You Must Change Your Life

  Rilke could not have agreed more. “I shall come to the great man, dear as a father, the Master,” Rilke wrote to a friend of the job. “He wants me to live with him, and I could not do otherwise than accept; so I shall be allowed to share all his days, and my nights will be surrounded by the same things as his.” Rilke used nearly the same words to write his acceptance letter to Rodin, telling the artist that it would be his honor to listen to him day and night, “if you’ll deign to speak to me.”

  And so, in September 1905, Rilke became not just a fervent disciple of Rodin, but his trusty, day-to-day associate. Rilke moved into his personal three-room cottage with views of the Sèvres valley. As he looked out the window, the bridge linking the two banks of the Seine “has become a stanza. And there my life is.” A renewed sense of “joie de vivre” rushed through him as never before.

  CHAPTER

  9

  RILKE ROSE WITH RODIN AT SEVEN O’CLOCK EVERY MORNING. Sometimes he saw the artist out his window, pacing the garden in his robe before changing into his country attire of sandals and a floppy beret. They sat down together for a light breakfast of fruit and coffee, and then the poet faced the mail pile.

  “Rilke plunged into the work,” recalled one of Rodin’s assistants. “For the first time Rodin’s correspondence was punctual, his files in order.” It was no easy task. Rodin rarely conducted sales through an art dealer, which made him responsible for all his own paperwork. He monitored and micromanaged every word his secretaries wrote in letters. He also changed his mind rapidly, made perpetual revisions and asked that every fleeting observation that passed through his lips be recorded. He never knew if it might become relevant for a speech or text down the line.

  Other than a visit from Westhoff in October, Rilke saw virtually no one but Rodin over the next few months, and that was fine by him. They talked about “everything” together, and just as often sat side by side in silence. Sometimes Rilke waited for Rodin to return from Paris so they could watch the sun set over the pool, which was graced with Rodin’s young swans. Rodin loved these birds so much that when the first ones appeared, wild and gray, he hired hunters to kill all the frogs and toads they could find in the woods to feed to the swans.

  After sundown Rodin would bid Rilke good night with the words, Bon courage. The sentiment confused Rilke at first, but later the poet thought he understood. Rodin must have wished him strength because he knew “how necessary that is, every day, when one is young.”

  Now that Rodin had so much assistance in his studio, he had more free time to travel. Whenever possible Rilke joined him on these day trips to the cathedrals or the countryside. He had decided to make use of his renewed proximity to Rodin to gather material for a second essay on the artist, which he would eventually publish as part two in all future editions of the monograph. Rilke wrote down everything now, like young Plato recording the words of Socrates, the master who never put pen to paper.

  Three mornings in a row the pair rose at five o’clock to catch a train, then a carriage, to Versailles, where they walked for hours in the park. “He shows you everything: a distant view, a movement, a flower, and everything he invokes is so beautiful, so known, so startled and young,” Rilke told Westhoff. “The smallest things come to him and open up to him.”

  Rilke would point out interesting sights and Rodin would draw conclusions from them. While Rodin was ethralled by a cage of Chinese pheasants at the zoo one winter day, Rilke jotted down descriptions of sickly monkeys with eyes as big and vacant as tuberculosis patients’; the sight of a flamingo’s tropic-pink feathers “blossoming in this chill air” was almost painful. He then turned the sculptor’s attention to the baboons, “flinging themselves against the wall.” It was as if Mother Nature had been too busy to correct their “unspeakable hideousness,” he said, and her cruelty had driven them mad.

  Well, Rodin reasoned, it must have taken a lot of experimentation before she was able to perfect life with the human form. One could at least be grateful to the baboons for that.

  Sometimes Rose Beuret joined them on these excursions and Rilke began to see why Rodin had stayed with her all these years. She was able to identify all the species of birds and trees in the woods. She was so like Rodin in this way, taking joy in a purple burst of crocus or a magpie balanced on a branch. Once she found an injured partridge and they had to leave early so she could care for it. She was a “good and faithful soul,” Rilke decided.

  There was a tenderly muted affection between Rodin and Beuret. One December afternoon, the three of them attended the two o’clock Advent Sunday service at Notre Dame. Beuret, always anticipating her companion’s needs before he did, set out two chairs for the men. The artist sat down, put his hat in his lap and closed his eyes. For nearly two hours he stayed there with his head bowed, beard splayed across his chest, listening to the organ and the soprano, whose voice soared up the cathedral like a “white bird,” Rilke thought. Sometimes a faint smile crossed his face. When the music ended, he got up, went to Beuret, who had been waiting patiently, and they left the church, without a word spoken the entire afternoon.

  Together the three of them formed a little family in Meudon. In November, the poet joined Rodin and Beuret to celebrate the sculptor’s birthday with a cake decorated with sixty-five candles. The following month, the three of them again treated themselves to pastries for Rilke’s thirtieth birthday.

  Rilke, Rose Beuret, and Rodin in Meudon.

  A few weeks later, Rilke returned to Germany to spend Christmas with Westhoff and Ruth. By now his wife had moved their daughter out of her mother’s house and into a place of their own. When Rilke arrived she was sculpting a bust of Ruth, which was not an easy task with a restless four-year-old. It had been so long since they were all together as a family that they agreed to forgo work for a few days and enjoy the holiday.

  In Rilke’s absence, the letters piled up in Meudon. When he returned in January, he was saddled with more work than ever. He did not realistically have time to accept Rodin’s invitation to visit the cathedral in Chartres that month. But this was the “Acropolis of France,” Rodin said, and he insisted that there was no lesson “so useful to study as our French Cathedrals and, above all, this one!” Rodin often said he wished that he had skipped art school altogether to spend the time bowed before the Chartres cathedral instead. The cathedral was the wisest master, he thought, a masterpiece of light and shadow that could have taught Rembrandt everything he knew about chiaroscuro.

  Rodin understood that it could be difficult to appreciate Gothic architecture at first. The labyrinthine decorations could easily overwhelm an untrained eye. But he believed that people ought to relearn how to see the cathedrals, and to recall the kind of schoolboy wonderment that he had once felt before the church in Beauvais. “The chief thing is to humble one’s self and become a little child, to be content not to master all at once, to be obedient to what Nature can teach, and to be patient through years and years,” he wrote.

  So on a gray, lightless January morning, Rilke and Rodin passed through wheat fields for an hour on the train, arriving in Chartres at half-past nine. The church sat alone at the center of town like an old stone gargoyle. From around its huge walls, the clusters of cottages unfurled like a diorama village. Built between 1194 and 1235, the Notre Dame of Chartres is one of the largest cathedrals in France, with a nave nearly twice as wide as the Notre Dame of Paris.

  Rilke and Rodin stood at a reverent distance, tilting their heads back to take in the full scale of the structure’s two towers, which were mismatched as a result of a fire. The fifty-foot-tall buttresses aged from blond at the base to a weathered black at the tips. Stone vines and arabesques uncoiled across every inch of surface. Normally Rodin would have taken it in inch by inch without a word, but on that day he kept interrupting the silence to grumble about the shoddy restorations that scarred its surface. The right lateral portal was stripped of its “suppleness,” and parts of the stained glass were missing from the windows
. The damage was even worse here than at the Notre Dame in Paris.

  The numbing cold became another distraction as a gust of wind barreled into Rilke as hard as a man shoving through a crowd. He glanced over at Rodin to see if he felt it, too, but the man stood there oblivious, as sturdy as the tower. Then another gust blew in violently from the east and whipped around the slender stone body of an angel that stood on a southern corner of the church. It smiled a wise and serene smile, like that of the Mona Lisa, Rilke thought, and it held a sundial in its hands.

  In the presence of this blissful stone being, the windbeaten poet felt even more mortal, as if he and Rodin were “two damned souls.”

  At last Rilke spoke: “There’s a storm coming up.”

  “But you don’t understand,” Rodin countered. “There is always this kind of wind around the great cathedrals. They are always enveloped by a wind that is agitated, tormented by their grandeur.”

  The freezing weather drove the two men back to Paris early that day. But not before the sharp gusts of wind had opened Rilke up and lodged an image of the stone angel firmly in his mind.

  IN THE CRYPT OF the Panthéon lie the remains of the foremost intellectual figures in French history. “For great men the grateful nation,” reads the inscription carved into the façade of the domed mausoleum where Voltaire, Zola, Rousseau and Hugo were laid to rest. More than a burial ground, the Panthéon became the illustrious mise-en-scène of France’s national memory in the years after the French Revolution.

  It was the highest endorsement of Rodin’s career to date, then, when the city of Paris agreed to erect The Thinker in front of the Panthéon’s grand staircase in the spring of 1906. It filled Rodin with pride to know that his statue would memorialize all of the thinkers housed within its walls, a monument to end all monuments.

  The art historian Élie Faure saw the plan as France’s attempt to correct its mistreatment of Rodin after the “outrage inflicted on him for so long.” The doors that had been closing on him for half a century, ever since he failed to enter the Grande École as a boy, had finally swung open. Newly initiated into this civic shrine, Rodin began to enjoy what he called his period of “liberation.”

  But the master’s liberation was beginning to usher in his disciple’s enslavement, or so Rilke described his workload that winter. It had taken Rodin two years to negotiate the bureaucracy and raise funds to cast The Thinker in bronze, all of which heaped more paperwork onto his secretary. Rilke found himself struggling to keep up with the boxes of unanswered letters, which now filled two rooms of the house. It took Rilke twice as long to write in French than in German and he refused to settle for less than perfect grammar. Between Rodin’s correspondence and his own, Rilke found himself writing hundreds of letters each day.

  The job dragged on well past the agreed-upon two hours, and was cutting sharply into his personal writing time. Sometimes he felt the “mass of untransformed material” swelling so large inside him that he fantasized about hopping on the first train out of town and heading to the Mediterranean. The book he had finished there, The Book of Hours, had just come out in November and was already attracting far more acclaim than anyone had expected.

  Supposedly Rilke never read reviews because doing so felt about as enjoyable as listening to another man admire the woman one loves, he once said. But critics widely praised the Book of Hours’ ambition in grappling with “the most elevated theme a lyric can attain: the theme of the Soul’s search for God,” as the German patron Karl von der Heydt wrote in an early review. Each of the five hundred copies in the print run would sell within two years, and a second run would be issued at more than twice the original size.

  While Rilke was contending with the unprecedented attention, he also needed to update an earlier collection, the Book of Pictures, for its second edition. “But I need ‘only time,’ and where is it?’ ” he wondered to Andreas-Salomé. When several German universities invited him to lecture that winter, it seemed like a legitimate occasion to request a little time off, especially since the subject of the tour would be Rodin.

  With some reluctance, Rodin granted Rilke the leave, and the poet set off for Germany in February. He was received like royalty at his first stop, near Düsseldorf. But almost as soon as he arrived, news came that his father had fallen ill and might not recover. Rilke made no sudden move toward Prague, instead delivering an electrifying lecture before continuing on to Berlin. He was eager to see both Andreas-Salomé and Westhoff there and to introduce them to each other for the first time. The meeting between the women apparently went beautifully, and afterward, Rilke thanked Andreas-Salomé for treating his wife so warmly.

  While Rilke was mingling with aristocracy, his father lay dying in Prague. After two weeks, Rilke received word that Josef had died and there was no one else to tend to his remains. When Rodin heard the news, he rushed the poet a telegram offering his condolences and money, if he needed it. The poet at last made his way to Prague, where he would face his father’s body, pale and propped up on pillows, and arrange for his burial. He did not invite his mother to join him at the grave site.

  At the end of his life, Josef Rilke had come to accept, in a sorrowful way, his son’s profession. But the poet maintained the belief that his father was fundamentally “incapable of love,” and that perhaps Rilke had inherited this deficiency from him. Rilke’s delayed response to his father’s death probably had less to do with a shortage of love, however, than it did with a desire to avoid the unhappy childhood memories of Prague. He could not bear to stay there for more than a few days before boarding the train back to Paris.

  When he arrived back at the master’s house in Meudon, he walked into another depressing scene. Rodin was buried under blankets in his big mahogany bed, suffering from a terrible fever. The old man rarely got sick, but when he did it completely hobbled him. He was also grieving his own loss, that of his dear friend Carrière, who had died of throat cancer that month. Carrière had been not only one of Rodin’s earliest artistic advocates, but also a president of the committee to mount The Thinker at the Panthéon.

  But now the inauguration had been abruptly disrupted, just weeks before it was scheduled to take place. Almost as soon as Rilke had left in February, hostility toward the The Thinker grew so intense that it threatened to derail the project altogether. Critics who opposed the plan said that a statue whose pose “suggests a scatalogical idea,” as the novelist Joséphin Péladan described The Thinker, did not deserve the prestigious Panthéon placement. Max Nordau, a physician and disciple of Dr. Charcot’s who wrote a book on degenerate art, ridiculed the figure, saying its “bestial countenance, with its bloated, contracted forehead, gazes as threateningly as midnight.”

  A vandal had even scaled the Panthéon’s fence and taken a hatchet to a plaster placeholder of the statue. “I avenge myself—I come to avenge myself!” the police heard the man yell. When they hauled him off it became clear that he was mentally ill and believed that The Thinker’s fist-to-mouth pose was mocking the way the poor man ate his cabbages. Even though the attack did not end up being personal, Rodin was shaken by the violent incident.

  The prospect of another public scandal drove Rodin nearly to the edge of his sanity. He became so paranoid in those days that once, when a package came in the mail from an unknown sender, he insisted it contained a bomb and buried it in the yard. Some time later a friend wrote back wondering whether Rodin had enjoyed the jar of Greek honey he had sent.

  Rilke had to set aside his own concerns now to come to Rodin’s aid. He did not dare abandon his besieged master at this vulnerable hour, believing that Rodin was in “need of my support, insignificant as it is, more than ever.” Rodin, meanwhile, was oblivious to Rilke’s rising stature abroad and the growing demand for his work.

  Rilke managed to preserve this precarious balance for a while, but it could not withstand the disruption that came in April. That month, the Irish playwright George Bernard Shaw hired Rodin to sculpt his bust. Then forty-
nine years old, the writer was eager to have his portrait done before he “had left the prime of life too far behind.” Shaw’s renown as a drama critic for the Saturday Review was being increasingly surpassed by his own theater productions, satirical morality plays that now routinely debuted at London’s Royal Court Theatre, including, most recently, his comedic drama Major Barbara. A socialist and a vegetarian, Shaw infused his plays with passionate political messages that were tempered by his lively wit.

  Rodin, who possessed neither drive and spoke no English, did not know Shaw’s work at all when they met. Since the sculptor was still recovering from the flu at the time, he asked the writer to come to him in Meudon for the twelve sittings, rather than to his more conveniently located studio in Paris. Shaw agreed and paid twenty thousand francs for the sculpture in bronze. One would have to be a “stupendous nincompoop” to have a bust done by any other artist, he said.

  But Shaw was wholly unprepared for the grueling weeks ahead. In their first sessions, Rodin took a big metal compass to Shaw’s head to measure it from the top of his red crown to the tip of his forked beard. Then he molded the face from sixteen different profiles. Once Shaw was sure he had been examined from every possible angle, Rodin told him to lie down on the sofa so he could capture the views from behind the forehead and below the jaw. Finally, once Rodin approved of the basic form, he began scooping out the features.

  Mesmerized by Rodin’s meticulous process, the playwright later wrote about it in a remarkable essay from 1912:

  In the first fifteen minutes, in merely giving a suggestion of human shape to the lump of clay, he produced so spirited a thumbnail bust of me that I wanted to take it away and relieve him of further labor . . . After that first fifteen minutes it sobered down into a careful representation of my features in their exact living dimensions. Then this representation mysteriously went back to the cradle of Christian art, at which point I again wanted to say: ‘For Heaven’s sake, stop and give me that: it is a Byzantine masterpiece.’ Then it began to look as if Bernini had meddled with it. Then, to my horror, it smoothed out into a plausible, rather elegant piece of 18th-century work . . . Then another century passed in a single night; and the bust became a Rodin bust, and was the living head of which I carried the model on my shoulders. It was a process for the embryologist to study, not the aesthete. Rodin’s hand worked, not as a sculptor’s hand works, but as the Life Force works.