The poet was fond of this new acquaintance and had sent him a note soon after their meeting. Rilke wrote about how delighted he and Rodin would both be if he would one day visit them in Meudon. He went on to describe the success of the Panthéon celebration and repeated his praise for Shaw, whose new bust radiated the man’s “astonishing intensity.”
The letter that arrived in Meudon on that April day was Rothenstein’s cordial reply. He returned Rilke’s pleasantries and thanked him for the kind words. Even though nothing he said was out of the ordinary, Rodin flew into a rage when he saw the note. He had not given Rilke permission to write his friend a personal letter. It didn’t matter to Rodin that the words had been innocuous, he saw the act itself as an unforgivable breach of trust.
Rodin tore through his files and soon uncovered a second unauthorized letter, this one written to Rilke in German from another prominent collector and writer, Baron Heinrich Thyssen-Bornemisza. Rodin confronted his employee with the evidence in hand. Rilke, who withered in the face of any confrontation, struggled to explain that although the baron’s letter was indeed addressed to him, it was done so as Rodin’s secretary. He reminded Rodin that he had approved the original outgoing letter to the baron. Perhaps the master had simply forgotten?
As for the more serious violation, the exchange with Rothenstein, Rilke argued that Rodin had introduced him to the Englishman as a friend, not an employee. As such, Rilke had thought there was no harm in writing an innocent note to his new acquaintance.
Rodin refused to hear Rilke’s excuses. His obstinacy surprised Rilke, but others who knew the artist then had become accustomed to it. “Rodin’s disposition had begun to change; he was impatient and despotic, and his commands fell like swords upon innocent necks. His warmest friends turned from him in dismay,” wrote his close friend Judith Cladel.
Rodin dismissed Rilke from his job at once, “brutally and unjustly,” thought Cladel when she heard the news. To Rilke, it was as if he were being thrown out “like a thieving servant.” After nine months of devoted service, banishment was a harsh punishment for the crime of opportunism. Rothenstein himself said he was shocked to learn years later that the letter he had sent to “poor Rilke” that day had been such “a source of grievance to Rodin.” But he also recognized that Rodin was a notoriously “difficult person to deal with.”
This was far from the first time Rodin had exploded at an employee. He responded to any misstep like a lion startled from his sleep, lashing out in rage, then acknowledging his overreaction later. He repeatedly fired and rehired his assistants. With one of his favorites he went through this cycle five times in just two years.
When directed at his work, the artist’s destructive energy resulted in fascinating amputations and fragments. When directed at people, it was merely destructive. When one young model, the future silent film star Lou Tellegen, brought his own clay figure to Rodin for critique—the first he ever made—the artist took one glance, picked up a tool, and started hacking into it himself.
“When he was through, there was hardly anything left of my original figure. Of what remained, he destroyed the whole mass and saying, ‘Begin it over again,’ walked away,” Tellegen wrote in his memoirs. Rodin “always called a spade a spade—that is, if he could think of no more vulgar name for it.”
By the time Rilke arrived, Rodin’s fame had made him even more sensitive to perceived betrayal. It also could not have helped to see his most loyal disciple fawning over Shaw during those stressful weeks leading up to the Panthéon inauguration, when he had needed support the most. By evening, Rilke had packed his belongings from the little cottage in Meudon and was gone.
RODIN DID NOT HAVE time to interview candidates for Rilke’s replacement. So when an acquaintance from a well-known painting family, Albert Ludovici, suggested his son for the position, Rodin hired him on the spot.
The twenty-five-year-old English writer Anthony Ludovici had admired Rodin’s work since he first saw it at the 1900 World’s Fair. But when he arrived for his new job in Meudon, to say he was disappointed would be an understatement. The sculptor looked old, hardened, and exhausted by the endless stream of visitors to his studio. He was consumed almost entirely with bust commissions then, yet the rest of his production galloped on relentlessly. Rodin now ran a veritable factory, churning out replicas of old works in multiple sizes and materials. For each wax or clay work that Rodin sculpted, his assistants made up to a dozen versions in plaster. Some of these would then be cast in bronze or sent out to a stone workshop to be carved in marble.
Rodin’s rough, country demeanor horrified the young sophisticate, who found him to be “uneducated, coarse, ill-mannered, and intimately associated in his home life with a woman,” Rose, who was “very much beneath him.” Unlike Rilke, Ludovici did not think he could learn anything from talking to Rodin and decided to take his breakfasts alone.
Ludovici also thought Rodin could be colossally unfair, requiring his staff to treat him with “unflinching sympathy, tolerance and devotion,” to the point of their own self-effacement, yet rarely returning the goodwill. He was not surprised when one of Rodin’s maids told him that his predecessor’s departure was a case of “the proverbial pot de terre et le pot de fer.” In Aesop’s story, the delicate clay pot always cracks when it tries to play with the overpowering iron pot.
Like Rilke, Ludovici, too, wrote a book about his time with Rodin, but what his Personal Reminiscences of Auguste Rodin lacks in unbridled awe, it makes up for in cool objectivity. Ludovici uses it to point out Rodin’s cruel treatment of his son, Auguste Beuret, whose name he never once heard the artist utter. Ludovici saw firsthand the heartbreaking letters Auguste wrote his father, often addressed to “Monsieur Rodin, Statuaire, Commandeur de la Legion d’Honneur.” Auguste would see his father’s name in the newspaper and then write to congratulate him on whichever award or exhibition was making headlines then. Ludovici also knew that these letters usually went unanswered.
Auguste embarrassed his father, who wrote off the boy as slow-witted his entire life. It is unclear whether Auguste suffered from an actual disability, or whether Rodin’s assessment was overly harsh. Some biographers have claimed that Auguste fell out of a window as a child. But this story has never been confirmed, nor were any diagnoses of brain damage made. In any case, Rodin saw the boy as a burden from the outset and for several years sent him to live with his aunt.
In adulthood, Auguste fared no better in his father’s eyes. Ludovici was troubled to learn that, despite Rodin’s fortune, the young man lived like a pauper, barely eking out a living as a secondhand clothes salesman.
After six months, Ludovici, feeling overworked and underappreciated, quit his post as Rodin’s secretary. He later wrote that his tenure had ended much like Rilke’s had, “in a violent quarrel over a trifling misunderstanding in which Rodin was insufferably rude.”
Ludovici went on to become a conservative Christian writer and a Nietzsche scholar of some renown. But his early support for Hitler and the eugenics movement soon relegated him to obscurity. A year after World War II ended, Ludovici took a break from writing about the feminist and black invasion of Great Britain to review a new English edition of Rilke’s monograph on Rodin. Ludovici wrote that he had initially expected the poet to have used the opportunity to write some vengeful words against Rodin for firing him.
In fact, Rilke had briefly considered it. When it came time to publish his second essay in the book, the poet debated whether to write it in a more critical tone. He had begun to worry that his early enthusiasm for the artist had been colored by “the demands Rodin taught us to make,” and not necessarily his actual achievements. He ultimately decided, however, that the timing was not right “to say anything new about Rodin now.” Introducing contradictory opinions on the artist would only confuse readers and spoil the book’s celebratory spirit.
Ludovici admired the conviction and originality of Rilke’s book. He concluded in his review that “Rilke was mu
ch too generous and understanding a nature, and too profound in his knowledge of humanity, to allow mere accidents of temper in an over-worked and much lionised artist to influence his interpretation of that artist’s life-work.”
IN THE GOSPEL OF Luke, the parable of the Prodigal Son tells the tale of a wayward son’s return home to his father. The younger of two brothers, he withdraws his inheritance early and spends it all traveling the world, while the elder boy stays home and works for their father. Eventually the prodigal son’s money runs out and he must return home, tired, hungry, and penniless.
Upon seeing his long-lost son, the father rushes to embrace him. Prepare a feast, he tells the other boy, who is horrified by the suggestion. Why should they celebrate his reckless, selfish brother, especially when he had been loyal for years and received no such honor? The father responded that it did not matter what the prodigal boy had done in the past. All that mattered was that he had come back.
This parable of forgiveness was on Rilke’s mind as he looked for a new home in Paris. To his surprise, his lifeline came from another prodigal child adrift in the city, his old friend Paula Becker. Three months earlier, Becker had left Worpswede in the middle of the night, while her husband slept. She wrote a letter to Rilke telling him of her plan to come to Paris, declaring in it, “I’m not Modersohn and I’m not Paula Becker anymore either. I am Me.” She told him that she was eager to see him again, to see Rodin and, most of all, to work.
Rilke hadn’t expected Becker to make it this long on her own, but she was content living with nothing but an easel, a pine-board chair and worktable. She had moved into her usual hotel a few blocks north of the Luxembourg Gardens, at 29 Rue Cassette. It was cramped but cheap, and allowed week-to-week leasing. When Rilke called on her looking for lodging in May, she helped him rent a room upstairs.
He immediately moved into the apartment, which looked out onto a church nave that plunged into the sky like a sinking ship, Rilke thought. He sat down at his new desk to break the news of his firing to Westhoff. He tried to bear the insult with grace, writing to her that perhaps Rodin had sensed his suffering and dismissed him out of mercy. The arrangement had to end at some point, he reasoned; maybe this was actually a “happy” outcome.
But Rilke exposed his true anguish in a letter to Rodin the next day. “I am profoundly hurt by this,” he wrote. Rodin’s casual dismissal made him feel like a mere employee, while he had seen himself as “a private secretary in external terms only,” and, as Andreas-Salomé later said, “in reality a friend in a full and free exchange.”
“It was not to your secretary that you gave those familiar quarters,” Rilke continued in the letter. He defended his actions once again, claiming that the infractions were mere misunderstandings, not breaches of trust. But regardless of what Rodin ultimately believed, Rilke pledged his everlasting devotion: “I understand that the wise organism of your life must immediately reject anything which appears detrimental to maintaining its functions intact . . . I shall see you no more—but, like those apostles who remained lamenting and alone, life begins anew to me, the life which will celebrate your great example and will find in you its consolation, its honesty and its strength.”
For Rilke, exile from Rodin was more than merely hurtful. It also cut short the crucial progress he was making as an artist. He felt like a grapevine pruned at the wrong time, and “what should have been a mouth has become a wound.” He captured his vulnerable state in “Self-Portrait from the Year 1906,” a poem he wrote that month:
In the glance still childhood’s fear and blue
and humility here and there, not of a servile sort,
yet of one who serves and of a woman.
The mouth made as a mouth, large and defined,
not persuasive, but in a just behalf
affirmative.
As he wrote these lines, Rilke also became the subject of another portrait. Becker needed to practice figure painting for her classes at the Académie Julian, but could not afford to pay model fees. Rilke had agreed to pose for her in the mornings. But then, during one sitting, a knock came at the door. Becker peeked between her curtains onto the street, then yanked them shut again. She spun around and whispered to Rilke, “It’s Modersohn.”
Her husband had been writing letters accusing her of being selfish and cruel. She insisted that she couldn’t be heartless because art was itself a form of love. He begged her to come back; she begged him to let go.
Rilke had managed to avoid their conflict so far, but now he felt trapped between his two friends. He worried that if he encouraged Becker’s painting too much it would look like he had chosen her side. When he left that day, Becker talked with Modersohn but remained resolved in her decision to live in Paris, writing him soon after, “Please spare both of us this time of trial. Let me go, Otto. I do not want you as my husband. I do not want it. Accept this fact. Accept this fact. Don’t torture yourself any longer.”
Paula Modersohn-Becker’s painting of Rilke, 1906.
Becker’s sister was furious with her, while her old friend Carl Hauptmann called her ignorant and weak. Rilke did not directly weigh in either way, but he implied to her his judgment by never returning for another sitting. Becker gave up the portrait and turned instead to still lifes.
In a way, the incomplete painting is a more accurate portrait of its subject, still an outline of a man himself. Becker left the eyes as dark featureless circles, rather than filling in their pale blue color and drowsy lids. These are poet’s eyes: wide open, absorbing and defenseless against their visions. The mouth stretches as “large and defined” in the painting as it does in the poem. But in Becker’s image it hangs slightly open, like the freshly pruned grapevine Rilke had described. Both works are portraits of transition, but Becker’s was the more prescient in its depiction of a poet on the verge.
Distancing himself from Becker, Rilke spent the next month shut up in his hotel like a monk. He would “kneel down and rise up, every day, alone in my room, and I will consider sacred what happened to me in it: even the not having come, even the disappointment, even the forsakenness,” he told his wife.
If poetry was Rilke’s god, then angels were the words that would lead him to it. So it was that the stone angel from Chartres returned to him then with a verse. In “The Angel with the Sundial,” Rilke comes to terms with the distance that separates his world from the angel’s. He recalls how the wind that nearly knocked him down that day had no effect on the stone sculpture. And he questions how well this angel, which holds its sundial out both day and night, understands his realm, writing in the last line, “What do you know, O stone one, of our life?”
The ideas that had been accumulating in Rilke’s head over the past nine months began to pour out of him in a great exhalation that would become the first part of his two-volume New Poems. Although he was at least writing again, he still was penniless and lost. Not for the first time in his life, he felt like the outcast Prodigal Son.
Only now that he had been ejected from the “father’s” house against his will, he saw the tale in a different light. Perhaps the prodigal’s journey into unknown territory was not selfish, but brave. Indeed, one could even pity the older son for staying. Because that boy believes that one’s destiny is contingent on where one is born, his life will slog on without change. The Prodigal Son would go on adventures, taste freedom and maybe even find god.
This was the kind of Prodigal Son Rodin had depicted with his bronze boy kneeling on the ground, his arms flung toward the sky. The work was originally titled The Prodigal Son, and later changed to Prayer, but Rilke recognized neither title as correct, writing in the monograph, “This is no figure of a son kneeling to his father. This attitude makes a God necessary, and in the figure thus kneeling are present all who need Him. All space belongs to this marble; it is alone in the world.”
Rilke subverted the parable this way in his poem “The Departure of the Prodigal Son,” which begins:
Yes, to go forth,
hand pulling away from hand.
Go forth to what? To uncertainty,
to a country with no connections to us
He then uses the poem’s last lines to applaud the son’s exit, rather than his return:
To let go—
even if you have to die alone.
Is this the start of a new life?
For Rilke, it was at least the start of a new chapter. He had officially left the house of Rodin and, by the end of July, would move on again, first briefly to the coast of Belgium and then to Berlin. His patron Karl von der Heydt had sent him two thousand marks to help support him during these uncertain times. “This last period has been confused, the leave-taking from Paris difficult and inwardly complicated,” Rilke had told him. In September the poet set his sights on Greece and made an elaborate appeal to von der Heydt to fund the trip as well. He told him that he needed to complete the second essay on Rodin, and could think of no better setting for this work than Greece, the sculptor’s spiritual homeland.
But then those plans evaporated when a baroness invited Rilke to be her guest in Capri for the winter. By then, von der Heydt’s patience had started wearing thin. He scolded Rilke for his neediness, arguing that a poet might require financial support in the beginning, but should ultimately strive for financial independence.
Rilke replied to the accusation with predictably tangled logic, claiming that it was because he placed such a premium on independence that he had not been able to support himself. Rodin’s employment had imprisoned him at the expense of his work for too long and he refused to relinquish that freedom again for a job.
In the end von der Heydt sent the money and off Rilke went, arriving in Capri on his thirty-first birthday.
You Must Change Your Life Page 16