By 1907, the public came to gawk, gossip and mock the salon as much as they came to look at the art. At first Rilke, too, was more intrigued by the spectacle than the work on view. But that changed the moment he set foot inside a gallery that was hung top to bottom with paintings by Cézanne. It was one of two rooms dedicated as a memorial to the artist, who had died the previous year.
This introduction to the painter came late for Rilke, as it did for the many critics who had long dismissed Cézanne for his slanted perspectives, gloomy coloration and seemingly inchoate compositions. Even just two years earlier, at the same salon, the collector Leo Stein watched as visitors “laughed themselves into hysterics” in front of Cézanne’s paintings.
That Cézanne spent most of his life on the fringes of society did nothing to win him recognition, either. A Provençal, he hailed from Aix, stayed there, and secluded himself in his studio for most of his life. When local children saw the bushy-bearded man passing through town in his knee-high military boots they threw rocks at him, “as if at a bad dog,” Rilke later wrote. It’s possible that Cézanne scarcely noticed; he was so preoccupied with painting that he skipped his own mother’s funeral to spend the day in the studio. He rarely bothered to attend his own openings, either, which may have been for the best, given his total lack of savoir faire. Cézanne did not care for bathing and, at dinner, he was known to lap up every last drop of soup and strip each strand of gristle from the bone.
But by the 1907 Salon d’Automne, critics had become increasingly intrigued by the flattened look of Cézanne’s paintings. He constructed his compositions out of geometric forms, puzzling together cones, cubes and cylinders with the belief that these shapes were the building blocks of nature, and thus were those most readily apparent to the human eye. This architectural approach naturally appealed to the Cubists—Braque and Picasso, who met each other in Paris that year—and sealed Cézanne’s stature as a visionary painter.
Rilke’s eyes darted around the fifty-six canvases on view at the salon. There were paintings of workmen playing cards, nude women emerging from a pool, and a self-portrait rendered with what Rilke thought was the “unquestioning, matter-of-fact interest of a dog who sees himself in a mirror and thinks: there’s another dog.” The poet decided then and there that, when it came to Cézanne, “All of reality is on his side.”
Rilke returned to the salon the next day, and then again nearly every day after that for the rest of the month. He stared at a portrait of Cézanne’s wife seated in a red armchair for so long that the color seemed to flow in him like blood in his veins. This armchair—“the first and ultimate red armchair ever painted”—felt as alive as he was. “The interior of the picture vibrates, rises, and falls back into itself, and does not have a single moving part,” he wrote. After seeing this, Rilke questioned whether the artists whose work hung at the Louvre even understood “that painting is made up of color.”
Each time he visited the show it unleashed new insights and sensations, which he then raced home to record in letters to Westhoff. When he described to her one of Cézanne’s “gray” backgrounds, he immediately wrote back with an apology. The pedestrian word choice was unfit for the richly nuanced color Cézanne used. “I should have said: a particular type of metallic white, aluminum or something similar.”
The painter approached color like an archaeologist, starting with its depth and then bringing to the surface the subtler tones contained within it. Thus grays often gave way to folds of violet or melancholy blue, as in Cézanne’s paintings of Provence’s Mont Sainte-Victoire. “Not since Moses has anyone seen a mountain so greatly,” Rilke wrote.
The poet was so taken by the range of blues in Cézanne’s work that he thought he might write an entire book about the color. Because Cézanne never settled for a straightforward blue in his work, Rilke’s descriptions followed suit: it was always “thunderstorm blue,” “light cloudy bluishness,” “bourgeois cotton blue,” or “wet dark blue.”
The poet never did write the book on blue, but he did complete the sonnet “Blue Hydrangea,” drafted on blue stationery. In it, he compares the flower’s mottled blue leaves to a palette of drying paints. One petal reminds him of a schoolgirl’s pinafore. Another one in a paler shade is like the same blue dress years later, after it has washed out and the girl has grown up. Thus, contained within these tiny petals, Rilke sees a metaphor for the fleeting nature of childhood.
In a single month, Cézanne became the third of what Rilke called his “Homeric elders,” following Tolstoy and Rodin. He began to feel protective of the art at the salon, as if it were his own collection at home. It infuriated him to see visitors complaining that the show was boring, and to observe women vainly comparing their own beauty to that of the ladies in the portraits. When his friend Count Harry Kessler joined him in Paris to see a gallery show of paintings by Cézanne, Renoir and Bonnard, among others, Kessler noticed that Rilke was “so totally obsessed with Cézanne that he is blind to everything else.”
Rilke saw in Cézanne’s work a continuation of Rodin’s philosophies. Both artists empathized with inanimate objects, with Cézanne painting everyday sights like fruit, jars and tablecloths as if they possessed inner lives. “I will astonish Paris with an apple,” the painter once said. They also both believed movement represented the essence of life. In one of Cézanne’s scenes of the Orangerie, he dashed its surfaces with bright streaks of paint that seemed to flicker and jump about the canvas.
Some have said that if Rodin taught Rilke form, then Cézanne showed him how to fill it with color. Or at the very least, the sculptor gave Rilke the framework he needed to appreciate Cézanne. “It is the turning point in these paintings which I recognized, because I had just reached it in my own work,” he wrote to Westhoff, who, at the urging of the philosopher Martin Heidegger, published this series of letters as a book, Letters on Cézanne, in 1952. Paintings he once would have walked by with only a passing glance now gripped his attention for hours. Rilke suddenly had “the right eyes.”
AT SOME POINT DURING Rilke’s research on Cézanne he discovered their shared affinity for Baudelaire. “You can imagine how it moves me to read that Cézanne in his last years still knew this very poem Baudelaire’s ‘Carcass’ entirely by heart and recited it word for word,” Rilke wrote in one of the Letters.
It was then that he made the connection between the painter and his own work. Rilke had been reading Baudelaire’s poem “A Carcass” in Les Fleurs du Mal, in which the narrator and his lover stumble upon a dead body. The woman’s corpse is rotting and crawling with maggots, yet Baudelaire describes it with the cold precision of a medical examiner. This was what Malte strived to do, Rilke realized. He was still unclear about what should happen to his young protagonist, but “I know much more about him now,” Rilke told Westhoff.
In The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge, Malte comes to the same conclusion Rilke did about Baudelaire. “It was his task to see,” Malte says. He had to look past his repulsion and connect with this corpse, to identify “the Being that underlies all individual beings.” This communion represented the ultimate test: “whether you can bring yourself to lie beside a leper and warm him with the warmth of your own heart.”
To Rilke, an author in perfect mastery of his sight also became a master of his emotions. When artists tried to sentimentalize or beautify their subjects they sacrificed certain perceptual truths; Baudelaire’s adherence to observation was what ultimately allowed him to write like a visual artist, molding “lines like reliefs to the touch, and sonnets like columns,” Rilke wrote.
Rilke recognized Cézanne as an artist for whom Baudelaire’s challenge was not too great. Cézanne penetrated a thing’s innermost reality “through his own experience of the object,” Rilke wrote. But then, to the poet’s great distress, the Salon d’Automne closed at the end of the month. Rilke spent every moment of those final days in front of the painter’s canvases, absorbing all the colors his greedy eyes could contain before the paint
ings were hauled off and an automobile show rolled in.
APART FROM THE Cézanne show at the Salon d’Automne, there was one other exhibition in the fall of 1907 that left a lasting impression on the poet. Galerie Bernheim-Jeune had staged the first major exhibition of Rodin’s drawings, and they were unlike anything the artist had shown before.
The previous year, a few weeks after Rodin had fired Rilke, the King of Cambodia invited the sculptor to a special French performance of the Cambodian Royal Ballet. Rodin did not know much about dance, but he found the androgynous ballerinas with their cropped hair and sinewy bodies enthralling. They crouched and shuddered and articulated their fingers in ways he had never seen before. Their bone structures looked as if they had been chiseled in granite.
The dancers reminded him of something ancient, as if they had leapt out of a temple’s bas relief onto the stage. Or perhaps from the side of the cathedral; in their perfect equilibrium and antique grace they recalled the stone angel that Rodin and Rilke had admired in Chartres two years earlier. But only now that he had seen the Cambodian dancers had he understood the beauty of the angel. He’d returned to Chartres to look again at the statue and felt modernity and antiquity, religious rite and artistic rite unite within him. “This angel is a figure from Cambodia,” he now said.
The day after the performance Rodin had visited the troupe at the gardens of their guest villa to observe and draw them. When they had left for the next stop on their tour to Marseilles, he followed. Within a week Rodin had produced a full 150 watercolors of the dancers.
Forty of those were among the more than two hundred drawings on view at Bernheim-Jeune when Rilke visited that fall. The dancers had no faces, only wildly outlined limbs blanketed in sweeps of rich color. The lightness and mystery of these drawings left Rilke “in a state of blissful astonishment,” he wrote. He returned to the gallery again and again. After several days of this he could not bear to keep his excitement to himself any longer. He wrote to Rodin to tell him how many mornings he’d spent with the drawings. Then Rilke wrote another letter the following week to say that they were still having their effect on him. “You have entered far more deeply into the mystery of the Cambodian dances than you realize,” he said. “For me, these drawings were a revelation of the greatest profundity.”
Rilke then boarded a train east to begin a reading tour and avoid another Parisian winter. He made his first stop in dreaded Prague, at the literary club Concordia, where the audience that November evening looked old and dull. Among its members were his mother and her friends, the “ghastly old ladies that I used to wonder about as a child,” he said. Phia Rilke followed her newly famous son around, clinging to him and bragging to anyone who’d listen. She was still the “pitiful, pleasure-seeking creature” that Rilke remembered, still stubbornly pious, and in denial of her age. Every time he saw her it was “like a relapse,” he once said.
He read a few selections in progress from Malte and the New Poems and then went to a tea hosted by an old mentor. He was disheartened to see that the party was populated by all the same faces that were there when he left Prague a decade earlier. He would have liked to leave town immediately, but instead spent four long, obligatory days there visiting old friends and family.
When it finally came time for him to check out of his hotel, the concierge notified him of a letter that had arrived from Paris. Rilke recognized the familiar seal; it was from Rodin. He carefully opened the envelope, which broke at long last the year-and-a-half-long silence with his former master.
Rodin had written to ask the poet his opinion about a man by the name of Hugo Heller, who owned a bookstore in Vienna. Heller wanted to show some of Rodin’s Cambodian drawings there to coincide with an upcoming talk Rilke was giving on the artist. Rilke, who was on his way to Heller’s shop in Vienna at that very moment, was happy to send Rodin his assurances of the man.
The letter to Rilke, written by a secretary and only signed by Rodin, was no grand gesture. But it elated the poet all the same. He analyzed every word, pointing out to his wife how Rodin had used the affectionate address, Cher Monsieur Rilke. The artist also told him that he planned to have Rilke’s second essay about him, published that year in the monograph and reprinted in Kunst und Künstler magazine, translated into French so that he could read it.
Rilke tried to temper his excitement but could not stop himself from replying immediately. He told his wife that he had responded “just as factually, but spoke of all the matters that had accumulated.” At the very least, Rilke knew that reopening the lines of communication with Rodin would make many practical matters in his life much easier. Building a reputation as an expert on an artist with whom he could not contact had proven troublesome. Already he had had to admit to Kunst und Künstler that he could not ask Rodin for images to run with the article.
When Rilke arrived in Vienna he discovered another letter from Rodin. This one was longer, with a clearer conciliatory tone. Rodin had now read the magazine essay and found it to be “très belle.” To Rilke’s amazement, he went on to invite the poet to visit him the next time he was in Paris. “We have need of truth, of poetry, both of us, and of friendship,” Rodin told him. There were “so many things, so many things” to discuss: the nineteenth century shift from idealized forms in art to naturalized ones, and why Rodin now believed it had taken so long for his own work to come into style. Come anytime, he told Rilke. He always had a room waiting for him at his old petite maison in Meudon.
“I could hardly believe it and read it over and over,” Rilke wrote to Westhoff. “The dear, just man who lives things so honestly from his work outward! The just man. I have always known that he is that, and you knew it too.”
This time Rilke let his euphoria pour out in his response to Rodin. “I have an infinite need of you and your friendship,” he wrote. He also knew that he’d made great professional strides on his own since their break and now stood on more equal ground with his former master. “I am proud that I have advanced sufficiently in my work to share your glorious and simple desire for truth,” he wrote.
By then Rilke’s publisher was in the process of printing a second run of his sold-out Book of Hours, the text that was to be the most widely read in his lifetime. Rilke had even started behaving a bit like the literary celebrity he was becoming. He now wore a fashionable black cloak to his readings and approached the lectern with confidence, peeling off his gloves and slowly lifting his eyes to meet the audience. He spoke with a “full, resonant voice that had nothing of boyishness or immaturity about it,” recalled the writer Rudolf Kassner, who saw him speak at the event in Vienna. Afterward, the poet shook hands with guests who crowded around to greet him.
Rilke had even managed to win over his harshest critic in recent months: Paula Becker. She wrote to him in October to tell him how much she, too, had enjoyed the new Rodin essay. In her journal, she wrote, “It seems to me that the youth with his fragile exuberance is vanishing now and the grown man is beginning to emerge with fewer words but which have more to say.”
WHEN PAULA BECKER had told Rilke that she was leaving Paris and going back to her husband in Worpswede, she had neglected to mention that she was also pregnant. Now her due date was one month away and she spent nearly all her time at home, reading, painting when she felt up to it and fantasizing about Paris, as always.
She had heard about the Salon d’Automne and how “fifty-six Cézannes are on exhibit there now!” as she wrote to her mother. The painter remained one of only about three artists who had struck her “like a thunderstorm.” She and Rilke had not kept in close touch since he had distanced himself from her in Paris, but she knew that he had written lengthy letters on Cézanne to Westhoff and she asked her friend if she would send them to her. “If it were not absolutely necessary for me to be here right now, nothing would keep me away from Paris,” she told Westhoff in October. Westhoff promised she would do better than that and come read her the letters personally.
Becker gave birth t
o a daughter, Mathilde, on November 2. A few days later, Westhoff arrived at her friend’s bedside with Rilke’s letters on Cézanne in hand. Becker was weakened from what had been a long, painful labor that ended with the doctor chloroforming her and delivering the baby with forceps. But Becker smiled sweetly at her beloved friend and Westhoff promised to return in a few weeks to read to her when she was feeling better.
Two weeks later, Becker finally rose from bed. She sat at the mirror in her nightgown and braided her long golden hair. She wove it into a crown around her head and pinned roses to it from the vase on her nightstand. The room had been filled with candles and flowers sent by friends and family. It looked as beautiful as Christmas, she thought.
She called out for someone to bring her Mathilde. When the baby was brought to the bedroom and laid in her arms she felt a sudden weight in her foot. It was as heavy as iron. She lay back to elevate it and gasped, “A pity.” A moment later, she was dead.
The doctor ruled the cause of death an embolism. She was thirty-one years old. Westhoff was traveling in Berlin then and did not hear the news until a week later when she returned to Worpswede, as promised, to see Becker and read her the letters. She arrived early in the morning and walked up the birch-lined path that the friends had “so often walked along together.” On the way she picked a bouquet of autumn flowers for her. When she went to the house she found it empty. Modersohn was gone, Becker’s sister had taken the baby, “and Paula was no longer there.”
CHAPTER
13
THE NEWS OF BECKER’S DEATH REACHED RILKE IN ITALY, where he was taking a vacation after his reading tour and visiting a new love interest, Mimi Romanelli. Just ten days into his trip, he packed his bags and returned to Germany. He stayed with his family there over Christmas and for nearly two months afterward. He fell ill with a flu that kept him bedridden for a month and compelled Westhoff to care for him, even though their marriage had long since existed in name only. Rilke even put up a picture of Romanelli in the house and apparently Westhoff agreed that she was very beautiful.
You Must Change Your Life Page 19