Ingeborg, beautiful, much loved, a lady bountiful—we need know, at this moment, no more—has died, and it is now the Thursday following her funeral. Malte’s mother, who was a mourner and a witness, tells her son the story, what Maman saw: She was taking tea on the terrace, which gave her a view through the trees of the family vault. The table’s setting was designed to disguise Ingeborg’s absence, her place divided among the rest like property at the direction of a will. Malte’s aunt, Abelone, was pouring. It had been Ingeborg’s habit to bring the mail out of the house every day at this time, although she hadn’t been able to do so during the final weeks of her illness. Nevertheless, at that instant, as expectation nearly placed her name on Malte’s mother’s lips—“Wo bleibt nur …” The family dog, who always ran to meet her, bolted from beneath the table toward where she should be, if she were coming, mail in hand as she always did, twice turning his head quizzically from side to side before rushing headlong till he reached where she should have been, if she’d been coming, jumping around and up near her face to lick it where it would have been bent when she leaned down to pet him, if her face had been there for him; the dog leaping and licking so exactly the way he always did that the mother felt Ingeborg must have been there, inside the circle of his loving, until Cavalier, as he was called, spun, howling, and collapsed like a balloon that’s suddenly lost its air.
The dog is borne from the stage in Malte’s father’s arms. There are no drums, only the sound of the father’s footsteps on the terrace.
ENTER Ghost
What else are we to call this count in eighteenth-century dress whom Rilke has imagined is sitting on the other side of the fireplace in a corner of his castle room at Berg am Irchel, and who dictates ten poems, each wholly unexpected, during a fortnight at the end of November 1920, and then completes the cycle with eleven more in early February of the following year? Colonel Richard Ziegler and his wife have lent Rilke their château for the winter, and his friend Nanny Wunderly has found him a housekeeper. The poet shall enjoy a solitude like that he’d had at Duino eight years before. Indeed, if he does not complete the Elegies now, what will be his excuse?
Whenever Rilke installs himself in a new lodging, he looks at once at the library, but in this instance the bookcases are bare. Well … bare but not bare: A dog-eared Stendhal, a lone Goethe are there (according to one biographer; a Molière and two Stendhals, according to another; while Goethe, Molière, and Stendhal is the opinion of a third). Rilke will have to create a few volumes himself in order to have something to read, so he imagines an author, one Count C.W., also thought of as a former owner of the Schloss, now deceased, whose style hovers between very clumsy and much too clever, and whose wishes Rilke obeys with an immediacy Hamlet might have employed to his profit. Yet, like Hamlet, Rilke obeys only to put off his obligation to those elegies as yet unwritten, hanging about, waiting for their words. As was his wont, he writes too many long letters. These letters were composed, and the words placed upon the page, with a pastry cook’s care, never to be eaten or otherwise disturbed, but to sit in a window and advertise the baker’s wares. With difficulty, he researches the history of the house he has been given, as also was his habit. He works on his translations of Paul Valéry and writes a brief preface in French for a book of narrative drawings by the twelve-year-old son of his present lover, Baladine Klossowska. The book is called Mitsou and we shall know its artist by the name of Balthus.
Of all abstractions, the Truth is the most ghostly and the most frequent cause of guilt. One evening, while Rilke was undressing (he told his publisher, Anton Kippenberg), verses began arriving, though they were never the first of anything final: “Mountains rest, splendored by stars;—though time sparkles in them too.”
The count, as Rilke remembers him in correspondence, begins as an amusing fiction, soon is guiding the poet’s pen, and finally feels personally present to him—as it were, growing more fully a ghost through each account of the case. Perhaps “Publish me!” is this ghost’s command. So Rilke insists on his charade and never issues the poems under his own name, since they are not only uncharacteristic; they are so clearly sad substitutes for the remaining elegies that didn’t arrive. There is one exception to this reluctance: he permits the poem “Karnak” to be published, though anonymously, perhaps because it is too much his. The poem begins with an arresting positioning of its phrases.
In Karnak. We were driven,
Helen and I, dinner dispatched.
The dragoman pulled up at the Pylon—
never was I so in the middle
of the moon’s world.
The remains of Egypt’s ancient past both measure and dismiss our shallow, fleeting present. This poem shoulders the others aside, and when the count begins offering Rilke lines in Italian, he is summarily dismissed.
ENTER Ghost
The death that enveloped and became Chamberlain Christoph Detlev Brigge grew so huge, it was feared that wings would have to be added to the manor house to hold it. His death required that it be carried from room to room by wearying servants until there remained but one place it had not lain and bellowed like an angry animal. This was, as tradition insisted, where the chamberlain’s mother had died twenty-three years before, and it had been reverentially left intact and untouched all the seasons since. Finally, the chamberlain’s death, refusing—outgrowing—every bed, lay in the middle of the floor, bulging between the buttons of a dark blue rumpled uniform. For ten weeks, it stayed there, waxing slowly, demanding to see others who were more thoroughly dead than it was, and calling for its own doom. Imagine: a death demanding to die. The roaring of the chamberlain’s death frightened the dogs that at first had howled in concert with its groaning. The noise seemed, in the village, like thunder, and pregnant women, hearing it as if it were a growl in their own stomachs, hid in remote rooms, fearing for their infants and themselves, wordless as statuary, their hands resting upon a double swelling, their features full of motherhood’s melancholy and its mysterious beauty.
ENTER Ghost
It is a poem, this ghost, that puts the words of a requiem into the voice of an eight-year-old boy, Peter Jaffé, who died in Munich in October of 1915, a boy who would consequently have to have at least a shred of still-embodied spirit; for if a detached hand can come out of a wall like a mouse, why can’t a disembodied mouth manage a few lines?
Requiem on the Death of a Boy
I impressed so many names upon myself
that cow, dog, elephant, the whole ark
might have filed by without remark
as far as zebra. And … for what?
The element that bears me now
rises like a tidal line
above all that. What comfort can there be
in knowing I existed there in me
but never got so far inside my face
to form a feature?
And these uninitiated hands—
The father, Edgar Jaffé, a political economist, played a significant role in the movement for peace that came to realization in 1918. He would later serve as Bavarian minister of finance. Yet this “Requiem on the Death of a Boy” would scarcely provide the parents solace. As in all of Rilke’s requiems, a bitterness resides there, turning farewell into an accusation, an accusation so unfair to the Jaffés, whom Rilke knew only remotely—politically, not socially—that one has to conclude another speaker really speaks it—again a ghost behind a ghost—namely, the poet’s own youthful self addressing another pair of parents, Phia and Josef Rilke.
You sometimes said: I glimpse a hint of promise …
I promised, yes—but what I promised you
was never overwhelming.
I would huddle near our house for hours
watching the skylark scale the sky.
If only I could have risen with my gazing,
had a look that lifted me right up there!
I held no one dear. Affection was anguish—
you understand—
the
n I was not we,
but bigger than a man,
I was the only risk I ran,
the seed of my own anxiety.
Rilke had been a replacement for a female infant who had died a year before his birth. For many years, he was dressed as a girl called René, or Sophie sometimes, when she was good, and played with like a doll to please her mother, only to be abruptly sent away to military school to satisfy his military-minded father, and deprived of childhood altogether, according to Rilke’s frequently voiced complaint. No wonder Rilke saw himself sometimes as the ghost of a girl.
A tiny seed. Let it sail down the street;
let it whirl in the wind. I give it gladly.
That we were all so cozy together
I never believed. On my honor.
You talked, you laughed, yet none of you
were in your language or your laughter. No.
How you all shillied, how you shallied
as neither sugar bowl nor wine glass would.
The apple lay. How happy it would make me
to hold a firm full apple in my hand,
or the table’s edge where breakfast stood
in its sturdy bowls—they pacified the year.
And my playthings were sometimes good to me.
They could almost be as other things were,
as staunch, though more excitable.
In terms of unwavering watchfulness they stood
somewhere between my hat and me.
There was a wooden horse, there was a cock,
there was a doll with one leg;
I have done a lot for them.
I shrank the sky when they wanted it
because I understood how alone
a wooden horse is. How one can make
a horse of wood into something possibly great
by painting it and pulling it by a string
over the bumps of a real road.
Why was it not a lie to call this stick a horse?
Because one felt oneself grow maned and muscular,
fourfooted, with glistening flanks,
so one might run to manhood as in a race?
But wasn’t there wood in oneself as well?
Didn’t one quietly grow hard for its sake,
and go about with a diminished face?
As a ghost-gowned girlboy, René would visit his mother in her room; but her false piety, as he saw it, her hypocrisy and dissembling; her selfish manipulations, fondling him and ignoring him by turns; her dissatisfactions with her life, so frequently expressed; her social pretentiousness, her petty mind: that is what of his mother, he remembered. In the costume of another sex, he saw another self, as Malte saw another self in the mirror of the manor house. The loss of identity, hence his autonomy, was horrifying. Yet the merging of the self with what it saw and felt and knew was a much-sought escape; it sufficed for his mysticism, and effected his salvation.
It would almost seem, each time, that we
swapped selves.
I would murmur when I saw the stream,
and when it murmured I would rush pell mell.
When I saw a ringing, I would be a bell,
and when it rang, I was its reason.
I embraced everything impetuously,
yet everything was everything already,
and made sadder by my company.
Now I am abruptly bid good-by.
Must I relearn my letters, ask anew,
or is my task to tell of you? That troubles me.
The house? I never understood it.
The rooms? There were too many things in business there….
You, mother, do you know who the dog
might really be?
Even that we gathered berries in the woods seems now a strange discovery.
“I am I because my little dog knows me,” Gertrude Stein wrote scornfully, and Rilke frequently agreed that he knew who he was when, as Ulysses was nosed, the dog greeted him; but here he turns that moment of recognition around: The mistress does not know her pet. In his life, memory has so highlighted its many miseries that the thought that he was happy once, and enjoyed familial feelings, seems as odd as an early photograph in which one is wearing a pageboy haircut and golfing knickers.
There must be some dead children
who can come and play with me.
There are always new ones, dying.
Same as me. After a long spell
of lying still and never getting well.
Well. How silly that sounds here.
Does such a thing make sense?
Here, where I am, no one is ill.
Since my sore throat, already so long ago—
Here each of us is like a refilled glass.
Yet who shall drink us I’ve not seen as yet.
Peter Jaffé, the eight-year-old son of Professor Edgar Jaffé, died in Munich in October 1915.
The poem is dated November 13, 1915.
Rilke read this poem frequently during his first lecture tour through Switzerland following the war. In all but one of his requiemlike poems, he preferred to memorialize individuals he scarcely knew. It allowed him more easily to cry out “rest, perturbed spirit” to restless pieces of his own past.
ENTER Ghost
For an interrogation. The first questions usually are: Who are you really? Why are you bothering me? What do you want?
Almost no one asks: How do you know?
There you were, Father, adrowse in your orchard, as you just said, when Claudius poured henbane, fiercely distilled, into an unheeding ear, where, like quicksilver, it sped through your sleeping form and in an instant took away its life. Now, ghost father, I can readily understand how you might have learned you were a cuckold, having lately hung near the royal bed of pleasure like a curtain, or how the story that you’d been stung by a serpent had been featured in the popular press; but how came you to know it was henbane, that it was carried in a vial, and when did you wake and rise and turn and see Claudius steaming with guilt like fresh dung? By your own account, since you and he were without witnesses, you could not have then learned anything, nor could you later have found such shocking facts out, lest you climbed through a window into Claudius’s head and there heard him confess it to himself.
Methinks, Father, you have made this business up, angry as you rightly are over your wife’s betrayal and how eagerly she now takes her plump pleasures from another. So—bad beguiling ghost—begone! The dogs of day do woof!
When Hamlet’s father’s ghost appears upon the battlements; when Christine Brahe floats her form past the dining chairs at Urnekloster as slowly as a sick person; when the chamberlain’s death oozes out of his coat between its buttons; when Count C.W. materializes at Rilke’s fireside to read to him from a yellowed manuscript: How a ghost can bear arms, sport a frock, roar commands, keep a manuscript around so long the pages sour—yes, where is the lung that lets Death bellow so?—are questions poetry is as reluctant to tackle as theology, because, presumably, little Peter Jaffé’s words are as ghostly as Hamlet’s father’s are hollow. It is, in fact, the unsettled soul that must find some countenance to be seen in, some sounds to make itself heard; it must inhabit a body as it once did its own, and make unfamiliar organs groan.
“Mountains rest beneath splendoring stars, but in each of them it’s time that twinkles” was the first sentence of Count C.W.’s dictation. Whose mouth made it, whose larynx shaped the syllables? Surely not the one still rotting in unison with the count’s corpse? How then can Christine Brahe’s borrowed body pass through the wood of a broad door if it is flesh, and if it be immaterial, how can a gown hang where there is no hanger? How can Peter Jaffé say “mütter” without the teeth to make the t’s? Because Christine Brahe’s body is an image, the same as she would be to me in my consciousness if I were attending the birth of her death when the baby split her.
The aged pages from which the ghost reads suggest that the poems were written by the living count and not the dead one, yet
the lines wear incoherence like a winding-sheet.
What is most worrisome to those who have been confronted by ghosts is that it is not merely a leftover bit of life like a stale odor Hamlet or Malte’s father or the reader has encountered, but an altered world where specters may read from spectral pages spectral words, because the door through which the ghost of a dead mother passes must widen the spaces between its molecules in an accommodating way, as immaterial in that moment as a dead king’s armor; because ghostliness is contagious; I am made a phantom, too, when the count, through Rilke’s agency, pours the poem’s words into the porches of my ear. “Never was I so in the middle of the moon’s world.” When the ghost departs, Hamlet is left with obligations from another realm, and in the grip of his father’s dream. How insubstantial does that make him? Yet is his sword now insubstantial, too? When C.W.’s figure fades, Rilke has in hand some problematic poems in place of the remaining elegies he was hoping for—an insufficient and inopportune substitution. If he does not lend them his name, do they remain as ghostly as their author? And how do their whispered words ride toward us on real air?
ENTER Clara
Westhoff. Not a ghost, of course, but the poet’s future wife, and the mother-to-be of his daughter, Ruth. Our stage cannot too long bear the weightlessness of so many specters. It needs a person of real substance to tread upon its boards and push them back aground. It is November 20, 1900, and Rilke is earnestly courting this young sculptor whom he has met at the artists’ colony at Worpswede, at the same time enjoying the attentions of, and attending to, her friend, the painter Paula Becker. Clara has just written him about the death of another friend, and Rilke enters in his diary a report on the contents of her letter.
Clara writes today about a black ivy wreath, and what she recounts is again a work of art. The way she speaks of this heavy black wreath that she took down unsuspectingly from the gable of her house and brought in out of the gray November air and that then became so monstrously earnest in the room, a thing unto itself, suddenly one thing more, and a thing that seems to grow constantly heavier, drinking up as it were all the grief in the air of the room and in the early twilight. And all this shall lie then on the thin wooden coffin of the poor girl who died in the South, in the hands of the sun. The black wreath may cause the coffin to cave in, and then its long tendrils will creep up along the white shroud and grow into the folded hands and grow into the soft, never-loved hair and grow into the heart that, full of congealed blood, has also become black and dulled and in the twilight of the dead girl will scarcely be distinguishable from the heartlike leaves of the ivy….
A Temple of Texts: Essays Page 35