You Must Change Your Life

  Unable to concentrate on his reading, Rilke wrote two letters to the young poet Franz Kappus in April. He tried to make peace with the uncertainty he felt at the time, even praising it by saying, “There is here no measuring with time, no year matters, and ten years are nothing. Being an artist means, not reckoning and counting, but ripening like the tree which does not force its sap, and stands confident in the storms of spring without the fear that after them may come no summer. It does come. But it comes only to the patient,” he wrote. This was how Rilke once described Rodin, “sunk in himself” like a tree that has “dug a deep place for his heart.”

  Whether or not the words comforted Kappus, they did little for Rilke, who himself still felt like a seedling. He advised Kappus to seek a mentor and named the two who had taught him the most about creativity: “About its depth and everlastingness, there are but two names I can mention: that of Jacobsen, that great, great writer, and that of Auguste Rodin, the sculptor, who has not his equal among all artists living today.”

  But perhaps Kappus was wise to have sought his master from afar. Rodin’s towering influence had inspired Rilke, but it also cast a diminishing shadow. He feared that his poetry lacked the potency of a tangible medium like sculpture. “I actually experienced the physical pain of not being able to render a bodily form,” he wrote. A verse would never fill a gallery, nor could a verb move through space like a gesture.

  The anxiety that paralyzed Rilke now resurrected his childhood nightmare of “the nearness of something too hard, too stone-like, too great,” he wrote. Days began to pass without his writing a single word. He was homeless and adrift, imagining he would return to Westhoff in Paris, but not knowing what he would do when he got there. Perhaps he would write a book on Rodin’s friend Eugène Carrière, the popular painter of brooding, sepia-toned portraiture.

  Before Rilke left Italy, his slim book on Rodin came out. Rather than offer dry academic criticism of the kind he had denounced to Kappus, Rilke savored Rodin’s art like wine, inhaling and swirling it into maximalist descriptions matched only by the melodrama of Rodin’s own work. Of the Gates of Hell, Rilke wrote: “He has created bodies that touch each other all over and cling together like animals bitten into each other, that fall into the depth of oneness like a single organism; bodies that listen like faces and lift themselves like arms; chains of bodies, garlands and tendrils and heavy clusters of bodies into which sin’s sweetness rises out of the roots of pain.”

  Because the study had served largely as an exercise in Rilke’s own powers of observation, the resulting book reveals as much about its author as it does its subject. “From no other book of his,” wrote H. T. Tobias A. Wright in the introduction to a 1918 collection of Rilke’s poetry, “can we deduce so accurate a conception of Rilke’s philosophy of Life and Art as we can draw from his comparatively short monograph on Auguste Rodin.”

  Nearly every critic who reviewed Auguste Rodin commented on Rilke’s exalted opinion of the artist: It was “enthusiastic,” “too attached,” “saturated with sensitivity,” or “panegyric.” “It is a poem in prose. To the eternally sober much will appear as excessiveness and pomposity, but all poetry thrives on exaggeration,” said one Austrian newspaper.

  Rilke asked his wife to hand-deliver a copy to Rodin, along with a letter expressing his regrets that the master would not actually be able to read it in the German. But he promised, truthfully, that it would not be his final word on the artist. “For with this little book your work has not ceased to occupy my thoughts,” he wrote, “from this moment on it will be in each one of my works, in each book that I am granted to finish.” He also confessed to him that he hadn’t been able to concentrate since he’d left Paris and that sometimes he read about Rodin just “to hear your voice, together with those of the sea and of the wind.”

  When Rodin received the package, the sculptor replied with a simple note: “Please receive my warmest thanks for the book that Mme Rilke has brought me.” He hoped that it would be translated into French someday.

  Then the lines of communication between the two men fell silent. As a storm moved up the coast of the Tyrrhenian Sea, Rilke felt a familiar stirring. Day after day the weather brought “restlessness and violence” to the town, wrapping the sky like a gray shawl. It drove Rilke into his room, where, in one sequestered week that April, he wrote the third and final part of his Book of Hours. The urban smog and concrete of Paris darken the palette of these thirty-four poems, subtitled “The Book of Poverty and Death,” in a sharp departure from the bucolic Worpswede setting of the first two parts.

  In the book, Rilke acknowledges that he is starting to change. A cry to god invokes the rock that once threatened to crush him in his childhood dreams, but now it reappears as the stony will of a master. In the verse, he believes the force can squeeze creativity from him, like spice from a seed, and this time it is a transformation he welcomes:

  But if it’s you: weigh down until I break:

  let your whole hand fall upon me . . .

  These creative outpourings emptied Rilke out. Completing the book felt less like a birth than a loss of purpose. Rilke returned to Paris in May, but instead of beginning a new project, he promptly fell ill once again. Now that he was out of work and Westhoff’s commissions were complete, they had no way to pay for their apartment in Paris. When Heinrich Vogeler invited them to come back to Worpswede, they had little choice but to accept. While Westhoff packed up her studio, Rilke lay in bed, dreading the loss of solitude that would accompany a return to the community. But then he considered that it would also bring him nearer to Lou Andreas-Salomé. He had resisted contacting his estranged friend for two and a half years, since the announcement of his engagement to Westhoff. But now he was more desperate for her guidance than ever. Remembering the caveat she had scrawled on the back of her “last appeal,” Rilke decided that he had reached his “direst hour.”

  In June, just before leaving Paris, he wrote her a letter. “For weeks I have wanted to write these words and dared not for fear that it might still be much too soon,” he told her. But now that he would be back in Germany he begged her to allow him to visit her for even a single day. She had moved near Göttingen, a university town in the north where her husband had recently accepted a professorship.

  By the time Rilke’s letter and a copy of the Rodin mongraph arrived, Andreas-Salomé had become “a peasant woman,” she joked, with a dog and a chicken coop. She was living in a valley of beech trees, just beyond a sylvan range of mountains. She began reading the book slowly at first, finding herself becoming gradually more engrossed as the days went on. Eventually she realized that Rilke had done much more than write an appreciation; he had mapped out a philosophy of creativity. This achievement, which must have required a major “psychic reorientation,” outshadowed any annoyances she had felt toward him in the past.

  When Rilke unfolded her reply a few days later, the sight of that familiar upright penmanship, so like his own, put him instantly at ease. She professed that the Rodin book had nearly rendered her speechless. “That you gave yourself to your opposite, your complement, to a longed-for exemplar—gave yourself the way one gives oneself in marriage—. I don’t know how else to express it,—there is for me a feeling of betrothal in this book,—of a sacred dialogue, of being admitted into what one was not but now, in a mystery, has become,” she wrote. It was “beyond doubt” the most important work he had published to date. “From now on you can depend on me,” she promised.

  Rilke’s hands shook as he held the letter. He didn’t know where to begin with his reply, he had so much to tell her. “I won’t complain,” he lied, unable to prevent the outpouring of anguish that followed. He told her about the three fevers he had suffered that winter, the torment of Paris and his recent writer’s block. “I can ask no one for advice but you; you alone know who I am,” he said.

  With that, the “two old scribblers” eased back into their old habit of letter-writing as if nothing had happened. Rilke
told her about how many of his youthful fears still haunted him. He sometimes felt so invaded by the lives of others that he worried whether the boundaries between him and them might break down altogether. Other people’s misery seeped into his mind like ink bleeding across paper. Did he even possess a self of his own? Perhaps not, he once thought, telling Andreas-Salomé, “There is nothing real about me.”

  He gave her an example of one such trauma that had arisen in Paris. He had been on his way to the library when he found himself walking behind a convulsive man displaying what Dr. Charcot would have called St. Vitus’ dance. The man’s shoulders shuddered, his head nodded and jerked. He walked in syncopated skips and hops. Rilke watched him with such curiosity that he felt as if his vision had tunneled inside the man’s body. He saw the tension accumulating in his muscles, gradually crescendoing toward the explosion of spasms that was sure to come.

  At the same time, Rilke felt a similar pressure start to rise in his own body, as if he had contracted the man’s ailment visually. He could not help but follow him through the streets, “drawn along by his fear [which] was no longer distinguishable from my own.”

  After describing this episode across several pages of the letter, Rilke concluded that the day had ended in utter derailment. He never made it to the library—how could one read after such a shock? “I was as if consumed, utterly used up; as if another person’s fear had fed on me and exhausted me.” This sort of thing happened all the time, he said. But instead of transmuting these fears into art, they swallowed up his creativity. How, he asked Andreas-Salomé, might he learn to channel such powerful feeling into poetry?

  Her answer was unequivocal: You already have. She wrote back to him that his description of the man had resonated with her so vividly that it no longer lived only within him, but in her, too. He could stop worrying about whether he would ever realize his talent and accept now that he already had—its evidence was right there in that last letter.

  Having begun an intensive study of Freudian psychology, Andreas-Salomé recognized Rilke’s anxiety as a common fin-de-siècle-era symptom. Growing concerns over crowds and urban alienation had pushed many theorists of the mind to adopt a more sociological approach to their work. The inquiry into individual consciousness that had led Descartes to declare, “I think therefore I am,” three hundred years earlier now became a question of, how do other people think? And how do we even know that other people have selves?

  The latter was the question to which Rilke’s old professor Theodor Lipps’s empathy research eventually led him. He had reasoned that if einfühlung explained the way people see themselves in objects, then the act of observation was not one of passive absorption, but of lived recognition. It was the self existing in another place. And if we see ourselves in art, perhaps we could also see ourselves in other people. Empathy was the gateway into the minds of others. Rilke’s prodigious capacity for it, then, was both his greatest poetic gift and probably his hardest-borne cross.

  Andreas-Salomé understood this predicament and urged Rilke to let his defenses down. He should nurture his gift as if it were a seed growing inside him: “You have become like a little plot of earth into which all that falls—and be it even things mangled and broken, things thrown away in disgust—must enter an alchemy and become food to nourish the buried seed . . . it all turns to loam, becomes you.” He should approach the sick and the dying like a pickpocket, scavenging their misery for poetry.

  Rilke tried to take her advice and identify with the convulsive man rather than block him out. He had already learned to “see into” animals and flowers, and now he could advance like an artist from still lifes to human models. Perhaps the spasmodic pace of the convulsive man was not so different from that of a poet, he thought. Both were people who simply moved through life differently than others.

  He began to reassemble these perceptual fragments in letters to Andreas-Salomé over the coming months. Gradually, an image emerged not only of the sights and sounds of Paris, but of a person who might experience them. Rilke gave this figure a name, Malte Laurids Brigge. The protagonist of what would become Rilke’s only novel, Malte is a young Danish poet and, like Rilke, he, too, goes to Paris and must defend himself against the onslaught of stimuli. And he, too, is disturbed by the sight of a man with a Tourette’s-like tic, recounted in The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge almost exactly as Rilke described it in his letter. As Rilke drifted away from his friends and family in the coming months and years, Malte was to become his closest companion.

  RILKE AND WESTHOFF’S REUNION with the Worpswede community was not a happy homecoming. Heinrich Vogeler had spent the last year planting a garden, renovating his home, and now had a second baby on the way. Rilke, the newly stoic disciple of Rodin, was disappointed to see that his old friend had made domesticity, rather than art, his primary creative act. His embrace of conventional comforts conflicted with Rodin’s gospel, leading Rilke to conclude that the Worpsweders seemed “small and inclined toward irrelevancies.”

  They, meanwhile, were no more impressed with Rilke and Westhoff, particularly when the couple demanded two separate rooms. Rilke’s monograph on the Worpswede artists came out earlier that year and had not gone over well in the community. Rilke had accepted the assignment purely for the money, without necessarily thinking very highly of its subjects, apart from Otto Modersohn. But since he had not wanted to disparage them, either, he suspended judgment from the text altogether. Instead he wrote portraits of young artists “in the process of becoming,” as he explained in the introduction. He described their childhoods and their lives in the colony. When Becker read the book she found the writing pompous and the mythologized content irrelevant. “There is a lot of talk and beautiful sentences, but the nut is hollow at its core,” she said. It couldn’t have helped that Rilke managed to omit Becker—the colony’s best painter—from the book completely.

  The Rilkes underwent another unhappy reunion that summer when they paid a visit to Ruth, who was living in an old farmhouse nearby with Westhoff’s parents. She was now a wild toddler, running naked outdoors. She had somber blue eyes that did not recognize her parents at first. She came up to Rilke tentatively and, after a few days, took to calling him “man” and “good man.” He felt incapable of addressing her with the attention she surely wanted. The pressure to bond with this mysterious little life unsettled him. Caring for her forced him out of his solitude and all but assured that he would disappoint her. By the end of August, he was eager to leave Worpswede behind.

  It felt like as good a time as any for Westhoff to take Rodin’s advice and study the sculpture in Rome, as he had once done. Rilke decided to join her for a “Roman winter” and pursue his newfound interest in Gothic architecture. Rilke would have preferred to live deeper in the countryside, but they rented a villa just outside the city for a few months. Then, as spring set in, so did the sound of German-speaking tourists, closing in on Rilke like soldiers cresting a hill. Westhoff stayed in Rome, but Rilke could not bear to stick around for another season.

  He took off wandering the Continent again, from Rome to Sweden and Denmark. He had started writing Malte in Italy, but since his young protagonist was Danish, Rilke now felt the pull to go to Copenhagen, “Jacobsen’s city.” In those days, “it was difficult to reach Rilke,” recalled his friend and fellow writer Stefan Zweig. “He had no house, no address where one could find him, no home, no steady lodging, no office. He was always on his way through the world, and no one, not even he himself, knew in advance which direction it would take.”

  Westhoff forwarded Rilke his mail in Scandinavia, including, in July, a two-month-old letter from Franz Kappus. Rilke was grateful to her for sending it, explaining that the young man was “having a hard time” then. Kappus had apparently been worrying about whether having had a difficult childhood had drained him of all his strength for adulthood. It must have been an especially fretful note, for Rilke praised his “beautiful concern about life.” He agreed that “sex is di
fficult; yes” and told him that he had waited to reply until he had had some thoughtful advice to impart. His miserable summer in Worpswede had finally shown him his message.

  Outgrowing your friends is a deprivation that frees yourself for growth, he told Kappus. As the world around you clears out, others may become fearful of the solitude you possess. But one must remain “sure and calm before them and do not torment them with your doubts and do not frighten them with your confidence of joy, which they could not understand.” One must seek nourishment in that emptiness, which, thought of another way, is a vastness. As one moves more deeply inside it, be kind to those left behind.

  Rilke had advised the young poet to forgo the big romantic questions in his first letter: “Do not write love-poems,” he had said. As Rodin had taught Rilke, simplicity precedes significance and small things often grow into big things, like the cell or the seed that eventually sprouts to life. That was why Kappus should focus now on everyday “things,” the “things that hardly anyone sees, and that can so unexpectedly become big and beyond measuring.”

  NO MATTER WHERE RILKE traveled, sicknesses flared up along the way: an oppressive toothache, a stinging in the eyes, an inflamed throat, “mental nausea.” Worse, he had no will to write and no means to earn a living. Unlike other writers of his ilk, Rilke refused to dilute his practice with a trade like teaching or journalism. Toward the latter he felt a special “nameless horror” because reporters had to operate within their times and he felt resolutely out of touch with his. Instead, Rilke claimed these in-between phases for “research.”