You Must Change Your Life

by Rachel Corbett

  “[I] stretched my contours, as one stretches violin strings, until one feels them taut and singing, and suddenly I knew I was fully outlined like a Dürer drawing.” With his psychic composition reinforced, he could now stand with the crowd before the Mona Lisa and appreciate her for the “incomparable” beauty she was.

  At this point, Rilke’s address book listed twelve hundred names, and he didn’t hesitate to use it. When the Ballet Russes came to town Rilke joined Cocteau, Diaghilev and Vaslav Nijinsky for a party after the performance at the nightclub Larue’s. He soon befriended the sculptor Aristide Maillol, and Count Kessler introduced him, at last, to André Gide.

  Gide was by then a writer of such stature that he seemed to have far more than six years on Rilke. He had already traveled extensively in North Africa, the landscape of his casually chilling 1902 novel The Immoralist. And the previous year he founded Paris’s leading literary journal, La Nouvelle Revue Française.

  In June Gide invited Rilke to a luncheon at his recently renovated west Paris mansion, Villa Montmorency, once home to Victor Hugo. Rilke was becoming proud of his French language abilities by then, and he spoke fluently with Gide and the two Belgians who joined them, the artist Théo Van Rysselberghe and the interior designer Henry van de Velde, who had decorated both Count Kessler’s home and the Nietzsche Archive in Weimar. The lunch marked the start of a meaningful and mutually beneficial friendship. When Rilke’s publisher Insel-Verlag sent him the proofs of Malte that month, Rilke sent Gide one of the first copies.

  The book was not greeted with much fanfare when it was released in July. The German-language press was largely favorable to Rilke’s sensitive portrait of a young artist, but some were befuddled by its nonlinear narrative. “The Notebooks were not written for many, but the few for whom it was written will like it,” read one early review from Berlin. Another critic found Malte’s hyper-susceptibility to stimuli “appropriate” for a moment in history that was characterized by “our yearning for internalizing.”

  Like many of Gide’s books, Rilke’s philosophical novel attracted more of a cult intellectual following than a popular mainstream audience. But Gide helped bring Malte to a wider readership in France the following year when he published excerpts of it in La Nouvelle Revue. The writers would go on to swap translations of their parallel books: Rilke rewrote Gide’s Prodigal Son in German, and Gide translated Malte into French. Rilke said he was amazed that anyone could so ably translate his “inaccessible prose” into a foreign language.

  In the United States, Letters to a Young Poet cemented Rilke’s celebrity more than any of his other books; in France, it was Malte. When the complete French translation came out in the early 1920s, the book’s themes of alienation, futility and consciousness pushed to the extreme helped shape the language of Existentialism in the decade to come. Jean-Paul Sartre largely modeled his 1938 novel Nausea after Malte. Rilke’s protagonist’s desire “to have a death of one’s own” informed Sartre’s belief that life is but a long unfolding of death. “You had your death inside you as a fruit has its core. The children had a small one in them and grown-ups a large one,” Malte says in the book. “You had it, and that gave you a strange dignity and a quiet pride.”

  Rilke’s struggle to write Malte had felt a bit like this long-gestating death. The self-destructive book had grown and grown inside him until at last it came into its own, was published and left Rilke feeling hopelessly barren. No amount of acclaim could undo that. Rilke believed that art was its own kind of death because it consumed its artist. The only way to go on was to begin the process again. But for Rilke that now seemed impossible. How could he bear to endure that suicidal cycle again? What would he even write about? Perhaps Malte had already said everything Rilke wanted to say. Maybe it was time to enter a more practical profession now, like medicine, he thought. Apart from artists, Rilke believed that doctors were the people who lived closest to god.

  He wondered to Andreas-Salomé whether the book had left him “stranded like a survivor, my soul in a maze, with no occupation, never to be occupied again?” So far, his choice of paths typically deposited him in one of three corners: Paris, Italy or Germany. Maybe he needed to try another direction. So desperate to escape the pattern of his old life, Rilke packed his bags in November for uncharted territory: Africa.

  The French fascination with “primitive” art and the “untamed” minds of its makers—what Claude Lévi-Strauss later dubbed la pensée sauvage—drove many artists to visit the country’s colonies in North Africa in the early twentieth century. The Orientalist mythology had inspired Rodin’s Cambodian drawings, while André Gide said the five years he spent traveling the lonely deserts of North Africa shaped his writing above all else. Now, following in Gide’s—and Westhoff’s—footsteps, Rilke set out for his own African journey in late 1910, a copy of Arabian Nights in hand.

  Arriving first in Tunisia, Rilke felt the presence of divinity around him as never before. He was shocked at how palpably Muslim the colonies felt. In the holy Tunisian city of Kairouan, “The Prophet is like yesterday, and the city is his like a kingdom”; in Algiers, “Allah is great, and no power but his power is in the air.” He considered meeting one of Gide’s lovers in Biskra but decided against it once it became evident that the man might be impoverished enough to rob him.

  After a few weeks he began to wonder what he was doing there. The colorful textiles, the white architecture and the spice-filled souks impressed him, but mostly the trip felt like an extravagant waste of time and money. It was procrastination, plain and simple, he realized, and an unfortunately costly way of doing it. Before he left, a dog bit him in Tunisia and he figured he deserved it. The dog had “simply expressed in his own manner that I was completely in the wrong, with everything,” Rilke wrote.

  A few months after he returned to Europe, another chapter came to a close. His correspondence with Westhoff had grown less frequent, sometimes at his encouragement. Once he suggested that she “write only briefly, we each have so much else to do.” When she did send mail, it mainly consisted of impersonal matters, like feedback on his work, or texts that she had typed for him. Thus, it was not altogether surprising when, in mid-1911, Westhoff asked for a divorce.

  Rilke did not object. He sympathized with his wife’s dilemma, lamenting to Andreas-Salomé how she was “not with me and yet cannot move on to anything free of me.” He believed that Westhoff had never fully come into herself as an individual, instead devoting her life to Rilke and the “alternating function of ingesting me and expelling me.” He supported her decision to leave Ruth with her parents for a while and undergo psychoanalysis in Munich with the young doctor Viktor Emil von Gebsattel, a friend and sometime lover of Andreas-Salomé. Rilke hoped the therapy would succeed in ridding her mind of his presence—“(apparently a pest in her nature after all).” Then perhaps she could resurrect herself as the young woman she was before she met him, and make a path of her own this time.

  Rilke wrote to a lawyer in Prague to explain that the couple had been living separately for years and requested legal documents now only to validate a situation that had been the reality for some time already. But the poet quickly learned that a divorce would not be so simple, and the amicable nature of their relationship would do little to ease the bureaucratic nightmare that lay ahead.

  Because Rilke had failed to officially leave the Catholic Church until after his marriage, he was bound to its stringent divorce policies. Meanwhile, the couple’s residencies in various countries over the years complicated matters of jurisdiction further. In the end, Rilke spent a small fortune on lawyers’ fees and still was never able to finalize the divorce before his death.

  CHAPTER

  16

  IN OCTOBER 1911 THE STATE ORDERED ALL THE TENANTS of the Hôtel Biron, including Rodin, to leave the premises by the end of the year. The government had still not officially declined Rodin’s proposal for a museum, but at the same time there were too many doubts to go ahead with it. S
ome officials opposed it on principle, holding the belief that museums should never honor living artists. Others argued that Rodin’s sacrilegious display of nude drawings in a former convent should alone disqualify his proposal. It had also occurred to the state to use the palatial property for its own interests, perhaps as government offices or a hotel to house foreign dignitaries.

  Rilke hired movers to pack up his room that month. One of them estimated that the books in his library alone would require seven crates. He put it all into storage and wrote to Princess von Thurn und Taxis to inquire if he might visit her again at Duino. He did not know whether he would be better able to concentrate this time or not, but he hoped at least to find some quiet time to work on a few translations.

  By then, Rilke had lived in Paris longer than any city except Prague. Although it would continue to lure him back as a visitor over the years, any lasting tenure in the city was now coming to a close. Rilke believed a place should function less as a home than as a vantage point, and other views awaited him now. “Paris is itself a work, a huge, wearing work which you accomplish without noticing it,” he once wrote. He finally felt like he had mastered its crowds, its language, its art, and taken from it all he needed to write the New Poems and Malte. “I have it to thank for the best work I have done so far,” he decided.

  The princess told him she would send a car and driver to pick him up. He could stay in Duino as long as he wished. Rilke disliked cars in theory—even typewriters were too modern for his bohemian tastes—but he was secretly thrilled to travel in such luxury. He directed the chauffeur to take his preferred route, through Avignon and Cannes, then on to San Remo and Bologna. It would take nine days to reach Duino and to leave behind “the memorable, the tiresome, the strange house in the rue de Varenne” for good.

  RODIN, ON THE other hand, had no intention of leaving. He was incredulous that the city wouldn’t jump to accept his generous gift. Refusing to accept the government’s order, he went straight to the press with the news that the city wanted to deny the public a free museum. To win over journalists who were less sympathetic to him as an artist, he launched a campaign to landmark the building as a historic monument.

  By the beginning of the following year, Rodin had enlisted the support of several key editors and preservationists. He and his friend Judith Cladel also gathered signatures from leading artists and patrons for a petition protesting Rodin’s eviction. They passed out brochures including statements from Monet and Anatole France supporting the proposed museum. “No one is more deserving than he of such special honors,” testified Debussy. Perhaps most importantly, in January 1912, Rodin’s old friend Raymond Poincaré was elected prime minister of France.

  But just as the tide seemed to be turning in Rodin’s favor, it crashed to an abrupt halt in May. A public spat had broken out between Rodin and the editor of the newspaper Le Figaro over a recent performance of the Ballet Russes in Paris. Sergei Diaghilev had worried that the final scene of the ballet, Afternoon of a Faun, might cause a stir when the dancer Vaslav Nijinsky pantomimed an orgasm. Sure enough, Le Figaro’s editor, Gaston Calmette, wrote a front-page story decrying Nijinsky’s “vile movements of erotic bestiality and gestures of heavy shamelessness.”

  Calmette’s opinion was in the minority among artists, many of whom had collaborated with the dance company over the years. (Matisse, Picasso, and Coco Chanel all designed costumes for them.) Rilke, too, was so moved by Nijinsky that he once said the desire to write a poem about him “haunts me, it keeps on calling to me: I must, I must . . .”

  Rodin agreed to write a piece for a rival newspaper, Le Matin, defending Diaghilev’s serpentine star. “When the curtain rises to reveal him reclining on the ground, one knee raised, the pipe at his lips, you would think him a statue; and nothing could be more striking than the impulse with which, at the climax, he lies face down on the secreted veil, kissing it and hugging it to him with passionate abandon.”

  The editor of Le Figaro retaliated, writing that he was not surprised that Rodin would defend the indecent performance. After all, Rodin was responsible for producing an even lewder spectacle: that of his own nude drawings, desecrating the walls of a convent. It was a blasphemy that only “swooning admirers and self-satisfied snobs” would condone. But then Calmette delivered the nearly fatal blow: “It is inconceivable that the state—that is, the French taxpayers—has paid five million francs for the Hôtel Biron, simply to house our richest sculptor. This is the real scandal, and it is the business of the government to put a stop to it.”

  The provocation quickly led other newspapers to pile on the outrage. One published a cartoon of a nude model asking Rodin where to put her clothes. He responds, “Next door in the chapel.” Never mind that Rodin was far from the only tenant in the building, that he didn’t live in the chapel, and that he of course paid rent. The press delighted in the scandal and soon highlighted the questionable reputations of Rodin’s other housemates, namely Édouard de Max, who also had been accused of turning the chapel into a den of iniquity. The bathtub he had installed in the priest’s sacristy became the linchpin of a Catholic campaign against the tenants.

  Rodin immediately regretted making the rare decision to participate in a public controversy. The denouncement was so targeted and scathing that the damage to his campaign felt insurmountable. At the end of May, his friend Count Kessler saw how devastated Rodin was and assembled Nijinsky, Diaghilev, and Hugo von Hofmannsthal into a “war council” to meet with him and devise a plan of action on his behalf.

  A trembling Choiseul answered the door. Teary-eyed, she told them that Rodin was “taking this very hard,” as if “someone had wilfully destroyed one of his finest marble statues.” She vowed that if the government forced him from the building she would personally ensure that not a single Rodin sculpture would stay in France.

  Rodin emerged then, looking disheveled. Choiseul swept a strand of hair from his forehead with a diamond-weighted hand. He told them that he was not as vengeful as his lover. If he had retaliated against every attack in the press he would have spent his whole career on the battlefield and never made any work. There was not much Kessler’s “council” could do now except drink their tea and try to console the old man.

  The face-off between Rodin and the media dragged on for months until Poincaré’s cabinet made its historic decision to accept Rodin’s donation and grant his request to remain in the building, as its sole occupant, for as long as he lived.

  Calmette, meanwhile, continued his provocations until, in 1916, the wife of France’s finance minister walked into Le Figaro’s office with a gun. She was enraged that Calmette had published her husband’s old love letters to her, written while she was still his mistress, and shot the editor dead.

  BY 1912 THE City of Light was descending into darkness. The endless glow of the twenty-four-hour street lanterns had not scared off criminals, it simply spotlighted the violence day and night. Anarchists were protesting in the streets while city-sanctioned brutality took place in the form of public guillotining.

  Theft was rampant. One morning a burglar walked out of the Louvre with the Mona Lisa under his arm. The police investigated the crime for two years—questioning Apollinaire and Picasso as suspects along the way—before the culprit was finally caught trying to sell the painting to a Florentine art dealer. Meanwhile, street gangsters known as apaches terrorized pedestrians. As fashionable as they were savage, the apaches stalked, robbed and stabbed their bourgeois victims, all the while sporting snug sailor pants and neckerchiefs.

  The crime wave petrified the Duchesse de Choiseul, who took it upon herself to personally protect her aging lover. She started stashing guns around the studio and told a friend that she once had to fight off a pair of night intruders. They had tried to blackmail Rodin, then seventy-two, “But I was luckily there!” she said. “And I had pistols too!”

  She bought a German shepherd to guard him and arranged for a policeman to accompany him every evening on his commu
te home from Paris to Meudon. Some nights the officer even slept in a chair at Rodin’s bedside. This lasted for about a month before the continuous company started to annoy the artist and he dismissed the man from his duties.

  Some of Rodin’s friends had started to warn him that it was Choiseul he should be afraid of, not gangsters. Rumors were spreading that the duchesse was scheming ways to wrest control of Rodin’s estate. Some believed that she had conned him into signing over to her the rights to all posthumous reproductions of his work. Others heard that she was trying to break up his relationship with Rose Beuret so that he would name her the sole benefactor in his will.

  She paraded their affair in front of Beuret and did not hide it from her husband, either. At one point the duke wrote to Beuret, “It is unendurable that you tolerate the state of things which I can no longer abide. I refer to the constant presence of my wife . . . in the atelier of M. Rodin.”

  He assumed Beuret would want a separation after hearing this news, but he underestimated the woman’s long-standing tenacity. Beuret endured Rodin like a teacup set under a waterfall, Rilke once said. In the years following Rodin’s affair with Camille Claudel, the artist sometimes made reference to his “beautiful” former assistant, causing Beuret to tremble with rage. If he noticed her reaction, he’d just chuckle and say, Mon chat, I always loved you most. That’s why you’re still here.

  It was no secret that Choiseul and her gambling husband’s financial troubles were worsening. Rodin sometimes bailed them out of debts, and never gave it a second thought. When the duchesse’s sister died, Rodin paid for her husband to accompany her to America for the funeral. For years Rodin either ignored the gossip surrounding Choiseul or pretended not to hear it. Perhaps he could not bear the thought of her betrayal. Or he may have believed women were too simpleminded for such conspiring.