A Temple of Texts: Essays

by William H. Gass

  And through the empty corridors of the blood the ivy will make its way, leaf by leaf on its long tendrils, like nuns who lead themselves along a single rope and pilgrimage to the dead heart, whose doors are lightly ajar. [“The Worpswede Diary,” from Diaries of a Young Poet, trans. Edward Snow and Michael Winkler. W. W. Norton, 1997.]

  Enter Dante Gabriel Rossetti like a smell. Enter Edgar Allan Poe. Rilke writes a requiem for Clara to address to this friend, Gretel, who, the poem says, has had a brother and a sister die before her so that she might know in advance what her own dying would be like. This is—I think—a novel explanation. The poem begins:

  In the last hour the world was made richer by a wreath.

  A while ago it was a few leaves. I wove them:

  and now this ivy is particularly heavy,

  and as full of dark as if it had drunk

  out of my things their future nights.

  I am fearful of my next night

  alone with this wreath that I wove

  not realizing that something happens

  when the tendrils wind themselves around the hoop;

  needing to understand one thing;

  that something can cease to be.

  And the wreath breaks into Gretel’s coffin, creeps into her corpse, crawls through her emptied veins toward her heart, as if it wished to justify my definition of decadence. Life is a dream, the poem not very originally reminds her, but the rest of that short line is Rilke marching to his own theme: Life is a dream, but we wake from it elsewhere. Moreover, Gretel is firmly admonished:

  Your death was already old

  when your life began;

  therefore he attacked it,

  lest it outlive him.

  In the German, her life is an “it” (es), her death a “he” (er).

  Being outlived is one reason for the maliciousness of ghosts, and often their only way of surviving is to hang on to some fragment of the living like a barnacle to a ship bottom. “You know,” Ruskin wonders, “if there are such things as souls, and if any of them haunt places where they have been hurt, there must be many about us, just now, displeased enough.” Christine Brahe, as one who haunts, is rejuvenated by the gasps she can cause, by the recognition that in some way she remains in the frame of life. You will remember me, like it or not. You will see me, hear me, feel me against your will; your awe, fright, guilt, astonishment will prove I’ve made my mark and am in the real world still. The poem makes Clara say:

  I am lost in thoughts I’ve never entertained,

  although wondrous things stand there

  that I must have somehow seen.

  ENTER a Day Dead for a Long Time

  Let us remember May 31, 1578, when a peasant digging for pozzolano, or volcanic sand, slipped through a sudden subsidence of the earth into the catacombs.

  Rome was amazed when these passages were rediscovered. Since the days of the Apostles, Christians had put not just their graves but their graveyards underground to save the bones of their families from the hostilities of persecuting mobs. The living said Mass there, and delivered homilies in the close dark halls, scratched words on walls, and painted faces and figures on the coffins that torches would disclose. Though the living often prayed that those whose death was now behind them would be forgiven their sins, equally often they directed a “remember me” to one deceased: “Pray that we may be saved,” they begged. Even a dead infant was considered to be “over there” and in a position to intercede. “Anatolius, our first-born, ours for a little while, pray for us,” one such petition began.

  Raising the dead for such purposes has not always been regarded a difficult thing. Robert Graves has written:

  To bring the dead to life

  Is no great magic.

  Few are wholly dead:

  Blow on a dead man’s embers

  And a live flame will start.

  Over there, yet in a position to intercede … but not much comfort would mom and dad receive if their child were a boy like Peter Jaffé, who used Rilke’s words to speak to them of loneliness and loss instead of forgiveness, and insisted that their parental love was a gaudy mockery—in short, to say what no child would have been allowed the words for while alive, and still so young, and still a victim.

  What a good thing, then, to be a ghost, to say what you dared not say in daylight, to order acts of vengeance on your own behalf, to urge the merely physical to follow you even to the precipitous edge of a castle’s battlements, or, at least, to trouble the conscience of a lover who had not mourned for you sufficiently or felt sadness to your satisfaction.

  ENTER Erik and a Parade of Images

  At Urnekloster, as was the custom in castles of that time and place, there was a gallery set aside for a lineup of ancestors: A regal row of rogues, it often was, and it meant as much not to be as to be there. For some painters, this bit of family pride provided a paltry livelihood because not all black sheep could be banished and have the household still pretend to a flock. Malte, increasingly curious about Christine Brahe and her appointment in the hierarchy, leaves a sleepless night to fret his bedclothes while he climbs the stairs with a tapered light that flickers with apprehension. In Rilke, space is as palpable as perfume and can cling too—for instance, like a collar or a sleeve. Now the deep corridor comes toward him; he feels the windows pressing against him as they must be pressing against the night, so he elevates his candle on the side opposite where the paintings hang in a single rank, awaiting review. Rilke’s poetic animism is rarely more evident than in passages like this one, for now the faces observe him with a fixity that demonstrates their interest in him, not with a stare that’s the result of the implacable settlement of paint.

  Perhaps the ghost of a king to come has had the living king’s portrait painted so that the ghost will have a place to inhabit in its afterlife, where it may be visited as one visits grandmother on high holidays, and where a conscience can be pricked by a stern look that perhaps it has waited generations to inflict.

  Malte’s intention was to watch for women only, but the gentlemen in their frames jostle the candle’s shadows for position. Hair, cheeks, eyes slide by as slowly as scenes from a departing train. Until the children. The candle is passed before them like a priest’s blessing, but that is how this reader imagines it, since the reader has been brought there, too, just as the audience is on guard at the battlements, and sees the shape of the king, huge in his armor, hoarse because the director demands it, stalk slowly toward Horatio, who is shrunken with surprise. Are these also ghosts then, these renderings of past pretensions? Unlike a figure that leaves an actual indentation of its form in any light that offers itself—any light a camera is poised to gather—these portraits have traveled through the thoughtful eyes of artists, layer by layer in their composition, and not in an instant, but over time, so that something more may be expected of them than mere nose and mustache can manage. But ghostliness? Are they uneasy, too, these wives of kings and paragons of doubtful virtue who dare to parade their laces and their braids before the course of history?

  A little girl has forgotten the pert bird standing on her palm. And the small dog seated at another’s feet is being ignored, along with the color of its ears. A ball, like an apple, lies nearby, incapable of roll. Though they are not yet ladies, they are waiting, waiting in their dresses, waiting … but not for buses.

  Then, that abruptly, he bumps into Erik.

  Mind your light, Erik whispers.

  This is a Disney world, where teapots talk and candles dance; but it is also where yet another female relative, primping like a princess before her mirror, amply lit on both flanks, has her filmy gown ignite and consume her while her reflection remains unburned and ready for the ball to begin. You here? Malte exclaims, wondering whether their encounter is a good or evil omen. The candle flame wavers to the music of his mind. Erik laughs. Then tells him that the woman he seeks, her portrait, is not here, but another floor up, in the attic—probably packed away—and that Erik
and Christine are looking for it.

  This Erik is a cousin Malte’s age, who might have become his friend, for they shared melancholy looks like notes in school, and had seen Christine Brahe step weightlessly across the dining room together. Erik, Rilke tells us, was based on a childhood chum, Egon von Rilke, and was therefore given Egon’s squint, small neck, long chin, and early death. Egon was awarded an Orphic sonnet, no doubt on account of the shortness of his life, always, for Rilke, an odd plus. Odd here because Egon’s stand-in is not nicely treated by the text, and is given the name of a historically (1722–1756) ill-fated monarchist and military man who was executed for his part in a plot to extend the powers of the king,

  In the sonnet (part 2, number 8), however, Egon is honored in the culminating line as someone who understood the estrangement of the poet and his playmates from our grim run-of-the-mill grown-up world. The emblem seen to be suitable for his fate is, as it often is in Rilke, the ball—round, rolling, bounding—which establishes a relation of pitch and catch that’s cooperative, connecting, and distant at the same time. Though what happens when you fail to catch it?

  You, rare playmates from a childhood far away,

  in the city’s scattered parks we played.

  Shyly we discovered one another,

  and like the lamb with the speaking banner, spoke without speech. Our happiness

  belonged to no one, like a sweet we shared,

  but how it melted among the pressing throng,

  and from the anxieties of a long year.

  Carriage wheels rolled indifferently around us,

  houses embraced us, their hugs firm but false.

  What knew us as we knew us from that unreal realm?

  Nothing. Only the balls. Their glorious roundings.

  Not even other children … But sometimes one,

  one frail and failing, stepped under the descending ball.

  In memoriam Egon von Rilke

  What do children know that we now know no longer? What makes them unreachable, except by Lewis Carrolls? They know that everything is alive, will remain alive in one realm or another, both stay and alter like a rhyme. When our toys dance while we sleep, it is merely playful romance; when the wind kisses their cheeks, they may blush at its advance.

  How had Erik come to know that Malte was in the gallery? How, for that matter, had he come to know Christine Brahe—to be, as it were, in cahoots with her—so chummy they had become search partners? After the fact, we might imagine that it was because Erik was half a ghost already, near to his own death, and practicing the art, but Malte cannot have had such a premonition.

  Erik blows out the candle. Giggling, he hangs on Malte’s arm. Malte protests the darkness while trying to disengage. Erik hisses. A spray of spit wets Malte’s ear. Shall I tell you? He giggles again. I brought her a mirror, a gazing-glass. Because she has no portrait here. Now he punches the muscle of Malte’s upper arm. But she wasn’t in it.

  Malte remembers, from a narrator’s distance, that Erik Brahe was sitting for his portrait at that time in a suit of velvet heliotrope. And he wonders if the painter knew that his subject might die before he was done, or patiently went ahead, his concentration on catching the squint in the right light. Then (in a passage protected by parentheses) Malte wonders whether, when the portrait is at last in line, visitors will confuse this small youthful Erik with the larger older one who was executed for serving too well the interests of an eighteenth-century Danish king.

  ENTER Ghost

  As an afterthought. Count Wolf von Kalckreuth was a nineteen-year-old nobleman who shot himself (for love, according to one biographer, because the failures of his art broke his heart, according to another) while in military service in 1906. Rilke had heard about the case from his friend Anton Kippenberg, who had published Kalckreuth’s poems and translations of Baudelaire at the Insel Verlag. Almost immediately following Rilke’s completion of the greatest of his requiems, that for Paula Modersohn-Becker, he embarked upon another. Like the one for Peter Jaffé, it would be as detached as Paula’s anonymously titled “Requiem for a Friend” was personal, although the mode of address and some of the poem’s tone would be carried over from hers. Moreover, they would form a polite pair while filling a little book to be called, simply, Requiem, as if there were only one.

  Strictly speaking, this count does not deserve a requiem, because he deliberately killed himself. Ophelia should receive no music, says the priest in charge of her burial. “We should profane the service of the dead / To sing a requiem and such rest to her / As to peace-parted souls.” Her death, the priest thinks, was doubtful—whether by accident, from madness or intent, who knew? And When in Doubt, Deny Service: That seems to be his motto. But Rilke is not a priest, not even Catholic any longer, and has more things on his mind than orthodoxy. He has his own career on his conscience, a place where he finds both guilt and pride; for he has succeeded many times in turning suffering to good account, and he has sacrificed many on the altar of his art, and given up much of what he could have had in his own life lest it flower too fully—captivate, oblige, consume, and thus destroy him: his own wife, his own child, numerous lovers—indeed, every attachment—many pleasures of the palate and the flesh, the condition of being a person—a lawyer or a teacher, a loving husband, a dutiful son—rather than a poet. Wolf, the count, has relinquished life because, like a netted fish, he could not escape human relationships, hence failed his art; but this point of view, we must remember, is pure conjecture.

  The official excuse for a requiem is the peace it is supposed to bring to the soul of the deceased, but in many cases its reason may be the relief it brings to those who grieve. The tragic choice the count could not successfully make still haunts the poet who made it.

  Is it true I really never saw you? My heart

  is heavy with you the way reluctance makes hard

  a difficult beginning.

  The requiem recapitulates common themes; its objectivity is only methodological. Death is a state like living is, not merely an end of life. It is properly “being dead,” as some are in love. The young count clearly expected to go to a better “world”; however, where he went is simply different: He hoped to possess what he wanted more purely in a place where wants are unknown and possession is impossible; he believed he would finally find himself in the picture, instead of standing outside it like a gallerygoer; he would approach his beloved from within, and pass lightly through everything, perhaps as the ghost of Christine Brahe does. The count was too impatient; he should have waited until the hardness of life was broken by its own weight, and new uses for suffering could be found. Instead, he destroyed when there was so much to build; some woman or workman might have saved him, and had either love or labor succeeded in arresting his fatal course, then he would have read the words he had been engraving in himself since childhood—as Peter Jaffé maintained:

  I impressed so many names upon myself

  that cow, dog, elephant, the whole ark

  might have filed by without remark

  as far as zebra.

  He would have found a space for feeling, experienced that saintly gaze that accepts everything and desires nothing, and, had he lived, he would have achieved his own chosen, homegrown, fully ripe conclusion.

  Most poets fail (and Rilke means his former self and practice) because they bewail their state instead of describing it; they evaluate their feelings instead of forming them; and although they believe their joys and sorrows should be known, they are unable or unwilling to transform their consciousness into an adequate poetic language, they fail to make of their poem “a thing” that can sit in the world as fat and steamy as a teapot, or the way, in Peter Jaffe’s poem, the apple simply lay.

  If the young man’s inadequacies were as numerous as his requiem suggests, we should not need to seek reasons for his suicide. How could he have called himself a poet and continued to live? Of course, he could have been sensible, given his probable level of talent, and have chosen
to be a count instead.

  The count is forgiven his impetuosity and the inflation of his feelings, but, as always, his requiem is scarcely his, nor is the famous summing up: “Who speaks of victory. To endure is everything.” Or, as I sometimes prefer to think: “To survive sums it up.”

  ENTER a Lineup of Ghosts

  “List, list, O, list! If thou didst ever thy dear father love—”

  Rilke has heard them, the Ophelias, the women who loved in vain, who perished in puberty, pure as an unbitten peach, women who went mad, young men who murdered themselves, children who simply succumbed: Gretel, Peter Jaffé, the sister he never knew, his boyhood chum, Egon von Rilke, as well as this young count whose cause he has taken up, and then Wera Ouckama Knoop, the young dancer who would die of the same leukemia that would kill Rilke later, and to whom he dedicated the Sonnets to Orpheus (yet another requiem in intention, if not in form), and of course Paula Modersohn-Becker, who was, after all, only thirty-one when an embolism took her. To listen, the “First Elegy” tells us, is a moral requirement, and the elegy asks them what they want, these voices, and the answer is, in effect, a requiem Mass.