A Temple of Texts: Essays

by William H. Gass

  Voices, voices. Listen, Oh, my heart, as hitherto only

  holy men have listened, listened so the mighty call

  lifted them straight from the ground, although they kneeled on,

  these magicians—and paid no attention,

  they so utterly listened. Not that you could bear

  the voice of God—far from it. But hear the flowing

  melancholy murmur which is shaped out of silence

  wafting toward you now from those youthfully dead.

  Whenever you entered a church in Rome or in Naples,

  did not their fate speak insistently to you?

  or a lofty inscription impose itself upon you

  as lately the tablet in Santa Maria Formosa?

  What do they want of me? that I should gently cleanse them

  of the tarnish of despair which hinders a little,

  sometimes, the pure passage of their spirits.

  The Reformation may have made intercession impossible, but these ghosts don’t know it. They howl, they complain, they argue, they dictate, they command, some merely prowl, but most of them seem to think this will cause a living being to do their bidding. However, there are not a few wraiths who are creations of the pen, for Gretel and Wera and Wolf, as far as we know, are unaware of their ghostly status, and never immaterially appear. They have already received, or did not need, their requiem. Count C.W. is part invention, part ghost, part joke. Who knows if Christine has a thought in her head, but merely floats along as witless as the air in a balloon? And the chamberlain’s bellowing ghost is Death itself. Fully sprung from the body of life.

  Rilke’s requiems are rarely pure in intention. They give the poet an opportunity to praise, but also a chance to complain on behalf of the deceased, or even to berate the deceased on behalf of Art; because it is clear that the principal reason for living is one’s work, which should not allow itself to be interrupted either by bourgeois institutions or human suffering, the demands of family, or the enticements of pleasure and power.

  If Death itself were to die, would it have a ghost, and would the ghost of Death visit the dead in the guise of someone alive, if only to fright them from any temptation to return?

  From Pindar to Pope, from Archilochus to Larkin, eulogies have been made of both encomium and invective. In Rilke’s case, complaint tends to exceed praise, but the mixture is the result of his belief that not only are life and death intertwined but guilt and goodness as well—shame and pride—so that, as Simonides saw, pure praise (and praise was an essential part of the poet’s business) was delivered despite reservations, in their—through their—teeth, because human heights are fashioned almost solely from shortcomings. Bruno Gentili’s description of Simonides’ practice as involving “a poetics of tempered praise” seems apt.

  The way Rilke writes about death suggests that there are three kinds of demise. A moment ago, I said that the chamberlain’s ghost was Death itself. That was carelessly put: It was only his death, though finally and fully realized. It was not pure impersonal death—its distilment, the famous “a blue residue in a cup without a saucer”—any more than a single Mephistopheles or Beelzebub makes up the whole of Satan, who has many names and forms. Both of these meanings (death in the abstract and someone’s death in particular) are different from the state or condition of being dead, which Rilke says we should recognize as a matter of degree in a continuum that includes life like a color, for as different as blue is from red, they are companions in the same spectrum—indeed, life and death are mingles of each other. Accidents and errors sometimes prevent it, but one should die one’s life and live one’s death. The “First Elegy” is eloquent on this point:

  True, it is strange not to live on the earth any longer,

  no longer to follow the folkways you’ve only just learned,

  not to interpret roses and other promising things

  in terms of a rich human future;

  then to be no longer the one who once lay

  in ceaselessly anxious hands, and to have to put aside

  even one’s proper name like a broken toy.

  Strange, to wish one’s wishes no longer. Strange,

  to see all that was one time related, fluttering now

  loosely in space. And it’s difficult to be dead.

  There’s all that catching up to do before one feels

  just a little eternity. All of the living, though,

  mistakenly make these knife-like distinctions.

  Often Angels (it’s said) cannot say if they linger

  with the living or the dead. The eternal current

  carries every age through either realm

  forever, and drowns their voices with its roar in both.

  ENTER the Ghost of a House

  When the Schulins’ manor house burned down, the fire was confined to its central rooms. Two wings of the building survived, and the Schulins divided themselves in order to live in the uncharred portions. Their passion for entertaining guests remained undiminished, but it sometimes meant, if company arrived on a foggy evening, or while it was snowing heavily, and if they failed to remember that the core of the mansion had been consumed, they would drive their carriages to a front door no longer there to respond to rapping or swing open in welcome. Neither of Malte’s parents could get used to the main building’s absence, and would call themselves ghosts to be knocking at a door that wasn’t there, or stubbornly affirm the house’s former presence behind a concealing scrim of flakes. Malte, a child when these occasions occurred, was convinced that the old place was still nearby, so he would slip away through billows of party skirts (like a dog, he says), though, in this singular case he was caught by one of the family’s many sisters and restored to the group, where, moments later, the odor happened.

  Count Schulin was in mid-anecdote when the countess apparently said something that stopped him long enough to issue a condescending pooh-pooh; but the countess hissed like a librarian in reply, and everyone listened so hard in the silence that followed that the furniture grew larger, and everyone looked about so intently, the family silver shone without uncertainty. One of the many sisters explained—“my mother smells with her ears”—herself becoming all nose. Then the company began to sniff hither and thither the way we do when trying to follow a scent with our scanty equipment. The reader, from a superior stage of development, will imagine that smoke from the fire, still caught in a curtain or soaked up by soft wood or lingering in upholstery inadequately cleaned, has escaped as one would expect it to do, to fill the mind with an unwelcome remembrance of the tragedy; however, young Malte, observing the grown-ups flummoxed by something invisible, begins to fear its power to bend a roomful of busy talkers to its will.

  Malte’s apprehensions increase—Is he the source? Will it burst from him? Will all noses point in his direction?—and when he observes his mother as if waiting to embrace him, he goes to her trembling side, though others twit him for it. There, mother and son remain to comfort each other until the ghost of the house finally returns whence it came.

  Requiem aeternam dona eis, Domine

  When Rilke met Clara Westhoff and Paula Becker at the Worpswede art colony in 1900, he was in emotional flight from his surrogate mother and former lover, Lou Andreas-Salomé, who had regretfully but with relief freed herself from the boyish demands and tantrums of her poet. Rilke immediately saw Clara and Paula as shapes in a painting—two women in white, he said—and stepped into the middle of their friendship, courting them with thoughtful attentions, observations, and beautifully crafted notes and letters—methods of seduction of which he was a master. He apparently fancied the painter, Paula, more than the sculptor, Clara, although the fact that the latter had been a student of Rodin piqued his interest.

  Rilke appears, however, to have been indifferent to Paula’s art, while she was already drawn to a painter, Otto Modersohn, who admired her work and won her hand. I suspect that Paula Becker at first saw marriage as a refuge. Her own family as well
as Modersohn’s were pushing her in that direction; otherwise, what could she do to earn a living but teach schoolchildren or become a governess?

  Rilke sought stability, too, but he could no more come to rest than a robber on the run. After a year of penurious confinement in a romantic cottage, he used his Rodin commission as an excuse to move to Paris, and although he is initially miserable there, he hangs on, if not for dear, then for dire life.

  A young man, far from fully formed, he had made a series of major mistakes. He had married Clara Westhoff, thereby obligating himself as a husband; he had agreed to have a child, thereby obligating himself as a father; he had, in doing so, deflected his wife from her work as well as inhibiting his own, wrapping them both in a bourgeois cottage romance—a mutually enhancing narcissism that scarcely survived the first months of the nesting routines customary for the recently married.

  Then Paula Becker, perhaps to save herself from the life of a governess, married Otto Modersohn, in the belief that he would help her further her art. Instead, she obligated herself as a wife. Nevertheless, she refused to have his child, refused to be drawn into that world where women were livestock, bore calves, and moo’d o’er the lea. Twice she left her husband (and his importuning family) for Paris, painted in increasing privacy, and slowly altered Rilke’s initially indifferent estimation of her work into one of admiration.

  This was, however, only Rilke’s view of the situation, because, as Eric Torgersen points out in his wisely balanced account, Dear Friend: Rainer Maria Rilke and Paula Modersohn-Becker, Paula had always wanted children and had remembered with some longing the comforts of her own middle-class family. It was her poet friend who had a horror of it. What she no doubt thought possible, when she did decide to have a child, was the presence of household help sufficient to free her for her art. Still, she put off this ultimate acceptance of her marriage, dropping a heavy anchor outside that harbor.

  So Rilke was encouraging, supportive, kept Paula company in Paris during her runaway days, sat for that openmouthed, olive-eyed portrait she painted of him; but the moment she seemed seduced to his side, Rilke grew as cool as Mama Bear’s porridge. Finally, Modersohn and Modersohn’s family put such pressure on her to return that she did fall back into their hopeful arms. And filled them with a girl.

  We do not know the details of Christine Brahe’s death, but Paula Modersohn-Becker’s was more melodramatic than any soap, for she dies only minutes after doctors have released her from two weeks of recuperation and bedrest. She stands; she combs her hair before a mirror (not unlike the mirror she used to paint her self-portraits); she sits in a chair to cuddle her child, and dies of an embolism with the baby still in her lap. Schade—what a shame—she says.

  ENTER Ghost

  Purely as a presence the poet feels her. She brushes a shoulder, bumps a table or a chair, not because she’s taken on awkwardness in the other world, but just to let him know: She’s there. Like the odor of burned wood, like the brisk touch of an unexplained breeze, like a gray glint of armor in those moments before dawn. The poet says: “I’ve had my dead, and I let them go / and was surprised to see them so consoled, / so soon at home in being dead, so right, / so unlike their reputation.” They became—these other, different dead—much like the Eurydice of myth and of that other poem, “Orpheus, Eurydice, Hermes,” which retells the time Orpheus, accompanied by Hermes (his safe conduct), went into the Underworld to retrieve his wife; and did so, but on the return journey, with the gates in sight, had to look back, contrary to Pluto’s injunction; had to see if she were happily behind him, eager as he was, his impatient strides gulping down the journey. Lot’s wife looked back and never knew the consternation that befell her. Orpheus also never saw how plump Eurydice was, as preoccupied as a pregnant woman, ripe as the ripest fruit, and so full of her own death there was no room for recognition. Who? Eurydice vaguely wonders when Hermes tells her; he … he has turned around. Who?

  “I thought you were farther off.” Paula’s presence is contrary to Rilke’s own consoling myth: that death is another form of existence, a transformation of the self into a sort of soul, satisfied simply to be, without wants and worries, all relations removed, dare we say, a Ding an sich. It’s wrong, the poet complains,

  that you are giving up some of your eternity

  to return here, friend, here again …

  And then, that it should be she, of all those dead the least likely to be still troubled because, the implication is, while alive she had transformed herself from a woman into an artist, and therefore should find the shift from the experience of life to the experience of death rather easier than most. Worse … she comes bearing a petition …

  that from the circle that received you,

  the stubborn pull of some past discontent

  has dragged you back into calibrated time—

  this starts me from sleep like the break-in of a thief.

  If I could say that you only come out of your

  abundant kindness, that because you are so sure

  and self-possessed you can wander childlike here and there,

  unaware of any risk from harmful places—

  but no: you are beseeching.

  “Was bittest du?” Literally: “What pleases you?” The tone is flat and challenging. What do you want?

  She might have arrived like Hamlet’s father’s ghost to chide the poet, to indict or blame:

  A grim rebuke, borne to me by your ghost,

  might weigh on me at night when I withdraw

  into my lungs, my guts,

  into the emptied chambers of my heart—

  such a protest would not be as grotesque

  as this pleading is. What do you want?

  The sarcasms that follow contain some of the most powerful lines in the poem. The poet guesses that Paula has returned in search of the ordinary things of life she lost—female things—since she apparently chose Kinder, Kirche, und Küchen, but also drearily conventional things: “oh to have seen Tuscany just once before I died!” Or visited India or read the walls of the Alhambra.

  Tell me, should I travel? Did you leave some

  Thing behind that runs after you now in vain?

  Should I set out for a country you never saw,

  though it was the other half of all you knew?

  I shall sail its rivers, search its earth,

  and ask about its oldest customs, speaking with women in their doorways,

  and watching when they call their children home.

  I shall see how they wrap their world around them

  when they work the fields and graze their meadows.

  I shall ask to be brought before their king,

  and bribe the priests to take me to their temple,

  so I may prostrate myself before their most powerful idol,

  and have them leave me there, after latching the gates.

  Does she regret not having had a peasant woman’s life of nurse-maiding, tending, of toil and subjugation, with superstition her sole solace? The poem then drops its tone of scorn and shifts in the direction of praise.

  I shall have gardeners recite to me

  the many flowers so I can bring back

  in the pots of their proper names

  some trace of a hundred scents.

  And I shall buy fruits, too, fruits in whose juice

  a country’s earth will rise to join the sky.

  For fruit you understand …

  Becker learned from Gauguin, van Gogh, and Cézanne. The hues she chose were earth tones, those of clay, the blown rose, euonymus leaves, apple and pear, bananas both ripe and green. She preferred to give women Fayum faces—supremely sad-eyed—and paint peasants, ungainly nudes, pottery jugs and plates of fruit, her pre- and pregnant self. Only thirty-one when she died, she was already painting with power and originality. Schade. Shame. Indeed.

  The poem remembers those still lifes and impersonal nudes, and celebrates Paula’s success with art’s powers of transforma
tion: that process that is its essence, and whose very name—Wandlung—is Rilke’s talisman.

  Peeling from your clothes, you brought

  your nakedness before a mirror,

  and waded in up to your gaze …

  The mirror, as we know, alters all our visible relations while leaving us under the impression that nothing has changed. This transformation represents, when Paula wades into the glass, her achievement of an artistic self; it is not now merely a woman who wields the brush, any more than the Cézanne who signed his paintings was simply a man. So when she paints herself, model, paint, and canvas become a single new thing. Who died, then, when Paula Becker died—woman or artist, giver of life or creator of being?—tell us, that the poet may know which ghost has breathed into his ear, tugged upon his sleeve, and made him start as though he’s heard a thief.

  Come into the candlelight. I’m not afraid

  to look the dead in the face. When they come back

  they have a right, as much as other things,

  to the hospitality of our gaze.

  As much praise as the poem contains, as much of Paula’s struggle as the poem struggles to understand, its conclusion is, nevertheless, inescapable.

  And so you died as women used to die,

  died in your own warm house,

  died the old-fashioned death of childbearing women

  who try to close themselves again but cannot do it,

  because that darkness that they also bore

  comes back again and bullies its way in like a callous lover.

  Incestuous rape is the shadow that this sentence casts. And the poem now turns plainly mean. The ghost is accused of making petty complaints about her mourning rites.

  Even so, shouldn’t someone have rounded up