A Temple of Texts: Essays

by William H. Gass

  How different from my sister’s light, airy hand, the sense of excitement, the perpetual presence of the spirit, the intricate and sensitive tendrils, the airiness and play of inner light! (Ibid.)*

  While Rilke was in attendance, Rodin took up with Gwen, another sister, this time of Augustus John. She would survive the experience to become a talented painter, though she never married and the little village of Meudon held her fast her entire life. (Roe.) Through Gwen John’s letters, we can follow the progress of their affair and get an idea of how many of these amours must have taken a similar path, because, if it was a unique romance for each woman, it was an established routine for the artist, who was consequently always in charge. As girls, they came to Paris to make art their career; they sought work as models in order to pay their way; sometimes they would pose for a painter who posed for Rodin and that way achieve an introduction. In Gwen’s case, it was her suppleness that initially appealed to the master, though other women doubtless had their own special qualities. Soon he would be singling her out, lending her books, asking her to make copies of certain passages he would mark for extraction, and then—la coup de coeur—requesting to see her work. One day, while she was in a half-naked prancing pose—knee up, head bowed—for the Whistler memorial statue, the kiss arrived. “I can feel, rushing across my lips, sensations of mystery and intoxication,” she told him. (Ibid.) Gwen would dream of giving up all for him (especially her career), of becoming his wife, of taking his material tasks in hand and, though not a tidy, enterprising person, organizing his life. For this last task, Rodin would solicit and seduce Rainer Maria Rilke.

  In his two monographs, Rilke will touch on such matters so discreetly, not even he will avow his knowledge of them; but the contradiction between Rodin’s life of quarrelsomeness, deceit, and sensual indulgence and his consuming artistic dedication; the difference between the studio’s dusty physicality and its apparent product—abundant beauty and grace arising out of clay, marble’s serene cool glisten like light in a water glass, lofty ideals caught in casts of plaster—these militant contrasts govern every line of the poet’s essays—where Rilke enlists awe to ward off consternation—just as they control every surface of the artist’s sculptures, including the version of the Balzac memorial that depicts the novelist with an erection. After George Bernard Shaw sat for his bust by Rodin, he wrote, “The most picturesque detail of his method was his taking a big draught of water into his mouth and spitting it onto the clay to keep it constantly pliable. Absorbed in his work, he did not always aim well and soaked my clothes.” (Quoted in Elsen.)*

  On Rilke’s next visit Rodin held class. After a lunch which resembled the first in everything but menu, they sat on a bench that had a fine view of Paris while Rodin spoke of his work and its principles. Rilke has to run after Rodin’s rapid French as though for a departing bus. The sculptor’s work is manual, like that of a carpenter or mason, and produces an object unlike the memos of a office manager, consequently, to the young, the calling has lost its attraction. They don’t care to get their hands dirty, but “il faut travailler, rien que travailler,” he likes to repeat. In fact, Rodin did little if any carving (or welding either, of course), although it is said that he liked to greet people at the door head-to-toed with dust and fisting a chisel. His bronzes were cast, his marbles carved, by workers he rarely saw. (R. H. Wilenski. The Meaning of Modern Sculpture. Boston: Beacon Press, 1961.) Henri Lebossé enlarged the sculptor’s plaster models to the dimensions proper for a public monument.* Rodin complains that the schools teach “the kids nowadays” to compose—to emphasize contour rather than to model and shape surfaces. “… ce n’est pas la forme de l’objet, mais: le modelé …” (Letter to Clara Rilke, September 5, 1902. Letters.) Rodin’s hands were his principal tools, and with them he plopped and punched and gouged and smoothed, making both curves and straight lines wavy, allowing shoulders to flow into torsos and torsos to emerge from blocks (even when they hadn’t), encouraging elbows to establish their own identity, his fingers everywhere busy at fostering the impression of life, giving strength and will to plaster, ethereality and spirit to stone.

  Not to everybody’s taste: Rodin’s hopes for his work were revolutionary and, at first, few shared them. Lovers of the antique saw in the figure of Aphrodite the embodiment of Love. She was a god of mythology and therefore never existed, so she could only be regarded as ideal. Her thighs were to be as smooth as a peeled stick, though fleshier and amply curved. Since, like Hamlet, or Jesus, for that matter, no one knew what Love looked like, her form and all her emblems eventually achieved a generic status (Jesus is blond and thin, tall and handsome, not in the least Semitic); but this stereotype was never of a particular, an instance of which you might meet on the street, instead its entire being was devoted to the service of the universal. For fanciers of Christian figures, however, Mark and the other Testament teachers, while remaining within the type that had been cast for them, and representing the ideals of the religion as well as figures in Christian history, were nevertheless to be depicted as actual persons. Jesus may have been a scapegoat, but he must not be so idealized he becomes nothing but sacrifice. Another example: Many sopranos must be able to play Mimi; if one of them cannot make Mimi’s emaciated weight, then cast, crew, and customers will pretend they are watching the role sing rather than the occupant of it. Rodin’s departures from these norms were felt before they were formulated. Where would we locate the walk of the Walking Man? in “walking itself”? in this sort of stride among many? in the habitual gait of someone exercising? and particularly during his morning constitutional? This amazing figure is the expression of a specific kind of muscular movement in which the determination of the walker’s will, even without the walker, is evident. These legs walk by themselves. Across meadows. Down streets. Through walls. The battered torso is the handle of their fork.

  The Walking Man as finally exhibited is the antithesis of the nineteenth-century statue, for it lacks the old values of identity, assertive ego, moral message rhetorically communicated, completeness of parts and of finish, and stability. More than any other of Rodin’s works, this sculpture overwhelms the viewer by the power of movement…. No sculptor before Rodin had made such a basic, simple event as walking the exclusive focus of his art and raised it to the level of high drama. (Elsen.)

  As Rodin’s style developed, so did the complaints. The Age of Bronze was felt to be so lifelike that it must have been made from a body cast. Walking Man convicted the sculptor of dismemberment. The Man with the Broken Nose, The Crouching Woman, and The Old Courtesan were attacks upon their subjects, deliberately disgusting, or perverse attempts to make the ugly attractive. The Kiss was too sexy or too pretty, and The Thinker banal—or worse, a schoolboy bathroom joke. The Gates of Hell had ended up an expensive hodgepodge. The Burghers of Calais were too sorrowful; the monument didn’t depict them as behaving bravely enough. And yet his terracotta sketch for The Call to Arms, proposed to commemorate the Franco-Prussian War, was so vehement, it failed consideration. The great draped Balzac didn’t look like Balzac, while the naked Balzac was an affront to the writer, his art, and his public. The Balzacs, in particular, called for outrage.

  He was accused variously of having depicted his subject as a penguin, a snowman, a sack of coal, a menhir, a phantom, a colossal fetus and a shapeless larva. Other criticisms included the charge that Balzac had been reduced to the role of an actor in a gigantic Guignol, that he had just gotten out of bed to confront a creditor, or that exposing the public to such maladroit handling of proportions and physical distortion was equivalent to the dangers of a live bomb. (Ibid.)

  As late as 1932, R. H. Wilenski would claim, in The Meaning of Modern Sculpture, that “Rodin’s interest when he modeled the Balzac was concentrated in the head. Remove the head and we have nothing but a shapeless mess.” Wilenski provides an illustration in which he has done the decapitation. (Wilenski, illus. 1b.)

  It was claimed that Rodin’s impressionistic style was
better suited to painting than to sculpture, although the Impressionists weren’t initially approved of, either; moreover, he appeared to disobey the modernist rule that the work should reflect the nature of its materials and manufacture, yet in what but clay would his kind of modulations occur? Or his mingling of limbs be easy? This much was true: Rodin’s aim was to transform his materials into something ontologically alive—after all, had not God made mud into man?

  Elie Faure enlists his eloquence, honed through a thousand pages of his History of Art, to register Rodin’s errors.

  Often—too often, alas!—the gestures become contorted, the unhappy idea of going beyond plastics and of running after symbols creates groups in which the embracing figures are disjointed; the volumes fly out of their orbit, the attitudes are impossible, and, in the whole literary disorder, the energy of the workman melts like wax in the fire. Even in his best days, he lives and works by brief paroxysms, whose burning sensation runs through him in flashes. (Elie Faure, History of Art: Modern Art, trans. Walter Pach. New York: Harper and Bros., 1924.)

  A good many of the misapprehensions that Rilke says constitute Rodin’s fame were fomented by social scandals, as I have tried to suggest, and the sculptor’s name continued to collect scurrilous rumors for the remainder of his life; but at the same time his renown drew to him many who were also famous, each bringing with them their own bounty of slander, gossip, and glorification. Isadora Duncan claims that she wants to have children of genius by him, and Loïe Fuller would love to wind multicolored ribbons round her body while he draws her.* Eleanora Duse will recite poetry at the Hôtel Biron, and Wanda Landowska play Bach upon a harpsichord trucked in for the occasion. Meanwhile, the press enjoys publishing lampoons of various kinds, and caricatures by Sem and Belon amuse their publics. In one, Rodin is depicted pulling the arms and legs off a female figure. I think we are to imagine she is not alive at the time. Another, called Terrain Rodin, shows a garden of disembodied heads and embracing bodies. (Descharnes and Chabrun.)

  The Meudon days begin to pass. Rilke reads Rodin’s press clippings in the villa’s little park and enjoys the garden’s postcard views, or he walks up the village slopes to a thick wood where he can brood in a solitude free of Paris’s insistent presence or Rodin’s impalpable one. Among his wishes: that he could take the forest’s lofty fresh air back with him to the city, where the heat is oppressive, the atmosphere odiferous, stale, and heavy. He presses his face against the fence of the Luxembourg Gardens like one in jail, and even the flowers in their beds feel constrained to be there.

  On September 11, Rilke does something so transparent, it almost ceases to be devious. He writes Rodin a letter. Like a lover, he explains that his poor French makes it difficult for him to express himself as he would like, and the care with which he prepares his questions make them seem contrived and inappropriate for the occasion; so he is sending on a few verses in French, with the hope that they will bring the two of them a little closer. After some customary fulsomeness, Rilke confesses, “It was not only to do a study that I came to be with you,—it was to ask you: how must one live?” The answer we’ve heard: “Il faut travailler.” However, Rilke says he has always waited for the beckon of the muse, waited for what he calls the creative hour, waited for inspiration. He has tried to form habits of diligence, but now he knows he must try again, try and succeed. Sadly …

  … last year we had rather serious financial worries, and they haven’t yet been removed: but I think now that diligent work can disarm even the anxieties of poverty. My wife has to leave our little child, and yet she thinks more calmly and impartially of that necessity since I wrote her what you said: “Travail et patience.” I am very happy that she will be near you, near your great work …

  I want to see if I can find a living in some form here in Paris,—(I need only a little for that). If it is possible, I shall stay. And it would be a great happiness for me. Otherwise, if I cannot succeed, I beg you to help my wife as you helped me by your work and by your word and by all the eternal forces of which you are the Master. (Letter to Auguste Rodin, September 11, 1902. Letters.)

  The verses in French Rilke wrote for Rodin have a German brother, because on the same day, doubtless after the same stroll through the same park, he also penned one of the two better-known autumn poems from The Book of Hours. His state of mind could not be better represented.

  Autumn

  The leaves are falling, falling from far away,

  as though a distant garden died above us;

  they fall, fall with denial in their wave.

  And through the night the hard earth falls

  farther than the stars in solitude.

  We all are falling. Here, this hand falls.

  And see—there goes another. It’s in us all.

  And yet there’s One whose gently holding hands

  let this falling fall and never land.

  Despite his misery, his anxiety, Rilke is greedily gathering material. These months will be among his richest. Incidents of no apparent moment will crystallize and coalesce. Here is one. At the end of September, he writes to Clara:

  Rodin has a tiny plaster cast, a tiger (antique), in his studio … which he values very highly … And from this little plaster cast I saw what he means, what antiquity is and what links him to it. There, in this animal, is the same lively feeling in the modeling, this little thing (it is no higher than my hand is wide, and no longer than my hand) has hundreds of thousands of sides like a very big object, hundreds of thousands of sides which are all alive, animated, and different. And that in plaster! And with this the expression of the prowling stride is intensified to the highest degree, the powerful planting of the broad paws, and at the same time, that caution in which all strength is wrapped, that noiselessness … (Letter to Clara Rilke, September 27, 1902. Letters. Rilke refers to the little tiger again in a letter to Lou Andreas-Salomé, August 15, 1903. Letters.)

  The panther Rilke will study in the Jardin des Plantes began to find its words, I suspect, as a tiny plaster tiger with a prowling stride and broad paws; the bars of his cage were borrowed from the Luxembourg Gardens, and his gaze from the poet’s own, as well as his sense of desperation. The abbreviated sonnet, J. B. Leishman suggests, was the earliest of the famous Dinge, or “thing,” poems, whose nature has been ascribed to Rilke’s Rodin experience. (J. B. Leishman, ed. and trans, Rainer Maria Rilke: Selected Works, vol.2. Poetry. New York: New Directions, 1960. These translations are from William H. Gass, Reading Rilke. New York: Knopf, 1999.)

  The Panther

  His gaze has grown so worn from the passing

  of the bars that it sees nothing anymore.

  There seem to be a thousand bars before him

  and beyond that thousand nothing of the world.

  The supple motion of his panther’s stride,

  as he pads through a tightening circle,

  is like the dance of strength around a point

  on which an equal will stands stupefied.

  Only rarely is an opening in the eyes

  enabled. Then an image brims

  which slides the quiet tension of the limbs

  until the heart, wherein it dies.

  Rodin’s surfaces are there to suggest a reality that can only be inferred, just as fingers or a face, by gesture or expression, disclose a consciousness that would otherwise be indiscernible. Sculptures are things: they start as stuff, stuff taken from stuff like rock or clay, and they stay stuff until the artist gives them a determinate form so that, through that form, they may have life. The poet’s problem is precisely the opposite. Language is our most important sign of elevated awareness, but language has weak presence. Though often on paper, it possesses no weight. A poem is like a ghost seeking substantiality, a soul in search of a body more appealing than the bare bones mere verses rattle. It is consequently not the message in a bottle that Rilke previously thought it was, nor a young man’s feelings raised like a flag. All of us have emotions urgently se
eking release, and many of us have opinions we think would do the world some good; however, the poet must also be a maker, as the Greeks maintained, and, like the sculptor, like every other artist, should aim at adding real beings to the world, beings fully realized, not just things like tools and haberdashery that nature has neglected to provide, or memos and laws that society produces in abundance, but Ding an sich, as humans often fail to be, things in themselves. In a strange way, Rilke’s new Rodin-induced resolve will unite the poet’s most primitive impulse—in this case, animism—with his most sophisticated inclination—art as an end, art that stands apart from nature and in opposition to it, since nature does not and cannot produce it.

  If we look at She Who Was Once the Helmet-Maker’s Beautiful Wife (sometimes called The Old Courtesan), we shall have to pass through several necessary shifts in point of view. The woman Rodin depicts is old, bent, clinging to a rock as if the river of life were about to sweep her away, skinny and scarred, all bone and tendon, her dugs pendulous, shrunken, and flat, her belly bunchy like a wrinkled bag; whereas once, we are asked to believe, her skin was smooth, her body lithe, strong, bearing breasts that were perfect bowls and boasting hair that fell across her back like lines of music; but the body’s beauty, the sculpture unoriginally says, comes to this: the condition of the prune, a figure formed from suffering and age, alive only to wonder why.

  Facile feelings of pity and regret are available from this site as stamps from a post office, yet what is piercing about the piece is its beauty, a beauty that we could sentimentalize by thinking, for a moment, that even decrepit whores in this wonderful world are lovely, when, of course, they are not; abuse takes its toll, hard living, too, and the body is our first grave. It is the bronze that is glorious; it is the bronze that reminds us that age and dying, death itself, have their own life, their own stages of fulfillment, their own value and measures of success. Baudelaire’s poem “A Carrion,” for which Rodin and Rilke shared an admiration, is of the same genre as Villon’s snows of yesteryear, Rochester’s dust that has closed Helen’s eyes, and Yorick’s dug-up skull, whose chaps are now quite fallen. It begins: