A Temple of Texts: Essays

by William H. Gass

  Remember now, my Love, what piteous thing

  We saw on a summer’s gracious day:

  By the roadside a hideous carrion, quivering

  On a clean bed of pebbly clay,

  Her legs flexed in the air like a courtesan,

  Burning and sweating venomously,

  Calmly exposed its belly, ironic and wan,

  Clamorous with foul ecstasy.

  Rilke’s animism is poetical, of course, but is also, in its way, religious, for it requires respect for all things equal to the respect we tend to show now for only a few, since we prize so little even in the things we prize. It gives value, as Rodin did, to every part of our anatomy, to each muscle movement—stretch, twitch, and fidget; our physical features—a silk soft earlobe, tawny limb, or crooked finger; or facial expressions—grimace, smile, or howl; as well as the very clay we come from (at least in his workshop)—wood block, slab, and plaster pot. Moreover, it endows even the accidental encounter of different parts—my hand on your shoulder—with its own dignity as a legitimate state of affairs. Gestures, expressions, postures, moods, thoughts, sudden urges merely change more rapidly than habits, attitudes, convictions, dispositions do, and can be slowed by stone to suit our scrutiny throughout a homemade eternity.

  The flies swarmed on the putrid vulva, then

  A black tumbling rout would seethe

  Of maggots, thick like a torrent in a glen,

  Over those rags that lived and seemed to breathe.

  (Allen Tate’s wonderful translation. Charles Baudelaire, The Flowers of Evil. Selected and edited by Marthiel and Jackson Matthews. Norfolk, Conn.: New Directions, 1955.)

  It was not simply in the shop, among the fragments and the figures, that Rilke saw this willful independence and fullness of life. He encountered it on the streets of Paris. That thin pencil that rose slowly out of an old crone’s fist was alive, as were the rusty pins that ran from side to side in their proffered drawer as if to escape your eye when you looked down on them. In the early morning, the water from the water wagons “sprang young and light out of their pipes,” the hoofs of the horses struck the street “like a hundred hammers,” and the cries of the vendors echoed while “the vegetables on their handcarts were stirring like a little field.” But his most indelible encounter was with the man suffering from Saint Vitus’ dance whose gyrations and frantic coping strategies he vividly describes in a letter to Lou Andreas-Salomé (another rehearsal for passages that Rilke includes in Malte Laurids Brigge). Rilke follows the man for several blocks as the poor fellow’s shoulders twitch, his arms fly about, and his legs jig. (Letter of July 18, 1903. Letters.) The man’s will is at odds with his limbs, each of which has its own plans, and all four would hop off by themselves if they had their way like the fragments in Rodin’s cases.

  So the surfaces of Rodin’s work, which his studio light makes lively, implicitly rely upon a philosophical principle of great age and respectability—one that has been seriously entertained by Galileo, Hobbes, and Spinoza, through Freud up to the present. Since the effect in question is one of animation, it may seem odd that the principle involved is that of inertia. A body at rest will remain at rest—a body in motion will remain in motion—unless something else hectors or hinders it. When that interference occurs, the stone or the ball or the dog at the door will resist; it will attempt to restore the status quo, strive to save its situation, maintain its equilibrium, preserve its life. Spinoza called the tendency to stay the same the object’s conatus. It is popularly thought of as the principle of self-preservation. All things would be self-sufficient, as windowless as Leibniz’s monads, if they could. The condition of the fetus, which is automatically fed, protected from every outside shock, surrounded by an embalming ocean, growing as it has been programmed to grow, is ideal. We are pushed out into the world; we are forced by circumstances both inside us (hunger and thirst) and outside (sensation and harm) to cope, and, as Freud argued, we are repeatedly compelled to reduce the unsettling demands of our desires to zero.

  A limp that tells the world we are compensating for an injury becomes a habit hard to break even when its cause has healed and there is no longer any “reason” for it. Except that the limp wishes to remain. Our stutter wants to stay. Our fall from a ladder would be forever like a cast-out angel if we didn’t fetch up in a lake of fire or at least on a floor. The fire, moreover, eats its way through every fuel it’s offered only because it is eager to stay burning like that bright gem of quotation fame. As the naked models move about Rodin’s studio, he observes the participating parts of their bodies until he can catch, in the middle of an action, the very will of the gesture, its own integrity and wholeness. The consciousness that inhabits us (and, as Rilke likes to imagine, inhabits even the so-called least thing) refuses to age. As we all have surely noticed, only the body gets old, and does so reluctantly, while each creak, each ache and pain, comes to stay if it can, as vigorous as a virus, youthful as our death will be, buoyant and hopeful. Dying does not want to die. Dying would make dying a career. And death has its own designs.

  We can call it war if we like—Hobbes did—we can call it competition, but unities create their own momentum, complex states of affairs resist disenabling influence (what are bureaucrats for?), and all of the figures that make up a sculpture like The Burghers of Calais, each eloquent in its own way, must feel the influence of so powerful a composition. The man with Saint Vitus’ dance had lost control of his Commonwealth. Which is what happens when parts of the body politic no longer feel safe to pursue their own plans and the grip of the state police grows weak. The group must ensure the safety of its members if it wishes to survive. Otherwise, it will explode or choke itself to death. Similarly, the elements of a work of art must form a community which allows each element its own validity while pursuing the interest of the whole. A word, if it could have had a choice, must feel it would have chosen just the companions it has been given, so that when it glows with satisfaction, it also makes its line shine.

  Moreover, the unity of a sculptural fragment, when imagined alongside a correspondingly severed limb, insists upon its own superiority, for it can flourish quite apart from any body, whereas both amputation and amputee are damaged possibly beyond repair.

  October was filled with Rilke’s work on the essay, but now Clara had arrived in Paris and had her studio in the same apartment building as his, according to an arrangement he had finally worked out with his conscience. Their economic circumstances remained dire; the couple’s dislike of Paris, now shared, increased; they endured their separate loneliness through the gray city’s winter, living on roots and water, or so it seemed. The essay at last concluded, Rilke came down with the first of several bouts of flu and a gloom that obscured the upper half of the Eiffel Tower. By March, he was ready to return to his itinerant ways, and fled for Italy, the first of many nations in which he would find refuge.

  It would be three years to the month of his first meeting with Rodin before Rilke would return to Paris and Meudon, this time as an invited guest. The master had read Rilke’s monograph by this time, since it now extolled him in French, and he welcomed the poet warmly as a trusted friend and fellow artist. The visitor was well housed, with a nice view of the valley. Rilke offered to help with some of Rodin’s overwhelming paperwork and was soon hired on, as it were, full-time. Often he, Rodin, and Rose Beuret would rise early to visit the city or enjoy Versailles, and once they dared Chartres in the dead of winter, where terrible winds, because they were envious of such grandeur, Rodin said, tormented the towers. (Some details have been taken from Ruth Butler’s Rodin: The Shape of Genius. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1993.)

  Rilke seeped into the role of Rodin’s secretary, a position he wanted because it cushioned him in Meudon, because he was paid, because the work was expected to be undemanding; yet a position he did not want because it confined him to Meudon, his French might be inadequate, because it put him below stairs in Rodin’s service when he had his own fis
h to hook and fry—the poet as ambitious as the sculptor.

  Rilke planned a lecture tour on behalf of Rodin, a project that would take him to Dresden late in October (the talk becomes part 2 of the Rodin book), but the response to his first appearance disappointed him because, although there were “six hundred people,” they were “not the right ones.” Then in Prague he twice performed for a small crowd of mystified officials and sleepy old ladies whom he imagined were more concerned with the digestion of their dinners. When Rilke asks, a few paragraphs into his text, “Are you listening?” is the question entirely rhetorical? Worse than their inattention, his take wasn’t covering costs. In Berlin, there were visits and readings before he repeated his Rodin lecture a final time—on this occasion with some success. (Freedman.)

  Spring of 1906 would find him back in Meudon, where his work, fatter than he remembered, sat upon his shoes like a heavy dog. In one of his poems, he likened himself to a swan out of water, waddling his way “through things still undone.” The personal epistle was an art form at which Rilke excelled, but the business letter in French was boring, intractable, foreign, and frustrating. The poet had become dilatory and the sculptor impatient. Moreover, Rilke had begun answering mail without taking the trouble to inform Rodin of the fact or the nature of the exchange, assuming an authority he did not have: once to Baron Heinrich Thyssen-Bornemisza, a wealthy German patron, once to Sir William Rothenstein, an important English art administrator and academic painter. Upon learning of these presumptions, Rodin fired Rilke with a force that expelled him from his cottage and the grounds as well as from his secretarial position. He was soon back in his little Paris room, a spent shell. (Ibid.)

  The poet had recovered his perilous freedom, his personal space,a space, one suspects, that was very like the space he believed Rodin’s figures required, not only one that allowed you to inspect them “in the round” but a space that was theirs by right of uniqueness, that distinguished them somehow “from the other things, the ordinary things, which anyone could grasp.” A small statue could, therefore, seem large. Rilke, too, required such room as respect conferred, where he might stand “solitary and luminous” with “the face of a visionary.” (Rainer Maria Rilke. Auguste Rodin, trans. Daniel Slager. New York: Archipelago Books, 2004.) Yet Rilke’s rhetoric, when he writes about Rodin’s work, is not simply a reflection of his need to enhance his own importance; it also expresses the necessity for any work of art to lay claim to the appropriate arena of its enjoyment, hence the close placement of paintings in some museums above, below, or beside one another on the same wall or the squeezing of a bust into a corner or the dumping of a figure at the end of a narrow hall that leads to the johns, the elevators, or the shops is a sign of catastrophic overcrowding, a show of curatorial contempt, or evidence of feeble artistic force. Even a fragment should stand in its space like Napoléon, and there is ample testimony to the imperial effect of Rodin’s sculptures whatever their size. In his essay collection Leonardo’s Nephew, James Fenton quotes Aristide Maillol—as his talk is recollected by the ubiquitous Count Kessler:

  When you view a Rodin from afar, it’s small, very small. But sculpture forms part of the air all around it. Rodin has a Buddha at his place, well placed on a socle, in his garden, in front of a circle of small shrubs. Well, it’s as big as that [showing it very small] and yet it’s as big as the sky. It’s immense. It fills everything. (James Fenton, Leonardo’s Nephew. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux. Berlin in Lights: The Diaries of Count Harry Kessler [New York: Grove Press, 1999] is an abridgement of the diaries and does not contain this quote, so don’t hunt for it there or in the corresponding English edition.)

  Rilke was similarly taken with this piece.

  Buddha

  As if he listened. Silence. Depth.

  And we hold back our breath. Yet nothing yet.

  And he is star. And other great stars ring him,

  though we cannot see that far.

  O he is fat. Do we suppose

  he’ll see us? He has need of that?

  Sink in any supplicating pose before him,

  he’ll sit deep and idle as a cat.

  For that which lures us to his feet

  has circled in him now a million years.

  He has forgotten all we must endure,

  encloses all we would escape.

  Rodin’s preeminent biographer, Ruth Butler, suggests that some additional factors were at work in Rilke’s dismissal. When Rilke returned from his leisurely lecture tour, Rodin was ill with what was called the grippe. Rose Beuret was in a foul mood, which didn’t improve his. So he asked George Bernard Shaw, whose bust he had been commissioned to sculpt, if he and his wife would take the train to Meudon to sit for it so that the ailing artist wouldn’t have to travel to his workshop in Paris. At first, the Shaws came unencumbered, but when Shaw learned that Rodin didn’t mind being photographed (the playwright had tried his own hand), he asked permission for a friend, the American photographer Alvin Langdon Coburn, to visit, as well. Shaw, not easily impressed by anyone farther from himself than his beard, was aware that Rodin’s thumb was a greater imprimatur than the Pope’s seal, and told Coburn, “No photograph taken has touched him…. He is by a million chalks the biggest man you ever saw; all your other sitters are only fit to make gelatin to emulsify for his negative.” (Details of this meeting are from Butler, and the quote is from Alvin Langdom Coburn Photographer: An Autobiography. New York: Dover Publications, 1978.) Rodin could not have been disappointed with Coburn’s customarily lyrical view of him sporting a beard that resembled a river and a hat we now call “a pillbox.” There is a slight upward tilt to his head that resembles the heroic pose he fashioned for Balzac.

  To watch him pose for his immortality, Shaw gathered a crowd, also calling the curator of the Fitzwilliam Museum, Sydney Cockerell, to his side.

  Rilke joined them, almost immediately impressed with Shaw as a sitter—the entire squad eager to write brilliantly about a glittering constellation they underestimated even while trying to exaggerate it.

  In the newspaper Gil Blas for May 24, 1912, Shaw wrote:

  Rodin worked laboriously…. When he was uncertain he measured me with an old iron compass and then measured the bust. If the nose was too long he cut off a section and pressed the end to close the wound with no more emotion or affectation than a glazier replacing a window. If the ear was not in its place he would cut it off and lay it on correctly, these mutilations being executed cold-bloodedly in the presence of my wife (who almost expected to see the already terribly animated clay begin to bleed) while remarking that it was quicker to do it thusly than to make a new ear. (Quoted in Elsen.)

  Rilke wrote to Shaw’s German publisher, Samuel Fischer:

  Rodin has begun the portrait of one of your most remarkable authors; it promises to be exceptionally good. Rarely has a likeness in the making had so much help from the subject of it as this bust of Bernard Shaw’s. It is not only that he is excellent at standing (putting so much energy into standing still and giving himself so unconditionally to the sculptor’s hands), but he so collects and concentrates himself in that part of the body which, in the bust, will have … to represent the whole Shaw, that his whole personality seems to become concentrated essence. (Quoted in Butler.)

  They all took a break to attend the celebration for the installation of The Thinker in front of the Panthéon. Shaw, not to be outdone (and as excellent at sitting as standing), persuaded Coburn to photograph him the very next day, naked following his morning bath, in the pose presently before the Panthéon. The photo exists for posterity’s wonder. Rilke was visibly taken with the English genius, who didn’t mind adulation even from callow unknowns. Apart from that, during Rodin’s week of work, and, worse, during his week of triumph, Shaw had clearly been competing for attention, if not glory, with a sundry that included Rodin’s secretary and Rodin’s statue. Butler says, “It was Rilke who paid the price for the mischievous Englishman’s visit.” (Butler.)
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br />   Although Rilke would suggest to Rodin the purchase of the Hôtel Biron, later the Musée Rodin, and for a time live in that building (as Cocteau would, who claimed to have a role in its preservation), his intimacy with Rodin was over. Two days after Shaw’s departure for London, on May 10, 1906, Rilke was “dismissed like a thieving servant.” We can pretend to know precisely.

  *In L’oeil écoute (The Eye Listens), Claudel had written extensively about Flemish art and praised it in particular for capturing “the movement of human life toward its conclusion.” In contrast, Rodin’s art would have had to seem profane.

  *Rodin’s impact on Rilke, from the French point of view, is thoroughly discussed by J. F. Angeloz in Rainer Maria Rilke: L’evolution spirituelle du poète (Paris: Paul Hartmann, 1936), and by K. A. J. Batterby in Rilke and France: A Study in Poetic Development (London: Oxford University Press, 1966).

  *See Albert Elsen’s “Rodin’s Perfect Collaborator, Henri Lebossé,” in Rodin Rediscovered, ed. Albert Elsen. (Washington, D.C.: National Gallery of Art, 1981.)

  *Lest we forget Mrs. Fuller’s talent—namely, her skill with illusion—here is a juicy bit from Cocteau: “Is it possible … to forget that woman who discovered the dance of her age? A fat American, bespectacled and quite ugly, standing on a hanging platform, she manipulates waves of floating gauze with poles, and somber, active, invisible, like a hornet in a flower, churns about herself a protean orchid of light and material that swirls, rises, flares, roars, turns, floats, changes shape like clay in a potter’s hands, twisted in the air under the emblem of the torch and headdress.” (Jean Cocteau, Souvenir Portraits, trans. Jesse Browner. New York: Paragon House, 1990.)