance, the twenty-six-year-old poet Rainer Maria Rilke appeared on the stoop of Auguste Rodin’s Paris studio and was given an uncustomarily gentle and courteous reception. Of course, Rilke had written Rodin a month before to warn of his impending arrival. It was a letter baited with the sort of fulsome praise you believe only when it is said of yourself, and it must have been an additional pleasure for Rodin to be admired not only by a stranger so young but one with a commission to write of the sculptor and the sculptor’s work as handsomely as, in his correspondence, he already had. Rilke was enthusiasm in a shabby suit, but Rodin, who paid little mind to social appearances except when he was mixing with potential clients, was willing to set aside some time for a chat, while suffering the foreigner’s fledgling French without complaint. He could not have realized that he was going to be the victim of a role reversal, because it was the artist who would play the sitter for a change. Rilke had arrived with an anticipatory portrait well advanced, and his tireless pen immediately began making mental corrections. “… it seemed to me that I had always known him,” he wrote his wife, Clara, the following day. “I was only seeing him again; I found him smaller, and yet more powerful, more kindly, and more noble. That forehead, the relationship it bears to his nose which rides out of it like a ship out of harbor … that is very remarkable. Character of stone is in that forehead and that nose. And his mouth has a speech whose ring is good, intimate, and full of youth. So also is his laugh, that embarrassed and at the same time joyful laugh of a child that has been given lovely presents.” (Letter to Clara Rilke, Tuesday, September 2, 1902. Letters of Rainer Maria Rilke, vol. 1, 1892–1910, trans. Jane Bannard Greene and M. D. Herter Norton. New York: W. W. Norton, 1945. Hereafter, Letters in any given citation refers to this work.)

  Released to explore the studio and its holy objects, Rilke discovers, almost immediately, a hand: “C’est une main comme-ça,” Rodin says, gesturing so impressively with his own broad, blunt peasant hands with their plaster white fingers and blackened nails that Rilke fancies he sees things and creatures growing out of them. In Rilke’s steamy state of mind, Rodin’s every word rises in the air, so that when he points to two entwined figures and says, “c’est une création ça, une création …” the poet believes, he reports to Clara, that the word création “had loosed itself, redeemed itself from all language … was alone in the world.” (Ibid.) Everything small has so much bigness in it, he exclaims to his page.

  Rilke tries to take everything in, as if there will not be a next day, but there is a next day, and at nine he is on the train to Meudon, a twenty-minute ride to transformation. The town clings to a hillside from whose crest the Seine can be seen snaking its way to Paris. He walks up a “steep dirty village street” to Rodin’s home, Villa des Brillants, which the sculptor had bought in 1895. Rilke describes the journey to Clara with the sort of detail one saves for wonders of the world: over a bridge—no voilà yet—down a road—no voilà yet—past a modest inn—no voilà yet—now through a door in the villa wall that opens on a gravel path lined with chestnut trees—still no voilà—until he rounds a corner of the “little red-yellow house and stands”—voilà now!—“before a miracle—before a garden of stone and plaster figures.”

  Rodin had transported the pavilion from the Place de l’Alma, where he had exhibited his work in Paris in 1900, to the small park surrounding his house, where there were already several studios set aside for cutting stone and firing clay. The pavilion was a heavily glassed, light-filled hall full of plaster figures in ghostly confabulation, and it also contained huge glass cases crammed with fragments from the design of The Gates of Hell. “There it lies,” Rilke writes, already composing his monograph, “yard upon yard, only fragments, one beside the other. Figures the size of my hand and larger … but only pieces, hardly one that is whole: often only a piece of arm, a piece of leg, as they happen to go along beside each other, and the piece of body that belongs right near them…. Each of these bits is of such an eminent, striking unity, so possible by itself, so not at all needing completion, that one forgets they are only parts, and often parts of different bodies that cling to each other so passionately there.” (Ibid.)

  Rilke had brought a sheaf of his poems, which Rodin dutifully fingered, although he could only admire (as Rilke imagines) their pose upon the page; otherwise, he left Rilke to roam about the place, examining its treasures. The poet poured out upon these figurines and fragments a bladderful of enthusiasm, as was his pre-Paris habit (“each a feeling, each a bit of love, devotion, kindness”); but the city’s unyielding and indifferent face and the sculptor’s dedicated work habits would teach the poet to see his surroundings as they were in themselves and not simply allow his glance to fall like sunshine on surfaces where it could admire its own reflection and its glitter.

  Then it was lunchtime. And the first lesson, en plein air. They sat five at a trestle. No one was introduced. There was a tired-looking, nervous, and distracted lady, whom Rilke assumed was Madame Rodin. There was a Frenchman notable for a red nose, and “a very sweet little girl of about ten” who sat just across from him. Rodin, dressed for the city, is impatient for his meal. Madame replies with a torrent of apparent grievance. Rilke begins to observe—Regarde! Regarde! is the new command—and sees Madame giving forks, plates, glasses little pushes that disarray the table as if the meal were already over. “The scene was not painful, only sad,” he writes. The master continues to complain as calmly as a lawyer until a rather dirty person arrives to distribute the food and insist that Rilke partake of dishes he did not desire. The poet should have been hungry—he was on his uppers, but he was also finicky to a fault, a vegan of a sort, a fancied sign of his ethereal nature. Rodin rattled on agreeably. Rilke spoke of his art-colony days in Worpswede and of the painters he met there, few of whom Rodin had heard of, although that would not have surprised the poet had he realized that his acquaintances, his friends, were nobodies. And as a poet, he was invisible in this space.

  Because it was full of blazing plaster casts in a pavilion that gathered light as if it were fruit. “My eyes are hurting me, my hands too,” he wrote to his wife. Madame Rodin was gracious after lunch, inviting him back, as we say, “anytime you’re in the neighborhood,” little realizing, I imagine, that for Rilke that would be tomorrow.

  And so ended the second day.

  Nothing is more fragile than adoration, yet Rilke’s adulation might have remained that intense, agreeably decorating a dirty pane like a window’s curtain, had he not sunk into an outcast’s life. Poor, alone, he sought refuge from the friendless Paris streets in the Bibliothèque Nationale, often from ten to five; or he fled by train to Meudon and its sheltering plasters, kinder to his eye, though they blinded him, than the beggars who would offer him their misfortunes for a franc; while evenings he passed in the squeeze of his room, writing letters to his wife as forlornly beautiful as letters get. The poet was, among other things, an inadequately educated youth who would play the poet even on those days he wasn’t one, and who sought to unite his spirit with the spirit of his poems, so as to live several feet above the ground. Yet the great sculptor would eventually prove to be a crude, rude clown, a satyr in a smock, who was losing his strut, caught in the curves of female connivance and flattery, only to be led around eventually (in Sir Kenneth Clark’s estimation) like a dancing bear. (Kenneth Clark, The Romantic Rebelli
on. New York: Harper & Row, 1973.) So loyalty would demand that Rilke separate the man from his art, a split easier for a Solomon to decree than a babe to endure, and an act at odds with his inclinations.

  Moreover, the fragments he so admired in Rodin’s workshops, alive in every brief line that defined them, were confronted by the ugly realities of the avenues, poor creatures who every day looked more like himself.

  They were living, living on nothing, on dust, on soot, and on the filth on their surfaces, on what falls from the teeth of dogs, on any senselessly broken thing that anyone might still buy for some inexplicable purpose. Oh what kind of world is that! Pieces, pieces of people, parts of animals, leftovers of things that have been, and everything still agitated, as though driven about helter-skelter in an eerie wind, carried and carrying, falling and overtaking each other as they fall. (Letter to Lou Andreas-Salomé, July 18, 1903. Letters.)

  In these lines, written in Worpswede during the following summer, he relived for his former mistress’s benefit his Paris suffering. Rilke was also rehearsing what would become the magical opening pages of his novel, The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge. It is worth quoting a bit more in order to demonstrate the psychologically stressful difference between the euphoric celebrational style of the first Rodin monograph and its author’s daily state of mind.

  There were old women who set down a heavy basket on the ledge of some wall (very little women whose eyes were drying up like puddles), and when they wanted to grasp it again, out of their sleeves shoved forth slowly and ceremoniously a long, rusty hook instead of a hand, and it went straight and surely out to the handle of the basket. And there were other old women who went about with the drawers of an old night stand in their hands, showing everyone that twenty rusty pins were rolling around inside which they must sell. And once of an evening late in the fall, a little old woman stood next to me in the light of a store window. She stood very still, and I thought that like me she was busy looking at the objects displayed and hardly noticed her. Finally, however, her proximity made me uneasy, and I don’t know why, I suddenly looked at her peculiarly clasped, worn-out hands. Very, very slowly an old, long, thin pencil rose out of those hands, it grew and grew, and it took a very long time until it was entirely visible, visible in all its wretchedness. I cannot say what produced such a terrible effect in this scene, but it seemed to me as if a whole destiny were being played out before me, a long destiny, a catastrophe that was working up frightfully to the moment when the pencil no longer grew and, slightly trembling, jutted out of the loneliness of those empty hands. I understood at last that I was supposed to buy it. (Ibid.)

  In the novel, Malte eventually realizes with horror that he has become an accomplice … another shabby person of the street.

  … when I noticed how my clothes were becoming worse and heavier from week to week, and saw how they were slit in many places, I was frightened and felt that I would belong irretrievably to the lost if some passer-by merely looked at me and half unconsciously counted me with them. (Ibid.)

  Perhaps, when you beg only from the best families and the finest foundations, you can call yourself a development officer, but where Rilke was living at the time, there were no banks, no fancy estates occupied by susceptible titled ladies, just aisles de nuit, the Hôtel Dieu, and hospices de la maternité.

  The path to Paris had been a circuitous one, the result of flailing more than plan. At Christmas, two years before, Rilke had returned to Prague to visit his mother, always a trying time for him, although Santa brought him a new briefcase, and on his way home he stopped in Breslau to visit an art historian, Richard Muther, who he hoped might agree to tutor him in this vast field, since Rilke was now considering a career as an art critic. He thought that perhaps Muther might help him combine this fresh but desperate interest with a trip to Russia that Rilke was planning. It would be his second. (Ralph Freedman, Life of a Poet: Rainer Maria Rilke. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1996.) Muther was presently the editor of some pages on art for a Viennese weekly called Zeit, and he suggested that Rilke write something on Russian art for its pages. Rilke promptly did so and composed another article after he had completed his trip.

  When they met again, it was at the newly married couple’s cottage near the art colony of Worpswede, outside Bremen. Rilke’s second essay was about to appear. Muther had just completed a monograph on Lucas Cranach and sent a copy in advance of his arrival. His hosts showed him studios and introduced him to painters as a part of their mutual cultivation. A few months later, Muther would get his review and Rilke receive the Rodin commission. In that regard, he had an edge his youth and inexperience could not dull: His wife, Clara, was herself a sculptor and had studied with the master, and for that reason they had initially planned to do the piece together. Clara’s previous relationship might be expected to make entrée easier.

  Rilke was eager to get out of his honeymoon house, a cute thatch that had lost a good deal of its charm after Clara had given birth. Babies often allow wives to feel they have done their sexual duty and husbands to feel they have been warned: What the house now holds will hold them. Housebroken is the customary word. Clara was also anxious to return to work and would eventually join Rilke in his Paris penury after she had dumped little Ruth with her grandmother. (The word join suggests more intimacy than was sought, since they maintained separate lodgings.) The commission was urgent because the couple’s funds were nearly exhausted, and, although Clara insisted on paying her own way, Rilke’s sources of charity were drying up.

  Rilke was learning on the run. He had no scholarly skills. Confronted by a mass of materials, he tended to freeze. “Instead of taking notes on a text with concentration and efficiency, he was forever tempted to copy the entire book.” (Wolfgang Leppmann, Rilke: A Life, trans. Russell Stockman. New York: Fromm International, 1984). There were many things about his subject he would have known, for they were in the air as well as in the newspapers or came from Clara’s recollections. But some of the things he thought he knew were wrong and some of the things Rodin revealed about himself weren’t true: that he had married “parce qu’il faut avoir une femme,” for instance (Letter to Clara Rilke, September 5, 1902. Letters.), since he would not marry Rose Beuret, the woman he had—unlicensed—lived with from 1864, when she had become his model and his mistress, until their approaching deaths made such legalities matters of concern. (Rose died in February of 1917, he in November of that year.)

  Rodin had been born a profligate and it had apparently always been necessary to have a woman … or two. Waiting to pose, nude or nearly, a pair of models might lounge around the studio. When they did, they often had to assume and maintain athletically strenuous erotic postures for extended periods while he drew—comfortably wrapped—in a room Rose kept cool to save sous and suppress inclinations, although often, nearer his models and more discreet, Rodin worked at the Dépôt des Marbres in Paris. “Moving constantly around him as he worked were several nude models. He watched them as they moved, like Greek gymnasts, establishing a familiarity with the human body, and with muscles in movement.” (Sue Roe, Gwen John: A Painter’s Life. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2001.) Occasionally, he would insist they caress one another. His artistic excuse for these practices was that through them women were psychologically laid bare, not merely their thighs and bosoms. Rilke, predictably, put a feminist spin on these images. Speaking of figures on The Gates of Hell, he says: “… here the woman is no longer an animal who submits or is overpowered. She is too awake and animated by desire, as if they had both joined forces to search for their souls.” During such times that the models moved or froze in the midst of a gesture, the artist worked with great rapidity, sheets of drawings literally flying from his pad to litter the floor. At a more leisurely moment, he would apply a light wash of color to the graphite. (Albert Elsen, Rodin. New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1963.) Rodin did not conceal his erotic drawings from less candid eyes, but exhibited them more than once. The Musée Rodin has many
thousand such sketches. Later, Picasso would exhibit a similar unremitting libidinous energy.

  Without warning, the maestro would disappear for weeks from beneath Rose’s eye. These absences sometimes corresponded to brief encounters with one of his models or with one of the innumerable society women whose appetites were aroused by his reputation as a lover. But when, to excuse himself, Rodin put up a sign on the door of Studio J of the Dépôt des Marbres that read THE SCULPTOR IS IN THE CATHEDRALS, it was sometimes true he was visiting them. (Robert Descharnes and Jean-François Chabrun, Auguste Rodin, trans. Edita Lausanne. Secaucus, N.J.: Chartwell Books, 1967).

  Four years before Rilke’s arrival, Rodin had broken off an extended affair with Camille Claudel, the gifted sister of the great poet and playwright Paul Claudel, and a splendid sculptor herself, with disastrous consequences for Camille, who had to be institutionalized, though there were doubtless other reasons for her paranoid delusions. She and Rose had passed through words to come to blows, and it is said (by those who say these things) that Camille had a habit of lurking about the grounds and that Rose had once fired a shot in the direction of some concealing plants. Camille’s brother, whose Catholicism was central to his work, was not Christian enough to forgive the sculptor such a prolonged misuse of his sister, but in this case, forgiveness might have been a fault.

  As for Rodin, he was nearsighted: he had the big bulging eyes of a lecher. When he worked he had his nose right on the model and on the clay. Did I say his nose? A boar’s snout, rather, behind which lurked a pair of icy blue pupils. In all his sculpture, what you have is his nose working together with his hand, and sometimes you catch the face emerging from the very middle of the four fingers and the thumb. He tackles the block as a whole. With him everything is compact, massive. It is dough that gives unity. His limbs tend to get in the way.