You Must Change Your Life

by Rachel Corbett

  Written in November 1902, “The Panther” was Rilke’s first composition for his breakthrough collection of New Poems, which he often referred to as his “thing-poems.” This sculpturally composed work, deeply bearing the mark of Rodin, was also his first attempt at a kind of alchemy of mediums. It was a radical poetic experiment, “as revolutionary as anything by Eliot or Pound,” wrote John Banville in the New York Review of Books years later. But this one poem did not bring about the artistic transformation that Rilke sought so desperately then.

  As fall turned into winter he ran out of ideas. The wordless days turned to months, and “still nothing has happened,” he said. He continued to see Rodin as a stream rushing in its path, leaving behind the people and facts of his daily life to “lie there like an empty riverbed that he no longer flows through.” But the poet could not stop his creativity from splintering off into dozens of aimless channels, no matter how badly he wanted to “course through one riverbed and become great.”

  Was he too weak? Did he want it too desperately? He had once believed that digging his roots into the ground with a house and a family would render him “more visible, more tangible, more factual.” But while the reality was certainly more concrete, “it was a reality outside me,” he said. It did nothing to help him achieve the existential change “for which I yearn so strongly: To be a real person among real things.”

  THAT FALL, WHILE RILKE was writing “The Panther,” a nineteen-year-old Austrian cadet named Franz Xaver Kappus sat in the shade of a hundred-year-old chestnut tree with a book of poetry. A student at the St. Pölten military academy, Kappus was an aspiring writer disguised in a soldier’s uniform. When he heard about a radical new poet who was modernizing German Romanticism, he picked up the author’s recent collection In Celebration of Myself and settled into the grass.

  Rebelling against the Romantic tradition, Rilke had begun filling his pages with saints, angels and gods, harnessing the potency of religious symbolism, but secularizing it. In one work, a Christ character sleeps with prostitutes and mourns his failure to impregnate Mary Magdalene. Rilke’s irreverence made him a hero among a younger generation. The Austrian writer Stefan Zweig recalled how he and his classmates used to copy Rilke and Nietzsche verses into their textbooks to read while the teacher delivered some “time-worn lecture” about Friedrich Schiller.

  One can imagine that Kappus, not two years younger than Zweig, felt similar awe at discovering Rilke’s disaffected verses for the first time. The cadet became so engrossed in the book that afternoon that he almost failed to notice that one of his favorite teachers, Franz Horaek, had come over. The professor took the book from Kappus’s hands and looked at the cover: “Poems of Rainer Maria Rilke?” He flipped through the pages, glancing at the verses and running a finger along the binding. Then he shook his head and said, “So our pupil René Rilke has become a poet.”

  Horaek explained that he had been chaplain of St. Pölten some fifteen years earlier, when the pale, sickly boy was a student there. He described Rilke as “a quiet, serious, highly endowed boy, who liked to keep to himself.” He had “patiently endured” life at the junior academy until his fourth year, but after he graduated on to the next level of military school, his parents withdrew him. Horaek had not heard any news of him since.

  Kappus could not help but begin lining up the similarities between Rilke and himself. Both poets had come to the academy from Slavic cities in the east, Rilke from Prague and Kappus from the Romanian town of Timioara. They both had lingered at the threshold of military careers that they felt were “entirely contrary” to their nature, as Kappus put it. As he thought about how the two young men had stood on the same soil, worn the same uniform, and shared the same dream, Kappus thought to write a letter to Rilke, the poet in whom he “hoped to find understanding, if in any one.” He told Rilke about their mutual acquaintance Horaek and enclosed a few of his own poems, asking for Rilke’s opinion.

  RILKE WAS HARDLY QUALIFIED to give career advice at that point in his life. In December, he turned in the Rodin monograph, but the measly fee hardly made a difference. He still could not even afford to send friends copies of his books—“I cannot buy them myself,” he admitted at the time. Meanwhile, royalties from previous projects were running thin.

  He and Westhoff spent the holidays in Paris, lonely for their friends and family abroad. Rilke wrote Otto Modersohn a New Year’s letter to soften the tensions with his old friend. He complained about Paris, saying that “the beautiful things there are here do not quite compensate, even with their radiant eternity, for what one must suffer from the cruelty and confusion of the streets and the monstrosity of the gardens, people, and things.” He urged Modersohn to “stick to your country!” The only good thing about Paris was Rodin, he said. “Time flows off him, and as he works thus, all, all the days of his long life, he seems inviolable, sacrosanct, and almost anonymous.”

  Rilke did not need to convince Modersohn. “That dreadful wild city is not to your taste—Oh I can believe that,” he wrote back to Rilke. To him, cities bred the sicknesses of egotism, Nietzscheanism and modernism. “Nothing, nothing at all is more important to me than my peaceful, serious countryside. I could never endure living in such a city—I should look at and enjoy the art that is stored up there and then quickly return to my peace and quiet.”

  But while Modersohn was content to sink into the sofa, pipe in mouth, and stay there all night, his wife had not yet exhausted her curiosities about foreign landscapes. Paula Becker was, at twenty-five, too young to give up and become one of those hard Worpswede peasant women, bitter and “bound to the plow,” as Rilke once wrote. The village’s monotonous routines, and the staid landscape painting it had been producing, was starting to dull her senses. Ever since she and Westhoff had gone to Paris three years earlier, German artists looked so obedient compared to the French. No one in Paris seemed to care whether their work achieved consensus. The mere thought of returning there quickened Becker’s pulse.

  Now that the Rilkes were back in touch, she saw her chance. Modersohn did not love the idea of his wife traveling alone. But he knew he still owed her for the sacrifice she made by attending the ghastly cooking school, and agreed that she could make the trip in February 1903.

  Becker could barely contain her excitement when she boarded the train for Paris that winter, just in time for her twenty-sixth birthday. She imagined her Parisian life picking up right where it had left off, with days occupied by art galleries, champagne and philosophical discussions with Westhoff, then Saturdays spent galavanting around the countryside. When she arrived, Becker rented the same little hotel room where they had stayed as students.

  On the first evening Rilke and Westhoff were free to meet, Becker rushed over to their Latin Quarter building, eager as a puppy. She regaled them with gossip about Worpswede, but they seemed not to care, as if her small-town stories were beneath them. It wasn’t that they were rude; it was worse than that. They were cordial. There was no warmth, no familiarity and, on top of it all, they seemed totally miserable. All they did was complain about money and feeling overworked. When Becker tried to convince them to take some time off and join her on a day-trip to the country they declined, insisting they had to work.

  The Rilkes “trumpet gloom,” Becker wrote to her husband the next day. “Ever since Rodin said to them, ‘Travailler, toujours travailler,’ they have been taking it literally; they never want to go to the country on Sundays and seem to be getting no more fun out of their lives at all.” Rilke spoke incessantly about Rodin and the monograph, a project that Becker believed was little more than thinly veiled social climbing. “Rilke is gradually diminishing to a rather tiny flame which wants to brighten its light through association with the radiance of the great spirits of Europe: Tolstoy, Muther, the Worpsweders, Rodin, Zuloaga, his newest friend,” she wrote to her husband. Westhoff’s latest work, a series of fragmented bodies, was also beginning to resemble Rodin’s a little too closely. “We shall see how s
he plans to avoid becoming a little Rodin herself,” Becker wrote.

  The only benefit to the Rilkes’ obsession with Rodin was that it opened the door for Becker to meet the famous sculptor herself. Rilke told her that Rodin hosted an open house for friends and colleagues at his studio every Saturday. Rilke would write a note identifying her as the “wife of a very distinguished painter”—an insult not lost on Becker—which should secure her entry.

  When she arrived the following weekend a crowd had already gathered at the studio. She hesitated at the edge of the room, attempting to compose herself before approaching the master to present her pass. When she finally summoned the nerve, she cautiously went up to him and held out the note. He nodded her along, not even glancing at it.

  Once inside, Becker was free to examine the sculptures standing around the room as closely as she liked. Not each work resonated with her, but they gathered such force collectively that she decided she trusted Rodin’s intentions completely. “He doesn’t care whether the world approves or not,” she thought. On her way out she worked up the courage to ask him if she might one day visit his studio in Meudon. To her amazement, he didn’t flinch: Come next Sunday, he said.

  When she arrived by train that weekend, an assistant informed her that Rodin was busy at the moment but she had his permission to wander the grounds on her own. Becker took a walk and revisited the pavilion of works she had first seen at the World’s Fair, recognizing now how deeply they expressed their maker’s “worship of nature.” After a while Rodin joined her and brought her to the studio. When he pulled out several reams of drawings, she was surprised to see how his process began with simple pencil lines that were then doused with watercolors. How unusual that such wild, blazing colors could come from such a mild man, she thought.

  Before long Rodin launched into a familiar soliloquy: “Work,” he said, “that is my pleasure.” It was the precise rhetoric that exasperated her when it came from Rilke, but out of Rodin’s mouth every word was intoxicating. Becker believed that Rodin truly lived by his words; the proof surrounded her in every corner of this room. But Rilke, who had only a few mediocre books to show for all his complaining, merely quoted them. Becker wrote to her husband that he must come to Paris at once, if only to be near Rodin. “Yes, whatever it is that makes art extraordinary is what he has.”

  Becker’s exhilaration was interrupted as soon as she returned to the Rilkes and their contagious misery, however. For a while she had been determined to salvage her trip and accommodate their interests over hers. Instead of a picnic in the countryside she went with them to see a show of Japanese paintings that contained flowing, childlike lines unlike anything she’d ever seen. But in March, Rilke fell ill again with his third bout of flu that winter. Becker brought tulips to him in bed but announced to Modersohn afterward that “I can’t stand him anymore.” She kissed her wedding ring and decided to cut her stay in Paris short.

  As she waited for the train back to Worpswede she wrote to her husband that she believed Westhoff would be better off if Rilke went away for a while. Her bust commissions were picking up and his wallowing only brought her down.

  RILKE’S OPINION OF HIMSELF was not much higher than Becker’s at that time. Having finished the Rodin monograph, he was left worrying once again where his next paycheck would come from, and where—or if—the inspiration for his next book would arise. “I cannot bring myself to write at all; and the consciousness alone that a connection exists between my writing and the days’ nourishment and necessaries, is enough to make my work impossible for me,” he wrote that spring to his friend Ellen Key, a Swedish psychologist and patron of the poet. “I must wait for the ringing in the silence, and I know that if I force that ringing, then it really won’t come.”

  His desk was now bare, apart from a stack of unanswered mail. Finally, in February 1903, he sat down to respond to a letter that had come from a student at the military academy he had attended as a boy. Rilke did not know this young man by the name of Franz Xaver Kappus, but he was pleased to see a reference to Professor Horaek. Rilke had always liked the man, who was the only teacher on staff who wasn’t also a military officer.

  “My Dear Sir, Your letter only reached me a few days ago. I want to thank you for the great and kind confidence. I can hardly do more,” Rilke wrote in his looping black calligraphy.

  Kappus had almost given up on a reply when the envelope bearing a blue seal and a Paris postmark arrived. The address was written in “beautiful, clear, sure characters,” he said. It “weighed heavy in the hand.”

  When he opened it he found that Rilke had sent eight full pages in response to his two. Rilke, knowing how anxiously he had been waiting for his own bell of creativity to toll again, advised the young poet now to consider carefully whether he was prepared to bear the burden of the artistic condition.

  “Search for the reason that bids you to write; find out whether it is spreading out its roots in the deepest places of your heart,” Rilke wrote. Then ask yourself, “would you die if it were denied you to write. This above all—ask yourself in the stillest hour of the night: must I write?” If the heart utters a clear, “I must, then build your life according to this necessity,” but be prepared to surrender to the imperative forever, for art was not a choice, but an immutable disposition of the soul.

  Rilke declined to critique the poems Kappus sent, other than to say that they possessed no distinctive voice and were “not yet independent.” He urged the poet not to send them to editors or critics again, himself included. That could only provide external validation, and a poet’s testament must come from within. Besides, nothing was further removed from art than criticism, Rilke said, and reviews “always come down to more or less happy misunderstandings.”

  Rilke’s response moved Kappus to write back immediately. We do not know what he said because his side of the correspondence was never published, but we know that they exchanged some twenty letters over the next five years. We also know that Kappus found Rilke’s wandering reflections on solitude, love and art so touching, so deeply felt, that he astutely predicted that the letters would also stir the hearts of other “growing and evolving spirits of today and tomorrow.” Shortly after Rilke’s death he brought the letters to Westhoff and Ruth Rilke to ask if they’d like to have them published.

  Rilke viewed his prolific letter-writing habit as a part of his poetic practice. He took such care in composing his correspondence—he would sooner rewrite an entire page of script than mar its surface with a crossed-out word—that he gave his publisher permission to posthumously release it. When Rilke died in 1926, Ruth and her husband, Carl Sieber, began sifting through the surviving seven thousand letters. They took several collections to his publishers: a set that Rilke wrote to the head of his Dutch publishing house in the last year of his life appeared in 1927, while another to his biographer Maurice Betz came out in 1928, as did his series of letters to Rodin. In 1929, Insel-Verlag released his correspondence with Kappus under the title Letters to a Young Poet.

  Little is known about Kappus because Rilke’s family decided not to include the cadet’s name or biography in the original publication, although some later editions include a brief introduction by him. Nor is it known why Rilke maintained such a long correspondence with a stranger from whom he had nothing to gain. But from the way his letters often read as though they were written to his younger self, it is clear that Rilke sympathized with this young poet and fellow victim of that “long terrifying damnation” known as military school.

  More importantly, however, was probably Kappus’s timing. His letter reached Rilke just as the poet had been trying to locate his own footing within Rodin’s in Paris, so he appreciated the desire to find one’s form. Just as the puppet Pinocchio became “a real boy” once his father saw the good in him, young artists are often affirmed when they see their reflection in a master’s eye.

  Even though Rilke was himself sublimely naive at the time, Kappus had tacitly anointed himself Rilke’
s disciple, and the older poet took this responsibility to heart. He wrote Kappus letters in a tone of authority that only an amateur would dare—trying on the master’s robe and liking the way it fit. But Rilke knew he was in no position to offer professional instruction then, having told a friend that spring, “I have written eleven or twelve books and have received almost nothing for them, only four of them were paid for at all.” Instead of advising Kappus on the profession of poetry, he opted to guide him on the poetic life. That was what Rilke had asked of Rodin, and from then on his letters to Kappus would serve as his field notes.

  CHAPTER

  8

  TWO DAYS AFTER PAULA BECKER DECLARED THAT RILKE ought to leave his wife alone for a while, the poet did just that. Still ailing from an especially resistant case of the flu, he came to the conclusion that only the balmy Mediterranean could soothe his winter-worn body. He left Westhoff to finish her work in Paris and, aided by some money from his father, boarded a crowded train, curled up in a camel-hair blanket and shivered all the way to Tuscany.

  At the edge of the marble mountains of Carrara, Rilke reached the elegant seaside resort Viareggio. He suited up in his black-and-red-striped swim trunks first thing and strolled barefoot along the beach, a copy of Niels Lyhne in hand. The soft sand and sun normally should have nourished him, but something was not quite right. The sea looked monotonously flat and the salty air made him thirsty. The tables at the restaurant were unfortunately round, rather than square. Worst of all, the sound of German echoed around him everywhere.

  Even though he hid behind a French newspaper, the waiters took his order in German. The honeymooners at the table next to him murmured to each other in German. Tourists loudly chattered away in German small talk. “I underlined my silence with the thickest strokes; it was no good,” he wrote to his wife. It was like hearing the voices of his family members at every turn. German had been the weapon of his mother’s snobbery, wielded to assert her superiority over the Czechs, and it was the language of the military government that had crushed his father’s pride. To Rilke, German was the sound of bullies and unearned dominance. He began taking meals alone in his room.