You Must Change Your Life

by Rachel Corbett

  OVER THE YEARS, Rilke had compared Rodin to many different gods. He once called him an “eastern god enthroned,” like the Buddha statue that meditated on the artist’s hill in Meudon. “It is the center of the world,” so self-contained and solitary, Rilke had said of it.

  Rodin also once reminded Rilke of the god in Genesis. When he sculpted a hand, “it is there alone in space and it is nothing more than a hand. And God made only one hand in six days and poured water around it and arched a sky. When all was completed, he was at peace with it and it was a miracle and a hand.”

  Most recently Rilke had called him “a god of antiquity,” and, for the first time, he had not meant it as a compliment. Once Rodin had seemed like a descendant of the great ancient traditions in art; now they held him captive. He was an obsolete god. His decline was now imminent, just as it was fated for every “Too-Great, the Transcendent, the Divine,” Rilke wrote.

  In a postscript to Westhoff the day after he had reunited with Rodin at the Hôtel Biron, he fantasized about how his own path to “divinity” would come to pass. He could no longer stand around in idle worship of Rodin, like trees to the sun. It was time to make his own way to heaven. He was like a forager gathering mushrooms and medicinal herbs, he told Westhoff. Now he would mix them together into a deadly potion and “take it up to God, so that he may quench his thirst and feel his splendor streaming through his veins.”

  The Nietzschean tone of this letter is probably not a coincidence. Rilke owned a heavily marked-up copy of Thus Spoke Zarathustra, in which Nietzsche made his famous admonishment to disciples who risk becoming imitators of their masters: “One repays a teacher badly if one always remains only a pupil. Why do you refuse to pluck at my wreath? . . . Now I bid you lose me and find yourselves; and only when you have all denied me will I return to you.”

  Rilke’s letter declares his intent to complete his literary transformation, from the disciple who began the New Poems to the Prodigal Son who authored Malte. Rilke was now ready to remake himself into the father. That spring, during the months he had declined to see Rodin, Rilke wrote the words that would commence this change.

  AT SOME POINT, we do not know precisely where or when, Rilke came across a statue of Apollo with its head and limbs broken off, and only a naked torso remaining. It may have been a sculpture by Rodin or Michelangelo. Or it may have been the iconic Belvedere Torso. Others believe it was the muscular chest of a young Greek man from the ancient city of Miletus, which was on view at the Louvre while Rilke was in Paris.

  Whatever the source, the statue inspired Rilke to choose Apollo, the Greek god of music and poetry—the origin of art itself—as his subject for a poem that spring. From this symbol of creative invention, Rilke would write his famous tale of reinvention, “The Archaic Torso of Apollo.”

  Rilke understood that god’s defining achievement was creating a human form. Yet it had been a year since Rilke experimented with figuration in his poem “Alcestis,” which had led him to conclude that his relationship to models was “certainly still false.” He went on occupying himself with “flowers, animals, and landscapes” for the time being instead. But a year later, “Apollo” would become for Rilke what The Age of Bronze had been for Rodin, his first full-scale figurative work.

  For a metaphysical poet trying to ground himself in the physical world, the body of a god entombed in stone was a fitting metaphor. Why he chose a headless, broken god probably had to do with the same reason that Rodin often chopped off his figure’s heads, and with them the most expressive features of the human anatomy. A faceless figure could no longer wink at or point to an intention. But to Rilke, Rodin’s amputated bodies were no less whole: “Completeness is conveyed in all the armless statues of Rodin: Nothing necessary is lacking,” he wrote in his monograph on the sculptor.

  The headless torso was a tabula rasa. To the nonbeliever, it was nothing more than a sleeping stone, but to those who had faith in this kind of god, it became a kind of mirror on which to project their inner lives. This was how Rilke, out of the absences of a broken, anonymous statue, crafted “The Archaic Torso of Apollo,” an almost perfect sonnet, the most tightly unified of poetic forms.

  We cannot know his legendary head

  with eyes like ripening fruit,

  And yet his torso

  is still suffused with brilliance from inside,

  like a lamp, in which his gaze, now turned to low,

  gleams in all its power.

  Otherwise

  the curved breast could not dazzle you so, nor could

  a smile run through the placid hips and thighs

  to that dark center where procreation flared.

  Otherwise this stone would seem defaced

  beneath the translucent cascade of the shoulders

  and would not glisten like a wild beast’s fur:

  would not, from all the borders of itself,

  burst like a star: for here there is no place

  that does not see you. You must change your life.

  One can almost hear Rodin’s voice speaking through the stone, like the oracle to which Rilke had once asked that almighty question, “How should I live?” Rodin had answered then, work, always work. And in the beginning of the poem, Rilke seems to obey this directive. He guides us on a perceptual journey down the torso’s parts: the eyes, the chest, the hips, the place where reproduction once happened.

  Then the encounter transcends his one-sided observation as Apollo begins to look back. The statue does not need eyes to stare, a mouth to speak or genitals to procreate—it carries its own birth inside it, the way Malte carried his death. As the Apollo and Rilke search each other, breaking down the borders that separate them, Rilke starts to relay the experience to the world as a poem.

  But then he seems to abruptly decide that a poem is not quite enough. If it were, the sonnet could have ended just before that startling last line, with Rilke remaining a dutiful conduit, a secretary of god. But seeing was not enough for Rilke anymore. He wanted new eyes. He wanted to be not merely in the presence of god, but to become the creator. When Apollo speaks to him, Rilke consummates the empathic union of object and beholder, author and reader. This new being could now communicate; it was whole. Rilke had acknowledged art, gave its god life and it changed him.

  THE WINTER THAT RILKE published “Apollo,” Franz Kappus broke a four-year silence with the poet. He wrote a letter from a remote army fort to tell Rilke that he had decided to accept a position in the military. He had given up poetry for good.

  Rilke responded in his tenth and final letter to the young poet that he had been thinking of him often in recent months and was happy to hear from him again. Surprisingly, Rilke said he was even happier to hear of Kappus’s new job. “I am glad you have that steady, expressible existence with you, that title, that uniform, that service, all that tangible and limited reality.”

  This courageous career, Rilke wrote, was preferable to those “half-artistic” professions of journalism or criticism for which poets so often settled. Those were pitiful attempts to cling to the art of others, whereas Rilke believed that any artist who approached his work halfway should relinquish it altogether. He’d be better off grasping onto a concrete job, like the military, which Rilke believed would at least keep Kappus grounded in a “rough reality.”

  Rilke probably would have been disappointed to learn that, years later, Kappus went on to become a newspaper editor, first at the Belgrade News and later at the Banat Daily. After fighting on the Eastern Front during World War I, he also wrote several action novels, including the The Red Rider, which was turned into a film in 1935. Kappus later admitted that “life drove me off into those very regions from which the poet’s warm, tender and touching concern had sought to keep me.”

  But for now Rilke comforted Kappus one last time as he entered this new phase of life, urging him to trust in his solitude on those nights stationed alone in “the empty hills.” The poet repeated some familiar wisdom about how all a
person needs to feel at home in the world is to stand “before big natural things from time to time.”

  In the last moment of his letter, however, Rilke makes a surprising reversal in the doctrine he had been ministering to Kappus for so long. He rejected Rodin’s rigid ultimatum between art and life, now imploring the young poet not to regret his decision to abandon poetry for a more stable way of life—for “art too is only a way of living.”

  CHAPTER

  15

  A LIQUIDATOR APPOINTED TO SELL OFF THE HÔTEL BIRON scheduled the auction for the end of June 1909. It was expected that a real estate developer would buy the dilapidated mansion, raze it and build a more desirable, modern building in its place.

  “Imagine the shock and indignation of the old master upon receiving this announcement! His beloved Hôtel Biron was to share the fate of many another antique of Paris and fall victim to commercial vandalism,” wrote Sylvia Beach, future proprietor of the Shakespeare and Company bookstore, of Rodin’s likely reaction to the news.

  Shocked and indignant only began to describe Rodin’s feelings about the government’s plans to demolish his studio and “enchanted abode,” as Choiseul called their secret lair. In the old days, kings personally housed the great artists in their palaces; now his country wanted to throw him into the street. Rodin would not endure this indignity without a fight. He wrote to a city councilman in late 1909 with a serious proposal. He would donate all of his works to the state upon his death, including the sculptures in “plaster, marble, bronze, stone, and my drawings, as well as my collection of antiquities,” to open a Rodin Museum on the site. The only condition was that he be allowed to stay there for as long as he lived. Rodin pointed out that his art already had a permanent home in America, at the Metropolitan Museum, so it seemed only appropriate that his homeland should honor him in at least equal fashion.

  The government promised to consider Rodin’s offer, but in the meantime many of the building’s tenants didn’t want to hang their fate in the balance, and the artist enclave started to disband. The looming sale gave Matisse the final push he needed to move to the countryside. His academy had been taking up too much time, and he had grown disillusioned by the ambivalent treatment he had received in the Parisian press. His 1908 manifesto “Notes of a Painter” was an attempt to settle the score with critics, who were alternately calling him too academic—André Gide said his Woman with a Hat was “the result of theories”—and too wild. But the essay backfired and only opened him up to more attack. Now he was eager to withdraw from society altogether and paint alone in peace. He had even begun practicing abstinence as a way to preserve his “creative” resources for his art. The bacchanalian climate at the Hôtel Biron had not been especially conducive to his efforts.

  Even Cocteau would soon leave, albeit against his wishes. His mother had found out about his forbidden hideaway when her ladies’ club, the Friends of the Louvre, heard about the historic site and asked her if her son might be able to invite them in for a visit. Apparently everyone knew about his secret garçonnière except Madame Cocteau.

  She was appalled that her well-bred son would keep company with such a depraved bunch of artists. Most likely she had the openly gay actor Édouard de Max, known for wearing eye shadow both on- and offstage, in mind. Even though the French public, living in a post–Oscar Wilde era, largely accepted de Max as a kind of monstre sacré, not everyone was so open-minded. “De Max was like the ocean, and like the ocean he was dreaded by mothers,” Cocteau said.

  She threatened to suspend her son’s allowance if he did not move out immediately. The Friends of the Louvre took their tour and then, with great sadness, Cocteau said goodbye to his “fairytale kingdom.”

  Rilke spent the winter packing up his room. His publisher had invited him to Leipzig to finish the manuscript for Malte. There he could dictate his notes to a typist, rather than transcribing them all himself, so he paid a courtesy visit to Rodin to wish him farewell before leaving the Hôtel Biron, possibly for good. Rodin gave the poet a drawing as a Christmas present and wished him good luck. Then, on January 8, 1910, Rilke boarded the train for Germany, a suitcase full of loose notebook pages in hand, ready to lay Malte to rest once and for all.

  “SO THIS IS WHERE people come to live; I would have thought it was a city to die in.” So begins the story of young Malte Laurids Brigge’s arrival in Paris. It is the first entry in a novel comprised entirely of impressionistic sketches, dated like journal entries. The first opens “September 11, Rue Toullier”—a variation on Rilke’s first address in Paris: 11 Rue Toullier.

  From there the similarities between Rilke and his twenty-eight-year-old foil multiply. Malte is a gloomy northerner displaced in a merciless metropolis, an aspiring poet whose obsession with death and decay is drawn out in passages lifted directly from the author’s own notebooks. While Malte is indisputably a work of fiction, it is worth remembering that Rilke nearly named it The Journal of My Other Self. One of the earliest modern novels, Malte’s journey involves little plot. It instead takes its protagonist on a meandering search for identity, and for an answer to Rilke’s own persistent question, How should one live?

  Malte’s story is one of eternally unfulfilled striving. He is a human sponge, steadily absorbing the pain of others. As Malte begins to harness his hyper-receptivity, he discovers its eye-expanding possibilities. “I am learning to see,” he says in the beginning. “I don’t know why, but all enters into me more deeply and nothing remains at the level where once it used to cease.”

  In the end, Malte returns home from Paris, a kind of Prodigal Son. We do not know whether he is back for good, only that he is there for now. But in Rilke’s retelling of the parable Malte does not seek his family’s forgiveness; “How could they know about him?” He belonged to nobody now. For Malte, the Prodigal Son parable was really “the legend of a man who didn’t want to be loved.” This was both his strength and, “in the end, is the strength of all young people who have left home.”

  Rilke ends his story there, before we know how the young poet turns out. “He was now terribly difficult to love, and he felt that only One would be capable of it. But He was not yet willing,” read the novel’s last lines. It’s not that Malte didn’t know what he had to do—he understood Baudelaire’s challenge—he simply was not able to ultimately achieve it. “This test surpassed him,” Rilke wrote, “so much so that he sought it out instinctively until it attached itself to him and did not leave him any more. The book of Malte Laurids, when it is written sometime, will be nothing but the book of this insight, demonstrated in one for whom it was too tremendous . . .” He was one who would have been overpowered by the sight of the convulsive man in Paris, like the old Rilke was and like Kappus probably would have been. But Malte’s failure marked Rilke’s transformation.

  The doppelgänger had been a hallmark of German Romanticism for a hundred years when Rilke became one of the first modernist authors to revive the literary device in the twentieth century. Rilke had to destroy his doppelgänger, traditionally a harbinger of doom, in order to liberate himself. At a time when psychologists were developing theories on mirroring and narcissism, many literary critics saw the doppelgängers of Rilke, Kafka and Hofmannsthal as vehicles for self-psychoanalysis. At one point Rilke asked Andreas-Salomé if she could tell that Malte “perishes in order to keep me, as it were, from perishing.”

  She could, she said, writing, “Malte is not a portrait, but rather the use of a self-portrait precisely for the purpose of making a self-distinction from it.” Whether it was through the unrealized potential of Malte or Rilke’s late sister, the poet felt he could be reborn only when the soul of another died.

  At the end of the month, Rilke wrote the final words of the book in Leipzig, at what his office mates at the publishing house had come to call “Malte Laurid’s desk.” “It is finished, detached from me,” he said. Not that this accomplishment gave him much joy, naturally. Instead it was followed by a feeling of emptiness, from w
hich he distracted himself with travel.

  He went to Berlin, where he briefly reunited with Westhoff, who was on her way back to Worpswede after spending three months sculpting a bust of their friend the writer Gerhart Hauptmann, in the small village near the Sudeten mountains where he lived. Then, in April, he traveled to Italy once more, this time for a few days at the princess’s castle. But he was disappointed to find that he was not her guest of honor. She was also hosting her son and the Austrian writer Rudolf Kassner, whom Rilke found intellectually intimidating. In conversation, Rilke, who never completed a university education, felt like he was failing a test he shouldn’t have been taking in the first place. Although he and Kassner would become good friends in later years, at this time Rilke could not get away from him and Duino fast enough. He promised himself to return again when conditions were more conducive to work.

  Then news came that the state had halted the sale of the Hôtel Biron to give officials more time to consider Rodin’s proposal for a museum. The tenant exodus the previous year had left a private apartment vacant on the third floor, farther away from Rodin. It had a bedroom, a small kitchen and an office, and was separated from the other residents by a long hallway. A window spanning from floor to ceiling looked out onto a bright green linden tree in the garden. Rilke figured that if he had to endure proximity to other people it may as well be in the place where he had been most productive. He rented the space and made his way back to Paris in May 1910, even bringing some furniture and books along to make it feel like a home.

  RILKE’S RETURN TO PARIS marked the start of a series of endings in the poet’s old way of life. No longer a sapling cowering beneath the shade of Rodin, he stepped into the sunlight of Paris that spring with more independence than ever before.

  He had learned to manage his crowd anxiety and the intrusion of other people’s lives upon his own. Ever since he had mastered the art of “inseeing” he could not only penetrate the interior worlds of objects and animals with his mind, he could also reverse the strategy to defend himself against penetration by others. In the past, going to the Louvre had meant bracing himself for an onslaught of flesh and faces, the real often indistinguishable to him from those on canvas. But now he learned to pause before his senses overwhelmed him, close his eyes and imagine fortifying his body’s borders, as if they were castle walls.